Tag: food and cooking

Mindless Cookery Revisited

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Or, yet another no-brainer crockpot entree for those days when the mind is on other things.  Around our house, this one rejoices in the uninspired but accurate name of:

Golden Mushroom Pork Glop

  • 4-6 boneless pork chops, or pork cutlets, or pieces of a bonless pork roast sliced into collops.  (Bone-in pork chops also work, but it’s annoying to have to fish the bones out at serving time.)
  • 1 large or 2 medium onions, sliced into rings
  • 1 can Campbell’s Golden Mushroom soup, undiluted
  • 1 tsp ground sage

Put the sliced onions into the crockpot; then put the pork chops or cutlets or collops on top of them.  Empty the can of Golden Mushroom soup on top of the pork, and smear it around with a wooden spoon until all the pieces of pork are covered.  Put the lid on the crockpot and cook it all day on low or for 7-8 hours on high, until the pork is tender.

Serve with your choice of starch to sop up the gravy.

 

A Good Soup for a Snowy Night

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Because dried vegetables from the kitchen cabinet and meat from the freezer have saved many a writer from having to go out shopping on a winter day, and they can be purchased when the money is flowing in and kept on hand for the days when it isn’t.

Pantry Staples Beef Barley Soup

  • 1 slice of cross-cut beef shank
  • 1 cup, more or less, of pearl barley
  • a bit under a quarter cup of dried onion flakes
  • a generous shaking of dried chopped garlic
  • a good handful of dried champignon mushrooms
  • a good handful of dried porcini mushrooms
  • a moderate sprinkling of mixed dried vegetables
  • 4 cups of water
  • 2 cups of beef stock
  • 1 packet of onion soup mix
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 2 pinches of dried rosemary
  • soy sauce (a couple of tablespoons, I suppose)
  • about a tablespoon of tomato paste

Throw it all into the crockpot at about 10 in the morning and let it cook all day.  At dinnertime, fish out and discard the shank bone, then bring the soup to the table and serve it forth.

 

A Useful Bit of Kitchen Trivia

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Sometimes you need to time a quick one minute, or a quick three minutes, of cooking time.  (Stir-fry recipes in particular are fond of directions like that.)  And sometimes you don’t have a kitchen timer handy, or maybe you’ve got two or three one-minute steps right after the other with no time to set a timer in between.

At times like these, it helps to know that a dramatic recitation of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” all the way through — no rushing or mumbling — takes about one minute.

(Medieval recipes would give similar timing directions.   “A Paternoster while” is the length of time it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer in Latin once through — about thirty seconds if you don’t rush it.  “Two Aves and a Paternoster” is about a minute.)

When you’re messing about in the kitchen, knowing a handy estimator like that one is as useful as knowing — in a writing context — that a page of 12-point Courier in standard manuscript format equals roughly 250 words and will take about a minute to read aloud.

A Thing to Do with Brownies. Also with Plots.

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If you’ve got a box of brownie mix — or a somewhat pedestrian scratch brownie recipe — you can elevate plain but good brownies into interestingly different brownies with the addition of about a teaspoon of cinnamon and a scant quarter-teaspoon of cayenne pepper.

You can do the same thing with a standard plot.  Throw in a couple of unexpected elements, something sweet and fragrant like cinnamon and something hot and tingly like cayenne pepper, and an ordinary story becomes a pleasing departure from what the reader expected — while at the same time still being the solid good thing (mmm, chocolate)  that he or she wanted in the first place.

Caffeine: A True Story

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Once upon a time there was a writer (who bore an uncanny resemblance to the owner of this blog) who was pulling an all-nighter in an effort to finish a book.

She started out in the morning of the day before, drinking hot tea with milk and sugar — a soothing and respectable brew, one that stiffens the sinews for the work ahead.  I can’t be certain, but I think the tea was English Breakfast.                                     .

She worked through the morning and into the afternoon, and at some point in the process she switched to coffee — no sugar, but plenty of cream — and kept on going.  I don’t know what she made for dinner that night, but it was probably something simple and mindless, because her brain was deep into that writing space where the internal world has at least as much reality as the external one, and things like complex recipes are beyond it at such times.

And she kept on writing, throughout the afternoon and on into the evening.

At some time around midnight she switched to instant hot chocolate made up using strong black coffee as the liquid — a truly deadly brew, but a potent one.  Fueled by several cups of the coffee-and-chocolate mix, she finished the first draft of the novel, then collapsed into bed at 4AM, weeping with exhaustion and the conviction that the book in question was utterly hopeless.

(It wasn’t.  But it would take a cast-iron ego to believe that, at 4AM on a caffeine jag.)

I’m not sure that there’s a moral to this story, other than “Caffeine necessary; too much caffeine bad,” or maybe “Writers on a deadline have been known to do silly things.”

In Honor of the Season…

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… a recipe for The World’s Easiest Cranberry Sauce.

1 bag fresh cranberries

1 cup sugar

1 cup water

Put cranberries into a small-to-medium-sized saucepan.  Take a moment to make certain there isn’t a twig or a pebble in there by mistake.  (I’ve never encountered one, but everybody says to check, so somebody must have, at least once.)

Add the water and the sugar.  Stir to combine.  It’s probably a good idea to use a wooden spoon, because you’re going to want to stir the mixture some while it’s cooking, and it’s going to get hot.

Put the saucepan on the stove and turn the burner up to high.  Bring the cranberries-water-and-sugar mixture to a furious boil, stirring every now and again.  Keep on boiling it until the cranberries have all popped.

Remove from heat and pour the sauce into a bowl or tureen or what-have-you, so long as what you have isn’t going to melt from the heat.  Put the saucepan in the sink and run some water into it, so that you don’t end up having to remove the cold solidified remnants with a chisel later.  Remember to turn off the stove.

Serve the sauce with turkey, or with pancakes, or with whatever seems good to you.  It’s good warm or cold, either way, and will keep for a day or so in the refrigerator.

Some people fancy this up with lemon peel or other seasonings, but simple is easier and works just fine.

Deadline Cookery Redux

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The looming deadline looms ever nearer, and tonight’s dinner is therefore dazzling in its simplicity:  Crockpot Kielbasa and Cabbage.

For which you need only a crockpot, a head of cabbage, and about one pound of kielbasa.  You cut up the cabbage into small enough pieces that it’ll fit into your crockpot, you cut up the kielbasa into half-rounds, and you slow-cook them together on low until dinnertime.  Some people put caraway seeds into the pot with the cabbage, but we’ve got at least one anti-caraway person in this household, so I don’t.

It’s hard to get much simpler than this.

A Truth Universally Acknowledged

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Thanksgiving dinner is essentially a Pie Delivery System.

This year we’re having apple streusel, cherry streusel, and pumpkin.

Things I’m thankful for, as a writer:

Word processing technology, because it hands over most of the mechanical drudgery to mechanical drudges.

The internet, and in particular the web, because it lets me do research without having to travel many miles over hedges and stiles in order to be physically present in the same room as the text, or on the same hillside as the view.

Editors, because they work to make my books not just better, but as good as possible.

Publishers, because they do all the hard work of production and distribution so I don’t have to.

And readers, because without them I’d just be talking to an empty room.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, if you’re celebrating; and have a good day anyhow, if you’re not.

Deadline Dinners Redux

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Yet another dead-simple crockpot recipe for writers (and other people) on a deadline who aren’t yet ready to break out the emergency frozen pizza stash:

Crockpot Orange Chicken

For the chicken:

  • 1 1/2 pounds boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut into 2-inch chunks
  • 1/2 cup flour
  • olive oil

For the sauce:

  • 1 tablespoon kosher salt (actually, regular salt would undoubtedly do just fine.  But recipe writers love their kosher salt, and we have a box of it in the kitchen, so . . . .)
  • 6 ounces of frozen no-pulp orange juice concentrate, thawed.  (If, like me, you couldn’t find a 6-ounce can, use half of a 12-ounce can and make orange juice out of the rest.  Vitamin C for the win.)
  • 3 tablespoons brown sugar
  • 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar
  • 3 tablespoons ketchup

Put the flour and the chicken pieces into a ziploc bag and shake it to coat the chicken all over.
Put 3 or 4 tablespoons of olive oil into a large skillet and heat it up.
Add the chicken and brown it on all sides, just enough to get the flour coating all cooked.  (Don’t worry about the chicken itself; you’re going to be cooking it in the crockpot for hours, anyhow.)
Put the chicken pieces into the crockpot.
Mix up the sauce ingredients in a small bowl and pour the sauce over the chicken.  Use a wooden spoon to mix up the sauce and chicken pieces until all the chicken is coated with the sauce.
Put the lid on the crockpot and cook the chicken on low for 6 hours, or on high for 3-4.
Serve over rice.

This feeds six people once around with lots of rice, or three people if they all have seconds/large helpings.

Deadline Brain

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From a fragment of conversation heard this evening in the office:

Me:  Is it Saturday that they want the cake for the church bake sale, or did I completely space out on things and it was today?

My husband and co-author:  Relax.  So long as they have it by 10:30 Saturday morning, you’re good.

In honor of that moment, and in lieu of something more substantive about writing (other than, my goodness writers do get spacey when they’re on a deadline), the cake recipe in question:

Marvelous Mississippi Mud Cake

5   ounces (5 1-ounce squares) unsweetened chocolate
2   Cups sifted all-purpose flour
1   tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup powdered instant coffee or instant espresso
2   Tbsp boiling water
1   cup plus 2 Tbsp cold water
1/2 cup bourbon, or rum, or amaretto, or cognac
1   cup unsalted butter at room temperature
1   tsp vanilla extract
2   cups powdered sugar
3   large eggs plus 1 large extra yolk
1/4 cup sour cream or buttermilk
cocoa or confectioners sugar optional

Generously grease  a nine inch Bundt pan – 10 cup capacity.  Position rack in center of oven and heat oven to 325 deg. F.

Melt chocolate in the top pan of a double boiler over hot, not boiling, water.  (Or, these days,melt the  chocolate in your microwave.) Remove chocolate before it is completely melted and stiruntil smooth.  Set aside.

Sift together the flour, salt and baking soda and set aside.  In a two cup glass measure dissolve the instant coffee in the boiling water, stir in the cold water, and bourbon or other flavoring and set aside.

Beat the butter with vanilla and sugar in the large bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle beater until  well blended and smooth. (Or use a handheld electric mixer if that’s what you’ve got.)  Beat in the eggs one at a time, beating after each addition.  Beat in the extra yolk and sour cream.  Scrape down the bowl and beater.  Add the melted and slightly cooled chocolate and beat until the batter is smooth.

Remove the bowl from the stand.  By hand using a spoon or rubber spatula stir in small amounts of the flour mixture and the coffee-bourbon liquid.  Beat until the batter is smooth;  it will be quite thin.  Don’t worry if the batter looks slightly curdled.

Pour into the prepared pan.  Bake until the cake top is springy to the touch and slightly cracked looking and a cake tester inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean — about 65 to 70 minutes.  Do not over cook.

Cool the cake on a wire rack for 15 minutes.  Top with another rack or plate and invert.  Lift off pan,  Cool completely.

Top with light sifting of confectioners sugar or cocoa.  Serve with bourbon-laced slightly sweetened whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

 
I got this recipe from my father; I have no idea where he got it from.  It’s clearly been around for a while, though; you can tell that much from the fact that the original version called for melting the chocolate in a double boiler.