The Dinner Files

My best friend from college has been trying to get me to make these on Christmas Eve for years. Not because she will be present and wants to eat them, mind you, but because I turn to her, beg for suggestions to mix up my family’s seafood-and-appetizers-for-dinner Christmas Eve celebration, and the baked clams, well, they come up.

This year was no different. I emailed her for suggestions. She emailed back that I should really ask Molly Watson. Hardy-har-har. She suggested baked clams. And then this year was different. I asked for the recipe. Her mother-in-law then very kindly emailed the basics back as she sat at the gate at the airport. (Don’t you love how they found elves tiny enough to fit into iPhones and Blackberries and whatnot? Miraculous!)

Mine have a bit more stuff on top of each clam than do hers, because I love me some spicy garlicky breadcrumbs, I really do.

We ate these Christmas Eve to great delight (see the rest of the menu below) – they’d be awfully nice on New Year’s Eve as well, if you’re looking for a treat tonight. Perfection with champagne.

Baked Clams

You can ask the fishmonger to shuck the clams for you. In my experience, having made them twice in the past week and having bought the clams from two different fishmongers, one of two things may happen: 1) The fishmonger may tell you one can’t shuck clams. They are wrong. One very much can shuck clams – it’s a bit trickier than oysters, but not that much. Littlenecks are trickier than Manilas, but both can (and should!) be shucked. Still, it is a hassle, so ask the fishmonger to do it for you. 2) The fishmonger may tell you you need to eat/use the shucked clams right away! Immediately! Once shucked they are dead and decomposing! The fishmonger may try to put the fear of god into you or, again, this may be just my experience, into your dashing husband. Again, the fishmonger, on this point, is wrong in my experience. Unless they’ve really mangled the shucking job, the clam should still be intact and even still gripping the shell again once it sits for a bit (in this way, clams are quite different from oysters) – just the hinge is broken and they’ll be easy to pop open when you’re ready to cook. That said, buy the clams the same day you plan to cook them.

This recipe easily doubles or triples. You could even bake half dozen portions in small gratin dishes to serve directly from the oven.

2 dozen Littleneck or Manila clams, shucked

1/3 cup fresh bread crumbs

2 – 3 Tablespoons minced flat-leaf parsley

1 – 2 cloves garlic, minced

1/8 teaspoon red chile flakes

1 Tablespoon olive oil

Get the oven nice and hot – at least 400 degrees. Set shucked clams on the half-shell (be sure to scrape off any clam that clings to the other side of the shell into the side you’re cooking – you want all that tiny bit of meat!) on a baking sheet or in a baking dish.

In a small bowl, combine bread crumbs, parsley, garlic, and chile flakes. Drizzle with olive oil and combine again. Distribute evenly on the clams.

Bake 10 to 12 minutes – 10 for slightly softer clams, 12 for those you really liked their cooked seafood cooked. You know who you are.

__

In the fine tradition of tracking Watson Family Christmas Eve menus, I offer you this:

• Denny’s smoke salmon (with cream cheese, red onion, rye bread)
• Crab salad (homemade mayo, lemon zest, lemon juice, chives) on endive leaves
• Crudités with dip
• Oysters on the half-shell (with frozen jalapeno-lime mignonette – mince a jalapeno, mix it with 2 Tablespoons lime juice and 2 Tablespoons red wine vinegar, add salt and pepper, freeze in a metal pan, scrape up into an icy mound and serve with oysters)
• Poached shrimp with homemade cocktail sauce (extra horseradish)
• Baked clams (see above)
• Flatbread two ways (mushrooms, roasted garlic, fontina and pancetta, fig spread, gorgonzola dolce)
• Semifreddo (made with dark toblerone bars in place of torrone Italian nougat to great success)

See? We left out the cheese this year. It was a good menu and there weren’t many leftovers, but we could pare down a bit and not all feel so very very full for so many days after wards. Fewer oysters and clams would have been okay – two dozen each, perhaps, instead of four and three, respectively.

I put out a call on Facebook. I picked up the phone. I tweeted. No one ponied up with a good popcorn ball recipe. I was making them with 40 first graders, so they needed to be easy. But I’m me, so they couldn’t be completely disgusting. They were still pretty disgusting, though, because they are popcorn held together with some form of sugar and smooshed together. But they were also really really fun. The kids loved squishing them as hard as they could, “harder than you think you should,” I told them. At six it seems that kids like being told to do things they think they shouldn’t do. Like man-handle popcorn, or eat yet another candy cane, or dredge seaweed out of a nasty-ass duck pond in the park at a birthday party, or hit that piñata just as hard as they possibly can, or eat a popcorn ball before breakfast. I’m just saying, as examples that may or may not have occurred over this pre-holiday weekend.

May your Christmas be merry and – since between travel and school break and general merriment I’m going to be more offline than on – a super duper happy beginning to 2010.

Popcorn balls

You can use any popcorn you want for these, but stove-top popped corn really does taste better. I fear the art of popping corn without a gadget, be it microwave or hot-air corn popper, is quickly becoming a lost one. I explain how to do it below.

1 – 2 Tablespoons vegetable, canola, or other neutral tasting oil

1/2 cup popcorn

1/2 cup dark corn syrup

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

Up to 1 cup nuts, raisins, chocolate chips, red hots, little candies, or other tiny items of tastiness you’d like to add to your popcorn balls

Butter or spray oil

Heat a large pot over high heat. Add oil and let that heat up for about 30 seconds. Add popcorn, shake pot to coat the corn with oil, cover, and shake the pot every few seconds until you hear that first kernel pop. Reduce the heat to medium and shake intermittently as the corn pops. When the kernels slow down and there are a few seconds between each pop, take off the heat and set the lid ajar. Let sit until corn stops popping. (At this point you can add butter or salt or brewer’s yeast or whatever else you like on your corn if you’re not making popcorn balls.)

Heat corn syrup, sugar, and salt in a saucepan over medium high heat. Bring to a boil, stirring frequently, and cook, stirring, until sugar dissolves completely. Pour syrup over popcorn, add nuts or raisins or whatever if that’s your style, and stir to coat popcorn as completely as possible.

Coat your hands with butter or spray oil (it ends up, kids love having their hands sprayed with oil, even as they scream “eww” and “yuck” and “what *is* that?” as you spray them), grab a handful of popcorn and press it into a ball. This will be more difficult than you may think, especially if you don’t have snowball-making experience. You will need to squish it much more and harder than you think you should. Once you have a ball, you can add more popcorn, again pressing it on much firmer than seems right, to make a bigger popcorn ball, if you like. The small ones are so cute, though, that I’m not sure why you’d do that.

You’ll get 10 – 12 handful-size popcorn balls with this recipe.

Hold onto your hats. These puppies are yummy. If they manage to sit around your house for more than a day, I salute you. We scarfed ours down. We made ourselves ill, actually. And after we made ourselves ill we then ate the rest of them. My dashing husband has asked me not to make any more, at least not any time soon. He finds them addictive. He wants help. These peanuts are perfect for cocktail parties, beer-thirst-inducing for sports watching, and – what with being nuts -  pack-able homemade gifts, too.

You can use the chile to add spicy heat, without the chile the peanuts have a lot of flavor from spices, but they aren’t hot spices. So they’re spicy but not spicy. I have a feeling you know exactly whether you want to use the chile or not already. Most folks do.

Spicy seeded peanuts

1/4 cup vegetable, sunflower, canola, or other neutral-tasting oil

1 teaspoon mustard seeds

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

1 fresh hot chile minced (spiciest version) or 2 – 3 small dried hot chiles such as arbols (some heat but less than the fresh chile), optional

2 cups peanuts (raw is best, roasted works just dandy, roasted and salted means you won’t need to add the “salt to taste” further down this list, dry-roasted are already flavored and aren’t quite right for this snack)

2 Tablespoons lemon juice (sounds weird, I know, but stay with me)

1 teaspoon sugar (again, I know it doesn’t sound right but it works)

1/2 – 1 teaspoon garam masala (an Indian spice mixture you can find at specialty stores or you can make your own – my version in below)

Salt to taste

Heat a wide saute pan or large pot with a fitted lid over high heat. When the pot is hot, add the oil. When the oil shimmers, about 30 seconds, add the mustard seeds and cumin seeds, cover the pot, reduce the heat to medium high, and listen for the mustard seeds to start popping. Then listen for them to finish popping – it should take a minute or two. Remove the lid (things can get a little smokey at this point 0 it’s fine! solider on!), add the chile if you’re using it, and stir as it sizzles.

Add the peanuts and cook, stirring frequently, until they get toasty and plenty of browned bits. Remove from the heat and sprinkle with the lemon juice, toss to combine, sprinkle with the sugar, toss to combine, sprinkle with the garam masala, and toss to combine completely and utterly thoroughly. Add salt (and more sugar or garam masala, if you like) to taste. Spread the peanuts out onto a few layers of papers towels and let them cool, drain, and dry a bit before serving. Serve slightly warm or at room temperature. These peanuts keep in an air-tight container very well overnight. I imagine they keep much longer than that – a week at least, maybe more – but at my house they only lasted about 18 hours.

I like a fairly cardamom-y, peppery garam masala and make it by whirling the following in a spice mill (I use a clean coffee grinder): seeds from 10 cardamom pods, 3 Tablespoons black peppercorns, 2 Tablespoons cumin seeds,  1 Tablespoon coriander seeds, 1 2-inch stick of cinnamon, 1 clove. I keep some in a spice jar in the cupboard and any extra in the freezer in a tiny ziploc bag. I have no idea if I should keep it in the freezer, but it always smells and tastes great when I take it out.

Macaroni and cheese, the kind made with actual cheese and not orange powder from a box, makes me think of one thing: the time right after my son was born. A dear friend made me a double batch (one for eating, one for freezing) of some kick-ass, creamy, luscious, rich macaroni and cheese. I was just home from the hospital, trying to nurse this tiny bundle of screams and coos, and – despite what books and doctors had promised – he was awake all day except for 20-minute dozes he would take after a feeding if I was lucky. Instead of sleeping 20 out of 24 hours, he used that time to eat. Everyone said I needed to nurse him on-demand, so I did. His demand, however, was insatiable. I was tired and hungry and so so so so very thirsty all of the time. It seemed like there would never be enough sleep or food in the world to fix my state.

That mac and cheese sure helped, though. I ate it for every meal one day – the breakfast included three scrambled eggs on the side which I maintain is the best nursing mother breakfast possible. Fortifying to exhausted body and weary soul.

In one sense I can still feel everything from that time – the magic of the new born, the feeling of a cascade of spit-up running down my chest, the pit of hunger that gnawed on me day and night as the life was literally sucked out of me, the ability to fall fully asleep while sitting up if given just 10 seconds of quiet and stillness – and in another sense it’s all a blur. But this I know: for better or for worse that time ended, or at least it morphed into other times. And those times quickly blur into one another in my memory and mainly what I see is the six year old beside me now. The six year old who leaves this on my desk:

Here is how the note came about:

“Mama, the chicken at Good Frickin’ Chicken is good, but the macaroni and cheese is also really good.”

“Mmmm hmmm,” I nodded as I drove to school.

“Mama, don’t you think their macaroni and cheese is really good?”

“Uh, it’s okay, I guess. It’s not my favorite.”

“What IS your favorite then?”

“Well, I suppose the kind I make.”

Silence. Stunned silence as Terry Gross murmurs over the airwaves.

“Mama, you can MAKE mac and cheese?!?!?!”

I like this about six a lot. Ernest knows I cook as part of my job. He knows I’m a good cook (mostly from people constantly telling him and trying to make him talk about how lucky he is, but to him it is just food and he wishes there was more fried chicken gracing the table, thank you very much). Yet he hasn’t quite figured out that if it is food, I can make it. So each new item is like a gift offered down from the heavens. As with crêpes, as with baguettes.

So I said I’d make mac and cheese for dinner and then forgot to go buy cheese, and the next morning the above was waiting for me when I returned from dropping him at school – a process that involved several verbal reminders to buy cheese. Cheese was bought, grated, and baked, all were happy:

Just Plain Delicious Macaroni and Cheese

This makes a decidedly Spartan version of macaroni and cheese – that is, the pasta-to-sauce ratio is a tad sparse. For a richer, saucier version, simply reduce the amount of macaroni to half a pound.

1 pound elbow macaroni or other small tube-shaped pasta

5 cups milk (sometimes I use a cup of white wine for a grown-up flair, adding that first to the butter-flour mixture, then adding four cups of milk)

1/2 cup cream (or increase milk to 5 1/2 cups)

7 Tablespoons butter

About 1 1/2 cups fresh bread crumbs (about 6 slices of white sandwich bread or similar)

1/4 cup all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon dijon mustard (optional)

1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

6 cups shredded cheese (about 20 ounces total) – I like to use about half aged gouda, and half regular gouda but there are infinite possibilities

Preheat oven to 375. Boil the pasta in a large pot of salted boiling water until just tender to the bite – drain it and set it aside.

If you’re feeling precise, gently warm milk and cream in a medium saucepan over medium heat or, I imagine, for about a minute in the microwave. If you add it cold to the roux the whole thing will seize up and you’ll have to really whisk a lot of lumps out of it – work now or work later, it’s your choice.

In a large pot over medium high heat, melt the butter. While butter melts put bread crumbs in a medium bowl. Pour out 2 tablespoons of the butter and toss with the bread crumbs. Set aside. Return remaining butter to the heat. When it stops foaming, whisk in the flour. Cook, whisking constantly, until you get a slight cooked pie crust smell, about 3 minutes. Reduce heat to medium and slowly pour in the milk, whisking constantly. Cook, whisking, until sauce thickens slightly. Stir in salt, mustard if you like, nutmeg, pepper, and cayenne.

Add cheese, one handful at a time, whisking or stirring between additions so you have a smooth sauce before adding more cheese. When all the cheese is melted into the sauce, remove from the heat. Add more salt, nutmeg, pepper, or cayenne to taste. Add pasta and toss to thoroughly coat the noodles with the sauce. Pour macaroni into a 9-by-13 baking pan. Cover with bread crumbs and bake until bubbling and golden on top, about 20 minutes.

Anyone else remember all that green chile I ate last spring in New Mexico and West Texas? I imagine the memory is less compelling, less sweet for someone who just read about it instead of digesting it.  Still, perhaps you remember all that talk about how I was going to figure out how to make it?  I used all of my stew-making knowledge and sha-zam: delicious green chile stew.

I was cooking for two families, and children besides my own relatively omnivorous son were involved, so I kept the whole thing on the mild side. To punch it up I served the stew with a serrano-jalapeno-red onion relish for the grown-ups to dabble on top of the stew. It’s a relish that I would happily swathe on pretty much anything (2 jalapenos, 1 serrano, 1 small red onion – all very finely minced – with about a teaspoon of lemon juice and salt to taste). A few warm corn tortillas (for the grown-ups to eat with their stew and for the children to make masks out of with strategic hole-biting) rounded out the delicious, soul- and gut-warming creation.

Feel free to add  few hotter chiles to the stew for an all-in-one spice fest.

Green chile stew

12 large mild green chiles, such as Hatch chiles

1 large onion

2 Tablespoons lard or vegetable oil

1 1/2 teaspoons salt, plus more to taste (if you’re using commercial broth, reduce this amount to about 1/2 teaspoon)

2 lbs. well-trimmed pork butt or shoulder cut into bite-size pieces

2 Tablespoons flour

1 cup beer or broth or water

2 cups broth or water

First things first, you need to roast and peel those chiles. You can roast the chiles over a gas burner or under a broiler. Then put the chiles in a bowl and cover with a pot lid or foil. Let them sit and steam and cool down a bit for at least 15 minutes. Scrape off and remove peels, pull off stems, remove seeds, and chop. Set chiles aside.

Then peel and thinly slice the onion. Heat lard or oil in a large, heavy pot. Add onions,  chiles, and salt and cook, stirring when you think of it, until soft, about 3 minutes. Transfer the vegetables to a bowl, leaving as much fat in the pot as possible.

Brown the pork, working in batches just large enough to be in the pot in a single layer of pieces that don’t touch. This step adds extra flavor and helps melt some of the fat off the meat.

Once you’ve browned all the pork and have transfered it out of the pot, sprinkle the remaining fat/oil in the pot with the flour. Cook, stirring, until flour smells cooked, about 3 minutes. Add beer, broth or water and scrape up any brown bits on the bottom of the pot. The mixture should thicken up fairly quickly. Add the 2 cups of broth or water and return vegetables and pork to the pot. Everything should be covered by liquid, add more broth or water if necessary.

Bring mixture to a boil, then reduce to simmer and cook, covered until pork is extremely tender, about an hour. Alternatively, you can put the whole covered pot in a 350 oven and bake for about an hour.

Remove lid and simmer to reduce and thicken liquid, if you like. Add more salt to taste, if you like.

You can cool the stew and remove the fat that will congeal on top, but that would be very silly of you because that fat is just amazingly delicious.

Long ago, in a bookstore far, far away, I killed some time reading an etiquette manual from the 1920s. It was awesome: all kinds of info about tipping the butler at house parties (that’s overnight or weekend visits to you and me), setting a formal table for 20, and writing invitations and notes of all sorts. I should have bought that book. It was so American – that someone who didn’t already know all of this might need to know it – and I loved that about it. Plus, it had a section that really stuck with me. It focused on how to act towards someone who is grieving. It was lovely and compassionate and practical and contained all sorts of common sense that is far better to pass on than to acquire by trial and error.

I knew much of it, of course. You send flowers or other memorial. You write condolences. You offer general but also specific help. And, being from the Midwest, I also knew you bring food. I knew you bring food because grieving people shouldn’t have to cook and because they’ll have people stopping by and need food to serve and because they lose their appetite and may not feel like cooking.

What I knew but hadn’t put into practical knowledge was this gem: people with a limited appetite are not tempted by great piles of food. You must cajole them into eating by offering very small portions of easy, comforting foods regularly.

And so it is with the sick. That tea and crackers above? That’s been my diet for two days. I had some plain white rice last night and that didn’t go so well, so it’s back to the crackers. Oh, there’s been some ginger ale in the mix too, of course. If you give me a few crackers, I’ll eat them. If you show me an entire box of crackers, I must turn away in revulsion. A half glass of ginger ale sounds okay. A full glass? What’s with that? Why are you trying to make me sick all over again?

My dashing husband has caught a lot of very deserved flak for his inability to care for the sick. Or, to be specific, for his inability to take care of me when I am sick. Or, to be more specific, for the way he practically abandoned me when I had pneumonia and then again when I had swine flu. The diagnoses brought him around, and then he was great. But until the doctor proclaimed me terribly ill, he seemed to think I was taking a very sweaty two-day nap. A combination of hypochondria, germophobia, complete inability to admit there could be something wrong with me other than “being tired” (because then I would be truly mortal and we all know what that could lead to), and a projection of what he thinks he likes when he’s sick (to be left alone!) have, in the past, conspired to make him take some very unfortunate turns on the “caring for ill spouse” track.

I say “in the past” because he really turned that ship around this holiday weekend. First our son and then I had extremely unpleasant stomach viruses. Ernest got it first – Thursday night. (Anyone who has ever been in charge of cooking the bird can imagine the visions of mass food poisoning that swam through my head as I tried, again and again, to get him to the bathroom in time.) We spent Friday doing endless amounts of laundry, bringing the child ginger ale, and more thoroughly cleaning his room than it had ever been cleaned before. Crannies were reached. Surfaces sterilized. Stuffies bathed.

My turn came Saturday night. I will spare you the details and you should be thankful I do because they are horrifying. Experience has given me both the timing and the aim to avoid creating loads upon loads of laundry, so we were grateful for that. I was then in bed, sleeping on and off, for all of Sunday. My dashing husband really came through. I was left in peace, and yet never had to go downstairs. I was hydrated and warm and distracted. I’ve looked around and most information I can find about “caring for the sick” is targeted at the seriously sick – people who are dying or people with cancer. There isn’t much out there for just taking care of someone who has the flu or other short-term illness that nonetheless leaves them fairly incapacitated. For your reference, just in time for winter, here are some completely anecdotal and unscientific guidelines – a recipe, if you will – for caring for the sick:

1. Offer small amount of easy foods regularly. Leaving a bit near the bed at all times is an excellent strategy if it isn’t disgusting to the sick person. What are easy foods? Plain crackers, plain rice, maybe rice cooked in broth, yogurt, broth, simple soups (like that classic chicken noodle), Popsicles, gelatin, ice cream for sore throats. Sore tummies tend to need sweet things, colds and flus salty things, but that could just be me. In general, you might want to avoid dairy, but if it sounds good (as malteds do to me when I have a sore throat), who am I to judge? In any case, you want things with actual salt and sugar in them – no artificial sweeteners, no low sodium. Sick people need those simple sugars and the salt helps them stay hydrated (funny but true).

2. Make sure the sick person always has a beverage (or two!) at hand. Ginger ale and herbal teas are grand, but whatever sounds good to them is a go. Keep the cold things cold and the hot things hot. For sore throats and colds, I highly recommend the curative (or at least symptom-reducing) powers of Honey Lemon Ginger Tea.

3. As you bring food or beverages in, take old plates and glasses out.

4. Sick people need quiet. Try to avoid asking them questions beyond “Do you need anything?” The sick person may want a bit of company, but they still probably need quiet. Quiet company. Calm company. Do not bicker with your mother or work out plans with your kid in the sick room. And for the love of god, do not the three of you argue about how to make Jell-O in the sick room (I’m just saying, as an example).

5. Make sure the sick person has entertainments. Books, if their eyes don’t hurt too much, an iPod with podcasts on it, DVDs or a laptop on which to stream movies. This is not necessarily a time for the new and the fresh. Old favorites may be the easiest for the sick person to enjoy – that way if they fall asleep for a part it’s no big deal.

6. Keep the sick room as aired out as possible. Fresh air is a great cure-all, even when enjoyed from bed.

7. Keep the sick room a comfortable temperature for the sick person. Heating pads and hot water bottles work wonders for the chilled (and against sore tummies), cool clothes and ice packs relieve the feverish.

8. The seriously ill may need to be reminded/helped to change their pajamas/clothing. Do this at least daily. More often for the feverish. Clean sheets are nice, too, if you can manage it.

9. Hey! If someone’s temperature is over 102, call the doctor. Just to check.

What do you need when you’re sick?