The Dinner Files

I made this chocolate pudding with my best friend from high school in mind. She loves chocolate pudding. I’ve seen her eat it for breakfast and I’ve seen her eat in for dinner. Nice big bowls of it.

She does not, however, like to cook much. She bakes some mean cinnamon rolls and whips up a batch of pudding if the mood hits her. She doesn’t understand what all the fuss about pie crust is and will throw one together if she feels like eating pie. Yet I once saw her pull a can of black beans out of a cupboard and prepare to eat them cold out of the can because, as far as she could see, there was nothing in the house to make dinner out of. Cheese and eggs and tortillas and salsa were sitting, waiting, in the fridge. I made her some ad hoc huevos rancheros and she thought I was a genius.

For all her baking, fussy is not her game. I don’t think she is at all interested in tempering eggs or doing other things that, to my culinary mind, are part of making pudding. So I experimented with streamlined methods and minimal dirty-dish production. Now I just want all those hours I’ve spent whisking hot liquid into beaten eggs back. It ends up it wasn’t really necessarily in the first place.

Chocolate pudding

This is not pot de crème or extra rich or super-duper chocolate-y. This is creamy, yummy, old-fashioned chocolate pudding. The kind that is mainly milk and eggs. The kind you can tuck into a nice big bowl of. If you want a bigger chocolate hit, simply melt two to four ounces of chocolate and stir it in at the end with the vanilla.

3/4 cup sugar*

5 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder

4 tablespoons cornstarch

3 cups milk, divided

2 eggs

2 egg yolks

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

In a medium saucepan, whisk together sugar, cocoa, and cornstarch. Whisk in about 3/4 cup of the milk. Work it until it is very smooth and all the cocoa and cornstarch are dissolved and you have a brown paste. Add the eggs and egg yolks and whisk until everything is completely combined again. Now whisk in the remaining milk.

Put the pot on the stove over low heat. Cook, stirring with a wooden spoon and scarping the bottom and edges and corners of the pan to keep bits of the mixture from thickening unevenly, until the mixture thickens and coats the back of the spoon. This will take about 15 minutes. You want to cook the mixture slowly so the eggs don’t overcook and curdle into chunks. If nothing is happening, however, you may need to increase the heat – just little bits at a time – to get the mixture to thicken up properly. Take off the heat and stir in vanilla.

Transfer mixture to individual serving bowls or a single large bowl. Cover surface with plastic wrap or waxed paper and chill at least 3 hours and up to 3 days.

* I used “vanilla sugar” – sugar in which I store fresh vanilla beans. The sugar keep the vanilla beans supple and fresh; the vanilla lightly scents the sugar. Regular sugar works just fine, too.

I was craving some chiles rellenos. Then I read this lovely post at Rachel Eats about walnuts, and her walnut pesto looked so yummy that the neurons started firing. Then I remembered that there is a traditional chile rellenos dish that uses a walnut cream sauce. After a bit of research I realized I did not want to make that dish, at least not any vaguely authentic version of it. I don’t much care for peaches in my meat.

So I MacGyvered my own version. They were fabulous and I will never make them again, at least not until someone tells me a trick for skinning walnuts that actually works (um, that baking soda thing? sure, it loosened the skins, but it turned the nuts dark and the skins weren’t all that much easier to deal with). I ended up picking the skin out of all those grooves like a crazy person. My self-diagnosed OCD doesn’t need that kind of aggravation.

Chiles rellenos in walnut cream sauce

1 1/2 cups walnut halves

1 cup cream

1/2 cup milk

1 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste

12 large mild green chiles

1 tablespoon vegetable oil or lard

1 onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

3/4 pound ground beef

1/4 cup currants or chopped raisins

1/4 cup pitted black olives, minced

1/2 cup sliced almonds

Pomegranate seeds or chopped red onion for garnish

Put walnuts in a medium bowl and cover with boiling water and let sit a few minutes. Drain. Return walnuts to the bowl and cover with boiling water, again letting it sit for a few minutes. Drain walnuts and spread on a kitchen towel. Settle in with a long radio program or a good chat and pick off the skins from the walnuts.

Put the skinned walnuts in a medium bowl and cover them with the cream. Let soak for a few hours or overnight (chill). Whirl in a blender with milk and 1 teaspoon salt. Set aside.

Roast and peel chiles (if this process is new to you check out this guide). Once cool, make a slit along the side of each chile and pull out and discard the seeds. Set chiles aside.

In a frying pan over medium-high, heat oil or lard and add onion. Cook, stirring, until soft, about 3 minutes. Add garlic and cook, stirring, another minute.

Add beef and cook, stirring and breaking up the meat as you go, until well browned and cooked through. Add currants and olives. Cover, reduce heat to a maintain a simmer and cook about 5 minutes. Drain off any excess fat and stir in almonds. Add salt to taste.

Heat oven to 350. Let stuffing sit until cool enough to handle. Stuff each chile with the beef mixture. Lay chiles in a baking pan, cover loosely with foil, and bake until hot through, about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, put walnut cream in a small saucepan and warm over medium low heat.

Serve chiles napped with walnut cream sauce and garnish with pomegranate seeds (traditional and would be amazing, but we had none) or the sad-sack but very tasty purple of the chopped red onion.

You will likely have extra walnut cream sauce. It is delicious spread on toast or tossed with a small bowl of pasta for lunch.

Bright and bitter. Some days that describes me to a T. Purple and salty. Sometimes that works too, although in a more metaphorical way. They all get right to the heart of this salad, which hits the bright and bitter, purple and salty notes perfectly.

Radicchio green olive salad

This is my riff on a salad made at Toro Bravo in Portland. Their version relegates the green olives to the side, as a spread atop two slices of grilled bread. I put all the flavors in the bowl. With some good baguette and tasty cheese, you have yourself a simple and utterly delightful dinner.

1 head radicchio

18 green olives

1 cloves garlic

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons sherry vinegar or lemon juice (good both ways!)

Salt to taste

Lots of freshly ground black pepper

Scads of freshly shredded Parmesan cheese

Trim radicchio and cut or tear into shreds or bite-size pieces. Put radicchio in a large salad bowl.

Mince olives and garlic into a paste and then mix with oil, vinegar or lemon juice, and add salt and pepper to taste. (You can also do this in a blender, if you like.)

Toss radicchio with the dressing. Then add a whole lot of Parmesan and toss it again. Serve topped with more Parmesan.

I love the Winter Olympics. The Summer Olympics are fun to watch and all, but the Winter Olympics grab my heart. I read the coverage, I watch clips, I follow the way fans follow things. I even disconnect our internet connection and plug the cable cord into an old 9-inch TV tottering on a stack of books on my desk to watch the coverage.*

This love is clearly the fall-out of a Minnesotan childhood. As active as we were when the snow melted and the humidity and the mosquitoes set in, so many Summer Olympic events bear little resemblance to the things I ever did or do. I love to swim and always have, but as a kid I swam in lakes, not pools. The winter sports seemed more like expert versions of what we all did all winter long – skating for both speed and grace, hockey, skiing whether with our heels fixed or not, sledding down hills aiming for speed and hoping against crashes.

Every November we’d head to the sporting good store for new-to-us skates. Every garage had an arsenal of sleds and hockey sticks. Our neighbors flooded their backyard to skate on. If that was full we grabbed our skates and a shovel and cleared the creek near the house or headed to the park where acres of baseball and soccer fields were drenched and cleared and turned into so many skating rinks. I took figure skating lessons after school every week and on Saturdays our parents put my brother and me on a school bus that took us to the various ski hills within two hours of Minneapolis.

A DC friend recently tweeted, after six days home in Snowpocalypse, for advice from Minnesotans on what to do now that all the bread was baked and the movies watched.

I told him that snow is celebrated in Minnesota. It’s what makes the cold fun. No snow and you have a gray, leafless, and ultimately useless landscape. Snow means you can ski and snowshoe and snowmobile. Snow lets you build the banks for pond hockey.

As much as I identify with the sports, though, I know an even more important element of this love of mine stems from the memory of those two weeks when – in those late days of winter when it still got dark by 4 and the cold had set in deep and all that snow had lost the novel luster it had in December – my parents and my brother and I would gather and cheer. It probably helps that I was 9 (going on 10) when the Miracle on Ice happened at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980. Of that twenty-man team, twelve, plus the coach, were from Minnesota.

So, as an ode to the games and as a way to keep busy on a school holiday that caught me by a bit of surprise and as a way of apologizing for steering every conversation towards the end of the Russian reign in figure skating or the number of Olympic-grade luge tracks in the Western Hemisphere or the percentage of Canadians who shoot left in hockey for the next two weeks, last night I made my dashing husband’s favorite dessert: oeufs a la neige.

Oeufs a la neige

These delights are lightly poached meringues floating in a vanilla custard sauce. A fun food fact: this dessert is called floating islands in English. The seemingly direct translation of that back into French would seem to be the dessert known as île flottante, which is, in fact, a different dessert altogether that may be made of meringue or cake but in any case is one big island surrounded by the sauce, not lovely little poached “snow eggs.” Since they are delicious served cold, you can make them up to a day ahead of serving.

4 eggs

tiny pinch salt

3/4 cup sugar, divided

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract, divided

2 1/2 cups milk, plus up to 1 cup more

Separate the eggs and set the yolks aside for the moment.

Put egg whites into a copper bowl, if you have one, but any large bowl will do. Feel free to use a standing mixer with a whisk attachment, if you like, but I’ve timed myself and I can beat four egg whites by hand almost as quickly – and with much less hassle and much more control – as the machine. Beat eggs with a large balloon whisk, if you have one, but any whisk will work, or in the machine until foamy.

Add salt and keep beating as it turned fluffy.

Keep beating until firm peaks form – when you lift the whisk or beaters out of the egg whites the peak that forms should droop a bit, but then stay put.

Fold in 1/4 cup of the sugar, incorporating 1 tablespoon at a time. Then fold in 1/2 teaspoon of the vanilla.

Put 2 1/2 cups milk and 1/4 cup sugar in a wide pot or sauté pan. Heat the milk to a gentle simmer, stirring occasionally to help the sugar melt. Use two large spoons to form football-shaped dumplings of the egg whites, scooping the mixture with one spoon and shaping it in that spoon with the other spoon.

Then using the free spoon to help ease the meringue into the simmering milk. Do as many meringues as fit without crowding or touching too much in the pan.

Cook, turning over once, until meringues are firm, about 2 minutes each side. You may be tempted to go check your email while the meringues are poaching. I cannot recommend you do that since, in my experience, it leads to this:

When the meringues are cooked, lift them out of the milk with a slotted spoon and drain them on a clean kitchen towel.

Repeat with remaining egg white mixture.

When all meringues are cooked. Strain the poaching milk through a fine mesh sieve. Add enough more milk to equal 2 cups, if necessary.

In a small bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the remaining 1/4 cup sugar until lighter yellow and thick. Keep whisking as you pour the milk mixture, which will still be very warm, into the egg yolks. Constant whisking will keep the yolks from curdling. Transfer this mixture to a medium saucepan and cook over low heat, stirring pretty much constantly with a wooden spoon until the mixture thickens enough to coat the back of the spoon and show the path where your finger runs to have a taste.

Stir in remaining teaspoon vanilla. Strain custard sauce, if you like.

You can now cover everything with plastic wrap and chill it up to a day before you serve, or prepare the dishes, cover them and chill them until you serve them, or assemble the desserts and eat them warm. You could even make one and eat it right away and then put the rest away for dinner time. Put about a sixth of the sauce in a bowl and float three meringues on top. Make five more.

* That’s right, we have no TV. We have no place we want to put it where the cable runs and we’ve just never fixed that because we seem to be able to watch most of what we want to on our computers or DVD. Don’t worry, we’re not actual crazy “no TV” people. As I’ve stated here before, the very fact of Project Runway gets me out of bed in the morning. I look forward to 30 Rock as much as anyone.

This cauliflower is like gold, but more precious.

That is an inside joke between me and a long-ago college boyfriend. When I was 18 the two of us traveled from France to Greece and Italy and Denmark (!) on EuroRail passes and change we found on the floor of the trains. Or so it seemed. We couldn’t have had that little money, though, because I managed to gain about ten pounds in two weeks in Italy. I had never had gelato. It was a revelation. I ate it several times every day. But I digress….

So we were traveling on a shoestring, as the saying goes, and we were terribly young and had pretty much no idea what the hell we were doing half the time. So we did things like not pay the extra few bucks for reserved seats. For the majority of our travels, this was fine. For the packed overnight train from Zurich to Zagreb, it was less fun. Every seat was taken. Plenty of other people in the corridor. And tons and tons of Yugoslavians (because that’s what they were then, we knew not yet of Serbs and Croats and the horror that would come soon enough) heading home armed to the teeth with the bright and shiny goods of Western Europe. All those televisions and boom boxes had to go somewhere – somewheres we could have been sitting. We ended up squished into a corner of the vestibule at the front of the car next to the bathroom that could have been working better.

That would never happen to me now, of course. Not only would I reserve a seat because I would do a teensy bit of research – ask the station attendant, even – about the need to do such a thing, but even if I didn’t have a seat there is no way on this green earth that I would let someone put their crap on a seat I could sit in and even if I ended up sitting in the corridor, when the pushing and jostling started I would push right back and refuse to huddle in the creaking, rattling, drafty vestibule next to the leaky toilet. But, as I said, we were young. We were midwestern. We were polite. We didn’t make a fuss.

We arrived in Zagreb sleepless and a bit worse for wear. We were planning on staying a day or two, maybe going to some other Yugoslavian cities. We exchanged whatever pittance we thought would see us through that first day and were handed several inches of bill-size paper that we could only assume was their terribly deflated money. We then spent the day witnessing what seemed like never-ending incidents of people kicking and spitting at “gypsies” (I didn’t know then that “gypsy” is derogatory and that they are called Roma).

It was all quite upsetting to a nice, sleep-deprived girl from Minnesota, raised among so many nice, restrained, liberal people. We decided to catch the night train south, this time snagging floor space away from the toilet. It was another long, sleepless night – with lots of stops and noise and confusion for us. We saw a group of people literally kick an old Roma woman off the train. At another juncture a group of passengers physically blocked a Roma family from boarding the train.

We didn’t speak the language or have any understanding of the culture, so we sat – wide-eyed and horrified – as we rode the train south to Greece.

When we finally disembarked in Thessaloniki, the fresh ocean air hit us like a tonic.

We soon bought the cheapest phrase book we could find and were delighted to find it filled with such useful gems as “you dance like a fairy,” “will you marry me,” and “your hair is like gold, but more precious.”

From then on we described everything good, everything lovely, everything that helped us forget about that train ride as “like gold, but more precious.”

This cauliflower gets its golden hue from a bit of turmeric. It works fine without the turmeric if you don’t have any on hand, but look at that color! Why leave it out?

Spiced caramelized cauliflower

The wee bit of sugar in the spice mix helps the whole thing brown and caramelize and crisp up ever so slightly. I tried making this dish with just 2 tablespoons of butter, and it worked fine just perfectly fine but was significantly less like gold.

1 head cauliflower

3 Tablespoons butter

1 teaspoon sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1/2 teaspoon hot paprika

1/2 teaspoon sweet paprika

1/4 teaspoon cayenne (optional)

1/4 teaspoon turmeric

1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Heat the oven up to 450. Cut cauliflower into florets. I like to try and keep things fairly bite-sized so I further divide the larger pieces, but I’m sure you know how you like your cauliflower cut up.

Melt the butter and then mix it in a large bowl (big enough to hold all the cauliflower) with the sugar, salt, and all the spices. Add the cauliflower and toss to coat the cauliflower as evenly as possible with the spicy butter.

Lay the cauliflower pieces in a single layer in a roasting pan or on a baking sheet. Cook them in the oven until browned, sizzling, and tender with crispy bits forming on the edges – mine took about 25 minutes.

Serve hot or warm. I think they’d be rather nice as a little appetizer – with toothpicks – with drinks.

We liked it with rice and brown butter dal, with a little fresh green chile and red onion relish (seasoned to taste with salt and lemon juice) for freshness and color. This dinner? It wasn’t just golden. It was like gold, but more precious.

Last week, before the lefse extravaganza, one of my other San Francisco Bay Area cousins (the Watson cousins have a quorum going – four out of seven of us live in the Bay Area; if you count Monterey, which is a questionable move, the number goes to five out of seven – impressive considering not a single one of us is from here) stopped by after work to make samosas. Why samosas? We really don’t know. I taught her how to make gougères last fall (for her book club meeting when they were to discuss My Life in France – the inspirational tale of Julia Child’s time in France, including embarking on her culinary career at the tender age of 37) and we had a rollicking good time and wanted to do it again.

So we made 110 samosas. I mean, if you’re going to get a pan of oil bubbling and pull out the rolling pins out and cover the kitchen in flour, you might as well have something to show for it at the end of the day, no?

First, the fillings. One potato. One lamb. I make no claims to even the remotest authenticity. We didn’t even fill them right. We gave up and filled them like ravioli or pierogi.

Potato Samosa Filling

This is what most people think of when they think “samosa” (or, I suppose, if they think “samosa”). This filling was soft and fluffy lightly spiced and full of little seeds – cumin, fennel, and mustard – to give it plenty of flavor. If you want to make them more like samosas you get at most Indian restaurants in the States, throw in about a cup of frozen peas towards the end.

4 large Yukon Gold potatoes

Salt

1 large onion, chopped

2 Tablespoons vegetable oil

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

1 teaspoon fennel seeds

1 teaspoon mustard seeds

3 dried small red chiles

10 fenugreek seeds

1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

1 Tablespoon lemon juice, plus more to taste

Put potatoes in a large pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil and add about a tablespoon of salt – you want the water to actually taste salty. Cook until potatoes are tender all the way through, 20 to 30 minutes.

Put potatoes through a ricer or peel and chop – the choice is yours. My cousin “chopped” ours into a mash. It was all very even and precise. She’s a lawyer.

Meanwhile, you can heat another pan over high heat and cook the onions in the oil until they start to brown , adjusting the heat so they don’t burn before they soften. Or, do as we did and wait for that potato pot to be drained and use it to avoid washing a pot. Yes, I’m that lazy about washing dishes.

When the onions are starting to brown, increase heat to high if necessary and add the cumin seeds, fennel seeds, and mustard seeds. Cover and cook until the mustard seeds stop popping, about 2 minutes.

Add chiles, fenugreek seeds, and turmeric. Stir to combine and then stir in the cooked chopped or mashed potatoes. Cook, stirring, to keep potatoes from sticking too much to the pan (they’ll come up when you add the lemon juice in a moment, so there’s no need to panic), until flavors blend a bit, about 5 minutes. Add salt to taste if needed and drizzle whole mixture with lemon juice. Stir to pick up bits of potato on bottom of the pan and transfer to a bowl to cool a bit.

Lamb Samosa Filling

This is essentially kheema, a spiced ground meat dish that goes with rice or bread or potatoes and makes a great stuffing for vegetables that can be stuffed.

1 Tablespoon vegetable oil

2 large onions, chopped

6 cloves garlic, minced

2-inch piece of fresh ginger, grated

1 1/2 pounds ground lamb

6 whole cloves

6 black peppercorns

2 bay leaves

3 dried red hot chiles

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon

3 chopped tomatoes (fresh or canned)

1/2 teaspoon salt

Lemon juice

In a large frying pan or pot, heat oil over medium high heat. Add onions and cook, stirring, until soft, about 3 minutes. Add garlic and ginger and cook, stirring, until very fragrant, about 1 minute. Add lamb and cook, stirring as you see fit, until cooked through. Add cloves, peppercorns, bay leaves, chiles, coriander, cumin, turmeric, and cinnamon. Stir to combine. Stir in tomato, salt, and 1/2 cup water. Cover, reduce heat to maintain a simmer, and cook for about 45 minutes. Remove cover, taste and add more salt if you like, and cook off any remaining liquid. Stir in lemon juice and transfer to a bowl to cool.

You will notice that the potato and lamb samosas look quite different on their outsides and well as their ins. We baked the lamb ones – since they had plenty of unctuous tasty fat in them to keep them moist anyway.

So, onto the dough (tired yet?). Use your fingers to work 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil into 2 cups whole wheat pastry flour mixed with 1/2 teaspoon salt. Stir in 1/2 cup water. You may need to add another 1/4 cup to make a workable dough. Knead it in the bowl until it holds together as a ball. Cut into 20 – 30 pieces and cover with plastic wrap or a damp kitchen towel. Work with one ball at a time.

On a floured work surface roll each ball into a 4-inch circle. Cut the circle in half. Now you can fold the half-circle in half and pinch the cut sides together to form a cone for a traditional samosa shape and fill the cone about 3/4 full of filling and then crimp the end shut, or just fill it and crimp the edges as we ended up doing because we were so tired and lacked proper Bengali skills. Place filled samosas on a lightly floured baking sheet.

When you’re ready to cook you can either bake them for about 20 minutes in a 375 oven and/or heat about 1/2 inch of vegetable oil in a heavy pot or cast iron pan over medium high heat to 350 – 375 degrees. Fry, in batches and without crowding the samosas – until golden on each side, about 3 minutes per side. Drain on paper towels or a cooling rack.

We were total heathens who just shoved them in our mouths as we went. I really just do not want to think about how many we ate as we filled and fried. A lot. We officially ate a whole butt-load of samosas. And then some. Luckily, I had made a cilantro mint chutney. It’s chock-full of vitamin A.

Last night my world fell apart. And thus so too did dinner. Just a bit.

My Very Tall Cousin’s Norwegian girlfriend had been home over Christmas and made lefse from scratch with her stepmother. Lefse, in Norway, is a traditional food and made, she said, really mainly at Christmas time. Most people buy theirs – often from old ladies who make them at home – but her stepmother thought she’d try it and was amazed as how easy (just time consuming) it was. She came back full of will to make lefse – and to teach me how to make it.

So on Sunday she and My Very Tall Cousin showed up, with lefse ingredients in hand. They came upstairs and she unpacked the ingredients on the kitchen counter: flour, milk, butter, and sugar.

Where are the potatoes? I asked.

What potatoes? she responded.

Isn’t lefse a potato bread?

(And here all you Minnesotans will want to hang onto your hats because your minds are about to be blown.)

No, lefse is just plain and you fill it with butter and sugar.

I thought it was a flat potato bread.

No, that’s potato lefse. Just lefse is plain, with butter and sugar.

And, according to Wikipedia, she is right about the food of her country. According to the stack of English-language Scandinavian cookbooks on my shelf, she is on crack. But these books were all written by Americans for Americans. In Minnesota you can buy lefse at plenty of grocery stores. It is always potato lefse. Always. I had literally never heard of lefse being anything else until last night.

Forge ahead. The dough is very cool – just 2 cups scalded milk, 1 stick melted butter, and 2.2 pounds of flour beaten until it holds together in a shiny mass. It’s soft and pliable but holds together and doesn’t stick.

Then came the extensive rolling –

The rolling actually takes both time and a fair amount of effort because you want it paper-thin. Really, what you want is to get it read-through thin –

Getting each lefse this thin is, as you might imagine, a total pain in the ass. The best combination for this feat was the much-used (and thus constantly well-oiled and seasoned) cutting board and the rolling pin with actual handles. Rolling on the almost-never-used-for-direct-food-contact side of the kitchen cart with the handle-less French-y style rolling pin was not so much fun. In a way, it’s easy to roll out. It has the consistency of playdough and doesn’t stick much, but it has a tendency to bunch up and fold onto itself if you’re not paying attention or you’re using the above-mentioned poor combination of location and pin. We all took turns, and drank beer or wine (or, in Ernest’s case, a rare treat of ginger ale), and made a good time of it as we rolled, cooked the lefse on a pancake griddle instead of an authentic lefse grill, and – and I believe this is quite different than with potato lefse – layered the lefses ain between damp kitchen towels to soften them. Once properly pliant, they were spread with a butter-sugar mixture, folded, and stacked – ready to freeze as you see at the top of this post.

Then it was time for dinner. I had defrosted a top sirloin roast from my meat CSA, salted and peppered it and let it sit in the fridge overnight. Then I just roasted it at 450 until a meat thermometer read 135, let it rest so the temp would go up to 145, sliced it and served with butter braised cabbage and celery salad. And no potato lefse.

The problem was that none of the three thermometers in my kitchen drawers were registering any temperatures at all – but I didn’t realize that for awhile, what with all the lefse rolling business at hand. The meat all got cooked to medium well, which was a shame. Luckily, I had made a horseradish whipped cream (whip some heavy cream until it thickens and soft peaks form, stir in freshly grated horseradish and salt to taste). It was delicious. Beyond delicious, actually. And, as My Very Tall Cousin pointed out, it was like putting Cool Whip on meat. In a good way.

After letting the cream melt like butter onto the steak, and enjoying the horseradish tang on the deeply savory and seasoned meat, we headed back to the kitchen, for more spreading and folding and to eat our fill of lefse. Or, as my dashing husband dubbed it, “sugar bread.”

Add fried chicken to the list – including crêpes, baguettes, and macaroni and cheese – of things that my son never imagined in a million years that I could actually cook right here in our very own kitchen. Sauteed greens with home-preserved lemon? Sure, he’s seen that plenty of times. But fried chicken? That’s something you get at the zoo! Or for lunch at ski school!

I cut up a pasture-raised chicken (doing, I must admit, a rather ill job of it – sometimes those joints come apart with ease and other times I swear the bird is fighting back), threw the back into a plastic bag and froze it for future stock making, and put the chicken pieces in a giant bowl. I then covered them with buttermilk, a bit of salt, some black pepper, and a dash of cayenne. I covered this gruesome looking concoction and put it in the fridge overnight. The acid in the buttermilk tenderizes the bird very nicely.

The next day, I pulled the chicken out of the buttermilk. I let a lot of the buttermilk that others might rub off  the chicken cling as much as it likes – I like a fairly thick coating by the time all is said and done. Then I dredged the chicken pieces in flour that I’d seasoned with salt, black pepper, and a bit of cayenne.

The trick to doing this with as little mess as possible is to keep one hand dry and one hand wet – I use my left hand to only touch or handle things that are dry, my right for things that are wet. This helps avoid having to constantly wash my hands as buttermilk and flour build up to dexterity-reducing levels during the breading process.

Then I heated plenty of vegetable oil (I decided to forgo the lard-frying in this instance) in a well seasoned cast iron pan and only added the chicken when the oil was around 350 – measure it with a thermometer or do what I do and dip the end of the handle of a wooden spoon into the oil, when the oil is the right temperature it will instantly but gently bubble up around the handle. I fried the chicken until it was brown and crispy, about 12 minutes each side.

Cast iron – or other heavy pots – are so great for frying like this because they hold heat so well and can maintain a steady temperature. You want the oil to be gently bubbling around the chicken constantly.

Drain the chicken on paper towels or on a cooling rack.

The verdict from Ernest? “Mama, this chicken is even better than the chicken at the zoo!”

Snap.

I spent some enjoyable hours reading Fuchsia Dunlop’s memoir, Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, last month. So imagine my delight when I pulled out an old family favorite from my recipe collection and noticed that it was from a Saveur story by said Fuchsia Dunlop. (She recently wrote a thoughtful piece on her decision to stop eating shark’s fin – despite a long-time resolution to eat everything she is served – for the BBC. It’s worth checking out for anyone who ever feels that their politically influenced dietary practices cause diner table tension.)

This is truly a 30-minute meal. Alongside it we usually add some sauteed greens or a tossed salad with crisp lettuce (like Romaine) drizzled with a dressing of 1 teaspoon freshly grated ginger, 2 Tablespoons rice wine vinegar, 1 Tablespoon vegetable oil, a teaspoon or two of mirin or 1/2 teaspoon sugar, and soy sauce to taste.

Pork and bean thread noodles

I think is really is best when made with pork, but I’ve used ground chicken, ground turkey, and ground beef all to great effect. The ground lamb experiment, however, did not go so well. I made it once using picked crab meat in place of the ground meat, which was pretty tasty but, of course, completely undid the frugal appeal of this dish. We’ve never found the amount in the original recipe nearly enough for the three of us, so the amounts here are duly adjusted.

1/2 pound bean thread noodles

2 Tablespoons peanut or vegetable oil

1/2 – 3/4 pound ground meat

1/4 cup rice wine or dry sherry (I will admit to having used sake or dry white wine when we had no Chinese rice wine or sherry around and they both worked  just fine)

2 teaspoons soy sauce, plus more to taste

3 Tablespoons chile bean paste [also sold as "chile bean sauce" or with the word "red" thrown in there – in any case both soy beans *and* fava beans or broad beans should be in the ingredient list]

2 cups chicken or vegetable stock

6 green onions, chopped

Put the noodle in a large bowl and cover with hot water, let them sit about 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat a large saute pan or wok over high heat. Heat oil until it shimmers a bit. Add ground meat and cook, stirring, until it starts to brown.

Add sherry and soy sauce and cook, stirring, until liquid is half absorbed/evaporated. Add chile bean paste and cook, stirring, until the whole thing smells spicy, a minute or two. You need to stir a lot here to keep the paste from burning at all.

Add stock and bring to a simmer. Add more soy sauce to taste. Add drained noodles and simmer until liquid is mostly absorbed, about 10 minutes. Stir in green onions and serve hot.