Cracker Country

The third game was in Jacksonville. Now, I don't much care for the New South. The New South is all about Real Housewives, NFL expansion teams, and Republicans. It's about computer-generated "country" music, mega-churches and privatized prisons. It's Krispy Kreme and white SUVs and Nicky Haley.
The South I love is air so thick it's like breathing through a sponge. It's honeysuckle and old ladies in house coats selling tomato starts. It's Brother Claude Ely and Jim Graham and Edna Lewis.
It's stories my friend Cecil would tell about growing up a genuine cracker in south Georgia and north Florida. It's how Florida, or parts of it, really is a Southern state.
So there I was, determined to find the soul in Jacksonville, FLA. Turns out I didn't have to look too hard. Cecil grows misty talking about the seafood of his youth. Poorly lit cinder block buildings selling fried shrimp and oysters with a side of Frank's hot sauce. Yessir, sign me up.

Menu Oct 18, 2010
Fried Gulf shrimp with cocktail sauce
Hushpuppies with dipping sauce (glorified mayo, of course)
Cabbage-cauliflower coleslaw
Stewed tomatoes
Edna Lewis' green bean salad
Piper's Ican'tbelieveshe'sayankee Coconut cream pie

MNF New Jersey

The second night of our MNF season was Oct 11. The Vikings, led by the walking Greek Tragedy Brett Favre, went to the Meadowlands to play the New York Jets.

Of course I needed to make Italian food again, but it needed to be markedly different than the SF Italian. I did some research and discovered red clam tomato pie. I knew of white clam pie from Connecticut, and dreamed of it. Charred, bubbled crust, loads of fresh garlic and chewy, sweet clams from a hot, hot oven.
Red clam pie, it turns out, is essentially the same thing, but with tomato sauce. It's a Northern New Jersey thing, and apparently particular to just a few pizza parlors, and now, available in my living room.

I thought it sounded perfect. I used fresh littleneck clams, Fred's excellent tomato sauce, a lot of minced garlic, some wine and a good handful of parmigiano. I left a few of the clams on the shell for appearance. The tomato-y, garlicky, cheesy clams scraped off the shell with your teeth were like the best stuffed clams you ever had.

I also decided 2010 would be the year of the bar cookie. It frankly may continue in 2011. Every American region has a signature bar (meaning every American home cook has a few bar cookie recipes up his/her sleeve), they are easy to make, easy to serve--the whole pan plunked down between empty beer or wine bottles in the 4th quarter, and always so darn popular.
I don't like to push dessert on people on a Monday night, and somehow a bar cookie or two seems like not quite dessert. Just a nice fillip to end the evening.
Go Jets.

The menu:
Antipasti--stuffed mushrooms, salami, olives, smoked whitefish, ricotta salata, assorted pickles
Red clam tomato pie
Salad with Italian dressing (basically red wine vinaigrette with a little oregano and sugar)
Cranberry shortbread bars, in honor of New Jersey being a top cranberry producer

Red Clam Tomato Pie:
Use a wet, nicely fermented pizza dough. I'm lucky to bring home Grand Central's U-Bake dough. Stretch it thin.
Steam fresh clams with tomato sauce, extra garlic and a little wine.
Put all the clams, some still in their shells, on the pie with enough sauce to cover, but not enough to make soggy.
Top with a good handful of grated parmigiano.
Bake in a pre-heated 500 degree oven until it's bubbled and charred and really good looking.

Monday Night Football

I like sports in general, and love two in particular. Those two are cycling and football. I also love to have people over to watch those sports on TV. Naturally you have to feed those people.
My husband, Fred, and I have been watching the Tour de France since the mid 90's. About 5 or 6 years ago I started cooking dinners that reflected the cuisine of the region the racers were cycling through on that given day.
I'm pretty sure I stole the idea from Robin Rosenberg who's been hosting Superbowl parties featuring regionally appropriate food (from the teams' respective homes) for years. It's a great conceit; if you love to make food of all sorts it's nice to focus your efforts. And if you can do it for Cincinnati and Minnesota, say, you can certainly do it for the Savoie and Provence.
July is dedicated to 3 weeks of intensive French cooking. Sept-Dec, though, is football season, and therefore 17 weeks of American food.
In truth I don't host 17 monday night football (MNF) dinners. I'm ambivalent about football in September; I'm not entirely willing to let summer go, and football is, of course, synonymous with fall. Also, Sept can be spectacular in Oregon and California, and Fred and I are often backpacking or riding our bikes or in some other way trying to cram in the last of summer.
The 2010 MNF season at our house started on Sept 20, week 2, with New Orleans at San Francisco.
Sometimes I like to cook a specific, emblematic dish of a region, like, say, Cincinnati chili. Other times I'll come up with a menu that reflects my feelings or impressions of a place. San Francisco was the latter. Oh, I almost forgot-- in general the home team dictates the menu.
This year I thought about old Italian North Beach San Francisco.

The menu:
Fresh Pacific oysters with lemon
Bucatini with anchovy sauce
Green salad with lemon juice and olive oil (happily late Sept is still CSA season around here, so we had gorgeous, hearty, sweet and bitter farm greens)
Spumoni sundaes--vanilla and coffee ice creams (I strongly prefer coffee to chocolate) with chocolate sauce, toasted pistachios and boozy cherry sauce.

Anchovy Sauce:
For 1 lb of pasta slowly saute a couple lbs (3 or 4 good sized) of yellow onions, sliced, in a good amount of olive oil. Let the onions get soft and caramel-y. This will take 30-45 min.
Add a couple ounces of anchovy fillets, rinsed if salted. Smash a couple cloves of garlic and add to the onions. Mash the anchovies into the onions and garlic and continue to cook until the anchovies dissolve. Add lots of black pepper and season to taste.
Toast about 1/2 cup of bread crumbs, chop a big handful of parsley, and toss with cooked bucatini and onion/anchovy mixture. Add a little of the pasta cooking water if the sauce is stiff or stodgy.

Virtuous Asian Meatball Soup

I like it when I'm a virtuous person. Growing up a Protestant Wisconsinite I was under the impression that virtuousness was the ideal state of being. Naked in hot tubs? That was for California girls. Getting up early to help at the church rummage sale? That was for us. Occasionally our plight of hard work and God-fearing hours would lead not to basements full of dusty leisure suits and jaundiced lighting, but to something with a more sensual reward, like, say, u-pick strawberries. Although now that I think about it I did buy my first copy of The Great Gatsby at a church rummage sale. I bought it because it had Robert Redford and Mia Farrow on the cover, and as a 12 year old I was deeply in love with Robert Redford. If he had been on the cover of Atlas Shrugged I would have snatched it up and tried to enjoy it.
I have since moved south, and then west. With those moves I have weakened my resolve against the hedonistic lifestyle, and have even been naked in a hot tub, although I won't say I enjoyed it.
I indulge in all sorts of pleasures, particularly those of food and drink, and every now and then my Midwestern superego will tsk tsk in my ear. If I've had a weekend of duck fat fried potatoes, horseradish cream sauce, puff pastry stuffed with the first of the morels, and possibly some country ham, that superego will lay out ideas for low cost and low calorie dinners. This austerity usually lasts a night or two, at most, but it seems enough to make me feel thin-ish. I'm also relieved that these meals usually clear out the 'frig of the leftover hamburger or ground pork or roast whatever from the weekend. I'm also thrilled with the economy of it all. In short, they make me feel virtuous.

My Virtuous Asian Meatball Soup

Meatballs:
5 oz raw ground beef leftover from your caramelized onion and cheddar burgers
2 T toasted sesame seeds, black or white
1 large clove garlic
An equal amount of ginger
1/2 tsp sesame oil
1/2 tsp soy sauce
1 T minced green onion or shallot

Blend ingredients and form into small meatballs the size of a fat grape. Brown over medium heat, drain and set aside.

Soup:
4 cup stock, whatever homemade stock you have on hand
1/2 tsp sugar
1 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp vinegar, black or sherry
1/4 tsp black pepper
1 1/2 cup vegetables--thinly sliced mushrooms, shredded greens, julienned carrot--whatever you have on hand
1 egg
scallions and/or cilantro

Bring stock to simmer. Add sugar, soy sauce and vinegar and stir to dissolve. Add vegetables and meatballs and simmer for about a minute or so.
Stir egg vigorously. Add to simmering soup in a steady stream.
Season to taste and serve with chili sauce and thinly sliced scallions and/or cilantro.
I also like to add frozen dumplings or leftover rice or noodles to the soup.

What To Do With a Lamb Neck

It's getting on towards end-of-animal time. Strictly speaking, I'm exaggerating. I still have plenty of lamb, beef and pork. I did re-organize my freezer the other day, though, and did a little inventory. Still have large cuts of pork--good for the upcoming bbq season (which, in Oregon, is roughly 1 month starting in mid-July), but too many hams. I guess we'll be having some ham-themed dinner parties upcoming. Stay tuned. The chops are all but gone. The ground pork is dangerously low. I cooked the last steak (sirloin) on Sunday for what turned out to be an excellent, er, restorative dinner. A very butch dinner of steak, baked potato and an icy martini, gin, thank you very much.

I think I did a little mis-management of my meat this season--I've got too many large, "celebration" cuts, and dwindling supplies of quick and easy dinner-for-two cuts.

Amongst the large cuts like hams, leg of lamb and pork bellies are a couple tongues, a pair of trotters, and, until, this past weekend, a lamb neck. I've been calling these the alternative cuts. Not offal, not organs, but not things you normally see in a grocery store, and maybe not things you grew up eating or cooking. The unfamiliarity, however, does not interfere with their deliciousness. And if I'm ever unsure of how to cook an alternative cut, I turn to my motto: "when in doubt, braise".

We had people over for Easter/Passover/post bike ride eating last weekend. I wanted to do a menu that was mainly Passover (as a Chaim Potok reading non-Jew I leapt at the opportunity to cook Jewish celebration food after marrying a sort-of Jew). It would also be a good conceit to feed my lactose-intolerant dinner guest. Naturally, I turned to Chinese cuisine.

I used the lamb neck to make twice cooked lamb. Based on a recipe from Fuschia Dunlop's excellent Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, I marinated the neck overnight in regular and dark soy sauces and sugar. The following day I braised the neck with ginger, garlic, leeks and stock.
The day after that, the day of the dinner party, I drained, de-boned and de-gnarled the meat, then wok-fried the chunks in a goodly amount of peanut oil (I'm a little sorry I didn't use lard. Next time.), a spoonful of my friend Jill's endlessly useful homemade plum sauce, and a splash of stock. The stock, I'm afraid, was made from a nice ham bone. It was what I had on hand, and it was lovely stock, and, well, it was sort of Easter, too.

The lamb was gorgeous--succulent chunks of mahogany garnished with a large handful of chopped cilantro.