ruthcooks

I love the way you write, Kathleen. People who love food often pick up more in the kitchen than they think. Sure you can cook. I have one question about your kitchen--where is the stepladder for reaching your pots and pans? Or do you have some other way of getting them down? Perhaps ferret go fetch?

Twice I've pared down my cookbooks drastically--I try to limit them to 300--and both times I've let some books slip away that I wish I had back. There were books by Ada Boni and Richard Olney and Dione Lucas whose value I didn't realize at the time. Two of my favorite books got sold by accident and had to be replaced. Many books I miss were those which had only one or two recipes I used and loved, and meant to copy before I got rid of the book. Either I forgot which books the recipes were in, forgot to copy the recipes, or lost the copies. There went my recipe for paprika-onion sauce served with Chicken Pojarski. My first recipe for tzimmes, with the direction: "add enough liquid to make a not too thick batter." And many other treasures I've forgotten. Still, I'm planning to clean house once more. I've purchased many more cookbooks since joining eGullet and many weren't worth the price. Better qualify that! eGullet is only responsible for re-kindling my interest in cooking after the divorce wars...er, years. The internet is responsible for the bad books by enabling me to buy books online, sight unseen. My DIL of four years is becoming very interested in cooking, so this time I'm going to give the books to her. She can keep what she likes, and sell the rest on eBay for mad money.

King Arthur has one in their catalogue on line. It's called Whip-It, and costs 59.95. I don't know anything about this brand, but this company is usually very careful about the quality of merchandise they sell. When I have used one of these gizmos, I remember that it became clogged very often even when used every day. Also, it didn't taste exactly like cream whipped by hand or mixer, but rather too foamy. In the catalog picture, cream aerated by the Whip-It appears rather dense, not foamy. Find it here: Whip-It Cream Whipper

News bulletin for smokers. It's no secret from non- or ex-smokers that you smoke, even if you chain-eat breath mints. You don't have to breathe in my face for me to notice the smoke. The odor lingers in your hair, your clothes, your car and your home. It's a nasty habit, and yes, I've been there once or twice. If you're touching or breathing around my food, please don't smoke.

Making up menus is one of my favorite things to entertain myself. Here's my entry and some of the rationale, containing foods from Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan and Minnesota and probably several other states. Wine choices are entirely up to you, I'm not an expert. Midwest Menu for Chuck & Cam Indian River Consomme (Tomato juice, orange juice, beef broth, vermouth, basil) Cheddar Biscuits * Second Crop Fall lettuces with Fresh Pears, Julienned Country Ham, Corn Bread Croutons And Maple Vinaigrette * Boneless Breast of Wild Pheasant Braised in wine with sour cream and dried morels Amana Colonies Rice Dressing (with some wild rice added) Timbale of Corn Pudding Shredded Brussels Sprouts with Browned Butter * Layered Sour Cherry Parfait Rolled Tuiles with Hickory Nuts Notes: Soup: what’s a Midwestern menu without beef in it? Also, since the main course is rather heavy, and the salad complicated, this menu called for a light touch to begin with. Salad: I often move courses around to make the tastes flow better. The purpose of serving it before the main course is to separate the relative sweetness of the maple syrup vinaigrette from the dessert. Main course: using sour cream to tenderize pheasant is a useful method for tenderizing older birds. Corn not in season? My recipe is for a fluffy rather than custardy pudding and is always made with frozen corn anyway. No cheese course? Just doesn’t seem to go with Midwestern foods, but if desired, serve a selection of Wisconsin cheddar and goat cheese with either Nauvoo or Maytag Blue Cheese, and omit or substitute for the cheddar biscuits served with the soup. Dessert: This is my little joke for those who think that Midwesterners eat Jell-O all the time. Part of the parfait is jelled cherry juice. Wish I hadn't lost the recipe.

I'm familiar with three kinds of cobbler: those made with pie pastry (on top, bottom or both), those with dropped baking powder biscuits on top, and those made with cake batter as above, . The cake cobbler version was popular for a time in the Midwest. My family's recipe came from a friend of my mother and was known as "Helen Jean's Cherry Cobbler". It called for heating 4 cups sour cherries(fresh or canned) with sugar, juice and butter, then pouring this over the cake batter. Mine never gets crunchy on top, probably because the recipe calls for 2 cups of juice. Peaches and brown sugar are good in this, but much less sugar is needed. The cake version is the sweetest of cobblers and is best eaten on the same day. The dropped biscuits (when my mother made this) were soggy on the bottom and too hard and crunchy on top. She mostly made apple cobbler, however, which is not the best fruit choice for this style of cobbler. My cobbler preference is for a thick pie pastry on the top only, as the bottom dough is too soggy. By soggy, I mean that the dough tastes uncooked to me. All cobblers call for copious amounts of whipped cream or pour cream. Some prefer ice cream, but that is too sweet for me--I like more contrast.

Everytime I tasted anything made with ricotta, I hated it. The texture. Blah. Flavor. Blah again. Ruined lasagna for me, ruined desserts, ruined everything. A couple of years ago, I decided to make a recipe for chocolate ricotta muffins. They were a bit dry, but I didn't think butter would be appropriate. Then I remembered that I had some of the ricotta left and spread it on the muffins. Oh, my, couldn't believe it tasted so good. Then I was reading about bleudavergne's Montignac diet, where she ate fruit compote with yogurt. Yogurt is too sour for me to eat in the morning, so I tried the fruit compote with ricotta. Ate this for breakfast or snack almost every day last summer. Note: I've sense revised the ricotta muffins--added more sugar and some black cocoa--and am mad about them.

I always look forward to Fran McCullough's "The Best American Recipes" series to see what's happening in the US food world from a broad perspective. The latest incarnation, the 7th, for 2005-2006, just came out. It's always bothered me that the recipes can't possibly be the best when the year hasn't ended or even begun yet, but I finally decided that many people wouldn't buy the books if the years looked outdated. I really miss the trends which she included in the early years, and the "some lady handed me this in the parking lot" recipes; nowadays virtually all the recipes are from print and internet. Some older recipes are "rediscovered" if they are mentioned or reprinted in a new form. One recipe I'm sure to try is the "Overnight Macaroni and Cheese" where the barely cooked pasta absorbs the liquid overnight, no sauce making necessary.

How about a Penn.-Dutch potato filling? It's like mashed potatoes with the same herbs and flavorings in bread stuffing. There are just a few bread crumbs in it, so you could use any kind of wheat-free bread and the texture wouldn't matter.

The coffeecake mentioned above is now posted here: Swedish Kringle

Swedish Kringle Serves 8 as Dessert. (This is more a coffeecake than dessert, but there doesn't happen to be a category for it.) When I was a member of the New Neighbors League Club in Nashville, I edited a cookbook. Guess the word got out that I wasn't accepting any recipes for canned soup or Cool Whip, as most of the recipes were from member's family or their travels. One member obtained this coffeecake recipe while living in Minnesota, which has a large Swedish community. It's not very sweet, but is very possibly addictive. Crust: 1 c flour 1/2 c butter 1 T water Cream Puff Layer: 1 c water 1/2 c butter 1 c flour 3 eggs, approx. 1/2 tsp almond extract Icing: 1 c powdered sugar 1 T butter 1/2 tsp almond extract Cream or milk 1/4 c lightly toasted sliced almonds, if desired Note: You may substitute your favorite cream puff dough using one cup of flour. Crust: Mix pastry ingredients as you would for pie crust. Press into 11 x 15 jelly roll pan in thin layer. Cream puff dough: Heat water and butter to boiling. Quickly add flour, stir until smooth. Stir in eggs one at a time, and beat after adding each egg. (If using large or X-large eggs, add the last egg a T. at a time. Paste should be spreadable but not runny.) Add extract. Spread over crust. Bake at 375 degrees for 45 minutes. Cool. Mix icing ingredients, adding enough cream or milk to make a spreadable glaze. If desired, the almonds may be sprinkled over the top of the icing before it sets. Keywords: Dessert, Snack, Intermediate, Breakfast, Brunch ( RG1460 )

Creamed Spinach with Bacon Look in RecipeGullet Bechamel with a bit of nutmeg, Hard Cooked Eggs, Chopped onion centers, Buttered Crumbs Garlic, Parsley, Olive Oil Crumb Stuffing with chopped fresh tomato or sun dried tomato Creamed fresh or frozen green peas and green lima beans Baby carrots glazed with maple syrup, butter, orange zest or whatever you fancy.

Did anyone make gougere from this recipe? If so, did you adapt the recipe? Difficult to imagine cheese and mustard with sweetened condensed milk. It seems the smaller the puffs, the more crisp the result. Larger puffs are not as crisp as small. Some gougere recipes call for spooning dough in a ring. I cook gougere in a jelly roll pan and cut into squares, sometimes, but it usually turns out more soggy than crisp. One of my favorite "coffee cakes" consists of choux paste spread over pie pastry and finished with icing and almonds. Sounds like I've got a whole lot of testing--and tasting--to do.

Now, don't all you Southerners (I'm talkin' to you, Brooks) post telling me that I "just don't get it" and what good country ham and biscuits you've had, I'm sure there are good ones out there, but I, personally, never been served one outside of my own kitchen. When I first tasted what usually passes as a "ham biscuit" in much of the South, I was appalled. Two halves of cold, dry unbuttered biscuit, sandwiched with a cold, too-thick slab of too-salty country ham. Dry as a bone and almost impossible to choke down. When I opened my first restaurant I set out to make a truly delectable ham biscuit to deserve the fame. I developed this recipe (mostly served with a green salad) as a sly, continental take-off, using prosciutto, although I later switched to Smithfield, my favorite country ham, mainly because prosciutto is so difficult to grind. I mixed a filling using a ratio of 1 part ground prosciutto to 2 parts butter, salted or unsalted depending upon the ham used, and let it come to room temperature before serving. (Hindsight, it would have been good to have added a lot of coarsely ground black pepper to the mix.) While the homemade buttermilk biscuits were still piping hot from the oven, I slathered them with about a quarter inch thickness of the ham/butter mixture and served immediately with the butter dripping. Oh, the ecstasy! Because of the logistics, this variation would not work on a buffet table, which is where ham biscuits are likely to be found. But you might try it for one of your breakfasts. (Great use for the scraps, too.)

Personally, I'd stay away from Kentucky hams. For some reason, they always taste musty to me, and certainly have a lot of mold to scrub off. (Or at least they used to.) Tennessee hams are much better, but Smithfield is king of all. Cooking the ham whole tenderizes the meat and removes quite a bit of the salt; the ham is usually scrubbed, soaked and then simmered in boiling water. It's a very messy process.* The ham can then be glazed in the oven if desired. In Tennessee, there are three chains which feature ham: Ham 'n Goody's, HoneyBaked Ham, and Heavenly Ham. I don't know whether these are located outside of the South, but if so, they have very nice whole cooked and sliced ham. Unless I wanted a whole ham presentation, I found that buying the pre-sliced ham was actually the most economical for catering. But that ham is not the kind you want for breakfast. Breakfast ham is usually not pre-cooked, just cured/smoked. You can't cut slices for ham and biscuits off the same raw ham you use for "fried" with red-eye gravy. You can do both with a cooked ham, it's just that your fried ham won't be as salty or authentic. Don't buy a spiral sliced ham if you plan to bake it. The things dry out terribly. *Smithfield is included among the companies now scrubbing and soaking their hams for you. Check out what this cook has to say about country hams: Country Ham

This is the reason I started using powdered milk years ago--no waiting for the scalded milk to cool. Proof the yeast in the water alone, then add powdered milk and other ingredients.

Thanks, Ling, I was madly searching all over the forum to find that reference to your stuffing, which is the one I'm committed to making this Thanksgiving. I'm not sure about that Mozzarella--I'm not a big fan of that cheese, and can just hear the comments: "How come this is stringy?" I have collected 35-40 dressing/stuffing recipes and would be happy to pass on any that sound interesting to you, Abra. Here are a few combos omitting the onions, celery and herbs which are pretty universal: ...wild mushrooms, hazelnuts, leeks, egg bread ...wild rice, bacon, mushrooms, bread crumbs ...savory bread pudding with peasant bread, wine, chevre, gruyere and pecans ...pumpkin sage bread pudding with parmesan ...Martha Stewart's fruit and nut with 4 dried fruits, apples, cranberries, 3 nuts and bourbon, no bread or rice, sweet spices (ugh) ...veal, pork, beef, bread crumbs, apple, orange, pineapple, lemon, water chestnuts, preserved ginger, mustard powder, seeds, turmeric, herbs ...Wolfgang Puck's French bread, spinach, mushrooms, oysters, It. sausage, prunes, dried cherries and raisins, cream and herbs ...Kate Heyhoe's French apple stuffing with chicken sausages, leeks, parsnips, dried cranberries, parsely, walnuts, eggs and applesauce ...walnut sized cranberry stuffing balls, pretty standard recipe otherwise, may be frozen and baked ...Hawaiian stuffing with Chinese sausage, carrots, green onions, water chestnuts, ginger, pineapple, macadamia nuts, sherry, cilantro ...Ukranian corn bread stuffing with other ingredients baked like a pudding There are a couple with chestnuts, but I think chestnuts could be added to about any recipe. More ideas on request. P.S. I'm with you on the state of the dGullet search engine, Abra. I once searched for a recipe of which I remembered most of the ingredients, the title and the poster. Nothing, nothing, nothing, until I got the magic combination.

Like you, Abra, I've been looking for the perfect stuffing/dressing for forever. I had a long way to come, baby, since here's what I grew up with: Wonderbread (or the like) heels dried and saved all year and torn into pieces. Some raw chopped onion, salt and pepper and enough dried sage to make it practically green. Now pour in boiling water and WHIP WITH A FORK UNTIL IT BECOMES A SOUPY MUSH. That's it. Yuk. You HAD to stuff this mess for it to have any flavor at all, but we always called it dressing. I made a perfect dressing once, of sourdough bread and sausage, plenty of onion and butter, some celery and parsley and chicken broth. But I've never been able to duplicate it. I've made pecan stuffing balls, lemon and ham stuffing balls, mashed potato filling, Italian rice dressing and cornbread dressing. Funny thing about the cornbread: I love it when it's all prepared and could eat it by the pint, but once it's been cooked in a casserole I don't like it much at all. Truth is, I like scalloped oysters better than dressing. Saltine crumbs soaked in butter, layered with oysters and their liquid, warm half and half poured over until the crackers are all soaked except for a layer on top which will get crunchy when it's baked at a fairly high temperature. Because my son-in-law is allergic to oysters, I have developed a version using all kinds of mushrooms (especially oyster mushrooms). Have to go now. Will post some ideas I haven't tried later.

In 1970 or so, I came across a set of three "Blueberry Hill" cookbooks written by a lady named Elsie Masterton. She quit her job as a secretary in New York and moved with her husband and small daughters to a ski inn in Vermont. She didn't know how to cook, the only food source was a small town grocery, and their first season there was no snow. She probably wrote the cookbooks--along with several other autobiographical books I've also read--to keep their heads above water. Unfortunately, Elsie died young of cancer, but one daughter carries on the family tradition as owner of a takeout shop/caterer in Asheville NC. Elsie was the most creative cook I've ever seen, serving a seemingly endless variety with limited food availability. Her breezy personal writing style became my ideal. Some cooks/writers who were similar in style (if only sometimes) were the late, great Bert Green, Cecily Brownstone, Helen Corbitt and Poppy Cannon. I admire Ann Hodgman's "Beat This!" and "Beat That!" for her sassy attitude, Jane and Michael Stern for writing about food most likely to be snubbed by the NYTimes, and Sarah Leah Chase's cookbooks (she was the third writer on "The Silver Palate Cookbook"). Most chef and restaurant cookbooks are a total bore, although I own a few of them, always hoping for something better. I hate cookbooks where the author never mentions herself. Unless I get to know you and your preferences, how can I tell if I'd like your recipes? For example, if you tout egg white omelets, use lots of hot peppers in your foods or are a fish lover, I probably won't care much for your recipes and won't care what you have to say, no matter how clever you are. Absolutely necessary is humor, humor, humor.

Overall, I think this is a tasty sounding menu, and a lot more work than I would care to take on, even as a caterer. But about those salads--pasta salad with turkey and cranberries? Corn and beans with beef and Bearnaise? It looks like they are equalizing the cost of the more expensive ingredients like beef and artichokes with cheaper stuff like rice, pasta and beans. There's a better way to do it. How about serving the green salad alone, and adding another choice of starch and vegetable? For example, instead of pasta or rice salad, serve one or the other in a hot, creamy casserole of noodles or gnocchi, or risotto cakes or emerald rice as a starch choice. Instead of corn salad, serve corn pudding or succotash as a choice with the glazed carrots. Or, change the salads. Choose salads that make more sense with the rest of the menu and/or, along with the green salad, go with each other like a mini salad bar. I'd choose one starch and either a vegetable or not-too-sweet fruit salad. Or, forget the other salads entirely, leaving just the green and don't add anything else to the menu. This is my preference...I think it's possible to have too many flavors at once, the palate just gets confused. Most menus today have too much seafood for my taste, but this one has none. Why? What are caramel crunch cakes? Chocolate dipped strawberries. Pineapple, oranges, raspberries, apricots, even grapes are good with chocolate, but I've never thought strawberries and chocolate tasted good together. Guess I'm in the minority here, or are other people sick of seeing them too?

I can see where it would be difficult to notice a texture change in gumbo. Mainly, my experience is with stewed chicken gravy when I'm making it from already hot stock, and adding it to hot roux. The texture is much better when adding cold stock to the hot roux. However, my home ec teacher taught me about "plain wrong" almost 50 years ago. Don't think the science has changed. I've never heard anyone advocate adding hot stock to hot roux until the past few years, much less heating it on purpose. This is not to say I've never added hot stock to hot roux, but I've only done it when it's expedient, as in making gumbo. (Guess we already know which side of that "discussion" with Fifi you were on.)

Those pumpkin rolls look wonderful to me, even with the cracks. Just sift a little more powdered sugar over the top. I roll my cake rolls from the long end, and cut diagonal slices from each end so it looks pretty. Servings are fat slices also cut on the diagonal. The main problem with the 15 inch roll is thart it's too long to fit on anything, until last year when I finally found some nice long and narrow serving platters. Gave one to my daughter also, as this is her favorite dessert.

Exotic Fruited Cream Serves 8 as Dessert. Talk about non-traditional…this jewel of a holiday recipe came from a magazine in the 70s, and was attributed to Alice Peterson, of the New York Daily News. The unusual combination of ingredients is just heavenly. Instead of the marrons glaces I use chestnuts packed in syrup, well drained, because they were more accessible to me back when I started making it. Those are available at Zingermans. You may puree the frozen strawberries, if serving frozen strawberries constitutes a faux pas for you, but please don’t substitute fresh strawberries. They just don’t work. Crème fraîche might work instead of sour cream, but no low fat sour cream, or I’ll have to come and get you. 4 c sour cream 1/4 tsp ground cardamom seeds 1 c light brown sugar, packed 1 7 oz. package marrons glaces, coarsely chopped 1 10 oz. pkg. frozen sweetened strawberries, partially thawed 2 T Grand Marnier 1/2 c slivered almonds, toasted The day before: place the sour cream in a sieve lined with several layers of cheesecloth or (easier) dampened paper towels. Place sieve over bowl, cover the cream with plastic wrap or the ends of the cheesecloth, if used, and refrigerate over night. Next day, discard the liquids in the bowl and remove sour cream to another bowl. Add the cardamom, brown sugar, and marrons to the cream, cover, and refrigerate until serving time. Before serving, allow strawberries to partially thaw and stir in Grand Marnier. To serve, place approximately a half cup portion of the cream mixture in each serving dish, preferable a stemmed champagne sauce. (If you dish out all 8 servings at once, before adding the strawberries and almonds you can even out the servings.) Top each with a spoon or two of strawberries and sprinkle over some toasted almonds. Keywords: Dessert, Christmas ( RG1448 )

St. Peter's Pudding Serves 12 as Dessert. This is one of my very favorite desserts: cool, creamy and sweeter than you'd suppose for a fruit dessert because of the amount of sugar. It looks very pretty in a cut glass bowl, but I prefer to make it in a rectangular pan or two, cut in squares and serve with whipped cream and a cherry on top. For some reason, the usually nasty maraschino cherries taste pretty good here, and their color is absolutely necessary. For Thanksgiving and Christmas... The fruit: 6 oranges cut into supremes, reserve juice (see below) 1 c seedless green grapes 1/2 c chopped walnuts (mine are always toasted) 1/2 c golden raisins 12 pitted dates, each cut in 4 to 6 pieces 12 maraschino cherries, cut in thirds or quartered The gelatin: 2 envelopes unflavored gelatin 2 T sugar 1 c water 2 c freshly squeezed orange juice (including above reserved orange juice) 1/2 c fresh lemon juice 2 c sugar The garnish: Whipped cream, barely sweetened, if at all Whole maraschino cherries with stems, for garnish Prepare fruit and nuts. To make supremes (orange sections with no membranes), first peel the oranges being sure to remove all the white pith and membrane from the outside. Now cut between membranes on both sides of each section. Catch the juices in a bowl as you go, and squeeze membranes into bowl to remove ever more juice. Refrigerate fruit and nuts. Make gelatin. Combine gelatin and 2T. sugar in a small pan. Stir in water and heat, stirring, over low heat until the gelatin is dissolved. Pour orange juice into large bowl. Add lemon juice, 2 cups orange juice, 2 cups sugar and the warm gelatin mixture. Stir until sugar dissolves. Refrigerate until the consistency of unbeaten egg yolks. Fold in orange sections, grapes, walnuts, raisins, dates and cut up cherries. Turn into a pretty bowl and refrigerate, covered, at least 12 hours or overnight. Garnish with whole cherries and whipped cream, or as suggested in notes, above. Keywords: Fruit, Christmas, Dessert ( RG1447 )

When I want to freeze individual servings of soup with rice or pasta, I first freeze the soup without the starch, leaving some room at the top. After the soup is frozen, I add the cooked starch top of the soup and press plastic wrap over it before placing the lid. I believe this should read: add either cold roux to hot stock, or cold stock to hot roux. You always add the cold to the hot. The point of the first method is to thicken something which you have been making in a pot on the stove or in the oven (think buerre manie). During the past couple of years I have noticed several TV cooks, including Sara Moulton, talking about heating their stock to add to hot roux. This is just plain wrong. It changes the texture to grainy.