kayb

Got to go with the BLT, on good non-toasted wheat bread, with a slice of a big, vine-ripened tomato, so big one thick slice covers the slice of bread, with Petit Jean Meats' peppered bacon, leaf lettuce, Hellman's mayo, the full-fat variety, please, and a few slices of avocado if I happen to have it handy. Or just the bacon and tomato and mayo on the bread.

Oh, absolutely. A few examples: Pot roast with veggies shows up a day or so later as vegetable beef soup. Any kind of chicken or pork is reincarnated in fried rice, which of course also necessitates cooking extra rice ahead for something else. Leftover meat loaf gets crumbled into beef and barley soup. Any grilled or Mexican-seasoned meat becomes the centerpiece in quesadillas. Leftover baked fish becomes a fish croquette (think the salmon or tuna croquettes of your childhood) Odds and ends of veggies get frozen in a special container which gets dumped into the vegetable soup. There are two of us at home, and one of us is a 20-year-old, which means I often cook just for myself. I take lunch of leftovers most every day to work, but that's still not generally enough to deal with what all is left. So "repurposing" the entree and/or sides is a critical part of meal planning for me.

I've been traveling much of this week, but I did have a couple of nights at home and put them to use with an old-fashioned country dinner of white beans and fried cornbread: And one day last week, it was a chicken quesadilla with sweet potato chile grits, sour cream, salsa and guacamole.

Yummm....Thanksgiving. My favorite holiday of the year. My menu has evolved over the years, but still includes many of my childhood favorites. This year, I'm cooking it at a friend's house in Philadelphia, so it'll be interesting to see how well I do outside my own kitchen comfort zone. Roast turkey, perhaps just turkey breast this year as there will be just three of us Cornbread dressing (Dan, mine is vegetarian but for the chicken stock, and I'd wager you could use vegetable stock) Giblet gravy Cranberry salad (fresh cranberries, apples, oranges, pecans, all chopped in the food processor and mixed with a big box of raspberry jello made with half as much water as called for, plus an extra cup of sugar; just gives it a little body, doesn't taste like a congealed salad at all) Sweet potato casserole with a pecan-brown sugar topping (NO marshmallows, NO pineapple, NO orange juice!) Homemade mac and cheese Green bean casserole (the canonical one from my childhood, with golden mushroom soup, pimentos, and french fried onions; only time of the year I buy canned soup) And probably pecan pie. The menu expands and contracts depending on who and how many are eating. It'll be somewhat abbreviated this year, as I'm cooking for a small group.

Best fried rice I ever made was from Mark Bittman's recipe in How To Cook Everything: Saute onions, garlic and minced ginger, remove; saute carrots, remove; saute peas, remove, saute meat, remove. Add rice, toss to coat with oil, make a clear spot, scramble in eggs, add some mirin, some soy sauce, some sesame oil, fold in veggies and meat. I use whatever's on hand; have used leftover yellow squash and zucchini,leftover cooked chicken or pork. That recipe alone is worth the price of the book, which remains my all-time favorite cookbook.

To this Southerner, the gravy/sauce/etc. divide is roughly this: 1. White gravy is made with the rendered fat of bacon or sausage, flour just cooked until it barely begins to turn color, and milk, salt and pepper to taste. It's served for breakfast, with biscuits, and one may use the bacon grease from the crock of it one keeps on one's stove (you don't do that? How do you cook?) to make said gravy for country fried steak, breaded pork chops, or fried chicken (or for the mashed potatoes that accompany those dishes). 2. Brown gravy is made from other meat drippings, flour cooked in until brown, and liquid which may be stock, water, wine or a combination of any of the above stirred in. It's served with all other meats except roast turkey. 3. Giblet gravy is made from the turkey drippings plus chicken stock, flour or cornstarch dissolved in water used to thicken, the cooked and diced giblets, and diced hard-boiled eggs, and eaten with turkey and cornbread dressing. 4. Red-eye gravy is made with the drippings from country ham, flour cooked to a dark roux, coffee and water stirred in. Must admit I have never heard of using any kind of tomato product in red-eye gravy. 5. The divide between brown gravy and a sauce is pretty thin. I guess I consider it a sauce when it has to be reduced to thicken, and a gravy when the flour serves as a thickener. Well, except for bechamel, but that's a white, and not a brown, sauce, and it's definitely not white gravy. 6. Spaghetti gravy is, I learned when I moved to Arkansas, a tomato-based pasta sauce with ground beef.

There's an easy fix for that. Leave the grill dirty. Wait until the next grilling event. Light the fire, put the grate back on, walk away. Come back 10 minutes later with your steel brush and clean in in about 15 seconds.

This morning: bran muffins with diced figs. And what was probably an unhealthy-sized pat of butter.

The peaches were. The pancakes left something to be desired. And I'm not sure how the pic got there twice!

Kim, it's just a basic carbonara, only with udon noodles rather than any other sort of pasta. While the noodles were boiling, I sauteed some diced bacon with a big clove of minced garlic, and set it aside in its rendered fat,and I beat two eggs and added a half-cup grated parmigiano reggiano. When the noodles were done, I drained them, dumped them back in the pot,and added the bacon and fat, tossed that, added the cheese and eggs and tossed until it got creamy. And then stuffed myself. The honey-miso roasted veggies were eggplant, zucchini and yellow squash, tossed in a mix of 3 tbsp each of honey and miso, 1/4 tsp powdered ginger, a dash of sesame oil, a tablespoon of rice wine vinegar, and a dash of soy sauce. (Measurements approximate.) I whisked that together, tossed the veggies in it, and roasted at 400 for about 15 minutes. It's a great treatment for veggies; I'm going to try it with butternut squash.

Chicken Cider Stew, from the Kitchen Parade blog, slavishly adhering to the recipe here: http://kitchenparade.com/2002/10/chicken-cider-stew.php It was good; would have been better with some paprika or some ancho chile powder, which I'll add next time.

Gosh....after that, I'm almost ashamed to post my meager effort from this morning....gluten-free pancakes (for the gluten-allergy child who was visiting) with peach sauce and creme fraiche: It was my inaugural run at gluten-free pancakes, and they were less than stellar. The peace sauce, though, with diced fresh peaches, honey, ginger and amaretto, was pretty wonderful.

In a food blog challenge in which I occasionally compete, the challenge this month was fusion cookery. Theme of the contest is economy -- make a meal for two for under $5. I combined Italian and Japanese with Udon Carbonara and Honey Miso Roasted Vegetables. In a very tightly cropped photo to disguise the fact that my plating skills leave much to be desired. The veggies were to die for, though.

Okra newbies should never make the mistake of buying supermarket frozen okra, encased in its little batter shells, which fries up approximately like ammunition for a .50-caliber machine gun. That is an abomination. Take fresh okra pods about 3-4 inches long and as big around as your thumb. Slice them about 1/2 inch thick, put them in a bowl, and forget them on the counter for about 20 minutes. This gives the okra time to ooze, and you need the ooze to make the cornmeal stick. Put cornmeal (NOT cornmeal mix!) in a bag with salt and pepper to taste; add the okra and shake. Heat about 1/2 inch oil in a (preferably) cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat, and put in one okra; when it starts to brown, the oil is hot enough. Scatter okra slices in the oil and fry until golden brown, flipping a time or two; do not overcrowd the skillet, but fry in batches. Drain on paper towels and eat while it's hot. Preferably with sliced ripe tomatoes, sauteed squash and onions, and purple hulled peas. Meat? Who needs it?

French toast, made from challah sliced a little more than an inch thick. Nothing else compares. Doesn't matter what you top it with -- maple syrup, honey, peach sauce, caramelized bananas, blueberry syrup. But never, never, never with confectioner's sugar or cinnamon sugar sprinkled over it!

I spend between $100 and $150 every couple of weeks at Kroger, which includes staples, paper and cleaning products and the like, and meat on sale; it also includes most of the import cheeses (this Kroger has an excellent selection, as it's in an upscale neighborhood). There's another $30 a week at the farmers' market (higher than Kroger produce, which here is surprisingly good), but better quality stuff. We (my 20-year-old and I) might eat out twice a month that is NOT work-related for me (and thus on the company nickel). If I'm not having a business lunch, I take mine from home, usually something left over or a salad and soup. I buy meat when it's on sale at Kroger, and keep it in the freezer until I decide to cook it; a roast will make two or three meals in one form or another, and I get ground beef and chicken in family packs, portion it out and freeze it; I also use a lot of cured meats. I order coffee online, probably $30 a month, and spend perhaps $50-$75 a month on alcohol (mostly wine, the occasional restock bottle for the bar, more in the summer when I'm buying beer because we live on a lake and, well, you just drink beer at the lake in the summer). So say $500 a month, which would probably also cover the periodic trips to specialty and import stores, for a family of two. But I eat lunch out probably at least two days a week for business, and dinner probably twice a month. The 20-year-old will subsist for a week on a batch of homemade mac and cheese.

Hot chocolate mix and spiced tea mix are both good. I loved getting preserved fruit I could eat with my toaster waffles, and Chex mix, and my mother's homemade popcorn balls (Halloween standby). I'll add my vote to the cheese and sausages, maybe with some well-wrapped cornichons and/or baby sweet gherkins.

This has been the firsr cool (read: soupworthy) week we've had. Thus, quickie tomato bisque (Bloody Mary mix and plain yogurt; don't knock it until you've tried it!) with grilled cheese, beef and barley soup, and today, tomato-lentil-chorizo soup: 8 oz Spanish chorizo, sliced 1/4 inch thick 1 small onion, diced 3 cloves garlic, minced 2 large tomatos, skinned and diced, with seeds and juice 3/4 cup dried lentils, soaked for about 20 minutes 3 cups chicken broth 1 tsp Hungarian paprika 1 tsp sugar salt to taste Saute the onion and garlic over medium heat; add the chorizo and let it stew for a few minutes while you peel and dice the tomatos. Add them and continue to cook over medium heat until the tomatos start to break down. Add the chicken broth and lentils, paprika and sugar. Let simmer 40 minutes, and then salt to taste.

Italian Roast Chicken with meat stuffing, cooked on the grill, for a dinner party last weekend: A mix of olive oil, thyme, basil, oregano and fennel rubbed beneath the skin, and the skin rubbed with olive oil and sprinkled with salt and freshly cracked pepper. The meat stuffing has ground beef, an egg, some grated parmesan cheese, basil, oregano, thyme, fennel; it's stuffed into the cavity and bastes the bird from the inside as she cooks. Later in the week, beef and barley soup with roasted sweet potatos with pimenton and cayenne, and cheese toast (sourdough with grated Gruyere). I love sweet potatos like this, particularly now when they're in season; olive oil, a little sugar, smoked pimenton, cayenne, roast.

Shameful admission: Starburst jellybeans. I will eat the entire bag. And Pancho's Cheese Dip (a mid-South regional specialty) with crispy, salty tortilla chips. Fried okra. Fresh corn.

Red beans and rice, with andouille sausage. Carbonnades a la flamande. Moussaka. Vegetable beef soup. Chili. Tagines of chicken or lamb with Middle Eastern spices. Roasted stuffed chicken.

In the event you're going back to Hot Springs again....I just moved there three months ago and have been learning my way around the restaurant scene. Here are a few I will testify to: Cafe 1217, salads and sandwiches, carry-out and warm-up-at-home entrees and sides, best cream of tomato soup on the planet. Taco Mama, good, very fresh, Mexican. Taco Shop, authentic, blue-collar Mexican. Porterhouse, good steaks. Belle Arti, excellent Italian Pompeii, good Italian, nice wine bar Back Porch Grill, decent steaks and such, overlooking the lake Brick House Grill, OK bar food Chez Paul's is supposed to be the local four-star; haven't been there yet.

Merchant's, on Broadway. The Wild Boar, on West End (as best I remember).

Don't know if you're flying or driving in to Jackson, or what your time demands are, but the best places to eat are about an hour south or an hour north. In Hattiesburg, MS, try the Purple Parrot; good seafood, Cajun/Creole specialties. In Greenville, do not miss the original Doe's Eat Place; steaks are wonderful, and the tamales, if you don't get them to eat there, well, then you must get some to go.

My favorite pork roast is similar to Fooey's, but with a Caribbean slant to it. I roughly chop an onion, about 6 cloves of garlic, and a couple of whatever kind of fresh peppers I have around the house, pulse them in the food processor with a tablespoon of cumin, some salt and black pepper,and a tablespoon of oregano, 2-3 tablespoons of oil, and the juice of a lime. You want a heavy paste, so add oil as needed to get to that consistency. I use a Boston butt, stab it a number of times, work the paste into all the nooks and crannies, wrap it tightly in plastic wrap and put in the fridge overnight. The next day, I let it come to room temp, sear it on all sides, and then put it in a low oven (275-300F) until the bone wiggles freely or big chunks of the roast can easily be torn off. You may need to baste periodically with the pan juices to keep it from drying out, but usually a Boston butt is marbled heavily enough to be OK; you can also cover it for the first couple of hours of cooking and then uncover it to develop a good crust. I've also been successful cooking this on the grill with indirect heat. A great treatment for leftovers -- pull the pork into shreds, soak it in lime juice, garlic and a bay leaf long enough to allow some sliced onions to saute until soft and starting to caramelize. Turn the heat up to medium high, squeeze the marinade out of the pork, and toss it in the pan; stir-fry until it develops some bits of browned crust. Wonderful!