Thursday, September 08, 2011
Recipe Corner for the Soggy NEPA Crowd: An Easy Threesome
Staring (not non-stop) for the past week at that creepy story about burbling prune juice (and not to worry, I’ve got a much creepier story on the way) has put me in the mood for some more uplifting kitchenly prose. Life’s too short to dwell on failed soft drinks, as my grandpappy said during his occasional bouts of dementia. And honestly, I’ve had much more good luck than bad in the knives-and-fire room. Considering how many chances there are to mess things up royally in there, I’d say I’ve fared fairly well, fare-wise. But the thing about food is, it’s one of those joys that is multiplied when shared. A good dish enjoyed with others is that much better; a bad dish endured in company is a common enemy, not just a personal degradation. Well, maybe both, depending on who made it. So let’s not go there. Instead, let’s visit THE RECIPE CORNER for a mouth-watering trio of oral pleasures fit for a family blog!
I could - COULD - tell you all about my egg bread. But it was a fairly complicated recipe, takes about 8 hours to assemble, and frankly what have you done for me lately? I would be happy to share that recipe with you if you were to, say, pick up the phone, or send me a personal email on a gift ipad, or something, but no, you just want free crap off the internet, preferably that doesn’t require a full workday’s worth of work on your part, whatever that part may be. So you can long for my challah indefinitely, and I expect you will, because it rocks. Instead, I’ma sharing three - THREE! - very simple recipes that will make your life and that of your kitchen meaningful, enriched, and scrumptastic. And just for the thrill of things I’ll do it in order of increasing difficulty, so you can have a sense of accomplishment once you’ve finished reading them. Which is tantamount to vicarious cookery, as the ancients incessantly averred.
So:
Watermelon Juice: I got into this because I was in the habit of buying a pineapple every week or two. The boys and I love its sweet, sweet taste, and it’s loaded with vitamin P. But one fateful day when I was out pineapple shooting shopping, I realized that all the available pineapples looked like hell. I wasn’t about to shell out hard-earned dollahs on substandard produce. Still, I needed a big heavy maxifruit to lug home with me, or I wouldn’t feel properly martyred by my shopping excursion. The watermelons looked bulky enough, I enjoy scarfing them, and I soon found one that was heavier than it appeared it should have been (that’s how you tell they’re ripe). I bought it and by the time I got it home, both my arms were about two inches longer. Putting aside the ulterior applications of such a treatment, I decided it was time to reduce this damn big fruit in size so I could recover the use of the rest of my kitchen. My first move was to cut the melon in half, and then to slice off the rind from one of those halves with a big-ass knife and cut up the flesh (mmm delicious flesh) so I could store it in tupperware or the generic equivalent and have it with breakfast (mmm breakfast flesh). So then I had a mess of stored flesh (mmm) but I still had a whole half a massive watermelon. My solution was to chunk it up, dump the chunks in a blender (mmm chunk dumpage), and puree the living crap of out it, which took basically no time at all - watermelon purees with gratifying rapidity. Then I fetched myself a bowl and a big strainer, dumped the puree into the strainer, and let the liquid dribble out into the bowl (mmm dribbly liquids). There was a certain amount of puree manipulation and strainer rotation and such to make it drain efficiently, but overall it was a very quick and easy process. I threw the drained pulp into my undersink compost tub, strained the juice once more for good measure, and poured the nectar - for that is what it then was - into a tupperware or generic equivalent. The watermelon flesh et straight was pretty darn tasty, but that juice was actually sublime. And I’m not even going to cheapen that with (mmm)s. Next time I will get a bigger melon and juice a lot more of it. I could drink that stuff all day long.
Okay, snap out of it, sinkface. Let’s go from the sublime to the piquant, with this handy recipe for one of my favorite kinda mints. See, as a kid, I always wondered why you’d want to put mint on a hot dog or hamburger, the same way I wondered why we needed special wine from Sacramento for religious observances. Eventually I realized, it wasn’t “Sacramento wine,” it was sacramental. And boy was my face concord grape red. Similarly, if I had a naked wiener or meaty buns on my plate AND YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN, for gods sake this is second grade I’m talking about people, it made no sense to me at all that folk would ask me if I wanted any kind of mints on it. But it wasn’t mint they were offering, it was ketchup and relish and mustard. Oh, CONDOmints. Like, a mint that’s broken down into individually owned apartments with shared financial responsibility over common areas, such as the stalk or root system. Or one that prevents pregnancy and the transmission of disease with a refreshing herbaceous flavor. But I digress. I figured out what a condiment was long before I started liking mustard, but now it’s sort of the top of that triumvirate in my book - a book that merits delicate handling and being closed very gently. I like a lot of different mustards and I put some on my luncheon sandwich almost every freaking goddamn day and no I’m not bitter about making/taking lunch to work. Not bitter - fired up. Fired up with mustard. Till I ran out. PHAIL.
However, I did (and do) have a nice package of Canadian powdered mustard seed from my go-to spiceatorium, Penzeys. (What, after all this time you thought I was kidding?) Per the packaging, it’s a “traditional blend of 1/2 yellow seed, 1/2 oriental seed.” Maybe that’s what passes for tradition up in Saskatchewan, but hereabouts we’re all about the fiddling on the roof and the ceremonial first pitch and all that. Still and all, this was the only mustard powder I had to work with, so I bit my tongue and took the challenge.
Here’s what I did: I called my boys to the kitchen and said to them, “Boys (they love it when I talk like that), who wants to mix up a batch of home-made mustard?” Much to my shock, they both wanted in on it. I’d never tried it before - as far as I knew, the viscous yellow goop I squirted out of squeezebottles onto my sandwiches was derived from the pure powdered stuff I kept in the spicerack only by means of patented industrial processes I was better off not knowing. But there was a recipe on my Penzeys Pack, whereby I could take a powder (as it were) and enviscousize it. Why not give it a shot? Figuratively, I meant. A straight shot of pure mustard, even to a fan such as myself, was a bit of a hard sell.
The recipe is JUST THIS EASY: One cup regular mustard powder (4 oz by weight), 3 fl oz vinegar, 3 fl oz water, 1/2 tsp salt and 1 tbsp honey. Of course, that is one hell of a lot of mustard, especially if you have no idea if it’ll be palatable or even edible, but I possess THE POWER OF FRACTIONS and figured out a secret method of dividing everything by 2 so I could make half a batch instead. I measured, and the boys dumped the ingredients into a bowl and stirred them into a smooth paste. And here’s the weird part: once they were done doing that, it was already mustard! Like, normal regular mustard! Like you’d ensquirtulate from a plastic bottle, or spread with a blunted butterknife on your kielbasum or meatloaf! I was so proud and excited that I tasted it right away and DAMN that was some spicy mustard. I wound up cutting it with mayo every time I used it, but the flavor was great, though a little too strong. I consumed the whole batch over the course of just a few weeks.
Funny thing though - linking up to the Penzeys site just now, I happened to check the recipe there again. As it turns out, more instructions appear on-line than on my bag of powdered spice. I’m supposed to let the mixed mustard fester ("age") at room temperature for weeks, or it’ll be too hot. And by “weeks”, I mean four weeks for merely hot mustard, and 8 for “nippy but not overpowering,” which is actually how I was reviewed after my first poetry slam. So I was sucking down immature kryptonite-style mustard, and I survived, more or less. The point is, it really was mustard. And it was damn easy to make. Though not quite as easy as watermelon juice.
Let’s move on.
I mentioned above, in passing, relish - one of the triumvirate of key condiments. But relish is nothing without pickles, dare I say, and pickles are one of those foods that always seemed a bit mysterious to me. I saw all the cucumbers in the produce bins, and I saw the jars of pickles into which someone had turned them. The middle step was a cypher. But then, good people (Testify!) I got the word from mom-in-law. When we visited her in July she had stocked her fridge with 24-Hour Pickles, and I was munching them with aplomb. Then when she ran out of aplomb I ate them straight. They were JUST. THAT. GOOD. And I realize that not everybody loves a good crunchy chilly tangy pickle the way I do - in fact, the way some of you love pickles does not even belong on the internet, you craven animals, but it’s a free country so just keep it to yourselves. However, I liked these 24-Hour Pickles so much that I felt I just had to learn how to make them myself. And I did. And now I’m gonna learn it to youse, so the good word can keep on reverberating like an emerald cuke in a jar of gleaming brine:
Get some cucumbers and wash them down - god knows where they’ve been. (See, it’s not so hard!) In a pot (oh, getting more challenging now), boil up a heady mixture of: two cups of water, 1/3 cup sugar, 1/3 cup salt, one cup of vinegar (the straight white stuff works fine - I have had good luck with half white, half apple cider), and some garlic cloves and dillweed. Exactly how much of these you use is a matter of taste; I like a pickle with plenty of pucker so I use about four cloves of garlic and four stalks of dill per jar and I can fit about two cukes in each jar so do the freaking math, people. You are probably reading this at a computer anyway, have it do the math. Google it. Show some goddamn initiative. ANYWAY. Boil everything but the cukes, and then let the liquid cool down. Cut the cukes into quarter-wedges and immerse them into jars of the cooled brine. (I do this in a sink. Visualize it and you’ll probably figure out why.) Then cap the jars up nice and snug, and enfridgulate them for no less than 24 hours, although honestly I can’t imagine the world would end if you tried one after a mere 18. But the recipe says 24 and that’s what I go by. I am a man of the law and follow it with blind allegiance. The pickles purportedly will keep for two months in the icebox but I’ve never kept a jar for more than three weeks. I pack them with my lunch and they add a certain “je ne sais quke” to my dejeuner. They stay nice and crisp, pack a serious flavor punch, and resolve a cosmic picklemaking mystery for me. I’m not sure how much more than that I can expect from my side-dishes. I can say for sure, you shouldn’t expect much more from this blog. Not today, nohow.
This post is dedicated to my inlaws, many of whom live in Wilkes Barre which is now under evacuation orders because of non-global-warming-related torrential floods. I’ve seen flooding and it sucks. But just to clarify, here’s some visual aids:
The Susquehanna in July, when I took an idyllic bike ride on a pancake-flat path paved on its bank - the river was a benign piece of landscape down at the bottom of a substantial levy which they’d built up after other historic floods in years past:
As of yesterday, I don’t think I’d have been comfortable riding that path:
And as of today, I wouldn’t even want to take the massive Market Street Bridge across town:
Good luck, beehive people. If you can’t stay dry, stay safe and get dry later. I’ll have mustard and washmelon juice for y’all if it will help. I think you’re already good with the pickles.
