The Salty Spoon

I apologize in advance for the extent to which you will crave this cornbread when you finish the first batch.  It started out innocently enough.  As so often happens to me, yesterday I read the word “cornbread” and had to incorporate it into dinner.  I don’t know why that happens – it’s like a fleeting idea of a particular dish will flip a switch in my brain and all of a sudden I am hungry for something I didn’t realize I wanted.  It’s fine when this happens with foods for which I have the necessary ingredients; not so much when I start jonesing for pan-seared foie gras.

So cornbread.  I started jazzing up cornbread a few years ago with diced apples and barbecue sauce – also delicious – and got really hooked on the idea that cornbread can take the main stage as an entrée rather than stay on the side dish sidelines.  I thought the savory trio of the onions, bacon, and cheese here would nicely complement the sweetness of the cornbread.  I didn’t really anticipate that the flavors would come together in a storm of perfection to create something I would end up dreaming about last night as I laboriously digested a third of the pan in my sleep (after intending to eat an eighth…oops).

There is cornbread and there is cornbread.  This is the latter.

(Keep reading Cowboy Quiche…)

The first time I roasted a chicken, my dad talked me through it over the phone.  The conversation went something like this:

Dad: Is the oven hot?
Me: Yeah.
Dad: Okay, put the bird in the roasting pan.
Me: Mmhmm, done.
Dad: Now spray it with Pam.
Me: The pan, or the bird?
Dad: The bird - just give it a good spray all over.
Me: Got it. Now what?
Dad: Peel an onion, and just shove the whole thing inside.
Me: Inside…where?
Dad: The bird.
Me: In its butt?
Dad: We generally call that the cavity, but yes.  Pop it in.
Me: Are you serious?
Dad: Yes! It will taste good.
Me: Okay, one onion in the butt coming up.
Dad: I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.
Me: Go on.
Dad: Shake a little salt and pepper over the outside and stick it in the oven.  Check it in an hour.
Me: That’s it?
Dad: That’s it.

And that really is it.  You can get a delicious roast chicken with almost zero work.  If you’ve never cooked a chicken before, and if you break out in hives of OH MY G-D THIS IS SO COMPLICATED when you read the rest of this recipe, go ahead and try the Butt Onion method.  But if you are feeling at all adventurous (and by “at all” I mean on a “dimes in your penny loafers” level), try your hand at the brine and paste method I describe below.  It’s really, really delicious.  And the smells that will fill your kitchen will blow your mind.

This recipe is an absolute stunner if you are trying to impress someone with your cooking skills. It comes out looking like a million bucks, and your guests will be rendered speechless when they take a bite of the moistest, tastiest chicken they have ever had.  The brining will assure you very moist meat (heh) - just don’t overcook it.  I know the spectre of undercooked chicken and all its various evils can keep the best of us up at night, but a meat thermometer or instant-read thermometer is all the backup you need.  I highly recommend an instant-read for its speed, accuracy, and overall niftiness.  I came upon this one by way of Cooks Illustrated, and was impressed that it was both extremely functional and highly affordable.  Though not absolutely critical, it’s one of those pieces of equipment that can really streamline your cooking process.

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My first foray into Passover baking came during my second year of law school.  My wonderful Seder hosts asked me to bring a dessert.  Knowing the somewhat crippling restraints on Passover baking (and there are really only so many flourless chocolate tortes one can choke down in one lifetime), they were kind enough to suggest that a few cans of Manischewitz macaroons would be fine – “so long as they are plain or chocolate flavor and not something gross like tutti-frutti.”  I wasn’t really interested in bringing macaroons from a can, so I embarked on what proved to be a horrifyingly fraught adventure in Learning How to Make Sponge Cakes the Hard Way.  The next time I feel like making that particular Passover sponge cake again, I’ll show you and I’ll detail the ways around my prior missteps.  It may be shortly after I cure cancer, so don’t hold your breath.

Tutti-frutti grossness notwithstanding, macaroons are a mainstay of Passover dessertdom.  There are two families of macaroons – coconut and almond.  If you aren’t particularly rigid in your definitions of chometz, my Mandelhoernchen could also work (the powdered sugar in the almond paste will pose a problem for many, as it contains cornstarch).  This year, I decided to try my hand at simple, straight-up, no frills coconut macaroons.  Ideally, they should be little orbs of golden coconut; crisped exteriors with chewy, creamy centers.  Some people extrude them from a star-tipped pastry bag, but I prefer to shape them by hand.

I’m somewhat sorry to say I didn’t get around to making these until the very tail end of Passover, and ended up finishing them after it was over.  I won’t make the same mistake next year.  Though not as addictive as matzoh toffee, they are profoundly good when you want something simple and tooth-achingly sweet.
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Once upon a time, an enterprising member of a hunter-gatherer tribe grew restless at the idea of yet another bowl of the same mammoth stew and added a handful of peppery-smelling leaves to the batch. The first bite brought surprise and delight to all, and soon seasoning the meat was de riguer.

Or something like that. We don’t really need the specifics. Amidst the variety of reasons our most ancient ancestors began seasoning and varying their food is a reason so simple and obvious it generally goes without saying: because it tastes good.

And so it goes today – we continue to think, churn, generate, experiment, augment, and create, create, create beautiful, wonderful, delicious dishes. Cooking is both an art and a science, and is easily accessible at some level on both fronts. But the art side has a special, unique aspect to it. Everyone participates in it, somehow, every day. You don’t have to listen to music, view a play, examine a painting, or read a book every day, but you do have to eat. I think this is why I find cooking so appealing; it’s at the very core of our lives, waiting to be drawn out and caressed.

Yes, there are different strata of cooking and food. There are simple dishes and complicated ones. I can make a complicated sauce using fifteen ingredients, or a baguette using four. “Good” is so subjective, and doesn’t necessarily correlate to expense, difficulty, or complexity. Food: the great equalizer.

It is also very personal. Everyone’s palate is different, sensitive in varying ways. To prepare food for someone is, in a sense, to attempt to really know a very fundamental part of them. And this is one of the reasons I love to cook. It is powerful to fill an empty plate with the symphonic orchestrations of your kitchen’s contents and your own two hands. You begin with nothing, and end up with a serious something. When you cook with someone else in mind, when you reach out and access someone else’s palate and say “I think I know what you’ll like,” you share a part of yourself with them. I gave my bridesmaids a cookbook of my favorite recipes before my wedding. In the introduction, I told them “I consider the kitchen to be the heart of any home; in sharing these recipes with you, I hope to share a piece of my heart as well as my home.”

I continue to connect with the people around me through food (see, e.g., this website). Recently, upon realizing I had forgotten to wish a coworker happy birthday, I told him I would bring him the baked good of his choice the following Monday. He asked for Mandelhoernchen, a favorite cookie from his childhood in Germany. I happily agreed. He told me later, after leaving me what promises to become one of my all-time favorite voicemails, that he didn’t realize when I told him to specify a baked good that I would be making it. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

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The Midwest is well-known for its casserole canon.  You have your hot dish, your noodle ring – the sorts of oven-baked concoctions that appear in starring roles at stock the fridge showers for a second babies in Wisconsin (and seem to make their way into every kitschy portrayal of Midwesterners in film and on television).  It’s a lesser-known fact that Utah also boasts a mean casserole repertoire.  I know, you’re thinking that Utah is known for having lots of one thing…

…Jello.  And you’d be right.  I believe Utah consumes more Jello than the rest of the country put together.  As much as I have tried to disavow it at varying points in my life, I can’t help it; I love me some rainbow Jello cake.  I have made it once, and it was a colossal pain, but so worth it.  The next time I have a free day and am on a sugar binge, I’ll whip one up and show you.  It’s just…wow.  Unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

But we’re here to talk casserole (to dish about casserole? Ouch).  I’m pulled in a casserole way by more than nostalgia.  They are an ideal endeavor for busy people; a little work up front and you can eat well for several servings  (and if the thought of eating lasagna for four consecutive meals makes you ill, they often freeze well).   In some circles, the act of creating one of these baked wonders is called “putting up” a casserole, which I cannot explain linguistically but love and use often.  It’s one of those charming bits of vernacular that you want to snatch up and squeeze for yourself because it hits the ear just right.  Or maybe I just like things that sound vaguely Southern.

Whatever, let’s put up a Passover casserole.
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I have to tell you about a love affair I have with a spatula.  It would be criminal of me to share my recipes and cooking insights with you without sharing the good news about the Norpro Silicone Spatula.  Sinful, in fact – a sin of omission.

My mom gave me a set of these when I was moving into my first apartment and setting up my first kitchen.  The spatula and the spoonula are an invaluable pair, and every time you see me refer to a silicone spatula, I’m talking about one of them.  Perfectly shaped and sized, they are durable, flexible, gentle on non-stick surfaces, and tough enough to handle tough deglazing.  In short, they are perfect.  And you should go order one.

Ah, the Passover diet.  No bread?  No pasta?  No rice?  Sweet!  It’s like Atkins, the holy way!  Just think of all the weight I’ll lose!

Wrong.  The sneaky thing about Passover food is two-fold.  First, many favorite recipes outside a Seder menu are variations on the theme of What Can We Do With Matzo Today?  For the uninitiated, matzo is flour and water that has been shaped and baked very quickly to prevent leavening (rabbinic law states that there cannot be more than 18 minutes from the time the water hits the flour to the time the matzo comes out of the oven).  Leavened or not, flour is flour and has between 400-500 calories per cup.    Second, in order to hide the fact that matzo is essentially a giant, flavorless, unsalted Saltine, most variations on the WCWDWMT? theme involve great quantities of eggs, butter, cheese, or some combination thereof.

I love Passover.  It’s a wonderful holiday with truly excellent traditions to savor.  And though it can be kind of a pain, I actually really enjoy keeping Kosher for Passover.  It’s just one of those things you do, with purpose, that helps you express your faith physically as well as spiritually.  As a Jew by Choice (the modern, touchy-feely longhand for “convert”), there is extra significance to me in adopting a ritual that is older than dirt, but very new to me.  It helps remind me why I made this choice, and how it is a part of my identity from here on out.

However.

Constructing multiple, filling meals a day without the benefit of a normal complement of starches and grains can be tough.  You cannot eat matzo pizza for 24 meals, no matter how easy they are to throw together in the microwave.  Well, I guess you can, but I can’t.

So here you are, too far from your family to eat mom’s Greatest Passover Hits every day.  Or maybe you’re like me, all grown up and newly Jewish.  Or maybe you’ve decided to keep K-for-P for the first time in your life, much to your family’s confusion.  Whatever reason brings you to the internet in search of Passover-friendly recipes, you may have already discovered that Seder menus are easy to find, and that what you’re supposed to eat for the rest of the week can be a bit of a mystery.  Particularly breakfast.

Yes, yes, I know you can put together a satisfactory breakfast that doesn’t involve bread.  On weekdays during Passover, I stick with fruit and a hard-boiled egg.  But weekends for us usually involve indulging in biscuits and jam while we watch reruns of any Law & Order flavor we can find.  I’ve always liked making something nice and carby for weekend breakfasts, and Passover doesn’t seem like a reason to stop.

Enter matzo brei.  There are about a zillion ways to make this, and it’s one of those dishes about which people can have bizarrely strong feelings.  It’s only good if you make it with onions!  You have to make it sweet!  The matzo should be soaked before you break it!  Break the matzo before you soak it!  Frittata-style!  Scrambled eggs-style!  It’s exhausting, really.

I like to stir mine constantly, so it comes out as a heap of little egg-covered pieces of matzo.  And I add a little cinnamon and sugar at the end to make it sweet.  There are dozens of recipes and techniques out there, but this is mine.
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Even in this modern world of non-stick everything (hell, I have non-stick pants, which is a story for another time), it is often helpful to have some sort of oil in a sprayable form to keep everything slipping and sliding in all the right ways. Yeah, I’m essentially talking about food lube, but let’s keep our eyes on the ball.

I am a former Pam devotee. It’s readily available at any grocery store, it’s inexpensive, and it requires exactly zero futzing in order to make it work. Pam is fine for many things, and if that’s what you happen to have on hand, it will totally suffice for much of your lubing needs when it comes to my recipes.

But…

The problem with Pam and its ilk is a function of the delivery method. In order to make that nifty aerosol action work properly, the cooking oil we want is accompanied by propellants we don’t. Please understand, this is not a fussy I Don’t Eat That stance; my objection to propellants is purely from an equipment maintenance position. The propellants in cooking sprays aren’t separable from the spray output. While this does nothing to the taste and texture of your food, they get all the hell over whatever cookware you are trying to lubricate. Do you have a cookie sheet that has become increasingly coated with golden brown crud? Do your silicone baking pieces have inexplicable sticky, gunky bits all over the edges? That’s baked propellant, amigo, and there’s nothing you can do about it. That shit just loves to land on your bakeware and singe itself into molten, messy poop, and any amount of scrubbing that would remove it will also remove half of the host. Propellant crud is, for practical purposes, forever.

So what to do? I use a Misto*. Actually, I use two. It charms me to no end that John and I both came to this marriage with a Misto in hand. We use one for olive oil and one for vegetable oil. I believe they come with labels upon purchase, but those are long gone, so I tell them apart by smell; John tells them apart by lucky guessing, as his sense of smell is, um, retarded.

One benefit of Pam and the like is the absolutely even, whisper light spray of oil that it reliably delivers. Conversely, while you can learn to control the output of the Misto to be as light or heavy as you like, the uninitiated can also end up with a sloppy squirt of oil where you intended a light mist. I can live with the tradeoff, but I am also fastidious about my silicone bakeware and love olive oil, so the occasional unintended heavy squirt doesn’t bother me.

And I must now go quietly die in a corner, as the temptation to run amok with all the squirty imagery in this post is just about killing me.

*I swear up and down, six ways to Tuesday that this product used to be called Mr. Misto. However, upon a foiled attempt to find anything productive or useful when Googling “Mr. Misto”, I discovered that the official product’s name is, in fact, Misto. But the website also includes the prominent tagline “DISCOVER THE MAGIC!” so I think anything is possible here.

Pasta is one of my absolute favorite foods. It can support an incredible variety of supporting actors, from the simple (butter and cheese) to the elegant (vodka sauce) to the bizarre (tomato juice – really, my step-sisters love it this way). It’s easy to store and is generally pretty cheap.

But why fresh pasta? If you don’t already know, I think any explanation I could give you would be woefully inadequate. Imagine trying to explain to someone why cold water is refreshing or that the tops of babies’ heads smell good. If you love fresh pasta and have shied away from making your own because you think you can’t, give it a go. It’s not an especially quick process, although I have successfully pulled this off on a weeknight when I came home on the daylight side of 7pm.

Like so many things in life, there are two ways to do this: the easy way, and the hard way. The hard way is not impossible by any means (and I have successfully tackled it many times), it’s just a little messier and requires more elbow grease than the easy way. However, in terms of tools, the easy way requires a food processor and the hard way requires a flat working surface you don’t mind covering with flour.

I should point out that you also need attire you don’t mind covering with flour. Don’t try to roll fresh pasta in front of your dinner guests if you don’t want them to see you turn into a freshly flocked version of yourself. There are some menus you can easily throw together in dressy duds; this ain’t it.

I use a pasta roller to get the sheets nice and flat, but I typically cut them into tagliatelle by hand with a pizza cutter rather than use the cutting attachment. One of these days, I’ll give fettuccine another shot. For now, the wide, flat ribbons of tagliatelle are perfect. Wider pasta can stand up to a very hefty sauce. That is not to say that there is anything remotely weak sauce about cappellini, spaghetti, or the like, but something wide like tagliatelle is really your ticket if you make, say, a hearty ragout.

You will note that I let the dough rest for 2 hours. You can speed it up, if you wish, but some rest is critical – at least 20 minutes. This lets the flour form gluten, which will make your dough elastic and lovely instead of sticky and crappy. If you make your pasta on the weekend, as I typically do, give it your best love and kisses and let it have its full nap. If you want to speed the play for weeknight carbtasticness, go with a 20 minute rest (during which time you can make a nice, quick sauce!).

A note on ingredients: I use all-purpose flour for my pasta. Specifically, I use King Arthur All-Purpose – comes in a red and white bag. After years of playing hit and miss with many flour brands, I have come to love King Arthur. I use their bread flour, wheat flour, and all-purpose flour (often referred to here as “AP flour”). Yes, you can do lovely things with fancier flours, particularly semolina. I just haven’t gotten around to trying. When I do, I will keep you updated. In the meantime, I like this recipe as I always have the components on hand. AP flour? Check. Eggs? Check. You can have a spectacularly bare fridge and still knock your own socks off with the simplest of ingredients. Try it.

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