Bone Appetite

Recipe: New Year's Black Eyed Peas

One of the several dietary traditions I inherited from my family, but virtually the only one from my father's side of the family, is the good luck New Year's black-eyed peas. I always associated this with the South, and figured that as a tasty but cheap legume flavored with pork, it had its origins in Southern agrarian poverty, whence the ancestors on my father's mother's side came. We at least have what I'd call a country menu for the day: 

• Black-eyed peas flavored with cheap pork product
• Jello with fruit salad embedded in it
• Corn bread
• Greens
• (optional) punch, with or without bourbon, almost certainly with ginger ale

I stick to this menu every New Year's, and it's to my dear spouse's credit that she has gamely gone along. This year the challenge was only in getting my eldest to try the peas, he now having decided that peas are yucky. We told him they tasted like meat and I got him to eat two. That should suffice for the good luck. To my surprise, when I looked up the origins of good-luck new year black-eyed peas on the Interwebs, the wiki claims that the black-eyed-peas-for-good luck came over to this continent with Sephardic Jews in the 1730s, mostly likely to Georgia, thence to the public at large. I have no idea what to make of this, but I guess I'll go along and believe anything I read on the internet. The pre-literacy on that side of the family into the 18th century precludes me from making any evidentiary conclusions about anything related to the family tree, particularly as I don't know whether my Grandmother picked this up from her own mother's side, father's side, or both, or just the culture at large.

In any event, here's my own version of how to cook the peas, plus or minus:

Cover two cups of rinsed black-eyed peas in water in a big pot (I use my trusty dutch oven) overnight. In the morning, drain them, rinse again, and set aside in a bowl.

Cut up one medium-sized onion into a rough dice and cook in the bottom of the medium-hot dutch oven with a tablespoon of heated cooking oil (these days I use the very inauthentic extra virgin olive oil; the flavor disappears in the vat of peas, so you can use almost anything, I think). Add salt and pepper, a quarter teaspoon of cayenne, a teaspoon of dry mustard (or a tablespoon of prepared mustard of your choice), combine with onion, and cook until the onion softens, 5-10 minutes. Add in about a half a cup of beer, combine, and bring to a simmer, about two minutes. Variation: use a quarter cup of bourbon instead of the beer.

Now add the soaked and rinsed peas and cover with water, and then about a cup more, usually 4-5 cups total of water. Add 1 tablespoon of molasses (less if you are not, for some reason, using beer). Bring the whole thing to a simmer.

Now add in your cheap pork product, sliced up according to the merits of the pork. In recent years I've been using about a half pound of shank, although I started out making this most years with salt pork, I can't find the latter now and can barely find shank. If it has fat and bone, don't bother defatting or deboning before throwing it in.

Bring back to a brisk simmer, then turn the heat to the lowest setting you have to to get the mixture to just bubble very mildly. Let cook for at least 90 minutes, preferably longer, up to 3 hours. Stir every 10-15 minutes (remember your pork cooking safety -- you want to get the pork good and done, so rotating it around your approximately 225 degree pot of peas is important.) Add a little water if it thickens before the time is up, but you do want the peas to reduce to a thickish pasty sauce with just enough liquidity to ooze a bit.

I usually then fish out the pork with tongs or a spoon, trim off the remaining fat/gristle/bone, dice up the remaining pork meat and throw it back into the pot, stirring it in.

Forgot to soak the peas? I rarely do these days, but if you really must, then you can of course boil the peas for 20-30 minutes, drain and set aside, and then re-insert them into the recipe as above.

Christmas Dinner

Just a little more retro-blogging to catch-up...

Christmas dinner menu! Ah! For many years my sister has been sending us tritips, the Central California beef cut that's oh so fun to barbecue, which was fun. But it's not a tradition we were wed to, and this year we decided to cook up something our youngest would eat...so drum roll please, we cooked a very traditional Turkey. We went pretty tame since there were only four of us at the table: mashed potatoes, roasted brussels sprouts, steamed carrots, cranberry sauce (which we forgot), and a little bread and cheese. Almost all of it was make-ahead and we split the cooking down the middle (spouse got the turkey, I did the sides). The hardest part was finding a small enough turkey, and we ended up settling on a 9-pounder.

We were surprised to count on our fingers and realize this is the first turkey we've cooked ourselves in three seasons. I'm happy to report it came out great...just like falling off the old bicycle or riding a log, following the directions on the turkey package tends to have happy results.

Christmas Eve Pizza!

Catching up after the fact on neglected holiday postings...

We don't have a particular Christmas Eve tradition in the house, so each year we just pick something different to do. If there's company, of course, a fancy meal is in order of some sort, but otherwise anything that's celebratory sounds like a good idea. This year, I asked the eldest what he wanted, and he answered "Pizza!" which was pretty predictable even if he doesn't actually eat much pizza when we do have pizza. We try to make a vegetarian pizza for the younger and Mrs. Claus, so I frequently make two small to medium pizzas on pizza nights. This time, however, I decided the seasonal design would lend itself well to a half-veggie, half-pepperoni! (That's artichoke, pepper, red bell pepper and cherry tomato on the upper half.)  

Neighborhood Nog and Nosh

I am not a big fan of the Splendid Table on NPR, for reasons I won't get into here, but I do listen to it when I happen to be riding in the car when it's on, Saturday afternoons. Sometime in December there was a guest on (didn't catch her name) who was somewhat glibly offering advice to those having holiday parties about what to serve and so forth. The one piece of advice she gave that I decided to take to heart was: when you're entertaining, make sure you entertain yourself, make yourself available to the guests, and don't commit yourself to a complicated menu that requires you be out of action and in the kitchen most of the time. I confess to having had this problem on occasion, and with all the other craziness around the hollerdays, I thought it would be nice to just have a relaxing get-together with some of the neighbor kids and their parents and a few selected other friends, if for no other reason, then to get some of the kids' wiggles out before Christmas. But it's nice to enjoy a little adult company when you can, too.

So I stuck to make-aheads, finger-foods, and a couple of store-bought, make-in-the-oven-for-12-minutes appetizers. Dips, bread and cheese, fruit and nuts. We featured the gingerbread house (so much the better to get it all eaten) and our second batch of Christmas cookies for the baked stuff, had some sparkling apple juices for the kids, and of course, egg nog.

Oh, egg nog, where did I go wrong. I thought I was really keeping myself in check, by not making even one kind of egg nog by myself (we did one party a number of years ago where we did three -- the New York Times cookbook, one from a family friend, and Elvis' Eggnog from the Elvis Cookbook). Yes, I had store-bought eggnog. 

Which nobody drank, save me. I was left with a lot of leftover eggnog. Not that I object, but even with a steady every day diet of a glass we had enough left over to have to throw it out a week later when it started getting aged. 

It may be that in these strange warm climes of California there isn't a big eggnog -drinking tradition. Or maybe the drink is out of fashion. Yes, it's incredibly rich and calorific, even without booze in it, but...it's the definition of a seasonal drink! (I don't think mulled wine or glüg ever came close in the US). Well, live and learn. Next year I'll make eggnog to please myself and save some spoiled 'nog in the end.

That said, I was glad I didn't overdo it with the food this time. Good advice to break with the usual discipline of the regular year as far as cooking-slow-unprocessed food per se, but more to just relax about the whole enterprise. Ho ho ho!

The Secret to Christmas Cookies

We have a variety of family-tradition cookie recipes we like to make every year, but I've abandoned any kind of schedule for doing this. Once upon a time we liked to bake some dozens and give them away as presents to co-workers, etc. One year we filled up 30 cookie tins' worth, and that was, well, both an apex and a nadir. That kind of commitment is hard to come by these days.

I may get around to posting the family recipes -- they were mostly included in The Hoffwall Cookbook (now still in its first printing, ten years after publication!) (For now, I've included the recipe for zimstern, which is a great cookie and simple but lends itself to exotic decoration.)

The one cookie recipe I long to make every year is chocolate crinkles -- which we don't, because of the boys' sensitivity to chocolate. Some of the more exotic (relatively speaking) cookies, such as thumb prints and spritzen, would certainly be eaten but we're not sure if we can consume them in sufficient quantity without having sugar-addled children upon us the whole holiday. At least not relative to the labor involved.

In any event, we got started last week with simple sugar cookies, and shape cutters. Duncan instigated this, of course, being the big baker in the family these days. In many ways these are the best holiday cookies -- real simple to shape and decorate, and enormously flexible with respect to the decorator's intentions. (Note our baker also wanted to make a lot of letters, and any cookie cutter can be made into a holiday cookie cutter with red, green, and white decorations -- our holiday cows are famous.)

The hard part for me to remember, the real secret to Christmas Cookies -- is to remember to have FUN MAKING THEM. When I think of those years where we went through a long list of cookies and lists of people to give them to and the mechanics -- well, it's nice to be able to give out a home-made thing. But when it started really interfering with a happy, sane, simple household at Christmas, it was time to put it into a pause. And so it is this year, where we're making cookies on a given night, preferably as a family, if we feel like making cookies, and we are also trying to keep our consumption down to somewhat-above-normal, but still-below-insane-levels-of-sugar, to keep the old holiday system in balance.

Next up: the gingerbread house, on the weekend. We're being smart about this this year as well: we have a plan for getting it eaten by the neighborhood kids before Christmas. Among other reasons, we did not want it to become a source of frustration for our youngest, who is a complex-carbs-fixated child and needs some positive encouragement and help in not pushing his natural proclivities too far.

ZIMSTERN

Yields 6-9 dozen

3 T butter (softened)
2 eggs
1 tsp lemon juice
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp ground or grated nutmeg
1/2 cup chopped nuts (optional) (fine chop)
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 more egg, separated
2 1/3 cups flour
1 1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt

Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees.

Mix the butter, sugar, and two eggs, plus the yolk from the third egg, and add the lemon juice. Mix this until very fluffy.

Stir the dry ingredients together in a separate bowl, then blend into the sugar mix.

Roll the dough out into three chunks of about 1/3 of the total each, to about 1/16th of an inch thick, on a lightly-floured board. Cut with cookie cutters, and put cookies on a lightly-greased cookie sheet. Fluff the egg white, and brush the tops of the cookies. Decorate the tops with colored sugars, etc. The tops can also be coated with food coloring, or you can divide the egg white into little bowls, color each little bowl, and use it as "paint" for each cookie.

Bake 10 minutes per sheet, removing to cooling rack while you lay out the next batch.

The origin of this recipe is obscure to me; it was one of the recipes I copied from my mother's 3 x 5 card recipe box when I set out on my own for the first time. It may have its origin with her or with my Grandmother.

The Thanksgiving Menu

We're again going up to see friends for Thanksgiving, who live about a half hour away. They're cooking the turkey and mashed potatoes and one cranberry sauce; we're cooking everything else and bringing the wine.

The real art of the whole enterprise of domestic economy is kitchen management. This gets, I believe, to the heart of the successful big holiday dinner. Having the kitchen organized, getting your ingredients prepped in the right order, rotating things in the oven, and timing everything to come out at just the right time, that is so much more important than mere recipes. I wish I had a magic bullet to make this all work, but I believe a lot of this is just intuition garnered from experience. (Oh, like the time we had our dishwasher break and the sink clog up halfway through the cooking in a galley kitchen. We ended up eating the pie for dinner and the turkey for dessert.)

That said, for something as complicated as Thanksgiving -- especially when we have to do much of the prep work "offsite", as it were, before dinner -- some planning is in order. I don't necessarily go so far as a schedule per se, but I do write down what we need to do in the order that it needs doing, because it sure helps you avoid forgetting things.

So, bearing in mind that we're splitting our part of the cooking into two halves -- before we leave to go to our Thanksgiving house, and after we get there (but before dinner, and certainly before the bourbon and wine have had a chance to kick in) -- here is our part of the menu and the approximate schedule, with notes. I write it here because I have to write it somewhere!!

Wednesday afternoon:

Bake sweet potatoes. Spice with a little salt and pepper, and just a touch of nutmeg. Cover and store in fridge.

Bake the pumpkin for the fresh pumpkin meat for the pumpkin pie, strain and puree and reserve in the fridge for tomorrow. (Start as soon after the sweet potatoes are done as is practicable, or do at the same time.)

Wednesday evening:

Make the braised cabbage and put in the fridge.

Make the traditional cranberry sauce and refrigerate.

Make the three pie crusts.

Make the cranberry-apricot pie (our own recipe to follow in a separate post).

Thursday morning:

Bake the Bourbonated Pecan Pie (requires 450 oven). (our recipe follows in a separate post).

Prep the green beans with leeks and dill as follows:
- french cut, then blanche the green beans and store in an airtight container.
- dice the dill and store in another container.
- slice the leeks and store in another container.

Bake the Pumpkin pie.

Thursday afternoon just before leaving:

Prep salad:
- clean and tear salad leaves (butter, escarole, red leaf) and pre-mix leaves, and bag them
- make champagne vinaigrette

Prep acorn squash with bacon:
- cut squashes into halves and clean (cut away bottom to make lie flat)
- put in one 1/2 T pat of butter into each squash, diced half slice of bacon, 1 T brown sugar
- cover with aluminum foil

Pack into car:

- whipping cream
- three pies
- cranberry sauce
- sweet potatoes
- braised cabbage
- green bean dish ingredients (beans, leeks, dill)
- salad ingredients (lettuce, dressing, pine nuts, goat cheese)
- glass baking dish with acorn squash
- wine
- extra pie serving utensils
- wife, kids, etc.

Immediately upon arrival (one hour prior to dinner):

- put into the oven with the turkey the acorn squash
- open wine and start drinking it

20 minutes before dinner:
- put braised cabbage into dutch oven on stovetop and warm on medium-low heat

10 minutes before dinner:
- put sweet potatoes into oven or microwave, as available
- combine salad ingredients onto salad plates
- in a hot skillet and 1 T EVO, cook leeks and dill together, add S&P
- toss in green beans, stir until warm

5 minutes before dinner:
- remove acorn squashes

After dinner:
- whip up whipping cream

So, that's the plan. Enjoy it now, because, as they say, the instant the cooking starts, the plan gets thrown out the door.

The Unholy Trickery of Healthful Treats

Ugh. Halloween. I love everything about this holiday, except the candy.

I like the traditional flirting with the scary and the dead, which is a universal part of every human culture in one form or another. I like the combination of pagan and "holy" traditions. I like the costumery, since we are not a big mardi gras culture so don't have the dress-up occasions otherwise (we don't celebrate Purim...) I like the fall harvest theme to it, since we don't have an Oktoberfest in this country. I even like the concept of trick or treating -- it's just about the only way we still have in this day and age to randomly connect with neighbors, and it's good practice for otherwise shy kids to introduce themselves to strangers under controlled circumstances.

But the candy. Egads. It's disgusting. And now that the razor blade in the apple mostly-urban-legend fears have pervaded our culture, it is simply not possible to give out anything that doesn't come in a wrapper with a recognizable name on it.

So this is my dilemma, and an open question I ask to my gentle readers: is there such a thing as a healthful treat you can give away to Trick or Treaters that meets the "comes in a wrapper" criteria?

The only thing I can really come up with are individual raisin boxes, but those also have problems. The single boxes don't have the cellophane wrappers. And frankly I'd be TPing the house that gave our raisins, at least in another era.

(When my sisters and I lived in Ohio there was a dentist at the end of the block who gave out toothbrushes for Halloween. It was the least visited house in the neighborhood.)

There's fruit wraps/roll, but, really, these are not only expensive but if you look at the ingredients they're not that much better than the usual candy.

In Cleveland, there was a middle eastern bakery that made fantastic spinach pockets. As soon as I got my license I used to go there to lay in a supply to eat for lunch or whatever whenever I could. They also had these wonderful sesame candies, of sorts -- they were small bars, with honey as the sweetener, and they were wrapped individually. Just perfect -- not terribly junky, but the right size for giveaways. I'd give these out if I could find them -- I haven't seen them for 27 years now, though.

You'd think a chain like Trader Joe's or Whole Foods would've tapped into the yuppie-foodie angst here and figured out some kind of packaged halloween candy to give out. I haven't detected that.

So, confession: we bought a bag of junk to give out, as usual. I feel like a hypocrite because there's no way we'd let Duncan and Iz eat any of the things we're giving out. (As far as Duncan goes, he loves to Trick or Treat, but since he's sensitive to chocolate, we've gotten away in the past with a subtle confiscation of almost all his candy - he usually gets one or two pieces of toffee or caramel and that's the end of that.)

And to further the hypocrisy, we're moderately extreme on even the very idea of candy. We just don't give it to the boys, period. The closest we get to dispensing candy ourselves is building a gingerbread house at Christmas.

Ideas? What are you doing for Halloween?