cooking @ home

Archive for November, 2007

What is sometimes almost indistinguishable to fresh? Canned. What’s better than fresh? Sometimes the answer is frozen. Sometimes the answer is canned. Notice I said “sometimes”. The fact that the answer is even that, as opposed to “never”, is in many ways, a modern wonder.

And I’ll bet for many of you reading this, this is news to you. I’m also guessing that many of you reading this are thinking I’ve really lost it this time. Nope. Actually I’ve found it — and I’m sharing it with you, and if you take it to heart, your cooking will never be quite the same again — in a good way.

Chefs and the Frozen Pea

Did you know chefs (yes, the five star restaurant kind, not just Moe’s Hamburger Joint) prefer frozen peas to fresh? It wasn’t until I saw Iron Chef America (ICA) “Battle Frozen Peas” that I found this out. And many moons later I saw Gordon Ramsey make something (was it his now famous Pea Risotto, not sure) with frozen peas. So what is the deal with these then? According to ICA host Alton Brown: “Well, because the sugar in peas quickly converts into starch, these peas are picked and preserved at the height of their quality. In fact, peas were one of the first successes that Clarence Birdseye had in his experiments involving flash-freezing vegetables.”

On another note, several generations in my family has been purchasing and enjoying cans of Le Sueur Very Young Small Sweet Peas — at least since the Thirties. Even though this has been a staple at every super market I know of since I was a kid, a look around the web for these showed that not only are they available in many a large chain store, but in some places they are actually sold as “gourmet”. (And trust me, when it comes to most vegetables, it’s either fresh first and frozen a close second, not canned. For instance why would I buy corn or string beans from a can? Meanwhile it’s the only way to get baked beans, peaches and pears in syrup and other sundries.)

The Canned Tomato

Chefs have long loved using canned tomatoes for sauces and cooking, though even more so today as the quality over the years has continued to increase. Across the board, when given a choice between a fresh, local, in-season tomato or canned, they will go with the fresh. But for the rest of the year, canned is what they work with because there is a consistently higher quality. We know ourselves going to the store at various times of the year that tomato can be on the sour side one week, mushy the next, hot house lacking in flavor the following week. Restaurants can’t run that way, top quality ones at least. They need to have two things a high quality and a high level of even consistency. Canned tomatoes give that to them.

The Tasteless Way It Was

You have to admit food-wise this really is a time of wonders. As a child in the Sixties, I ate TV dinners which were rubbery Swiss steak, dried cardboard potatoes, burnt peas and a apple cobbler that was like a rock and burnt your tongue on plates made from aluminium foil. I ate either watery or acid throat-burning spaghetti from cans. Chinese food was chop suey from Chun King.

This gave way in the early 80s to industrial grade convenience store boxes called microwaves in which you would put inside a sandwich sealed in plastic for several minutes and out would come a soggy yet hard roll that had no grain in it, between which was a blue-purple rubber thing labeled ham and a yellow-orange glue called cheese. How’s that for twenty years of “progress”, huh? Not!

The Food Revolution of Today

Two more decades and looked what’s happened. An entire cable network devoted to cooking and food. Several of the top reality shows on the tube are competitions by chefs and aspiring chefs. Food shows are major parts of TLC, Bravo and BBC America as well as still as staple of Public Broadcasting. Two hit movies this summer were about food, No Reservations and Pixar’s animated Ratatouille. It’s become not just what we eat, but what we watch; it’s becoming a part of the American culture, with catch phrases from “Yes, Chef!” to “You donkey!” to “You really need to get smell-o-vision” to “Yum-o!”

Back to the packaged food though. From those horrid sandwich things mentioned at the 80s convenience stores, it went to such frozen food in the 90s as Healthy Choice meals, the first “tv dinners” in my opinion to actually taste good, I mean really pleasant. To today’s frozen dinners like those from Bertolli which, like the commercials say, make it seem like you have a chef in your kitchen. And with the somewhat recent San Marzano tomato crops and the organic and artisanal movements in the food industry, these items are at an all time high of quality and production. Looking back, I swear I grew up in the culinary dark ages of processed foods. That’s right, I did.

So there’s so much now at our fingertips, that saves us time and gives us better quality, we would be foolish not to use these. What else besides canned tomatoes and frozen peas you ask?

Dried versus Canned Beans

You know this past year I’ve gotten into (finally) canned beans. Check out my own Mediterranean Four Bean Salad. Trust me that I mean it when I say it is delicious, and that it contains three kinds of canned beans and one frozen bean — and yes it’s delicious! This made me wonder though — as many things food do — is it worth getting the dried beans and rehydrating them overnight as our grandparents did? Or are canned beans nearly as good?

Thankfully, to a guy named George Duran and his short-lived quirky show called Ham on the Street, I have the answer. He let folks taste blindly from both a recipe made from canned beans and from dried. The consensus was either that no one could tell the difference or that the canned was better. Either way, I’ll happy take that result.

The Pumpkin and the Strawberry

Then the other day, I’m watching an episode of the Barefoot Contessa when Ina Gartan answered something else I was wondering about. To make a pumpkin pie, was it worth the trouble of getting the fresh pumpkin? And she said to use the canned, that she had done it both ways, that the fresh one was labor intensive, and that both tasted the same so use the can.

I’ve long known — and no doubt so have you — that canned frozen strawberries in syrup are reliably delicious and sweet, while getting fresh strawberries to be consistently sweet is both impossible and like rolling dice. You can never never tell looking from the outside of the fruit. (Besides, let’s face it, fresh strawberries just don’t come with that delicious syrup that can turn a bowl of breakfast cereal, an ice cream sundae or a homemade daqueri into something heaven sent.)

Alright, that’s all I got. I’m sure there’s other wonderful things out there. For now these are the ones that come to mind. (If you know of some, come to my blog, leave a comment and share your finds!)

There You Have It

Now, just to make sure my espousing the glories of some processed foods as cooking ingredients (and sometimes straight out foods ready to eat) isn’t mistaken. I’m in no way saying ditch the fresh. And I’m certainly not saying every canned or frozen veggie or fruit is going to be great either. There’s way too many sources, companies, methods of operation, varieties of produce, and a hundred other variables to ever say something so all-encompassing. In short, this is not a panacea. There’s plenty of yucky and mushy canned and frozen veggies out there for everyone, alas.

What I am saying is these things definitely do fit into my personal cooking philosophy, that if it’s just as good and easier, go with it. And if it’s better, well, I recall the last time I spent ten minutes shucking fresh peas from their pods and the end result (compared to frozen) just didn’t seem to justify the labor to me. And it turned out I was right.

Oh, and while I hadn’t mentioned this before because it’s fairly obvious, I find I still can’t end this article without mentioning it: The true wonder of frozen and canned is the shelf life compared to fresh. They are literally there whenever you need them. Frozen for months, and canned you could (if you had to) go years. Compare that with iffy tasting fresh that’s going to start turning fuzzy in your crisper drawer next week if you don’t get to them! When that’s tossed into the equation, it’s difficult not to say that sometimes, canned and frozen foods really are better than fresh.

First let me direct you to my recipe on Fruit and Cream Cheese Triangles as that covered a lot of the basics found in this recipe here. In fact, this recipe is in many ways a continuation or the next step after those delicious little triangles.

Using the same amount of puff pastry dough that made the nine triangles, one sheet, I was this time able to more simply create four large turnovers. Since I’ve never really played with puff pastry dough prior to these two outings, I saw no sense in making the filling from scratch, as I was more interested in getting the pastry correct and learning from what I was doing.

Speaking of which, I found with the nine mini tarts that 350°F for 16-18 minutes worked best. No doubt because they were larger and each individual item has a lot more filling, 375°F for 22-25 minutes turned out to be the time for the apple turnovers.

With that in mind, I “copped out” and used a can of apple pie filling I had gotten from the market on a previous outing. That said, I also “upped the ante” a tad by deciding I would make frosting for the maybe the second time in a decade. So, for me, a second learning experience with the dough and basically a newer one with the simple icing.

Btw, although I do have an icing bag that comes with the variable nibs to make designs, I decided to do “the old plastic baggie trick” for you (see photograph) just to show this easily can be done without all the fancy “equipment”. That means you can do it too!

What can I tell you, this was so easy and delicious it tasted like I bought them at my local bakery shop. And there, where they cost three bucks a piece, I’m sure I spent considerably less with my ingredients, and they tasted as good — if not better — afterall I was able to eat mine 10 minutes after out of the oven.

  

Apple Turnovers
©2007 Harry Kenney

1 sheet puffed pastry
1/2 can of apple pie filling
1/4 cup of raisins
1/4 cup of golden raisins
1 tsp of lemon juice
egg wash

Preheat oven to 375°F.

Take one puffed pastry sheet, slice into four squares. Take filling above, mix and place as much as can hold into the squares, roughly three or four tablespoons. Fold one corner over to the opposite corner creating a triangle or “turnover”.

Brush egg wash along the two sides, press together, then use a fork on the edges to further press sides together and to make that nice ribbed design along the two sides. Also make two sets of steam holes in the top.

Place on cookie sheet with parchment paper on top. Greasing or flouring can work, but it will not work as well as the parchment paper will. Cook until brown about 22-25 minutes. When cooled, put on royal icing. (Recipe below)

Royal Icing

2 egg whites
2 cups confectioners sugar
1/4 tsp cream of tartar
1/4 tsp vanilla extract

Place all ingredients in bowl and beat on medium high for a full 10 minutes. Icing will become thick and glossy. Keep covered with damp cloth while using, removing small portions to bowl as needed. Fill a Ziplock or other plastic baggie. Move contents to corner of bag, using scissors, carefully snip a small — repeat, small — area of the corner. Gently squeeze the icing to and fro across the top of each tart to make wavy pattern.

Good news, it worked. Bad news, you’re going to have a lot of icing left to figure out what to do with. (I’d cut in half or quarter it but then how do you get 1/16th of vanilla extract?) So I suggest save in the refrigerator a few days and find something else to make and use up the icing on.

I’m noticing as time goes on and, especially with pasta dishes, when you interchange different ingredients, it becomes tougher and tougher to come up with the actual names of the recipes. To me, my short-hand for this dish is “Chicken Z-and-Z” for Zuccini and Ziti. Of course if I actually named it that, you would be going “huh?” and either turn away. Or maybe it would conversely grab your attention. But you surely wouldn’t know what it was until — and if — you started looking closely. And if you were specifically looking for a chicken and squash pasta dish, you might not find it here either.

No wonder Rachel Ray and others come up with crazy names after a while for things. I mean I love pasta simply because you can put sooooo many different ingredients, meats, seafood, proteins and veggies in it. And then the number of sauces as well are staggering. But then with all those mixes and matches, naming does become difficult.

You know, this might make you laugh. Or maybe you think the same way as I do, but, in many ways, pasta seems to me as a very American dish. It’s sometimes difficult to think of them as Italian. And this coming from an Irish-American no less.

Sure, America is the home of hamburgers, hot dogs and apple pie. But growing up, pizza, spaghetti and meatballs, and alternately cheese and meat raviolis, strombolis and calzones and lasagna were as much of it. I have this one friend from England who’s lived here forever and she still doesn’t get it, as they never ate that way in the UK. First time I heard this I thought it was weird saying, “Wait, you’re 4,000 miles closer to Italy than we are!” Right there, that shows you it’s more an American thing.

I say, fair is fair. The tomato was grown only in the Americas; Europe never had the tomato before Columbus. And yet for two hundred years the tomato has been the staple of Italian cuisine. If they can do all that with our tomato, then yeah, I don’t see why we can’t therefore say a lot of Italian food is just plain American. It’s just the boomerang effect.

  

Chicken & Squash with Ziti in Roasted Garlic Sauce
©2007 Harry Kenney

two large zucchinis, diced large
1 large yellow squash, diced large
yellow onion, diced
ziti (or penne or rigatoni, etc)
fresh baby carrots (halved)
1 1/2 pounds skinless chicken breasts, diced large
salt
pepper
garlic

While garlic is roasting in oven (see sauce below), sweat the vegetables, that is, one a medium heat and olive oil you want to cook them, break them down, but you don’t want them brown nor do you want them mushy, you want the vegetables still to have a good deal of body. Season as required. So sweat the zuccini and the squash, take out of pan. Put in the chicken, and later (so it doesn’t brown) the onion and cook them well also. Meanwhile boil lightly or steam the carrots (you can do this in the microwave if you want.) Cook the pasta per directions. Drain. Into the large vessel containing the pasta now add the chicken and veggies, mix well, add any additional seasonings. Add the sauce below. Mix well, serve. Makes enough for 8-10 servings

Roasted Garlic Sauce

head of garlic
dried oregano
dried basil
salt
pepper
1/2 cup olive oil
some lemon zest
2 tblsps lemon juice
red pepper flakes
1/4 cup grated parmagen

First, preheat oven for 350°F. Take an entire head of garlic, cut off the top, place in aluminum foil, and make an open pocket. Pour olive oil on top along with dried basil and oregano. Seal, place in oven for 25-30 minutes until roasted brown.

Squeeze the garlic out of it’s “head” of paper and place in blender. (Note, this works with the normal old bar blender as well as the super new ones.) Put in the ingredients listed above, except the oil, mix. Take off the top, pour the olive oil in as the rest is mixing, this is to emulsify and create the sauce properly. Taste, adjust as needed. Pour onto pasta, mix and serve.

Do you ever find watching the cooking shows frustrating? And I mean for the single reason that you can’t find the ingredients? Do you start wondering is it where you live is unusual? I mean when chef after chef after cook after cook keep using an ingredient, and you’ve been to one, three, seven different super markets and can’t find it, do you start to wonder is it a television conspiracy or do I live in some backwater?

This happens to me all the time. Now, just so you you know, I live in the fourth largest city in the US, Philadelphia. In an a section of the city known as Northeast Philadelphia that is “regular” average, middle and upper income area. I know therefore I am not supposedly living in the sticks, and yet, I am apparently living in the “culinary boonies”, a “food ghetto”. Either that, or I’m not alone, meaning these cooks keep using things we may never find.

Anyhow where was I? Oh yes, living in an average neighborhood in the fourth largest American city, yet not a single supermarket near me carries mascapone cheese. They even give me odd looks every time I ask an employee where it is or do they carry it. They’ve never heard of it before. Yet name me a single TV show cook who hasn’t used it once. I think between Rachel and Giada alone it’s in 200 recipes. But you’ll not find a single one of those recipes (apparently) made anywhere in NE Philly.

It took me my third market to find pizza dough, I mean the real thing. (that wasn’t that Pil;sbury crapola substitute). Four stores to finally find puff pastry (that’s 1 out of 4 or 75% of the ones I went to that didn’t carry it). I still can not find ravioli sheets nor wonton wrappers anywhere in my area. Those I’ll end up making myself at this rate. At least with those I knpw I can. When it comes to phyllo dough however is another one I can’t find, and I know I won’t be making that, so I guess I need to wait until I take a trip into Center City and hit a specialty store or buy it off the Net and get some shipped. The things you do all in the pursuit of wanting to make some homemade baklava!

Question is. It can’t just be me can it? I mean, where do you live? Big city, burbs, rural, boondocks? Can you find these items? What other items can’t you seem to get where you live? I’d honestly love to hear from you and find out. Seriously, hit up my blog and let me know. We can commiserate.

Right now, as I write this article and therefore obviously haven’t heard from anyone yet, I have to theorize that I can’t possibly be alone. And if that’s true, this begs another question. Why are those television cooks torturing us so? Is it because they work at networks that can get anything that the cooks are clueless that normal folks just can’t find this stuff? What is it?

The other day I passed up looking at a Rick Bayless episode because he was going to cook goat. No, it didn’t turn my stomach. But if I can’t even find anadlous sausage (there goes 50 Emeril recipes that will never happen) nor chorizo (so much for authentic Spanish dishes) where the heck am I ever going to find goat here in Philadelphia? Ain’t going to happen. (I’m not saying there isn’t some unusual little butcher somewhere in this city that might have it. But if it’s not at my local markets unless I’m dying to make it a mission in life to track it down, it ain’t happening. I’m too admittedly lazy and disinterested in seeing if it’s possible to find goat in this city and then, not at a restaurant, but where I can pick it up and cook it myself.)

Let’s see …. mascapone cheese, anadalousa sausage, chorizo, goat … ah, quinoa. This is the latest “super star mystery food” … a South American food that goes back to the Incas. Seems every other week one of the TV cooks come up with something to use this for. Why? Apparently it has appeared in the American food import list in the past six months. Apparently only TV cooks can get quinoa, that’s not an exaggeration either. Ok, ok, very possibly in a Latin neighborhood, but ethnicity aside in a “regular” multi-ethnic neighborhood national supermarket chain store, forgitaboudit. Try asking at your market. Become that crazy person who is always asking for stuff the workers there never heard of and which you hear on TV several times a week.

Ok, is there an answer? Probably not. Am I mad at the cooking folks? Nope. Do I think they should stop doing recipes of items that are difficult, or impossible to get? No. They are right to explore new things. And it’s — albeit frustrating it is also — only exceedingly natural they would get to the newest items are hard to find items first. Afterall, eventually, they help set the course of things. If they keep talking about them, then eventually those items will find their way through the distribution channels into the local supermarket.

Meanwhile two things, first to the TV cooking hosts themselves: could you maybe stop saying “you can find this in your local market” until your know it’s true? Did they get theirs from their local market or did the cooking network or production team hand it over to them? Can they actually get those ingredients in their own supermarkets or butchers or produce store?

And for the rest of us, there are five choices. First, live with out it. Naw. Second, substitute ingredients where possible. This helps in some ways, but it still doesn’t give you the taste of the real thing you want. That leaves waiting until it gets to our area, or travel a bit for it: try and find a gourmet shop or farmers market or specialty store in the midtown of the big city near you, or, as I’ve found recently, if you really want to try something, Or the last and final choice is right under our noses: there are places on the web you can order from and have it shipped to you. (Probably even goat meat, though I have no impetus to go type and get some.)

Now, mind you this isn’t going to work for a spur of the moment thing. But if you, like I, have been dying to try out some recipes with heretofore unfindable ingredients, or may be you just want to know what these things on their own taste like, I found a place online that has, to my surprise, every food item and cooking ingredient I’ve mentioned so far.

Now there are some places cheaper, for instance a saw a few different places that specialized in Spanish meats where I could get chorizo. I found some cheese places on line that had the mascapone, but the place mentioned was the only one that had every single thing I typed in there. Some were the same price, some a little bit higher, but for the convenience sake I know I’ll be soon trying out all those delicacies in the near future. Fill my cart up and when they come to the door, have a week where I “go to town” on it and finally see and taste what everyone’s been talking about for so long.

This began as one of my experiment meals a good decade or longer ago. You go to restaurants, you see various veggies in the rice. Get a box of Rice-a-roni, little carrots or peas in the rice. So, what the heck, one night way back when, I put two dishes together, spinach and rice. They tasted good, looked great together. My mother and step-father Dave who I was cooking for enjoyed it a lot, as did I.

Can’t say it was great, but it was darn good. As time went on I started to mess with it more — aka, perfect it. Adding raw onion was too bitey. Dave thought it was an improvement though. Mom and I didn’t. Then again, Dave could smother so much horseradish sauce on a hot dog you couldn’t see the hot dog.

Eventually, it came to what you see below, with onion nicely cooked in butter and parmesan cheese added. It’s literally funny how much this super-simple combination of basically four ingredients can taste so good and yet it does. I almost forgot to add it here, as, whatever the reason, haven’t made it in a good six months. Maybe it’s because it’s turned Fall that it came back to my mind. Something about it yells robust and warming and soothing.

In any event, it makes a beautiful side. Trust me, once you’ve had this you will make it again and again. Great alongside a starch, though naturally with all the rice in it, this really should be the starch on the plate. I feel like I should write more, but there’s nothing else to say except: it’s true, sometimes simple is best.

Spinach and Rice
©2007 Harry Kenney

ingredients:

6 cups of cooked white long-grained rice (follow box directions)
16 oz cooked frozen chopped spinach (steam or light boil, and do reserve the water when draining)
one onion, diced and browned (preferably in margarine or butter, not oil)
3-4 oz grated parmesan

season to taste:

salt
pepper
died basil
dried oregano
garlic powder (optional and if use, use sparingly)

Boil the rice, lightly brown the onion, cook and drain the spinach, mix with big spoon in pot thoroughly, add spices, stir thoroughly, add parmesan, stir well. When adding parmesan, do to taste and texture, that is, go for the taste you want, but as it also dries out the mix, add 1/8 cups of spinach water to it, keep adding cheese and water as required to get taste and good consistency. When have those where you desire them, one more taste for seasoning (you may have watered that down while adding the water and cheese) so season more as needed, serve. Makes enough for 8-10 servings.