Someone's In The Kitchen...

and it ain't Dinah. Tis I, me, myself.

I love fiddling in the kitchen on Sunday afternoon, and I love it best of all in the fall and winter when I can use my oven without jacking up my air conditioning expenses. Last week I bought these cute multi-colored root vegetables: carrots and potatoes in several different hues, including blue (potatoes) and white (carrots). And yes, I do buy my crayons in the 64 color boxes.

I roasted the potatoes and carrots with some garlic cloves and cut up red onions (which are really, as you know, purple). I then cannily tossed them with several dribbles of the oil of the virgin organic olives, a grinding of four kinds of fresh peppercorns, a toss or two of sea salt and several sprigs of thyme plucked fresh from my garden.

I bet you're wondering what that yellowish cowpie is at the top of the pan. That, my dear friends, is fresh polenta that I made. For that, I had to first sift through a half cup of polenta, taking it out into the broad sunlight to try and ascertain what exactly those dark specks in it were. I was looking, of course, for movement, legs, feelers. I saw none, so I decided that either the black specks were a natural part of the polenta--or they were dead bugs. If the latter, I reassured myself (in the best Alton Brown mode) that they were merely protein to go with my veggies. For some reason, the meal was singing a siren song of lemon to me, so I used the juice of a lemon as part of the polenta's liquid. When the whole mess was nice and thick, I threw it into the pan with the veggies, which is as you see it here.

And here you see it as I've plated it. I recently learned the verb "to plate", but obviously I haven't learned to do it.

Never mind--the whole thing was exquisitely delicious. As it was again tonight. And will be again tomorrow night.

How's About Some Cabbage & Apples?

It's Sunday and I'm in the kitchen with the Food Channel again. But yesterday I was there as well...and here's what I made
I'm calling it, in a streak of originality, Cabbage & Apple Side Dish. I made it to eat on it's own, but it would be terrific as a Thanksgiving dish. And it's cheap. And easy. And I made it up.

Here's what to do:

1. Chop 1 purple onion (nice color, doncha think?) and a couple of cloves garlic and brown them in some oil (I used walnut, but olive would do as well). I got them quite brown, some were actually crispy, but you don't have to do that. You can just saute them till they're limp or golden or however you like your onion/garlic mixture.
2. Add 2-3 T of butter (sweet, please, is there any other kind to cook with? d'oh?)
3. Cut up half a cabbage into chunks or slivers or however you want to slice 'em. Add to skillet (I did tell you to do this in a large skillet or dutch oven, didn't I). You can use any kind of cabbage. Mine was the frilly kind because--it just was.
4. Peel, core and slice a tart apple and mix it in with the whole thing. Do some salt and peppering, if you like. Cover the pot and stir occasionally. Oh, did I mention this should be on a medium fire?
5. Cook until the cabbage and the apples are limp. Serve. Eat.
6. This is an expandable recipe. Just add more of everything to feed more people. Mine provided a side dish for four (me and three more of me.).

Making Myself Sick

I cannot stand cute. I abhor twee. Don't give me any angels, please, and unless I sneeze, don't bless me. As a recent post of mine attested, I call things as I see them. Dead is dead, dumb is dumb, and bullshit is bullshit.

So why is it that whenever I want to refer to a friend that I have made through blogging, I keep wanting to say bliend? Pronounced blend, as in blog + friend. Omygod I'm gonna puke....

So--one of my "bliends" is offering this month an easy summer recipe/hint/treat a day, and I'm addicted. She lives in Napa and is in the Food & Wine Trade, as they say, so she is nothing if not au courant, etc. etc. with all things Foodie.

The other day I made HelenJane's Tomato Avocado Salad. I seeded and sliced chocolate brown Rosso Bruno tomatoes, peeled and sliced an avocado, cut up into--yep, you guessed it--thin slices some Vidalia onion, poured olive oil on it, salt and pepper and the juice of a lime. It was, in a word, exquisite (and you know that if I say it, I mean it). This is exactly HelenJane's recipe, and she has lots more. Go visit. Maybe you'll make a new bliend, too.

Chopped Rosso Bruno Tomato Salad

Chopped Rosso Bruno Tomatoes
Originally uploaded by By Jane.

The beginning of a tomato, basil, and fresh mozzarella salad. The tomatos are heritage, I believe, and their skins are so dark they look to be chocolate. The basil was the purple, frilly kind and I tore it into bite size pieces. The fresh mozzarella was perlina, very small balls, the size of a pea. Mixed together and drizzled with an extra virgin, cold pressed olive oil.

Nothing more. Nothing less. Sufficient.

The Story of the Stuffed Cabbage - Part II

My mother taught me to cook. My two earliest memories of being in the kitchen as more than an observer were when she had me preparing roast chicken. Salt and pepper it inside and out, shove a quartered onion up it, put it in a pan, stick it in the oven at 375 for an hour or so, and when the leg wiggles, the chicken is done.

The other memory is when I made dinner for my dad. My mother was away and that left me in the dominant female position, which I fulfilled with a meal heavy on food types that I liked, canned green beans for one, but also a new-to-me product, Cool Whip. I hate to tell you how long ago this was; suffice to say, Cool Whip did not start out in those cute little tubs in the freezer. It originally came in packets that you had to mix up. I thought it was, well, cool. So canned green beans and Cool Whip--even I knew that something was missing, so I mixed several different colors of Cool Whip. Blue Cool Whip as meat, yellow Cool Whip as potatoes, and red Cool Whip as salad. The green was taken care of by our canned beans, remember. My father was a peach, and I believe he cleaned his plate and may have asked for seconds.

All of this was a preamble to a lifetime reputation as one hell of a cook. Thus, I felt no fear when faced with the Stuffed Cabbage. I found two recipes, one in the vintage Good Housekeeping that my sister gave me when I got married [the first time] and the other in Joan Nathan's Jewish Holiday Cookbook. I used the first the only other time I made Stuffed Cabbage, which was back when I was married [the first time] and had an unfortunate mishap with the stuffing bowl and the dish washing soap, which tainted forever that recipe with the tang of lemon Palmolive. That being the case, I elected to go with Joan Nathan.

Nathan's recipe is unique, or so it seems to me, in two ways. First, rather than lemon, she uses frozen lemonade. Second, she recommends that one freeze the cabbage head for two days prior to making the rolls because this makes it easier to fold the cabbage. I followed her recipe to the T--almost. The only part I didn't do: Miss B is a vegetarian, and thus my Stuffed Cabbage had to be meat less. I substituted some product called Chorn (or that may be the name of the village in Russia that my grandfather came from). Whatever--this stuff is made of egg whites and other things and is crumbled up to look just like hamburger meat that's been cooked. I mixed the fake hamburger with the onion and garlic and rice that Nathan called for--and it didn't smell bad, but it didn't smell good either. Although how fake meat would/should smell is beyond me. Still, I must have had a frisson of concern because I did note the odd odor.

But I persisted and went on to the prepping of the cabbage. This called for defrosting the thing over night (can you see how long this is taking on the shetl--two days to freeze, one day to defrost, and this is just the cabbage we're talking about). Then I cut the core out of it and, as instructed, began to separate and spread the cabbage leaves out. Nathan is right; the formerly crisp, sturdy cabbage leaves were now, well, limp. They had taken on an odd coloration, sort of translucent, but with a vaguely plastic look. Kinda like they food samples that some Asian restaurants put in their windows. It's food, but yet not food.

However, they were quite easy to work with, and I began the stuffing processing with a kind of joy. I was channeling my mother; my hands just seemed to know how they should go, and it was a kind of Zen moment for me. Soon, I had a pot full of little cabbage rolls. I meant to stop at this point and take a picture so this could be an illustrated tale, but I poured the tomato sauce over them before I remembered that. So, sadly, my story is text only. I put the covered pot in the oven at 350 for four hours, as Nathan said to, and walked away, feeling proud.

You all know where this is going, don't you. I don't have to drag it out and detail the odor of burning tomato sauce, turning the temp down, more odor, more temp down, until after two hours or so, I couldn't stand it and pulled the pot out. Already I had some crispy critters in there, but I could remember times my mother had burned things and she just left the burnt parts and served up the still-good middles. So all was okay, I could still feel pride, and we would eat our Stuffed Cabbage for dinner.

Even up to the point when I served myself a portion of the Cabbage from the pot, I was still walking in my mother's shoes. I could feel myself holding the spoon as she had (and, truth be told, it was her spoon) and plating the Stuffed Cabbage as she had and taken a forkful as she once did and--.

These were not my mother's Stuffed Cabbage. I hope they weren't Joan Nathan's Stuffed Cabbage either. They were, in a word, awful. I don't think it was just the fake meat, although that probably contributed (Note: can fake meat go bad, because this stuff smelled rank). The frozen cabbage certainly contributed. It occurred to me that the chemical breakdown that renders the cabbage malleable may also make it spoiled. Whatever, my Stuffed Cabbage were gag-worthy. I had D try them, just to make sure I wasn't prejudiced by having dealt with all the ingredients, and he said, "it's not often that I can't eat something...."

He went out for hamburgers, and I stuffed my Stuffed Cabbage down the disposal. It was, to say the least, a chastening experience.

The Story of the Stuffed Cabbage

My mother was known far and wide, particularly within our immediate family, for her Stuffed Cabbage. She was an excellent cook of that genre of Eastern European dishes, but her cabbage was among the best. It was a meal she made to say 'I love you,' and no wonder since it requires a multitude of prep steps. Stuffed Cabbage is clearly a shetl food, made by women who (a) are making do with the end of the end cuts, and the dregs of the field, and (b) have nothing better to do with their time than peel apart a cabbage, cook the individual leaves to a softness suitable for folding, and then spoon stuffing into the leaves and roll them up, put them into a pot, and cook in a sauce, which has already been cooked for some time, for four or five hours. They are also called Pigs in the Blanket, but not by Jews who keep kosher.

I don't remember the last time I had my mother's Stuffed Cabbage, but back in '96, she gave me a casserole of them. Frozen. To keep on hand, should one want a taste of Mom.

I did just that, kept them on hand in my freezer, tucked away in the back in their celadon green ceramic dish for oh, I hate to tell you how long. Far past the point when they would have been tasty. Far past the point when they would have even been edible. After my mother died, I liked seeing that green dish in the freezer. It reminded me of her, and it spoke to the fact that I was still, even in absentia, being mothered. To anyone who dared to comment, I told them we were keeping it to send out and have its chemical makeup determined, since my mother left no written recipe for her famous Stuffed Cabbage.

The years passed, and still the green dish remained in the freezer. Then we were moving, and among the many decisions of what reminders of my parents to keep and what to throw (yes, to some stationary from my father's last business; no, to his household bills from 1983), I was faced with the Stuffed Cabbage. I regret to tell you, dear reader, that it was also 'no' to the Stuffed Cabbage. I don't think I did the actually handling of the bowl into the garbage; probably I got my friend Jimmie, who was doing most of the heavy work for us that week, to do it for me. Probably I just said with a wave of my hand, "Toss it." I doubt that I made much of what it was, since he was already overwhelmed with the Stuff My Family Thinks It Has To Keep.

So the Stuffed Cabbage is gone, and I confess, I haven't missed it much. Until last week, when Miss B, in a swoop of postpartum something or other, asked me if I'd gotten the recipe back from the chemist's as she was hankering after Mama's Stuffed Cabbage, and could I make it for her when I came to visit. I didn't have the heart to tell her I had never actually sent it to the chemist, and I rarely have the heart to say "no" to her requests, so I smiled and said, "I can do that. I can do that."

And tomorrow, I will tell you the story of how and why and whether I could or could not.

Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby....

Two years ago today, I started By Jane on Live Journal. Here's my first post,
in which I expressed the rather mild, nay, weak intention that my blog be a place where my friends and family could go to keep up with my life. Ha! And Double Ha! They refused, outright, sometimes silently and sometimes testily. The only family member who regularly reads my blog is Ratphooey, to whom I am eternally grateful, not the least because if I suddenly conk out at my computer, at least she will be able to tell the rest of the family.

The first year, I was trying to figure out what I was doing here. As I said in my LJ profile

You can also read there my stuttering starts at finding a voice for this blog. I always taught my students that good writing is draped on a rhetorical frame. Thus, knowing your purpose is paramount to effective communication. What I have struggled with over these months is what my purpose is here. In other words, what the fuck am I, a woman of a certain age, doing writing a blog that is read by few people, some related to me, all much much much younger than I am. My own generation, being those who cannot set their VCRs, are blog-challenged and even threatened. So I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here, but I'll keep on doing it--because I want to.

I just went back over last year's posts, and it's fascinating to see my voice develop (not to mention my confidence) . I no longer feel like the wizened old lady of the group, and I know what the fuck I'm doing here. Over the year, I learned that I am, above all, a writer, and this is the place that I write.

I had intended to mark this day by introducing some new features, like Book Club, in which I'll just blather on, as is my wont, about what I'm reading and what I think about it. And What's Cooking, in which I'll post recipes that I've tried or created. And Office Hours, in which I'll talk about things of a therapy nature. I'm going to try to make these regular posts. And if you have any suggestions for them, please let me know.

So, happy, happy birthday to By Jane--may she live a hundred years and drink a hundred beers...