Dip’idy Doo Dah, Dip’idy Eh!!!

Crudités Curry Dip
Classic French Onion Dip
Sundried Tomato and Feta Dip

Crudités Curry Dip
1 cup Greek-style yogurt (or two cups regular; drained in cheese cloth to equal one cup)
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tbsp curry powder
1/2 cup mayonnaise
2 tbsp sweet mango chutney, finely chopped
1 scallion (white and green), thinly sliced
hot sauce; to taste
1 tsp lime juice
1 tbsp fresh cilantro; chopped
Salt and freshly ground pepper

If using thick Greek-style yogurt then there is no need to drain. If using plain whole milk yogurt, then place 2 cups into a coffee filter inside a strainer over a sink for 2 hours or until it has drained to yield only one cup.
Heat the oil over medium heat. Gently cook the garlic for about 2 minutes until fragrant. Add the curry and stir about 30 seconds more. Set aside to cool.
In a large bowl, combine the yogurt, curry mixture, mayonnaise, chutney, scallion, hot sauce, lime juice, and coriander. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Store covered in fridge until ready for service (up to three days), and serve with raw or blanched crudités vegetables.

Classic French Onion Dip
2 tbsp butter
2 large onions; sliced length-wise
1/4 tsp kosher salt
1 1/2 cups sour cream
3/4 cup mayonnaise
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp ground white pepper
Salt; to taste

Over medium heat, slowly caramelize the onions in the butter, salting them immediately after adding them to the pan. (about 20-30 minutes). Remove from heat and stash in fridge to cool completely. Mix together the rest of the ingredients in a large bowl, adding the cooled onions. Adjust seasoning with salt if needed. Refrigerate and stir again before serving.

Sundried Tomato and Feta Dip
3/4 pound feta cheese, crumbled
1/2 cup sun dried or oven roasted tomatoes in oil
1 clove garlic (1/2 teaspoon granulated)
2 tsp fresh thyme leaves
1 tsp fresh oregano leaves
3/4 cup milk (use buttermilk for interest)
1 tsp black pepper

Puree all the ingredients in a food processor until smooth, adding milk to adjust consistency. Transfer to a serving bowl, and serve with chips and veggies.

Spanish Food

Classic Sangria
Garden Gazpacho
Serrano and Chorizo Stuffed Mushroom Caps
Patatas Bravas con Allioli

Remember biscuits and gravy? I don’t know if they are just a southern thing, or if they are eaten in diners everywhere, but they are basically just halved biscuits with a white bechamel gravy that is either plain with lots of black pepper or with ground sausage bits. The interesting thing about them is their simplicity, and yet their complexity. No, I’m not pulling the old ‘mysterious oxymoron’ shtick just to confuse and make myself sound clever.

I just mean that the basic ingredient list for biscuits is so simple:
Flour, Butter, Salt, Milk (or buttermilk), Baking powder

And then the ingredients for white gravy:
Flour, Butter, Salt, Milk, Black pepper

Isn’t that incredible. When you eat biscuits and gravy, you are basically eating an entire plate full of flour, milk, and butter! And yet the end results couldn’t be more different. I think I’ll start using this as an example when people ask me if it mattes that they follow a recipe.

Just a thought.

I find that so-called big birthdays like this take the looking glass of perspective, slip it into a linen sack, and bash it into a million kaleidoscopic shards.

In the past 15 years I have…

Gotten my driver’s license, My first car, Graduated High School, My first apartment, Moved to and lived in Germany for years, Got a consulting job for Texas Instruments, Learned to speak a foreign language, Got married, Learned to cook, Got a job in Marketing.

And these are just off the top of my head. I’m sure there were many more moments along the way. I don’t know if I should be proud of all that I’ve accomplished, or sad that I haven’t accomplished more.

So anyway, I’m glad that you guys find my cooking classes fun. I hope you learn something about food. I hope that you think about the things that we nourish our bodies with and the smells, flavors and textures that nourish our souls. I hope that you all have a long list of first that you are proud of, and that at least some of them are things like, “The first time you made a soufflé, or the first time you made bread from scratch.”

Cooking is a peaceful place, and I’m happy to share it with you good folks!

Parsnip & Apple Soup
6 Tbsp Kerrygold Irish Butter
1 medium onion; chopped
5 parsnips; peeled and chopped
3 granny smith apples; peeled and cut into 1” pieces
1 medium russet potato; peeled and cut into 1” pieces
6 cups veggie broth 2 tsp curry powder
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
salt & freshly cracked black pepper
½ & ½; to taste
Chives for garnish

Heat the butter in a large soup pot over medium high heat until melted, then add the onion and a pinch of salt and sweat until translucent, approx. 3-5 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium and add the other vegetables stirring to coat in the butter. Put the top on and let the veggies cook covered for 10-12 minutes, stirring occasionally making sure nothing scorches. Uncover the pot, and pour in the stock, curry powder, cumin, coriander, salt and pepper and let the soup simmer (not boil!) for 35 – 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. Finally with a food mill, a blender, or an emersion stick blender puree the soup to desired smoothness. Lastly, add the half-n-half, adjust seasoning to taste, and serve hot.

Shepherd’s Pie
Filling
3 Tbsp Kerrygold Irish Butter
2 lbs. ground lamb (beef, pork, or chicken is okay)
1 medium onion; diced
2 carrots; peeled and diced
2 Tbsp minced fresh flat-leaf parsley
1 tsp fresh thyme
1½ Tbsp all-purpose flour
3 cups beef stock

Topping
2 lbs. russet potatoes; peeled and cut into 1” pieces
½ cup milk
2 Tbsp Kerrygold Irish Butter
3 Tbsp Dubliner cheddar cheese
salt and freshly cracked black pepper

Preheat the oven to 425°F
Heat 2 Tbsp butter in a large skillet or sauce pan over medium-high heat until melted, then brown the meat in the butter. Remove the meat from the pan to a plate with a slotted spoon. Add the last Tbsp of butter to the pan and sweat the onion with a pinch of salt for 2-3 minutes until translucent, then add the other vegetables and cook for a few minutes. Scatter the flour over the vegetables and stir to combine. Put the meat back into the pan along with any collected juices. Add the broth and let the stew simmer for 20-25 minutes adjusting the temperature to make sure it isn’t a rolling boil.
In the meantime, steam or boil the potatoes until fork tender. Drain the really well, then add the milk, butter, salt, and pepper to taste, mash them with a potato masher to your own taste. Here’s where you can make the dish as rustic or as refined as you’d like.
Grease a casserole dish large enough to hold the mixtures. Pour in the filling first and shake the casserole to settle the mixture. Now, working very carefully, scoop out large blobs of the mashed potatoes and using a finger, carefully scoop them out of the spoon into little islands of potatoes over the filling. Now you can either leave it like this, or you can carefully smooth the potatoes down into a solid layer. At any rate top with grated cheese, and bake until golden brown.

Guinness Extra-Stout Mousse
8 oz. semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate
½ cup Kerrygold Irish Butter
¼ cup superfine sugar
¾ cup Guinness Stout; slightly warm but not boiling
3 large egg yolks
1 cup heavy cream; whipped 6 oz. white chocolate
1 cup heavy cream (divided into half cups)

Set a pot with one inch of water on medium heat. Find a metal bowl that fits slightly down into the pot but doesn’t touch the water at all. Melt the chocolate, butter and sugar in the bowl until smooth and fluid. Next add the warm Guinness and egg yolks. Remove from the heat and whisk to combine being careful not to curdle the eggs.
In a second bowl whip the 1 cup of heavy cream to soft peaks and then fold it carefully into the chocolate Guinness mixture. Spoon the mixture into individual little beer glasses, cover each with plastic wrap and put into the refrigerator.
Clean the metal bowl and set it over the water again. This time melt the while chocolate along with ½ a cup of the heavy cream. Once the mixture is completely melted, remove it from the heat and let it cool for 30 minutes stirring occasionally as it thickens. Then whip the extra ½ cup heavy cream to soft peaks, and fold it into the white chocolate mixture. Remove the chocolate glasses from the fridge and uncover them. Spoon a dollop of this white mixture over top of each glass to create the Guinness beer look. Recover, return to the fridge and chill for at least four hours; overnight would be best.

Enter the show: The Iron Chef! Seemingly overnight, it turned food preparation into a competition. The Japanese figured out a equation that was custom tailored for Americans… television, male competition, mellow-drama, and mountains of food. Now the Food Network has the following shows in it’s line up…

Food Network Challenge
Glutton for Punishment with Bob Blumer
Dinner: Impossible
Ham on the Street (less than the others)
Iron Chef
Iron Chef America
The Next Iron Chef
The Next Food Network Star
Ultimate Recipe Showdown
Throwdown with Bobby Flay

All of which are food competition shows. Now, don’t get me wrong. I think Iron Chef was a riot; a laugh-a-minute. I was captivated by the strange foods, weird hosts, odd seriousness of faux-drama and bad overdub. What I do hate is the outbreak of food competition shows that the Iron Chef at least helped foster. Every second show is two rednecks competing to see who makes the best bar-b-q, or two housewives talking about the stress of the competition as they shove their grandmother’s cookie recipe into an oven at a Pillsbury bake-off, or the look in some donut maker’s eyes when Bobby Flay shows up and ruins his day in the spotlight by challenging him to some ridiculous donut “Throw Down”. How laughable!!!

Anyway, I guess I don’t have a real point to all of this. I just find it sad that I can no longer see any actual cooking on the Food Network that isn’t bound for some judges table. I think it says so much about our nature.

The concept behind pizza couldn’t be more simple. The dough is made strictly (according to the Italian government) with only: wheat flour, water, salt and yeast. The sauce is an uncooked blend of tomatoes (28oz. can of San Marzano), garlic (1 Tbsp granulated), basil (1 tsp dried), oregano (1 tsp dried) and salt (1 tsp kosher). That’s it. Basta!

Looking back though, I honestly do see how hard good pizza is to make, because I failed at it so many times. The person who taught me how to make pizza was a chef from Rome named Roberto. He made a cracker thin crust that he rolled out with a 3 ft. long by 1 inch dowel rod; that’s right, no flying, spinning, hand tossing… rolling! When I moved back to the US, I went out and bought a pizza stone and a flat wooden pizza peel. Trying to recreate Roberto’s thin crusts, I ripped through more than I’ll ever care to mention.

I’ve had to shut off the oven, and wait for it to cool down so that I could go in and scrape off the nuclear meltdown that happens when the middle of the crust dissolves in the wet sauce with cheese oozing and sticking to the stone. You need sandpaper to remove it all (not kidding!). I’ve had the kitchen temperature be too low, and the dough take four hours to rise, which meant dinner time at 11:30 at night. I’ve left too much excess flour on the dough which made the pizza come out powdery to the point of not being able to breathe in as you eat it for fear of starting a coughing or sneezing fit. I’ve sent olives and all sorts of toppings rolling off the pizza and down into the oven or onto the stone as I tried to perfect the quick snap of sliding the pizza onto the stone. I’ve been too timid and missed the stone by about four inches leaving pizza drooping off the front end of the stone, and then gone back in to fix it and shredded the pizza into the above mentioned nuclear meltdown. I’ve had crusts that didn’t rise at all, some that rose like a rescue life saver ring, and some that had huge air pockets the size of soccer balls. In fact, I’ve been disappointed so many times, pizza is a living testament to itself that only something so freaking good would be worth all this pain and heartbreak to perfect.

But after about 300 pizzas, you really start to hit your stride. The good news is that the traumas of failure run so deep that you never really lose the skill. I’ve taken entire years off from pizza making, only to find that my hands remember exactly what to do the next time; like reconnecting with an old lady friend, if you know what I mean [wink].

If you have some free time, and you care at all about the quality of food you eat. Please try making your own pizza. Few feelings in the world can beat the first bite of “real” pizza that you’ve made yourself. A word to the wise though… do a couple of practice runs before you inviting people for dinner.

Stewed Okra and Tomatoes
1/4 lb. smoked bacon
1 yellow onion; sliced
1 (28oz) can whole peeled tomatoes
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
hot sauce; to taste
2 pounds okra; sliced
Cook bacon in a large pot, cooking until most of the fat has rendered and the bacon is starting to crisp. Add onion in with bacon and saute over medium heat until translucent. Stir in the okra and cook for a few minutes without browning. Pour in the juice from the tomatoes and then squish them into a pulp with your hands. Add the Worcestershire hot sauce, salt and pepper. Reduce the heat and simmer 15 minutes, stirring occasionally until the okra’s bright green color begins to fade.

Cornbread
2 cups organic medium grind yellow cornmeal
1 tsp salt
1 tblsp honey
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 cup buttermilk
2 whole eggs; beaten
1 cup creamed corn
2 tbsp vegetable oil
Preheat oven to 425 F with a 10 or 12 inch cast-iron skillet into the oven with the 2 tbsp oil placed insied.
In one bowl, wik together the cornmeal, salt, baking powder, and baking soda. In another bowl, combine the buttermilk, eggs, and honey and creamed corn. Pour the wet ingredients into the cornmeal mixture and stir briefyly to combine.
Pour the batter into the skillet. Bake for about 20 minutes, until the cornbread is golden brown.

Hoppin John
1 tbsp olive oil
1 ham hock
1 sweet yellow onion; chopped
1/2 cup green pepper; chopped
1 tbsp garlic; chopped
1 lb. dried black-eyed peas, soaked overnight
1 quart chicken stock
Bay leaf
1 teaspoon dry thyme leaves
3 tbsp green onion; chopped
3 cups cooked rice
In a large soup pot, heat the oil over medium high heat and sweat the onion, green pepper, and garlic for about 4 minutes. Add the black-eyed peas, stock, bay leaves, thyme, and ham hock. Bring the liquid to a boil, and then reduce the heat to a simmer. Cook until the peas are tender and starting to become creamy, about 1 hour, stirring occasionally. Adjust seasonings, and garnish with green onions. Serve over rice.

Collard Greens
1 qt water
1 1/2 lbs smoked turkey legs or ham hocks
2 lbs collard greens; stemmed and chopped
1 tsp salt or 1 Tbsp Braggs Liquid Aminos
1 tsp honey
2 Tbsp apple cider vinegar (or pepper vinegar)
Make a broth by boiling the turkey legs or ham hocks in a large soup pot for about 10 minutes. Make sure the collards are squeeky clean. You should have 2 pounds of greens once they are stemmed. Add the greens, salt (or Braggs) and honey, reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer gently for 45 minutes until the greens are tender. Taste and season with additional salt, if needed.

In all honesty, the first things I ever cooked were “Bread-Mush 60-Watt Cakes”. Never heard of them? No, you won’t find them on the menu at the French Laundry, and they are not burning up the Parisian bistro scene either. The taste of a properly prepared “Bread-Mush 60-Watt Cake” is a delicacy that is too magnificent to exist anywhere other than the mind of a six year old boy.

My older brother Stephen has exposed me to many things, some good, some bad, and some just plain bizarre. We were living at 1714 Cherokee Blvd. in Douglasville Georgia circa 1984’ish. One day Steve comes into the play-room with a salt shaker, a bowl of water, and a half loaf of Sunbeam white bread. I being three years his junior of course want to know what’s going on. He dunks the bread into the water, completely soaking it through. As he wrings out the excess he kneads the bread into a cohesive “dough” if you will. Then he pulls of a marble-sized blob and flattens it to an eighth of an inch disk the diameter of a quarter. Having preheated the lamp when he entered the room, he walks over and flops the disk onto the light bulb to a pleasant sizzle.

Once salted to perfection, all that is left to do is wait. If you try to flip it too soon, it sticks to the light bulb and shreds. Wait too long, and it’d be a dry puck. In the hands of a master, a Bread-Mush 60-Watt Cake fills your mouth with all that is right in the world. I’d spend the next weeks of my life encrusting that light bulb with bread-mush residue in search of the perfect consistency. After about my six thousandth attempt, I finally made the perfect bread cake… just like Steve’s. It was so delicious, I decided to try to repeat my success. The light bulb shattered the second I flopped on the dough.

I am sure there is some moral to this story about perfection, ego and greed. All I know is we moved away a few weeks later, and I never tasted another Bread Mush Cake again. That makes me sad somehow.

Thanks Steve.