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As you have probably already surmised, if you've read several of these posts, Gran Fran is an awesome cook who uses mostly intuition, learned over decades of cooking, alongside her unquenchable thirst for cookbooks.
Read MoreHomemade mulling spices make a wonderful gift with either a bottle of wine or a jug of apple cider.
Read MoreStuffing was never high on my list of Thanksgiving loves. I never loved the flavor, and was put off by the number of ingredients involved.
Read MoreFig and ham sandwiches with butter on rye bread mark my second installment in our Cook The Book project.
We are cooking through Marion Cunningham's The Breakfast Book. There are six of us participating in the project: Rachel of Ode to Goodness, Sammy of Rêve du Jour, Emily of The Bon Appetit Diaries, Aimee of Homemade Trade and Claudie of The Bohemian Kitchen.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that our author, Marion Cunningham, passed away last week. She was 90 years old, and died from Alzheimer's in Walnut Creek, CA. You can read more about her in the New York Times' obituary. I'm glad we chose her book and that we can use these next few months to showcase her wonderful recipes and keep her legacy alive.
The sandwich recipe I selected, fig and ham with butter on rye bread, is a perfect example of Cunningham's style of cooking. She was known for relating recipes from home cooks for home cooks. The straightforward nature of her writing is a breath of fresh air. Though I love today's cookbooks and all the techniques, varied ingredients and multiple steps they outline, I just adore a simple home-style recipe.
As my mother, Gran Fran, put it: "Cunningham joins Dionne Lucas, Elizabeth David, and M.F.K. Fisher as much-missed writers of the joys of cooking." So right. These are the names I recall when looking through Gran Fran's cookbook collection over the years. I can remember Gran Fran reading and marking up Cunningham's books, just as I do today.
The sandwich turned out wonderfully. It would never have occurred to me to add butter to a sandwich with meat (although I do recall loving a sandwich I had in Paris that clearly had butter on top of ham). Even though I didn't have gluten-free rye bread, I did eat one triangle of this sandwich. I just couldn't resist. The sweet figs, salty ham and soft creamy butter make a heavenly combination.
So here's to you, Marion Cunningham, for leaving wonderful tomes of recipes for us to remember you by. I can't wait to cook the next installment of The Breakfast Book.
The rye bread featured in the pictures is standard-issue. You can purchase this Colorado Caraway bread from Canyon Bakehouse, online or check out their store locator to see if it's available near you.
from Marion Cunnigham's The Breakfast Book, Copyright 1987, Alfred A. Knopf
Makes 2 sandwiches
It's time for Mother's Day! I am so very excited to see what my daughter has up her sleeve this year. In honor of Mom, I'm posting some very nice sweet recipes you can make ahead and bring to Mom. The lemon curd and the granola make several servings that you can bottle and distribute to your mom, grandmother, stepmother, godmother or whatever lady is the fabulous mom-figure in your life.
You can also check out my piece on Mother's Day with links to 3 more great recipes here.
Enjoy and happy mother's day!
I love chili. When my daughter was home sick with a stomach bug, I took the opportunity to break out the chili fixin's for myself.
Weird thinking, I know, but when there is a bonus day off from work (not saying her being sick was a bonus, mind you), I feel inclined to go big with my cooking. She doesn't eat chili and said the cooking smells wouldn't bother her, so I figured since I had to make really bland stuff for her to eat, I'd make myself something extra spicy. I also made oven-roasted jalapeno peppers (recipe will be appearing shortly, needs some adjustments...). Clearly, I was not having any of the bland food myself.
For years now, I've been using a mix for the spices, from Carroll Shelby's Original Texas Chili Kit, which I highly recommend. There are no chemicals or weird fake-foods in the box, just cayenne pepper, corn masa flour, cumin, garlic, ground chili peppers, onion, oregano, paprika, salt. It's just easier to have everything put together for me, especially since I may not have all the ingredients on hand, most importantly, the corn masa which you use towards the end of cooking to thicken the chili.
I'd like to talk about chili-mac now. It's not a dish I grew up with. Maybe it did exist in NY, but it never made its way to me. The first time I encountered it, I was in southern Illinois with my then in-laws at Steak 'n Shake. It seemed to me like an ingenious combination. Why not use pasta as your vehicle of choice for chili? It's a pretty good combination of textures, and the cheese just sinks into the pasta every so nicely.
While I cooked the chili, I looked around for some corn tortillas to serve it with, only to come up empty. Instead, I chose a rice pasta as my base for the chili, making this the first time I've made chili-mac in my own kitchen. There is no cheese in this version, as I'm primarily dairy-free (except for butter, can't leave that behind), but you should feel free to add some nice sharp cheddar and maybe even some sour cream to finish off this great dish.
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What were the odds that I would happen to have a piece of fabric with apples and pears on it to present this lovely crisp? Slim to none, I'd say.
I hadn't pre-planned including the pears in the crisp, but as luck would have it, I ran out of apples and had to combine the two fruits. The mix of the flavors turned out well: one bit might be all apple, the next all pear, or you may get two-for-one!
I've never made a crisp before. We were invited upstairs to dinner with our fabulous neighbors. When they came down to invite us over, I asked what I could bring. Somehow, the topic of a crisp came up and knowing that they liked my granola, I offered to make one.
Pastry dough and I aren't generally friends, but I am good at cutting and mixing things, so this was the perfect project for me. And, I found a funny little knife that made the fruit into crinkle cuts. I think it's meant to be used for potatoes, but it worked just fine on my pears and apples. You can't go wrong with the combination of flavors here: butter, vanilla, lemon, cinnamon, fruit and oats. And it's the easiest thing I've made for a dessert in a long time.
The neighbors loved it. I think this will go into my regular rotation of easy, take-along desserts. Hope you like it.
adapted from Simply Recipes
serves 4
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I'm on some kind of a fish kick right now. It probably has to do with the amount of meat I consumed over the holidays. I've been craving fish and salads, so I'm going with it.
Just after my salade nicoise evening, I decided to make some clams served over a saffron rice. Just before I began to cook, I realized there was no saffron in the house. Gran Fran is always very innovative when it comes to missing ingredients. I thought for a minute, went through my spice cabinet and pulled out the smoky Spanish paprika I love.
Gran Fran uses anisette or vermouth in her saffron rice preparation, but again, I came up empty. A bottle of nice white wine with lots of fennel seed added to the pot, along with some clam juice and lemon juice, saved the day. My McGyver-type survival skills will do Gran Fran proud.
I've often watched her make clams, but I rarely do so myself. If memory serves, Gran Fran would flip out if more than just one or two of the clams she had steamed didn't open up when cooked. Her take on this, I think, was that all of the clams were tainted and maybe we shouldn't eat them because who knows what kind of disease one might get? Botulism? Salmonella? I'd like to point out right here and now that we all made it through, just by avoiding those unopened clams along the way.
But, her fears did come bubbling up within me when I prepared to cook these clams last night. What if I didn't cook them long enough? What about those diseases, or worse yet some unknown hazard came up? I tried to channel the other side of Gran Fran in the kitchen: the devil-may-care cook who throws ingredients in a pan with reckless abandon and comes up with wonderfully delicious dishes in the end.
It worked. The clams turned out great, it was fast and simple and the broth was really interesting with the extra hit of paprika in the end. The rice turned out well, too, though different in flavor than my beloved saffron rice, it was a hit. No one got sick, and the food was delicious.
serves 4
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I mentioned here that I'd be working on a bunch of recipes for my friend Sara. She says it's cheaper for her to eat out more often than not, and I'm trying to convince her that with a few simple recipes she could make a bunch of stuff and recombine it all week to keep it interesting.
I'm not going to make her crazy or anything, just see if my theory is right: if you make (or buy) some good sauces and cook the basics for the dishes in advance, in bulk, you'll end up with enough variety in the end to not feel like you're eating the same leftovers again and again.
And, so, here is the first installment.
I started with a basic pork chop recipe. After I cooked it, I stored the chops in individual portions in the fridge in airtight containers. They should keep for a week this way, which means, Sara wouldn't have to eat
them several days in a row. I also made sure the herbs and flavors I used to season the chops would taste good with a variety of side-dishes. In reality, this recipe will work well with chicken, too (I don't eat lamb, but maybe it would taste good with that, too).
As we go through this experiment, it may turn out that cooking a quick piece of meat while putting together the rest of the meal might be the best way to go. My goal is for Sara to not have too much clean-up on her hands, and to keep it simple, she's a very busy lady. But, most of all I want her to enjoy what time she does have to spend in the kitchen to execute these meals.
I'll be posting the side dishes separately this week. If you'd like to see them posted with the main dish, drop me a line, I'd be happy to give that a go, too.
makes 2 chops
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Enjoy!
