Comfort Foods

Comfort foods are a very personal thing. Within the same family, everyone has their own unique preferences.

Now Farmer Paul, he’s a gravy guy. Biscuits and sausage gravy, fried chicken liver with potatoes and cream gravy, pork chops with potatoes and cream gravy, turkey with giblet gravy…you get the idea.

Nick…well, Nick likes everything. But he really loves Tuna Pasta Salad. Austin goes for homemade burgers and baked beans and Ryan is all about Spaghetti and Pizza.

For me, it’s a good brothy soup. Zuppa Toscana-style potato soup, meatball soup and, best of all, chicken/turkey Noodle soup. Not just noodle soup, but Noodle with a capital “N” soup.

This is the soup I grew up with. A delicious, cooked-for-hours broth with chicken or turkey, carrots, onions, sometimes green beans and mounds of homemade noodles. It’s simple, but it’s just so…so…so warm. Austin and Ryan don’t care for the noodles much. Paul and Nick can take them or leave them as long as there’s plenty of broth. And that works great for me, cause I would just as soon eat all the noodles myself and leave the rest of the soup for them.

I wish I could give you an exact recipe for the noodles, but I can’t…sometimes it takes extra flour, sometimes extra milk. But this’ll get you started:

Before you begin the noodles, your broth (with your veggies of choice) must be completely cooked, ready to eat.

On the clean counter, make a pile of about 4 cups of flour. Then make a little ditch in the middle. Crack in 4 eggs, add 2 teaspoons salt and 4 Tablespoons of milk. Start mixing the wet ingredients with a fork, slowly incorporating the flour into the mixture.

At some point, it’ll get too hard to keep mixing with the fork. So get in there with your hands and mix until it comes together. Knead it a few times until it forms a smooth ball of dough, and then you’re done.

Make sure the counter is generously floured (you don’t want the noodles to stick), roll the dough out to about 1/8″ – 1/4″ thick. Use either a pizza cutter or a big knife to cut it into strips about 1/2″ x 1 1/2″. Drop the noodles into the pot of rapidly boiling stock. Stir the noodles down occasionally. After the noodles are all in, continue cooking for 10 minutes.

Eat as soon as it’s cool enough that you don’t burn your mouth.

And plan for leftovers…it’s even better the next day!

Real French Fries

Ryan: “But what do you use to make fries?”
Me: “Potatoes and oil”
Ryan: “What else?”
Me: “That’s all, potatoes and oil.”
Ryan: “But they’re too good to not have other stuff in them.”

When Farmer Paul and I got married, the agreement was that he would take care of any bugs and/or rodents that dared to invade my space (and, as we lived in Texas, the bug part of it came into play often). In exchange, I agreed to take care of all of our frying needs. Again, being in Texas, this covered everything from bacon to okra to jalapenos to turkeys. We have both benefited greatly from the deal.

Frying has never concerned me. I have gotten huge blistered burns from oil (lesson #1, NEVER attempt to cool even a little bit of oil down quickly by adding cold water!!) but It’s never scared me for long. I know there are plenty of people that are afraid to fry, and many who have bad – read greasy – results from their attempts. But it’s really not difficult, though it can be messy.

Today was the best kind of day for frying. Cool outside, but not cold, meaning you can keep the doors open and air moving through the house, but you’re not going to get too hot or cold. So, on a perfect frying day, we decided to make homemade fries. And really, all it takes is potatoes and oil along with your seasoning and condiment of choice.

First peel (or not, depending on your preference) several Russet potatoes…however many you want. Cut them into french fries, and put them in a big bowl of cold water. Let them soak at least an hour. I haven’t soaked them more than about 2 hours, so I don’t know if longer would cause problems.

After they’ve soaked, heat your oil to 350. No more, no less. I make mine in an electric skillet, if you have a fryer, that’s great. Stovetop frying is touchier and more difficult to keep the oil at the proper temperature.

Dump your potatoes out into a colander while the oil heats and allow them to drain. If they’re still pretty wet when the oil is hot, use a towel to dry them a bit more. Again…oil and water don’t mix!

Set out a cookie sheet covered with a couple layers of newspaper which in turn is covered with paper towels. The newspaper does a good job of soaking up extra grease.

Add some of the potatoes to your oil. Again, I can’t tell you how many, just don’t put too many in or the oil temperature will drop and you’ll end up with greasy fries. Swoosh the fries around a couple of times to make sure they’re not sticking together. After 3-5 minutes, the fries will look like this:

Pale, soggy and un-fried looking. That’s fine. Just put them on the paper towels and move on to the next batch. Keep going until you’ve cooked all the potatoes.

Now raise the temperature on your oil to 400 or 425. My electric skillet only goes to 400, so that’s what I do, but the higher the oil, the browner your fries will end up. Dump your french fries into the colander to free up your cookie sheet. Replace the newspaper and paper towels if necessary.

Once the oil is at 400, put your first batch of fries in the oil. Then start watching. After a bit, they’ll start floating. Start watching for them to get nice and golden brown. Scoop them out of the oil, season and eat as soon as they’re cool enough to handle.

I like dipping them in a mixture of ketchup and horseradish. Farmer Paul’s condiment of choice is A1 Pepper Sauce, Nick goes for Jalapeno Ranch, Austin’s a Frank’s Hot Sauce mixed with ketchup addict, and Ryan eats them plain and dry. Take your pick. It’s all good.

Can-Free Enchiladas

Several years ago there was a very popular little store not too far from me in Texas that had a thriving business selling “home-made” food that was packaged for freezer or oven. It was supposed to be a step up from a regular deli and a couple steps up from frozen dinners. I thought it was a great idea, so I went in a few times and bought meals.

I must have gotten pretty unlucky with my first casserole…some pasta thing with chicken. One of my first bites had a huge piece of fat rather than chicken. Kinda ruined the dish for me. I tried a couple different dishes that were pretty good, they definitely did taste better than frozen, but then I got a huge shock. While looking at their little pan of Sour Cream Enchiladas, I read the label and discovered that they used canned cream of chicken soup!

Now I know there are a lot of really good cooks out there that use cream of chicken soup, but I always have considered the canned cooking approach to be cheating. Besides, this store was charging me $12 for an 8″x6″ pan of canned cooking! I know that a big part of their business was busy people saving time, but let’s get real! I don’t need some chi-chi store to make a canned-soup casserole for me!

So I started to play and I discovered how easy it is to make the enchiladas without the canned soup. It takes just a little bit more time, but not much, and it is So. Much. Better.

Since I figured it out, I never use canned soup anymore. Anytime a recipe calls for it, I use the basic method below, and adapt accordingly, adding mushrooms or cheese or just onions.

If you have the chicken pre-cooked, this is actually a pretty easy work-night dinner. It also keeps well for a couple of days in the fridge before cooking. And it freezes nicely, too.

Sour Cream Enchiladas
Filling
1/2 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic
3 T butter
4 T flour
2 c chicken stock
1/2 c half-and-half
1/2 t cumin
1/2 c sour cream
1 can chopped green chilis
1 – 1 1/2 c Monterrey Jack cheese, grated
chopped jalapenos, if desired

Filling
3 chicken breasts, poached and shredded
6 flour tortillas

Topping
1/2 c Monterrey Jack cheese, grated
1/4 c sour cream
milk to thin as necessary

Saute onions and garlic in butter until soft. Stir in flour until thoroughly combined with butter. Slowly add chicken stock, whisk until smooth.

Cook until thickened, add half-and-half and cumin. Return mixture to simmer. Slowly stir in sour cream, green chilis, optional jalapenos and cheese. Season to taste with salt and pepper. (The cheese is pretty salty, you probably won’t need much.)

Spread a couple spoonfulls over the bottom of a 9″x13″ pan – this will help keep the enchiladas from sticking. Spoon filling mixture into flour tortillas, roll to close tortillas and lay them, seam side down in pan.

For the topping, using the pan you cooked the filling in, mix together sour cream and cheese. Season with salt & pepper. Mix with milk to a easily spreadable consistency. Spread over the top of the enchiladas.

Bake at 375 until hot, melted and bubbly.

There’s a First Time for Everything

…Even sushi!

Once again, we found ourselves at Anna & Sean’s. Kids playing guitar hero downstairs, adults cooking and chatting upstairs. I puttered around, panfrying potstickers and sauteeing shrimp for Anna while she made the sushi.

I do question whether this really was my first sushi experience. I have a vague memory of maybe, possibly having the Japanese mother of one of the girls in my 6th grade home ec class come in and show us some of her native cuisine. And I’m pretty sure seaweed came into the discussion.

Keep in mind, we were in a small village in the middle of the Canadian prairie…most of us had never had any fish other than in stick form and sushi was so completely off our radar as to be completely alien to us. I clearly remember her frying wonton skins and making a soy sauce dipping sauce for them. I liked those! But I can’t remember anything more than knowing I was expected to eat seaweed in some form. And I have to assume it was sushi. Quite possibly I wimped out. I was a real weenie about some things back them. (But not now…I’m not a weenie now…usually.)

So, back to the present. Anna was making shrimp and smoked salmon sushi and had assured me that the only raw things would be vegetable. She always takes such good care of us when we’re over there, so I wasn’t worried. Maybe just the teeniest-tiniest bit nervous about the seaweed wrap. But worried? Nah!

Well, we loved it. Paul especially. Anna did such a great job making the rolls. They looked just like they were supposed to, were perfectly flavored and oh, so pretty.

For my part, I marinated a couple small flank steaks in soy sauce, ginger, scallions and garlic then threw them on the grill (in the pouring drizzle). The flank steak was good, but the sushi far outshone everything.

So, thanks to Anna and her mad sushi skills, I am no longer afraid of sushi.

As long as I know what’s in it.

Betrayed by the Girls

We’ve got five hens that we raised from day-old chicks. They are collectively known as “the girls”, although I also call each one Betsy. It just sounds like a hen name, and I can’t tell them apart, so they’re all Betsy.

Hens don’t start laying eggs until they’re 4-6 months old. We got the girls last March and they started laying eggs in August. Of course, they didn’t all start at once. For a couple of weeks we got 3 eggs a day. Then it went up to four and finally all the girls were giving us an egg every day.

And what eggs they are! Thick, deep yellow yolks. Deep, deep yellow. So yellow that it changes the color of pancake and sugar cookie batter.

We gave a few away to family and friends when we fell behind on using them. But it never took long for the egg carton to fill back up. Like the bottle of wine in the old Christmas classic movie “The Bishop’s Wife.” Magical, really.

Then last Sunday, we changed our clocks for daylight savings. And we stopped getting our five eggs a day. In the course of one week, we have gone from five a day, down to two. And I’m afraid that even the two will disappear soon. And I’ll have to start PAYING for eggs again. Store-bought, dull, mass-produced eggs.

Oh, the humanity.