As the granddaughter of Austro-Hungarian immigrants, I ate an awful lot of Hungarian food as a kid.
Oh, no, no, wait. I don’t mean “awful.” I mean a wonderful lot of Hungarian food. Chicken Paprikas. Hungarian Goulash. You know what I’m talkin’ ’bout, right? Oo oo ooo.
My blood runs paprika red. It’s true.
Oh, and beef stroganoff. Which isn’t actually Hungarian (it’s Russian), but its sour creamy goodness endeared itself to my peeps of yore, and, with a little paprika, became a winter dinner staple from grandmother and mother alike. Coming home from school to a big, boiling pot of wavy egg noodles was a jump-up-and-down hand-clapping sight: it always meant stroganoff was simmering in the covered pot on the other burner.
And it’s still a favorite in my house. It’s not the way my grandmother made it — she would definitely frown at the fish sauce and lack of lard — but she would’ve enjoyed the finished dish just the same, beaming that her granddaughter loves to cook as much as she.
I spend a lot of time thinking about connections.
Not the creepy kind, like the US Probations Officer who wants to join my LinkedIn network (um, eh?).
But the odd and completely unlikely connections that occur and persist, despite time or distance. Coincidence, happenstance. Fate. Serendipity. Whatever you want to call it.
Like this: After my mom passed, my brothers and I had the completely daunting task of clearing out my parents’ house. They were quite tidy, my parents, but after 85 years, you collect a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff.
One Saturday afternoon, alone in their house, packing random things into random boxes, I settled my exhausted self on the floor in front of a small bookcase. My mom’s wind chimes rang a soft, improvised tune from the window nearby. Lovely and melancholy. Pulling my dad’s high school year book from the shelf, I opened it to the inside cover where my eye caught a small notation in my dad’s perfect design engineer’s handwriting: “M.R. p 42″
That’s odd. “M.R.” is my mom’s initials. But, my mom didn’t go to my dad’s high school — they lived across town. I flipped to page 42 anyway, and there she was, my mom, a sophomore at my dad’s high school. This was news to me, her attendance at this school (and, sadly, is a mystery that will never be solved since any relative who could explain why my mom was at this high school that year have long since passed).
But, I was completely fascinated. It was 1942. WWII was raging across the Pacific, and my father, a senior, was concentrating only on graduating so he could enlist. He wasn’t thinking about marriage and jobs and mortgages and kids. He was thinking about gun ships and the Army Air Corps.
My parents did not meet that year — they would not meet for another 15 years, actually — but I can’t stop imagining how many times they must have passed each other in the halls — perhaps even uttering a polite ‘hello’ once or twice — completely unaware that they were fated to marry and grow old together.
Connections. This post is about connections, both made and missed.
Walking to my car this morning, I noticed crocuses sticking their little heads up out of the ground.
I don’t know whether to be cheered, confused or depressed about this. Honestly, I’m feeling a little bit of all three. Saturday morning, my world was coated in a solid 1/4″ of ice. No snow — just ice. By Sunday afternoon, the ice had melted. Overnight, we had thunderstorms and wind gusts up to 70 mph. This morning, it’s 50° and spring-like, complete with windy sunshine. And crocuses.
From ice to spring flowers in 48 hours. Mother Nature, you are one fickle biatch.
P.S.: please stop messing with me, okay?
In a moment of serendipitous timing, I heard on Tuesday — with only minutes to spare and scrambling for my headphones — that Dorie Greenspan was about to appear on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” to chat about Tuesdays with Dorie (the original Dorie-centric baking group that preceded French Fridays with Dorie, to which I belong).
She’s just so delightful. I mean, she just really is.
Dorie is the aunt I wish I had growing up. Witty, kind, and French-hip with a back-pocket-full of crazy-wonderful adventures, I can imagine my young self, elbows on the table, chin propped in both palms, hanging on her every word, googly-eyed with adoration. Delightful.
(Listen to the NPR interview here.)
My involvement with FFwD waxes and wanes, depending on the recipe selection for the week, but whenever dessert appears on the docket, I’m likely to dive right in (even if I don’t make it in time for the weekly Friday unveilings). Dorie is a fabulous, adventurous cook, but her talent really shines in baking.
Honestly, it’s not terribly difficult to become a functional, creative, recipe-disregarding home cook with some patient and persistent practice. Baking, however, requires the discipline of mathematics and science. It’s all about proportion and chemistry. No one “wings” a cake. There are formulas to be followed and mastered. From genoise to pound cake to focaccia and crusty French baguettes: it’s all in the formula.
The decision to replace white chocolate with dark chocolate in a recipe must come with a preponderance of the balance of fats in the ingredients, not just a casual measure-pour-shrug. A flopped souffle is a sign that math and science is punishing you for your disrespect of the formula. Start over, no soup for you!
[Side note: In editing this post, I'm kind of giggling over my use of "preponderance" in the previous paragraph. How serious I was typing that sentence, brow furrowed, fingers pounding, "Preponderance! Formula! PREPONDERANCE!" I really need to lay off the morning espresso.]
So I say this with profound respect: Dorie is, first and foremost, a baker’s baker.
And my long lost aunt.
Last Friday, the foodie world uttered a simultaneous [gasp!] when the media speculated that Butter Queen Paula Deen seems poised to admit to her long-rumored Type II diabetes diagnosis.
But was this really gasp-worthy news? Interesting, perhaps, that a chef who has built her celebrity around the overuse of butter will finally concede that she was, at last, foiled by same. But no one should be shocked. Butter in small amounts is probably not going to kill you. Shameless use of butter by the stick, however, is a different story.
(And never one to take the hint, the Food Network, Paula’s TV home, did America’s pancreas and arteries no particular good in adding yet another butter-queen-in-the-making to its regular show roster. Am I all alone in the world in wanting to see a show with someone like Kim Boyce or Heidi Swanson?)
So what’s a foodie to do? It’s really simple: moderation.
Yeah, you already knew that. You did. But it’s really easy to forget when you’re browsing a recipe site, getting hungrier with every click.
And here’s the thing: you don’t need a whole stick of butter to create incredible flavors. Take my go-to chicken and dumplings. A dish traditionally made with skin-on chicken, rendered chicken fat, lots of butter, and full fat milk, I slim things down considerably — skinless chicken (and therefore no chicken fat), a little butter, reduced fat milk, whole wheat flour subbed for a portion of the white — and instead inject lots of flavor with loads of aromatic vegetables and simple herbs, both in the stew and in the dumplings (hello, tarragon-parsley-and-chives dumplings, my little darlings).
One of the things I enjoy very much about the turn of the calendar year is the parallel turn of the food year, from autumn to winter.
We wave goodbye to super-heavy brown foods and embrace bright citruses and nourishing grains. Pomegranates and winter greens and windowsill herbs. Sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts.
Hello, my lovelies! I’ve missed you so.
Meet my latest condiment obsession: herbed hummus vinaigrette. Thick and creamy, tangy-sweet, this dressing goes with everything — use on green salads, grain salads, sandwiches, crostinis. (But especially on this Mediterranean Farro Salad.)
And unlike cream-based dressings (or worse, so called “low fat” dressings stuffed with all sorts of weird ingredients to compensate for bad texture) it’s super healthy, protein-packed and stuffed to the brim with herby goodness.
Enjoy!
Karen, xoxo
A couple of years back, I wrote a post about making homemade butter. If you’ve never made butter before, you have to try it. Please, do try it. Every accomplished home cook should know how to make butter, even if you do it only once.
The first time I made butter, not only was I completely gobsmacked by the delicious result, but I also felt oddly self-sufficient and pilgramy, like I had just stepped into another time, unlocking a lost but fabulous cooking secret.
Butter has one simple ingredient (cream) and, while a stand mixer is easiest, you really don’t need special equipment (large glass jar with a leakproof lid, and the willingness to shake-shake-shake for about 10 minutes straight will get the job done).
But I’ve been holding out on you. Homemade butter is really only half the story. The rest is all about … fermentation.
Fermented cream, to be exact. Now, please don’t hit the Back button, or unsubscribe from my email list, or anything rash like that. Just sit back and take a deep breath. It isn’t gross, I promise.
And the reward is butter like you’ve never had before.
Cultured butter, that is, which is what milk wants to be when it grows up. And this post is a two-in-one: the byproduct of making cultured butter is cultured buttermilk — buttermilk you can drink (if that’s your thing — it ain’t mine, ew) and bake with ([nods] now you’re talkin’).
January has gotten off to a wonky start. Not a bad start, it just … doesn’t feel like it’s the turn of the New Year. First, January is already almost 1/3rd of the way over. Can you believe it?
Second, we haven’t had any appreciable snow this season (and the temps hit almost 60°F on Saturday). Honestly, it feels like November. But this is not a complaint, mind you — nooo, sir — this summer girl is not a fan of snow. It could stay like this through April, and I’d consider it a gift from the gods. (But I know better. Sooner or later, we’ll be pelted, and I’ll be doing my annual mumble-grumble as I’m snow-blowering the drive.)
Still, despite the warmer temps, I’m in full-tilt comfort soup mode. The days are full-on dark by 6:00pm, and there’s just something very hearth-and-homey about cooking in front of darkened windows, rooms lit only from within. Very Little House on the Prairie. Without the prairie. Or the pigtails.
On Sunday, I decided to dig into one of my New Year’s resolutions — read more books — and pulled out my long-ago-discharged Kindle and charging cable. I had already purchased the book on tap for the day (“Darkly Dreaming Dexter,” no chick-lit for me, thank you very much) and only had to download it to my Kindle. I leaned over to plug in the charger and was met with a shower of plastic pieces. White plastic, everywhere. Whaa?
The coating on my Kindle cable was cracking and falling off wherever I touched or bent it, leaving only a twisty bundle of silver wires that I was not inclined to attach to an electrical outlet. With all of the technology I’ve owned over the decades, I’ve never, ever had the coating on a wire disintegrate like that. After a few moments of blinking confusion, I, uh, got all blue up in here. (Which meant that I thwarted not one but two resolutions — the second being not to anger so quickly (SoupAddict has her prickly moments) — already on the very first day of the year. Drat!)
