Why would you think a soup would be named Tuscan CHICKEN Soup when there isn’t any chicken in it? Beats me! But, I’m being true to the original recipe, which called it Tuscan Chicken Soup. Even though it has beef in it.

When the instructor, Patty Padawar, explained this soup, she must have had some kind of explanation, but it’s nothing that stuck in my head, nor did I write anything on my notes. My only recollection is that it’s a traditional peasant soup from Tuscany. Whether it’s chicken or beef, it’s just a plain old good soup.

This recipe came from a cooking class at Sur la Table, and was a compilation of some of the cooking school’s “favorites.” How could I not go to a class that culled through hundreds of cooking class recipes and pulled out the best of the best? Only one of the recipes was one where I’d attended the class (that was Joanne Weir’s Sicilian Tuna Salad, which I’ve already posted here on my blog).

I’m a real sucker for soups. I’ve loved them always, but over the last 10 years or so I’ve found them to be such a time saver and they make a very full, tasty and easy meal. We don’t eat many bean soups just because neither of us need the packed carbs at our age. But, I love vegetable soups, chicken soups, beef soups, squash soups too.

This one is a mixture of ground beef, escarole, fresh fennel, onions, and orzo pasta. A nice combination. If you don’t know if you like fennel, trust me on this – fennel once cooked is very mellow. There isn’t even an inkling of anise flavor in this soup once it’s been simmered awhile. And, as always, this soup is much better the next day if you can plan ahead!

The soup also has one added touch that I’d never seen done before: just before serving you slice a plank of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, using a cheese plane, and place it in the bottom of the soup bowl. Then you ladle the hot soup on top and within a minute the cheese is mostly melted, although it doesn’t “stir” into the soup at all. It’s best when your spoon just lifts a little bit of the cheese with a bite of soup. Be sure to tell guests so they don’t scrape the bottom and get an entire mouthful of cheese.

Actually, this time I used some ground chicken (a third) to this soup in addition to ground beef (two thirds). And I added some celery too, just, well, because. The soup is low in calorie, although I don’t think this serves as many as the recipe indicates. We eat about 1 & 1/2 cups per serving, and I think the recipe assumes less. I made a double batch so I’d have leftovers. And this soup freezes well to join others in my soup library. That is, if there are any by the time we finish tonight’s dinner.
printer-friendly PDF

Tweet

(photo from thatsanice.com)

We went to an Italian restaurant the other night – Vessia – in Irvine. One of the chefs from Prego opened it a couple of years ago. Good food. We’d been there when it first opened and were disappointed, but last night was a big improvement. My DH ordered their Braesiola.

When I looked at the word on the menu I wondered if it was something similar to the Braciole that I’ve made for years. Or if it was a completely different dish. Reading the fine print it sounded very similar. Why the different spelling, I wonder? Maybe some reader of mine who is Italian, or knows Italian cuisine can tell me why a dish can have so many different spellings? I did an internet search and found several also. Confusing to me! I think the meat roll is Sicilian in origin, but it’s claimed by all Italians, now.

So, I decided to take a look again at my version of this standby, Braciole – I think it’s pronounced brah-jol. Our Mexican waiter butchered the word big time as well as every other Italian word he tried to pronounce. I think I previously asked an Italian how to pronounce it.

Anyway, today I read online of many variations on the braciole theme. I liked reading about the addition of pine nuts, garlic, Pecorino-Romano cheese, parsley too. Here’s one version I liked. And I also like the option of cooking it on a bed of tomato sauce. I may have to try some of those options next time I make this. My recipe dates back to the 1960’s.

Because refrigerators with large freezers were a new fangled thing back then, there were lots of books and articles in magazines about how to use your freezer. Hard to imagine but I even bought a small BOOK about how to freeze. It seems like second nature now. But back then we didn’t have plastic bags. And initially we didn’t even have plastic containers (boxes) to store or freeze in either. You just used the ceramic (lidded Pyrex) or metal containers things were cooked in. Hard to believe, I know.

Because I still have the original clipping from this recipe, it was from an article about freezing meals ahead. About buying a larger amount of meat, prepping it, then fixing half and freezing half. Seemed like a logical thing to do. Have done it every since when I make this dish.

At the time I’m sure the refrigerator manufacturers probably paid marketing writers to punch out lots of material about why we needed to have these new-fangled refrigerator-freezers so they’d have umpteen more customers. Freezers had been around for awhile, but they were tiny little cubby-holes nested inside the top of the refrigerator. And they weren’t frost-free. Far from it. I remember many a time on a weekend putting bowls of hot-hot water inside the freezer unit trying to hurry-up the process of defrosting the thing. Using an ice pick to pry the chunks of ice off the sides. The opening was so clogged with ice and frost that you could hardly store anything in it. Or what was in it was completely enveloped in ice so you couldn’t remove it to use it. Then there were the piles of towels you needed to use to mop of the dripping water. And sponges and bowls to mop up the water on shelves below the freezer. It was an awful process. I hated it. Hated it. Hated it. But do it every homemaker did; otherwise the freezer was a useless feature.

But then they came out with frost-free. I wasn’t exactly first in line because such refrigerator/freezers were pricey and beyond the budget, but I do remember, in about 1967 finally getting one. Oh, was I excited! I can hardly believe it now, but my former husband, always pinching pennies, gave me a choice (I was a stay-at-home wife) of getting an old used car of my very own OR a new frost-free refrigerator freezer. We had one car only and he used it to go to and from work. Twice a week I took him to work and used those days for errands, shopping, etc. Then I had to pick him up from work too. The other days of the week I was at home all day. Baking, cooking, cleaning, writing letters, reading, etc. Anyway, I chose the refrigerator/freezer. I was greedy: I wanted both. But both I could not have. It was probably 5 more years before I finally had a car of my own.

So, back to freezing food and braciole. However you pronounce it, it’s a very simple stuffed meat roll. You start out with round steak, cut 1″ thick, then you butterfly it to make a big flat surface. Then it’s filled and rolled with Italian sausage, red bell pepper strips, some cheese and a bit of bread stuffing. You tie it, bake it, adding some additional cheese near the end. Remove, let sit briefly, then slice to serve.
printer-friendly PDF

Tweet

This is about chiles. You want a bit of chile heat in your meatballs? This is your recipe, then. Usually I make these during cool weather, not in the summer, as the spicy heat seems to taste better when the rain is falling or the wind is blowing. But, there’s no reason why this couldn’t be eaten any time of year. We’d been on a hiatus from eating beef when I made this some years ago. The recipe was in Bon Appetit, and just hit a taste button with me and I promptly went out to buy the ingredients. I made a moderate batch of them and froze the remaining in dinner-sized portions. I freeze the rice in a separate quart-sized Ziploc bag but put it with the meatballs in the gallon sized bags. Then my meal is all together.

This could be made with ground turkey or chicken, or a mixture. It’s the little bit of capers in the middle that make the meatballs unusual. And the chipotle chiles. Then the fresh tomato sauce is also different. Fresh Tomato Sauce merely means you use fresh tomatoes and you don’t cook it very long. So the sauce retains some semblance of a “fresh” taste. It’s easy and delicious. Summertime is a good season to use up your abundance of home grown tomatoes.As I mentioned, the recipe called for rice (I use brown basmati), but it could also go over mashed potatoes just as easily. Or pasta for that matter. But you might want some kind of carb to soak up the good sauce. Generally I make more sauce than the recipe says, but it’s truly not necessary unless you like sauce like we do.

Chipotle chiles are an ancient condiment, I’m sure, with all the Mexican or South American cuisines that include hot chiles. They’re merely jalapeno chiles that have been smoked and canned or bottled in an adobo tomato sauce. They’re spicy. Very spicy. I’d open a can and use a mere teaspoon or two, put it in the refrigerator and months later would discover this moldy messy gunk in there. So I was overjoyed when at one of the cooking classes I attended, the instructor suggested piling the chipotles into a plastic bag and freezing the leftovers. Then when you need some, you just use a spoon and scrape out whatever you need. Very easy, and certainly a better use for the contents of the can. I don’t cook Mexican food very often – we have such wonderful restaurants here in our part of the world that I don’t need to make it. But I use lots and lots of Mexican food products in my cooking. And this meatball dish certainly isn’t Mexican particularly.

Are any of you enjoying Rick Bayless’ cooking program on public television? I’ve been Tivo it for awhile, and have enjoyed it immensely. Rick is a famous American chef from Oklahoma, although he lives in Chicago now, where he has two very popular Mexican restaurants. He’s a very unassuming kind of guy – I don’t detect a bit of ego in his style. He just adores Mexican cuisine, particularly from the Yucatan. He uses copious amounts of chipotle and other chiles in nearly everything he makes. Some I’d never heard of. Rick has published six cookbooks. (Just an aside here for those of you who follow my cookbook obsession, I own not one single Rick Bayless cookbook . . . aren’t you proud of me?) This series, with the recipes from the PBS series is from his book called Mexican Everyday, although the series is called Mexico One Plate at a Time.My hands are particularly sensitive to chiles. No matter how careful I am with cutting up a chile, I always manage to feel some heat from it – usually underneath my fingernails. Not everybody has this problem, so this is just a friendly warning. I use plastic gloves. The staff in my dentist’s office has been kind enough (thanks Joan and others) to give me a box of their gloves every couple of years. They’re a must for me. Particularly with the chipotles. Getting a little bit of that spicy chipotle sauce under my fingernails can be so painful for hours and hours.So, if you’re looking for something a bit different, give this a try. Use gloves.
printer-friendly PDF

Tweet

I probably should start out this posting with the sentence: I love thyme. It is this recipe that introduced me to its culinary virtues. And I’ve been a frequent user ever since.

My memory serves me poorly on this recipe. I’ve been making it for so long, and it’s been written into my old recipe binder for so many years that I didn’t remember who gave it to me. When I did a search for the title (in French), sure enough, I found it. This is Julia Child’s recipe from her first major tome, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (2 Volume Set). I found a write-up about the recipe on the Julia-Julie Project (the young woman who decided to methodically cook the entire contents of Julia’s book in a year, all the while blogging about it, and she subsequently wrote a book based on her blog). I tried to read her blog a couple of years ago (after I read Julia’s memoir, My Life in France  by Julia Child, written by her nephew, which I just loved), but this woman, named Julie, has such a foul mouth I just couldn’t continue. (I’m not even going to insert a link to her site because I disliked it so much.) I don’t understand why people feel they have to use the f and s words in every sentence. (Later note . . . Julie’s website was taken down once work started on the movie, Julie & Julia.)

So, obviously, this isn’t anything original. This has been a staple in my cooking repertoire for 35 years. I’ve even served it to guests (I double the sauce in that case), and whenever I do make these I make extra and freeze at least 4 patties so I can make them just by defrosting. They aren’t difficult. Not in the least, although they do take a bit more time than just making patties from raw meat and cooking them.

Since I haven’t read Julia Child’s take on using minced beef (raw), I don’t know the origin of this method either. But she recommends using lean beef (I use 80/20 in this), then you ADD butter to the raw meat. Interesting, huh? Most current chefs and cooking magazines recommend using nothing leaner than ground chuck. But, realize that when you cook these, if the cold butter is in the middle, when the heat finally reaches the butter, it melts right into the meat, not out into the pan. That’s what gives the meat it’s richness. But first you saute some onion and butter, cool it, then combine that with egg and thyme to make thick patties. It’s necessary to allow these to chill a little bit (with the egg to hold it together). That’s an important step. Then you dredge them in flour, then fry them up until done to your liking. I cook them to about 130°F using an instant read thermometer, with the probe inserted into the side.

You remove them from the pan and set in a warm oven while you make the sauce. Drain the fat from the pan, and add wine or broth. I usually use sherry wine, but have also used red wine. You can also use broth, or white wine for that matter. Deglaze the pan, scraping up any of those pan juices and little sticky parts, until the wine has evaporated some. Remove from heat and add some additional butter, in bits. Pour into a HOT little pitcher to serve at the table. The recipe says pour the sauce on the burgers, but then most of the sauce ends up on the platter, not on the burger, so I prefer a pitcher.

I like serving this with pasta, just simple buttered pasta. Because some of that sauce tastes great with the pasta. Or mashed potatoes work well here too. Then with a bright colored veg – like broccoli, or green beans perhaps. And a salad. This used to be – back in the days when nobody thought anything of eating beef 3-4 nights a week – this was a frequent visitor on my regular family menu. Now it’s a treat.

printer-friendly PDF and MasterCook file (click link to open recipe)

Tweet

We may be one of the few cultures to make baked meatloaf. Lots of other cuisines include a ground meat stuffed something (pastry, cabbage, etc.) or small orbs of some kind of chopped meat, but we Americans appear to have invented meatloaf (really, we did), meaning we started with finely chopped raw meat. Mostly I learned, earlier cooks used cooked meat to make any kind of chopped meat dish. I wanted to know more about the history of the dish, and found this:

• The raw, ground meat commonly used to make today’s American meat loaf has a humble heritage. In the 19th century, we know the Industrial Revolution made it possible for ground meat to be manufactured and sold to the public at a very low cost. At first, many Americans were slow to purchase raw ground meat products and generally regarded them with suspicion. Cooks continued to mince their meat (often already cooked, as was the practice for centuries) by hand. Companies selling meat grinders to home consumers at the turn of the century endeavored to change this practice by providing recipe

Regarded as the ultimate comfort food, there are certainly lots of types of meatloaf. Some with fillers and additions (bread crumbs, cracker crumbs, carrots, onions, eggs, red bell pepper) and many variations of toppings (savory tomato, catsup type, even teriyaki style). But the most common is with a tomato-based sauce on top. I’m no different than the crowd, so this may not be one of the recipes you’re going to try since you may already have a favorite sauce. But for me it’s simply the sweet and sour sauce that is a must here. The recipe came from one of my old 1960’s era military officer’s wives cookbooks, and since I first made it, this has been the standard by which any and all meatloaves are measured. In our family, this is THE recipe, and mashed potatoes on the side are an absolute must. No rice. No pasta. It must be mashed potatoes.

And generally I increase the sauce because everybody loves to put more sauce on the potatoes. So early on I began doubling it. No problem. It’s easy enough to make. I’ve made this with partly ground turkey, and it’s also very good. I think my daughter Sara makes it with all turkey and her family loves it that way. When I make it now I use 50/50 beef and ground turkey. That gives the meatloaf a little firmer texture, which is what we (and most people, I surmise) miss about eating ground turkey. It just doesn’t have the “tooth” to it that beef does. I’ve made this using Splenda (it’s fine) and with Brown Sugar Twin (also fine). So we can still have this but with less carbs.

Back when our children were teenagers we asked each of the kids to choose a weeknight and be responsible for preparing dinner for the family. (We’re a blended family, so between DH and I we have 3 children, two daughters and a son, all in their late 30’s now and for most of their teenage years we all lived together.) We had to plan ahead so the ingredients were on hand, and mostly the kids were pretty good about it. They got to fix one of their favorite meals, and we were all appreciative (at least I think we were). I will tell you that this item was a real “regular” on the menu. Everyone in our family loves this meatloaf and they all learned how to make it because they had to do it.
printer-friendly PDF

Tweet

I absolutely promise that my blog is not going to be all about casseroles. It’s too bad that the word itself is a semi-bad one on blogs. I don’t have all that many casserole recipes. Honest. But those of you old enough to remember the casserole era (that would be the 1960’s and into the 70’s for you young’ns) probably have many of your own of similar ilk as this one. I’m trying to give you some variety here on this blog, and I wouldn’t have chosen this as a subject of a blog post except that this happened to have come out of the freezer the other night – literally it kept falling out of the freezer every time I opened the door. It was trying to tell me something, I finally concluded.

Some of you may know that way back in my deep, dark past, I was a Navy wife. My former husband was an air intelligence officer, and we lived in a variety of places (Florida, Washington, D.C., Whidbey Island, Washington and Denver, Colorado) over the years of his Navy service. During one of the early years I acquired a Navy Officer’s Wives Cookbook, with hundreds and hundreds of recipes from other American Navy officer’s wives from all over the globe. Actually there was a series of them (one of each of these: salads, desserts, casseroles & breads, meats, and one on international foods too). I still go to those cookbooks sometimes to get ideas about dishes to try, even though the plastic spiral bindings are nearly disintegrated on all of them. I was in my mid-20’s then and new to the day-to-day cooking arena when these books went to press, so I didn’t even think of submitting one of my recipes for any of the books. I’m not even sure I had any recipes I could call my own at that time.

As many of you probably remember, casseroles were a staple in every cook’s repertoire. They were popular for family meals, and more elegant casseroles were very popular for guests too. They certainly were in mine, and they were inexpensive. In the 1960’s my normal weekly food budget was $20, and that fed two people for 7 days, 3 meals a day. So, in the Meat cookbook of that era, amidst the little spots of food that spilled there is this recipe for Mister Charlie. Heaven knows why it’s called Mister Charlie. Was Charlie the inspiration? Was he the cook and his wife submitted the recipe? Or, I like to think it’s the dog’s name, because he ate Suzie Q’s portion when she dropped it on the floor? Do you ever ponder why recipes receive the names they do? I’ve asked myself this question about this dish for many years. Undoubtedly I’ll never know the story. I even did a Google search for the title to just see if there was anything official out there for a pasta casserole called Mister Charlie. Nope. Over the years I’ve adapted the recipe some (I use Italian sausage rather than ground beef) and I’ve added mushrooms and cheddar cheese to it. So maybe I should call it Missus Carolyn? What do you think?

Well, then. There isn’t anything startling in this casserole – pasta, meat, mushrooms, a variety of cheeses and a tomato-based sauce. That’s it. But in combo, they make a very tasty dish. Casseroles sometimes don’t look very appealing. Does the photo convey a little bit of the 1965-ish boredom of the tops of many such casseroles? What it does have going for it is that it makes a LOT. It can be made ahead. It’s high in carbs (sigh). But all-in-all, it’s still a keeper. Most of all, it’s American comfort food. So, enjoy Mister Charlie, wherever he is. Woof.
Printer friendly PDF

Tweet

If we’d wanted these ribeye steaks to turn out any better than they did, I don’t know what we could have done to make them so. The recipe is very exact in its cooking method, and with the help of my meat/oven thermometer, they cooked to perfection. The smear underneath is a puckery sauce made ahead and plopped on the hot plate just before serving.

Up until last night’s dinner, we’ve been a bit disappointed with steak we’ve purchased lately. The Costco ribeyes weren’t all that tender, and even the steaks from Whole Foods weren’t very tasty or tender, either. So we decided to splurge on our next steak dinner and buy U.S.D.A. Prime meat, only available at a local, independent butcher (Pacific Ranch Market in Orange Park Acres).

It was money well spent, as these steaks were outstanding in every way. The recipe comes from Hugh Carpenter, a prolific cookbook author and entertaining instructor. He came to my attention about 16 years ago with classes he taught in Los Angeles and Pasadena. I’ve purchased several of his books, and a couple of years ago he taught a grill or barbecue class at Sur la Table in Newport Beach (SLT is rarely doing guest chefs anymore, so don’t look for him there or at any other SLT store . . . perhaps I’ll write a rant about the Sur la Table cooking school on another posting . . . I used to be a big fan, but no longer). This was the recipe he prepared that night, and it’s been a success every time. I believe it’s from his book Hot Barbecue printed a few years ago, which I do not own.

Buy the best quality meat you can afford. Make sure you have a very reliable meat thermometer like the one pictured here. This little number has been a lifesaver for me more times than I can count. And as good as anyone thinks he/she is as a grill king, it will make a believer out of you that every cook needs one. This particular model by Polder tracks the temperature in the grill oven as well as the food so you can make adjustments. The method of cooking is this: the steak is marinated for a few hours. Meanwhile, make the Amazing Glaze sauce and allow it to cool.

After removing some to serve on the finished plate, drain the steaks, blot them dry and let them sit in remaining glaze for about 40 minutes. Heat grill to medium high, sear the steaks for one minute on each side, then put them on a rack on a baking sheet and place back in the grill at 300° but not over the direct heat. Watch the meat thermometer carefully and remove them when they hit 120°. Allow to sit for 5 minutes covered loosely with foil. Serve! You won’t be disappointed.
Happy grilling . . .
Printer friendly PDF

Tweet

I think it was about 1973. At the time I was living in Oklahoma City with my then husband, and our daughter, Dana, who was about 5 years old. A neighbor invited my daughter and me for dinner. She said “oh, it’s just chili spaghetti, the kids will love it.” Now I must tell you, this IS a casserole (uh oh, is that an ugly word in blogdom?). But, when you consider the ingredients – chili with beans – buttered spaghetti – and a very unhealthy mound of shredded jack and cheddar cheese – it becomes comfort food to the sublime. How can this stuff be so darned good, I ask you? It was only years later – years and years and years – that I found a mention of Cincinnati Chili and reckoned this was a similar piece of work. The Cincinnati version is not baked, but it’s a do-it-yourself plate with many similar ingredients (and a couple of toppings like crumbled crackers and green onions).

Chili Spaghetti is simple. It’s tasty. It can be frozen. It’s kid friendly. It reheats well in the microwave. It can be made in lickety-split time if you need to, as long as you’ve got all the ingredients at the ready.

I made this recently and wondered why I hadn’t prepared it in so long. It’s not gourmet in the least. But it sure tastes good on a cold winter’s night. Below is the original recipe. You could substitute ground turkey with very little taste alteration, and you can definitely reduce the amount of cheese. I’ve even made it with less pasta, to try to bring down the carb count. Serve with a green salad, using a simple oil and vinegar dressing. You can serve garlic bread with it, but you hardly need it.

Printer friendly PDF

Tweet