All the Ingredients

Cookin' With Coolio

Okay, I confess. Although I spend my share of time on the internet, I do not watch a lot of YouTube. That is obviously how I missed the numerous episodes of "Cookin' with Coolio: The Ghetto Gourmet." Which is a good thing, because I find videos of Coolio overwhelming. His loud & colorful personality, his "sous-chef" Jarez, and the ladies who provide the background eye-candy, completely overshadow whatever he is cooking.

Spend time looking through his new book Cookin' with Coolio,and you get an entirely different view of this rap star. An appealing view. Coolio cooks because what you make at home is better than what you get at a drive-through window. It is also better for you. And you can do it on a budget and still eat well. There are a whole lot of fancy cookbooks out there waiting to end up under your Christmas tree this year that will charge way more than $16 to tell you that.

And this book is funny.

Maybe all the folks who have spent their summers trying to wade through the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, need to try lightening up with Coolio's recipes where the spices are measured in the quantities of "dime bag," and "nickel bag." (A dime bag of salt = 1 T salt, a nickel bag = 1/2 T.) 

Coolio's sous-chef Jarez adds his comments in bold blue ribbons across each recipe. Some are technical comments about how to preheat the oven or drain the fried shrimp. Some are more audience-specific: "To check and see if your [Sweet Chocolate Potato] pie is done, simply shank it with your shiv. If it comes out clean, it's done." My son found this book highly entertaining, although I am not sure any cookbook would push him to prepare any food beyond his comfort zone of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Coolio is not afraid of vegetables, and includes recommendations for lightening up recipes, such as using chicken or turkey sausages in place of ground beef in "Bro-ghetti" sauce. And the food styling and photography in this book would make Emeril or Paula jealous.

I tried the "Dom Chicken Alfredo." Coolio says that Fettuccine Alfredo is just mac and cheese for adults, and that if you make his recipe, your kids will never want the stuff out of the blue box again. My daughter already likes Fettuccine Alfredo (and still likes the stuff in the blue box). However, on this evening, she declared that she was not hungry and didn't want any. But by the time I had sauteed the onions, garlic, and mushrooms, and mixed together the sauce with its two types of cheeses, she was sniffing  around the kitchen.

The last ingredients added to the sauce before you pour the "Dom Chicken Alfredo" over the cooked fettuccine, is the chicken you have grilled and cut into strips, some sour cream, and fresh diced tomatoes. Even though I drained the tomatoes after I diced them, they were just watery enough so that they broke the cream sauce. My gorgeous alfredo sauce turned stringy. But it was delicious. My daughter was halfway through her plateful before she noticed the tomatoes and exclaimed, "What are these pink things!" I think the next time I will either cook the tomatoes with the rest of the vegetables, or serve them sliced on the side drizzled with balsamic vinegar (one of Coolio's favorite ingredients along with hot peppers).

I think a lot of the new cookbooks out this holiday season are retreads. (I swear that the photo of Nigella Lawson on the cover of Nigella's Christmas was taken when she was eighteen!) I guarantee that you will get your money's worth with Cookin' with Coolio, and it will be a unique present under anyone's Christmas tree.

Feeding the Flu

My son came home from college a week ago, having fallen victim to H1N1. I knew at some point he would catch the flu. He is a member of one of the most susceptible populations, and as a college student, he doesn't get enough sleep or eat right. One of the perks of going to college 40 minutes away is that he could come home and not have to try and get better in a dorm room with dorm food.

He was miserable, with chest congestion, high fever, and chills. I don't even remember what cooking plans I may have had for last week because it quickly became about feeding and caring for Plague Boy. ("Nice nickname. Thanks Mom. I love you too.") 

In the early stages of the flu, when his fever was the highest, we kept pushing liquids: soda and Kool-Aid. When he did feel hungry, he was very happy with some Club Crackers and peeled slices of apple. Mostly he just wanted to sleep. And his cat, thrilled to have him home, slept with him. That seems to be the trick in the high-fever stage of the flu, lots of liquids (with pain relievers) and just enough food to keep the stomach happy. Also he didn't want anything hot or cold because the chills were still coming and going.

In the next stage of the flu, Plague Boy's fever had come down to about a degree above normal. He wanted something more to eat, but wasn't really hungry. Now, usually I make my own chicken noodle soup when people about the house fall sick. But when you are trying to keep one person segregated and sanitize contaminated items (we actually wrote on his drinking glasses with a permanent marker so we all knew they were his), making food from scratch takes too much time. So we fell back on one of the pantry's staple items, Campbell's Healthy Request Chicken Noodle Soup. It the only canned soup that everyone in the house will eat. The kids like it because there are lots of noodles, chicken,and carrots, and not so much broth and celery. And the soup tastes great with Club Crackers broken up into it. Once the chills stopped, we also started giving Plague Boy popsicles.

Once the fever was gone completely, we went back to offering him favorites like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches--still with apple slices instead of chips. Or pb&j with the chicken noodles soup. Zach never seemed to have the nausea that can come with the flu, and I think that the fact that he could continue to eat, plus the fact that he's young and healthy, helped him recover in five days. And so far, no one else in the house has come down with it, although it's early in the flu season. But we have restocked the soup just in case. Be well! 

Ode to Gourmet Magazine

When I was ten years old, I had to write a Social Studies Report on Germany. Something about the Black Forest perhaps. I was the fourth child in the family, and our set of encyclopedias--Funk and Wagnalls--had been purchased by my parents before I was born. Their entries were brief and boring, and there were no pictures. It was late the night before the report was due, and I complained about my lack of resource material.

My mother said, "I just read an article in a magazine about Germany. I'll get it for you." She brought me an issue of Gourmet.

"This is a cooking magazine, " I said.

"Yes, but read the article. It will make you want to go to Germany." The article was a travel piece with food commentary thrown in, and it helped me finish my report in time. When, as a  junior in high school, I was preparing to go on a tour of Europe with members of my class (and several spoil-sport nuns), instead of buying me a tour book, my mother painstakingly went through her back issues of Gourmet, and pulled issues with articles about the countries I would be visiting.

Unfortunately, on this packaged tour we had few opportunities to eat unplanned meals, but I was prepared enough to go into local bakeries in Italy for their version of pizza, and I had been warned that Viennese pastries often aren't as sweet as you think they ought to be by the way they look.

My mother read Gourmet all of my life, and each issue was stacked carefully in the back hall closet. My mother scribbled on the pages of recipes she had tried, marked recipes she wanted to try with scraps of paper sticking out of the top, and eventually just started writing on the covers. I don't know what happened to all those magazines when my parents' house was finally cleaned out. I know one of my brothers wanted them.

I only have one issue of my mother's--August 1985--that was on the bedside table in the guestroom when my husband and I got back from our honeymoon. On an article entitled: "Jellied Consomme: A Reminiscence" she had written and underlined: "Please Read." My  mother could never teach me to appreciate consomme or aspic, and this article didn't do it either. However, there was also an article on peaches in the issue, and I swiped the magazine to take home with me. I made the recipe for Amaretto Peach Ice Cream as soon as I had bought our first ice cream maker (electric!) at the hardware store. I starred the recipe and still remember how wonderful it tasted.

I don't remember an essay in that issue, "Nursery Food," by Laurie Colwin, but I read it and decided to try her novels. I loved them all, but loved her two collections of food essays the best. She was the first food writer I read. That is one of the things that has always set Gourmet apart, and that kept me subscribing even in the days when I couldn't afford it--there were great writers tucked into those pages!

When David Foster Wallace died last year, booksellers where I work talked about their favorite books of his. One of them asked me if I had read any of his books. No, I answered, but I had read his piece in Gourmet, "Consider the Lobster," about the aesthetics and morality of cooking lobsters, and had been quite impressed with it. When his collections of essays by the same name had come out, I had  flipped through it, disappointed to discover that essay was the only one about food!

My last issue of Gourmet arrived in the mail today, with its card offering me, a loyal subscriber, the chance to give the magazine to others for Christmas. It pictures the December issue that will never arrive, and I am sad. The December issue with its outrageous cookie recipes was always my favorite of the year. Every Christmas I make chocolate hazelnut biscotti for friends and family. But first I have to look through my many years of Gourmet to find the pink note that sticks up from the cover, marking the issue that the recipe is in.

I know enough about the trends in publishing these days to understand why Conde Nast is abandoning Gourmet. We get our recipes from so many places these days. But I wish they had let us go out with the holiday issue. With a few more cookie recipes to tide us over the long, Gourmetless winter.

Bacon Jam

A friend who knows how much bacon is revered in my household sent me the link for the Homesick Texan's recipe for Bacon Jam. Bacon in jam form? Hmm. The recipe seems pretty simple, although the preparation steps leave out how to add several ingredients. I wasn't bothered by the fact that the recipe didn't seem complete. I have reached a stage in my cooking life where I often read a recipe and drastically change it in my head before I even start to prepare it. This is one of those recipes.

The original recipe called for lots of garlic and a little onion. Since my husband is not a huge garlic fan, I flipped those quantities. I also like the way onion and bacon compliment each other in recipes, so I wanted about an equal amount of each. One of the liquid ingredients in the original recipe was coffee. I am the only person in our household who drinks coffee, so I substituted something else that I thought would work: root beer. I think you could use coffee or cola with success.

So the ingredients as I reshaped the recipe became:

• 1 medium sweet yellow onion
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 lb bacon, sliced

Now I am sure you can make bacon jam quite nicely with the bacon you can find in your local grocery store. However, if I was going to go to this much trouble, I was going to shell out $6 for a pound of meaty local bacon from the farmer's market, made from pigs who wore crowns of flowers and gamboled in green meadows. Okay, so these pigs were raised on Iowa farm in a barnyard. But they were antibiotic free, and actually saw the light of day until they became a jam ingredient.

• 2 chipotles en adobe (found in a can on the grocer's shelf) 
• 2 teaspoons adobo sauce (from the can)
• 1 tablespoon cocoa powder
• 1 cup root beer
• 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
• 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar

Dice the bacon into 1/2 inch pieces and cook in a heavy pot or skillet over a medium-high heat until the pieces start to crisp. Remove the bacon pieces and drain on a paper towel. Pour out all but 1 tablespoon of the bacon fat. Chop the onions into medium pieces, and mince the garlic. Add to the bacon fat and saute until the onions are clear and soft. Remove the chipotles from the can and chop as fine as you can (they are smooshy and slippery). Add them and the rest of the ingredients to the pot and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and stir periodically. You want the mixture to thicken to the consistency of a nice jam. Cool and put into a jar and refrigerate.

There are numerous on-line postings to tell you where to put your bacon jam: on egg breakfast biscuits, on BLTs, in baked beans and so on. So far, we haven't got past burgers. The jam was fabulous on bacon-cheeseburgers. It was also quite tasty on patty melts made with marble rye and swiss cheese. My husband thinks the jam is a little too spicy; my son, not an adventurous eater, thinks it is just right. You can certainly only use one chipotle or add more depending on your heat tolerance. I liked the bacon jam exactly as I made it. You taste the onion and the bacon, and then finish with a slight sear across the tongue that makes you want another bite. And another.

Cooking with Julia Child

  It's Sunday. I didn't work today so I cooked breakfast: cinnamon rolls (not from scratch, sorry), and bacon. On the end of my kitchen counter is a TV with a DVD player, and on Sunday mornings, I treat myself and cook with Julia Child. Christmas before last, my husband gave me the two DVD sets that are available with episodes from her series, The French Chef. I love these DVDs because I enjoy watching Julia make recipes I would never try (terrines) and some I would try, like today's crepes. I also hate the DVDs because they are divided up by type of recipe--Starters, Main Courses, Desserts--and not arranged chronologically. You can go from watching a black and white early episode, to a later episode in color, and then back to balck and white. There were originally 134 episodes of this show, the first 13 of which were lost. So I only have 36 out of the remaining 121 on these two DVD sets. I would quickly fork out bundles of money for a complete, chronological set of The French Chef, but for now I make due with what there is. I love the fact that Julia is messy, drops things, and doesn't always worry about the final presentation of a dish.

Because I work in a bookstore, it's easy for me to see how media exposure drives book sales. As soon as the movie Julie & Julia came out, sales of Julia Child's books increased dramatically. We couldn't keep copies of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in stock because everyone wanted. Julie Powell made cooking from it seem so attractive. I sold it to one woman who bought it simply so she could learn to make a bechemal sauce. There are cheaper and quicker ways to get your hands on the recipe and technique of making bechemal sauce, but I certainly understand the attraction of having Julia teach you how. When I was a child  back in the 1960s, I learn to cook from my mother--and from watching Julia Child.

I own both hardcover volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (I paid $2.50 for each at a sidewalk sale outside a cooking store a long time ago), but I confess I never use them to cook with. They certainly are the foundation of the way Julia Child built her approach to cooking, but I prefer the more Americanized versions of her recipes: Julia in later life.

When my daughter Emily, was a toddler, she loved watching cooking shows. She was fascinating with what the hands were stirring and making. She loved to watch Julia and Jacques Pepin when their show, Cooking at Home, was on the air: "Mommy! The people who talk funny are on!" She thought Julia Child was from France too. Two of our favorite recipes for Sunday dinner come from that book: Roast Chicken (Jacques's version) and Scalloped Potatoes (Julia's Pommes des Terre Dauphinoise). I have never made scalloped potatoes as good as my mother-in-law's, but Julia's recipe fixed the mistakes I was making, and produced a recipe my husband found to be different than his mother's but "Very good!" The book is laid out with Julia and Jacques's recipes for the same basic dish side-by-side, and I often end up somewhere in the middle. But I have never made a bad recipe from this book.

The other book I use is Baking with Julia, based on a TV series Julia did baking with famous chefs such as Lora Brody, Martha Stewart, Marion Cunningham, and Nancy Silverton. Some of the recipes in this collection are completely over the top such as Martha Stewart's for a three-tiered almond wedding cake with meringue and apricot glaze between the layers, frosted with rum buttercream, and decorated with marzipan fruit. Other recipes are fabulous such as the Danish Braid (I made it with the apricot filling), or the White Loaves. This latter recipe produces two magnificent loaves of bread that toast  beautifully. That probably has  something to do with the half a stick of softened butter that is beaten in as the last step of making the dough. The recipe says that the "mountainous loaves" are four and half inches high. The two I made this week topped out at six inches!

And when I want an older, basic recipe, I tend to go back to The French Chef Cookbook, that has the recipes, chronologically, from the original series. My mother and I watched Julia make Beef Bourguignon with its Onion and Mushroom Garniture (Episode 96), and we bought the ingredients and made it soon afterwards. For years it was my requested birthday dinner. These recipes teach basic techniques and are aimed more towards how America cooked (at least in the 1960s) than the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

So if you are inspired to cook with Julia, take a look at all the different books she has on the shelf in the bookstore, and don't automatically head for the bright blue cover of her original gem. Take time to find the one that's right for you. And if you want a good look at how cooking television used to be before being FoodNetworkicized, I highly recommend the DVD sets.

Rustic Fruit Tart

I had to work all of this past holiday weekend, and didn't have time to  cook anything complicated. I had bought lovely peaches at the natural foods co-op (where they sell organic fruit that actually smells like it's supposed to, unlike those plastic pieces of fruit at the super market). So I handed my daughter Emily several cookbooks and told her to look for a rustic fruit tart recipe. As a child of the new century, she simply did a web search and picked out a recipe that sounded good and looked simple. I was impressed with this. The recipe had no accompanying picture (I was was trained by my mother to cook by picture), yet it seemed  simple enough. Basically I just needed a crust to hold these gorgeous peaches together.

I would provide a link to the recipe, but not only did I change the manner or preparing the dough, I changed the ingredients. The original recipe gave careful directions for mounding the flour on your work surface, adding the egg yolk, and sugar and so on. I didn't have that kind of time. I threw the ingredients in the food processor, whirred them about, rolled the dough into a ball and carried on. The tart was ready to eat one and a half hours after we started.

For the dough, put the following into the food processor with a metal blade attachment:

• 2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 stick unsalted butter, cut into pieces
• 1/2 cup Crisco (I use the stick form because I can also cut that into pieces like the butter)
• 1 egg yolk 1/4 cup sugar
• 4-5 tablespoons of ice water

Pulse blend until the mixture has the consistency of coarse meal. Add water 1/2 tablespoon at a time until it starts to come together. Turn the dough onto a work surface and knead gently into a ball, adding more water if you need to. Do not overwork the dough. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least half an hour.

For the filling you will need:

• 4 large ripe peaches, pitted and sliced with the peels left on
• 3 tablespoons apricot preserves (made without sugar)
• 2 tablespoons brown sugar

a dash of cinnamon and nutmeg

some raw sugar

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Roll out the chilled dough on a floured surface to make a circle about 12 inches in diameter. Place on a baking sheet and coat evenly to within one inch of the edge with the preserves. Mix the fruit with the brown sugar and spices. Mound the fruit into the center of the dough and fold the dough up over the fruit, making an edge of folded dough about two inches wide. Brush the exposed dough with the egg white left from the egg, and sprinkle it with the raw sugar.  Bake about 30 minutes until the crust is browned and the fruit bubbling. Cool to room temperature before serving.

The one my daughter and I made for the 4th, disappeared quickly. The peaches that I had bought were fabulous, and it would have been hard to make something with them that didn't taste great. But my husband said it was the best dessert he had ever eaten. I made another one with more fresh peaches and blueberries from the farmer's market. I think it could easily be made with any combination of fresh summer fruits (except, perhaps, watermelon!).

What to do with Leftovers from Lunch for 100

When I was planning the Zachs' graduation party with the other Zach's  mom, it never occurred to me that there would be leftovers. I have fed Zach and his friends. There are never leftovers. But I never considered that by the time you get to your third or fourth graduation party of the day, you really don't want two or three sandwiches. So when the party was over, the tent taken down, and the chairs folded up, I was left with (approximately): 10 pounds of pulled pork; 7 pounds of baked beans; a huge bowl of sliced strawberries; a huge bowl of sliced watermelon; three large bags--one each--of broccoli, cauliflower, and baby carrots; 72 cans of assorted diet pops; 6 large bags of chips, including Fritos and Cheetos, some of which had been opened; one large pan of iced brownies; and 1/8 of a chocolate sheet cake.

We ate pulled pork sandwiches with baked beans and chips and raw veggies for two days, quickly reaching the point where we craved something different. Like pizza. That was a nice break, but every time I opened the refrigerator, I saw all the tubs of food, the baggies of fruit and vegetables.

Before the strawberries spoiled, I mixed them with rhubarb out of the garden and made a strawberry-rhubarb crisp. My husband did his best to eat large quantities of watermelon every day, but other than watermelon ice or perhaps a blended watermelon drink, there is not a lot to do with leftover watermelon. You can't grill it or make a pie out of it. (Had I not been so brain-dead from weeks of cooking and the effort of the party, I would have done an internet search and discovered that there are indeed recipes out there for watermelon pie --including a traditional Greek recipe--and grilled watermelon.) Some of the watermelon spoiled.

Based on something I had seen on the Food Network once, we made pulled pork nachos. The recipe is simple:

In a metal baking pan, carefully lay our your favorite brand of plain tortilla chips. Carefully spoon a little bit of the pulled pork onto each nacho. Then sprinkle with grated cheddar cheese and your favorite barbecue sauce. Heat in a  400 degree oven until the cheese melts and bubbles. They are great with a side dish of cole slaw.

That got rid of the bag of leftover tortilla chips. With the bag of opened Fritos on their way to stale, I tried a version of Frito Pie. In this recipe, I put the pulled pork across the bottom of the baking pan first, then top it with the Fritos and grated cheddar. This got thumbs up from the whole family. And were great with a side dish of baked beans.

Finally, I made pulled pork enchiladas, using the pork in place of shredded chicken. I used the same enchilada sauce (package mix plus tomato paste) and corn tortillas as usual. By far this was the most warmly received pork transformation (especially since I left the baked beans out).

With the great bags of raw broccoli and cauliflower, I was pretty much on my own. My husband and daughter will eat these vegetables if they are covered in a heavy cheese sauce. Not exactly in line with my attempts  to eat healthy after helping finish off the graduation brownies and sheet cake. So I grilled the veggies and topped whole wheat pita pizzas with them. They froze well and were great to heat up in the oven for quick work lunches.

We ate baked beans with everything long past the point of enjoying them. Finally, I was sure they were about to turn bad, so I asked my husband if he cared if I threw the rest out. He said, "No, please get rid of them!" In the end, we ate way more of the leftovers for 100 than we threw out, considering we had a little over a week to do this. There are still a few cans of pop left, and my husband is plowing his way through the last bag of stale chips. And the carrots are still fine--it was a very LARGE bag of baby carrots.

And I haven't told my husband yet, but there is another container each of baked beans and pulled pork in the freezer.

How to Make Lunch for 100

My son recently graduated from high school. In Iowa, that means a graduation party. I don't remember any of my classmates having a party when we graduated from high school, but that was a hundred years and a thousand miles ago. In Iowa, you throw a party and you invite all your friends and all your graduate's classmates, and it turns into an enormous undertaking.

Now my Zach has been friends with another Zach since they enrolled in the same daycare at the ages of four and six months. They have been neighbors, classmates, baseball teammates (and rivals), and their friendship has stood the test of eighteen years. So we  decided to have a double-Zach party, splitting the food, drinks, and prep between the two families. Since we had the bigger, flatter backyard, we rented a tent and sent out the invitations with our address.

The menu: pulled pork sandwiches, baked beans, raw veggies with dip, cut-up fruit, brownies, cake, a hundred different kinds of chips and canned pop. I took the preparation of the pulled pork and hte baked beans. And the cake. The other Zach's mom spent hours of her life cutting up fruit and veggies, and baking brownies (to go with the cake).

My preferred method of cooking a pork tenderloin to pull is on the grill, but when faced with the challenge of making pulled pork for a hundred guests, I resorted to using my crockpot. For each batch, I start with slices of one yellow onion--half goes on the bottom. Then I put in approximately five pounds of pork tenderloin, and add the other half of the onions on top. Add a cup of any broth you like--I use the fat free mushroom or vegetable out of the paper carton--and layer the rest of the onions on top.Put the lid on the top of the crock pot, turn it on high, and leave the pork to cook for six to eight hours. Approximately halfway through the cooking time, turn the meat and onions. 

When the meat is done cooking, you can put the tenderloins on a plate and pull the meat into shreds with two forks. This is the time to discard any fat left sticking to the meat. Add the shredded pork back to the crock pot and mix in approximately a cup of your favorite barbecue sauce. Usually this is when I serve the pork. In this case, for each batch I put the meat into a foil lasagna pan, covered it and put it into the freezer. If you are making lunch for 100 people, you repeat this recipe four more times. The meat freezes beautifully. For the party I thawed the trays overnight in the refrigerator, and heated them the next day in the oven, to be ready to replenish the crockpot.

For the baked beans, go to your local mart and buy the seven and half pound  can of baked beans. Saute a whole diced yellow onion. When it is translucent, add a tablespoon of raw sugar and a few sprinkles of your favorite dry rub which will turn the onions a lovely golden color. Add the onion to the can of baked beans in another crockpot. To feed 100, repeat three more times, keeping the batches of beans hot in the oven in foil lasagna pans. Buy a hundred hamburger buns, and lot of cans of pop, and bags of chips.

Then on the day of the party, put up the tent, put out the food, and enjoy the company!

Next: what to do with leftovers from lunch for a 100...

The Last Indoor Meals of Winter: Chili with Cornbread

I love chili. It's got meat, beans, veggies, tomatoes--all cooked together with some spice. It's one of my favorite cold-weather meals.

During a meal of chili early this winter, my husband mentioned that while my chili was fine, it wasn't really one of his favorite meals. I am still surprised--after almost 24 years of marriage--to discover a food preference or non-preference of my husband's. My children's' food likes and dislikes change with the day of the week, hour of that day, and position of the moon. I'm used to that. But if my husband and I were on the OldyWed Game, I would get a perfect score on all the food-preference questions. Or so I thought.

I am not about to give up chili, so I had to think up a way to make it more husband-friendly. There are two things my husband thinks improves almost any meal--the addition of bread and cheese. Now I could just sprinkle cheese on the chili, but I decided to combine it with the cornbread I usually serve as a side dish. I rooted around on the food recipe web-sites and found a cornbread that is meant to be layered on top of chili and baked.

When I make chili for potlucks, people always ask me for the recipe. But it's one of those dishes I just make. There is no exact recipe. For the chili topped with cornbread, I start with one and a half pounds of meat: lean ground beef, lean ground turkey, or sometimes a mixture of half and half. I saute it in a Dutch oven on the stove-top and drain the fat. Then I dice a whole large carrot, a couple of stalks of celery, and one or two cloves of garlic, and saute them in a little olive oil until they are translucent. I do this in the Dutch oven while the meat drains since I am too lazy to wash extra pans.

Then I add the ground meat back to the vegetables and add canned tomatoes and tomato sauce. I start with a large can of basic tomato sauce. Then I add a small can of diced tomatoes. These are great because you can get them with added flavor. I like to make chili with the diced tomatoes with jalapenos. When all of this is mixed together, if there are not enough tomatoes for me (a visual thing), I add another small can of diced tomatoes. This is a matter of preference.

At this point I add one packet of McCormick's Original Chili Seasoning. My family prefers the mild, but the hot version is good too. I also add the water recommended on the packet. Yes, I can add chili and other seasonings myself, but the packet flavoring pulls the dish together. Plus, if I am using only ground turkey in the chili, the seasoning packet makes the meat look darker--almost like ground beef. Then I put the lid on the Dutch oven, and put it in a 350 degree oven for at least two hours. (If I am making just the chili, it goes into a crock pot at this point.)

About half an hour before I want to serve dinner, I mix up the cornbread topping:

• 3/4 cup cornmeal
• 1/4 cup flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 1 egg
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil

Then, using an ice-cream scoop, I mound the cornmeal mixture on top of the chili, put the lid back on the dutch oven, and bake it until the cornbread is done--about 20 minutes. Finally, I sprinkle the top of the cornbread with a cup of grated cheddar and bake it for another five minutes until the cheese has melted. This makes six good-sized servings.

The first time I did this, my husband raved about the chili. I was happy too. I had found a way to adapt the dish to both of our tastes.  Soon it will be too warm for chili. I am counting the days.

Now if only there was a way to make me love scalloped potatoes--a dish my husband loves but that I can  do without.

Handcrafted Cheeses

I have long been a fan of hand-crafted cheeses. A friend and I go to the local food co-op's fall tasting of wines and cheeses every year in order to pick out what we are going to put on the Thanksgiving appetizer cheese board.

Over the years I have become very fond of cheeses from Neal's Yard Dairy: http://www.nealsyarddairy.co.uk/about.html . I especially like the cow's milk cheeses like the Montgomery's Cheddar and Keen's Cheddar. I have tried a number of sheep's milk cheeses, but haven't developed a taste for those yet.

Last year as part of the Slow Food auction, I bid on and won a gift certificate for a pound of aged cheddar from Shelburne Farms in Vermont. I redeemed it before Christmas and received not only a pound of their Farmhouse Cheddar Cheese, but also a copy of a lovely cookbook, Cooking with Shelburne Farms. I adore cheddar and can just sit down and eat it, but I wanted to do something special with this cheese.

I also received a Williams-Sonoma gift card for Christmas. With it, I ordered a pound of Beecher's Handmade Cheeses from the Pike Place Market: half a pound of Flagship, a year-old semi-soft cow's milk cheese, and half a pound of Marco Polo, a creamy cow's milk cheese blended with green and black Madagascar peppercorns.

I wanted to do something with these cheeses that let the flavor of the cheeses come through. Something simple. So for a special dinner, I made grilled cheese sandwiches. I got a nice loaf of bread from the local food coop--a large grain loaf that crisped up beautifully. And to made each sandwich even more special, I cooked some bacon so that each sandwich was striped with it down the middle. I grilled three sandwiches, one with each cheese.

With just a little butter on the outside of each piece of bread, I grilled each to a nice golden brown. All three of these cheese are made from cows milk, and are not the bright orange of their artificially colored grocery store counterparts. The cheeses melted quickly as I grilled the sandwiches and oozed out from the edges of the bread.

My husband liked the Marco Polo best. He loves pepper and its inclusion gave the sandwich a slight bite that was a pleasant combination with the bacon. I thought the Flagship made the creamiest grilled cheese sandwich I have ever eaten. I made another one days later without the bacon, and it was sublime. But the Farmhouse Cheddar was also fabulous, and less crumbly just to eat out of hand. I have a half a pound of it left and will try a recipe from the Shelburne Farms cookbook with it.

I have always loved cheese and have greatly enjoyed getting to know handcrafted cheeses--certainly they weren't available in my mother's 1950s kitchen, although I am sure she would have loved them. There are some fine ones made locally where I live, and I will continue to buy them mail order whenever I can. Shelburne Farms has a great mail-order catalog, and the farm itself has a guest lodge and is open for tours: http://www.vtcheese.com/members/shelburne/shelburne.htm . Check out Beecher's Handmade Cheeses as well: http://www.beechershandmadecheese.com/ . Their webpage boasts that they make "The World's Best Mac & Cheese." I am sure you could do a wonderful job at home yourself with their cheeses. Until then, find a local cheese, some handmade bread, and treat yourself to a great sandwich.