All the Ingredients

Cooking from the Books: Good Eats: Volume 2: Swiss Steak

Alton Brown makes my short list of food personalities that I admire. After all, the man convinced me that brining is a necessity for the Thanksgiving Turkey, and I have a permanent Post-It on that page in I'm Just Here for the Food. But I have to confess that although I have all his cookbooks (including the newest, Good Eats: Volume 3), I have not cooked around in them very much. Maybe it's because I consider him a sort of foodie older brother. Need to know why high-gluten flour works better for homemade pizza dough? Check Alton. The answer will be there in one of those volumes--probably accompanied by a cute diagram of gluten molecules. Alton has all the answers.

My husband and I recently had the pleasure of hearing Alton speak in person at a benefit for the Cedar Rapids Public Library. A flood two years ago laid waste to the main branch of the library, and soaked many of its volumes. Alton came to speak at a fund-raising benefit, and donated a number of books to help rebuild the Library's collection, including some rare and odd cookbooks, and all of the ones he has authored. He was just as charming and funny in person as he appears in all of his television venues.

The Cooking Channel is rerunning all of the Good Eats episodes, and there are many that I have never seen. I was intrigued by the episode about Swiss Steak and how it belongs in the Museum of Food Horrors. I was born in Atlanta, but spent most of my formative years in Phoenix. I learned how to cook South, and Southwest. Swiss Steak was not on either of those menus. Then when I moved to Iowa to go to graduate school, I entered a new food arena and learned that many people in the Midwest ate breakfast, dinner, and supper (instead of breakfast lunch, and dinner), often consuming "hotdish" at some of those meals (instead of "casserole"), and drank pop instead of soda. And suddenly I was dining in restaurants that had pork tenderloin sandwiches instead of tamales, and Swiss Steak instead of fried chicken, biscuits, and gravy.

I ate Swiss Steak once in a well-known restaurant because my husband likes it, and recommended it to me. It tasted like the sole of an old shoe floured, fried, and swathed in white gummy gravy. Nasty! It quickly joined the list of things I never order in a restaurant like beef stew (no one ever makes it as well as I do) or tuna sandwiches (they should not be half dark tuna, half mayo and onion).

So I was intrigued by Alton's tear down and reconstruction of this midwest favorite. The rules emerged: you should buy your own good quality meat, slice and tenderize it yourself, and after flouring and searing the steaks, cook them low and slow in a broth in a Dutch oven. Alton set the bar pretty high, but I don't have time to buy, slice, and tenderize my own meat. Plus I shop at a small-town grocery that has a beautifully run meat department. In their meat case, I found lean, high-end,
tenderized "cube" steaks. I bought four.

Then I floured them lightly in seasoned flour. I am big fan these days of Mrs. Dash's Table Blend--no salt (and I don't miss it), but lots of pepper and other spices with a nice zing. Then I browned them in olive oil, and layered them in my Dutch oven. I strayed outside the suggested recipe here: I used organic beef broth, but added about half a cup of mushrooms and onions that had been left over from a batch I had sliced and sauteed for another recipe. I also threw in a little chopped sage, fresh from the garden. Then the covered pot went into the oven for about two hours. Halfway through, I rotated the meat layers. 

Instead of making mashed potatoes which seem to be the standard accompaniment to Swiss Steak, I again took the fast route and put half a bag of Ore Ida Golden Fries on a cooke sheet in the oven. My mother always made real Beef Stroganov over shoestring potatoes, so I piled my fries on the plate and topped them with Swiss Steak and the now thick and creamy mushroom and onion gravy. My husband pronounced the combo fabulous, and rechristened the dish "Swiss Steakanov." He said that this take on Swiss Steak is a new creature entirely, moist and tender in a way that most midwest Swiss Steak is not. 

I think it's time for me to cook around a bit more in the Good Eats cookbooks. Thanks, Alton!

At the Farmers' Market

Our small town has tried several times to establish a farmer's market. The first year it consisted ofthree men who showed up on Thursday nights to sell fruit and vegetables out of their pickup trucks in the parking lot next to the ballpark. The offerings were basic: corn, tomatoes, beans, onions, and melons. After about six weeks, no one showed up anymore. The second year, the location was the same, and the vendors different. Again it didn't last the summer.

This year the farmer's market was moved to Sunday afternoon behind the town's rec center. This was a smart move. Not only is this location within biking and walking distance of more of the town, but it also attracts the rec center traffic--patrons who have come to work out, or to use the pool, the library, or the playground.

The first week there were four vendors. The gentleman with fresh pork and vegetables from his farm, the lady who had just opened her own herb shop in town and who gardens and bakes, the family selling elk meat and elk leather goods, and the lady selling home-made baked goods. That first week I bought tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuces. Glorious tomatoes! It had been such a wet, nasty spring that the tomatoes had been grown in a hot house. But I ate one everyday for week--often in a salad with the lettuce and cucumbers.

Four weeks later there were twice as many vendors with kohlrabi, potatoes, early onions, tiny strawberries, the end of the rhubarb and the radishes, and the beginning of pea pods and sugar snaps. There were two more ladies selling pastries and fresh fruit pies, and two other ladies selling their handmade jewelry. Then followed the two wonderful weeks of the sour cherry harvest. I couldn't get enough fruit either week to make a cherry pie, so I started hunting for crisp recipes. I turned to a cookbook I had just bought, Deborah's Madison's Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmers' Markets, just out this spring in paperback. In this book, she describes farmers' markets all over the U.S. and gives recipes grouped by what you will find in these markets seasonally. There's a great recipe in the book for a "Apricot-Cherry Crisp."

I didn't have any apricots or the sweet cherries the recipe called for, but the sour cherries worked great. The recipe calls for only two tablespoons of sugar to be added to roughly one pound of cherries. I increased this to a quarter cup for my two pints of sour cherries. I combined that with two tablespoons of minute tapioca and a dash of almond extract and poured into a buttered 8-inch square glass baking dish. Then I followed the crisp topping recipe exactly as Madison has it, and worked together six tablespoons unsalted butter, three-fourths of a cup of brown sugar, two-thirds of a cup of flour, and a dash each of salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. I baked it at 375 degrees until the juices from the cherries almost bubbled over the edge of the pan--about 30 minutes. We ate it warm out of the oven with a good french vanilla ice cream scooped on top. In the last two weeks, I have found nice sweet cherries and apricots (not indigenous to my local farmers' market) and made the recipe exactly as it appears in Madison's book. It's excellent. The apricots and cherries play off each other nicely, and barely need any sugar, as sweet as they are.

Last Sunday, the farmers' market had swelled to over twenty vendors, each with a colored tent to protect them from the harsh midday sun. As I pulled up, families were getting out of their vans to shop, kids and dogs in tow. It finally looked like a "market," busy with shoppers.There were melons, green beans, beets, sweet corn, peppers, potatoes, and squash of all shapes, sizes, and colors. The herb lady who has been there every week is now selling her hand-crafted breads and pastas as well as her herbs. The pork farmer still has his freezer of various cuts of meat (they are right next to the folks who sell the frozen cuts of elk), and his vegetables have expanded as well. My refrigerator is full and it's time to hunt for more recipes.

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

I was privileged last Sunday to hear Michael Pollan speak about his new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. If you have read the early posts on this blog, you know that Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, was the topic of a number of my first writings. He has changed the way I think about and consume food, and to get to hear him in person was quite a treat.

Pollan was supposed to begin speaking at 2 p.m. I got to the library's lecture room at 12:50. Every seat had been claimed by 1:25. I had a seat in the front row, and was reading some more of Michael Ruhlman's The Elements of Cooking. A young man sat down next to me and said, "I got a gift card to Barnes & Noble for Christmas. I just bought that book with it." He opened his backpack to show me the bright orange cover of Ruhlman's book, and everything else inside: a well-read paperback copy of The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, a copy of Carlo Petrini's Slow Food Nation, and finally, still in the envelope it had been mailed to him in, his diploma from culinary school. He proceed to talk and talk for the next 30 minutes about his culinary school experience at a two-year community college and the slow food movement and his new job in Des Moines ("that's where food is happening in Iowa"). As he talked, I watched the room fill with people sitting on the floor in front and standing along the sides and in back--people in Sunday church clothes, people wearing Birkenstocks, most of them holding at least one of Pollan's books. Some wearing "Michael Pollan for President" stickers that someone had passed out.

Although I have lived in Iowa for over twenty years, I have never been to an Iowa Caucus. One of the people introducing Pollan explained that he had originally been scheduled to speak the night of this year's caucus, and that the date had had to be changed. The speaker explained that that scheduling conflict was why we were in the library's large conference room instead of in an auditorium that would have held more people. And the caucus was why everyone was crowded together to listen to Pollan and ask questions in an jumbled atmosphere, rather like a caucus.

Pollan spoke every bit as well as he writes, exploring some of the topics from his new book. Basically, In Defense of Food starts with his list of rules to eat by and gives advice on how to follow them. The audience was receptive and asked very thoughtful questions about the place of food in our Iowa agriculture. The thing that struck me most was that everyone there seemed to be just as passionate about food as the young man sitting next to me with his backpack of books and his newly minted culinary degree. I garden alone, put food by alone, often shop alone, and mostly plan and prepare meals alone. To be part of such a food-conscious group was a very heady experience. And in many ways, Michael Pollan is a better choice for president than some of our other candidates.

More on In Defense of Food later.

A Matter of Taste

With two of our employees enrolled in culinary school, we have been having bake-offs at work this summer. I have been eating lots of tasty things--fruit pies, chocolate chip cookies, flourless chocolate cakes--and decided that, even though I have been swamped at work, it was time to joint the action. I got the honor of picking what we baked, so I chose filled cupcakes. Cupcakes are all the rage now. An article in the New York Times last month detailed the trend in L.A. where people wait in long lines outside bakeries just to buy a single cupcake for $3.25. I wanted to do something trendy, yet small and easily shared.

Where I work, everyone loves chocolate, so I went on the hunt for a non-chocolate cupcake recipe. My cookbooks yielded nothing of interest. Neither did the on-line Food Network recipe search. So I simply "Googled" "filled cupcake." Of course, the first recipes that came up were chocolate--specifically for the devil's food type, cream-filled cupcake that I already knew someone was making. I scanned the entries working my way down the first page.  I wasn't interested in self-filling cupcakes (rather like molten lava cakes), or cupcakes filled with jelly. Then one caught my eye; "Lavender Cream Filled Cupcake with Citrus Cream Cheese Frosting," on the Cup Cake Bake Shop Blog by Chockylit:  http://chockylit.blogspot.com/2005/07/recipe-lavender-cream-filled-cupcake.html. Lavender is currently one of my two favorite flavors (along with ginger), and I was one hundred percent certain that no one else would make a cupcake flavored with lavender. This was it--something fun and different.

The white cupcakes were easy to make: a basic white batter with the beaten egg whites folded in at the end to give them a light texture. While the cupcakes were cooling, I made the lavender cream filling. I boiled a simple syrup of water and sugar, and steeped lavender blossoms in it (part of my harvest from last summer's lavender plants). After it cooled, I strained out the blossoms, and streamed the liquid into cream I had whipped to soft peaks. I whipped it to firm peaks, and the resulting cream had a lovely, light lavender flavor. (In fact, I ate the leftover for the next several mornings over fresh strawberries.) Following the recipe's directions, I used the small end of a melon-baller to scoop a hollow into each cupcake, reserving half of the plug to recap the cupcakes after I filled them. Using a squeeze bottle, I filled the cupcakes, capped them, and put them in the fridge to keep cool while I made the frosting.

The recipe called for a basic cream cheese frosting. I like cream cheese frosting, but always find it cloyingly sweet in my mouth. When I was baking cakes professionally, I always used to add some lime juice to my cream cheese frostings, just to take the edge off. Chockylit had taken it farther by adding a little juice from a lemon, lime, and orange, plus a mixture of their zests. To my mind, all of this citrus would overwhelm the subtleness of the lavender cream in the center of the cupcake. So, deviating from the recipe, I added only the lime juice and zest, and streamed the remainder of the lavender syrup into the frosting as well. A few drops of purple food coloring, a few lavender blossoms whipped in, and I had perfume frosting to top the cupcakes with.

The next day in the break room at work, mine was indeed the only non-chocolate cupcake. Besides the cream-filled devil's food cupcake, I sampled a rich chocolate cupcake filled with peanut butter, and topped with a shiny chocolate frosting and chopped, roasted nuts. It was a perfect blend of nuts and chocolate, not too sweet. The fourth contender was a mocha-mousse filled and topped chocolate cupcake decorated with swirls that had been poured of melted semi-sweet chocolate and stuck into the cupcakes once they had cooled and hardened. Those certainly won for presentation. I had piped the frosting onto my cupcakes, and added a few lavender blossoms--not quite as jazzy, but pretty none-the-less.

I had worried that my co-workers would miss the subtle lavender flavor. The night before, my husband had walked through the kitchen as I finished frosting the cupcakes, and had asked me what kind they were. I passed one under his nose and said, "Lavender. Do you smell it?"

"No, but they look great." My husband is used to me experimenting in the kitchen, and knows that a compliment might get him a sample.

At work the next day, my co-workers quickly sorted the strengths of the flavors out. Early samplers told others, "Eat the lavender ones first, or you can't taste their flavor after you have all that chocolate."

We never declare an official winner of our bake-offs. The winners are the employees who get to skip vending machine snacks on their breaks. I was happy that I got to make filled cupcakes that everyone enjoyed eating--including me. But as much as I liked the smooth sensation of the lavender cream filling of the lavender cream on my tongue, when I make the cupcakes again, I will just make them with the lavender lime cream cheese frosting. They will still be trendy and different, but not as time-consuming to make.

Baking complicated cupcakes with such a subtle main flavor had also made me more sensitive to what people can smell and taste when I cook. As an experiment, I took one of the lavender cupcakes from our bake-off home to my husband. We split it for dessert that night a while after dinner, each eating our half in several bites.

"How is it? " I prompted.

"Good!"

"Could you taste the lavender?"

"No, it just tasted sweet."

He couldn't taste the lavender at all.

Intriguing. I know that some people say that women have a keener sense of taste than men, but I just don't buy it. There are too many good male chefs out there tasting and tweaking seasonings in their restaurants. I had watched one of the guys I work with eat one of my lavender cupcakes. He ate it slowly, obviously thinking about the taste. He saw me watching him.

"Well?" I asked.

"It's interesting to taste these, " he said. "There are three parts to the flavor. First, there's the taste of the cream filling with lavender mixed with the taste of the cupcake. Then there's the zing of the lime in the frosting. Then it finishes with sweetness of the frosting and a faint lavender aftertaste." He got exactly what the recipe was trying to do.

Over the course of the day, I watched other people tasting the cupcakes on their breaks. Each type disappeared pretty quickly without anyone else seeming to analyze the flavors in their mouth. Was it because of the speed at which they ate the homemade goodies, or the fact that perhaps some of them didn't pick up on the lavender at all?

Over the next several days, I continues to think about the ability to taste or not taste certain flavors. My husband, who cheerfully eats almost anything I put in front of him, sometimes seems to miss the high and low notes of the foods I prepare. We also have different preferences in our tastes. He likes things that are very sweet or very salty, often salting foods at the table that I have already salted in cooking. I like more bitter and sour foods--wild greens, dill pickles--and he does not. I like red wine and like to use it in cooking. My husband, who does not drink wine or coffee because he dislikes the taste, does not like wine in stew or tomato sauce if I use as much as I like, bringing the wine to the forefront of the dish's taste. If I back off on how much I add to recipe so that it just deepens the flavor, he's fine with it. I have experimented with this compromise over the years we have been married because I want to make food that satisfies my creative urges, yet that also pleases him.

Perhaps he's a "supertaster," someone with an unusually large number of taste buds. These people tend not to like alcoholic beverages, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, coffee, grapefruit, green tea, kale, spinach, and soy products. Except for the grapefruit, that's a list of things I will eat but my husband would prefer not to. Supposedly, supertasters tend to eat less fat unless they have a history of ear infections which decreases the sensitivity to fat as a result of nerve damage (this could be my husband). "Medium tasters" have a more muted taste world, and tend to eat more vegetables and more foods with a wide range of tastes (that would  be me).Then there are not-tasters who through disease, injury, or luck of the genetic draw don't taste food at all.

There's also the fact that taste is much diminished when we can't smell what we are eating. So if for whatever reason my husband couldn't smell the subtle lavender, then  he wasn't going to be able to taste it. He just enjoyed the sweetness of the cupcake and the fact that I had brought one home. For his next treat, I'll make something chocolate--a flavor he and I both enjoy. Because after twenty-two years of marriage, the differences in taste are what still make our marriage spicy.

Thanks to all the participants in Faith Adiele's food writing class at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Food," who commented on this piece in earlier drafts.  And to my husband who gave the workshop as a present!