All the Ingredients

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.

New Year, New Food

The problem with working retail is that I lose the months of November and December to my job. Last week, when I had stopped working six-day weeks, I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I had cooked a meal from scratch. Or had enough energy to think about cooking a meal from scratch. I had ordered a ham and pears and we ate ham sandwiches with pears for Christmas dinner. Since Christmas was the only day off I had that week, that was my speed. So last week I began my re-entry into the food world by making chili.

I had made chili one Saturday for my fellow employees. It had received rave reviews, so I made it for my family. Someone asked me for the recipe but chili is one of those dishes I don't really have a recipe for, but it goes something like this:

Brown one pound of the leanest ground turkey. Chop and saute together a small onion, three carrots, three stalks of celery, and a pound of mushrooms. Mix with the turkey in a dutch oven with two medium cans of chopped tomatoes, a large can of tomato sauce, and a packet of Lowry's mild chili seasoning. You can jazz this recipe up by using a hotter seasoning and using the chopped tomatoes with jalapenos. Add one can of red kidney beans that have been rinsed. Put the  lid on the Dutch oven and cook in a 350 oven for about an hour and a half. (There is a lot of wiggle room here. You can certainly make this chili with beef, but we are trying to have a healthier new year in our house.

With half an hour to go before people will be banging their spoons on their bowls, mix the cornbread topping:

• 3/4 cup cornmeal

• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1/2 cup buttermilk

• 1 large egg

• 2 teaspoons oil

 

and drop by spoonfuls on top of the chili. Put the lid back on the Dutch oven and cook for another 20-25 minutes until the cornbread is cooked through. For the last few minutes, top with a handful of grated sharp cheddar. Serve in bowls with a topping of half salsa, half sour cream mixed together.

This was a very simple meal to make. I was warm and happy from eating the chili AND from knowing that my cooking life is coming back.

Happy New Year!

Pimento Cheese Sandwiches

Last weekend, I made food for a friend's baby shower. The party was in the middle of the afternoon and we wanted food that was easy to eat that didn't require silverware. I couldn't face another platter of cold-cuts and cheese, or sliced chicken wraps, so I made finger sandwiches.

My age is really showing here, because I don't think people make platters of finger sandwiches anymore. At least not here in the Midwest. When I was a sophomore in high school over thirty years ago, my school had a mother-daughter tea in the spring. My mother was in charge of the finger sandwiches for two hundred girls and mothers, and the two of us made hundreds of ham salad sandwiches. It was at least a decade before I could look a ham salad sandwich in the face. But as a hostess, I have always had a fondness for finger food for parties. Especially for showers where people are sprinkled throughout a living room to watch the bride-to-be or mother-to be-open presents.

For this shower, I decided to make ham salad, olive and cream cheese, and pimento cheese finger sandwiches. The nice thing about these were, I could mix up the spreads and make the sandwiches a day or two early, and they would keep beautifully. I also had my bases covered for the Muslim and vegetarian friends in the crowd who couldn't eat the ham salad.

The ham salad was easy. I had baked a ham and ground chilled slices of it in the food processor with sweet pickle relish and mayonnaise until it was the right consistency. You have to be careful not to over-process ham salad, or it becomes too pastey. You want to be able to see little pieces of ham and pickle.

For the olive and cream cream cheese spread, I started by putting a block of cream cheese in the food processor and adding a small can of sliced black olives. To perk this recipe up a bit, I also added a half a cup of a variety of olive--mostly green--that I had bought at the food co-op. The zesty green olives gave the spread more olive flavor.

Then I made the pimento cheese following my mother's recipe:

• 1 lb grated cheddar cheese (the recipe in her handwriting actually says "rat cheese"--I think this means mild cheddar, but I like sharp)
• 8 oz softened cream cheese
• 1 T melted butter
• 1 C mayonnaise
• 1 4 oz jar pimento cheese
• dash of Worcestershire sauce
• dash of Angostura bitters

I didn't add the bitters because I didn't have any, so I doubled the Worcestershire sauce and added an extra 2 oz jar of pimentos because I like a lot of them in my pimento cheese. My mother used to make this when there was only about a cup of mayonnaise left in the large mayonnaise jar, and would then pack the cheese spread into this handy container.

Finger sandwiches are made on bread that you have cut the crusts off of, and that are then cut into three "fingers" or four triangles. I like to use wheat and white bread so that the sandwiches can alternate colors on the platter. There are lots of nice breads available, but I always use Pepperidge Farm bread for finger sandwiches as my mother did. It holds up well to the trimming and tastes good. To keep the sandwiches from drying out, I packed them in plastic lidded containers between layers of damp paper towels (my mother, of course, used damp linen tea towels).

The sandwiches were a hit at the party. We served them with potato chips, small fruit kabobs, and a punch made of Sprite and limeade. Sometimes old-fashioned food is just what you need.

After the party I looked in several cookbooks to see what sorts of pimento cheese recipes exist. IBeing Dead is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral  by Gayden Metcalfe devotes an entire page to discuss this "Southern pate" debating the pros and cons of sweet versus savory, and creamy versus fluffy. The six pimento cheese recipes here run the gamut from simple to complex, but the sweet pimento cheese recipe sounds awful to me. I can't imagine putting sugar in a cheese spread.

The "Epilogue" to Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Souther Specialties: An Entertaining Life (with Recipes) by Julia Reed is entirely about pimento cheese, and gives an overview of the ways this spread changes throughout the South. I can see the merits of adding jalapenos or pecans, but I would never use either. And if I felt the urge to add onion, I would just grate in the tiniest bit.

I was fascinated by the section on pimento cheese in The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbookby Matt & Ted Lee. Their basic recipe uses a red pepper they have blackened, peeled and diced, themselves. That sounds wonderful. They also include a recipe for a pimento cheese that can be used for grilled pimento cheese sandwiches or to top hamburgers. This recipe uses only cream cheese and no mayonnaise so that the resulting mixture is thick enough to slice when it's chilled. I can see the attraction of this. One of the ways I prefer my pimento cheese sandwich is to toast the Pepperidge Farm Bread, spread the cheese, and eat the sandwich immediately while it is hot. The Lee Brothers explain that to grill the pimento cheese you have to take the mayonnaise out of the recipe or the spread breaks down when it is cooked. I will have to try this new twist on an old favorite.

Retro Dutch Apple Pie

Recently I was working my way through a lug of Colorado peaches by making a number of peach pies for the freezer. (Warm peach pie tastes great in front of the fire on a cold Iowa January day.) I found myself left with only enough pie dough for a bottom crust. I had a lovely bowlful of Cortland Apples that I had gotten at the farmers market, and decided to make my mom's Dutch Apple Pie. It has a crumb topping and only needs dough for the bottom crust.

I rolled out the dough while the oven preheated to 425 degrees, and peeled and sliced nine small to medium apples.I had never tried Cortlands before this fall. They are grown at the local Honey Creek Acres, and were recommended to me by the lady who sold them at the market as her "new favorite eating apple." The fruit of these apples is pure white, with a nice crunchy texture that doesn't break down in a pie. I had made applesauce of the first batch I had bought, cooking the apples with the red skins still on. They produced the most lovely pink applesauce.

Following my mother's recipe, to the sliced apples I added:

• 1/4 C sugar (the recipe calls for 1/2 C, but these apples don't need a lot of extra sugar)

• 1/2 t nutmeg

• 1 t cinnamon

• 2 1/2 T lemon juice

• 2 T flour

Once I had mixed all the ingredients, I heaped the coated apple slices into the pie shell. Then I mixed up the crumb topping (what my mother's recipe called the "Dutch part" of the pie). It consisted of:

• 1/2 C flour

• 1/2 C sugar

• 1 stick butter, at room temperature

Mix the flour and sugar, and cut it into the butter to make thick crumbs. Then place the crumbs evenly over the apples in the crust. (It was very warm in my kitchen and the crumbs were a bit gooey.)

Then (and this is the really weird part of this recipe) you slide the pie into a clean brown grocery bag, being careful that the pie pan is in the center of the bag and not touching the sides. Staple the bag closed, place it on a cookie sheet, and slide the pie-in-bag onto a rack in the oven that has been lowered enough so that the top of the brown grocery bag doesn't touch the top of the oven. Bake the pie one hour.

Now when the pie first starts to bake, your kitchen will smell like baking grocery sack, and you will be sure the entire bag is going to burst into flames in such a hot oven. Mine never has. And after about ten minutes, the smell goes away.

After baking the pie for an hour, slide the pie--still in the bag--onto a rack to cool. When you can easily handle the pie (but it's still a little warm), take it out of the bag and enjoy a slice with some vanilla ice cream on top.

I don't usually make pies with this much butter and sugar anymore. I like to taste the fruit without much more than crust, but we enjoyed this apple pie a lot. My mother didn't bake a lot of pies (that was my area of expertise), but we always had fun with this recipe. It also works well with peaches or strawberries. You just want enough fruit to mound into the pie pan, so that when it cooks down, it's a good ratio to this sweet topping.

 

Tomato Sauce

Well, it doesn't look like I will get much corn out of our garden. Someone (a raccoon perhaps?) has been systematically pulling the ears off the stalks--even the baby, half-formed ones--and eating them. I go out every morning to find the cobs, husks pulled back, cleaned of kernels. But whoever is dining on my corn doesn't like tomatoes.

I picked approximately two batches of a hundred each last week, mostly the Romas, but also some of the yellow and pinks (can't find the plastic name tag under the vines), and the Big Boys. To make my basic sauce, I cleaned and chopped the tomatoes in halves or quarters, depending on their size, and threw them in a pot with chopped up zucchini and onions. The first zucchini I picked were the large ones, so it only took one per pot. I think that the onions and the zucchini round out the flavor of the tomatoes, and give the finished sauce a smoother texture.

I cooked this mixture until all the vegetables were soft, and then ran it through it through what is now called a "vintage" food mill--an aluminum cone in a stand with a wooden pestle. I bought this one at the hardware store the first time I ever made cranberry sauce after I moved to Iowa because it's the kind my mother used. Now food mills have flat bottoms and handles that spin the food through. The sauce at this point was very thin. I added fresh basil leaves and a stalk of oregano from the garden and simmered the sauce for more than an hour. Then I scooped out the herbs, added a bit of salt and red wine.

At this point, the sauce is just the right consistency for tomato soup. I ladled some out to take to work to eat that way. It is great soup with a little cream and some croutons added. I personally prefer mine with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole grain bread for dunking. Then I put the pot back on the burner and continued to simmer it under the sauce in the pot is reduced by about half. I could can the sauce at this point, but not having a lot of time, I packaged it in different size containers for spaghetti sauce or homemade pizza, and froze it.

I hope to have enough tomatoes to make two more batches next week. Nothing is quite as heartening in the Iowa winter deep freeze as the taste of that fresh tomato sauce.

Give a Gift: Bacon Of the Month

In my household, bacon is one of the most popular foods. Of the nine creatures under our roof (cats count), only my daughter doesn't really care for bacon. The rest of us love bacon. Bacon plain. Bacon in dishes. One of my favorite cookbook purchases of the last year has been Seduced by Bacon: Recipes and Lore About America's Favorite Indulgence by Joanna Pruess. This volume is a collection of bacon facts and lore as well as great recipes that take bacon from the breakfast table through lunch and dinner to dessert.

One recipe that has become a favorite in our house is "Bacon-Wrapped Breadsticks." You take the hard breadsticks that you can find in the bread aisle of almost any grocery store, wrap bacon around them, and cook for half an hour in a 350 degree oven. Seduced by Bacon recommends coating the inside of each bacon slice, before wrapping, with mustard and sprinkling it with Parmesan cheese. That sounds good, but I just sprinkle the inside of my slices with my favorite barbecue dry rub--I don't want to interfere with the taste of the bacon. Since the fat of the bacon softens up the bread sticks as they cook, I bake mine on a cookie rack on top of a baking sheet in the oven. That way the breadsticks don't sit in the bacon fat. Cook them until they are nice and crisp, and let cool just a bit before you serve them.

I caused a traffic jam at the hors d'oeuvre tray on Thanksgiving by following the same technique to cook bacon-wrapped dates (one friend who was fifteen minutes late didn't get any). The sugar in the dates caramelizes and adds extra crunch to the bacon. These are also fantastic cooked over low heat on a barbecue grill. However you cook the bacon-wrapped dates, you must watch them carefully because they will burn easily.

We have done a lot of experimenting with bacon recipes in our house over the last year because last February for Valentine's Day, I gave my husband the Bacon of the Month Club: http://www.gratefulpalate.com/?p=Category_11 . For $150 you get a different artisanal bacon delivered, cold-packed, to your door. Over the last twelve months, we have had some truly fabulous bacons such as Nodine's Apple Smoke Flavored Bacon, Edwards Brown Sugar Cured Virginia Bacon, Hempler's Pepper Bacon, and Burger's Smokehouse Sliced Country Pork Jowl. One of our favorites was Vande Rose Farms Applewood Smoked Artisan Dry Cured Bacon from Oskaloosa, here in Iowa. A fight almost broke out over the breakfast table over who would get the last piece. The pork used for this bacon is fed all natural grains, and the meat was hand-rubbed with spices before being smoked over applewood.  

The problem is that once you've eaten your way through a year of the Bacon of the Month Club, you can never go back to grocery-store bacon again. These are not highly-processed bacons filled with water and phosphates, and for most, there is minimal shrinkage when you cook them. One of the biggest surprises is that these artisanal bacons actually taste like pork--you know that they come from a pig. Most supermarket bacon does not taste like its animal of origin. My family at first was resistant to bacon that resembled a good Iowa pork chop in flavor, but now they prefer it. That flavor is the sign of bacon that was made in a traditional manner, preserving and respecting the flavor of the original pig.

If you really want to give a great present to the bacon-lover in your life, I highly recommend the Bacon of the Month Club. You can also visit their web page for other great bacon-themed presents such as bacon salt, bacon popcorn, and bacon brittle: http: //www.gratefulpalate.com/?p=Page_24. Give the gift of bacon this Valentine's Day!

Lost Recipes

Now that the kids have gone back to school, and life is settling down at the Big Bookstore, I have time to start reading all the cookbooks I bought or was given over the holiday season. The first I have been noodling about in is America's Best Lost Recipes: 121 Kitchen-Tested Recipes Too Good to Forget, by the Editors Of Cook's Country Magazine. The magazine editors had a contest for readers to send in their best "lost" recipes--something appealing that captured a moment in American food history AND that was still good.

There are all sorts of recipes in here that I have heard of before--Cheese Crusted Olive Balls, butter Horn Rolls, and Wacky Cake, a dessert that was invented when war rationing made it necessary to find a way to make cake without eggs. Flipping through this lovely book is a pleasant way to spend an evening. I found myself arguing with some of the editor's choices (you can't look at a display in a bakery these days without tripping over Red Velvet Cake), and reminiscing with others. My mother made her own version of Tipsy Squire using Sarah Lee pound cake as the sponge base, with the tipsy provided by a nice cream sherry. Not a fan of alcohol in food as a child, I loved assembling the dessert, and made my own, small, non-tipsy version that I liked just fine.

One of the other things this book made me think about is my own "lost" recipes. You still see chicken and dumplings on comfort food menus, but my mother made fabulous blueberries and dumplings when I was a kid. This was probably a recipe born from her cold, Ohio childhood, and it was not one she made often in the warm Phoenix winter, but I remember her serving up bowlfuls of the deep purpley blueberries, cooked with sugar and lemon peel. I loved the way the syrup from the berries would turn the dumplings light purple on the outside, but they would stay white on the inside. My mother would finish by pouring Half-N-Half into each of our bowls, leaving us to mix it in as we ate. I don't have an official recipe for blueberries and dumplings, but I bet I could figure one out.

And that's one of the nice things about the Lost Recipes. Except for some of the ethnic recipes, the dishes here don't call for complicated ingredient lists or long, drawn-out preparations. Poor Boy Stroganov is made with canned and fresh ingredients you probably have on hand,and cut put together pretty quickly. And now I have a recipe for the fruit-filled Kolaches that I love to buy at the Farmer's Markets all summer.

So for my new year's gift, I give you a great recipe from my family's lost recipe files:

Ham Loaf

• 1 lb ham, ground
• 1 1/2 lean fresh ground pork
• 1/4 t pepper
• 1/4 t salt
• 2 eggs, well beaten
• 1 C milk
• 1 C Saltine crumbs

Thoroughly mix meats. Add remaining ingredients, and place in a loaf pan. Smooth top, and  with handle of wooden spoon, score top. Fill each row with sauce. Bake at 350 degrees for 2 hours, basting frequently.

Sauce:

• 1/3 C brown sugar
• 1 T yellow mustard
• 3/4 C apple cider vinegar
• 1/4 water

Not a wordy recipe. I always serve it with mashed potatoes and peas.

Happy New Year!

Brining the Turkey

I used to buy my Thanksgiving Turkey at a local market in the small town where I live. It would be a fresh bird, never frozen. I would pick it up first thing Wednesday morning and on Thursday we would have juicy turkey for dinner. Unfortunately, the market suffered a large fire the week after Thanksgiving last year, and was not able to reopen. This was a great loss to our community which had had a locally owned grocery store since 1950. (The building was finally sold and is soon going to open as a hardware store. Currently our only hardware store is part of the town's oldest gas station--I am not sure how well this new, freestanding store will go over with the old-timers.)

So when it came time to get our turkey this year, I wasn't sure where to find a fresh one. Since this was in the midst of the holiday set-up at the bookstore where I work, I didn't have time to research a local fresh turkey like I wanted, and ended up buying a Neiman Farms free-range, organic turkey at the local food co-op. I have no problem paying for quality food, but I did blanch at the check-out line when the turkey rang up for $53 dollars. Why, that's as much as a top-flight Christmas tree! I decided that because the bird was such a major investment this year, I would do something I had always wanted to try and brine the turkey.

For the information on how to do this, I turned to Alton Brown's guide I'm Just Here for the Food. I know there are lots of people who find Alton to be completely over the top, but when I want food science, he's where I start. In his chapter "Brines, Marinades, & Rubs," there is very detailed information on how brines can "supercharge" meat with flavor and moisture. The brining pumps salt and moisture into the meat and makes it harder to overcook the bird. Alton explains this on a molecular level, complete with diagrams  of the water-soluble proteins that trap the moisture that the brining introduces. I followed Alton's brining recipe--a mixture of kosher salt, brown sugar, orange juice concentrate, water, and ice--and put the turkey in a large cooler (it weighed 23 pounds) to soak in the solution overnight. I flipped the bird in the solution once in the middle of the night to just make sure it soaked evenly. The icy bath kept the bird cold, and all I had to do was remove it from the brining solution, fish ice cubes out of the cavity where they had been trapped, pat it down, and proceed immediately with roasting. I stuffed the cavity with my family's cornbread stuffing (yes, I know that's evil, but the stuffing was precooled and I haven't poisoned anyone yet), rubbed it down with butter, and put it in the oven to roast over sage branches.

The turkey was perfect. Nice and moist, and not too salty.  The cells of the meat can only absorb so much salt and water, and then they stop. I was afraid, if anything, the turkey would taste of the orange juice in the water. It did not. One thing I did notice about this free-range bird is that it was much fattier than the usual frozen turkey. The skin browned much sooner and had to be tented with foil. As a result, it made the best, darkest  pan dripping gravy I have ever tasted. I drained off most of the oil, stirred a little flour into the drippings to make a roux, and followed that with warm chicken sock and a little red wine. Delicious. I am hoarding the little bit of gravy that remains in a tiny container in the refrigerator for smearing on my turkey sandwiches. Everyone else gets packaged gravy to flood their plates of leftovers with.  Shhh--don't tell!