Fairy tales, myths, and chicken stock

Rumpelstiltskin

Whoever first conceived the notion of a bouillon cube must have been a true charlatan, a charlatan who deprived generations of home cooks of the delight of transforming simple ingredients into liquid gold. In their original conception, bouillon cubes were called portable soups and made from dehydrated vegetables and fat. Now they are made commercially and contain 1200 mg of sodium in a single cube.

Here it is, a rainy spring day, damp and chill, yet my kitchen is warm and cozy because I’m making chicken stock. I’ve always loved the story of stone soup, and this morning life imitated art. When I opened the refrigerator, the meaty carcass of last week’s chicken almost fell into my hands. I pulled out my stockpot, tossed in the carcass, and covered it with water.

While I waited for the water to come to a boil, I found carrot and celery sticks from last night’s crudité platter, the au jus from the original roast that I hadn’t bothered to turn into gravy, and three lonely cloves of garlic. Each of these items alone could have been discarded easily, but they all were welcomed into the pot.

At this point, I could have left well enough alone. The soup would be fine as is, but I do like to gild the lily. A yellow onion studded with cloves (from Penzy’s, of course), a few whole black peppercorns (also from Penzy’s), a sprinkle of sea salt all joined the bubbling jumble in the pot. In the crisper, I saw the green leaves that topped the organic celery, the part that many home cooks toss without thinking, but today they, too, were added to the soup.

In an hour or two, I’ll strain the liquid and refrigerate it. Tonight we’ll have chicken rice soup, and there will be golden stock left over to use later in the week, in recipes that call for a bouillon cube.

Maybe this is more the story of Rumpelstiltskin, of spinning worthless straw into gold. But the funny little man in that tale didn’t tell how he made the transformation. Instead he used his secret to blackmail the queen. There is no secret to making a pot of soup, not even a real recipe. Use what you find in your refrigerator and you’ll find that you, too, can turn leftovers into something even better than gold—because you can’t eat gold. Ask Midas. But that’s another story.

Easter Bread and Frittata

Credit: Double Nickel Farm

For many, Easter is synonymous with candy, marshmallow peeps, chocolate bunnies, coconut eggs, jelly beans, even pastel candy corn. When I was growing up, I looked forward to shopping for a spring coat, dress, and patent leather shoes. My brothers and I anxiously anticipated an end to this season of fasting and penance. We were starving for all the foods we gave up for Lent.  One of my fondest Easter memories involves not candy but bread.

After a long Lenten season, my great-grandmother would celebrate the coming of Easter with a special bread. She started with a rich, brioche-like dough, shaped it into a braided ring, and tucked colored hard-boiled eggs into the spaces in the braid. For her great-granddaughters, she would make pocketbooks from the bread with a colored egg peeking out from the top. For her great- grandsons, she made long-eared bunnies holding an egg in its paws. Did anyone think to write down her recipe? Sadly, no.

The eggs in the bread made the children aware of this important symbol for Easter, which for my great-grandmother was truly a holy day. Eggs represent new life, and for Catholics, Easter is about the Resurrection, so eggs represent Christ's emergence from the tomb.

My brother Michael
with our Easter frittata,
a 50 egg omelet.

Now that even the youngest of our family is too old to hunt for eggs, they are still a part of our Easter tradition. The centerpiece of our Easter brunch is a frittata. This frittata is true to our great-grandmother's recipe that she brought with her from a tiny village near Cassino, but as our family has grown, so has the size of this special omelet. I can remember my father coming into the kitchen, asking my grandmother how many eggs were in the frittata this year. My brother Michael has taken over responsibility for making the frittata, which has grown to 50 eggs. That is not a misprint.

This frittata is not fast food. Michael starts over an hour before we sit down. He carefully cracks fifty eggs into a huge bowl. He finely chops a whole bunch of Italian parsley. He grates orange rind. He adds a three-pound container of ricotta to the eggs and carefully breaks up the yolks and incorporates the cheese. He heats oil in the skillet until is sizzles when he drops a teaspoon of the egg mixture into the pan. And then it's time to pour the egg mixture into the oil, to carefully lift cooked egg to allow raw to seep underneath. Eventually, it's time to flip the frittata over, no feat for the timid, but Michael has never been accused of being a scaredy cat. And then it's time to serve this masterpiece to the oohs and aahs of everyone at the table. We'll say grace and be thankful for our family, and then savor the best frittata ever.

May you and your family have a happy and holy Easter Sunday.

Here is a scaled-down recipe for our family's frittata recipe:

Frittata
8 eggs
1 cup ricotta cheese
1 Tablespoon grated orange rind
1/4 cup chopped Italian (flat-leaf) parsley
pinch salt
generous grind of fresh pepper

2 Tablespoons canola oil

sprigs of parsley and thin slices of orange for garnish

Mix the eggs with a fork until the yolks are broken, then add the next 5 ingredients. Mix until well incorporated. Heat about half the canola oil in a medium skillet* until it sizzles when a drop of egg is added. Add the egg mixture. As the egg cooks, gently lift the cooked egg and allow the raw egg to run underneath. When the eggs are set but the top is still moist, remove the skillet from the heat, place a plate that is slightly larger than the skillet on top, and flip the frittata onto the plate. Remove any egg that is stuck to the bottom of the pan, wipe the pan clean, reheat with remaining oil. (Work quickly!) Slip the frittata back into the skillet, wet side down, and cook until the bottom is golden brown. Transfer the frittata to a clean plate, garnish with the parsley sprigs and orange slices. Serves two or three generously.
*Use a medium or even a small skillet so that the frittata is thicker than a standard omelet.

Happy Father's Day

Sfinge di San Giuseppe

While the celebration of Easter has to be calculated each year based on the spring equinox and the phases of the moon, St. Joseph’s Day is a fixed late-winter holiday. March 19 is the day Catholics around the world honor the father of Jesus. It is also the day Italians honor all fathers.

The celebration of St. Joseph’s Day is somewhat muted because it always falls in Lent, but most fathers I know prefer less fuss than more, so the tone of the day fits most dads. Of course, it involves food, but it is a meatless holiday.

Every Italian meal includes a pasta course, and many people serve Pasta di San Guise, pasta with breadcrumbs that symbolize sawdust, with the obvious connection to St. Joseph’s profession.

The food most associated with St. Joseph’s Day is Sfinge di San Giuseppe, or St. Joseph’s cream puffs. You can buy them at a traditional Italian grocery, especially if the owner is from Sicily, but you need to buy them early. When I visited Croce’s at noon, there were only a few of the mascarpone-filled cream puffs left.

St. Joseph’s Day also marks the beginning of the spring planting season. My great-grandmother always started her garden on this day, planting peas and onions. She based all her planting on the liturgical calendar rather than the Farmer's Almanac and was always successful. 

To celebrate your father, here is a recipe for Pasta di San Guise:

1 pound of angel hair pasta, cooked according to package directions.

As the water is coming to a boil, prepare the sauce.

Sauce:

2 TBSP olive oil

5 cloves garlic, chopped

pinch of red pepper flakes

2 cups chopped fresh fennel

2 cups crushed tomatoes

2 TBSP tomato paste

1 TBSP chopped fresh basil

4 cans of drained, skinless, boneless sardines

Heat oil in large pot, and saute in it the garlic and pepper flakes. Add the fennel, tomatoes, paste, and basil. Cover and let simmer 30 minutes until fennel is tender. Add the sardines and simmer a few more minutes.

Topping:

1 TBSP olive oil

1 cup fine homemade breadcrumbs

Heat oil, and add crumbs and heat until golden brown. Pour sauce over the pasta, then sprinkle with the breadcrumbs.

What should we give the bride and groom?

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue...

 

If you are like me, you want to give the bride and groom something special for their wedding. I've been told that cash always works, but it seems crass to put a dollar value on the start of a life together, and unless the new couple puts all the money they receive toward a big purchase, like the downpayment for a house, they won't even remember what they bought with the money gifts after the first blooms of marriage begin to fade.

February is a long time away from the traditional June wedding season, but it's a perfect time to prepare a truly memorable gift: a personalized collection of recipes. If you are a family member, you can enlist the help of other relatives to gather recipes that go back generations, holiday specialities, picnic favorites, comfort foods unique to your heritage, the foods that you love.

You don't have to be a family member to give recipes to the new couple. Diane, one of my teacher friends, gave me a box of her family favorites when we were married thirty years ago, and many of those recipes have become staples in my kitchen. Even though I haven't seen Diane is twenty-five years, I think of her every time I make lemon chicken or banana blueberry muffins.

The presentation can be as simple as a box of recipe cards or as formal as a printed book, but it should include the stories behind the recipes as well as the recipes themselves. If you decide to create a printed book, you can even scan some original, handwritten recipes and include snapshots of the people who passed each recipe along.


Of course, you can create a personal recipe book for any occasion. My daughter took the digital family recipe book that I compiled for my brothers and created an heirloom book for Mothers Day. It is hardcover, with pictures of everyone in our family.

Now is a great time to start sifting through your recipes and calling friends and family to pull together a gift that will be treasured forever.

Here is one of my very favorite recipes from Diane's wedding present. In fact, I'm making it for dinner tonight!

Lemon Chicken

3 chicken breasts (split, boned, pounded--six pieces, each about 1/2 pound)

salt, pepper

¼ pound butter

2 tablespoons sherry

2 teaspoons grated lemon peel

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1 cup cream

6 thin pats butter

Parmesan cheese

Salt and pepper chicken breasts.  Heat butter in heavy skillet.  Sauté chicken in one layer for 5-8 minutes in hot butter, turning once to cook both sides.  Remove chicken to oven-proof shallow dish that is large enough to hold chicken in single layer.  Pour sherry, lemon peel and lemon juice into pan.  Cook one minute, stirring.  Add cream slowly.  Stir.  Pour sauce over chicken.  Place a pat of butter on each chicken piece and sprinkle with cheese.  Put under broiler until lightly browned and bubbly.  Serve at once.  It is delicious over rice.  Add a green vegetable and salad and it looks like you worked all day!  Serves 4 to 6.

Old dogs, new tricks: pasta

I've been making pasta for over forty years (a frightening thought in and of itself), and I didn't think there was much I could do differently. My recipe for pasta is a typical Italian non-recipe, and while most of the time the finished product is good, there have been some catastrophic failures--pasta that wouldn't cut properly, pasta that congealed in the boiling water into a huge mass, pasta that turned into mush because I got called away at a critical moment. The resulting tears are never pretty.

Cooks should never rest on their laurels, and there is always something to learn. A fall issue of La Cucina Italiana featured pasta in many forms, and each shape had its own recipe for the dough. The big difference between their dough and mine is the flour. Each recipe used some measure of "tipo 00" flour, a very soft flour not available in most grocery stores. My family has always used all-purpose white flour, nothing fancier than that. When my great-grandmother was alive, that was the only flour available, and if it was good enough for her, it was good enough for me. But I was intrigued by the "tipi 00" flour, so the last time I visited Croce's in Cherry Hill, I picked up a bag of this super soft flour. The owner gave me a nod that showed a new respect for me and my cooking prowess.

This afternoon, I didn't know what to make for dinner, and after doing an inventory of the refrigerator, I found that I had enough left-over roast beef to make gravy, and roast beef gravy deserves homemade pasta. I chopped onions, sweated them with good olive oil and a few flakes of hot pepper, then incorporated several minced cloves of garlic and some leftover roasted peppers. After a few minutes to cut the bitterness of raw garlic, I added a half cup of decent chianti, let it boil off, and then tossed in a can of San Marino tomatoes, crushed them with a potato masher before adding the leftover beef. I left that to simmer on the back of the stove.

Now was the test. I put a cup of all-purpose flour and a cup of the tipo 00 flour in the bowl of the food processor along with a generous pinch of salt. After a few pulses to combine the flours, I added three large eggs, one at a time, letting the food processor run after each addition. One it started to form a ball, I stopped the food processor and pulled the dough away from the blade, forgetting how sharp the blade is. After running for Neosporin and a bandaid and administering first aid, I kneaded the dough briefly and put it into a zip-lock bag. After a half hour, I started to roll out the dough.

While I don't have a guitarra, I do have a hand-crank pasta machine that gets its fair share of use. They last forever, unless you happen to have a husband of German descent who couldn't believe that one would not take APART the pasta machine to clean it, but that's another story. The usual procedure is to  roll the pasta into a thick coil, and cut it into the same number of pieces as the number of eggs used, plus one. In this case, I cut it into four pieces and covered them with a vintage cotton tablecloth that serves to help clean up the flour and to cover the dough while it rests.

The next step is to roll the pasta through the rollers at the widest setting several times, folding it in three like a business letter between each pass, and sending it through with the open end first  (that's a trick I learned a long time ago--it makes for silkier pasta). Once I'm satisfied that the dough is really ready, then I dial the rollers one step closer together and run each piece through the machine. My machine goes from 1 (widest) to 7 (closest). Usually, I take the pasta through the rollers all the way to step 6, and the dough is paper thin. However, when I do this, the pasta doesn't always cut when I go to the next step, but that's the way we always did it.

Again, according to La Cucina Italiana, neither angel hair (my favorite) nor linguine (the other size on my pasta machine), should use dough that thin. I gritted my teeth (after all, change is difficult), and stopped myself at step 5. In a leap of faith, I started to put the first pasta sheet through the narrower cutting side and started to crank.

It was amazing. The dough separated into perfect strands, and it was the fastest I've ever been able to cut pasta. I repeated this step with the other sheets of pasta, and as soon as the water (salted generously) came to a rolling boil, I carefully transferred the pasta to the pot. If you are used to making dried pasta, you will be astounded at how quickly fresh pasta cooks. Let it come to a full rolling boil and IMMEDIATELY (I can't stress this enough), dump the pasta into a large colander to drain. It shouldn't take more than a minute. Seriously. Trust me on this one!

Sauce the pasta and put it on the table quickly. Fresh pasta is ephemeral!

When I served the pasta with the melt-in-your-mouth beef, my husband of German heritage noticed that the pasta looked different, almost extruded, and I agreed, but when we twirled our first forkfuls and put them in our mouths, we were pleasantly surprised at the taste and texture.

Take home lessons: 1) Substitute 1/2 tipo 00 flour for the all purpose stuff. 2) Don't make the dough paper thin.

See, even an old dog like me can learn a new trick or two!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

When I was little, and when I say little, I mean four or five, snow was serious business. Unlike today, when we know in advance how much snow we are going to get and when, the storm 0f March, 1958 came as a surprise. The forecasters had called for flurries, but some places (like Morgantown) had 50 inches of fresh snow. The high winds were responsible for drifts as high as two stories. In addition to closing roads, the storm brought down power lines, and it took several days for the emergency workers to restore some semblance of normal to our lives.

Our house in Caln township saw snow so deep that my father had to dig a tunnel from the cellar door to get to the back yard. We still had a coal stove to heat the house, so at least we were warm, but the neighbors who had converted to oil heat were freezing. My parents invited everyone to stay with us while the power was out, so it was like a jumbo pajama party, with adults and children sleeping all over the house.

My great-grandmother was still alive then. A snowstorm of this magnitude was occasion for her to make vanilla snow. Pennsylvania's winter weather never seemed to bother her, even though growing up in a small village between Rome and Naples, she had never experienced snow and ice when she was a child. She showed her ingenuity during the storm. She gathered fresh, fluffy snow in a big ceramic bowl, added vanilla extract, and gave me a big bowl. I'm sure she told me, "Mangia, mangia, picollina." I had to eat it right away because this treat had no shelf life whatsoever. I remember it being sweet and cold and delicious.

When my own children were little, I wanted to treat them to vanilla snow. It had to be the right consistency, fluffy and fresh. Vanilla alone didn't seem to do the trick, so I bought a bottle of Toroni vanilla syrup in anticipation of the perfect snow. Finally the day came that the stars were in alignment. The snow was fluffy, and there was no time for any critters to spoil it. The kids were home from school, and I didn't have to work. It was afternoon, time for a treat, so I ran out into the storm. I packed big scoops of snow lightly into a ceramic mixing bowl, rushed inside, added the syrup, and served it to the kids. They weren't quite sure what to make of my insistence that they eat it quickly before it melted.

I closed my eyes and put a spoon into the vanilla snow, expecting to savor a taste of childhood. Of course, it wasn't the same. It wasn't creamy or sweet. The syrup formed rough lumps, and any attempt to mix it turned the snow to water. We dumped the melting, lumpy snow into the sink, and the kids could see my disappointment.

We all went outside to build a snowman, and when their cheeks were red and noses were runny, we trouped back indoors, shrugged off snow pants and parkas and mittens and hats and scarves and boots. I put on a pot of cocoa, and we watched the snow continue to fall as we sipped our cocoa and nibbled on graham crackers. They won't have vanilla snow to remember, but they will remember going sledding with their cousins at Nonna and PopPop's house, building snow forts, and hosting monumental snowball fights with their friends. And I hope those memories will bring smiles whenever snow flakes start to fall.

Snow storms and French toast

It happened again. The weather forecasters called for snow, and immediately, the grocery stores filled with worried customers, all stocking their carts. Heaven help you if you really needed to buy groceries because there were no carts, the aisles were packed, and the checkout lines went on to infinity.

You would think that a snowstorm would keep us indoors for a month the way people flock to stock up. I know that we can lose power, but I also know that in less than a day, we will be again able to go to the grocery to buy the things we need. However, we are all subjected to the hype of the news forecasters, and a winter storm is news. They look worried, so the viewers become worried.

What confuses me, however, is the standard list. Milk. Eggs. Bread. When they were little, my children wondered if everyone else was having a gigantic French toast party, and their surmise sticks with me to this day. I imagine every kitchen in the storm area with parents presiding over griddles. I imagine children seated at tables, elbows planted, chanting, “French toast! French toast!” I imagine butter melting and maple syrup flowing over stacks of caramelized bread. I imagine wafts of cinnamon and vanilla rising through houses.

The fact that neither of my kids even likes French toast keeps me from participating in this weather-related party. I feel left out of the festivities, so I avoid grocery stores all together until the flakes start flying because by then, the snow-fearing population is all at home, prepping their griddles. I have the store to myself. But I know there won’t be any milk, eggs, or bread on the shelves. Sigh. I guess I’ll have to bake my own bread.

For those of you who did get the prerequisite ingredients, though, here is an easy recipe for French toast.

My Favorite French Toast

(multiply by the number of people you are serving)

2-3 slices of good white bread

1 egg

¼-½ cup milk (any type)

¼ tsp. cinnamon

½ tsp. vanilla

butter and maple syrup for serving

canola oil for griddle

Heat an electric griddle to 375° and grease with canola oil and a pastry brush. In a pinch, you can pour a little oil into a small bowl, dip a paper towel into the bowl, and use the paper towel to grease the griddle before you heat it.

In a glass pie pan, beat the eggs and milk with the cinnamon and vanilla. Dip the bread into the egg mixture and turn over. Don’t let it get too soggy or the toast will burn before the center sets.

Test the griddle by sprinkling a few drops of cold water. If the water drops dance, the griddle is ready. Carefully move the egg-dipped bread onto the griddle. Let cook undisturbed for two to three minutes. Flip and finish cooking.

A nice touch is to heat the dishes in a 200° to keep the French toast warm a little longer.

Serve with a pat of butter and lots of real maple syrup.