#6 - The Freezer

On the farm, the freezer was the chest type, horizontal to the floor and not vertical, and no doubt a Sears purchase, and it might be pumping the cold yet today, wherever it is.  It lived on the enclosed back porch, which in and of itself wasn’t warm in the winter, anyway!  Being asked to get something from it was the beginning of a scary adventure, first for the bone-shattering cold in the winter, and, second, because I was never tall enough to reach easily to its contents, generally packages of meat stacked up from the bottom of the chest in neat columns, placed by type of meat and cut.  The last carton of sweet corn was definitely an exercise in balance, me hanging mostly upside down and holding my breath until it could juuust be reached. 

The tiny freezer compartment in the kitchen’s fridge on that farm was where the ice cream lived, exclusively, so when I set up housekeeping for myself, I never pictured myself needing more freezer space, because, after all, I no longer had to store half a pig or cow nor had a garden.  It wasn’t long, however, before I requested a small one as a Christmas present, and my father was happy to oblige, again from Sears, and I’ve moved it with me through two duplexes in Kansas City and finally here to Seattle.  It’s always lived in the garage or the basement, and getting something from it is still a pretty scary proposition, depending on the time of night!

That freezer, however, is mostly for loaves of bread, my own baked goodies, backup unsalted butter, and only one package each of the three cuts of meat I fix just for myself. 

The fridge freezer upstairs in the kitchen has become my gourmet palace, and neither of the freezers functions as a place where food goes to die.  Instead, I treat each as a valuable comrade-in-arms for meal production, chiefly because I don’t cook for leftovers, so there are never any in there!  Just as I do with the refrigerator, the freezer’s contents are rigidly placed and patrolled often, and I do find an occasional stray surprise, like fudge or the last piece of lemon poundcake.

I’ve also discovered over the last couple of years that cooked beans freeze wonderfully, just the way nuts always have, and individually frozen pieces of fruit make great smoothies, so much better in texture than the same fruit fresh from the fridge.  You drop your yogurt into whatever whirly, chopping thing you use for smoothies, pull several frozen raspberries/banana chunks from the plastic bags or waxed paper cocoons in which they’re stored, and then when you squeeze the honey bear over that mixture, the honey doesn’t incorporate into the finished product.  Instead, it gets almost hard and taffy-like.  Mmmm; a honey-string smoothie.

Once I tried cooking dried chickpeas myself, I’ve since been unable to use canned ones, as though they were some inferior food product, so I’ll cook just a cup of whatever dried bean I need--cranberry, black, chickpea, and my latest find, a huge butter bean type called Corona—and then I’ll use about a third cup for the recipe I have in mind, and then I double-Ziploc-bag the other two portions with a bit of their cooking liquid, placing the bags flat on the floor of the freezer, so they freeze that way.  After they’re frozen solid, I can stand them up in a little plastic box so they’re all together and can be pulled forward like file folders in a file drawer. When I see it there at the back wall of the freezer, I always have to laugh about my “bean file.”

However, I’ve been doing the same thing with nuts for years now, because I could never find those pesky little packages in the freezer when I needed them.  The “nut file” is a shoe-box sized clear plastic box, and the nuts themselves are double-bagged in sandwich bags, because I’ve usually bought the nuts from the bulk section rather than in the Diamond or Planter’s sacks.  Cashews are always in the front of the box, luxury nuts that they were in my past, and so it is that I’ll see them and think, “Hey, I haven’t made a stir fry for weeks!”  You see, that’s why I started keeping cashews in the freezer because I never had them when I wanted to add them to my chicken stir fry with broccoli and celery and scallions.  When I realize that I haven’t used them in awhile, I yank them out and roast them for Citrus Curried Cashews, and, once roasted, they’ll last in the cupboard for a couple of weeks, parceled out for yourself with your evening glass of wine at Supper preparation time.  You’ll just have to add 15 minutes to the front end of your preparation of Roasted Chicken Breasts (#2 – The Protein That Never Fails) to do the same thing yourself.  Talk about efficiency!

The recipe(s):

Curry Powder – The Family Mix

Begin with ground coriander.  Measure out about a third of the jar you’re trying to fill. All other spices, then, are measured according to how much coriander you used.

Measure one-half as much ground cumin, chili powder, and tumeric.

Measure one-third as much coarse ground black pepper.

Measure one-quarter as much celery seed.

Measure one-sixth as much nutmeg or mace, clove, cayenne, and ginger.

Store the mixture with a bay leaf and a dried red chili and a cinnamon stick, just to make it look pretty.  But you never know!  The essences of these whole herbs and spices might just permeate the mixture and add their culture!

Citrus Curried Cashews

This recipe is my adaptation of the buttered, curried cashews served at Columbia City Ale House here in Seattle:  http://www.seattlealehouses.com/?

Prepare the spice mixture and preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  For one cup of cashews, you’ll need the grated zest of one orange (about a tablespoon), 1 tablespoon of curry powder, and 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt.

Turn the whole raw cashews in 2 teaspoons of olive oil in a dish, and then spread the oiled cashews onto a baking sheet so they’re all in one layer.  Roast them for 7 – 9 minutes, sort of until you can smell them. 

Pull the baking sheet from the oven and use a spatula to turn the cashews over rapidly.  Begin sprinkling them with half the spice mixture, turn them again, and sprinkle with the rest of the spices.  Allow them to cool on the sheet, and as they do, they’ll become crisper.

Store, covered, for a week or more.

Next time: I’m taking a month break, and when I come back, we’ll finish our first menu.

#5 - Meal planning - tastes and textures

Seattle is now in its November-December mode of seemingly continuous rainy days---unfortunately with what I call “real rain,” meaning that it gets you wet when you walk in it.  Still, this is Supper’s best weather, the cold and dark of which makes looking forward to Supper most satisfying. 

I live along the southern edge of Lake Washington, and in late October, there begins this curious gathering of crows, flying in big flocks toward a common meeting place, it seems.  When Daylight Savings Time leaves us and Seattle’s descent into the darker November begins, I’ll look out and see the first big groups about 3:30 in the afternoon, winging their way south and cawing argumentatively.  They sound as if they’re discussing Supper, actually, and I never see this natural happening without wanting to pour my evening glass of wine and pull out the ingredients for the evening meal. Given that the assisted living facility where my parents live begins serving Supper at 4:30, I don’t believe my wanting to start cooking that early is a bad thing, and the daily appearance of the crows makes it seem just right.

It also makes me remember fondly how true autumn was announced in the Midwest, with huge V’s of geese, flying high and honking loudly, so much so that you could hear them even at night or in the Kansas City suburb where I raised my daughter.  True, they flew the other way in the springtime, but for some reason, the flight and its accompanying clatter were never as distinctive in the spring. 

So, those geese and this month’s throng of crows makes me crave autumn and winter flavors instantly, right along with wanting to race into the kitchen and start cooking.  I can smell cinnamon and clove, ginger and nutmeg, and I can almost taste them in soft, dark gingerbread as well as butternut squash, two entirely different textures but equally satisfying tastes.  I can feel the crunch of toasted walnuts in a salad with avocado and grapefruit as well as to recreate that flow of slight bitterness they produce back over your tongue after you swallow. And rosemary, with that strong and herbal scent, beckons.

Supper, too, has to have play among various textures and tastes, and those elements are as important to one’s satisfaction and enjoyment of the food as are the food’s nutritional and colorful attributes.  Creamy is one of those textures, and we just came through what is possibly the biggest creamy food festival of the year in some families, what with mashed potatoes and various preparations of sweet potatoes and creamed corn/puddings.  If you don’t already read Smitten Kitchen, you should.  Deb admits she isn’t a fan of things mashed with what proves to be entirely too much dairy in her pre-Thanksgiving post:  http://smittenkitchen.com/2010/11/sweet-corn-spoonbread/   But I find them necessary rather often, because they make a starch a whole different ballgame on your Supper plate.

Other necessary tastes and textures are salty, crisp/crunchy, density, and melty butterfat.  “Salty” is pretty obvious; it’s why you can’t be satisfied with only ice cream for Supper and probably the single reason it’s traditional to serve pancakes with bacon.  “Crispy/crunchy” as a texture isn’t attained just by slipping a carrot stick onto one’s plate; sometimes, you need toasted almonds scattered among your green beans or the aforesaid walnuts on your soft cheesy toasted bread,  and doing so means that you’re increasing the number of nuts in your daily diet.  Nutritionists across the land will rejoice!  Density is a matter of biting into something at which you actually have to work, so I often accomplish it with a square of cornbread or a lovely and chewy whole wheat bread cut in a thick wedge when a stew is the protein and required vegetables combined (See # 4, Meal planning – the basic food groups).  Otherwise, it’s likely to be the protein itself, because something to chew provides density.

 And I’m sure I don’t have to explain “melty butterfat,” richness flowing over your tongue and filling your mouth with a coaxing, sleepy sensation.  That’s clearly the chocolate of choice one has for dessert!

I mention texture and taste because texture is the final component of the way I plan a Supper, even one for myself. There has to be something “creamy,” and it’s usually the starch on the plate, even if it’s a roasted potato. I roasted the darkest blue potatoes I have ever seen last night for my brother’s family, and they were so satisfying that we all kept wandering back to the roasting sheet to steal another piece of potato.  Because they also comprised “crisp” with their French fry outsides (gloriously brown even on a blue potato!), I didn’t have to roast some walnuts to scatter over the salad, and, in fact, I didn’t even fix the salad, because we had broccoli, so we had our green vegetable covered (See Rule 2 in #3 – Broccoli, the green jewel) and there were carrots in with the braised pork shoulder for our second vegetable, anyway.  I tend to overkill the vegetables with my niece and nephew because I believe, against all evidence to the contrary, that they aren’t eating vegetables any other time than when I cook for them!

To get back to the point, however, it is this:  There can’t be two creamy textures on the plate, so if I want to go to all the work of making a cheesy cream sauce for the dying cauliflower in my vegetable crisper, then I can’t serve a starch of any other kind.  Besides, it’s usually at least a two-step process to fix scalloped cauliflower, and I have to watch out for complicating my cooking procedures, using more than a minimum number of cooking vessels, and wanting Supper right now! 

We, the queens of our kitchens, must be mindful of these considerations (adopt royal air; raise hand to bestow grace); our subjects depend on us, hapless and helpless cooks that they are. . .

Next time:  Enough with the philosophy!  Back to a recipe/technique!  

#4 - Meal planning - basic food groups

Meal planning always seems a sort of math problem to me, the dreaded algebra equation with its silly “unknown” letters.  

I wasn’t always so dismissive of mathematics. Elementary school was a one room country schoolhouse, just like you read about in Little House on the Prairie.  In fact, the school was called Prairie Grove, and I can remember concentrating hard on reciting the multiplication tables while a cruel north breeze swept across the wood floor.  It was good to sit with your feet curled up under you at your desk, even if it meant they fell asleep!  At home as homework, I paced while I learned those tables, and then I used little memory jogs to keep the math in my head, always feeling quite secure that I was correct, because I could always go back and count it up to see if I’d been right.  In the fall of 1963, when I began my freshman year at the rural high school at Bern in Kansas—big, big happenings for me!—algebra entered my life, and I never felt the same way about math again.  I do remember liking what was called Geometry then, mostly because you just had to memorize the formula and the solution made a nice, pretty shape, but I was quite happy to skip any math for my junior and senior years in high school.  This was a rural school, so practically everyone took band and chorus, and I was the only one who could play the piano well enough to accompany the boys’ chorus, so I never took the next levels of math or chemistry—sigh.  Happy Days!  It was quite a shock to be placed in a remedial algebra class when I started college, but the graduate student teacher/tutor was impressed by my ability to traipse across campus, again in cold, cruel winds, to get help, and he probably gifted me by passing me, and then I NEVER DID MATH AGAIN!  Yay!

Still, you can look at meal planning as that sort of formula where multiple solutions depend upon multiple probabilities.  You’ve got your basic food groups located in those three different places:  the fridge, the freezer, and the pantry.  And the affecting probabilities are how much time you want to spend cooking and what you feel like doing vs. what you’d like to be eating at the end of the process.  Let’s just analyze food groups this time, since these various permutations invite long discussion!

There are 6.  I don’t care what the USDA Food Pyramid says.  There are six food groups, and at Supper time, all six have to appear in the meal.  (Lunch and breakfast count only as additions for the day, not as accumulating “credits.”)  Those food groups are protein, a green vegetable, a satisfying vegetable starch or bread, another vegetable, a fruit, and. . .chocolate. When I plan, I think of which things in each group I’m willing to eat and how much effort is required to produce each.

Here’s my working list, with every element reduced to the simplest cooking method.  Yours will obviously be different, because I’ll bet you’re willing to eat things like fish and Swiss chard and even—(shudder)—kale.  Good for you! 

Protein – chicken breast, roasted; pork chop, beef and pork tenderloin, sautéed stovetop; Hillshire Farm sausage; eggs; toasted walnuts, pecans, pumpkin or sunflower seeds; lentils.

Green vegetable – broccoli, blanched (See #3 – The green jewel, broccoli) or roasted;  green beans, delightfully fresh from the farmers’ market in the summertime and frozen French cut, otherwise; romaine lettuce with my own vinaigrette, celery; Brussels sprouts in season; green cabbage, raw, roasted, sautéed with pork.

Other vegetable –  any orange squash, roasted; green, yellow, or red sweet peppers, carrots, cauliflower, raw or roasted; fresh tomato slices in the summertime; tomato sauce or roasted tomatoes, otherwise;  purple cabbage, mostly in salads.

I’m sure you get the idea of my food groupings without my having to fill in all the blanks.  I eat fruits on a seasonal basis, buying just a couple of pieces and letting them come to goodness on the kitchen counter, and they are always eaten raw, in addition to being a separately served course when I’m entertaining or providing a meal for someone else.  I keep rice and instant couscous in the pantry, and when I bake any bread, even cornbread, I cut and freeze what isn’t eaten at the meal. And, finally, everything I bake has to freeze wonderfully—because no one should eat an entire pan of brownies for dessert and they dry out the next day—as well as have chocolate in it. Besides, a chocolate bar hidden in the back of the cupboard is a pretty easy way to keep chocolate around, and why shouldn’t it be great dark chocolate?  It’s good for you!

So, I start thinking, probably about lunchtime, what’s available in each of my hidden storage spaces, and then I put the meal together thinking of the simplest preparation for each choice, adding the caveat of using only one or two cooking vessels; cleaning up is, after all, part of the cooking process, and I don’t want it to be complicated, either!  Some food always stands out as “I want that right now,” and then the rest of Supper has to fall together from that item’s cooking process.  That’s why the roasted chicken breast (See #2 – The protein that never fails) makes a good fallback Supper; I can roast two vegetables with it, and, thus, use only one pan! 

However, wanting pasta for supper works the same way.  I can start the cooking water for the pasta, drop in one of the two vegetables, probably the broccoli, and fish it out before I even cook the pasta in the same water.  Then, when the pasta’s finished, quickly I will drain it, slap its cooking pan back on the heat, add some sausage I’ve sliced off the hunk which lives in the freezer, and after the sausage has browned and made the bottom of the pan all smooshy with its juices and carmelization, I smash some garlic and add some olive oil, both of which will serve as additional flavor enhancement for reheating the pasta and broccoli. If I’ve remembered to save some of the pasta water, that’s even better!

And, yes, I’m cooking for myself most of the time.  However, every technique I’ve shared with you thus far can be multiplied to feed however many you’re needing to feed.

I challenge you to make your own Food Group list, and, okay, you can drop off chocolate if you really don’t like it, but don’t forget to work in something wonderful you crave each day.  Don’t skip dessert.  Life is to be lived, and you deserve something good each day! 

Next time: Meal planning, tastes and textures.   

   

#3 - The green jewel, broccoli

Ahh, broccoli; how I do love thee.  I’m not sure I should admit to the beginning of that love affair, because I’m afraid to besmirch my reputation as the “gourmet” cook I’ve always claimed to be.  After all, the only broccoli I ever experienced on that Midwestern farm where I grew up was frozen, so how can I explain my great admiration except to confess that I probably loved the Velveeta melted on it more! 

Still there was something about those funny-looking green spears that I found wonderful; they looked like the trees I drew on my pictures of pointy-roofed houses with red birds flitting about and the big yellow sun’s rays beaming onto the whole picture from the left side.  And there was that moment when they were being cooked that they were the most glorious shade of green, almost luminous and bright, as though the vegetable combined both the green of nature and the yellow of the sun’s rays.

When I graduated from college, my one requirement for a place to settle was the availability of fresh broccoli in the neighborhood grocery, which pretty much meant I had to settle in suburban Kansas City on the Kansas side, and I could never move to the small town where I worked the bulk of my teaching career.  How I moved from frozen to fresh broccoli, however, is an event I can’t remember, but I suspect it had something to do with the number of  PBS cooking series I watched avidly in the seventies—several being resurrected now on the Cooking Channel which launched back on Memorial Day weekend this year.  My, it’s nice to hear Julia trill and gasp her way through reruns of the French Chef/Julia Child and Company!

At any rate, I’m figuring it was seeing Julia, or more likely Jacques Pepin, peel the stems of the spears which made light dawn for me.  “Well, hey, it isn’t just the tree part that would be good, then??”  And from there, I went to deciding I liked broccoli only blanched, and not steamed, and so I devised a blanching method that suited both my desire for an evenly cooked product and my tendency to categorize things.  I cut off the little “trees” at the top of the spear and broke them off from each other where they were joined, and, subsequently, placed them into piles on the cutting board, big and little.  Then I peeled the stems, placing them horizontal to the board so that I could cut straight down with my knife—faster and more efficient, and certainly not as ridiculous as that silly vegetable peeler!  Then it was either cutting the stem through horizontally or slicing it into chunks, depending upon how thick it was.  It was again probably Julia or Jacques who taught me to bring lots of water to the boil and salt it copiously, but the system of dropping in the stems first and letting them boil for a minute or two before I dropped in the “bigger trees” pile from my board is all my invention.  . .at least, I think it is!

When you do this, it’s important to get all the “sides” of the little tree parts into the water as it’s boiling because that’s what sets the color, and if you just let the pieces float, they won’t cook evenly.  Finally, you finish up, a couple of minutes later, with the “smaller tree” pile, and when one of those smaller trees can be pierced with a knife, it’s time to abandon the ship and get that vegetable drained, cuz it’s done. . .NOW!  It isn’t long cooking; you can’t mess around, and it really IS two minutes between drops of stems and tree piles.

I was so happy to discover that my daughter would eat raw broccoli stems when she was very small.  Somehow I felt that meant I was better than the average mother and blessed, as well.  So, it made perfect sense to raise her believing that one of the two vegetables on your plate at suppertime had to be green—another of my cardinal rules. She was raised believing it so firmly that when she was a freshman in college and her fellow band members held a potluck pre-Thanksgiving dinner to which she took mashed potatoes, she filled her plate, poised her fork, and then burst into anguished dismay, “I can’t eat this; there’s nothing green on the plate!”  Ahh, mother guilt. . .a great tool for raising children!

I am convinced, however, that even though there is a genetic tendency towards breast cancer in my family, I’m now 61, and I have never been diagnosed.  It’s all that fresh broccoli, I’m tellin’ ya!

You can dress up the broccoli after you’ve cooked it by shocking it in ice water immediately as you drain it and then save the pan in which you cooked it for reheating.  Just as you’ve pulled the chicken out of the oven (see #2 - The Protein Which Never Fails) to rest for its ten minutes, pour a bit of olive oil in the cooking pan, and let it heat for a minute while you smash a clove of garlic and throw it in to flavor the oil, actually peeling and chopping it if you want that much garlic flavor.   When you can feel a bit of heat rising from the oil in the pan, and particularly smell the garlic, throw in the drained broccoli and turn it fast in the oil, taking a couple of seconds to grind on some pepper or sprinkle in a pinch of red pepper flakes.  This is a particularly welcome technique for your broccoli spears at this year’s Thanksgiving dinner.  Peel the stems of whole broccoli spears as much as you can without tearing off flowerettes at the top.  Cut each spear of broccoli in half vertically, and use your biggest cooking pan so that you have plenty of water in which to cook the broccoli.  Salt the water liberally.  When you’re finished cooking—and pay attention so that you undercook and keep that glorious green—save the pan and clear off your cooktop to do whatever else you need to do there.  Ten minutes before you’re calling people to the table, do the oil reheat as previously described, and if you start a little earlier heating up the oil, you’ll have time to add some red bell pepper strips!  Talk about “green on the plate!”  You’ll have no problem feeling healthy as well as beautiful, and you certainly won’t feel guilty about not having eaten anything green at YOUR Thanksgiving Dinner!

Next time:  a meal planning guide 

#2 - The protein that never fails

In the fifth grade, I learned to bake the cookies because I wanted them, and I thought they tasted better slightly soft when pulled from the oven.  Along about the seventh grade, I prepared the “relish” plate at holiday dinners because I wanted to make sure the best part of the celery was served so that I could eat it; and, yes, there’s no doubt that I’m a control freak, but is there any other aspect of life where control is actually important than in what one eats?

Surely, I’m not alone in thinking this.  And the best part of the celery is the heart with those practically translucent yellow-green leaves, correct??

Those early cooking-to-eat experiences are why I am adamant that a cook needs to be satisfying only one person, first and foremost, and that person is her/himself.  I think this has always been my guiding philosophy, and because she said it better, I’m quoting from Jenni Ferrari-Adler’s introduction to another book I’d recommend, Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant:  Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone, (Riverhead Books, 2007) to wit:

“A good meal is like a present, and it can feel goofy, at best, to give yourself a present.  On the other hand, there is something life affirming in taking the trouble to feed yourself well, or even decently.”

Someone has to control what is served at your house for Supper, and it might as well be you.

The first component of any satisfying Supper, then, has to be protein, and sometimes it’s hard to get it in there if you don’t want a lot of it left over.  Take a pork roast, for example.  You spend all that time cooking it, and, indeed, it is comforting and yummy and so satisfying that you wonder why you don’t do this all the time.  And then the next day, you remember, because you’re faced with leftover pork in sandwiches for a week, at least, and that’s only IF you remember that it’s in the fridge!  That’s why I never learned to roast a chicken or to make Julia Child’s boeuf bourguignon.  I’m not fond of dark meat chicken. Leftover meat can’t be easily reheated without tasting leftover, and, furthermore, cold is not a satisfying temperature for food at Supper.  You need something hot, cooked for the occasion; after all, you’ve been waiting allllll day!

Back in my aforementioned days of cookie baking and raw vegetable tray fixing, cheese was Velveeta, and, thus, Campbell’s Tomato Soup and a grilled cheese sandwich could be “protein.”  Never mind that a simple look at the ingredient list of either product would have announced quite a different makeup.  The protein in our Supper was generally from our own cow or pig (we didn’t do chickens on our farm; nasty, pecking things), and there was a lot in the freezer.  Mom was a school teacher, and it wasn’t always practical to defrost and then prepare a major roast requiring a long braise in the oven.  Still, I grew up knowing that protein was the essential in the meal, so much so that when our family was once caring for my aunt’s wonderful vegetable garden and the sweet corn “came in,” I was so shocked that my mother prepared sweet corn at Aunt Elnora’s house and we ate it without giving one thought to the normal accompaniment of pan-fried hamburgers.  As we drove home that evening, I kept expecting to faint from the lack of protein in my body.     

It’s funny, then, that I had to wait until I came to Seattle to think of chicken as a solo option which can be multiplied as necessary to feed the masses at the Supper Table.  The Barefoot Contessa changed my life with chicken when she roasted skin-on, bone-in chicken breasts, almost as an afterthought to get chicken for her Chinese Chicken Salad:  http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/chinese-chicken-salad-recipe/index.html

That’s the link to the whole recipe, but the part I’ve used for several years now is just her preparation for the chicken, and cooking it with the bone on makes the most marked difference in the world.  The technique produces a moist piece of chicken to eat on the spot—serving it with roasted vegetables done alongside—or you can save half (because chicken breasts on the bone are enormous these days!) to slice for a cold lunch entrée.  I’ve dedicated a nonstick, quarter-size jelly roll baking sheet to be my chicken “roasting pan,” so that I don’t have to worry about how the pan looks when I can’t clean off all the dark, burned on chicken and olive oil goodness.

I think you’ll like this, and it’s not much work, and it might be the personal Supper Cook gift you need that keeps on giving. . .but not too long!

Next time:  The family green vegetable legend

The recipe:

Roast Chicken Breasts, Barefoot Contessa Style

A 35 minute effort

4 split chicken breasts (bone-in, skin-on), less than 8 ounces each

Olive oil, a half teaspoon for each breast

Kosher salt, a liberal pinch between your thumb and forefinger for each breast

Freshly ground black pepper, three hefty grinds for each breast

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Sprinkle the chicken breasts liberally with salt and pepper, a pinch of kosher salt and three grindings of pepper for each, and place them on a sheet pan.  Rub the skin side with olive oil.  Roast for 35 to 40 minutes, until the chicken is just cooked.  Set the pan aside and let the chicken rest for 10 minutes before slicing it to serve.  It can also be cooled further until handling is easier, and then remove the meat from the bones, discard the skin, and shred the chicken into large bite-sized pieces for use in salads or casseroles.  Saved in the refrigerator, it lasts about two days without tasting leftover, so use it fast.

#1

I’m a cook who believes in a meal, a family meal, the kind for which everyone comes to the table  and, by golly, they’d better enjoy themselves while they eat!  Everyone has always been happy to eat what I cook, but they’ve never been particularly interested in my method for getting it on the table, nor do they seem to appreciate, beyond how good the food is, the considerable meshing of time and effort that make my meals efficient as well as delicious. I think my talent is actually that, making it all come together, and so I’m launching a blog, in heavily-populated food blog Seattle, to explore that tenet. 

I hereby promise that if you keep checking back every two weeks, you’ll get another insight into maintaining an efficient kitchen and getting a meal on the table.

Since I moved from Kansas City to Seattle nine years ago, bringing my parents so that they could be local grandparents to my niece and nephew the way they were to my daughter as she was growing up in KC, I’ve been wrestling with “identity,” that kind of identity which earmarks one’s place in life, lets people categorize the talent you have and see if it helps them.  After all, we exist to help each other, in my book-of-life-as-it-should-be-lived, so I’ve spent 8 years now wondering where I was on that ladder. 

More specifically, I’ve been wondering who I’ll be after my parents are gone, because right now, my identity is closely tied with caregiving—thankfully, not on a live-in, daily basis, but, nevertheless, caregiving to parents.  About four years ago, I thought I had the answer.  I knew that one of my talents was cooking, and I had categorized myself as a “gourmet” cook for at least a decade before that, so I was primed to teach cooking.  After all, I’d been an English teacher and a librarian, and I clearly had a gift for teaching, as well as for getting a meal on the table, sometimes even in adverse circumstances, so I imagined myself teaching and planned how I’d do that and commissioned one of my daughter’s college colleagues to design the logo you see here.  I gave a few cooking lessons, never charging for them, because, after all, I was neither a culinary school graduate nor an expert on any type of cuisine.  And then, life happened, and I felt my contacts for free lessons run out, and I still couldn’t imagine charging anyone for this vast store of knowledge and instinct I seemed to possess.  

Why Supper Cook?  Supper is when the family gathers to be together after a day spread out across the world, and that is so whether or not the primary cook has left the house to work elsewhere during the day.  Supper is when you, as the cook, feel it’s time to start the prep work for the meal; you look out and the light has changed,  the sun moving down the sky the opposite of the way it streamed in your windows,  the birds chirping differently, than either did this morning. So, you pour yourself your evening drink, set out something that will serve as an appetizer to keep the wayward hands and queries out of your way while you cook, and then you cook, keeping in mind my first rule:  cook for yourself!

I cringe inwardly as I say this, because it sounds so selfish, particularly coming from a liberally guilt-ridden, but nevertheless, 80s feminist Baby Boomer with a WASP background.  But you won’t enjoy the process if there’s not something in it for you, so it actually doesn’t matter a whole lot that you’re cooking for kids who won’t eat anything but macaroni and cheese or someone with allergies.  You’re the one who needs to enjoy what goes on the table.  Eventually, you’ll make adjustments so that you can both please and provide the necessary for the other eaters, but if you don’t start with the idea that you’re cooking for you, it will never be any fun.  And it has to be fun, or there’s not any reason to do it.

This time, I think I’ll just share a good book which might make a difference for you, because it did for me, even though “Selfish Cooking” had already my ingrained philosophy for 20 years.   Look for What We Eat When We Eat Alone, by Deborah Madison and Patrick McFarlin (Gibbs-Smith, 2009), and read it with an eye turned to what pleases you in food, as did all of the people who responded to Madison when she asked them what they cook for pleasure and comfort.  You’ll discover what makes you tick in food—whether or not your only requirement is healthy food, or perhaps you need a starch to feel comforted and full, or maybe you just need your cooking result to be incredibly easy before you’ll make an attempt. 

Whatever you discover about yourself is fine, but adopt the stance that it’s all about you!  Nothing else matters.

Next time: my easy comfort protein which never fails.