Recipe Reduction 4...3...2...1

Open-faced Greek Omelet
by The Mediterranean Dish

Not bad and could be easily prepared in the 15 minutes they suggested. Slice tomatoes into a skillet with the barest dusting of olive oil, sprinkle with minced garlic. When soft, add a little cheese (I used queso blanco not that nasty feta stuff), then pour on eggs beaten with baking powder, paprika, dill, coriander and salt. Plus fresh mint leaves, which I did not have. Cook for a minute and then slap it under the broiler to finish the top.

With fresh, ripe garden tomatoes and the fresh mint, this could be heavenly. Mine was prepared with those nasty pink acidy things from the supermarket. Wish I'd sprinkled them with a bit of sugar along with the garlic.

Aside: I'm not trying to be all Nero Wolfe about this, but I'm beginning to think garlic powder has no place in my kitchen. I just returned from a visit to a friend's house where it's just about the only seasoning used, and it seems to add a funny aftertaste to everything.

My stuffing recipe changes every year, but it always involves onions and celery stewed in butter; cornbread and toasted wheat bread; lots of seasoned broth with bits of meat in it, poultry seasoning, rubbed sage, and thyme.  I should be charitable and offer to bring the dressing next year.

Rio Arriba Baked Beans
developed by the Bean Education and Awareness Network (B.E.A.N.)

These are really good. There's just something special about putting sugar on beans...remember the Shaved Ice with Beans on the North Shore of Oahu? No relation to this, of course, but magnificent.

Plus i have a weakness for baked beans. This is a good recipe, despite it calling for beer--I hate wasting good beer on a recipe--and of course the sugar is a given. I didn't spend money on "sun dried tomatoes packed in oil" but instead used some of the garden tomatoes I dried in the oven last year. Lovely things!  But next time, I must insist on peeling them.  The recipe didn't say to, but I know better.











Temple Soup

What a winner to be the next-to-last recipe of the set! This stuff is hearty and wondrous.  And strangely contains no garlic, no onion, and no ginger!  Is it possible?

It's a vegetable soup with tofu, butternut squash (I used sweet potatoes), carrots, white potatoes, daikon, and shitake mushrooms. Stir-fry the in a little oil until they're browning and delicious, then add edamame, water, mirin and soy sauce. Also a bit of seaweed. When it's all simmered soft, add spinach, white miso paste and little more soy sauce. It was already so close to perfection that I considered leaving out the extra soy sauce, but it seemed to belong there.

Whatever the reason, it has a very filling, satisfying body to it. 

If the last recipe turns out suckish, I may rearrange the results and put this one at the end.




 

Ginger Pork #1
by norecipes.com

How do I say this, Good! But I'll not likely make it again. Indecisive, no?

The marinade was tasty, but overpowering. Ginger, miso, sake and sugar. But nowadays my favorite way to have pork is to cook it with just a light marinade to keep it juicy, then dip it in a spicy Korean barbeque sauce.

But if you like a caramelized, tangy crunch to your pork, go with this one. Good.












#0

It's over! It's over!  Recipe Reduction is over!

No more cooking, no more books, no more husband's dirty looks.

Ruth Reichl's Hash Browns

I know that my goal of 199 recipes ended at #1, but I threw this one in as a companion to the pork.  Plus, she made it sound so tasty in Garlic and Sapphires.

It was a failure, of course. I can cook really good raw-fried potatoes. Good as Mom's, IMHO. But my hashbrowns were a sad failure.

She called for 8-10 small waxy potatoes but I'd pulled up the wrong recipe and bought three gigantic russets. If I'd cooked only two of them, I think the proportion of potato to butter might have been correct. As it was, they were underdone after almost twice the cooking time and didn't have a brown, crusty exterior. To add insult to failure, my husband put margarine on them.

I'm not upset. No more cooking stupid recipes!  I'm free!!!!!

Gardening in my Roots, a winter bonus

Last fall I planted a row with radishes, carrots, turnips, and daikon radishes. I don't think a single radish or carrot appeared, but the turnips and daikon were doing fine--until the deluge. All through the dry months it rained, frequently and heavily. I stopped even walking (sloshing through the mud) out to look.

When I finally ventured out last week, I saw that most of the turnips had disappeared but one big clump of them were still green-topped and alive. Not exactly large, but big enough to hope for roots. And there were about eight plants in the daikon radish bed, four of which turned out to actually be daikon. I have no idea what the others are but I'll leave them alone and not disturb any more by tugging them out of the ground. They don't look like any weeds of my acquaintance, or any vegetable plant either. Maybe they'll fruit and feed some birds.

So here's the year-end harvest of glory:

 

Recipe Countdown #6-5

Mapo Tofu
by Marc Matsumoto at norecipes.com

It was supposed to be a 'blazing hot' dish but my substitutions--crushed red pepper for the Szechuan peppercorns and miso for the doubanjiang--ruined any chances of that. I meant to use dried red peppers from the garden but got in a hurry; for the doubanjiang I should have substituted that red chili-garlic paste. Not authentic but still tasty.

Which is what I can say about the dish. Not authentic but tasty and, of course, a hundred times better than what I can get at the Chinese restaurant. Sigh.

Fruit-Nut Balls
from A Homemade Life

If you like dried figs, apricots, prunes and cherries, plus walnuts, powdered sugar and dark chocolate, you might like these.  They're not bad at all.  But for me, I'd rather just mix the fruit, nuts and chocolate chunks together in a bowl and eat them one piece at a time.  Because now it all just tastes like chocolate (who was that who said chocolate is an overbearing beast?  The Tipsy Baker?). But I want to taste the figs and apricots and prunes and cherries.

Best memoir of the year

In Pieces
by Sally Field

Wow. Wow. Wow. I was bowled over from page one, or should say line one since I listened to the audio book read by the author. If her life was a can of spaghetti then  writing this memoir was like ripping the top off with a can opener and dumping it all out on the table.  Sauce, noodles and little chunks of meatlike product. All out.

Her career was equally fascinating with her personal life. I never knew Gidget only lasted one season; I never guessed how much she hated the idea of playing a chirpy little flying nun in a world where deep problems were never addressed and all the trivial disasters could be solved in a half hour minus commercials. Also I never guessed what a career suicide it was to be identified with such a well-known character and how hard she had to work to come back and be Sybil or Norma Rae.

Recipe Reduction Countdown #7

The bread with wheat germ
from  Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads

Okay, I boasted I could make bread. That needs to be corrected:
I can make white bread. This Sunday I attempted a loaf of mixed whole wheat flour and bread flour. The first rising was phenomenal--the dough was strong and springy as I split it in halves to fill the two bread pans. It was beautifully brown, too.

But during the second rising I got busy with other stuff and left it too long. The larger of the two spilled over the sides of the pan and fell in the center; the smaller simply drooped. Not drastically--they still looked like bread--but not with that lovely rounded top you would expect.

Then during baking they started to burn on top more than ten minutes before the recommended baking time. I pulled one out but left the other in for the full time, and it was distinctly black on top. Oddly enough, once you cut off an inch at the top, the one with the full cooking time tasted better.

Texture on both is great and they slice well. It's certainly edible, but problematic. This time, I blame the recipe.

Recipe Countdown at last 9...8

Butternut Squash and Black Bean Tostadas
I liked the results, but nowadays, recipes like this rub me the wrong way.  Their butternut squash comes pre-cubed in a bag; the beans come from a can.  So I cheated--I whacked a butternut squash in half, scraped out the seeds and baked it in the oven until soft. I presoaked a cup of black beans and threw them in the slow cooker with onion, garlic and cumin.

But the idea was good and the results were great.  It's a keeper. I doubt if I'd bother with a recipe next time.

Chinese Inspired Chicken Noodle Soup

Oh, my. I can't think of enough bad things to say about this recipe.  Here are the simple facts. 

I don't care how good it tastes, the recipe is stupid.  You can't cook a chicken and then "remove chicken pieces" from the broth.  It was a whole chicken and it fell to pieces. What about all the little tiny bones that fall out of the meat?  Were they somehow magically going to hold together so I can dip them out? Impossible.

It was okay, tastewise, but not special enough for the aggravation of trying to dip all those little bones out. I'll go back to the normal approach--cook, take the meat, cook the bones some more then strain the broth.

Here was somewhere but not quite here

Here is Where
Discovering America's Great Forgotten History
by Andrew Carroll

I wonder sometimes if editors suffer fatigue when reviewing long books. Is 462 pages long? I think it is, although I've read longer ones. And I suspect it is difficult to sustain the sharp attention to detail needed for editing such a lot of pages.

if so, editor fatigue might explain why I started this book with such enthusiasm but had to force myself to finish it. The last few chapters seemed to cover interesting topics--Daniel Boone's grave, which might or might not be in Frankfort, Kentucky; the current whereabouts of the 200 official copies of the Declaration of Independence; the source of the 850,000 unidentified and unclaimed bodies on Hart Island;.... But I lost interest at some point and the book failed to draw me back in.

Or possibly as the book took shape the author took fewer notes on his journeys to the places, so he was left with just the research materials. I admit to being more interested in reading how a place was discovered, how it's significance was determined, and how it looks now--rather than just the historical facts of its existence.

Here's how one of the stories starts.

My elation is tempered by the fact that I don't exactly know where I'm going.... I have old photos of a relevant site in Springville, just south of Provo, but the area has changed drastically since the 1970s. When I called around before coming to Utah, no one I spoke with from this area--librarians, town officials, real estate agents--key the specifics. Granted, the crime took place about forty years ago, but it's not often that someone carrying half a million dollars jumps out of a plane over one's town.

He goes on to relate the facts of the skyjacking, then his attempts to find someone who can tell him where the man landed. He finds someone who remembers and they tell him where to go. He then finishes the history of the crime and the guy who did it. But when he gets to the site--now an empty field behind a construction zone--dusk has fallen and there's nothing to see. End of story.

See my disappointment?  They weren't all like that, but just enough to make me feel like he could have written them without ever walking out his doorway.