My $150 dinner

Tandy Wilson, in signature ball cap, and Ashley Christensen fixing us supper.

I am as cheap as they come. I revel in a $7.35 lunch for two at the Krystal. Fifty percent off of anything? I’m there. But once in awhile you just have to kick out the jams.

The Southern Foodways Alliance, of which I am a proud member, holds these Stir the Pot suppers around the South. They’re fund raisers for the SFA’s documentary film program. Watch one of the films here. I promise you it’s worth it.

So the Stir the Pot came to Nashville starring Chef Ashley Christensen of Poole’s Diner in Raleigh, N.C., ably assisted by Chef Tandy Wilson of City House (where the event was held) and Chef Tyler Brown of the Hermitage Hotel’s Capitol Grill. Yes, my cheap self shelled out $300 for Mark and I to gluttonize ourselves. I do not believe gluttonize is a word but it should be. And it was worth every mouthful.

So without further delay, here’s the menu:

Snacks:

Hook’s 3-year Cheddar pimento cheese

Oyster stew with vermouth and turnip

Cornmeal fried green tomatoes with roasted tomato slaw

Chicken liver pate with whipped honey and Fallot Dijon (I had to look up what that was – it’s mustard with a pedigree)

Dinner:

Wood-roasted asparagus with frissee, beets, Chapel Hill Creamery Calvander (a cheese) and tarragon emulsion

Crispy N.C. softshell crab with sunburst tomato and marinated white acre peas

Rabbit confit pizza with Carolina ramps, pickled carrots, and black pepper aioli

Slow-cooked flank steak with oyster mushrooms, macaroni au gratin, and broccoli raab in vinaigrette

Dessert:

Warm cornmeal strawberry shortcake

Warm cornmeal strawberry shortcake with Cruze’s Dairy buttermilk anglaise and rhubarb jam.

This is more food than I eat in three days, folks. But you know what? I’ll remember every bite. And do you know what? The next day this is exactly what I ate: a package of cheese crackers. That’s how full I was from the night before.

This is so decadent in these times of trouble, spending $300 on dinner. But here’s why it’s worth it. If

The salad and that tarragon emulsion

you appreciate food, you appreciate it at every level from bacon-wrapped crackers to pimento cheese to a dinner like Stir the Pot. But Stir the Pot takes it up a notch. You taste things you’ve never tasted before. I practically licked the tarragon emulsion off the plate. The oyster stew with vermouth and turnips? One of our dinner companions said she hates oysters and she ate every smidge of it. Oh and let’s just wax poetic for a second about the

Flank steak, macaroni au gratin (that would be mac and cheese taken to a whole new level) and broccoli raab

warm cornmeal strawberry shortcake. This was the last thing on the menu, after eight other offerings. I cleaned my plate.

Recipes? I have no idea. I could spend three years trying to figure out exactly what was in all this stuff and never come close. That’s why it’s worth $150. I can cook. I can cook damn well. But I can’t come close to that dinner.

By the way, I am making bacon-wrapped crackers right now for a Community Resource Center event. They are not worth $150 but I’ll bet I could get $5 a cracker for them.

Welcome Happy Morning…the end of Lent

In the Episcopal church, especially in our Episcopal Church, St. Paul’s, we always greet Easter morning by belting out a soulful rendition of  “Welcome Happy Morning.” Father Bob can’t get enough of that song. It just kind of sets up the whole service of joyful worship and, not incidentally, it marks the end of the 40-day season of repentance and fasting known as Lent.

Happy morning, indeed, because this is Hamburger Day. Every year, someone asks me what we’ve having for Easter dinner, imagining baked ham or roasted leg of lamb. “We’re having hamburgers,” I say. “At Five Guys.”

Every year I give up hamburgers for Lent. I adore hamburgers. I am like Wimpy in the Popeye cartoons, the character that ferociously downed hamburgers but couldn’t pay for his habit. “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” he would plead.

So this morning, after the 8:45 service, we headed to Five Guys. It is apparent that eating hamburgers was not a religious experience for most of the diners because they were dressed in t-shirts and shorts. Heathens. Oh, I’m sorry. Maybe they were all Jewish. Then again, probably not. It’s Passover and I’m pretty sure Five Guys is not kosher. Druids. They were probably Druids. Whatever.

You know how it is when you deny yourself something and the deadline for ending your fast draws nearer and nearer? You just want that forbidden thing all the more. For the past week, I’ve imagined hamburgers all day long. I’ve superimposed them over the faces of my friends.

A Five Guys burger with sauteed onions, mushrooms, lettuce and mayonnaise. Oh, yes. That’s what I ordered. I was tempted to tell the clerk at the cash register of this momentous occasion, my first hamburger in 40 days, but he was wistfully looking past me at the line of Druids still waiting to order so I just took my order slip, No. 71, and moved on to the Diet Coke dispenser. By the way, Mark and I were the first people in line. How is it we’re No. 71? I don’t get that.

Bliss. That’s all I can tell you. Worth waiting for. Worth dreaming about. Worth giving up because getting them back is so sweet.

Beef short rib pizza

I have nothing profound to say about this except that it’s amazing what you can put together from bits and pieces and end up with something that gets the ultimate complement from Mark: “I’d have this again.”

The short rib pizza is a prime example. I’d made braised beef short ribs one night a couple of months ago and I couldn’t fit all the ribs in the dish. So I froze the one rib that couldn’t jump in the pool with the rest of his cousins. One solitary short rib. What in the heck do you do with that?

Pizza is what’s for dinner when I am idea challenged. We always make our own. Ball of pizza dough from Trader Joes or my beloved Publix. Almost never tomato or pizza sauce. I just think that’s admitting creative pizza-making defeat. Sometimes pesto sauce, sometimes chow-chow or sometimes just olive oil and herbs. And then whatever I have on hand. Which, on the night Noah came home from college for spring break, was a solitary short rib, some grated Monterrey Jack, some onions and green peppers.

If you’ve never braised a short rib, here’s how. First, go to Costco. They have the best short ribs. Those puny things in the grocery store will not feed a cat on a diet. Salt and pepper the rib and throw it in a shallow dish, add some beef stock if you have it or even water if you don’t. If you have a can of diced tomatoes, so much the better. Throw those in. You don’t need to brown the short rib first. It, in the final analysis, won’t make that much difference. Trust me on this. I’ve tried it both ways.  Cover the dish with foil and put it in a 320 degree oven until it’s tender. This could take a few hours so plan ahead. It is done when the meat falls apart.

What I did to make the pizza sauce was to merely take the juices the short rib had braised in and reduced them down to a thick syrup. And my boy had the brilliant idea to make a stuffed crust, so he cut some matchstick-sized slices of cheese and folded the dough over them.

So here’s the thing, as Alec Baldwin would say (and if you haven’t listened to his new podcast, you should), it doesn’t take more than a bit of imagination to make a meal out of bits and pieces. Use the short rib idea  or don’t. Maybe you just have ground beef and Velveeta. Make a cheeseburger pizza. I guarantee you it will be better than anything that comes in a box.

By the way, “I’d have that again” translated into zero leftovers. Made Momma happy.

Grilled meatloaf with garbage can mashed potatoes

Oh, you want this. You so want this. Smoky meatloaf and mashed potatoes studded with all the good stuff. You want it so badly, you need to hop on over to the Char-Broil site and take a look-see. I promise you will not be disappointed.

For those of you new to this blog, I am also a Char-Broil All Star Blogger and the good folks at Char-Broil prefer that my blogs for them are exclusive to their site. So get on over there. And leave a comment! Makes me look good to the guys or gals in the front office. Hey, I want a front office. What is that exactly, anyway?

Burger love

We are only seventeen days into Lent.  Twenty-three days to go. And all we Episcopalians can do is talk about what we’ve given up. It’s a source of constant conversation. Kind of like the weather.

“How about that storm last night and sure wish I had some chocolate…”

I have one friend who has given up steaks and red wine. The first thing he does after Easter Sunday is go to the Palm and order a big ribeye and a glass of red. I have another friend who’s given up meat entirely. His favorite place is Chick-fil-A and, sadly for him, there will be no chicken sandwich on Easter morning because they are closed on Sundays. But I will be rewarded on Easter Sunday because I have given up hamburgers and I believe somewhere in the greater Nashville metropolitan area there will be a hamburger joint open.

But now, I am obsessing over hamburgers. Oh, an ode to Krystal right about now. These little puppies were extremely tasty: Krystals with barbecue sauce and fried onion rings. So wrong and yet so right. Is it unnatural to take photos of your hamburgers so you can gaze upon them lovingly during Lent? It probably is. But the packaging says it right there. Special. They are special. If you don’t live in the South you will never know how special they are. Particularly at three in the morning. After the possibility that you may have been slightly overserved. A sackful of Krystals will put you right.  Hardee’s Blue Cheese Steakhouse Burger:  blue cheese, Swiss, A.1. steak sauce, mayonnaise, crispy onion strings, lettuce and tomato. Oh, Lord, please don’t let this special go away until after Lent is over. Please?

And then there’s the Juicy Lucy.  I am about to faint. Genuine, Grade A, processed American cheese sandwiched between two beef patties and grilled to perfection so that when you bite into it the cheese oozes out the middle. On a sesame seed bun. I have gained five pounds just thinking about it.

O.K. Get a grip. Just twenty-three days to go. Avert your eyes when you pass the Burger King. I can’t see you. I can’t see you. I will go make a salad now. Salads are just like hamburgers only greener. And less greasy. One of the downsides of salad.

Twenty-three days to go. Twenty-three. Sigh.

Meat stadium

Well, I just had to smile at this. Barry Martin, my amigo at Char-Broil, e-mailed me about his staff building a meat stadium for the Super Bowl. This is not something I would ever attempt as merely consuming the cocktail weenie football players would send me into a coma. However, I admire the creativity and silliness of the whole thing and was very gratified to see at the end of this video that the staff actually ate the thing. And it looked good. If you’re having massive amounts of friends over for a Super Bowl party, you might want to attempt the meat stadium.

As for me, I will be at the concession stand getting another glass of Chardonnay.

Homemade corned beef hash

Corned beef hash is such a Northern thing. I don’t know why.

I realized this a few years ago at a church breakfast. We arrived and went down the food line and there was corned beef hash. I was instantly intrigued, but everyone around me was decidedly not. You could practically read their minds: “What is that strange pink substance? It looks like dog food.” Nobody ate the corned beef hash, which was a very unchristian thing to do.

Come to think of it now, you can hardly find a corned beef in the supermarket. It’s as though they stock them for the people who move here from Michigan or New York, who are made fun of when they pick one up. “Yankee, Yankee!!!” You can almost hear the taunts. So I hope I’m not chastised when I admit that I love corned beef and the resulting hash from the leftovers. Nothing is easier to cook.

For the corned beef, you just put it in a casserole dish, add a bottle of beer and enough water to come halfway up the meat and stick it in a 320 degree oven for a few hours until the corned beef is tender. I don’t add cabbage or potatoes to the casserole dish because they come out mushy. Oh, oh, another very non-Southern thing to say. We generally love our mushy vegetables. They’re going to drum me out of the corp.

So after you have your first round of corned beef, then you get to make the hash. The best part. If you want to gild the lily, add a poached egg on top. Dang it. Another Northern thing. They’re going to take away my license or my tub of lard. I think I’m going to have to eat this in the closet.

Corned Beef Hash

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 cups Yukon Gold potatoes, cut into small cubes

½ yellow onion, diced

Salt and pepper to taste

2 cups cooked corned beef, diced

1 tablespoon butter

Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add to potatoes and sauté for about 10 minutes, flipping them as they turn brown. Add the onion, salt and pepper to taste, and continue sautéing until the potatoes and onions are both golden brown and potatoes are cooked through. Add the corned beef and blend thoroughly. Finish by stirring the butter into the mixture.

(Note: To just make this extremely Northern, we always have English muffins with our corned beef hash.)

Empanadas

Ya’ll are such party poopers. Not one single person commented on my brilliant kale post, except a guy in Reno who saw it on my Facebook page and simply wrote: “Kale? Your Southern roots die hard.”

“Well, that kale post won’t go down in history as your greatest,” Mark said supportively. Thank you, dear. How kind of you. That’s alright. More kale for me.

Now then, how about a lovely pocket of dough stuffed with ground beef, raisins and olives? What do you think about that? Not displaying my Southern roots? How about the fact that empanadas come from South America. And the first time I ever had them was in Charlotte, North Carolina, while I was renovating my kitchen. What an ordeal that was.

So I bought my first house, a 1929 bungalow, in Charlotte. The former owners were taxidermists. You don’t want to know, but it took three weeks to fumigate the house. The kitchen was a disaster. And so I decided to renovate it. I hired a construction company that said it would take about four weeks. The first day of demolition I came home to the construction foreman who offered that we had a little problem. “What?” I say. “Look up,” he says. I look up. The entire ceiling is gone. When the workmen started removing the cabinets, the ceiling fell in. Four weeks became three months. Three months of me keeping all my food in a cooler. Since wine took up about three fourths of the space, I had to get take-out a lot. Which is why I found empanadas at a gourmet take-out place nearby.

If you think the combination of ground meat, cinnamon, raisins and olives is strange, just give it a chance. It’s a standard flavor combination in much of the world. Don’t like green olives? Use black ones or leave them out entirely. I don’t care, you kale haters. Your taste is already questionable to me.

Empanadas

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

½ cup red onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, diced

½ teaspoon cinnamon

½ pound ground chuck

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon smoked paprika

1 tablespoon tomato paste

1/3 cup chopped tomatoes

1/3 cup golden raisins

1/3 cup chopped green olives

1 ball pizza dough

1 egg, beaten

Heat the vegetable oil in a skillet over medium high heat. Add the onion, garlic and cinnamon. Cook for about a minute, and then add the ground chuck and salt. Saute until the meat is browned. Add the tomato paste, tomatoes, raisins, and olives. Combine thoroughly, reserve and let cool completely.

Divide the pizza dough into four equal portions. Roll each into a circle. Fill half the circle with ¼ of the filling. Brush the edges of each circle with the beaten egg. Fold and crimp the edges to seal in the filling.

Put the empanadas on a baking sheet and brush tops with remaining beaten egg. Bake at 425 for about 20 minutes or until the empanadas are golden brown.

Swedish meatballs

That boy is gone again. Back to college. He did not even look back as he drove down the driveway. He did not even wave one last time. He will not remember to text me when he gets there and I will watch the clock relentlessly to assess what time he should get there, give it another 45 minutes and then call him.

I think I’ll have a drink. Be right back.

There now. Just a wee glass of Cabernet. It’s five o’clock somewhere. Not here. But somewhere. I will get to the Swedish meatballs in a moment. After I wallow a bit more. Such an unattractive trait, wallowing. Parting is such sweet sorrow.

I think I’ll play a little World of Warcraft. I started playing this stupid game because of my boy, so we could communicate while he was away. He stopped (wisely) and I am now addicted to my Night Elf Mage and Dwarf Death Knight. Yes, you all had better watch your p’s and q’s or I’ll send Denholm the Death Knight after you. He’s heavily armed, even if he only reaches your knees. A little gratuitous violence and looting will make me feel better. Did I tell you that Noah once rang up an $800 phone bill calling his friends from World of Warcraft? He said he didn’t realize long distance costs money.

Okay. The wine is mellowing things out a bit. Blurring the edges.  Meatballs. Let’s speak of meatballs. He ate all of them. Noah ate all of them. Actually, that’s not true. He ate all but four of them, which I took to work. Resentment. Maybe if I work up just a little resentment. Over meatballs. How pathetic.

Seriously, I was on a comfort food kick over the holidays and remembered how much I adore Swedish meatballs. With the lingonberry jelly, of course. The recipe I used is from the Food Network Magazine, which published an approximate match to the famous Swedish meatballs at IKEA. Of course, we in backwater Nashville do not have an IKEA so I have no idea why they would be famous for meatballs when they sell furniture. But apparently they are. Here’s the link.

The meatballs and the New Year’s Day pork loin sliders were by far Noah’s favorites over the holidays. The meatballs are seriously addictive. He wanted more to take back to school, but I ran out of time after I made the potato salad, tuna salad, pesto pasta, and meatloaf that he also requested. Maybe I’ll make some now. And send him a photo. Ha, ha. I have Swedish meatballs and you don’t. That’s so immature.

Stop it. I think I’ll go play WoW now. Get into a dungeon group with three anonymous 14-year-olds and just rip it. And watch the clock.

 

Moroccan Ground Beef

That boy is home again. How do I know beyond the fact that the washing machine has been going nonstop for the last three days? Because the refrigerator, once again, fills up and empties out on a daily basis. I cannot keep up. First, it’s just him catching up on ingesting as much home cooking as his bean pole body can handle. Then his friends come sniffing around and they’re hungry, too. What do they do when Noah’s away at school? They must starve because they practically unhinge the refrigerator door as soon as they get to the house.

I may sound like I’m complaining but I’m really not. Who could object to the adoration of the multitudes as they line up, fork and knife in hand, to decimate my larder? Locusts. They are like locusts with piercings and the occasional tattoo.

There are three requirements that must be met to dine at the Mayhew household. The first is that you must make eye contact. You’d be amazed at the kids who don’t. If I can’t tell what color your eyes are, no soup for you. The second is that you must try everything. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to eat the rest. But you have to try it. I fell in love with one kid who had supper with us one night and was forced to try Brussels sprouts. He’d never had them. At the end of the meal, he said: “Mrs. Mayhew, I ate the Brussels sprouts. Both of them.” Hooray for an adventurous eater! One more sprout than I had required.

The third requirement is that after you dine at the Mayhews one time you are no longer a guest and must help with the dishes. The rule in my kitchen is that whoever cooks doesn’t clean up and since I am the cook about 99 percent of the time that always works in my favor. Most kids willingly adhere to this requirement but every once in awhile I encounter a laggard. One kid, when presented with a dish towel, said, “I’m sorry but I’m dyslexic.” You’re dyslexic? Really? That’s the best you can do? No more soup for you.

So since I’m cooking for 10 or 20, economy of time and money is of the utmost importance. This ground beef dish takes about 20 minutes to make and is different enough because of the Middle Eastern spices to perk up the taste buds of even the pickiest eater. Sadly, I have encountered very of them. Except on fried chicken liver night. Which I do intentionally from time to time just to catch a break.

Moroccan Ground Beef

2 teaspoons vegetable oil

1 medium onion, chopped

2 carrots, cut into rounds

1 pound ground chuck

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 teaspoon cumin

1 teaspoon curry powder

½ teaspoon smoked paprika

Salt and pepper to taste

1 cup beef broth

1 tablespoon flour

1 15-ounce can chickpeas, drained

½ cup chopped apricots

½ cup golden raisins

Heat the oil in a skillet and sauté the onion and carrot until tender. Add the ground chuck and continue cooking until the meat is well browned. Add the cinnamon, cumin, curry, paprika, salt and pepper and combine thoroughly. Whisk the flour with the broth and add it to the ground beef along with the chickpeas, apricots and raisins. Serve with couscous.