Poppy Seed Chicken and death

I apologize. Right from the start. I will talk to you about Poppy Seed Chicken, one of the South’s greatest inventions. But first, death. In a funny way.

My husband is a lawyer and a few days ago he got a letter in the mail from a company that records your message to your loved ones to be left with your will and “enjoyed years after (your) death.” Really? Is that a good idea? Here’s my message to Mark: Hi, honey. Miss me yet? Have you fed the cats and cleaned the litter? How about the trash? I know you love the tall trash, the kind that spills out of the garbage can in the kitchen. Did you empty it? Are the doors locked? You know my OCD about locking the doors. Are you sure they’re locked? Check again. No, check three times. Hey, I have a great view of the house now and I think I see some cat vomit in the living room. Can you clean that up? Miss me? By the way, the mortgage is due.

So, Poppy Seed Chicken. There is no greater threat to public grooming than poppy seeds. You do not want to eat a poppy seed bagel at an important business meeting. Just as you’re about the seal the deal, you smile. Oh, God. And yet, we love our Poppy Seed Chicken. We serve it at potlucks, funerals and christenings. We just don’t smile much on those occasions.

Poppy Seed Chicken

1 supermarket rotisserie chicken

2 tablespoons butter

8 ounces sliced fresh mushrooms

2 cans cream of chicken soup

16 ounces sour cream

1 tablespoon poppy seeds

1 sleeve Ritz crackers

1/3 cup butter melted

Remove the chicken from the bones and shred it. Melt the butter in a sauté pan and cook the mushrooms until they have released all their juice and they are well browned. Reserve. In a large bowl, mix the chicken soup, sour cream, and poppy seeds. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Add the mushrooms and the chicken.

Pour chicken mixture into a 9-by-13 dish. Crush the crackers and mix with the melted butter. Sprinkle over the top of the chicken. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

 

 

 

 

 

Bacon pancakes

No, this is not a pancake with itty bitty pieces of bacon in it. This is a an entire strip of bacon surrounded by pancake batter.

Wednesdays are Bacon Days at the Community Resource Center. We will probably not live to regret this as we will die of coronary artery disease before regret has time to set in. However, bacon pancakes are worth the cost of dying young. Which,  of course, won’t happen to me, but could well happen to Betsy and Kim. You’ve been warned, girls.

So bacon pancakes are constructed thusly: Bake some bacon (400 degrees for about 15-20 minutes). Get some Bisquick pancake mix in the plastic jug. Add water. Shake. Pour over the bacon. Flip when bubbles appear. Serve with butter and real maple syrup. If I had known about this recipe when Noah was a boy he would be a Nobel Laureate by now.

What kind of bacon, you ask? You are asking that, correct? Well, I have recently learned that a lot of commercial bacon contains chemicals that give it that bacon taste. Bad. I hate learning about what actually goes in our food. Makes me have to ponder and worry. Hate pondering and worrying. So I am now buying organic bacon, dammit. Thick cut is better.

Try this. With really good bacon. It won’t change your life, but it will improve your disposition. If you don’t smile while you eat this, you’re brain dead.

Bacon Day

Every once in awhile, worlds collide and my work life and blogging life intersect. For those of you who don’t know, I run the Community Resource Center, a nonprofit that provides basic household necessities for people in need. But more importantly, we have instituted Bacon Day at CRC and with that comes the recipe for the single best reason to blow your diet: pig candy. By the way, if you want to see what we’re up to at CRC, please hop on over to the CRC blog, Two Chicks in a Warehouse. And now, Bacon Day.

Betsy, the creator of Bacon Day

Here at the world headquarters of the Community Resource Center we have declared Wednesdays to be Bacon Day.

By the way, it has come to my attention that I do not include information on the important work we do every day at CRC on this blog nearly enough so I will intersperse important information in this blog about Bacon Day.

Betsy actually thought this up. Who doesn’t like bacon? she asked. Just the thought of Bacon Day makes her smile.  So for the inaugural Bacon Day last week we decided to make the classic bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches. I borrowed Mark’s electric skillet that his mother gave him when he moved into his first apartment, oh, about 40 years ago and which still works perfectly fine because they made things better back in the day.

Important information: CRC just facilitated the donation of an entire office suite including cubicles, desks, filing cabinets and chairs to New Horizon, which assists people with developmental disabilities to become part of a productive workforce.  Because of the donation, New Horizons can take the dollars they would have spent to outfit an office and redirect them to their programs.

Of course, the proper bacon, egg and cheese sandwich must include very good bread, toasted, and then

Kim lovin' on a little bacon

liberally buttered. There must also be an ample amount of butter in the skillet to fry the eggs. Not a sandwich for dieters. And because I had cooked an entire package of bacon, there was extra bacon to snack on. Just to balance out the caloric excess of the whole enterprise, Betsy brought clementines.

Important information: The Mental Health Cooperative is opening a new Crisis Stabilization Unit and Intensive Intervention Center, which will serve a combined population of 3,000 people in need. CRC helped furnish those two centers. Horn tooting! Horn tooting! “We appreciate everything you (CRC) do for us (MHC),” wrote Della Baker of MHC.  “You do it well and are as excited to give, as we are to receive. Thank you all again for the good work you do for the non-profits of Nashville.”

So tomorrow is once again Bacon Day and I am bringing the ultimate, ultimate bacon treat: Pig candy!

Important information: The recipe!  You take your favorite bacon. Heat up your oven to 350 degrees. Take the  bacon and coat it with dark brown sugar. Put some foil on a cookie sheet with a rim and then put a rack on top if you have one. Put the bacon on the rack and bake it for about 20 minutes. That’s it! If you don’t have a rack, then you might have to turn it over once. Oh, and CRC distributes more than $1.5 million in new and gently used goods to more than 90 nonprofit agencies in Middle Tennessee every year.

Butter-roasted pecans

Thanksgiving Day, boys and girls, officially starts the beginning of the Season of Overeating, at least in the South. Can you count the ways we use cream cheese? No, you cannot. And the dairy cows run in fear to cower behind the barn this time of year because we are all in butter overload.

Cooking magazines always feature “healthy eating” recipes during this time of year. Why in the world would you want to do that? Show me a woman at a holiday party with carrot sticks on her plate and I will guarantee you she is on some kind of appetite suppressant. I well remember traveling to Bunny’s in Knoxville one year for Christmas and accompanying her to a dress shop where they were serving the patrons sausage balls. You have to have some kind of moxy to serve sausage balls to women trying to fit into a size 2 Christmas sweater. But those sausage balls were going like hotcakes.

Nuts are always part of a Southern holiday tradition. They crust cheese balls, find their way into hot dips and, of course, are a star ingredient in fruitcake. Yes, we are the people who actually like fruit cake. I have a theory about this. Back in the day, it was frowned upon for good Christian women to imbibe. However, if you are making fruitcake one of the requirements is that it be soaked in rum or bourbon and allowed to sit for several months before serving. No one ever questioned the baker’s devotion to the production of fruitcake. But I think it was just their way of getting a good snort, as my mother used to say.

So here is the Mayhew standard for beginning the holiday season: butter-roasted pecans. I usually make a batch up right before Thanksgiving and keep making them through New Year’s. They are addictive.

Butter-roasted pecans

1 pound pecan halves

3 tablespoons butter

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon pepper

Dash of Tabasco Sauce

Sea salt in a coarse grinder

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Melt the butter (I do this in the microwave using a coffee cup) and add the Worcestershire sauce, salt, pepper and Tabasco. Line a large rimmed cookie sheet with foil and mound the nuts in the center. Pour the butter mixture over the nuts and coat thoroughly, spreading them out into a single layer.

Bake for 10 minutes. Stir to redistribute nuts and bake another 10 minutes or until nuts are a golden brown. After removing them from the oven, sprinkle with coarse sea salt and stir one more time. Let cool completely before storing them in a glass jar.

Roasted acorn squash

There is nothing profound to say about acorn squash that I can think of. You are either a squash person or you are not. Mark is not. My husband sees no point in it whatsoever. He will eat a crookneck squash casserole every summer but that is only because the ratio of squash to cheese, butter and Ritz crackers is about 1 to 20. With the winter squashes, there is no disguising them. Whenever I present Mark with a beautifully roasted acorn squash, I get “the face.” You know, that look of slight disappointment. Oh, you made acorn squash. Joy…not.

But my love of acorn squash is unparallelled. And the preparation is almost always the same. Roast it. The first – and most dangerous – part of the roasting process is to cut the squash in half. This is not an easy proposition. A squash’s exterior is about as hard as a concrete sidewalk in the middle of January. Do not attempt to just hack at it. Acorn squash is round. It will get away from you very quickly. It may even fly off the counter and hit the cat. This is not what you want, of course.

My method involves a heavy knife and a hammer. Simply make a shallow slice in squash parallel to the stem and then whack the back edge of the knife with a hammer. Industrial cooking 101. Then scoop out the seeds and add the goodness. There are no measurements here. I don’t know how big your acorn squash is, do I? Smear the flesh with a goodly amount of butter. Then add in a tablespoon or so of brown sugar. And, just for good measure, drizzle a little real maple syrup on each half. (By the way, as someone who grew up on Log Cabin, and thought it was very tasty, I was shocked to find out a few years ago that it’s mostly high fructose corn syrup with a little maple flavoring added. Get the real stuff. It’s expensive, but it’s worth it.)

So then just pop the squash in a 400 degree oven for about an hour. You’ll know it’s done when a fork easily pierces the flesh.

Tomato sandwiches

Sometimes only a tomato sandwich will do. Like when you’ve had a raging summer cold for three days and you feel like cotton balls are stuffed between your ears. Like when the thought of actually cooking something requires far more energy than you can muster. Like when it’s still in the 90s and September is just so close, but right now turning on the stove seems an act of foolhardiness.

And that is why I am eating a tomato sandwich, a yellow tomato sandwich to be exact. So comforting. So familiar. So easy.

Everyone has their favorite way to make one. Some like them with soft white bread, slathered in mayonnaise and so juicy and loose you have to eat them over the kitchen sink. I like mine this way: Toast two pieces of bread, any kind, and then butter both sides. Slice the tomato and get rid of the seeds. Place the tomato slices so there is just one layer on the bread. Salt and pepper liberally and add a pinch of sugar. Put some mayonnaise on the other slice of bread that you have already buttered. Slice and serve.

Sometimes only a tomato sandwich will do. I’m going back to bed now.

 

On a desert island

So I have just finished making flat chicken and green noodles for the boy, who is home from college. I just love flat chicken, which is just chicken breasts pounded thin, coated in seasoned bread crumbs and fried in lemon juice, oil and a little butter. I also love green noodles, which are just thin spaghetti noodles tossed with pesto and Parmesan cheese.

But it got me to thinking about that old chestnut of a question: If you could have just one thing on a desert island, what would it be? I cannot choose one thing but I think it is entirely appropriate to pick one item from the four major food groups, at least as we see them here in the South. So here goes.

Vegetables: Macaroni and cheese. Yes, macaroni and cheese is a vegetable in the South. If you doubt this, just look at any menu at a Meat and Three and you will see macaroni and cheese listed every time.

Meat (or as every TV chef now refers to it, protein): Pig. Of course. What other animal provides you with so many different tastes? Bacon. Ham. Pulled pork. Ribs. Fatback. Yes, fatback. That may take this category into my next major food group.

Grease: This is a major food group in the South. Noah learned the answer to this question at an early age: What makes everything taste better? Grease. If I were on a desert island I could probably scare up a fish or two but what would I do with it? If I had grease, there would be no question. And since I have my pig already, I would have bacon grease and fatback.

Dairy: Butter. Does that count as dairy or grease? I’m a little confused on that one. I do not understand people who buy margarine. I just don’t get it. I think I have even converted Bunny on this question. My mother-in-law loves the Parkay squeeze bottle, but I have been over to her house enough lately that I have started sneaking butter into her icebox. This trip, I actually found a box of butter I did not put there. Good girl. But I digress.

So I have my mac and cheese, pork, grease and butter. I think that about covers it. If I ever end up on Survivor, I will be the only contestant to actually gain weight. I think I will go online right now and apply. Does wine count as the one luxury item every player gets to bring? Gosh, I hope so.

Lobster rolls

Oh, yes. What else is there to say?

Back before I got married, I did a lot of traveling by myself. I liked it. And one of my favorite places to go was Maine. Fly into the Boston airport, rent a car, drive an hour north and start hitting the lobster shacks all the way up the coast. Whole lobsters were, of course, the first object of the exercise – my favorite shack was in Kittery on the water and the menu included just three things: steamed lobster, clams and corn on the cob. Period.

But after a few (dozen) whole lobsters, I would then migrate to the lobster roll, probably the most decadent yet simple sandwich ever invented. It is comprised entirely of large chunks of lobster dressed in mayonnaise, salt and pepper (some places add in diced celery but that’s just completely unnecessary) nestled in a special bun that is brushed with butter and grilled. The bun resembles a hot dog bun but with the sides cut off.

I have been thinking about lobster rolls quite a bit lately although I don’t know why (or, perhaps, the better question is why not?) and completely gave in to temptation when I saw whole cooked “chicken” lobsters (one pounders) in the seafood case at my beloved Publix the other day.

I will now briefly digress to tell you that, yes, it had occurred to me that I could just buy a couple of live lobsters at any time and cook them. But then I remembered a rather unfortunate occurrence during my last foray into live lobster cooking. It involved scratching, shall we say. From the inside of the pot.

So, this was a better alternative. You can make a lobster roll using only tail meat and it would be perfectly acceptable, but adding the claw meat really takes it over the top. I suppose you could also make it with crab meat for a slightly different take. But the bun is really the thing and I can’t find lobster roll buns down here, which is where I think of myself in relation to Maine.  So what I did was buy a loaf of soft French bread and slice the sides off before applying liberal amounts of butter and popping them into the skillet. It was not authentic. But it was serviceable.

So, there’s no recipe here. Just a procedure. Procure your lobster meat and boil it, if not cooked, just until the shell turns red. Chop it into large chunks, add the mayonnaise, salt and pepper. Refrigerate for an hour or so. Then grill your bun, apply the lobster and devour.

Dad’s barbecue sauce

My dad had his first heart attack when I was 4 years old. It was not a momentous event for me, of course, because I didn’t know what a heart attack was. However, that was when Mazola Corn Oil entered our lives. Mazola Corn Oil, apparently, was the cure-all for heart conditions in 1956. My dad’s doctor instructed him to drink a shot glass of it every day. Can you imagine? Yuk. But Troy A. Chapin Jr. faithfully carried out the doctor’s instructions until the day he died, yes, of another heart attack but many years later.

Here I will digress because Mark found this fabulous photo of my dad and me at my debut. In the South, we are very keen on making our debuts. Generally speaking, debutantes are introduced to society at age 18. In the olden days, when a young lady made her debut it meant she was eligible for marital suitors. Of course, that whole thing has gone by the wayside and now it’s just an excuse to get dressed up in white gowns and allow your poor parents the privilege of shelling out massive amounts of money for parties and such. That is probably why my father looks rather shell-shocked here. He’s just adding up the dollar signs in his head. This photo was taken at Curtis Hixon Convention Center in Tampa, where I made my debut, where I danced an exquisite waltz with my dad and where my then-boyfriend, Tommy, was mortified that, by custom, he had to dance with my mother who absolutely hated him. Too much information. And that’s not fair. My mother was always careful to point out that we were not allowed to hate anyone. We could intensely dislike them.

I will now return to the subject at hand. Mazola Corn Oil. Since butter was no longer on the list of approved heart healthy foods (and, truth be told, we were a product of the 1950s and margarine was king at the moment anyway), my father was keen to incorporate this new wonder drug into his everyday diet.  I am most partial to oil and vinegar dressing for salads because that’s what I grew up eating.  There was rarely frying in our household, but when that happy occasion occurred  it was done with Mazola Corn Oil (even now, I say those three words as one).

But the best an highest use of Mazola Corn Oil was when my father grilled chicken. He came up with this wonderful tart combination of lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce and Mazola Corn Oil that was so clean and delicate and completely unlike chicken grilled with that other favorite of the 1950s, Kraft Barbecue Sauce.

The only detail in which my father cheated was leaving the skin on the chicken. It is a must. Don’t do this with skinless chicken breasts. My recipe returns butter to the dance because it’s better. The recipe that follows is for two well-proportioned chicken breasts, bone in. If you want to grill more chicken, just double or triple the recipe. The beauty of this sauce is that you can continually baste the chicken – and you should – because there’s no sugar in the sauce to burn.

Dad’s Barbecue Sauce

Juice of 2 large lemons

2 teaspoon’s Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon Tabasco sauce

½ teaspoon pepper

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon garlic powder

¼ pound butter

Combine all ingredients in a small saucepan and heat until butter is melted, stirring all ingredients to incorporate completely.

Compound butter

I am all about the compound butter. Being the thrifty person I am compound butter is a way to use up all the scraps and leftover bits of stuff you normally let sit in your icebox and go all limp and brown. You know what I’m talking about.

Parsley. Let’s just start with parsley. You have a recipe that calls for 2 tablespoons of minced parsley. Unless you steal some decorative sprigs off the salad bar at the Kroger you have to buy a whole bunch. What to do with the rest of it? I read that minced fresh parsley freezes beautifully. It doesn’t. I tried it and it took on an other-worldly hue of green that was not pleasant to observe. You can pretty much apply the parsley rule to any other fresh herb you buy. (I know, you are now saying: Catherine, just grow your own herbs. I know that. My house is entirely surrounded by shade trees and you don’t need to remind me that the only plant I can grow are hostas, which I hate.)

However, if you introduce butter into the equation, you can use up those bits of parsley and other herbs in a spectacular fashion. And the best thing about this is that there’s really no recipe, no wrong turn to take. Just mince everything up and mix it in with some soft butter. Then you put your compound butter on a sheet of plastic wrap and roll it into a log. Pop it in the freezer and you have compound butter anytime you want it and you have used up an entire bunch of parsley, which is almost unheard of. I am also very partial to adding minced shallots to mine. That’s another thing I buy for a single recipe and then have to figure out how to use the rest of them before they go bad.

What do you use compound butter for? I mix it in hot cooked rice or pasta. I top a grilled steak with a pat of it. Smear some on saltine crackers and then bake them at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes and serve them with soup. Melt some and toss with cubes of leftover bread. Again bake at 350 degrees until the cubes are crisp – homemade croutons. It would also be delicious on cornbread right out of the oven.

I fear this is going to turn out like my meatloaf recipe. I make the meatloaf so I can get the sandwiches the next day. I think I’ll have to find a parsley recipe now.