Giada’s Italian-style grilled steak

So I am thumbing through my People magazine yesterday. I am devoted to People magazine, although it is starting to lose some of its luster because there are now way too many stories about ordinary people losing weight. I don’t want to read about ordinary folks in People magazine, especially if they are on a diet. I want to read about deranged celebrities trashing hotel rooms and the preparations for Prince William’s wedding.

However, I turn to page 103 and see right there a recipe from Giada de Laurentiis for rib-eye steaks with smoky arrabiata sauce. And it says that the recipe is one of the reasons Giada’s husband asked her to marry him. Really? Steak with what amounts to spaghetti sauce? Is that even a good idea?

But I trust Giada de Laurentiis. I have two of her cookbooks and she has never steered me wrong. In fact, a few of her recipes are now a regular part of my repertoire. I cannot live without her lemon spaghetti and her marinara sauce is the basis for my award-winning (at least in my house) spaghetti sauce.

It’s been cold and drizzly here and all of us in Middle Tennessee are slightly more than a  little depressed so I decided to splurge and get some steak and just see how well this recipe works out.

Oh, my God. I rarely invoke the Almighty’s name when it comes to food, but this steak and arrabiata sauce is unbelievably delicious! I mean we barely got some on a plate because we were so busy just dipping the slices of steak into the sauce pot. I just don’t know what else to say. It was that good.

The sauce recipe makes more sauce than you’ll need for the steak, unless you are tempted to just drink it (as we were). But the leftover sauce would be just dandy with some pasta or on a homemade pizza. Or chilled as a cocktail with a little vodka. OK. Maybe not the last one.

 

Giada’s Rib-Eye Steaks with Smoky Arrabiata Sauce

1 3-inch serrano pepper

1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes

1 small onion, coarsely chopped

2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed

1 tablespoon capers, drained, rinsed and coarsely chopped

1 tablespoon sugar

2 ½ teaspoons smoked paprika

1 tablespoon kosher salt, plus extra for seasoning

2 one-pound ribeye steaks, each about 1-inch thick

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 ½ teaspoon kosher salt

½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Remove stem and half the seeds from pepper; coarsely chop. Pulse pepper and next 7 ingredients in a food processor until mixture is chunky. Bring tomato mixture to a boil over medium heat; reduce heat and simmer 25 minutes or until thickened. Salt to taste. Cover and keep warm.

Heat grill pan or skillet over medium-high heat or preheat grill to 350-400 degrees. Drizzle each side of steak with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Grill 5-6 minutes on each side for medium-rare. Cover steaks and let stand 5 minutes. Slice steaks across the grain into ¼-inch slices and serve with sauce.

Salmon patties

Ya’ll are going to have to forgive me here, but I led a deprived childhood. There were no salmon patties in Illinois. I did not even know about them until we moved to the South. But I got here as quick as I could because somehow I just knew there were salmon patties in my future.

This was the cheap go-to meal of Mark’s childhood. His family grew up without a lot of money, but canned salmon was always accessible. In the foodie world of 2010, canned salmon may seem an abomination. But in the 1950s, it was cheap and a good form of protein. And you know what? It’s still on the supermarket shelves which means that more than a few people like it. Now Spam is also still on supermarket shelves and that’s a whole other story. I just never could cozy up to Spam. A friend of mine used to make sushi with it but that’s because she’s from Guam and they were all about the Spam after World War II and it remains so to this day. Actually all of the Pacific is in love with Spam, including Hawaii. And that’s a good thing because it’s probably kept the Spam company afloat.

But I digress.

Now you have to admit this looks pretty tasty, doesn’t it? The key is to make the patties so they will hold together while you fry them. The amount of breadcrumbs you use as a binder is variable. Just make sure you use enough to keep those puppies from falling apart in the pan. And then the other tip is to LEAVE THEM ALONE. Let them brown. Shake the pan and if the patties don’t move freely in the oil, let them be. It’s O.K. to use a spatula and peek to see if they’re brown. But the crunchy exterior is key to a satisfactory salmon pattie.

Salmon Patties

1 14.75 ounce can of salmon

¼ cup finely diced onion

¼ cup of finely diced red pepper

2 eggs, beaten

1 tablespoon dill

½ cup seasoned breadcrumbs

Salt and pepper to taste

Vegetable oil

Remove bones and skin from salmon. Add remaining ingredients and form into patties. Heat ½ inch of oil in a skillet over medium heat. Fry salmon patties until golden brown on both sides.

Squash casserole

I believe there are two camps where squash casserole is concerned: the camp that likes their squash casserole with identifiable chunks of squash and the camp that prefers their squash casserole to be almost the consistency of cornbread dressing. I am in the later camp.

I have already held forth on the abundance of zucchini in the Southern summer and that at some point polite people avert their eyes when they see a neighbor coming with a bag of zucchini so as not to make eye contact. It is the exact same thing with crookneck squash. Southerners feel compelled to grow crookneck squash even though, in their heart of hearts, they don’t like it. Crookneck squash is a bland, watery vegetable. That’s just a fact. Not only do Southerners grow it in abundance, but they “put it up” so that they can be reminded of how much they hate it in December.

So the only answer to the challenge of using up crookneck squash is to disguise it. Thus, the ubiquitous squash casserole.  You cannot go to Sunday supper anywhere in the South during the summer without encountering it. Some, as I’ve said, prefer it kind of chunky. But I feel that only highlights the shortcomings of crookneck squash. I prefer to disguise it completely.

For my squash casserole, I like to grate the squash and then fry it with the onion in butter until it just begins to brown. That browning gives it some extra flavor. Then – and here’s the secret – I mix the squash with Ritz cracker crumbs and Velveeta cubes. Shameless, I know. But here’s the thing. When you take that casserole out of the oven and spoon some on your plate, the Velveeta oozes out of the casserole! How can you not love that? As with almost everything in Southern cooking, I have taken an essentially healthy ingredient and made it unhealthy. And I’m not at all ashamed about it.

Squash Casserole

4 cups seeded grated crookneck squash

½ medium Vidalia or other sweet onion, diced

Salt and pepper

4 tablespoons butter

24 Ritz crackers, crushed

4 ounces Velveeta, cubed

1 egg, beaten

Melt the butter in a sauté pan and add the squash and onion. Season with salt and pepper. Saute over medium heat until the squash begins to brown. Put the squash and onions into a bowl and add the Velveeta cubes. Then add 2/3 of the cracker crumbs and the egg. Mix thoroughly.

Put squash mixture into a casserole dish, sprinkle with remaining cracker crumbs, and bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees.

The bishop is coming

Is it wrong to know the cucumber sandwich recipe by heart?

It is Friday night. The bishop is coming on Sunday and everyone is atwitter, at least the Women of St. Paul’s. It is mega-reception time and we have kicked into high gear. When the bishop comes, everything must be on silver. All sandwiches must be perfect. There is no room for error as if the bishop will even notice. HE WILL NOTICE. We’re convinced of this.

So tonight, I am making the filling for cucumber sandwiches because I’m going to be gone all day tomorrow at a barbecue contest. The first thing is the cucumbers. You have to peel them, of course. Then you have to remove all the seeds with a spoon. All the seeds. If a cucumber seed found its way into the cucumber filling it would be a disaster.

I know the filling without looking at a recipe. I have made perhaps 8,734 cucumber sandwiches so far in my reception/tea service career. One 8-ounce block of cream cheese to one cucumber with smidge of grated onion and a drop of green food coloring. I have had the same bottle of green food coloring for the last six years. It never goes bad. At least I think it never goes bad. You have to be very careful because if you add too much green food coloring, the spread looks radioactive.

Here’s what it’s supposed to look like, as if the green essence of the cucumber somehow found it’s way into the cream cheese. Little children and old men think this is the case. We never disabuse them of this notion.

I will make the actual sandwiches tomorrow night. They must be on white bread rounds. They  must be topped with a thin slice of peeled Japanese cucumber because it is prettier. And then they must be sprinkled with the most sparse dusting of dill.

So tonight my biggest challenge is keeping Noah from eating the cucumber spread when he comes home.

I have taken to leaving signs on the food in the refrigerator that I need to keep for another purpose other than Noah hoovering it down his gullet. I once left for work with an entire gallon of milk in the refrigerator, intending to make cream gravy for chicken-fried steak for supper. When I got home, the empty jug was in the trash. I learned my lesson from that, let me tell you. Refrigerator management is Job Number One.

Pepper steak

I love my friend, Gail. She is addicted to Survivor, just like me. Loves Dancing With The Stars, just like me. And loves food, just like me. The other night, she made her husband, Les, his favorite meal for his birthday, Pepper Steak. She got the recipe out of a Southern Living magazine in the 1970s so it’s certainly stood the test of time. She says you can use low-sodium soy sauce with no ill effect, but do not consider using salt-free ketchup.

She gave me the recipe the way all good Southern cooks do – a little bit of shorthand, a little bit of guessing and a little dab of this and that. I’ve put it more in standard recipe form.

Gail Kerr’s Pepper Steak

1 ½ pounds round steak

Vegetable oil

1 cup ketchup

1 cup water

1 beef bouillon cube

4 tablespoons soy sauce,

1 tablespoon flour

Salt, pepper, garlic powder and cayenne powder to taste

1 green pepper, sliced into strips

1 medium onion, sliced into strips

Rice

Cut the steak into strips and brown in vegetable oil in two to three batches so the meat has room to brown and form a nice crust. Set aside.

Combine the ketchup, water, bouillon cube, soy sauce, flour and seasonings. Add that to the skillet you browned the meat in and simmer for five minutes. Add the meat back and simmer on low heat for 90 minutes. Add the green pepper and onion while you cook the rice.

Serve the pepper steak over rice.

Hoarding And Purging

As with almost all Southern women, I like a bargain. Never pay retail. Remember that. So when there’s a two-for-one special  or a buy-0ne-get-one-free at the Publix, I snap it up. I have a separate freezer for all the stuff I buy at the grocery store that I won’t use right away. The only trouble is, I forget that I’ve stashed stuff in the extra freezer and at some point I realize that I have over-bought.

I have to pause here to mention a thing about my mother-in-law. I know this is a small photo but I grabbed it off Susan’s Facebook page and I just wanted to show you what she looked like not three weeks ago at the Mayhew-Mayhew-Harbin reunion. She’s the one on the left with the red hair. Next to her is the best daughter-in-law in the world, Tammy. Granddaddy’s holding Baby Girl.

By the way, here’s a picture of Baby Girl in her Vols outfit. If that isn’t precious, I don’t know what is.

Granbunny got her the Vols rocking chair from Cracker Barrel. I don’t think that girl’s got a chance, even though neither of her parents went to Tennessee. We have instituted mind control early.

So back to Bunny. When I first met her, we’d stay at the Harbin house and I couldn’t help but notice that Bunny was a food hoarder, too. You’d open up her pantry and there would be 27 boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and 38 cans of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup. I know these two items have an indefinite shelf life, but that’s extreme even for me. And don’t even get me started on the packages of hot dogs in her freezer.

So, this week I began the purge portion of the hoarding problem. I promised myself that I’d cook supper with whatever I had on hand for a week. Last night I did country fried steak with cream gravy, which was pretty darn delicious if I say so myself. But tonight I tried to lighten it up a bit. Here’s what I threw together:

Chicken cutlets, sauteed in vegetable oil with salt and pepper. Remove and reserve. Add chopped green pepper, chopped onion and saute until tender. Add minced garlic and cook about 30 seconds (never add your garlic at the beginning of a saute). Add a can of petite diced tomatoes, drained. Add about half a cup of chicken stock (I make my own with the bones left over from rotisserie chicken from the Publix – how thrifty is that!). Squeeze in the juice of one lemon. Add a handful of sliced kalamata olives (not Southern U.S., but southern Greece?). Put the chicken back in and let the sauce reduce by about two thirds.

This is what I ended up with. I made some spaghetti and tossed it with butter. Chicken with sauce on the top. I was pretty proud of myself because it tasted great and except for the butter it was pretty healthy. You have to go with healthy every now and again because tomorrow morning it’s Saturday breakfast out and that almost always means the Waffle House or the Krystal. Yes, you can get sliders at 9:30 in the morning. You just have to wait a few minutes.

Twigs and sticks

As you can imagine, we all came home just bloated from the family reunion. Our send-off breakfast at Flapjacks Pancake Cabin (don’t you love Southern restaurant names – a flapjack is a pancake so you could call it the Pancake Pancake Cabin) consisted of scrambled eggs, biscuits, hashbrowns, cream gravy, sausage, bacon, blueberry pancakes and steak. Then Noah got a KFC craving when I stopped for gas so that added fried chicken to the list. By last night, I couldn’t move.

Meanwhile, I somehow came home with two packages of mushrooms and a red and yellow pepper each. I guess because they’re vegetables they just didn’t fit in with the program. So here’s my throw-it-together, get-the-lard-out recipe for something healthy after too much grease (and I hardly ever go there!)

The picture shows what I already had on hand – a lemon, some garlic, some Parmesan cheese, olive oil and Marsala wine. By the way, do not ever in your life buy “cooking wine” at the grocery store. You cannot sell actual wine in grocery stores in Tennessee (that’s a rant for another day), so you can imagine what “cooking wine” really is if they let it into the Publix.

Throw the mushrooms and peppers (sliced up, of course…I know I don’t have to paint every picture for you)  into a frying pan with a little olive oil and saute them until they’re browned. Chop up the garlic and add it last so it cooks but doesn’t burn. Deglaze the whole thing with about a quarter cup of the Marsala and let that cook down a bit. Then add the juice of one lemon and the lemon zest. If you don’t know what lemon zest is or don’t want to bother with it, then just leave it out. It’s not that important.

Meanwhile, cook about a half pound of thin spaghetti until it’s al dente. That means not mushy. Toss the whole thing together and top it with grated Parmesan cheese. I will get a little snobby here. The pre-grated stuff in the plastic tubs is not permissible unless you’ve just had a really bad day and can’t muster the effort of getting out your grater and using a block of the real stuff.

I told Mark yesterday when I let him get deli meat at the Publix that we were eating twigs and sticks this week to make up for the bad, bad weekend, and do you know what that boy did? He bought liverwurst! I love liverwurst but it’s just full, full, full of fat. So after my good pasta meal of last night I am faced with the absolute certainty that tomorrow morning I’m making a liverwurst sandwich with thin sliced onion and Duke’s mayonnaise for breakfast. With those really crunchy kettle potato chips. I am so weak.

The virtues of Velveeta

When I was a kid, my mom would make me Velveeta and mayonnaise sandwiches on Wonder Bread. I actually thought that Velveeta was a type of cheese, like Swiss or Muenster. My mother only bought two types of cheese: the processed cheese squares in the individual plastic wrappers and logs of Velveeta. Unfortunately, my mother was not from the South so she did not understand the real virtues of this glorious processed cheese food. She only knew to slice it and put it on squishy highly processed white bread. And she certainly didn’t know about Duke’s mayonnaise. Kraft was the brand of choice in Illinois.

So fast forward to about 15 years later when I got to Charlotte, N.C., my first outpost in the South. Velveeta was an entirely different animal past the Mason Dixon Line. It was melted with Ro-Tel tomatoes to make a sublime dip. It was cut into cubes and folded into macaroni and cheese. And, in its highest calling, it was the gooey foundation of that perennial summer favorite, Squash Casserole.

Every Southern cook, it seems, has a different and equally delicious recipe for Squash Casserole. Like zucchini, you’d better have a lot of good recipes for summer squash because it spreads like wild fire down here.

What follows is a recipe passed along to me by Terrell Jones, one of the great gentlemen of Georgia, who has taught me more about Southern foodways than any other person. It came to him by way of Norris and Sandy Brewer and was his mother’s recipe. Terrell says he’s eaten a lot of Squash Casserole in his time and this is the best he ever had. And you can take that to the bank.

Squash Casserole

1 poound summer squash, sliced

1 teaspoon sugar

3/4 cup onion, diced

1 stick butter, softened to room temperature

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1/2 cup grated Velveeta

1 small jar pimentos

Salt and pepper to taste

Cracker crumbs, additional grated cheese and additional butter (melted) for the top.

Cook squash and onion in boiling water until tender. Drain and mash together. Add butter, sugar, cheese, pimento, salt and pepper.The  mixture should have the consistency of pudding. Put it in a 2-quart casserole. top with cracker crumbs, and additional cheese and butter.

Bake at 350 degrees until set, about 30 minutes.

(By the way, Terrell leaves the sugar out but I think it adds sweetness to the squash.)

The best spaghetti sauce

I have made probably 40-plus recipes of spaghetti sauce over the years. Some of them made up, some of them from recipes. But I stumbled across the best method for making what I think is the best spaghetti sauce ever and it happened at my mother-in-law’s house. Granbunny is a good seat-of-your-pants cook. She doesn’t make fancy food, but what she does make is really, really good. We were over at her house one night and she served us spaghetti. It was the best sauce, but I couldn’t figure out what she’d done to get this dense consistency without any watery tomato residue in the bottom of the pan. Here’s the trick: She uses two pounds of ground chuck and she doesn’t drain the grease. So what happens is when you brown the meat, you go beyond the “gray” stage and you continue really browning the ground beef in its own fat until the fat disappears into the meat. Yes.

I’ve modified her recipe to make it even better, I think. Here’s the recipe.

Take two pounds of ground chuck and brown it until the grease has almost disappeared. Add about 1/2 cup finely diced carrot and 1/2 cup finely diced onion. Continue cooking until the vegetables are soft and the onion is translucent. Add two large cloves of diced garlic. Cook for about a minute and add a fourth of a can of tomato paste. Stir the paste into the meat mixture for a minute or two. Add a 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes and about a cup of dry red wine. Stir that in and then add about a tablespoon and a half of dried oregano, salt and pepper to taste and a teaspoon of smoked sweet paprika. Simmer until you can’t stand it anymore.

The smoked paprika adds a smoky depth of flavor to the sauce. I actually add it to any tomato-based sauce I make.

This is terrific sauce for lasagna as well as spaghetti. I’ve also been known to take leftover sauce, heat it up in the microwave and use it as a dip for Fritos.

Tonight the sauce pot on the stove is for my husband, son and his best friend, Evan, who thinks I’m the best cook on the planet and calls me “mom.” I’m not the former at all or the latter to Evan, but I enjoy both complements.

(By the way, take the rest of the tomato paste in the can and divvy it up among two or three sheets of Saran wrap. Freeze it and use it when you make your next batch of sauce.)