Bacon-covered goat cheese bites

We are headed down the road to damnation at the Community Resource Center. Bacon Wednesdays. They have become so dangerous.

This all started out innocently. My colleague, Betsy, suggested we initiate Bacon Wednesdays because whose day is not improved markedly by the consumption of bacon? Only there was one thing Betsy was not counting on. Or maybe she was. My competitive nature. So far, I am the sole provider of bacon comestibles on Bacon Wednesday and every week I now believe I have to outdo myself.

We started simply with bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches. We then progressed to a tasting of Benton’s Bacon, the finest bacon in the world. Trust me. It is. Then we had bacon-wrapped crackers. Let me pause to say the bacon-wrapped cracker week was a disaster for me. I had to go to a meeting and “we” were saving the bacon-wrapped crackers for cocktail hour. When I got back, there was exactly one cracker left. And I made them! I spent all that effort wrapping bacon around club crackers and those girls ate all of them but one. If there is not something in the employee manual about this, there will be soon. Under insubordination, I believe.

This week was a triumph, if only in my own mind since I’m the only one contributing to Bacon Wednesday right now. Bacon-covered goat cheese bites. Green olives, covered in goat cheese, covered in bacon. Oh, yes. I was shocked that Betsy has a problem with green olives (yippee!). More for Kim and me. Next week, we’ll go back to something more basic. Bacon-wrapped cocktail weenies? Yes, I think that will work. Pork on pork. Always a good idea.

Bacon-covered goat cheese bites

10 strips bacon

4 ounces herbed goat cheese

2 ounces cream cheese

Small green olives

Bake the bacon in the oven on a foil-lined, rimmed cookie sheet at 400 degrees for 20 minutes or until bacon is crisp. Drain on paper towels and chop into fine pieces.

Beat goat cheese and cream cheese together until creamy. Refrigerate about 30 minutes to let it harden a bit.

Pat the olives dry and cover in the goat cheese mixture. Roll in bacon. Chill for 30 minutes.

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?

Please read me

I’m sneaking one in on you. You looked at the title and you clicked because you were curious.

Ha! Kale!

No, no, don’t go away. This is one you’re going to like. I promise! This is a snack. A healthy snack. You will never know you’re eating kale. Kind of. In a way.

The end of kale season is near and I know all you kale haters are happy about that. You can now confidently go to the farmer’s market and not worry about making eye contact with the poor farmer trying to peddle his kale.

But let’s all face it. We’re heading into swimsuit season and you’re going to need a little help. Maybe a lot of help. So Kale Chips. Couldn’t be simpler. And they almost have negative calories. Just coat kale leaves in a little olive oil and bake them until they’re crispy. After they come out of the oven, sprinkle a little freshly ground salt over them. I made a complete cookie sheet of them the other day and I ate every single chip. They’re also delicious as a garnish for soup or as a crunchy element in a salad.

This is the last you’ll hear about kale this year. Please don’t hate me.

Kale chips

1 bunch kale or one 16-ounce bag fresh kale greens

2-3 tablespoons olive oil

Freshly ground salt or kosher salt

Preheat the oven to 275 degrees. Pull off the ribs from the kale, either bagged or fresh. If you’re using bagged, just distribute the kale over a foil-lined cookie sheet. If you’re using fresh, cut it in bite-sized pieces. Bake until crisp, about 20 minutes. Sprinkle with salt to taste and toss.

N0te: Be careful with the salt in this recipe. It can easily overpower the kale. A light hand is called for.

 

 

A college student cooks…well

Noah checks out

Teachable moments. When a child is five, it seems there are a thousand of them. By the time they’re twelve, the stack starts to dwindle. And, at almost 20, I am now down to five or six. Or so it seems.

Noah wants an apartment next year and, with that, will come cooking his own meals. He will have a budget of $100 a week (what, in a year, his meal plan would cost) and I am superior in my assumption that he has no idea how to make that money stretch for a week. So we test the theory. We go to the grocery store with a calculator.

We hit the perimeter of the store first. That’s where you want to shop. The produce, meat and dairy sections. Only go to the dark side for staples like pasta, oil and spices. Hamburger Helper? NO! Chips Ahoy? DANGER! Velveeta? Okay, you’ve got me there. I love me some Velveeta.

So, to make a long story short, he did great. Dammit. He bought (I bought) a package of chicken breasts, thin-cut pork chops and two pounds of bulk sausage. Low rent ham for sandwiches. Lower rent bread. Frozen vegetables, rice, pasta, apples, coffee, canned soup and store brand cheese. He bypassed the relatively expensive convenience foods. He was unsuitably smug in his victory and totally discounted the fact that I had guided him away from the frozen pizza.

Having a basket full of groceries and knowing what to do with them are two different things, however.

Pork chops, mashed potatoes and green beans

Hah! I’ll get him here. “So, son?” I say coyly. “Why don’t you cook us supper with your new groceries? Just whip something up. Anything, really.”

And I leave. I go down to the garage to smoke and play World of Warcraft, confident in the fact that when I ascend again there will be mass chaos, a smoke-filled kitchen and burnt shards of something inedible on the plate.

“Mom?” he says. “Supper’s ready.”

I ascend. I gasp. How did friggin’ Emeril Lagasse find my kitchen? Noah has made coffee rub/breadcrumb coated pork chops, cooked perfectly until just rosy in the middle. He has made buttery mashed potatoes with garlic. He has made hericot verts with garlic. Alright, too much garlic but I am not going to quibble. It was all delicious.

So, tonight we go again. Chicken breasts, chopped green and yellow pepper, red onion, mushrooms.

Chicken, peppers, mushrooms and pasta. Noah style.

He chops the chicken and seasons it with Montreal Chicken Seasoning. Sautes in oil, removes the chicken and then adds the vegetables.  When they’re nice and brown he adds a bit of Madeira (not something he’ll have on campus – I can’t see you)  and then adds a can of cream of mushroom soup. This is going to suck, I think. He thins the soup with milk, adds back the chicken, and then puts the entire mixture over pasta.

Dang it! It’s good. If I hadn’t watched him add the soup, I would never have known. I had seconds. And I wasn’t being polite.

I am proud of my boy. I would like to think that my miniscule attempt at one of the last few teachable moments had the seeds of germination in the hours he’s spent watching me cook over the last 19 years. But as I told him tonight there is no way to teach someone to cook. You either have the intuition or you don’t. You’re a recipe follower or you’re a creator. You can pick up tips and tricks, but you have to just have the knowledge of what goes with what and how much in your gut.

And he has it. No brag, just fact.

The world’s smallest kitchen

People who know me, even those who slightly know me, know I cook. It is more than a hobby. It is an obsession. And, so, they often ask me about what they assume to be the fabulous and spacious kitchen I create in.

Yes, the world’s smallest kitchen is mine. Although our house is comparatively large at more than 3,000 square feet, the kitchen is the size of a walk-in closet, the byproduct of  the German playboy who built the house for entertaining and not cooking.

I’ll give you a quick tour. First, meet Max, my constant cooking buddy. He sits at the counter but never begs. Cats are too proud to beg. Past the bag of cat food that was yet to be put away are my notepad and camera. About 99 percent of all the photos on this blog are taken under Max’s watchful eye at the kitchen counter. Diet Coke in Styrofoam cup is always by my side. TV is tuned to Food Network, unless it’s Rachel Ray or Sandra Lee. What is it with those two? So annoying. Lately, Guy Fieri’s beginning to bug me, too.

But I digress. Past the sink, which overlooks the Coxes’ house, is a bowl with my staples – onion (red and Spanish), garlic, lemons. The gas cook top is the smallest ever. Practically microscopic. Above that is the mighty Advantium, which is both a microwave and a conventional oven. It also has this “speed cook” feature, which is why we bought it in the first place. A guy in a home store roasted a chicken on “speed cook” and gave out samples. I’m a sucker for a good roasted chicken. The regular oven is next to the cook top and against the third wall is the refrigerator. That’s it.

Having the smallest kitchen in the world is actually an advantage. No pesky extraneous kitchen gadgets to collect. No waffle maker, ice cream machine, hot dog cooker or George Foreman grill. I have a KitchenAid stand mixer, a food processor, a blender and a hand mixer – all stored out of sight. I can’t stand clutter and if you open the mail in my kitchen you have clutter.

We have a “three square feet” rule at our house, a rule I don’t necessarily want to obey. The rule is in a fairly large house the three of us, when Noah’s home, will always be within three square feet of each other, getting in the way. This is never more true than in the kitchen. If even two of us are in there, we’ve taken up all the room. When anyone offers to help me cook, I always kindly agree but tell them they have to stand in the living room. I’ll throw a cutting board their way. Clear off the coffee table and get busy.

I will say the kitchen is a model of efficiency when it comes to the triangle rule, which is that every good kitchen should have the refrigerator, stove and sink at the points of a triangle. The theory breaks down, sadly, when you realize you need not take even a step to reach all three.

It’s okay. I can live with a small kitchen. I just pretend I live in France. Everyone in France has a small kitchen. I can smell the croissants out the kitchen window. C’est la vie.

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.

Fire in the hall (and breakfast casserole)

Everything was going according to plan at the St. Paul’s Episcopal Church Fat Tuesday pancake supper. Until the fire department came.

Youth Minister Derek Larson fist pumps a pancake flipper

The Youth started off strong. They were pumping out pancakes like a Ford assembly line. I was proud of them. From pancake know-nothings to masters of the flip. They had it going on. Casseroles were flying out of the kitchen. Syrup was being refilled. The kitchen staff was in full battle mode. We were a well-oiled machine, an Army of the Lord. Until we smelled something burning. I checked one of the ovens. The tiniest bit of a breakfast casserole had dripped on the oven floor. Microscopic, actually. It will burn off, I think, as I shut the oven door.

A few minutes later, I open the door again. A cloud of smoke bellows into the kitchen. Oh, dear. What to do? I don’t know. I close the door again. I can’t see you. I wait several minutes and open it again. Smoke roars out of the oven. I close the door. I can’t see you. And then the fire alarm goes off.

The music minister, Dona Stokes-Rogers, calls the fire department to say that, no, the church is not burning down and they need not pay us a visit. Apparently, they could not hear her over the screech of the alarm. I am told later that Donna is conversant with calling the fire department because the last time this happened the choir was cooking in the kitchen. I feel slightly better.

The next thing I hear are sirens in the distance. Please, please let those be for someone else (not wishing anyone harm, of course). The sirens get louder. Really loud. In fact, they are right outside Otey Hall. Along with the ambulance, that is surely here to carry me away because I am having a freaking heart attack.

Finally, the alarm goes off. The crowd cheers. I slink back to the kitchen. If I chair the pancake supper next year all the food will be cold. There will be no turning on of ovens, there will be no spillage of casseroles. There will be no visit from the fire department.

By the way, we added a breakfast casserole to the menu this year. It was a big hit. If you are a Southern cook, you know this recipe. Everyone has it. If you’re not, here you go. Please take care not to spill any of it in the oven. Apparently, it’s highly flammable.

  St. Paul’s Breakfast Casserole

8 white bread slices, cut into cubes

1 pound bulk pork sausage, crumbled and cooked

1 1/2 cups grated sharp Cheddar cheese

10 large eggs

2 cups whole milk

2 teaspoons dry mustard

1 teaspoon salt

Pepper

Grease 9-by-13-inch glass baking dish. Place bread in prepared dish. Top with sausage and cheese. Beat together eggs and next three ingredients. Season with pepper. Pour over sausage mixture. Chill overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake casserole until puffed and center is set, about 50 minutes. Cut into squares.

When teens cook pancakes

Will Wesson earns his stripes. Photo courtesy of Emily Nance.

Lord, help me. The annual St. Paul’s Episcopal Church Pancake Supper is tonight and I’m in charge.

Episcopalians, Catholics and Lutherans are very serious about this time of year. Lent starts tomorrow. Forty days of self-reflection and penitence. We are worms. That is the season. We give up things we like a lot. Many times, I give up hamburgers. That is sacrifice, my friends.

But tonight is Fat Tuesday and St. Paul’s celebrates with the pancake supper, the proceeds of which support the Youth programs. Which is why a few days ago I was teaching teenagers how to cook pancakes.

The mechanics of pancake cooking are fairly simple. You pour the batter. You wait for bubbles to form. You flip the pancake and wait another 30 seconds to a minute. You remove the pancake from the griddle. But you would have thought I was teaching quantum physics.

They gathered around the griddle, staring intently at it as if it would rise up and smite them. “Who wants to try it?” I ask. They continue to stare at the griddle. One brave teen tentatively raises his hand. O.K., good. One volunteer out of 15 or so kids. “Come on, then,” I say encouragingly. “You can’t mess this up.”

He pours. I have miscalculated. There are already bubbles in the batter. He wonders if he should immediately flip this raw mass of liquid goo. “Wait for the BIG bubbles,” I offer. We wait. They appear. He cautiously slips the spatula under the pancake. “Flip with conviction!” I say. The teen regards the pancake as though it were a landmine he was removing from a war-torn battlefield. “FLIP!” I startle him. He flips. He smiles. It is beautifully brown. He has made a pancake.

Thus encouraged, the rest of them step up one by one to attempt the mastery of making a pancake. God is watching over the Otey Hall kitchen at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Franklin, Tennessee. They all succeed. The Lord loves a cheerful flipper.

About 150 people will attend the pancake supper tonight. The ladies of the church have contributed hashbrown casseroles, egg and cheese casseroles, fruit and juice. The Men of St. Paul’s footed the bill for the pancake mix, sausage and bacon. The proceeds will help our Youth go on mission trips in the summer.

And the youth will be flipping fools tonight. Fools for pancakes. Fools for God.

The best fried chicken ever

OMG. The best fried chicken ever and it’s not my recipe.

I have suffered over making fried chicken. I have several Southern staples slap down. I can make a mean pie crust. I can fry catfish with the best of them. But fried chicken has always defeated me. To brine or not to brine? All-purpose flour or self-rising? I’ve tried both ways in both categories to no decent result. And the infamous direction in any fried chicken recipe: cook until done. What the hell does that mean? How do you know if it’s done?

So I was very anxious to try the recipe in Bon Appetit. The whole issue is on Southern food and the recipe promised this: “This is the only fried chicken recipe you’ll ever need.” Pretty boastful.

I am a big believer in following a recipe exactly the first time. And I did. And I learned some things. The first thing is that today’s chickens are too damn big. Fried chicken, as I learned in the article, began as a spring dish with young chickens. Small chickens. If you look at a package of chicken breasts in the supermarket today they’re the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s biceps. So I cut the breasts in half, as the article advised.

The second thing I learned is that you should flip the chicken every two minutes or so. You’d think after countless tries of making fried chicken and having one side turn out almost black I would have figured this out.

The third thing is about seasoning. I’ve wet brined chickens before and I always thought the texture of the meat became spongy. What the article says is to dry brine it. They don’t call it that because they’re probably worried they’d scare you off, but basically you just apply the seasonings the night before and rest the chicken in the fridge. Somehow the spices penetrate all the way to the bone. How do it know? My question always about mysterious processes I can’t understand. I don’t know how it knows. But it does.

Last, cook until done. Get an instant read probe thermometer. I’ve told you about this before, people. Twenty

Probe poked in chicken leg, checking the temp, which is at 122. Keep a going to 165.

bucks at Bed, Bath and Beyond. If I had to list the top five essential kitchen tools, this would be near the top of the list. The chicken is done when the thermometer reads 165 with the probe in the thickest part of the meat but not touching the bone. Actually, you can just go to 160 because the meat will continue to cook after you take it out of the pan, which naturally must be cast iron. Don’t make me come after you.

One thing I didn’t do in following the directions is get a deep-fat thermometer. Too cheap and I followed the old Southern rule of knowing when fat is hot enough to fry in: Stick the handle of a wooden spoon in the pan. If bubbles immediately (but not furiously) form around the handle, the fat is just right.

So I am giving major props to Bon Appetit (someone asked me the other day what “props” meant – Aretha Franklin, look it up) by not even putting the recipe here. Go to Bon Appetit for it. They deserve all the credit. Guess I should describe the end result. Shatteringly crispy skin. Deep flavor in the meat. Utterly juicy. What your grandmother probably made every Sunday. Not mine, but yours. I feel complete. I’m on top of the world. Master of the universe. I ate three pieces by myself. Bad mommy. But so good.

Shrimp scampi

My friend, Mary Ann, goes on a mission from time to time to empty her entire freezer, refrigerator and pantry of all food objects – finding a way to make them into some kind of meal. I admire this. When you look in the freezer and there are unidentifiable objects that you cannot remember putting in the freezer, that is a bad sign.

I have a few. I have bags of Thomas Keller’s beef stock that I made, oh, more than a year ago. It was a torturous process making that damn stock so I value those bags far more than I should. Perhaps I can sell them on E-Bay. I have cornmeal that I got at a BBQ contest in 2009. Does cornmeal go bad in the freezer? I don’t think so, but I don’t really know. I have meatloaf mix that is tinged with those telltale frost crystals that mean it has frost burn. But I am too cheap to throw it out. Plus it would mean thawing the meatloaf out so that I, being extremely cheap, could wash the disposable plastic container it is housed in.

So for the past week or so I’ve been trying to honor Mary Ann and just cook from the ingredients I already have. To be completely honest, I have more ingredients than most. Do you have miso sitting in the refrigerator? Do you even know what it is? How about fish sauce, sumac and za’atar? Oh, I could put some links in here, but I think you need to look them up. The exotic stuff, plus the usual such as pizza dough, an array of vegetables, canned everything, a gross of rice, barley and pasta, frozen chicken, pork tenderloin, ground beef and sausages from West Wind Farms (I will give them a plug because they are the best sausages on the planet and you need to give Ralph and Kimberlie Cole some love and order some) would feed Mark and I for at least a month.

Which led me to shrimp scampi (scampi is really a name for a type of small lobster but, of course, we’ve screwed this up in the United States and what it means here is shrimp in a butter and lemon sauce – we’re so uncivilized). My poor shrimp had been frozen so long that ice crystals were forming on them. So that’s what Mark got tonight. Shrimp scampi with thin spaghetti, of which I have at least 10 boxes because I cannot pass up the “buy one, get one free” sales at the Publix.

If you can find wild American shrimp, please spend the extra few pennies to get them. They’re better for the environment, they’re caught off Southern waters and they sustain our precious fishermen.

Shrimp scampi

1 pound shrimp, preferably wild-caught American

1/3 cup butter

Juice of one lemon

¼ cup dry white wine

3 cloves garlic, chopped

¼ cup minced parsley

Shell and devein shrimp. Melt butter in a skillet over medium heat. Add the lemon juice, white wine and garlic. Saute garlic for about one minute. Add the shrimp. Salt and pepper to taste. Saute the shrimp for about one minute on each side until they turn pink but are still plump. Sprinkle with parsley.

Serve over buttered pasta.