Tag: childhood

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

138. Macaroni and Cheese p.223


The recipe

I haven’t eaten all that much macaroni and cheese since I graduated to shoes with laces, but most of the kids I knew, and the stoners they grew up to be, loved the stuff from the box. As a child, macaroni and cheese was just the brand neutral way of saying your mom was making Kraft Dinner. I decided that KD was not for me around age 5, and looked for creative ways to avoid it, or mask its flavour. For reference, cut up hot dogs made it better, ketchup made it worse. Unfortunately kids in Montreal ate a lot of KD in the ’80s. My mom accepted my quirks and stopped serving it to me, but I still ate a lot of it at friends houses.

I was well pleased to leave mac and cheese behind me by the time I reached high school, and it stayed that way ’till a a nice Southern girl introduced me to the home made version in my early 20’s. Her macaroni and cheese was an entirely different animal, using real cheese, building flavour and texture with a roux, adding a touch of heat, and baking the whole thing with some extra cheese on top. I came around, and macaroni and cheese became something worth looking forward to.

I started experimenting with my own versions of mac and cheese, without much success. The problem I was trying to solve was that M&C is inherently rich, bland, and straightforward. Some people interpret that as a food surrogate for mother’s love, but I find it a bit dull. I tried adding herbs to the M&C, which fubared it, adding more chili flakes didn’t help either. One version with chipotles was actually pretty good, and worth revisiting sometime. Drawing on my childhood hot dog experience, I tried adding some slices of merguez, which worked quite well. These experiments brought me closer to what I was looking for, but they were still lacking. I was happy to discover that Gourmet has hit upon secret elixir that cuts the richness, and ties everything together, Dijon mustard. The Book’s version isn’t perfect, but I’m immensely grateful to it for bringing me closer to the ultimate macaroni and cheese recipe.

In this version, you make a three minute roux with butter, flour, and red pepper flakes, then whisk in milk and bring the sauce to a boil. After letting it boil for a few minutes, cream, extra-sharp Cheddar, and Dijon are added. The sauce is then added to cooked macaroni, and some of the water from the pot in a baking dish, then topped with mixture of butter, panko bread crumbs, and more cheese. The casserole goes into the oven for around half an hour, and then served.

The mustard and red pepper flakes make all the difference, and prevent this from being just too rich to be enjoyable. Getting the cheese right is important too. The recipe calls for extra-sharp Cheddar, which seems simple, but even an average grocery store will have about ten different versions, ranging from the plastic packaged stuff sold along with the milk, to fancy-pants imported stuff at the cheese counter. You can spend a fortune on truly wonderful Cheddar, but it’s probably a waste of money to go melting that into mac and cheese. The low end rubbery stuff will be OK, but not as good as it could be. The cheese really carries this dish so spending a bit more on a nice piece of aged local Cheddar is a worthwhile investment.

The recipe calls for panko, or other dried bread crumbs. I couldn’t get my hands on any panko, so I went with bread crumbs from the bakery down the street. Panko are known for their lightness and texture, while my bread crumbs were quite finely ground and dense. The 2 cups of panko the recipe called for might have been a nice topping, but 2 cups of my bread crumbs probably weighed twice as much as panko did. The macaroni was just too heavy on the topping, and the very dry bread crumbs sucked up a huge amount of moisture, so that within about 20 minutes of taking the dish out of the oven, the macaroni had set up, and lost the saucy-runny aspect you’re looking for in macaroni and cheese. You can see from the photo that it was next to impossible to find any of the macaroni under all the topping.

I think this recipe did a very nice job with the macaroni and sauce aspects, but fell short with the topping. I can’t comment on how it would have been with panko, but while they gave regular bread crumbs as an acceptable alternative, it obviously wasn’t. Beyond the topping, it was probably the best macaroni and cheese I’ve ever had. I’m sure that just a little tweaking could result in a truly great macaroni and cheese dinner, for the adults as well as the kids.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

83. Oatmeal Cookies p.664

The recipe

People are funny about baking. Not everyone, but probably a majority of people who “don’t bake” would at least be willing to try their hand at making oatmeal cookies. When their 5 year olds help bake, they make cookies. These are the same people who will look at you funny if you tell them you’re making biscotti, they think shortbread is too complicated, and are convinced that brownies and cakes only come from a box mix. It must be an issue of familiarity and comfort, but in reality making good cookies is often harder than any of those other baking projects. The skills are the same, sifting, creaming, beating, cracking eggs, the order is just a bit different. Cookies are notorious for burning, and cooking unevenly. Pans have got to be rotated, and racks switched. This is not to say that baking cookies is hard, just that there are many many baking projects which people won’t try because they lack the confidence. Since everyone can bake a cookie, it’s a chink in their armour, and a lead in to more unfamiliar projects. It’s possible that all of these straw men I’ve set up know perfectly well that they could bake other things if they wanted to, but feel it’s just too much effort. Fresh warm cookies are pretty much universally agreed to be worth working for.

These particular oatmeal cookies are fairly standard issue, a bit rough around the edges, but in a very satisfying way. These are about as casual as cookies get, standard butter cookies spiced up with rolled oats, cinnamon, vanilla, and brown sugar. Chocolate chips are given as an optional addition, so I stirred in half a cup. Sift the dry stuff together, cream the wet stuff together, then mix the two doing your best not to create gluten. Bake at 375 for 12 minutes, and contemplate just accepting the second degree burns to your mouth while you wait for them to cool.

If you’ve had an oatmeal cookie before you know what to expect with these. When I’m in the mood for an oatmeal cookie, familiarity is what I’m after though. They’re miles better than the cracker crisp packaged ones, and the oily and inexplicably huge cafeteria cookies. The cinnamon and vanilla come through nicely, and the use of both white and brown sugar adds a bit of molasses depth. The rolled oats let you pretend they’re healthy, but the added chocolate chips give away the lie. This is my standard go-to oatmeal cookie recipe, I probably make them four times a year, and I love them every singe time. Just make sure to have a glass of milk on hand.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

53. Old Fashioned Meat Loaf p.448

The recipe

Take cover! NORAD has detected an extraterrestrial turd loaf coming in fast over the arctic. It wants our Humpback whales to save the future.

This was not the most visually appealing dish I’ve ever made, but it did taste good. I think it’s um, distinctive, shape helped with the flavour too. I’ve made meatloaf in a loaf pan before, and while it’s geometry is soothing, there isn’t all that much surface area exposed to direct heat. This loaf developed an excellent crunchy crust which really made the dish. The secret to the crispy crust was a healthy slathering of ketchup before it went into the oven.

I’m quite proud of The Book for using ketchup here. They didn’t seem to feel bad about it, or tell me that I really should be making my own, or ordering heirloom tomato preserves off the internet. They recommended plain-old funding-John-Kerry’s-political-career ketchup. Maybe this was The Book’s attempt to show that they’re in touch with the common man? who knowns? But I appreciate it.

This is a classic meat loaf recipe that doesn’t deviate or experiment too much. There are a couple of nice touches, but generally it’s straight up memories of childhood comfort food. It starts with a sweat of onions, garlic, celery, carrot, and scallions (one of the slight deviations from the textbook). Then ground beef, pork, breadcrumbs, eggs, and parsley are lightly mixed together and shaped into the giant worm of Arrakis. It’s then covered in ketchup, and baked through.

The book recommends having the butcher coarsely grind beef chuck, and pork tenderloins for this recipe, instead of using the finely textured twice-ground meat that’s available pre-packaged. It wasn’t a command from on high, so I just bought the stuff in the display case. I now see that The Book was right and I was wrong. The flavours in the meatloaf were excellent, its main problem was the texture. It was too tightly packed and dense. Using more coarsely ground meat would almost certainly have taken care of the textural issues, and made this an even better loaf.

My dining companion and I occasionally like to have cook-offs. Kind of like Iron Chef in the privacy of our own home. This dish was my entry for battle meatloaf, and I’m happy to say that it swept the judges votes. Her entry won top marks for presentation and style, but it just couldn’t compete on seasoning and depth of flavour. I’ll have to write the Heinz company to thank them.

Categories
Fruit Desserts The Book

44. Apple Crisp p.812

Sorry, no recipe.

The Book and I do not get along when it comes to dessert. It’s becoming a tired refrain, but it calls for too much sugar in just about everything.

Familiarity as we all know breeds contempt, and I am certainly familiar with fruit crisps. If this had been an obscure Austrian confection I would have been fairly impressed, but once you call it an apple crisp you’ve plunged into much deeper waters. My ideal apple crisp has a (wait for it) crisp topping, which crumbles nicely. I’m not sure how a crisp is distinguished from a crumble, but I want both in the same dish. The topping should be substantial, not too buttery, and avoid being too fluffy and cookie like. The filling should have a bit of running juice at room temperature, and distinct apple pieces which offer a bit of resistance when you bite into them. A nice dose of citrus punches up the flavours of the apples, and cinnamon is a must-have, tastes-like-home addition.

This recipe measured up reasonably well to those standards. The topping was nicely crisp, but failed the crumbly test. It erred too far on the side of cookieness. However the pecans added a nice crunch, and provided a bit of crumble. The topping could have stood to have more nuts in it actually. The dish let me down on the filling though. It called for three types of apples, Macouns, Fujis, and Jonagolds. The texture was nice, with some toothsome chunks and plenty of juice, but the flavour was way off. All of the apples they call for a fairly sweet, plus they added a good deal of sugar, taking it to candyland. The lemon juice was limited to two tablespoons, with all the sugar in there the lemon could have been doubled easily.

This dish had some things going for it, and the end result tasted pretty good. The topping could have been part of an excellent dish, unfortunately the filling was underwhelming. Fruit crisps are a simple, ubiquitous summer / fall dish, and everyone will have their own way of doing it, and their own standards by which to judge it. This dish may very well be someone’s favorite apple crisp in the whole wide world, it’s just not mine.

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

3. Garlic Bread p.606

the recipe

Ahh Garlic bread, the ubiquitous starchy accompaniment to a big plate of my mom’s pasta. Weren’t the fat phobic carb happy 80’s a good time? So this is fairly idiot proof: apply garlic butter to bread, bake in tinfoil till warmed through, open tinfoil package to crisp up bread. Who could screw this up? apparently I can.

Things were going well through the cutting of the ciabatta loaf, and smearing butter stages. All clear for operation put in tinfoil and bake at 350 for 15 minutes. Things were going so swimmingly I decided to focus on the rest of dinner. 15 minutes became 20, and the first hint of burning came to my nose. I never opened the package to crisp, and while the bottom of the loaf got nicely done, the rest of the loaf was the soggy mess of a thousand backyard BBQs.

Soggy garlic bread does have some fairly good memories associated with it, and
I enjoyed it thoroughly. However, I was really looking forward to the crispy crunch. Thankfully this is as simple a recipe as there is, so a redo won’t call for any untoward effort.

One thing I really appreciated about this was the suggestion to replace the parsley with basil (a suggestion not made in the linked recipe). To me parsley is a bit of waste of an herb, the Italian stuff has some nice flavor, the frizzy has none. All in all I’ll give parsley a pass whenever possible. Unfortunately The Book (and the whole world) seems to have a bit of thing for it. I won’t balk at spending eight bucks on a tiny piece of goat cheese, but that 79 cent parsley tax so many recipes charge really irks me.

This is a childhood classic not re-imagined in any way, as it should be.