Year: 2010

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About Family Meals

Let me acknowledge at the outset that there is no question of contradiction in the notion of “family meals” made outside the family by someone not remotely connected to the family.

But I did name our new service (four days of meals ready on Monday afternoon) deliberately. Our “family meals” are intended to be the same kind of food someone with time, inclination, basic skill and experience would provide at the evening table if the conditions of his or her life would permit it.

For many families, that’s not possible now. If both adults work, there’s no time. If you grew up with fast food everywhere, instant food available out of the freezer at the market, you just may not be familiar with how things as simple as roast chicken are put together. And, it is very possible that, never having watched it happen or be around to taste the results, you may not know how to cook.

Family meals when I was growing up were the work of my mother. They were made from basic ingredients. A cake, for example, she made using flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, eggs, milk and vanilla extract instead of a cake mix. Fried chicken from a whole chicken, cut up, floured, seasoned and fried in bacon grease. Not that she had any problem with using prepared food – it just wasn’t quite so prevalent as it is now.

With that base, I began my life as a cook by trying to make things instead of buy them. Making a tomato sauce with tomatoes, instead of just opening a jar. Throwing away the bag of powder from the little mac & cheese blue box and making a sauce with butter, flour and real cheese. When I did cook something out of a can or from the frozen meal section of the supermarket, I would adjust (increase) the seasoning so that it tasted a bit better. You get the idea.

Now, we’re providing this kind of simple food, made by chopping, blending, roasting and other simple-if-time-consuming techniques for people who, we hope, will sit down together around a table and enjoy a family meal.

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Real Cajun – A Great Cookbook

I love getting new cookbooks, and recently my son, who understands my enthusiasms, sent me a copy of Donald Link’s Real Cajun. This is his first cookbook and is focused on a rich family history of cooking good food out of the Louisiana pig pens, rivers and swamps. It’s also the inspired work of a great chef.

Link runs Herbsaint and Cochon in New Orleans, two remarkably good places to eat in a city full of fine restaurants. I particularly like Cochon, having dined on pigs with great gusto most of my life, including an evening at Au Pied de Cochon (pigs foot) in Paris. Link, like the French, takes his swine seriously and makes all his own bacon, sausage, tasso, boudin, pork belly cracklins and andouille. I highly recommend tasting a sampler, his boucherie plate, as a heavy appetizer to acquaint yourself and the table with his skill.

Link has the heart of a butcher and as a devout meat eater he reluctantly includes dishes for vegetarians. But, he’s also a good husband and his wife doesn’t share his devotion to meat. Hence his recipe for Maque Choux, a dish I’ll be serving from his recipe July 31 at the third Hot Rock Hollow dinner concert at the Flying Monkey. I’ve had various versions of this simple corn, pepper and tomato dish, but Link’s is lovely. It’s spiced with fresh thyme, basil and bay leaves. It has a bit of heat in the peppers, but not too much, and it is especially good this time of year in Alabama when the tomatoes, corn and peppers are fresh out of the field. Vegetarians will love it, as will the meat eaters.

Jambalaya is also on the menu, though the version I’ll be preparing is more of a Creole version, according to Link, since it is cooked in stock with tomatoes and includes shrimp, chicken and tasso served under a rich tomato sauce. Cajun jambalayas lose the tomatoes and are heavy on chicken and sausage to flavor the rice. Not a bad combination, either.

I highly recommend the book to lovers of Louisiana cooking, and if you don’t want to bother with the book, or with cooking, do come taste some good food while you listen to good music at the next dinner concert.

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A lifetime of diets

As a general rule in restaurants, I don’t want a chef cooking my food who looks like a marathon runner. Like Shakespeare’s Caesar, “Let me have [chefs] about me that are fat, sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.” I want people who love to eat, who have a hard time saying no to something good, and whose bodies bare the imprint of a rich, varied and luscious diet.

With that said, I must confess that I’ve spent a lifetime on diets of one form or another. This is because everyone in my family succumbs, eventually, to circulatory and heart problems. So, at one time or another I have given up or restricted virtually every type of food – meats, cheeses, eggs, chocolate, sweets, dairy products, salt, sugar, bread, pasta. I have fasted for, I think, up to three days (trivial to serious fasters, but tough for me). And, please understand, none of this has been easy. I am not someone for whom food is fuel. Food is keen pleasure. 

At this time of my life, I’m sorry to say, I eat nothing white (a concession to an overworked pancreas). That is as restrictive as it sounds if you think about it, and  particularly if you add sweets to the list – these, even if not white, act like it, according to my medical advisors. If you add to that a personal and intense aversion to fast food of any kind, to processed food, to factory food, you can see some real limitations here.

For the most part, though, I live with it just fine. The reason is that I know how to cook and if you know how to cook, you have a world of interesting things to choose from, even if none of them can be white or sweet. There are meats, crustaceans and fish, poultry, eggs, butter, vegetables, beans, nuts, herbs, olive oil, cheeses, fruit and all the lovely things one can do to prepare them. And, there’s foix gras (not a nice food but absolutely wonderful) and sausage and barbeque, also not nice but definitely on my list.

The diet works for me, but I would be hesitant to recommend it, nor do I think, like reformed smokers, that everyone absolutely must eat like I do. I love what I don’t eat and I cook it very well. So sweet desserts and all good things made with sugar, flour, eggs and butter – pies, cobbler, cakes, candies, mousse, fudge, ice cream, egg custard, creme brulee. Roasted potatoes, French fries, mashed potatoes, homemade potato chips. Crepes and waffles with maple syrup.  Lasagna and all forms of pasta dishes. Pizza. Foccacia bread. Sandwiches. Burgers. Bread pudding with bourbon sauce. And on, and on.

As a dieter, I can also cook for other dieters. It comes easy.

And another consolation is that when I get the chance to cook verboten things, I do have to taste them. Sometimes more than once. After all, your food has to be perfect.

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Humble ingredients, wonderful food

When I was an inexperienced cook experimenting with different recipes and culinary traditions, I was often amazed to learn what could be done with one or two ingredients. A sack of tomatoes becomes marinara. An egg and oil becomes mayonnaise. Water and corn meal morph into polenta. And a small piece of cheap beef and four or five onions becomes a dark, rich oriental meal for four.

I made this Chinese dish recently and was again rewarded and delighted by what a little technique can do to humble ingredients.

The cheap beef would be tough and unappetizing cooked whole. Certainly nothing you would grill for your friends. But, chill it till almost frozen, slice it paper thin against the grain and cut the slices into tiny julienned sticks. Then toss these with an egg white, coat with corn starch and a little salt, heat oil in a wok and deep fry briefly. Remove and drain. That takes care of the meat.

For the onions, you slice them in half and stand each half on end. Then you slice these to get thin, julienne-ish pieces. Cook a wok-full of these onions slowly with a little oil for twenty minutes or so, stirring as you go. The onions get soft, then they start to brown and soon they caramelize and become sweet and soft.

Then you stir in the cooked beef, a little sugar, a little soy sauce, taste, adjust the seasoning, smile and serve it forth.

No one who tastes it would believe it’s humble origins, how little it costs and how simple it is to make.

It’s one more demonstration that some of the most interesting dishes in Chinese, French, Italian, Cajun, Southern American and other great traditions were created by inventive cooks who were scared of starving to death. Far from the kitchens of the rich, they originate in scarcity and necessity. And, we who wallow in an overabundance of everything, inherit the result of their genius. I am grateful.