Upcoming changes

Things are going to get very fishy on here in the next few weeks—literally. Practicing Catholics 14 or older who are medically able to do so are bound by liturgical laws not to eat the meat of warm-blooded animals on the 7th Wednesday before Easter (Ash Wednesday) and every intervening Friday (until and including the last Friday before Easter, Good Friday).  It is out of this liturgical law that the custom that Catholics eat fish on Fridays, especially during the season of Lent was created. Furthermore, Catholics who are at least 18 and who have not yet turned 60 who are medically able to do so are told to have 3 meals such that the two small meals do not equal or surpass the large meal on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

Since I definitely fit both categories (I’m 21 and healthy: this means that I’m older than 14, and I’m older than 18 but not yet 60) and you may also be in at least one of these categories, especially if you are Catholic, you will notice a number of changes coming to the content and difficulty level of the dishes being posted here between now and mid-April. This coming Friday, up until (and including) April 8, every recipe will contain fish. The recipes will all be shorter, simpler, and will all be designed to have smaller portion sizes. In addition, there will not be any recipes posted on Friday, April 15, but at least one recipe will be posted instead on Saturday night, April 16.

Beginning Friday, April 22, portion sizes will increase back to normal, and, if the dish is a main course, the protein will no longer necessarily be fish. Recipes will return to their normal complexity.

Hummingbird Tales: A friend's review

{Before we get started: Brittney is a dear friend without whom I definitely would not be so close to publishing my own book. All of the things I say here take into account the fact that we’re friends and have been for years (and all the praise I give her and her book are absolutely genuine, not just because we’re friends). She doesn’t even know I’m writing this review, so no, I’m not being paid to write this. What you’re about to read is about 1700 words of spoiler-free praise of one author’s work by another author who happens to be good friends with her.}

I love to write. I've published dozens of recipes and other short-form pieces on this blog, and I love taking a walk out in nature and just writing down my thoughts for the day. For the most part, I've stayed away from long-form writing, with a notable exception: I have a 100,000-word manuscript I've been working on since I was 15 which I hope to finish soon. Shortly after I opened my Instagram account, I wanted to find out if there was a community of people like me: teenagers who were really passionate about something and who were writing books about their passions as I was. In August 2016, I started working on a book (the manuscript I mentioned above), and I knew I would need community and friends to support me through the project. I found one author around my age fairly quickly, around the time I was 16 or 17. I looked around her profile, and I was pretty amazed by what I saw. So, I followed Brittney, and pretty soon, we had messaged for the first time. We introduced ourselves to each other, and we talked about our books. Forsaken had come out a few months before, so, definitely prematurely (in retrospect, years prematurely, since I’m days away from turning 21, and yet I’m still nowhere near being ready to publish), I had lots of questions about formatting, and editing, her process, and pretty much anything an aspiring author would venture to ask a published author with whom he was messaging on Instagram and who was friendly enough and had enough free time to actually respond.

Through those initial interactions, I grew closer to her, and now I’m lucky to call Brittney a very good friend. I got involved with Brittney’s second novel, Fifty Days (which, by the way, has won several awards, so you should totally check it out!) when it was basically finished. In 2018, she put out a message asking for beta-readers, in the midst of all the adorable shots of her cats and the other glimpses into her life she gave us on social media. I didn’t really know what beta-reading was, so I messaged back saying I was… cautiously interested, but that she’d need to bear with me, explain what I needed to do, and correct any erroneous assumptions a few hasty Google queries might have created.

But eventually, I figured out exactly what I was supposed to do: read Brittney’s book ahead of its release to the general public later that summer and help catch plot holes, grammar issues, formatting quirks—anything that a second pair of eyes would be good for before publication. I loved the idea, so I sent Brittney my email address, and I soon received a PDF of Fifty Days. There were a few minor issues (when aren't there?) if I remember correctly: something had corrupted the PDF, so she had to resend it, there were a few minor formatting glitches once the PDF was in good working order, a few typos, minor plot holes. But the communication with Brittney was great, and all the problems were sorted out. Though I’m nowhere near ready to put out a call of my own, working with Brittney helped me to understand what to expect when my own book will eventually get to that same stage, and so I’m very thankful to Brittney for giving me that wonderful opportunity. Truthfully, by the end of the beta-reading process, once I’d read the fiftieth day in Fifty Days, it was one of my favorite books, if not my favorite outright. A few more weeks went by during which Brittney sorted out the logistics of publishing, promoting, and distributing the book; took our advice into consideration and implemented some of our changes; and made her own final changes to the manuscript. Once the beta process was complete, I got a physical copy of Fifty Days, personalized with a signed message for me.

In 2020, my beta-reading epicenter shifted from North Texas to Singapore, and I beta-read a novel written by another friend I met online. I had no apprehension that time since I knew from working with Brittney what a beta-reader’s role was supposed to be. I enjoyed the experience immensely, and I was impressed with how many of my friends around my age (late teens through early 20s) were published or were on the cusp of publishing. That other friend’s book, as far as I know, is still in final edits, but it’ll be out soon, I’m sure. That book too will be a phenomenal read by another young author who I'm honored to call a friend.

I think it was shortly after I finished working with my friend from Singapore on her book that Brittney put out another post, asking if we wanted a collection of short stories that she’d written to be published. Knowing how much I liked Brittney’s previous work, I was so happy that this was even a possibility. That collection eventually became Hummingbird Tales. 

Hummingbird Tales came out in mid-September of last year, and I got it in the mail having made its way all the way from Texas soon after. Unlike with Fifty Days, I wasn’t one of the beta-readers, so I only read Hummingbird Tales once it was released to the general public. Unfortunately, though, I couldn’t read it when I got it, since less than a week later, I got sick for the first time that semester. That flu lasted a few weeks, I had maybe a week of full recovery, and then I was down again, until just before the end of the semester. Then, I left my apartment for 6 weeks, unfortunately realizing as soon as I got home for winter break that I’d left Hummingbird Tales on my desk.

I came back to my apartment to find a raw, engaging, book that I know was written from the heart, a book that demands emotional vulnerability from both author and reader. And those, honestly, are the best books. I’ve read quite a few anthologies, but none have woven together fiction and non-fiction as Hummingbird Tales did. Britney is an incredible writer, and you’re practically guaranteed to feel like you’re in the scene she’s laying out for you. I had already read some of Brittney’s prior work, and I remember how blown away I had been by her ability to achieve this when she was even younger, and yet, the sky is the limit. Keep it up, friend! You got this! This book truly is one-of-a-kind and should be on almost anyone’s reading list. So, if you like collections of short fiction (and non-fiction) pieces, go get Hummingbird Tales!

I started reading it a few days ago after I finished all the work I needed to do that day, and I pretty much didn’t put it down until I finished it at bedtime, except to send Brittney a few updates along the way. The book is organized into 3 parts which contain a total of 48 short pieces, so in theory, you have 48 good stopping points—more than that, actually, since some of the stories have multiple parts. But trust me when I say that you’ll only want to put it down when you finish. So wait until you have a few spare hours all in one unbroken period and then sit down and enjoy Brittney’s latest. A great storyteller is one who puts words on a page in a way that transports you into the world in which those events occur—real or not—in such a way as though you feel yourself a spectator in that world in real-time. This is a twofold challenge: setting up the world in which the events occur and then writing the events themselves. Fueled both by her real experiences and a vast imagination, the worlds of Hummingbird Tales are among the most vivid I’ve ever read. This book receives my highest recommendation, and surely is and will remain one of the best I’ve ever read. Sometimes, it takes a while to find your style as much as a reader as it does as a writer. As far as reading styles go, I've found what's as close to a perfect match as there can be, in Brittney's writing. Beta-reading or not, having such close access to an author—this is even more true if you're friends with that author—provides a reading experience unlike any other. With this close access comes the opportunity to have greater access to the author and thus to better understand her voice by knowing what her life is like. It creates opportunities for spontaneous discussions about writing or anything else. Most of all, it builds community.

What started out with Brittney has grown to a community of dozens of authors who I know. We all have two common goals: to write as well as we possibly can and to motivate each other to do the same. Even if a book only has one listed author, so many more people are vital to its success. And that’s one of my favorite things about writing: the community. I’ve had a lot of doubts about my own work, but this wonderful little community I’ve found myself in has been nothing but supportive. Thanks to Brittney for being my entry point into this wonderful community, and thanks to everyone else for your support!

If you know Brittney well like I do, you know about the importance of sea turtles in her life, as creatures that give hope, joy, and meaning to life. Well, Brittney, thanks for being a sea turtle in my life through our friendship. I am the writer I am today—and I’ve kept at it for so long—because you’ve always been so kind, motivating, supportive, and friendly. Whoever you are, wherever you are, you are perfectly equipped to take my good friend’s advice: go be a sea turtle in someone’s life! Be for them a source of hope, joy, and life. 

____________

You can find Brittney on any of her social media channels:
On Twitter as Brittney Kristina (@mindfulbrittney) / Twitter
On Instagram as Brittney Kristina Dear (@brittney.kristina) • Instagram photos and videos
On Facebook as Brittney Kristina - Home | Facebook
On Goodreads as Brittney Kristina (Author of Forsaken) (goodreads.com)
Online at Mindfulness Blog | Mindfully Brittney (brittneykristina.wixsite.com)
You can buy her books at Amazon.com: Brittney Kristina: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle

Super Bowl Party Wings

Credit

The most-watched broadcast of the whole year in the United States is just a few days away, and with the game come several traditions: listening to see if the singer will spontaneously forget the lyrics and/or the melody of the Star-Spangled Banner, hoping the coin actually flips when someone tosses it, arguing with friends and family about which commercials were the best or the worst, enjoying or thoroughly hating the halftime show… the list goes on. Of course, here I mean to list only the traditions not proper to the game of football itself.

Today’s recipe comes out of another one of those traditions that are integral to the game experience, but which have nothing to do with the game per se: food. Specifically, finger foods, namely, chicken wings.

As I’ve covered many times in several chicken recipes already posted here, poultry and fowl have two different kinds of meat: white and dark. White meat is the meat that has the least myoglobin, hemoglobin, proteins, and connective tissue. Dark meat is just the opposite—lots of myoglobin, hemoglobin, proteins, and connective tissues. Especially because of the differences in that last category, dark meat tolerates a much higher temperature without going dry. (In fact, if you go to my Signature Dish, you’ll see that there I tell you to cook the meat 20-plus degrees more well-done than “well-done” for chicken, according to the government.) 

Connective tissue melts at a very high temperature, which explains why it’s beneficial to “overcook” (according to the FDA/USDA) dark meat—because if dark meat is eaten at 160, the experience will be suboptimal since the collagen in the dark meat will not have fully converted into gelatin. This collagen-to-gelatin melting reaction is part of what makes poultry (and other meats) “juicy.” White meat has very little collagen, so it’s much easier to dry it out, which explains why it's important to stop the cooking process as soon as white meat reaches a safe temperature. Even 5 or 10 extra degrees will feel overcooked and grainy or gritty if you deal with white meat.

Anyways, back to the wings. Chicken wings, if they’re intact, look kind of like a Z. One end was obviously connected to the body of the bird. The first of the three segments of the “Z,” the part closest to that connection to the body via a joint, is the drumette. After the drumette comes the flat, which has less meat on it. Further out still is the wingtip, which has the least meat. When you eat a chicken wing and you find yourself in a part of the wing with one thick bone, that’s the drumette. If you see two thinner bones, that’s the flat. If you can, try to buy wings that only have the first two sections, since the third section is basically only bone and/or cartilage. (But if you’re making chicken stock, buy whole wings—you need the extra cartilage in that case.) If you prefer one of the parts of the wings, of course, buy only that part. For all intents and purposes to a home cook, the flat and the drumette can be treated exactly the same way.

Here, I’ll present 3 recipes for chicken wing rubs. All these wings should be cooked the same way: in a single layer on a baking sheet in a 400-degree oven until they reach at least 180 degrees internally. 40 minutes should be perfect, but that could fluctuate depending on how accurate your oven is, how big it is, how full it is with chicken, etc. Go by how cooked the chicken is, not by how much time has passed. If you deal with wings enough, you’ll know by feel if they are done.

First, let’s begin with a true classic for the chicken wing: buffalo sauce. A day before the wings which will become buffalo wings are to be served, take them out of their containers and place them on a sheet tray (ideally with a wire rack to maximize air circulation). Liberally salt the wings. Leave them uncovered in the fridge on the sheet tray for 24 hours. This process is known as dry brining. It more thoroughly seasons the wings, and it dries out the skin, allowing for more crispy skin that won’t go soggy even when the wings are totally coated in the various sauces. (This method should, like the cooking method, be observed with all the sauce combinations. Buffalo sauce is a mixture of butter, hot sauce, and spices. 

Over medium heat on a stovetop in a small saucepan, 4 tablespoons of unsalted butter per dozen wings, and add to that garlic powder, onion powder, fresh cracked black pepper, and your choice of paprika style (hot, smoked, sweet, or any combination thereof). Whisk to dissolve the powders. Once the powdered spices have been activated by the hot fat in the butter and the spices are fragrant, add to that mixture 1 ounce of hot sauce per dozen wings (more if you like the heat, less if you don’t). Whisk again. Cook over medium-low heat for another 5 minutes. As soon as the wings are done in the oven, place them in your biggest heatproof bowl and transfer your sauce into that same container where the wings are. If you have a big bowl, you can toss your wings by flicking your wrists, but if you aren’t comfortable with the technique, use a pair of tongs to toss the wings and evenly distribute the sauce to coat all the wings.

For lemon-pepper wings, follow the same procedure of dry-brining and then roasting the wings. The sauce is again made up of 4 tablespoons of unsalted butter per dozen wings, plus the zest and juice of 3 lemons per 2 dozen wings, salt to taste, and 20 cranks of freshly ground black pepper per dozen wings. I have worked with “lemon-pepper” seasonings before, and I have also made my own lemon-pepper chicken (not necessarily wings), and the two versions of the seasoning—the premade “lemon-pepper” and the seasoning I make myself—are worlds apart. Lemons are quite acidic, so if you want, feel free to use limes, oranges, or another citrus you prefer instead. If you would like to, you could also add a shot of tequila to the butter, fresh citrus juice and zest, and ground pepper. If you do this and you choose to make tequila-lemon-pepper wings, be sure the alcohol completely evaporates before using this sauce with the wings, especially if you’re making these wings for a party and little kids might be watching the game with you.

This third recipe is a riff on the Signature Dish I mentioned above. Combine the spices from the signature dish (paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, dill, oregano, thyme, basil, salt, fresh ground black pepper) with the butter, and, as before, infuse the spices into the sauce, then toss the wings in the sauce as soon as they’re done.

Finally, a honey mustard sauce. Combine the butter, garlic powder, salt, pepper, paprika, and 2 teaspoons each of good Dijon or whole grain mustard and raw clover or other wildflower honey. Adjust the seasonings as necessary so that the tangy mustard, sweet honey, and rich butter are balanced. As before, prepare the sauce and toss it immediately with the wings.

(Credit to Bon Appetit's BA's Best Wings)

Mac and Cheese

I’m sure almost all of you would agree with me that, as far as traditional American comfort foods go, mac and cheese has to be one of the most iconic, and one of the favorites, especially among the youngsters. As good as it is when you’re at a casual summer barbeque with friends, celebrating Thanksgiving with your family, or just craving some comfort food, there are a few adaptations we can make to the traditional ways of making this dish to make it even better.

There are three key components to this dish that’ll make it or break it. First, sufficiently undercooking the pasta. Second, building a mornay that doesn’t split. Third, creating a topping and baking the dish to completion. Mastering each of these tasks individually is crucial to mastering the perfect mac and cheese. But don’t be too afraid—these tasks may look difficult, but they really aren’t.
Elbow macaroni is the traditional shape associated with this dish. And as good and nostalgic as mac and cheese with this shape is, there are a few shapes that actually hold up better to the sauce and the baking process. Instead of the traditional elbow shape, I suggest gemelli or cavatappi, in that order of preference.

Regardless of its final use, I like to cook each pound of pasta in a gallon of water. But unlike a lot of my other pasta dishes, pasta to be used in mac and cheese should never be cooked in water to al dente. This is a common mistake people make with this dish: cooking the pasta to al dente in the water overcooks it in the oven, and the texture is nowhere near as good as it would be if the proper procedure had been followed. Luckily, pasta boxes or bags give the time required to reach al dente. We can use that information as a baseline, and, in this case, subtract 3-4 minutes from that time, and drain the pasta after that much time.

Bringing a gallon of water to a rolling boil and then parcooking pasta can be quite a slow process, but we can use this time to our advantage. Preheat your oven to 400 Fahrenheit. We need to build a béchamel to eventually turn into a mornay, so this is the best time to do that. By doing things in parallel, the pasta doesn’t get soggy as it waits for the sauce, and the sauce doesn’t develop a skin or thicken too much as it cools. (Sauces thickened by a roux, a mixture of flour and butter, like most of the French Mother Sauces, thicken faster and faster as they get progressively cooler.) We need a mornay sauce eventually, but a good mornay starts with a Béchamel base. Béchamel is one of the five classic Mother Sauces of the French cuisine, so I’ve already covered how to prepare it in a series I did back in October. Since I’ve already covered béchamel, I’ll just create a link to that recipe which you can access by clicking here. 

Once you’ve finished the béchamel as described by that recipe, come back here to learn how to turn the béchamel into a mornay and finish the dish. I will give one tip about the béchamel before moving on: for each pound of pasta, make the roux according to the instructions in the other recipe with 3 tablespoons each of all-purpose flour and unsalted butter.

Once you are satisfied with the taste of your Béchamel, check its texture. A proper béchamel should reach nappe. That is, it should look like a tiny Red Sea if you coat a metal spoon with it and drag your finger across the back of the spoon: there should be two distinct sides of the spoon covered in sauce, a trail in the center where your finger was, and the sauce on either side should not flow back to the center to cover the trail you left. It takes time, but with enough practice, you’ll be able to bring any sauce to nappe. A mornay is a béchamel to which cheese has been added. Cheddar is, of course, the classic cheese for maximum nostalgia in this dish. I already recommended something other than the classic way by suggesting a different shape of pasta, but I’m not going to do that here regarding the cheese. 

Cheddar is a great cheese on its own, and it works really well in mornay sauces, but I do have one recommendation. Just make sure that if you use cheddar, you get a high-quality mild cheddar. Cheaper cheeses (particularly cheddar) usually have extra emulsifiers. These compounds are harmless, and you don’t notice them when you eat the cheese cold or at room temperature, but their presence can slightly change the texture of the cheese when it melts, as it will in this application. Higher quality cheeses lack these additives, so we need to be more careful not to break the emulsion of the sauce, but by using better cheeses, the results will be superior. Milder cheeses, for reasons I don’t quite know how to explain, split less often than sharper cheeses.

I recommend adding a little bit of mustard to a mornay sauce for two reasons. The tang of the mustard cuts through the richness of the cheese quite nicely, and the chemistry of the mustard works in our favor by helping to naturally keep the mornay stable even after the cheese is incorporated and the sauce is heated substantially in a hot oven.

Ideally, it is best to hand-grate a high-quality cheese into a mornay sauce. In any case, however you add your cheese (shredded or grated by the store or processing plant, or grated yourself), do so with the pan containing the sauce off the heat. If direct heat is applied to the sauce before the cheese is combined, the sauce will split. Feel free to adjust the consistency of the sauce with extra milk if it becomes too thick.

Add ¼ cup of olive oil to a skillet, and once the oil is hot, add 1 cup of panko breadcrumbs. Keep the pan and its contents moving constantly and fry the breadcrumbs until they’re golden brown. Remove them from the oil and place them on a paper towel to drain. This should be completed in time with finishing the mornay and the pasta being ready (several minutes shy of al dente). Once all these components are ready, combine the pasta with the mornay sauce, and then transfer the sauced pasta to an oven-safe dish. Top with the breadcrumbs. Cook until golden brown and bubbly. Serve.

(Credit to Fine Cooking)

Revised Bolognese

The Bolognese alla Quarentena has to be one of my most cooked sauces here at home, and a few weeks ago, I made a change to the recipe that merits more than a quick footnote update to the original recipe. The alla Quarentena, as I’ve been preparing it, has always been with a rather lean ground turkey, but traditional Bolognese is made with ground beef (honestly, I don’t remember the last time I worked with ground beef), so I’ll make two changes to the alla Quarentena here: 1) ground turkey will revert back to the original traditional ground beef, and 2) I’ll make the signature change that differentiates this recipe from my other one.

This recipe begins the same way, by sauteing 1 pound of ground beef (a good ground chuck is best). Beef has a significant advantage over turkey: it’s a lot fattier. The most common ground beef sold here in the United States is 80/20. That is, 80 percent of the meat is protein and 20 percent is fat. In general, this is the perfect ratio of ground beef for almost anything. If one of my recipes calls for ground beef, you can safely assume I want you to use 80/20 unless I say otherwise. The ground turkey I’ve worked with, on the other hand, is 93/7. Poultry in general is leaner than beef or pork, but even by poultry standards, this is very lean. (So lean, in fact, that I don’t think I could find beef that lean without going to a specialty butcher shop; most ground beef is 90/10 or higher.)

This higher fat content of the ground beef over the ground turkey (20% versus 7% means that the beef is basically 3 times fattier than the turkey) is important for three reasons: Fat is a barrier that allows for even heat transfer from the cooking surface to the protein. Without that barrier to move the heat from the pan to the food, it cooks unevenly. If that barrier doesn’t exist, I need to create it by adding fat into the system myself, which comes in the form of olive oil. Second, cooking an animal (in any form—ground, as a steak, etc.) in its own fat adds another complex dimension of flavor that is impossible to replicate when cooking an animal in some other fat. With fatty beef, most of the fat is in the beef, and it can be rendered out and used to cook the beef with close to no additional fat. Doing this allows the “beefiness” of the beef to shine, whereas with the turkey, since that fat basically isn’t there, the fat isn’t turkey fat, but olive oil. Don’t get me wrong, I like olive oil, but cooking turkey in olive oil (which obviously isn’t the turkey’s own fat) doesn’t give as robust a flavor to the turkey as the method for the beef. Third, fattier meat stays moister longer. This is why, in general, it’s really easy to prepare a filet mignon terribly, but it’s almost impossible to mess up a brisket in that sense. Beef has more fat than turkey, so I have to put in less effort to keep the beef itself just as good as the sauce it’s sitting in compared to the work I have to do to have the same effect on the much leaner turkey.

In any case, the first step to any good Bolognese is browning the protein of choice. For reasons that will become apparent later, do this in an oven-safe vessel. Whether I use this method or my older method, my preferred vessel of choice anytime I make a Bolognese is my 8-quart stainless steel Dutch oven, but you don’t necessarily need a Dutch oven; anything big, heavy, and oven-safe should do the trick. Protein expels water from within its cells at first, and at this point, it looks gray and, frankly, quite unappealing. However, if you’ve been cooking long enough, you’ll start learning to recognize the different sounds proteins make when they’re expelling that water versus when they’re frying in the fat you put in the pan (or which they already naturally contain). Listen for that sound to change, and with it, watch for the color to change. This is one of the points where I deviate from the original Bolognese alla Quarentena, and one of the keys to making this recipe successful. When you start browning the meat, preheat your oven to 250 Fahrenheit. By the time you finish browning the meat and preparing everything else, your oven should be up to temperature. And even if it’s not quite there yet, that’ll be okay—more on that in a few paragraphs.

This sauce is quite simple, and rather similar to the alla Quarentena sauce or the Sauce Tomate I posted in October when I covered the French Mother Sauces. In a food processor, combine 1 large yellow onion, 6 cloves of garlic, 1 large red bell pepper, and 6 Roma tomatoes, and keep the processor running until the sauce is as smooth as possible, given you’re using a food processor and not a blender. Place the sauce into the vessel you have chosen, where the browned meat should already be. Add to that enough water so that you have 3 parts tomato mixture to 2 parts water. Season this with freshly cracked black pepper, dried oregano, dried dill, dried thyme, dried basil, garlic powder, and onion powder. Stir to combine all the spices and to make sure nothing has burned on the bottom or sides. Place this sauce into the oven (which, again, should be set to 250 Fahrenheit). As mentioned before, it’s totally fine if your prep work is quicker than the time it takes your oven to hit 250. If that happens to be the case, just put the oven-safe vessel into the oven and let it go. In any case, leave the sauce in the oven for at least 1 ½ and up to 4 hours. Resist the temptation to open the oven door for any reason; don’t look at it, don’t stir it, don’t rotate the pan, don’t add more liquid. Leave it alone. This, I think, is one of the areas where home cooks struggle the most: knowing what needs constant babysitting and what can be left alone for hours on end. There’s a ton of liquid in that vessel. Nothing is going to burn, and the oven is at such a low temperature that you don’t have to worry about the reduction process. This is absolutely a recipe that can be left alone.

Up to 4 hours after it went into the oven, turn the oven off and remove the sauce. Stir the sauce again and taste it. Only now, salt it and taste it again. This sauce should never be salted ahead of time (i.e., when you’re preparing it to go into the oven) for two related reasons: 1) temperature and 2) time. I don’t know how accurate your oven is (and, truthfully, you probably don’t know either), and I have no way of knowing how long your sauce will stay in the oven. These are the two variables that control how much something reduces, and reduction is an accelerating process. So if something tastes good before reduction and it reduces just a little bit in my oven, it’ll be okay. But if that same dish tastes good before reduction and it reduces by tenfold in your oven, it’ll be inedibly salty by the end. If you know you have to reduce something, or you even think about reducing it, hold off on salting it until you’re satisfied with the final volume.

As with the original recipe, the ideal serving companion to this sauce is a long, wide, dry pasta, like a good tagliatelle, pappardelle, or fettucine. Cook those according to the package instructions, combine with the sauce, mix, and serve.

French Onion Soup

French Onion Soup is a classic rustic French soup perfect for a cold winter’s day. Done properly, start to finish, this soup can take up to 48 hours, so most people are very intimidated by it. But since most of that work is passive, this is actually a very simple recipe that every home cook should know.
Onion soup is so time-consuming because of the soup base, namely, a beef stock. Beef stock is made with beef bones and, at the lowest of simmers, takes anywhere from 16 to 48 hours of stove time. I have a chicken stock recipe already uploaded, and you can find that by clicking here. The process for beef stock is nearly the same: roast the bones and the aromatics, add a lot of water to a tall pot with as much volume as possible, and let it simmer as gently as possible for as long as possible. If you want, you also have the option of following the stock recipe exactly by using chicken wings to make chicken stock, even though the traditional version of the soup uses beef stock. If you are vegetarian/vegan, I suppose you could make this soup entirely vegan by roasting vegetables and mushrooms, adding water and soy sauce, and simmering that to make a vegetable stock to serve as a base.
 

Cut 3 pounds of yellow onions in half pole-to-pole, that is, through the root and the stem ends, like I always recommend for when they are to be chopped. Peel the onion halves, and then cut them thinly, once again pole-to-pole. If you have a mandolin slicer, use it, but be sure to put on a hand guard first, since mandolin blades can be very sharp. If you use a knife, make sure your blade is sharp, not only because sharper blades are safer, but also because sharper blades disturb fewer cell walls and are thus less likely to make you or anyone else around you cry as you slice the onions. Once all the onions have been sliced, melt a whole stick of butter. Once the butter has melted but has not started browning, place all the onions into a large pan or Dutch oven.

Caramelize the onions slowly, over medium-low heat. Stir constantly. Caramelization is not a linear process, so you should never step away from caramelizing onions. Watch and stir them constantly from anywhere between 30 and 60 minutes, depending on how much moisture your onions need to expel before they start taking on color.

If you have any, when the onions are almost done, you can deglaze the pan with sherry or cognac. Otherwise, use an equivalent amount of water (2-3 ounces) to deglaze the pan. The caramelization process certainly created fond—the chef’s dream, the sticky flavorful bits that get stuck to cooking surfaces, just waiting to be dissolved. Deglazing a cooking surface picks up that fond with a liquid and dissolves the fond into that liquid, so no flavor is lost. The onions have finished caramelizing when they are deep mahogany brown, have an almost jammy consistency, and are about to burn but have not yet. Monitoring the onions as they get closer and closer to this point is essential. I’ve said it already, but it is worth repeating you CANNOT walk away from caramelizing onions, or they will burn.

For 3 pounds of onions, I recommend about half a gallon of stock. Add the stock to the onions, and let simmer, stirring occasionally for 25 minutes. Once the stock goes in, you can afford to step away, only checking every five minutes or so. There’s a gallon of liquid in your pan/Dutch oven, so surely nothing will burn because there’s no way that a gallon of liquid will evaporate, since the liquid is only simmering, and for not even half an hour. Check for seasoning and adjust as normal, bearing in mind that my stock recipe never called for salt precisely so that at a moment like this, you could season your soup to your liking.

In the meantime, figure out how many portions of soup you will be serving right away (this soup is great for leftovers after the fact, but right now, handle however many people you’ll be feeding right away). Find that many oven-safe ramekins or bowls and cut slices of baguettes about ¾ of an inch thick so that the tops of all those dishes can be covered in bread. At the same time, grate enough Gruyere to generously cover all of the bread.

When 25 minutes have elapsed, the soup is ready to be portioned into the ramekins. Top the soup with the bread, and then top the bread with the cheese. Place the filled ramekins on top of a baking sheet and place the baking sheet into an oven with the broiler (“grill” if you speak non-American English) on high. Check on the soup after 90 seconds, and every 15 seconds thereafter. The objective is for the cheese to take on some “leoparding,” that is, for it to look like the cheese on top of a well-made cheese pizza: taking on some color but not burned. Once you are satisfied with the degree of melting and leoparding of the cheese, turn off the broiler, carefully remove the ramekins from the oven and serve.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Cream of Mushroom Soup

Cream of mushroom is a great soup to have on hand for the winter, and it’s actually one of the simplest soups to make. There are three components to good cream of mushroom: a good bechamel, sauteed mushrooms, and good duxelles.

Whether someone recommends washing mushrooms in an application like this can be quite a point of contention, and, putting this out on the internet, I fully recognize I might be putting myself in a position to have a heated discussion in the comments below. For several years, I was of the opinion that white, baby bella, or cremini mushrooms shouldn’t be washed per se, and that they should just be scrubbed with a moist paper towel to remove any grime that might be on the surface. But now, after dozens of experiments, I’ve concluded that washing mushrooms by submersion makes no difference to the saturation when compared to the moist-paper-towel-scrubbing method. Personally, then, I’ve returned to submerging the mushrooms, but if you would like to, feel free to scrub them individually.

Cream of mushroom makes use of the whole mushroom—the cap and the stem. But unlike other dishes I’ve developed that use mushrooms (like this stroganoff), the cap and stem are not used together. For this, we need to separate the cap and the stem from each other. This is a simple process that can certainly be done by hand. To do this, I like to place the cap of the mushroom in my non-dominant hand; grab the stem with my dominant hand, and then gently twist clockwise until the cap and the stem have come apart. Keep the caps on your cutting board and go ahead and place the stems in your food processor.

Peel and quarter one large yellow onion, and peel half of a head of garlic, placing both the onion and the garlic with the mushroom stems. Run the food processor until the mushroom stems, onion, and garlic cloves have become a relatively homogenous paste. This will eventually become the duxelles.

Slice the caps into relatively even pieces; in general, cutting each cap into 3 to 4 pieces should be a good size. Smaller-than-average mushrooms should be cut only in half, and larger-than-average mushrooms can be cut into up to 6 pieces. Coat the bottom of a Dutch oven or large saucepan (at least 4-5 quarts) with a thin film of oil. When the oil begins to shimmer, place the sliced caps in the oil. Be careful to avoid splatter. Water in the mushrooms may splatter when it hits the hot oil, so a burn hazard certainly exists at this point. Early in this process, there is no risk of the mushrooms burning, but as they expel water and begin to sauté, these mushrooms need progressively more attention. The sound you’ll be hearing when the mushrooms expel water versus when they sauté will be different, and you’ll learn to recognize the different phases of the cooking process by experience. Once the mushrooms start to sauté, add 2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, and let the vinegar cook down a little with the mushrooms, taking care not to burn anything. Season with salt, freshly cracked black pepper, dried thyme, and dried dill. After a few more minutes, transfer the mushrooms and the vinegar to a separate heat-safe container.

In the same pan, cook down the mushroom stalk-onion-garlic paste from the food processor. Season the paste with salt and freshly cracked black pepper. Once most of the moisture has come out of the onions and garlic (this requires constant stirring since the pieces are so much smaller than the pieces of the caps), reserve this to a separate container. This is the duxelles.

For the last time, start over with a clean pan, being sure to remove anything that may have burned to this point. Build a béchamel using the method I’ve outlined here. Once the béchamel is ready, return the duxelles and the mushrooms caps to the pan. Stir. Adjust the consistency of the soup and check for seasoning. Adjust the consistency and/or the seasoning if necessary.

(Photo credits to Cafe Delites)