Category Archives: Cooking

Beef heels, pork jowls, bulgogi. These are the cuts I didn’t get at H-Mart today. It’s a huge pan-Asian supermarket around 20 minutes from the cabin and is the type of place where you can get beasts chopped up in innumerable different formats (I didn’t need chicken feet, I brought some home recently for soup). There were piles and piles of produce, leaves and bulbs I’d never heard of or seen. Wild-caught fish, like the red snapper fresh with slime that I had the fishmonger clean (head off, please) to bake later. This place is an oasis in Shop-Rite-Ville, Westchester County. We don’t even have to cook dinner tonight since we got seaweed and fermented black beans and dumplings and kimchi to go.

Home from Holland, my parents brought me a wheel of Gouda. Or How-da, as they say. Howdy, gouda! Apparently the company that makes this particular brand of gouda maintains at least a dozen cheese stores around the country. Imagine. The only region of the U.S. that has that kind of devotion to, or need for, cheese is the midwest, where giant supermarkets offer refrigerated piles of blocks of the stuff, divided into yellow, white, and mottled (colby). You take your life into your hands asking a supermarket worker for blue, feta or, worst of all, parmesan. Well, you can get a green can of it in aisle 4.

Ham or lamb, lamb or ham, the eternal question for the Easter cook.

Lamb, traditionally, because the new spring lambs are out and about and, not so important to me, because lamb represented the “Lamb of God,” Christ.

Ham, because at least in the past the hogs of fall had been successfully cured and were now ready for cooking. Also because hogs were thought to represent luck.

We feel lucky to eat our ham, smeared with a paste of a third mustard, a third marmalade and a third brown sugar. Stuck with a few cloves and a few dried apricots. Irresistable.

No eggs this year, though Maud is pining for them. Gil is underwhelmed, he says.

The patio of the cabin is soaking in sunshine as we drowse and wait for dinner.

Happy rebirth.

We made one of those cheapo pieces of corned beef on the 17th and it was pretty good with cabbage and carrots and onions and potato.

But the truly delectable dish came about when Gil took the cleaver and chopped up all the leftovers together, then threw it into the frying pan. Red flannel hash.

I’m a hash freak and I order it whenever it’s on the menu, but this was the best I’ve ever had. Ate the leftovers of the leftovers last night and it was equally good. Thank you, Gil!

Red Flannel Hash

I was asleep when this recipe made the rounds a few years back. But that’s okay, because now I have the dope, and my life has changed. Instant chocolate cake, a further incarnation of the EZ Bake light bulb version. Here it is.

Might not look this pretty, but hey.

TWO MINUTE CHOCOLATE MUG CAKE

Combine 1 egg, 3 T milk, 3 T neutral oil in a coffee mug, mix well.

Add 3 T flour, 4 T sugar, 2 T cocoa powder, mix thoroughly.

Add 3 T chocolate chips and a splash vanilla, mix again.

Put your mug in the microwave on high for 2 minutes. The cake will rise out of the mug; what a fine sight.

Allow to cool if you must and tip it onto a plate if you feel like it. Otherwise just dig in with a big ol’ spoon.  A dollop of vanilla ice cream wouldn’t be bad either.

P.S. You don’t have to share.

I collect two kinds of cookbooks: pamphlet recipe books of the ’30s-’70s, and community cookbooks of various vintages. They speak to me.

For example, I have a tiny fold-out sheet from Drake’s Bakeries, vintage 1940s, bearing the title “Snappy Desserts with Drakes Handy Layers – Always Fresh,” with the picture of a goose (is the snappish goose what makes them snappy?) and inside, “He married an angel if you serve him Drake’s Angel Food Cake with any of these icings.” It suggests adding any one of fifteen ingredients to “the basic icings”: fresh fruits, nut meats, tutti-frutti, maple syrup, etc., etc. The pictures of cake slices, raspberry, coconut, boston cream, look like the perfect plastic foods you might have played with as a child.

Moving on. “Good Housekeeping’s Cake Book with decorating ideas for many occasions” has lurid cover cake shots and an interior harlequin theme. A birthday cake glows in one photo with dyed pastel coconut stripes.

From 1941, “300 Tasty, Healthful Dairy Dishes: For health, beauty and happiness, use more milk and dairy products. These economical recipes will add tempting variety to your daily menus.” Oceans of white sauce flow over asparagus and beans. Would you care for some scalloped tuna and cabbage?

And all the booklets from the blender companies. Eerie photographs of beaming, aproned kitchen divas wielding mixing bowls.

But weirder still come the industry offerings. ‘Proven Recipes Showing the uses of the Three Great Products from Corn,” published by Corn Products Refining Co. of New York; “Success in Seasoning” by Lea & Perrins, also located in Manhattan; and “What Shall I Cook Today,” my hands down favorite, published by Spry, a shortning giant that was once a competitor to Crisco – “The new, purer, all-vegetable shortening triple-creamed” and advertised via hopelessly bland, homey comic strips:

“I’m getting another can of SPRY.”

“So am I. I think it’s marvelous. It creams so easily.”

“Spry is so white. I just KNOW it’s purer.”

“It’s more economical, too. You can fry with it over and over again.”

I love to take these booklets out once in a while and just paw through them and imagine a time when women relied upon their recipes, and were inspired by the, rich, technicolor images within.

I’ve never cooked out of one though.