Basics to Brilliant Y'all.

I don't cheer on too many teams. My days of watching and supporting professional sports have faded into the misty fanaticism of my youth (a certain cross country Winnebago trip to feed the Washington Redskins ribs as they prepared for the Super Bowl fixed that). These days my cheerleading is reserved for the health and well being for our country as a whole. GO USA. However there is one team that I am wholeheartedly on the Winnebago for. That's Team Willis. It's pretty easy to figure out why. Whether getting quoted in the NY Times about wistfully hoping for gay marriage rights in Georgia, coming to terms with being "a big gal", pulling the curtain back on making of a cookbook or sharing her love of all things seafood, Virginia is a kindred spirit that I love seeing success rain down on her self described offensive lineman's shoulders.

Photo by Angie Mosier

If you've followed this blog at all you know I've been casually cooking my way through Virginia's most excellent first cookbook, Bon Appetit Y'all. It's not just beautiful and graphically amazing, I have not yet found a bad recipe. But you just knew that Virginia had more than one delicious cookbook's worth of recipes tucked away in the nooks and crannies of her chef's jacket. Now comes Basic to Brilliant Y'all, her second stunning offering.

Right off the bat I have one minor issue. Really, just a little one. It's this recipe right here....

Photo by Helene Dujardin

...and the fall release date of this book. You see, to prepare a dish the best way you sometimes have to cook seasonally. This recipe of grilled soft shell crabs with lemon gremolata really only should be prepared with fresh soft shell crabs. Which for yours truly, will not be available until the next spring. Let's just say it's going to be a long, cold winter before I can satisfy my hunger for that particular tidbit. But that's OK because when digging into a new cookbook, I like to make the very first recipe the author lists and since the theme of this cookbook is basics, it's only appropriate that we start with chicken stock (and participate in Virginia's Virtual Potluck). Now again, if you readers have been following along you also know I jibe pretty closely with the Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen crowd. I've been using their basic chicken stock recipe and have not been disappointed in the flavor. But then again, they don't use chicken feet.

That's right, Virginia suggests that two pounds of well washed chicken feet would make an excellent chicken stock. I just happen to frequent a grocery store that has a well stocked meat counter with big piles of chicken feet. Which brings us to the weirdness factor of your basic American cook. Why am I a little skeeved out handling chicken feet? I know why.....the fact that we (mostly) are generations removed from killing and butchering our own meat. My grandmother made a mean fried chicken but that meant starting the process of the meal by chopping the head off a chicken. Attending yearly hog butcherings at an early age keeps you from being squeamish about meat but still, chicken feet are skeevy. Of course that didn't stop me from making the stock.

Liquid gold, baby. I'll probably make Virginia's Meme's Chicken and Rice.

You will be sad because you won't be able to just drop in to see what I'm cooking.

Soufflé Two Ways

When it comes to making desserts, I fall squarely (and with a ample assed thump) in the homey, fruit pie, cobbler and crisp camp of earthly delights. This results in two reactions....1) It pisses off the gooey chocolate dessert lover fans (why don't you make more chocolate things???) and 2) I don't get around to making the more delicate airy desserts. Virginia Willis challenged the readers on her blog to Rise Up and tackle the delicate soufflé as this weekend's cooking assignment. Actually soufflé was already on my cooking to do list but Virgina naturally assumes there's an audience for the test kitchen soufflés you're about to make. For my kitchen, (which in all honesty, is a food photography blog kitchen) this posed a bit of a problem. Soufflés, once out of the oven, need to eaten immediately. IMMEDIATELY!!! So making six soufflés for just myself is overkill on the egg white consumption. But that's ok because the soufflé I was planning to make before Virginia threw down the Georgia Peach Soufflé gauntlet was a savory Cheese Soufflé from Judith Jones excellent cookbook, The Pleasures of Cooking For One. I've been thinking about making this version ever since I got hooked on Iowa Prairie Breeze Cheddar. I have to say it was fascinating comparing the styles and methods of these two chefs while preparing soufflés from their cookbooks.

Now if you've never made a soufflé before (like me) you might be a little hesitant. I think the general perception is that soufflés are difficult to make. That might have been true back in the day of hand whisking whipped cream or meringue but in the age of the mighty Kitchen Aid stand mixer and the efficient food processor? Not a problem. What is a hurdle is timing. If you plan to make a soufflé for others, say at a dinner party, serving the soufflés at their peak height is a tricky thing. The photo above was taken seconds after emerging from the oven and still you can see the center has started to sink. That's not to say it's not supposed to inevitably sink some but if you haven't whipped your egg whites to the right consistency your soufflé won't rise enough to sink any. The recipe for Judith's cheese soufflé can be found over at Martha's conglomo website. NOT to be confused with Oprah's conglomo website.....where the recipe can also be found. Someday soon they will just merge into the World Dominatrix website Marthoprah and there will be no escaping either one of them....but I digress. Judith's instructions includes adding shredded cheese your buttered soufflé dish but not leveling off the top of the soufflé before it goes into the even, giving you a more rustic looking top. This is a great dish when you've got not much else in the fridge. An egg, some cheese, butter and milk and you can whip up something elegant and delicious in no time.

And then we have Virgina and her peaches. You know she's a good ole Georgia girl when she doesn't have one chocolate souffle in her cookbook but she does have a Georgia Peach soufflé. Sadly there were no Georgia peaches to be found anywhere in the greater Kansas City area so I had to settle for fresh Missouri peaches that I found at the farmer's market. A sacrifice, I know but what can you do? Now, Miss Virginia's recipe serves six so I sorta riffed off of Judith's proportions for Virginia's recipe so I didn't have to make and eat six mini soufflés all my myself.

That's not to say they weren't so wonderfully delicious that I couldn't. Oh no, I could. However I was too busy trying to be all "Karmic Kitchen Artistic", getting just the right shot with a dish that just wasn't destined to cooperate. Seriously, look at the badly out of focus and poorly lit reject photo below....

...to see just how much taller it is from the previous picture. They were taken seconds apart. Seriously this is why cookbook photo shoots have tons of assistants and stylists. To get the perfect soufflé shot at the peak of the rise. Not that it mattered in the end.

Because it was like eating a fluffy peach cloud. It even got a thumbs up from my good buddy Craig who stopped by to drag me away to go a quest for nesting Pyrex bowls. Virginia's recipe is in her cookbook but you really should go to her website for the more detailed lessons on creating the perfect soufflé and some beautiful bonus pictures of Paris. Don't be afraid to making your own soufflés, it anything is will amuse the children watching the incredible shrinking dish collapse right before their eyes.

Pimping the Pretty

I couldn't do it. I just couldn't blog the Big Top Chef All Stars Pimp. The company that bought the Elimination Challenge of the last episode certainly doesn't need my microscopic blathering on the results. So here's what happened, the chefs had to shop for everything they needed to make a dish for one hundred people. Pots, pans, heat source, and serving implements. Dale won the challenge, Angelo lost. I threw up a lot in my mouth.

I decided that if we were going to pimp something it was going to be something I enjoyed and wasn't a massive corporation whose advertising budget wasn't larger than some third world country's GDP. I had just the person in mind. Remember this?

This is the artwork painted by Haley Harmon of the blog Don't Eat the Paintings. She painted it after I sent in a recipe from Virginia Willis' cookbook Bon Appetit Y'all. Ever since I've been following Haley's blog and her take on all things culinary. You know I had a huge smile when she recently posted this:

(get out of my head man!!!!!!!!!)

Haley has been very busy. Not only is she still making beautiful art, she's also making grocery bags out of her art...

...she's selling her current artworks...

...and this is the best, she'll take your favorite recipe and make your own personal painting.

How do you get in on all this watercolor goodness? The first place to take your tippy tappy fingertips is Haley's Etsy shop, Don't Eat the Paintings. All the details can be found there. I can't think of a better gift for a loved one than a personal painting of their favorite recipe to hang in their kitchen or dining room. I know I'm going to break out my favorite monkfish recipe.

(Just kidding Haley...snort!)

Southern Saturdays with Virginia - Mama's Seafood Gumbo

Virginia Willis continues her weekly series Southern Saturdays with Virginia. Each week she picks a recipe from her cookbook, Bon Appetit Y'all and asks her readers to cook the recipe. This week she picked Mama's Seafood Gumbo. A stew with crab and shrimp? I think we all know what I was doing today.

While I enjoy a wide variety of ethnic foods, creole cuisine is not something I normally find myself cooking or ordering in a restaurant. I have not had the pleasure of visiting New Orleans nor do I remember ever having had gumbo let alone a good gumbo before. So I was definitely in uncharted waters this Saturday. That wasn't the only issue. There was also the roux. The roux for a gumbo can be a bit tricky.

It starts out like all roux, with fat and flour. In this case, unsalted butter. The directions seem simple enough: In a heavy-bottomed pot or Dutch oven, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the flour, stirring slowly and constantly, and cook to a medium-brown roux, about 30 minutes. Check out that last part. 30 minutes of stirring so your roux doesn't burn. No wandering off to see if the dog is barking at something important or just another squirrel mocking him from the tree outside. No checking your email for the latest Groupon coupon. You're on Roux Duty because your Gumbo depends on it! Once you get that done, it's all smooth sailing from there.

I even had time to make Virginia's $20,000 Rice Pilaf. How was the gumbo? Well it was certainly warm and comforting, thick with crab and shrimp. Just a bit of spice with the addition of the hot sauce at the end for my mild mannered tongue. The filé powder was another new experience for me. I love okra so I was curious how a little bit of dried and ground sassafras leaves were going to thicken up this stew in place of the okra but it certainly did and added a wonderful new flavor as well.

So the next time the weather prognosticators are predicting a major snow dump, instead of stocking up on milk and toilet paper at the grocery store before it hits, get the makings of Mama's Seafood Gumbo and spend that snowstorm productively practicing your roux making skills and warming up your loved ones with some spicy seafood goodness.

A Southern Challenge

Virginia Willis, author of Bon Appétit, Y’all, threw out a challenge on her blog. She's started up Southern Saturdays with Virginia. She posts a recipe late in the week and her readers make the recipe and report back to Virginia. The premier recipe for Southern Saturdays is her grandmother Meme's Yeast Rolls.

Yes, I do love my Kitchen Aid mixer because this is a whole lotta dough to mix. I forget how wonderful rising dough smells, that yeasty beast working hard to achieve that smooth elastic dough. After two rises and a quick trip into the oven you get some wonderful and delicious rolls.

Wish I had made these back when I made the Black Bean and Pumpkin Stew. Delicious slightly sweet rolls perfect for creamy butter and a generous drizzle of honey. What a great start to fun Saturday cooking.

Grits and Greens - Harmon Style

Here's the great thing about cookbooks. They keep on giving. Back in October of 2008 I won a copy of Virginia Willis's cookbook, Bon Appetit Y'all while attending the American Royal. I love this cookbook. I made biscuits, I made Chicken Saltimbocca with Country Ham and I was happy. I even grew my own collard greens in the backyard just so I could make my own organic Grits and Greens.

It was only natural when Haley Harmon of Don't Eat the Paintings called for reader recipe suggestions to paint that this was the recipe I wanted to submit. Who could resist those big beautiful collard greens?

Isn't it beautiful? I think she did a great job. I know it made me hungry. Thanks so much Haley. Don't forget to visit Haley often to watch for more yummy paintings.

Grits and Greens

Happy News!! I'm actually having some success with this planting/harvesting/cooking experiment. It was in doubt there for a while. The bugs were enjoying themselves just a little too much by eating my collards down to the veins. Despite the little bastids my greens have finally reached a size that allowed me to try out a recipe I've been itching to make since I first flipped through Virginia Willis's Bon Appetit Y'all.

A grits and greens recipe that will satisfy my Southern culinary yearnings which have been stronger than usual due to the fact that I'm reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Syd over at Adrenaline's Shadow recommended it. The book is chock full of dish and food descriptions so Grits and Greens should help my taste buds to simmer down.

Actually this is two recipes. The Tangle of Bitter Greens could easily stand alone as a dish. But add these two recipes together and you will get a beautiful thing.

Grits with Corn and Greens Recipe

Ingredients

• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 large white or yellow onion, grated
• 1 cup whole corn kernels, either frozen or freshly cut from the cob
• 2 cups whole milk
• 2 cups water
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 1 cup stone-ground or coarse-ground grits
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 3/4 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (about 3 ounces)
• 1 recipe of Tangle of Bitter Greens
  

Method

1 Heat the oil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat. Add the grated onion and cook, stirring, until transparent, about 2 minutes. Add the corn kernels and cook, stirring occasionally, until the kernels become soft, about 5 minutes.

2 Add the milk, water, and 1 teaspoon of the salt. Bring the mixture to a boil over high heat. Whisk in the grits, decrease the heat to low, and simmer, whisking occasionally, until the grits are creamy and thick, 45 to 60 minutes. Stir in the butter, Parmesan, and Greens. Taste and adjust for seasoning with salt and pepper. Serve immediately.

Tangle of Winter Greens

The best way to clean greens is to fill a clean sink with cold water, add the greens, and swish them around. The dirt will fall to the bottom of the sink. Lift the greens out, drain the sink, and repeat until the water is clear and the greens are free of dirt and grit.

2 tablespoons canola oil
3 medium cloves garlic, mashed into a paste (see below)
1 medium bunch kale, collards, turnip greens, or mustard greens (about 1 1/2 pounds), cleaned, tough stems removed and discarded,
and leaves very thinly sliced in chiffonade
Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper 

In a skillet, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Add the garlic and slightly damp ribbons of greens; season with salt and pepper. Cook until the greens are bright green and slightly wilted, 3 to 4 minutes. Taste and adjust for seasoning with salt and pepper. Serve immediately.

Garlic Paste
To prepare garlic paste, place the broad side of an unpeeled clove of garlic on a clean work surface and give it a whack with the flat side of a chef’s knife. Remove the papery skin and trim away the tough basal plane at the top of the clove. Halve the garlic lengthwise and remove any of the green shoot, if present, as it is bitter. Coarsely chop the garlic, then sprinkle it with coarse salt. (The salt acts as an abrasive and helps chop the garlic.) Then, using the flat side of a chef’s knife like an artist’s palette knife, press firmly on the garlic, crushing a little at a time. Repeat until the garlic is a fine paste.

This is a surprisingly hearty dish with a lot of texture and flavor. I've never grated onions as a prep for a dish and was surprised just how little onion flesh is left after grating. My collards were not too bitter and not cooked to death. A little bite in your greens never hurt any one. This dish would make a great accompaniment to some braised short ribs. Or do like I've been doing for breakfast, slap an egg on top with a side of bacon and you're good to go, Y'all.

Dim Sum Sunday - It's Chile Picking Time

I have to say I had a blast researching and cooking for this week's Chile Dim Sum Sunday. I've never been a pepper fan so it's not like I have a go to recipe. So I googled. Quite a bit actually. I found tons of the typical recipes which sounded good but just didn't connect. It wasn't until I hit upon Central Market's recipe web site that I finally found what I was looking for, Apple Hatch Bison Meatballs. Why did this recipe resonate with me? It called for a decent amount of chiles, it features a protein I haven't used before, and it calls for fresh sage and mint which just so happen to grow abundantly in my backyard. That's not to say it was perfect. One of the ingredients is a cup of roasted Hatch Poblano pesto which I gather is a jarred condiment sold at this market. I had a choice, go without or concoct my own. C'mon, it's pesto, how hard could it be?

Not that hard. A classic pesto is pine nuts, basil, garlic and salt, a hard dry cheese and olive oil. The Hatch chiles took the basil's role, pumpkin seeds or pepitas became the nuts, the garlic, salt and olive oil remained the same. The cheese was a bit of a problem. I wanted a nice dry pepper jack but got lucky at Whole Foods.

(excuse my cell phone camera and the Midwestern Goober spelling of Chiles)

It seems Hatch Chile Peppers were one of their feature items this week which meant fresh, roasted and an excellent Hatch Pepper Jack Cheese. While the cheese was fragrant with peppers, it was a little too moist for my pesto so I added in some Pecorino Romano to help even out it's mixability. Worked like a charm. But I wondered, would the meatballs really need the pesto?

The mixing of the meatballs was fairly easy. I left the adding the pesto until the end and scooped out enough of the meat mixture to make two meatballs. Once I had those two samples, I incorporated the pesto into the remaining meat mixture and fried them up. I tasted the pesto-less balls first. The balance of savory bison was overcome by the flavor of the cinnamon. The the meatballs with the pesto were much more balanced. The bite of the peppers combines with the sweetness of the cinnamon to give an interesting backdrop to the deeply complex and meaty bison. Where ground hamburger seems to be more about fat and juice, lean ground bison gets all of it's flavor directly from the meat. It's a good hearty flavor, certainly bold enough to dance with the Big Jim Chile peppers. I also took a tip from the website and made up a batch of Smoky Hatch Blue Corn Grits so I could use even more of my Hatch Pepper Jack Cheese.The meatballs and the grits hit all the right notes for this early fall day, hearty, spicy and stick to your ribs good. Thanks to Moi for including me in the Harvesting of the Peppers.

BONUS DESSERT

After all the chile action I decided I needed a cool refreshing dessert to cool off my tongue. Virginia Willis's Tipsy Watermelon Salad was called into action. Here's the original recipe:

1 6 lb watermelon, halved lengthwise

1 cup lemon juice

2/3 cup sugar

½ cup Vodka

1/3 cup crème de cassis

pinch of fine sea salt

¼ cup chopped fresh mint

To prepare the watermelon, using a large ice cream scoop, remove the watermelon flesh from the rind and place balls in a large bowl. Reserve the scooped out rind of one half to use as a serving bowl.

To make the dressing, whisk the lemon juice and sugar in a bowl until the sugar dissolves. Whisk in the vodka and crème de cassis. Season the mixture with a pinch of salt. Pour the mixture over the watermelon and gently stir to combine and coat the balls.

Cover with plastic wrap and chill for at least one hour and up to two hours.

When ready to serve, gently toss the watermelon balls once or twice to redistribute the liquid. Transfer them to the reserved scooped out watermelon "bowl." Sprinkle with chopped fresh mint and serve. Serves 6-8.

As you see I've hacked the recipe just a tad. See I've got this teeny tiny melon baller and I was dying to use it. So instead of big ice cream scoops of watermelon, I've got little delicate drops. Plus I paired it up with some mascarpone cheese in the base. I also plan to freeze some of the watermelon drops so I can later plop them into some lemon or limeade. That is if I can keep from eating them all before I get some into the freezer. It's a really good dessert.

"Bon Appetit, Y'all"

I love free stuff. Most of the time, however, when you score free booty it turns out that it really wasn't worth the effort it took to haul it home. Then you have to find a place to store it while it waits for your next yard sale or it's new life as a re-gifting opportunity. It's the rare occasion when the free object exceeds your wildest expectations and actually allows you to recall with fondness the looks of envy you got when the lovely free object was placed into your greedy hands. Virginia Willis's Bon Appetit, Y'all is just such an object.

Photos by Ellen Silverman

There are, literally hundreds of "Southern" cookbooks out there in the bookshop world. Why add this one to your library? Well, for one reason, it doesn't dumb itself down to reach the widest possible audience. It expects you know that making your own stock will make your dish much more complex than canned stock, that you know what sorghum is and that you know the exquisite flavor that comes from splitting and scraping down a vanilla bean. Virginia knows her stuff, but is also funny as her "$20,000 Rice Pilaf" recipe demonstrates. As she tells it, her efforts at making rice before her time at L'Academie de Cuisine were dismal at best but after a year at school, her rice pilaf sang and the "$20,000 Rice Pilaf" was born (1 year = $20,000.00 tuition). Imagine how much you've saved by letting Virginia do all the work.

You'll have a hard time choosing which recipe to make first. The purely Southern recipes like "Funeral Grits" or "Meme's Fried Chicken and Gravy"? Or how about the classic French recipes like "Coq Au Vin" or "Gratin Dauphinois"? Can't decide? Then maybe you'll be tempted by the fusion of the two in recipes like "Fried Catfish Fingers with Country Remoulade" and "Vidalia Onion Quiche".

What did I make first? Biscuits of course.
Photo by Linda Misenheimer

The best way to test a true Southern cook is to make her biscuits. These are Meme's Biscuits made with buttermilk and butter. They get the lip smacking, finger licking seal of approval, especially when paired with a tasty hunk of good bacon. When I was at the event where Virginia was giving demonstrations I asked her what I should make first. She thought a minute, mentally flipping through the recipes in her head and settled on two, neither which were biscuits. The first was her "Coca Cola-Glazed Baby Back Ribs". Considering how much I love the sweeter sauces out there in the barbecue nation, you'd think I'd whip this right up. However, when you live in Kansas City and pass by at least five barbecue joints on the way to work just as they are just firing up their wood for the day's meat parade, I decided to leave that one for later. Her second suggestion was much more intriguing - "Chicken Saltimbocca with Country Ham". Photo by Linda Misenheimer

Boneless, skinless chicken breast wrapped with fresh sage leaves in a paper thin slice of Prosciutto de Parma. Lightly dust the whole little package in flour and fry in a little bit of oil. I served mine with basic grits accented with a little dry Italian cheese melted in for good measure. Don't be afraid of the saltiness of the ham. It marries well with the mildness of the chicken. You'll have even more depth of flavor with that layer of sage and a generous drizzling of a reduction of wine and Marsala sauce. It's a wonderful dish and one I will be making again.

This cookbook is beautifully done. And while you may see touches of "La Martha" (for whom, as I mentioned above, Virginia worked) in the color palette and the art direction, the main focus is on the food. Absent are the cluttered dressings and props that littered most cookbooks thirty or so years ago. It's clean and sharp and lovely. Both Virginia (who not only cooked the food but styled the photos) and Ellen Silverman (the photographer) take the rule that "You eat with your eyes first" very seriously. There's a simple close up shot of baby back ribs on a cutting board with an Old Hickory knife that makes me want to lick the page. And off to the side, just a little out of focus are two gnawed on ribs...ribs so good that you can't keep the photographer's assistant from eating them. This is a book from a woman who cherishes her very first memories of food. In it, she shares her knowledge, her generosity and her belief that we can all find common ground when we break biscuits together. There's plenty of time before Christmas to get your copies at Tenspeed Press to give as gifts. Just don't forget to get one for yourself!