Meat Loaf

 It would appear that we have never posted about meat loaf before. I'm a little surprised by this. But, I also know that we rarely have prepared this in our 34 years of marriage. The impetuous for the preparation of this ultimate of comfort foods was a bit of ground beef, a bit of spicy sausage meat, a bit of "bacon ends" and some leftover rice all sitting side by side in our refrigerator. Since I indeed had not made meat loaf in quite some time I turned to Amy Sedaris for some guidance. What I prepared was only loosely based on the recipe in her book I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence. For instance, I, remarkably, had no garlic or onion, so I used garlic salt and onion powder as substitutes. She called for ketchup (no quantity given). I used a can of tomato sauce. I used one egg instead of two because that was all I had. I also threw in about a cup of the cooked rice. I topped the loaf with some of the bacon ends before baking - a suggestion Amy provides. The loaf baked at 350 for 55 minutes. It wasn't as firm as either James or I remembered our mothers' loaves to be, but it was tasty and made for some good leftovers for lunches this week.

The ingredient list as provided in the cookbook is pictured below.

Easy Spicy Chicken

Deciding to continue our recent success with recetas nuevas, on Sunday afternoon I took An Appetite for Passion from the shelf. For the long version of our interest in this book -- which has nothing to do with the author and everything to do with the writer of its forward -- see our 2014 Cooking in the Car post.

I include a photo of the book cover because it is much more attractive than a photo of the dinner would be. Delicious food is not always photogenic. 

Thumbing through the thin volume for dinner ideas, I noticed that many of the recipes are for seafood, but we would not have a chance to get to the fishmonger before Monday. And I no longer buy seafood at the regular grocery store. If there are not boats behind the store, I'm probably not buying fish there. I might be moving this book to the shelf of our ocean-proximate kitchen in Fairhaven.

The book has a lot of desserts and breakfasts, which could serve as a dinner. But I kept turning pages. At least two recipes call for venison, duck, or other meats that I am not set up to bring in, as it were. 

But then I saw a simple recipe for spiced roast chicken. I do often roast chickens, as readers of this blog know. But I decided that this recipe could succeed with the boneless chicken breasts that are part of our weekly dairy delivery. 

Preparation was very simple. In a small bowl, I combined brown sugar, ground cinnamon, cumin, red pepper flakes, fresh-ground black pepper, ground coriander, chili powder and just a little salt. I crunched these together thoroughly with a teaspoon. 

The recipe calls for rubbing this mixture under the skin of the chicken before roasting -- much as I have done with Thanksgiving turkeys in recent years. (In fact, I might just spice up next week's turkey just a little next week.) I knew that these chicken breasts would be delicious and tender, but with no surface fat to work with. So I turned them in a bowl with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil before rubbing on the sugar-spice mixture.

I then heated a mixture of oil and butter in an indispensable cast-iron skillet, adding the breasts when the pan was hot enough to sear them. After 2-3 minutes, I turned them, searing the other side. I then lowered the heat and began to prepare the side dish -- just leftover brown rice that I fried in another skillet, scrambling in one farm-fresh egg from our friend's chickens.

I served this with some chilled cranberry sauce -- a delicious mix of flavors, temperatures, and textures. We often write that our meal paired well with Malbec from Mendoza, but this time it was an exceptional pairing. Highly recommend. 

Chowdah de Crab

Our weekend house is only beach-proximate, but it is close enough that careful readers of this space will know we have added The Beach House Cookbook by Mary Kay Andrews to the small collection of cookbooks in the galley at Whaling House. It is full of fun, flexible recipes -- some of them involving seafood.

We turned to this volume when we finally got around to inviting some friends over who live full-time near the same waterfront. Pamela found a suitably maritime recipe: crab chowder.

Followers of this space may also have noticed that we are somewhat finicky about all things crab. Being from Maryland, we are cautious when our national crustacean is prepared by non-Chesapeake folks, even if they are good with other seafood. But we would be in charge of this dish, and we would get our crab, if not from the Great Shellfish Bay itself, then at least from a trusted Maryland.

The location of the cookbook ends up being consequential -- we looked over the recipe and jotted down some ingredients but not others. The result was more than the usual number of substitutions. One of those was fortuitous -- I replaced all of the called-for chicken broth by doubling (OK, more than doubling) the half-and-half. And I don't regret that!

How I made this -- as executed, not exactly as written:

I heated some olive oil, and added some chopped up bacon. We had bacon ends rather than slices, so I coarsely chopped them. Once crisp -- after about eight minutes -- I added finely chopped onion, in lieu of shallots. I then added a bit more oil and a pound of tiny red potatoes, each quartered. I added a seafood seasoning mix and I sautéed these for about 5 more minutes before adding most of a bag of frozen corn (of course I would have used local corn a few weeks ago) and close to a quart of half-and-half.

I brought it to a simmer -- actually, I covered it and walked away at the wrong time. It boiled over. But it did not get overheated on the bottom, so I moved it to another burner and controlled the heat more carefully. I kept it on a low simmer for 30 minutes. 

Near the end, I added a full pound of Phillips lump crab meat (from Costco, rather than our local fish monger; again, it's a Maryland thing). I then added a tablespoon of flour I had whisked together with just a splash of reserved half-and-half. I also stirred in a glug of port (in lieu of sherry) and kept simmering until the crab was gently broken up and heated through, about 10 more minutes.

We served this with Pamela's famous skillet cornbread and a fruit salad. This all paired quite well with two different unoaked Chardonnays and was followed by a sweet, tannic punsch from Sweden.

This was not a meal made for photography; hence the iconic crab above rather than the chowder itself. 

Seedy Salmon

We've gotten a bit lax in our dinner planning the past few weeks. At the height of the pandemic we had all three daily meals planned for 7-10 days out. This week we've found ourselves asking "what's for dinner?" at least twice. Last night was one of those nights, but fortunately we had plans to be in Fairhaven for  Veteran's Day which meant that we could make a stop at our favorite fishmonger Kyler's Catch where we picked up some salmon to make Crispy Salmon with Mixed Seeds from the New York Times Cooking page. 

The unseasonably warm weather here in New England meant that we still had fresh mint growing on the side of our house, we also still had a bit of parsley growing on our back porch, which was good since this recipe called for fresh herbs. 

I chopped some of the herbs and mixed them with a cup of plain Greek yogurt, along with some lemon zest and salt. A small bit of this was placed in a separate dish and then mixed with 1 T. of sesame seeds, 1 t. cumin seeds, and 1/2 t. fennel. I spread this mix onto the flesh side of the fish and placed in our indispensable cast iron skillet with some lemon-infused olive oil, skin side down, over medium heat. It cooked for about 12 minutes, and then I flipped it, which caused the skin to peel off the bottom. It still took a few more minutes to cook through. Salmon often has a thick spot in the middle that takes longer to cook than the rest of it. I cut the fillet in half to help it cook a bit faster. 

This was served with brown rice, lemon wedges, and the rest of the herbs and yogurt on the side.