Simply Hot

Pam and I scanned the recipe shelf as we contemplated a Nueva Receta for this week, and for some reason our eyes rested on the same title: The Tabasco Cookbook, a slim volume written by a scion of the McIlhenny family on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of my favorite sauce (almost my favorite beverage).

Every page exudes Paul McIlhenny's upbringing in the midst of culinary legend. Many of the recipes we will save for seasonal ingredients, a larger crowd, or the availability of seafood. The vignettes of Tabasco lore sprinkled throughout make this a particularly good cookbook for browsing.

After a few minutes of noting recipes best suited for a different day, we chose "Craig Claiborne's Ultimate Hamburger" on page 88. (The name was familiar, but it is only upon finding his obituary that I realized he was both a food writer for the New York Times and a native of the Mississippi Delta.

The recipe is simplicity itself. Start with good ground beef and handle it minimally, just enough to form patties. Heat a cast-iron skillet to a searing temperature, sprinkle it with salt and then sear each side of the burgers. Once flipped, cook for three minutes or to desired doneness and then top with salt, pepper, Tabasco, lemon juice, Worcestershire, and fresh parsley. Transfer to buns and serve.

I digressed just slightly from this recipe. My one failing is that I got the skillet -- which I had just reseasoned -- hot but not searing hot. I will be braver next time. Second, I added a little Mexican cheese. I also used basil because we had it fresh and a little lettuce and tomato. Next time I will skip the cheese, cut back on the salt (the cheese combined with Claiborne's prescribed salt was just a bit much), and also skip the vegetables.

Regarding the salt, Pam pointed out that it was nicely balanced by the Wild Oats Shiraz we paired with this meal, and I agree.

It is fitting that as I prepared this, I listened to an interview about simplicity, food, and flavor that I am writing about separately under the title We Eat Giant Babies, forthcoming on my Environmental Geography blog. It was a hopeful interview, in which a food writer expresses the view that people really are starting to understand what we have lost in big-ag food systems, in terms of both health and flavor. A simple recipe works well if the food -- in this case the beef -- is real food with its own inherent flavor.

Actually, the title of this post is a bit of a lie. The pan was hot, and hot sauce was involved, but the author rates this as one chile on a four-chile scale, and we have to agree. Even New Englanders can try this without fear of excess Scovilles.

Country Captain Chicken, Cap'n!

We take a brief pause from our non-stop posts about the Big Green Egg to prove that we do still know and care about cooking by non-kamado means. A couple weeks ago I returned to The Tabasco Brand Cookbook by Paul McIlhenny and Barbara Hunter, a small volume from which we have drawn several successful recipes (and blogged about them here, of course).

I found Country Captain Chicken, which appeared to be a simple recipe that would use ingredients I had in mind using. It had the added bonus of being a personal favorite of FDR, that Patrician social democrat who saved capitalism.

But I digress; back to the recipe. This recipe calls for a whole chicken, cut up, which is the start of many recipes I remember from earlier times. This is increasingly difficult to find, and as is often the case I simply used some organic chicken breasts. I cut these into chunks and tossed them with flour, paprika, a tiny amount of salt, and pepper. I cooked these in a bit of oil in our indispensable cast-iron skillet. After they were browned, I set them aside, and then added to the still-hot pan:

Tabasco wreath motif -- see below

chopped onion and green pepper, minced garlic, minced parsley, cumin*, a can of tomatoes (recipe calls for whole; I used diced) with juice, raisins (in place of currants) and of course the magic potion -- that is, Tabasco Sauce.

* I chose to use cumin instead of the curry powder called for. I very recently learned that curry is mainly cumin plus turmeric. Since I like the former and tolerate the latter, I decided to make this a cumin-forward curry.

While all this was going on, I cooked some Basmati rice, using the soaking and rinsing technique I had learned only recently (took me long enough!).

We were supposed to have topped all this with toasted, slivered almonds, but the cupboard was (again, oddly) bare in that department. Nonetheless, this was quite a tasty dinner, which we will make again. It was quite a while back, but I'd be willing to bet we paired this with Malbec to good effect.

Tabasco Wreath: On the page facing this recipe is the story of how Tabasco came to be included in Meals, Ready-to-Eat, the combat ration that I helped to manufacture for a couple years back in the 1990s. I worked for a company about 5 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border (on the U.S. side) that made 100,000 of these meals a day. This meant that we shipped out more than 30,000 of those 1/8-ounce hot-sauce bottles, which came to us in enormous totes. We literally had millions of these things in the warehouse at any one time. And so we had them in our offices, purses, pockets, and homes. For secondary quality assurance -- and because the McIlhenny people were always bringing us cool Tabasco gear. Pam made both earrings and a wreath from some of this surplus.

Pam's Crafty Wreath

Day of Delightful Dining

Our Christmas Eve tradition, since 2005, has been to have lobster with friends in East Bridgewater, each year making it more of a day-long event. Yesterday was perhaps the best so far, and not just because their kitchen -- which has been under development this entire time -- is near completion (and perfection). No, it was mainly the company and also the food, drink, and music that made the day perfect.

Lobster is lobster, so there was not much room for culinary innovation on the main course itself. Rob -- raised on the Connecticut shore and possessed of two great lobster pots -- cooked six lobsters to perfection, with melted butter being all they needed.

In thinking about a side dish to complement the lobster, my mind turned naturally to Paul McIlhenny's Tabasco Brand Cookbook. This scion of the Tabasco-making family was smart enough to partner with a real writer -- Barbara Hunter -- for this work, so the book is like a small Louisiana Bible. I turned to it both for the Christmas Eve side dish and for breakfast on Christmas day.

My choice was Piquant Onion (p110), which I insist on pronouncing with a bad French accent. Small white onions -- a bit larger than pearl onions, but no larger than an inch or so, typically sold in mesh bags -- are browned in butter and then simmered for the better part of an hour in a mixture of broth, tomato sauce, and vinegar with sugar, thyme, bay leaf, and raisins. Yes, raisins.

To prepare for cooking in our friends' kitchen, I created a piquant-onion kit, assembling most of the ingredients in our own kitchen, knowing that they would have the basics (butter and cornstarch) and the essential cast-iron skillet.

I seem to recall using this kind of small onion recently, but I do not remember spending so very much time with them. The tricky part in this case was to peel them while keeping them whole. It would have been tedious, but for the fact that I was doing the job under ideal conditions: a nice counter top in a new but homey and huge kitchen, good company, good music, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, and a festive chef hat!

Once the onions have been permeated by this sweet/sour mixture, it is thickened with cornstarch and zinged with Tabasco. The word "piquant" is appropriate, as the result is quite flavorful and complex, and not dominated by the heat. It worked very well with the lobster, fingerling potatoes, and macaroni.

The result was pleasing both to the palate and the eye. This will be a regular part of Hayes-Bohanan-Waterman-Rue holidays to come!

The title of this blog post comes from Rob's comment near the end of the day. In addition to the dinner itself, we shared various nibble and nips, including a toast to our lately-departed friend Anna, out by the fire. For this we had Portuguese aniz liqueur in ornate glasses with a requisite coffee bean in each. The title of the post should in fact it should be pluralized, since the good food has continued into Christmas day itself. I prepared omelet (p36) made with a little home-brewed rye beer and Tabasco, with fresh-grated Parmesan. I used twice as much Parm as called for, and should have used twice as much as that.

Of course, the cheese was grated with our stainless-steel box grater, a heavy investment when we purchased it years ago, but the last grater we will ever need. And we were able to inaugurate our whimsical cow cutting board (made of bamboo), sent for Christmas by none other than Lori, our beloved COW (Cousin Of Wisconsin). We were just realizing that ours should be a three-cutting-board kitchen, and then this arrived. Of course, cheese was its first project! The eyeglasses are another part of essential kitchen gear -- two twisted up for regular use, they stay in the kitchen so we can consult recipes without foraging in the rest of the house for glasses.

But the omelets were nice and light -- saving appetite for Pam's famous and delicious lasagna in the evening!

Rare Baked Scallops

Careful readers of this space will know that our menu choices are often inspired by the National Day Calendar -- and that we often do not consult it early enough to make a solid plan. In these unprecedented times, we have to balance among three factors: our desire to get the meal right, our willingness to improvise, our ability to improvise, and our willingness to risk an extra grocery run.

To these usual considerations, we added a bit of seaside snobbery to the decision matrix for Friday's dinner. The most important scalloping harbor on the planet is minutes from our weekend kitchen -- we do not subject fresh scallops to heavy-handed preparations, and we certainly do not BAKE them. But Friday was -- for whatever reason -- National Baked Scallops Day -- so we decided to make an effort. Even the calendar page suggests that baking is not the best way to treat scallops, but I must admit I did not even read the recipe posted there.

Rather, I turned to our weekend-kitchen bookshelf for Scallops: A New England Coastal Cookbook by Elaine Tammi, Karin Tammi, and Chris Schlesinger. This is more of a scallop bible than just a cookbook. I decided that if these authors had ideas for baking, they would be good enough for me

I found "Baked Scallops with Bacon Bits" and decided to proceed without the bacon. Even though it turns out we did have enough free-range bacon on hand to have provided these bits, they were certainly optional. I also concerned myself with an ingredient from the recipe on the previous page in the cookbook, "Baked Scallops and Leeks." My lazy reading conflated the recipes, but I do not regret it. Having no leeks -- and being willing only to go to the fishmonger, not the grocery -- I decided to use an onion, but with the mildest preparation possible. So it came to be that I sautéed a thinly sliced onion over very low heat with a lot of butter. I spooned this into the bottom of a small baking dish.

I cleaned the scallops carefully -- removing that muscly "foot" from each one makes a BIG difference in any scallop meal. I then used this recipe's key innovation: poaching. I simply poured boiling water over a bowlful of scallops and let them rest for two minutes before draining. Scallops are so sensitive to heat that even this very mild form of cooking made them all opaque. I neglected to add a bit of vinegar -- again, I was not so much following this recipe as allowing it to exert a bit of influence on a freelance effort.

I then prepared a "wash" by whisking an egg with a bit of water and Tabasco. using indispensable tongs (click-click!), I drenched each one and then dredged it in flour. The recipe called for dredging in bread crumbs as well, but I opted to sprinkle them on top, and then to drizzle just a bit of melted butter over the entire dish. I baked 15 minutes at 400F and then broiled (from the center of the oven, not top-rack) for 5 more minutes.

Baked scallops -- a rare sighting that might become
more common at Whaling House

The result: perfect! I am convinced that the gentle poaching was key -- it gave the scallops just enough of a cooking start that the baking time could be limited and toughness avoided. This paired nicely with a chilled Chardonnay from our favorite local vineyard.

The other key: my favorite librarian, life partner, and co-blogger has asked that I mention an additional key to the success of this dish. I like putting bread crumbs on casseroles; Pamela does not. But some while ago, she realized that panko crumbs are different. She liked this dish because I used panko and not the "toaster shakings" I might otherwise have imposed on the dish!

Lagniappe

Please see my 2018 post Hot Island Hot Spot for information about the McIlhenny efforts on behalf of the rapidly disappearing coastal lands of Louisiana and Tough Shape for more thoughts on the importance of coastal erosion there.

Coq au Velouté

Note: The Hayes-Bohanans met in French class, when we were Hayes and Bohanan, respectively. Pam went on to some level of competence in the language while James was not a stellar student and was lucky he remembered to switch to the Pass?Fail option just before the deadline. We both gained a lot in the long run though, namely each other, as the New York Times has reported. All of which is to say that I can barely pronounce the title of this blog post, though I did prepare the dish.

Its more pedestrian title in the Tabasco Cookbook is Chicken Hash, but the rich sauce makes that seem like rather an unworthy label. It is a fairly basic hash, except that it is baked with a complicated sauce. In other words, it is a dish with relatively few ingredients that will use every dish in the kitchen.

A velouté sauce in the book is similar to Emeril's version, except that the good people of McIlhenny call for a bit of their pepper sauce and the use of TWO saucepans. The hash itself simply requires boiling and chopping a couple of chicken breasts and potatoes, and then adding them to sliced mushrooms, chopped onion and yellow bell pepper, and parsley cooked in butter. The velouté  is poured over this and baked.

The result was amazingly delicious for a chilly evening. Sadly, a week has passed by before I got a chance to write, so we are not exactly sure which Malbec we had with it!