Pre-Fried Shrimp

 Let's not think of this as a calendar malfunction, but rather as a public service. 

Followers of this blog (and we think there are some) will know that we are suckers for "National Day" entries as an excuse to try new things. We usually find these because Pamela remembers to check -- again, regular readers will know that this is often a "day of" realization, and that we sometimes impress ourselves with the alacrity of our mid-day pivots.

So today was not entirely unusual -- early in the day I heard that today was National Fried Shrimp Day. I mentioned this to Pam and we decided we should mark the day. We already had plans for black bean quesadillas (I'm realizing that this Hayes-Boh standard is not yet on this blog) and I also have never fried shrimp before. So when Pam sent me a couple of recipe links, I decided right away that I would try the simpler of the two, and that I would make a small amount as an appetizer. I was in Fairhaven for the day, so I would be able to pick up some shrimp at Kyler's (the only place we buy seafood) on the way back to Bridgewater. 

And then I remembered that this is Monday. Because it is so busy on weekends, Kyler's closes its retail store on Mondays -- this has caught me flat-footed (or flat-finned) a couple of times in the past. I had already committed, so I set my coastal snobbery aside and made the shrimp purchase at our local grocer. I also picked up some peanut oil and some cocktail sauce.

I followed the simply titled recipe Fried Shrimp by Jonathan Reynolds on New York Times Cooking. Although the title is simple and the directions are both brief and very clear, I have to admit I was a little nervous about this -- and not just because of that one time a friend started a small kitchen fire while trying to fry shrimp. I was more afraid of a breading failure than of a conflagration.

I did make two kinds of modifications to the the instructions Reynolds provides. The first kind was kitchen math. Because I was using a half pound of shrimp instead of two pounds, I used a saucepan instead of a Dutch oven. This allowed me to us a small bottle of peanut oil.  Similarly, I reduced the egg/milk mixture to a single egg and half the milk. The second kind of mod was for flavor. As I often do with any kind of breading, I added Tabasco to the wet ingredients and Old Bay to the dry. Plenty of each.

Only when the shrimps were sitting in a bowl coated with panko (in lieu of cracker crumbs) did I venture to begin heating the oil. I applied medium-high heat and checked the temperature frequently. When it was close to 365F, I added the shrimps one by one.

As they simmered, I could see the breading going from skimpy to skimpier, and I realized I had no easy way to test for doneness. After a couple minutes, though, I skimmed a couple of them and realized the color was not yet uniform, so I let them go about a half minute more. I quickly removed them all to a paper towel, using a bagel skimmer. 

We let them cool long enough to open a bottle of coastal-grown dry Riesling from Westport Rivers. During this time, I nearly convinced myself that this was to be a one-off project. The results were not photo-worthy and this was clearly a dish that would be cheaper to buy than to make. But the proof of te pudding (or shrimp) is in the tasting. These were quite delicious -- and also filling. We decided that what we prepared as an appetizer would serve as our entire meal.

And being somewhat agog at the unit cost of high-temperature peanut oil, I sieved and bottled it for my next frying project. 

That Calendar Malfunction 

And now for the calendar PSA. In the midst of my cooking, Pamela checked the National Day Calendar and reported that it did not list today as shrimp day. We joked about having an unofficial celebration, as if there were anything official about the many other National Day celebrations we have had. After the fact, though, I noticed that tomorrow is indeed National French Fried Shrimp Day. If you are reading this in time, you can honor the day as you honor the solstice -- on December 21.

National Cookie Day - Brownie Cookies (with coffee!)

Saturday (December 4) was National Cookie Day according to the National Day Calendar. For me cookies are homemade (or go home!) so I took a gander at the subset of cookbooks we keep at our weekend house and found a seldom used coffee cookbook which I assumed would include a choice of dessert items. Indeed it did, and I selected Brownie Cookies mostly because the ingredient list included nothing I would need to run to the store for. Although I did notice that it called for instant coffee, as did most of the other recipes. We never have instant coffee on hand, but since the instructions said to dilute one T. of instant coffee granules in 2 T. hot water James and I determined that brewing a small amount of super strong coffee would bring the same result - an excellent use for our Melitta single-serve pour-over brewer.

As cookies often do, this recipe required two mixing bowls. I mixed the dry ingredients together, and then everything else except the eggs and chocolate chips in a separate bowl as instructed. However, I accidently then put the eggs into the dry, rather than wet bowl at which point it seemed that the better part of valor was to simply beat everything together. 

The cookies did have more of a consistency of chewy brownies than crunchy cookies. A bit on the sweet side. I usually cut the recommended sugar in a recipe by 1/3 to 1/2 which I neglected to do. It really is something I need to remember.

Measurements for flour are 2 1/2 c.

for cocoa powder 1/3 c.

for brown sugar 3/4 c.

for chocolate chips 1 1/2 c.

Bake at 325 for 9-11 minutes

6.28 or Two Pies

We were happy this Thanksgiving to get back to our usual tradition of having dinner with our friends Lisa, Rob, and their children. Last year's Thanksgiving "lite" was better than not getting together at all, but for us spending the day together cooking and laughing is just as important as the enjoying the meal. 

As is often my role in this annual celebration, I made dessert. I like lots of kinds of pies, but my favorite is key lime. However, I discovered from Atlas Obscura that in fact Sour Orange Pie predates  key lime as Florida's favorite. I don't think I'd ever heard of Sour Orange Pie before, and I don't know where I would even find sour oranges, but luckily the recipe explains that equal parts orange juice and lemon juice can be substituted for the sour orange juice. The pie is much like a key lime pie, with a citrusy-custard filling and load of whipped cream on top. 

This calls for a graham cracker crust "either pre-baked or store bought". I of course made my own crust. Luckily James found that our local grocery store actually sold graham cracker crumbs for just such an occasion. Whenever I've made a graham cracker crust in the past I've had to crush the crackers myself, and always wound up with rather inconsistent crumbing.

The pie was sweet and tart. It turned out that I liked it as much as I do a good key lime.

The very first pie I remember liking was a chocolate pie. I think I had only had store-bought fruit pies up to that point in my then-short life, and they were nasty. Pies of all sorts can make me happy now, as long as they are not store-bought (even bakery pies rarely thrill me). I like mine homemade. As an adult I have always enjoyed pecan pie (even though it is often cloyingly sweet). When I saw a recipe from the New York Times for Chocolate Pecan Pie it seemed like a perfect celebratory dessert that brought together two of my favorite types of pie.

This one has a flaky crust. Crust making always feels like a major project to me, but must needs and all. This recipe calls for putting the crust ingredients in a food processor, which I do not own. So, I did what I always do in this situation, I used my blender. The crust ultimately turned out flakier than any other I've made, so I may follow this process in the future. And my resolve not to purchase a food processor remains in tact.

Image: shamelessly lifted by James
from Texas Smokehouse

The filling calls for bittersweet chocolate "to give depth to what is traditionally an achingly sweet pie". James went to the store on Monday before Thanksgiving to buy the ingredients we needed, which included bittersweet chocolate. He called me from the grocery to ask if chips would be okay, to which I responded that if he could find bittersweet chocolate chips that would be great. When I was ready to make the pie on Wednesday I noticed that there was a bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips, and asked if he also bought bittersweet chocolate. No, he hadn't. Did it matter, he wanted to know. Of course it matters. We don't want our pie to be "achingly sweet" after all. Back to the store he went for the appropriately sweetened chocolate. The pie was very good not only because it wasn't too sweet, but the filling also included bourbon to give it a "grownup finish", plus more pecans than many recipes call for which gave it better texture as well as a better flavor.

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.