Tag Archives: In the Kitchen

A Winning Combination

29 Wednesday Dec 2010

Posted by in In the Kitchen, Life at Home

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No matter how it’s done, a meal followed by a game is a winning combination.

Tonight, while my husband and brother-in-law dined out before going to the Thunder game, Kyle and I did it our own way– by taking advantage of my husband’s absence to enjoy a meal my husband doesn’t like:  Red Swiss Steak, Re-baked Potatoes and Cream-style Corn.  And tonight I lucked out.  Because the potatoes turned out nice and creamy when usually I struggle to make them as good as Mom’s.

Kyle and I were lucky in other ways too, since we shared our meal with Bryan and Amy, who ended up bringing along Amy’s new board game to play after dinner.  We had so much fun — one minute eating good food around the table, the next wiping it clean to set up Amy’s game.

It made me wonder how many times my children ate this same meal at Mom’s —  followed by a game.  Too many to count.  Though usually the game was some sort of card game — the favorites being either Ten-To-One or Nasty Canasta, depending on how many card-players there were.

Life without Mom does get easier, though it doesn’t happen sequentially.  Because there are times — like this week —  when I really wish she could have been here to tell me “things were going to be all right.”   And maybe it was this desire  — to tell myself that “things” were going to be all right — that actually inspired tonight’s menu.

We take comfort where and how we can — and tonight, I took mine in Mom’s tried and true combination of Red Swiss Steak and Re-baked Potatoes.

Miss you Mom.

Red Swiss Steak

Feeds 4 to 8  Preparation time 20 minutes/Oven time 90 minutes

2 lbs cubed round steak
2 Tbs cooking oil
1/2 cup flour
1 onion sliced thin (microwaved 70 seconds on high to soften)
1 12-oz can tomato paste
2 cups water
2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper

Preheat oven to 350.  Heat oil in skillet over medium heat; flour and brown steak on both sides.  Cook onions in microwave and mix remaining ingredients for sauce.  In a greased casserole dish with a lid, add a half cup of sauce, half the meat, all the onions topped with another half cup of sauce, followed by the remaining meat and sauce.  Cover and bake.

Re-Baked Potatoes

Serves 6 to 8  Preparation time:  15 minutes/ Cooking time:  1.5 hours

4 baking-size potatoes
1 Tbsp olive oil
6 Tbsp butter, softened
4 oz cream cheese, softened (I use the kind with chives)
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup milk
1/2 to 1 cup grated cheddar cheese
Salt and pepper (begin with 1 tsp of salt & 1/4 tsp pepper, then adjust to taste)

To Bake: Preheat oven to 425.  Wash and dry potatoes.  Pierce with fork, three times on each side and coat with olive oil.  Place in pre-heated oven (without foil) and bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes — or until potatoes are tender when pinched (using a potholder).  Remove from oven and cool for 5 minutes.

To Re-bake: Slice potatoes horizontally into two even portions.  Scoop potato into a large bowl filled with  butter, cream cheese and sour cream.  Place empty potato jackets onto a foil-lined baking pan.   Add milk, salt and pepper and mix with an electric beater, until smooth and creamy, having the consistency of mashed potatoes.  Add more milk if necessary.  Adjust seasonings.  Then scoop potato filling back into jackets and top with cheese.  Return to oven for final baking — 10 minutes at 350 or until cheese is melted.

Preparation Note:  These can be made in advance up to the point of re-baking — though if the potatoes are cool, the re-bake will take longer — up to 20 minutes.

Dilly Rolls & Ham Salad

04 Saturday Dec 2010

Posted by in In the Kitchen, Life at Home

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There are many subjects I could write on this cold December night where temperatures are dropping to twenty-something — but it’s these two dill-flavored recipes that rise to the top like cream.

The reason is simple.  After an entire day of keeping house, and putting up the last of the Christmas decorations, I still find myself in the cleaning and “putting-in-order” mode — and as my recipe file has been cluttering the top of my kitchen counter since Tuesday, when I mixed up our most recent installment of ham salad, it’s time to put it up.

We had ham with our Thanksgiving turkey — and come to find out, so did Aunt Carol and the rest of my Utah family.  According to Aunt Carol, my Greek grandfather never served one without the other — as a restaurant chef for most of his life, Papa was adamant that pork always be served with turkey — he believed doing so would ward off a cold that eating turkey alone would surely deliver.

I never put much stock in Papa’s sayings.  They went in one ear, out the other — for, even as a child, I had a barometer for truth.  I had discerned at an early age that Papa was good at sandwiching truth between lies.  And one of Papa’s favorites was  how he had come to America sailing on the Titanic!

Amazingly, I heard a version of this tall tale from a cousin of a cousin just last Monday.  Ninety year-old cousin Rose (who’s not my cousin) sounded a little disappointed to hear the boring truth; it made me wonder how many miles this Titanic story had traveled over the years.

But here’s the gospel truth that I ran across last summer:  An old ship manifest of the S.S. Athinai, lists my grandfather, great-great-grandmother Kaleroy and great-great Aunt Mary as passengers from Tripoli, Greece, arriving in America on June 11, 1911.   But fifty years ago, all we knew for sure was that Papa had immigrated to the U.S. from Tripoli, Greece.  We thought he had traveled alone.  And no one knew when.  Like most of Papa’s activities, no one had specifics.   Papa had told so many lies over the years, even he had forgotten the truth.

But today I’m thinking a little more like Pilate, when he looked Jesus in the eye and said without blinking, “What is truth?”   These days I wish I had listened.  I wish I had written down Papa’s sayings because they were pretty darn cute, especially when spoken in his broken English.  Aunt Carol reminded me of this one recently — “Hurry up. Your SOUP’s getTUN’ cold!” — which he’d yell to other drivers who passed him like a speeding bullet, while he slowly made his way through the world in his 1955 “spring special” Chrysler Windsor like Mr. Magoo.

Neither of tonight’s recipes are Papa’s though they would combine nice with a bowl of soup.  The ham salad is a variation on a recipe I pulled from the internet seven or eight years ago.  And the spoon rolls  come from a nice church lady from Lake Jackson who would have a hard time telling a lie.

Before this evening, I’ve never thought of serving the ham salad on the spoon rolls —  but how good they would go together!  With or without soup.  “And that’s the truth.”

Dilly Ham Salad

Serve with crackers or enough for 4 sandwiches

In a bowl, mix together:

2 cups finely chopped honey-smoked ham (I use a food processor)
1/2 cup finely chopped celery
1 1/2 tsp dried dill weed
1 Tbsp chopped green onion

In a small bowl, mix together dressing ingredients:

1 cup mayonnaise (I use Duke’s)
2 tsp. vinegar
2 tsp. sugar

Combine together and chill until serving.

Dilly Spoon Rolls

Makes 18 rolls

3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (divided)
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp. dry dill weed
1 tsp. salt
1 pkg. yeast
1 1/2 cup milk
1/3 cup butter
1 egg

Grease 18 muffin tins.

Combine 1 1/2 cup flour with sugar, dill, salt and yeast.  Blend well and set aside.  In a small sauce pan, heat milk and butter (120 to 130 degrees F.)  Add to flour mixture with egg.  Blend, then beat 3 minutes.  Gradually add remaining flour to form a stiff batter.  Cover with tea towel and let rise 45 minutes.  Stir down and spoon into greased muffin tins.  Let rise for another 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Bake rolls for 15-20 minutes, until golden brown.  Turn out on cooling rack and serve warm with butter.

German Potato Salad

12 Friday Mar 2010

Posted by in In the Kitchen, Life at Home, Writing

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I like to try new recipes, though at best, most of my trials are one-hit wonders.

But occasionally, one runs across a recipe like this dish that has been in our family for almost forty years.  It became part of our lives, and part of Mom’s permanent supper rotation, when she brought the recipe home as a souvenir from one of the many trips my parents made to Houston to visit my Uncle Melvin and Aunt Wanda.

Mom and Wanda were the female response to The Odd Couple, who like Walter Matthau and Tony Randall, enjoyed a proverbial love-hate relationship; they enjoyed each other when they were on good terms and they thrived on dissension when they weren’t.  The quality of my mother and aunt’s relationship actually seemed to improve with physical distance — when separated by 500 miles, they were the best of friends — when separated by a fence, these next door neighbors often carried on a cold war — the fence might as well have been the Berlin Wall.

When a relationship like Mom’s and Wanda’s is encountered in fiction, it makes for hilarious reading.   The fictional situations that ensue inspire tears to roll down my face and the sides of my chest to hurt from overdosing on laughter.  But I can assure you it’s no laughing matter when these colorful and highly combustible relationships invade real life.  Life grows surreal, taking on the quality of a daytime drama.

When ‘things’ between Mom and Wanda were good, life was sugary sweet, to the point of making most everyone else sick from too much artificial sweetener.  When things grew ugly, tempers flared, they drew a line in the sand and both rallied support for their cause of ‘being right.’  Each would call the other the worse names they could think of — and the words whispered behind one another’s  backs would come home to roost, by the time the gossip mill churned it around and around.

One thing I learned from watching Mom and Wanda’s revolving door relationship over fifty years is this:  No matter how good a writer becomes, there’s no way any author can ever dream up the sort of outrageous situations that naturally transpire in real life, especially between two women that love and hate one another so well.  And when you throw into the mix that both women professed themselves to be God-fearing Christians — well, the irony of it all is just so delicious, it becomes hard to resist  —  just like this potato salad — sort of sweet… sort of tart.

Try it and see how easy sweet and sour can come together so nicely.

German Potato Salad

Serves 4    Preparation Time – 15 minutes   Cooking Time — 2 hours

Ingredients:

2 strips of bacon
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 Tbsp olive oil
2 cans sliced new potatoes, drained

Dressing:

1/3 cup sugar (original recipe call for 1/2 cup)
1/3 cup white vinegar
2 cups water
2 tsp. garlic powder
2 tsp. dried parsley
1/2 to 3/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. black pepper
 

In a cast iron skillet over medium heat, fry bacon crisp.  Drain on a paper towel.  Drain oil from pan and add olive oil.  (Original recipe does not call for the substitution).  Over low heat, saute onion until soft and translucent.  Add potatoes and cook for a few minutes, crumbling bacon on top.  Mix all skillet ingredients and add dressing until just covered.  There will be enough dressing for two applications.  Let the potatoes cook down, uncovered, over low heat, stirring occasionally.  Then add second round of dressing.  Once liquid has cooked into potatoes and thickened, remove potato salad from heat.  Cover with foil.  The salad can be reheated prior to serving.