Month: May 2019

Whatever’s in the pantry

Sometimes it’s not about what you want for dinner, but what you have in the pantry. Our refrigerator is completely packed, our pantry is at capacity, but for some reason there’s still nothing to eat. I have everything to cook with, but nothing to cook. How is that even possible?

One thing I try to keep on hand, is three cans of minced clams. That way if all else fails, or it’s just a cold and dreary day, I can whip up some clam chowder. Or at least my version of it, which is less clams and more chowder, and not as rich as most recipes. All the other ingredients (potatoes, onions, bacon, milk, frozen corn) are things I always have on hand.

Then I thought I’d bake a cake. I found a box of cake mix and some instant vanilla pudding, which I had left over from making rum cakes at Christmas. Being orange farmers, we have orange juice in the freezer. So orange juice bundt cake it is.

Most importantly,  I always have my clean-up crew on hand, just in case I drop something while I’m cooking.

 

Making Gnocchi…and Potato Figasa

I had an Italian grandmother, but she never made gnocchi. I’ve managed to live most of my life without ever tasting gnocchi, and having tasted it, I’m not sure it’s one of life’s necessities. Still, our kids love the stuff, so I decided to make gnocchi today and post the recipe.

I made a double batch, which I will NEVER do again. Half way through, I lost my will to live. The last third of my efforts looked less like gnocchi and more like mutant slugs that crawl up your nose into your brain and take over your body. Don’t worry kids, I won’t give you that last tray.

Still, there really isn’t much to making gnocchi. And if you don’t want to bother rolling each one on the tines of a fork, to make little sauce-holding ridges, it would be really fast.

I’ve never tried cooking them fresh. I always just make them and stick them in the freezer for a rainy day. So I guess it’s possible they may not come out the same. I guess if somebody tries making and cooking them without freezing, they can let me know. So here’s what a non-slug looking gnocchi is supposed to look like.

Cousin Gayle has been craving the potato figasa our Noni used to make. When she had some leftover mashed potatoes and needed an afternoon snack, Noni would make a little figasa. I often dropped in about the time it was done, since I lived spitting distance away, and poor Noni had to share her figasa and beer with me. Oh yeah, that’s the way us Italian kids rolled.

Full disclosure, we always got booze, coffee too, at Noni’s. Breakfast was a mug of coffee with a lot of cream and sugar. We’d dump in Cheerios, eat them, then drink the coffee. Meals came with wine, but it was a glass full of water with just enough rot gut red wine to give it a little color. Figasa came with beer. Anybody remember ABC beer? Silver can, red and blue letters. Noni probably bought it because it was the cheapest. 7up got jazzed up with a splash of Creme de Menthe. Coffee got zippy with a dash of brandy (Coffee Royale). And today, I don’t like beer or wine, but still do LOVE coffee! And I’ve digressed down memory lane.

Anyway, back to potato figasa. If you fry the gnocchi dough in olive oil, you get something pretty much like the potato figasa Noni used to make. We’ll let cousin Gayle give it a try and see how it measures up.

It doesn’t matter how it looks….

All that matters is how it tastes. Words to live by when you’re just a lowly home cook. I think I’m doing good if what I cook doesn’t end up as the dog’s dinner. Truth be told, I once made something so horrible the cat wouldn’t eat it.

The other night I was watching little kids making eclairs on Master Chef Junior. It dawned on me it had been a really long time since I made eclairs. The kids were coming for dinner, so I thought it would be nice to have something different for dessert.

You’re supposed to have a pastry bag to exqueez the pastry dough onto your baking sheet so they’re pretty and uniform. I couldn’t find my pastry bag. Pretty hard to keep tabs on something you use so seldom, but I think it’s possible I threw it out.

An industrious mouse chewed through our dryer vent, through the dryer hose, through an interior wall in the laundry room, and from there went on a rampage through every nook and cranny of our house. Well, maybe more than one mouse. We had no idea how they were getting in, so the pillaging went on for quite a while.

Long story even longer, at least one ended up in our kitchen cabinets. I had to clean and disinfect the cabinets, wash everything, and threw out lots of stuff. So probably that’s what happened to the pastry bag.

Anyway……I had no pastry bag, so I decided to put the dough in a plastic sandwich bag and cut off the corner. Only it turns out I had fancy sandwich bags that are pleated to make square bottoms, so no real corner. Forging ever onward, I cut a hole and squeezed out just a horrible mess. I wasn’t about to give up at this point, so I used a knife to sort of smush the pastry into something that resembled what might turn out to look like eclairs. And guess what, they didn’t look too bad, see!

Of course, not having a pastry bag, I couldn’t inject the pastry cream into the eclairs, so I just cut them in half. It’s probably better anyway, because how can you tell how much cream you’re squeezing in when you can’t see it?

I didn’t have semi-sweet chocolate, but I had some bittersweet chocolate chips, so they worked for the glaze. All things considered, they didn’t look to bad, and more importantly they tasted pretty darn good. So you don’t have to be a pastry chef, and you don’t have to have all the fancy shmancy tools of the trade to make your culinary dreams come true. Raise a glass, lower your expectations, and make some chocolate eclairs for yourself. Have two….they’re small 🙂