I’ve tried a few times to make a beef variation of Mexican carnitas, which are typically made with pork shoulder. I’ve had some success, but the dish always lacked the depth and richness I had in mind. I found a recipe for Mexican Braised Beef that seemed like a decent starting point. This recipe came out pretty bland as written, so I changed it up a bit to get the kind of Jalisco flavor I was going for.
I realized I forgot to buy a loaf of sandwich bread at the store the other day, so I just decided to make my own. I’m glad I did. It came out much firmer and tastier than standard white bread.
It’s funny how, when you’re a kid, you love the most random foods. My mother would spend hours making a nice, expensive meal that I would refuse to touch. We had weekly showdowns where I would opt to go directly to bed rather than eat the food on my plate. Other nights, in what I now recognize as the leaner times, she’d stretch our food budget with traditional recipes that I couldn’t get enough of. Roast Beef Hash was a staple in our house and a favorite dish of my older sister and me. It’s a nice way to turn a few ounces of leftover roast beef into a meal for the entire family. I’ve carried on this tradition and it’s still one of the prized meals in our house.
When most families get together for holidays and special occasions, everyone sits around a dining room table in Rockwellian fashion while the patriarch carves a roast beast. At my Italian family’s events, seventy-five people scarf down pounds of Italian sausage while the fraternal brotherhood of retirees complains in escalating fashion about the food not being ready yet. We have the typical American fixins’ like baked ham, deep-fried turkey, stuffing/dressing, potato salad, and mac and cheese, but there are also a couple of lasagnas, stuffed shells, fried eggplant, etc. One of the stars of the show is the stuffed artichokes. We haven’t seen them much at events since my grandmother died, so I decided to learn how to make them.
Anybody who’s ever been to an event in the South has had the standard meatball appetizer. It’s always a hit. Most people dump a bottle of chili sauce into a slow cooker with a jar of grape jelly and bag of frozen meatballs. My problem with this method is that it comes out way too sweet for my taste. I like a little sourness and heat in my meatballs, so I’ve changed the recipe slightly. I thought I’d finally write it down.
When the wife was recently in New York City, she bought me the Presidential Cookbook at Bonnie Slotnick’s. It’s a collection of recipes enjoyed by the first families up until publication in 1895. That’s the era of Grover Cleveland’s second adminstration, the only time a President served a second nonconsecutive term.
I’ve gotten pretty good at making homemade potato chips, but I’ve never tried to make french fries. It’s such a cumbersome process in that you have to fry the potatoes two different times at two different temperatures. And the frozen bags of pre-cut fries always come out soggy and limp. In my mind, french fries are one of those things (like Chinese food) that’s easier, better, and cheaper to buy somewhere else. However, a recent episode of America’s Test Kitchen introduced a cheap and easy method for making fries at home and I thought I’d give it a try.
As most people know, I like old things. Not too long ago, the wife’s mother passed down her old electric waffle iron that she got from her grandmother (the wife’s great-grandmother). It’s a Manning-Bowman model from 1941, which means it was manufactured just before all US industry shifted to the war effort following the attack on Pearl Harbor. We recently cleaned it and let it heat outside for about an hour to burn off all the old grease. This past weekend, we finally decided to try it out.
The wife’s family collects other people’s traditions. They’re not German, but they hide a pickle ornament in their Christmas tree and make the kids look for it on Christmas morning. And they’re not Danish, but they always make ebelskivers for breakfast on the morning after Christmas. The wife has carried on these adopted traditions, but we’re pretty flexible about when we make the ebelskivers. Anytime between Christmas and New Years works for us.
I wasn’t planning to make meatloaf, much less blog about it, but the wife forced my hand when I caught her putting ketchup on the shepherd’s pie I made over the weekend. Since that’s a sacrilege in my book, I decided to make her a real meatloaf that she could defile however she pleased. Ironically, the meatloaf I made was so delicious that she raved about the taste and balked at the notion of masking the flavor with a sugary condiment.
