Michael Grant

I'm not sure I want you to try this at home, but I want to tell you about a cooking technique that worked for me, and it is one I will use again, maybe with one modification.

It started with four big country-style pork ribs, but you could also use pork shoulder or baby back ribs. Any other cut would be too lean. I seasoned the country-style ribs with salt and pepper, put them in an 11-inch cast iron skillet, and baked them for three hours in a 250-degree oven. They came out tender, crunchy and delicious.

I put the skillet on the range and didn't think about it until the next day. I was about to wash it when I saw quite a bit of nice fat and jellied juices in the skillet. That evening, I heated the skillet on the range, just above medium. I had two leftover ribs. I cut each into two pieces and fried them in the leftover fat. They came out better than the original ribs, crunchy and redolent, true carnivore candy.

"Hmmm," I said. Karen, who might have balked at this sort of idea, was out of town for a few days. So I decided to leave the skillet on the range, covered, for another day. The next day I fried bacon in the fat. Delicious. In the evening, I fried a couple of slices of pork loin in the fat. Delicious. On Sunday, I cut a thick chunk of sirloin into two thinner slices (thus doubling the area for the crunch effect) and fried them in the fat and had them with some black-eyed peas. Delicious.

It reminded me of bakers and their sourdough starters. You can keep a sourdough starter around for years. Why couldn't you keep a black skillet of pork fat around for years? Or at least weeks. Or days. At this point, I would remind health officials that in the first paragraph, I said I wasn't sure I would want anyone to try this at home. I certainly, however, plan to do it again, this time starting with some of that great CostCo pork shoulder.

The modification: I'll keep the skillet of fat in the refrigerator, covered with foil, between uses. I am seriously considering dedicating one of my black skillets to this theme full-time. If Karen will let me.

I know I have not blogged in awhile. I am going to start again, but with different material. I had hoped to grow readership with the old format, which I put in place last spring. But it didn't happen. Starting next week, I'll be posting columns written during my 20 years at The San Diego Union, plus some graynation material as it materializes, and of course the various cooking adventures.

I will use the available time to write novels. This is the time to learn to write novels, and write one, before I die. I have a couple under way, including one that has really focused my attention. I hope someday it will focus yours.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 7:17 AM | Permalink | Comments

Somewhere along the way, I got separated from one of my favorite cookbooks, "Pasta Pronto." Then, lately, Karen has been whipping up a very mean Spaghetti Carbonara, and it reminded me of my old friend, and inspired me to look for it at Amazon. The book is out of print, but I bought a used one from an Amazon dealer for $5.95.

Italians have been masters of stretch cooking for hundreds of years, and "Pasta Pronto" follows that theme, with a twist. The author, William E. Massee, focuses on recipes that require little or no cooking, other than boiling the pasta, and that can be ready pronto, many in 10 minutes or less. "You just dump everything in a bowl," writes Massee. "You can do it all while the water boils."

In the book, the carbonara recipe is called "Trenette alla Carbonara," or, in English, "Noodles, Woodcutter's Way." What could sound better? That is one of two recipes I had remembered specifically over the years, with "Spaghetti a la Mode de Grand Mere," or "Spaghetti, Grandmother's Style." I was also partial to "Spaghetti alla Salsa di Tonno," or "Spaghetti with Tuna Sauce," which is really good, if you haven't tried it, and "Spaghettini alla Funghi," or "Spaghettini with Mushrooms: Fine spaghetti with mushroom sauce that includes bacon, garlic, cream, cheese, and parsley."

For Noodles, Woodcutter's Way, put on 6 quarts of water to boil, with a tablespoon of salt. Dice 4 ounces of lean salt pork, or 6 slices of lean, thick bacon. Melt half a cup of butter in a small skillet and lightly brown the salt pork or bacon. Dump one pound of trenette, or linguini, into the water and cook 5-6 minutes, until done but still firm. Have ready 2 eggs, lightly beaten, and 4 ounces (about a cup) of Pecorino Romano or Parmesan. Drain the pasta and dump into a warm bowl. Add the eggs and toss to coat the pasta. Add the butter and bacon and toss again. Add half the cheese and toss thoroughly. Add a few twists of freshly ground pepper and the rest of the cheese and toss once more.

I may like Spaghetti, Grandmother's Style, even better. Put the salted water on to boil (Massee estimates this will take a half-hour). Dice 2 slices of thick, lean bacon and 6 ounces of cooked ham in half-inch cubes. In a large skillet, slowly cook the bacon with the ham, until the bacon is crisp. Remove the meats and drain on paper towels. Cut three slices of French bread into half-inch cubes. To the bacon fat in the skillet, add a tablespoon each of butter and olive oil. Add the bread cubes and stir until slightly brown on all sides. Drain on paper towels. Cook spaghetti 8-9 minutes until done but still firm. Drain, and dump it into a warm bowl. Toss with 4 tablespoons butter and a quarter-teaspoon black pepper. Add bacon, ham and croutons and toss. Serve grated Parmesan on the side.

Besides the "pronto" recipes, Massee includes recipes for things like "Roman Beef Stew," "Chicken Tetrazzini," "Lasagne," "Veal Marsala," and several slow-cooked red sauces. Now all we need is some fall weather.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments

We actually had a little cool snap around here recently. Temperatures dropping into the 50s. I’m not kidding. No rain, but some nice clouds and brisk winds. It all clicked on my comfort food switch.

There are tons of comfort food recipes that take some preparation, time, and effort. There are others that can be baking in the oven in 10 minutes. These are the recipes I like when you walk in the door after work on a blustery afternoon with hunger pangs and a thirst for Scotch.

You just need to have a few basics on hand. In the freezer, a stack of Porkyland corn tortillas. In the cupboard, a can of Hormel chili (no beans), a can of refried beans, a can of green chile enchilada sauce, and a bottle of Trader Joe’s red enchilada sauce.

In the refrigerator, you will have grated cheese such as the Mexican Blend variety from CostCo, a jar of salsa, and a package of Porkyland’s 10-inch flour tortillas. Wherever you keep them, you will have onions and tomatoes.

Last night I poured a Scotch and snapped off three corn tortillas from the Porkyland’s stack in the freezer. They really do just sort of snap off, very easily, one by one, when you place the tip of a dinner knife just between the edges of the top and second tortilla, and twist. I let these thaw while I opened the Hormel’s, got the cheese and Trader Joe’s red sauce, chopped a quarter of a medium onion, and pulled out a shallow, 8-inch Corningware baking dish.

I heated a skillet and poured a teaspoon of olive oil in the baking dish. I painted the tortillas on both sides with the oil, then softened them one by one in the skillet. I scattered some chopped onion in the dish, laid a tortilla in, smeared it with a big tablespoon of chili, then generously scattered onion and cheese over. I repeated the layer and finished the stack with the third tortilla. Over this, and down the sides, I poured the red sauce and scattered more cheese on top. I finished my Scotch while this baked for 30 minutes at 350, then chopped a tomato and dressed it with some salsa. I lifted the steaming tortilla stack onto a plate and scattered the tomatoes alongside.

Last Friday, getting home late, I took two of the Porkyland’s flour tortillas, warmed them in a skillet (no oil), and zapped some frozen chicken strips. I rolled the chicken, cheese and chopped onion into the tortillas, burrito-style, nestled them into that same 8-inch baking dish, poured green chile sauce over them, sprinkled cheese on top, and baked them, foil-covered, at 350 for 25 minutes.

Today, all the makings are sitting in their places, waiting for the next comfort mood to strike. Shouldn’t be long, but now it is the weekend, and I will probably cook. Maybe Spanish Porkchops tomorrow night. One of my favorites.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments

Hearing of the demise of Gourmet magazine delivers the same sense of loss as hearing of the death of Fred Astaire.

People who like to eat look at the pages of Gourmet Magazine the way that people who like to pretend look at Brad Pitt and Juliette Binoche on the screen. Movies let us experience star-studded stories bigger than ourselves, sometimes for entertainment, sometimes for escapism.

Gourmet, for one more month, at least, is that way. People who like to eat, also like to eat with their eyes, and Gourmet offered beautiful plates of that fare. It was stuff we might never prepare at home, but it was satisfying to look at the pictures, sometimes for entertainment, sometimes for escapism. The economy being what it is these days, and that effect on home dinner tables, establishes the mood for monthly Gourmet escapism, just as Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and those dazzling sets and silly plots provided a couple of hours of visual happiness to people trapped in the Great Depression.

Some critics discount Gourmet as elitist, yet I find evidence the magazine is tuned in to the times. I picked up the April issue this morning, the one with the strawberry tart on the cover that I wouldn’t attempt at home but was a great treat for hungry eyes. The very first recipe, on the “Contents” page, was “Ham and Rice Croquettes,” deep-fried nuggets whose purpose is to help use up leftover ham, which is a very stretch-cooking thing to do (the “Joy of Cooking” famously defined “eternity” as “a ham and two people”), and something I would cook at home in a heartbeat.

Editor Ruth Reichl’s column that month assumed a “renewal” theme, of spring goodness to soothe the sting of a hard winter “as dispiriting as the one we’ve just endured,” that collapsed on us from the skies and from Wall Street. She spoke of ham as “reassuring,” and of lemon and egg desserts as “spectacular (and inexpensive).”

There is also a reference to a Gourmet online feature called “Extreme Frugality,” a blog written by W. Hodding Carter of his experiences feeding a family of six for $550 a month. One of his first moves was to acquire some chickens, for eggs and occasionally for the table. I don’t know if Carter dispatches the chickens with a broom handle, as my grandmother Susie did, but it goes to show, with stretch cooking, some things never change.

In the meantime, I keep flipping back to the “Contents” page and looking again at the Ham and Rice Croquettes, which also incorporate parmesan cheese. I feel an impulse growing to go buy a ham, planning for a near-future brunch of Ham and Rice croquettes, soft-scrambled eggs, asparagus, and orange-beet salad with cilantro and feta cheese.

Speaking of ham, I was a visitor in a Southern household some years ago, and was privileged to a plate of the best baked ham I ever ate. My host said it was from a Southern cookbooks. She gave me the name, but I have never been able to find it. Is anyone out there familiar with a recipe that calls for baking a ham by starting it in a 500-degree oven for half an hour?

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments

Some places you swear you’ll never forget, but I have. I can’t remember the name of the café in Cross Plains, Texas, where the chicken fried steak was so good. Cross Plains was 45 miles southeast of my home town, Abilene, and we would make the drive regularly to Cross Plains for chicken fried steak at this place.

There was one trip in particular. I was alone, except for a decent thunderstorm, which stayed about five miles behind me as I drove at moseying speed on Highway 36 out of Abilene toward Cross Plains. The country turns hilly down that way, green clumps of mesquite and red swatches of clay, intensified when there are storm clouds around.

Every few miles I would pull off on the highway’s wide shoulder – state highways in Texas are designed as linear viewing points – and drink in the color and texture, congratulating the random cattle for this fine home they had. Five miles ahead of a Texas thunderstorm is always a still, warm, zone, no wind, no sound, into which low thunder rolls from the dark cloud wall to the north. Heavenly. I would watch until the first fresh gusts arrived, running just ahead of the cold rain. Then I would get back in the car and drive on, five more miles, then stop again.

In this way I would reach Cross Plains, and the Café of the Forgotten Name so that I was just sitting and opening the typed menu when the thunder rose from rolling to roaring, the lightning and rain crashed, and the café became a cave where some of the best chicken fried steak in Texas was served. It was one of the luckier noontimes of my life. And now I can’t remember the name of the place.

Wait a minute. It was the White Castle. I would almost swear. I know, White Castles are tiny steamed hamburgers famed in the East. Besides, why would somebody in Cross Plains, Texas, name their place the White Castle? I couldn’t say, but I know there was a White Elephant in Eastland, up on I-20, and it had pretty good chicken fried steak too. And in Abilene, we had the Dixie Pig. Massey’s, in Fort Worth. Threadgill’s in Austin. The Alamo Café in San Antonio. Chicken fried steaks as big as dinner plates, covered in cream gravy.

People like me, with memories like those, don’t go too long without making chicken fried steak at home. I put the recipe in my cookbook, which is a collection of recipes I developed after I moved to California so I could eat, whenever I wanted to, like I was in Texas. My Texas pal Ray just last month sent off for the book, and now it has arrived, and it was so nostalgic for him because it’s all the recipes his mom cooked. He also, he said, was inspired by the chicken-fried steak recipe to head for Massey’s. Lucky duck.

If you have chicken fried steak at my house, you start with a round steak, about a pound and a half, three-quarters of an inch thick. Trim the fat and cut the steak into four pieces. Tenderize the pieces with a meat mallet. You can buy round steak pieces already tenderized, if you’d rather. Salt and pepper the meat, and give it a dusting of garlic powder.

Have ready a pie pan with flour in it, and another pie pan in which you have beaten two eggs and half a cup of milk. Heat a half-inch of oil (lard, Crisco, peanut oil) in a large black skillet on medium-high heat. Dredge the meat pieces in flour, then in the wet mixture, swishing it around on both sides, then back in the flour to coat. Fry the pieces until golden brown, about five minutes per side. Turn down the heat if the oil gets too hot. Drain the pieces on newspaper.

Gravy: Pour off almost all the oil, leaving a sheen of it across three-quarters of the bottom of the skillet. Set the heat at medium-high. Add three level tablespoons flour and stir constantly until the flour loses its raw smell. If the flour mixture is dry and crumbly, add a little more oil. When the flour is smooth and cooked, add two cups milk and stir constantly until the gravy thickens. Season with salt and generous pepper, and serve on the side. Choose your own side dishes. At my house, it might be mashed potatoes and green beans.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 1:31 PM | Permalink | Comments

For several years, we have had two refrigerators in the house, one in the kitchen and one on the back porch, which is enclosed but not air conditioned. The BPIB (back porch icebox) was an older model, with exposed coils. When we looked for ways to cut our electric bill, our eyes fell almost automatically, and sorrowfully, on the BPIB. Last week, the men came to take it away.

It puts a dent in stretch cooking strategies. I have lost half my freezer space. The back freezer is where I held the meats I bought at CostCo, sliced into cooking sizes, and wrapped for freezing. In there, for example, were 17 wrapped packages each containing two half-inch slices of pork loin from a whole loin I bought for $17.65, a dozen half-pound packages of hamburger, and some sirloin steaks. Not to mention a six-dozen package of Porkyland’s tortillas, which freeze beautifully.

How Karen got all that stuff into the kitchen freezer, I do not know. But it was FULL. Excavation is now required to find everyday meal items like frozen slices of Trader Joe’s sourdough. But we will adjust. Freezer items we tend to use every day – bread, fruit, black-eyes, green beans, etc. – will gravitate toward the front.

The vegetables are already cooked and frozen in plastic containers. They get eaten before freezer burn can start. I hate those containers, by the way. I hate washing them, they are hard to store, and they have a built-in bounce that drives me nuts. I tolerate them, though, because of the facility with which they keep black-eyes and other stretch goodies in the freezer until you’re ready to eat them.

Many people cook everything first, then freeze it. Many people belong to that part of the stretch culture that does once-a-month cooking. I am not among those. I do quite a bit of once-a-week cooking, and freeze half of it, if it is what I call freezable. You can freeze chili, for example, but not barbecue, either beef or pork. I would no more put barbecued pork shoulder in the freezer than I would throw it in the dirt outside.

So I freeze a goodly amount of fresh meat. I avoid freezer burn by wrapping the meat tightly in foil and placing the packages in gallon-sized Ziploc freezer bags. It is air, of course, that causes freezer burn. If you have any question at all about freezer burn, by the way, go here. Or to any other of the 370,000 results that Google shows for “freezer burn.” I tell you, there’s not an adjective astonishing enough to describe the Internet as a repository of information.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments

September is traditionally one of our hottest months in Southern California; in fact next week the weather bureau is looking for temperatures in the 90s or 100s in the inland valleys of San Diego, where we live.

That’s not to say it’s not the right time for Green Enchiladas. There is no unright time for Green Enchiladas, which is one of the most reliable comfort foods known to man. There are certain days, though, that issue a particular call for comfort food, and many of them are associated with cooler temperatures.

I am thinking specifically of the day that Daylight Savings Time ends. Spring forward, fall back. On Nov. 1, a Sunday, we will turn our clocks back one hour. On Monday night, we will suddenly be driving home from work in the dark. I hate that. And on Nov. 2, even in Southern California, it’s likely to be cool, maybe even rainy. Monday, Nov. 2, is the date I have circled for Green Enchiladas.

You want to make them on Sunday, then Monday night just pull them out and run them into a 350 oven for 30 or 40 minutes, until they’re steamy-hot all the way through.

The smallest batch you should make, even for two people – or even one person, for that matter, in which case you may REALLY need Green Enchiladas – is that which will fill a 9 by 13 Pyrex baking dish.

Brown a pound and a half of hamburger in a black skillet, seasoning to taste with salt, pepper, garlic powder, cumin and a scant teaspoon of Gebhardt’s Chile Powder. Put it aside to cool.

Make the sauce. In a large saucepan, melt two tablespoons of butter. Over medium-high heat, add three tablespoons of flour and stir with the butter to make a roux. Cook the roux just long enough to take off the raw flour taste. Add two cups of milk and stir constantly until the sauce thickens. Turn down the heat. Add two medium cans of diced green chiles and three-quarters of a pound of cubed Velveeta. Keep stirring until the Velveeta is melted and the sauce is smooth. Take the pan off the heat.

Have ready chopped onion and grated cheese. Prepare the tortillas. You need good corn tortillas. I recommend Porkyland’s, which you can mail-order, but if you have a good tortilleria near you, go for it. You will need 9 or 10. Paint both sides of the tortillas with oil. In a dry skillet, heat tortillas one by one and make a layer in the bottom of the baking dish. I like to cut one tortilla in half and snug the straight edges up to the ends of the pan. Make a layer of hamburger, chopped onion, and grated cheese. Be generous with the grated cheese. Repeat the tortilla layer, then repeat the hamburger etc. layer. Put on a top layer of tortillas. Then pour the chile-Velveeta sauce over all, getting it into all the seams and corners. Sprinkle the top with grated cheese.

Bake in a 350 oven for 40 minutes. Or cover with foil and refrigerate, as I am going to do on Nov. 1, in anticipation of Nov. 2. When it is ready, cut it into six sections with a spatula. Make a salad of shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes, and good salsa, all mixed together, and serve on the plate with a section of Green Enchiladas. The only thing standard at your table on Nov. 2 will be the time.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 2:58 PM | Permalink | Comments

If I had to guess why Amazon.com is selling a copy of my cookbook for $122.24, I would have to say it was the pecan pie.

Yes, I said $122.24. Check it out. Go to amazon.com, search “Books” for “Michael Grant’s Cookbook – Hearty Fare From a Country Kitchen,” and you will find seven available, “Used and New.” Click on that link, and there they are, offered by different booksellers across the country.

The new, never used, unopened, book is the $122.24 item. A “Used – Very Good” copy is selling for $80.94. Other used copies are available for $24.95, $24.94, and $14.74. I am grateful to my Texas associate Ray for bringing these to my attention. In his email, he said, “Better get all the extra copies out of the closet.”

I wish I could, but I’m down to one. I am studying it now, looking for clues to what would fuel the prices shown at Amazon.

As I say, the $122.24 must be the pecan pie. In addition to the eggs, dark Karo, brown sugar, and vanilla, I use butter, a square of dark baker’s chocolate and three cups of pecan halves in mine. A pecan pie CAN have too many pecans in it, but it’s a close call. I hate pecan pies that have spaces of filling between the pecans. So in my pecan pie, I make the filling work hard for an identity. I put in enough pecans so the topmost ones acquire a lightly roasted edge in the baking. With the price of pecans, you couldn’t call this a stretch recipe, although at $122.24, I couldn’t call it a stretch cookbook, either.

In the last one I made, I added, out of necessity, a new wrinkle that was well-received. When I went to add the vanilla, I discovered we were out. Instead, I used a half-teaspoon of almond extract, and a half-teaspoon of rum extract. You can’t go wrong with three cups of pecans (some lightly roasted along the edges), dark chocolate, brown sugar, butter, and rum extract, when you are baking a pie.

The $80.94 copy must be for the Texas-style brisket, though it isn’t so much a recipe as a technique. And this one IS a stretch recipe. You can make a lot of people feel happily fed with a 10-pound whole brisket-in-the-bag at $1.79 a pound, rubbed with salt and pepper and held for 12-14 hours in the slow heat and smoke of smouldering mesquite. I do mine on a Weber 22-inch kettle that I bought 35 years ago for $45. The price has gone up since then, but it’s still terrific bang for the buck, when it comes to making people happy. Don’t forget to catch the drippings to add to the sauce.

The $24.95 book is going, I figure, for the barbecue chili recipe, which starts calling to me in the cool first days of November, until I go out and smoke chuck roast and pork shoulder for several hours, then dice the meats and, with it, and the drippings, simply make chili: onion, chiles, a big can of tomatoes, cumin, chile powder and water.

You can pair barbecue chili nicely with Jim Price’s Cornbread, which I suspect must be the reason for the $24.94 copy. I admit, in the book, that it is not my recipe, but was given to me by Jim Price, a native of Childress, Texas. Take cornmeal, salt, eggs, buttermilk, cans of creamed corn, and a third of a cup of melted lard, and bake the mixture for half an hour in a black (cast-iron) skillet. It is the best corn bread I ever had.

I can’t decide about the $14.74 copy. It could be pinto beans, black-eyed peas, or green beans with bacon and potatoes. Or it could be Corn Bread Thangs! If I didn’t have my own copy, I might pay $14.74 to be able to say I served Corn Bread Thangs to company. What I really should do is dig out my copyright document, revise this book, and get back out there in the market.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments

Several years ago, the world was overrun by a polenta craze. It was on the lips of all who spoke or wrote about food. Finally, one evening in a nice Italian restaurant, having read so much about the trendy re-discovery of this old Italian staple, I ordered a dish that featured polenta.

I was amused. Polenta was only a smoothed-out version of corn meal mush, with butter or cheese whirled in. As a kid, I ate a ton of corn meal mush, without the butter or cheese. I liked it lumpy, which was good, because that’s the only way my grandmother would make it. We ate it mostly for breakfast, with milk or syrup or bacon sprinkled over. Nothing was better, on mornings when the blue north wind railed at the window seams and sleet froze the screen doors shut. In later years, I found that mush went with almost anything, at any meal, any time of the day, as long as it was hot. When it cooled, it ceased to be mush, and could not be restored to mush.

What you could do with it then, was cut the cold mush into squares, and fry it. Note: This is not how you make a corn bread thang. This method would yield only squares of browned, hard mush, which weren’t bad, but offered neither the flavor or the texture of a corn bread thang, which is fried hot, not cold, mush.

Its filling power, its flexibility, and its ingredients – corn meal, salt, and hot water – make mush a classic in stretch cooking lore. I assume it existed in Italy all this time, but I never heard the word, “polenta,” until I was into my 50s. When I learned what polenta was, I was glad mush had hit the big time. If “mush” were introduced into the Italian consciousness as the trendy new “polenta,” it might acquire some cache there. It’s all in the marketing. “Mush: the New Polenta.” I can see it now.

I am craving mush right now because my old friend Ray, who can rattle silverware with the best of them, sent me an email yesterday asking about red-eye gravy. He thought I had once published a recipe for red-eye gravy, which is true. It is on page 13 of “Michael Grant’s Cookbook.”

Like mush, red-eye gravy isn’t a recipe so much as a technique. It is best to start with half-inch slices of ham with some fat on the edges. Trim the fat, and in a black skillet render the fat to produce a tablespoon or so of melted fat in the skillet. Or, if the ham is totally trimmed, use olive oil, just enough to give the ham a moist, not dry, surface to touch. Brown the slices on both sides over medium heat. In the best of all worlds, you will be cooking the famous, salty, country ham from the South, but plain old ham slices from CostCo work, too. While the ham is cooking, brew a pot of coffee.

When the ham is well-browned, set it aside and add to the skillet half a cup of the coffee and half a cup of water. Purists argue that strong black coffee, straight, is the only way to prepare red-eye gravy. But I don’t think the coffee should dominate the gravy. I like a balance between the coffee’s aromatic richness and the ham’s salty bite. In fact, I lean a little bit toward the salty bite. Stir the coffee and water to bring up the browned bits in the skillet. Increase the heat and cook the gravy until it bubbles. Lower the heat, return the ham to the skillet, and simmer the slices in the gravy for five minutes.

Here’s where the mush comes in. Red-eye gravy is great on biscuits and on grits, but spooning it onto hot mush, with the ham alongside, makes it hard not to go look for your Davy Crockett cap. Boil 3 cups of water, add a teaspoon of salt, and stir in a cup and a quarter of yellow corn meal. Turn the heat to low and stir the mush until it is thick and big heat bubbles rise and “plup” through the surface.

You should also try this mush with any braised meats, stews, chili, seafood stews, black-eyes and turnip greens. My God, what time is it?

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 1:26 PM | Permalink | Comments

There was a time, before I was married or knew how to cook, that I ate a lot of chili with rice. It was pretty simple. Boil a cup of rice – I learned how to do that – and when it was ready, open a can of chili (preferably Wolf Brand, no beans), and dump it in the pan with the rice, add a handful of chopped onion, stir it all together, and let it heat until the chili was steaming.

It was good, it was cheap, it was easy, and it was filling. I am starting to crave some right now. I haven’t had it in years. It carries a whiff of kid stigma, like slicing up hotdogs in macaroni and cheese, as my son Tyler used to do. Maybe still does. But then if somebody asks him, “What did you have for dinner last night,” and he says, “Hot dogs sliced into macaroni and cheese,” the person will say, “What are you, a college kid?”

Same way with chili and rice. It’s just not something a grown man would naturally do. “What did you have for dinner last night?” “Chili and rice.” “And you can get a woman to live with you?” On the other hand, if I say, “Frito Pie,” the person may say, “Oh, how interesting.” So I’m interesting if I mix together a bag of Fritos, a can of chili, and some onions, and heat that until the chips are nice and mushy, and eat that, whereas if it’s rice, I’m a slob. Such is the unaccountability of stigma.

It must be the rice. When I announce that I am going to make tuna casserole, and 10 people hear me, eight of them will think I am going to make it with egg noodles. Rice needs a council or something, to lobby for its status. Maybe it’s because of all the instant rice on the shelves, a Rice-a-Roni onus. I happen to like most Rice-a-Ronis, but I would never make chili and rice with it. Nor would I make chili and rice with noodles. The flavors that rice picks up (and, with its chewiness, incorporates into every bite) just slide off of noodles.

But I’m not here to talk about rice stigma; I’m here to talk about the merits of tuna casserole in a stretch cooking repertoire. Tuna casserole has established itself as the best way to stretch cans of tuna and bags of potato chips. Typically, in the chip drawer, a day will come when there are a couple of bags of potato chips, each down to their last handful, which are sort of stale. That is the time to make tuna casserole.

Following instructions on the bag, boil a cup (dry) of rice. In a large saucepan, heat together a can of cream of mushroom soup and a can of cream of chicken soup. Add to the soup a small can of button mushrooms, a small can of tiny green peas, and two cans of light tuna. You can use albacore, but that is like putting tenderloin in Hamburger Helper, if you are one who likes Hamburger Helper.

Add the cooked rice to the soup. Season to taste with black pepper and garlic powder. Stir until the ingredients are mixed, then pour the mixture into a casserole dish that has been lightly oiled. Some people like a deep dish, others a shallow one; I favor the shallow because there’s more acreage for the potato chips. Sprinkle the casserole with grated cheddar. Roll up the bags tight to crush the chips, then sprinkle them on top. Bake at 350 for 25 minutes.

Next day, if asked what you had for dinner, say, “Tuna Casserole.” And if you can’t resist, add, “With rice.”

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments

The one kitchen item I have always coveted, just as at the same time I was so grateful I didn't own one, is the deep-fat fryer.

Coveted, of course, because of french fries, fish and chips, onion rings, etc. You can fry any of these in a skillet, but they aren't the same. After half a dozen tries, and five fool-proof techniques, including "pre-frying" the fries, I quit altogether, trying to fry french fries at home.

Onion rings, I tried once, and before they were anywhere near going into the skillet, they had become more trouble than they are worth. As a general statement, I think you can say that about all fried foods. It's a testament to the desirability of fried foods that, by God, no matter how big the mess gets, in prep, in clean-up, and in your arteries, people keep trying to fry them at home.

That general statement is the reason I am grateful not to own a deep-fat fryer. If I did, I know where I would find it: at the back of the bottom cabinet, with webby spider civilizations thriving in the dark corners. More trouble than it's worth. Actually, a big addition to the trouble. So you've pulled out half your hair trying to batter onion rings, then you pop these rings into the deep-fat fryer, and three-quarters of the batter slips right off the rings and sticks to something else. When you are finished, what do you do with two quarts of oil and half a pound of bonded-to-the-basket batter? I pour all my used oil into coffee cans, but we can't drink coffee fast enough to deal with the oil that Emeril LaGasse goes through in half an hour. And I won't follow any recipe calling for a basket, or a grate, like pork chops baked on a grate over a drip pan. Cleaning that grate just isn't worth it.

So I save the rings, fries, fish, calamari, for the cafes, and do home fries in the skillet. That's why they call them "home fries." They bear not the slightest resemblance to french fries, but they are potatoes fried at home, and the name acknowledges the difference. Home fries also re-heat nicely, which is not something you can say about the french kind. As I write this, Word keeps capitalizing "french" (don't you hate it when Word corrects you, or even tries to help you?), and I keep going back and overriding the capitalization because they aren't French fries. In France, they're pommes frites. I mean no disrespect here, because the French really know their way around pommes frites, in the cafes, at least.

For a big batch of home fries (and I always make enough for two, sometimes three, meals), pre-heat a 13-inch black (cast-iron) skillet over medium heat. Wash and cut into one-inch dice, four medium baking potatoes. You can peel them, but I like to leave the skins on. Chop one large onion and a medium green bell pepper. Place these in a mixing bowl, add salt, pepper and garlic powder to taste (and paprika for tang and color, if you like), and add about three tablespoons of olive oil, so that stirring coats everything nicely.

Add the mix to the skillet and stir around. Cover the skillet, to help cook the potatoes. Stir every five minutes until the potatoes are softening. You should not rush the cooking process. You want the potatoes golden, not black, around the edges. When you can easily cut through a potato piece with the spatula, leave the cover off, turn the heat up a couple of numbers above medium, and cook until the potatoes are nicely browned, stirring frequently.

These go great with steaks, pork, chicken, hamburgers, sausage, eggs and bacon, and they don't lose a thing in re-heating. And clean-up is a snap.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments

I always keep flour tortillas on hand, because they make quick and easy lunches, and because they are a great way to stretch things in a pinch.

Say a couple of friends call at 4 in the afternoon. They are in the neighborhood and wonder if they could stop by for a drink. There is nothing more fun than that, particularly when they bring the wine.

So you're into the wine (or margaritas or whatever), and 5 p.m. becomes 6, and at the patio table, somebody's stomach growls. Doesn't matter whose. The host says, uh-oh, I'd better offer up something to eat. But all I have in the icebox are a couple of bits of leftover braised pork. Not enough for four. Hmmm. I'll chop those up, with the onions they braised with, which with some cheese rolled into flour tortillas will make eight mini- burritos, two each.

These tortillas are the eight-inch size, which you can heat to soften, then roll into them grated cheese and salsa (or chili or leftover veggies or whatever, put in the oven for 10 minutes, and make the easiest, cleanest, fastest lunch in the west. Or the fastest patio snacks for unexpected friends. The larger sizes, 14 inches (or larger, for the "burrito grande") are for making the kinds of burritos you get from take-out places. These I like to feed a passel of family, which includes kids, all of whom would never turn their backs on a hot chimichanga, with sour cream, salsa, and guacamole.

A chimichanga is basically a burrito, fried in oil to a golden brown. Arizonans claim the chimichanga originated in Tucson, specifically at the El Charro Café, where, accidentally, a burrito was dropped into a deep-fat fryer.

Get two packages of flour tortillas, the 12- or 14-ounce size, that come eight or 10 to the package. (You might as well make a lot of them; they freeze nicely.) Brown two chorizo sausages, one pound each, in a large skillet, then add two large cans of refried beans. Blend these well. If you want leaner chimis, you can use a pound and a half of hamburger, seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic powder, a pince of cumin and a couple tablespoons of chile powder. But the chorizo variety is better.

In a hot, dry skillet, soften the tortillas, one at a time. Place the tortilla on a carving board and drop half a cup of the chorizo mixture onto the half of the tortilla nearest you. Flip the sides of the tortilla inward, then roll the tortilla from the bottom to make a cylinder. Keep the burritos on a cooking sheet until you are ready to eat.

Heat half an inch of corn oil or peanut oil in a heavy skillet over medium heat. CAREFULLY place the burritos into the oil, three at a time. Let brown on the bottom, then flip to brown the other side. Drain on newspapers or paper towels and keep warm in the oven until serving. The ones you don't fry, put in a freezer bag and freeze.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments

Of course the champion stretch-cooking cookbook of all time is the good old "Joy of Cooking," whose first copyright was recorded in 1931, just as the Great Depression was beginning to seriously ravage the land. Yes, you can find many high-tone recipes in "Joy," such as Beef Wellington, but you will also find this caveat preceding the recipe:

"If time is no object and your aim is to out-Jones the Joneses, you can serve this twice-roasted but rare beef tenderloin encased in puff paste – but don't quote us as devotees."

I am actually an unabashed fan of Beef Wellington, since I was introduced to it in, of all places, Abilene, Texas, in the early 1970s. I was a sports writer at The Abilene Reporter-News, and my then-wife Lynn, the mother of our children, worked in the nutrition department at Hendrick Memorial Hospital, headed at that time by Milla Perry, who today is the sister of the sitting Texas governor.

On evenings when the Hendrick board met, Lynn would bring home with her whopping slices of Beef Wellington left over from the board dinner. Were such extravagant habits already embedded in the health care culture, contributing to today's crisis? I couldn't say, but the Beef Wellington sure was good. It was a whole beef tenderloin, quickly roasted in a hot oven, smeared with pate de foie gras, rolled up into puff pastry, then baked to a golden brown. The beef was still rare in the middle. I wouldn't mind a slice right now.

Where was I? Oh, yes. I was saying that "Joy of Cooking" reminds us that stretch cooking embodies practices that today may be considered haute cuisine, but whose origins were absolutely basic. Take stock, for example. It has not been all that long, really, since all recipes began with harvesting or killing something you had cultivated, found, herded, or hunted. Cooking, shelter, and finding water were the original hard work, and those cooks learned to use everything, and make it go a long way. I have absolutely no attribution for this – it just popped into my head – but the first "gourmet" cuisine probably evolved as the human class system evolved, and the privileged class developed privileged tastes because they had the lower class doing all the work out there in the kitchen, the fields, and the pasture. Part of liking Beef Wellington so much was that they didn't have to make it themselves.

The same holds true today. I would like to know if any members in the history of the Hendrick Memorial Hospital Board ever made Beef Wellington for themselves. Daily, I am sure, their recipes are the original lower class, modified by our present, astonishing, ease of procurement. A frightening number of Americans can't even cut up a chicken for themselves, even though whole chickens can be bought for a fraction of the price of cut-up ones, and the gizzards, hearts, necks and backs, used for – that's right – stock.

To make a piece of meat go a long way, buy a big piece of meat with the bones in, learn what to do with it, and use all of it. It's all right there in "Joy of Cooking." On the very same page as the Beef Wellington recipe is text and illustrations showing how to cut up a whole sirloin into tenderloins, T-bones, ribeyes and porterhouses. If there are bones, there are five pages on preparing stocks, which can be frozen and show up in hundreds of stretch recipes, in soups, in gravies, in braising.

Outside of the slaughtering, the head, and the hide (you don’t want to go too retro here), with "Joy" you could essentially raise your own steer, butcher it, and use all of it, for some minuscule fraction of the cost of buying all those parts through a middle-man. There are some recipes in the book that I wouldn't eat, ("Beef Tongue with Raisin Sauce" is one), but "Joy" is the essential stretch cookbook. It doesn't throw anything away.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments

I was fiddling with what I thought would become a very interesting recipe last week when I made a discovery: corn is like hamburger. We all know that no matter what you do to hamburger, it remains hamburger. Same thing with corn, it turns out.

This is not a bad thing. The best way to eat corn is fresh, hot, and straight off the cob. No butter, no salt, nothing. You can swirl it in a stick of butter, nothing wrong with that, and you think you've got buttered corn. In fact, what you have is corned butter. It's the butter that changes, in the relationship.

So why, if corn is so perfect all by itself, would someone try to modify it? Good question. It must have something to do with the human brain. Every human brain has a superiority complex. The song from "Annie Get Your Gun": "Anything you can do, I can do better." Potato chip manufacturers: "New! Improved!" boast the bags of their latest flavored chips, when they understand in their heart of hearts that there is no improving on the original product, a thin slice of plain potato fried in hot oil.

Yet it's because of the brain's superiority complex that potato chip people make insane profits off the flavored chips. It's called demographics: a "demographic group" is people banding together to insist that their choice is superior to all others. Once Lay's discovered there was a "Barbecue Flavored" superiority out there, the age of potato chip innocence was over. It's so easy for Americans to believe that they are No. 1. Before the season starts, football fans on 100 college campuses will all be brandishing index fingers, insisting, "We're No. 1!" They will still be doing that in November, when their team is 3 and 5.

I am guilty. I thought I could create America's No. 1 recipe for Southwestern Corn Salad. The secret would be freshness, and subtlety. I chopped half a large onion and diced three bell peppers: green, red and yellow. These I placed in a tablespoon of olive oil in a large skillet, over low heat. The idea was to let the ingredients cook very slowly, so they would soften and weep out their natural flavors without any intrusion of the browning effect. Surgical, eh?

After 20 minutes, I added one large zucchini, diced, and four diced tomatillos, for that distinctive tomatillo flavor. I added some salt and fresh-ground pepper. I shucked four ears of corn and cut the kernels off the cobs, and scraped the cobs, to collect the flavorful pips and a bit of pulp. After 20 minutes, I added these to the skillet and let the completed mixture gently simmer another 20 minutes.

When it was finished, I spooned up a bite and thought I would be blasted by primal goodness. It was not bad, by any means, but I had had a vision of guests, tasting this, to burst spontaneously into "America, the Beautiful," and I knew that was not going to happen, and I was disappointed. It tasted like corn.

Of course I will make Southwestern Corn Salad again. I will go to Trader Joe's for bags of frozen white corn and mixed peppers, already chopped. I will sauté the peppers and onion over medium heat, toss in the zucchini and eight (this time) diced tomatillos, and finally the corn. It will be done in 20 minutes, and it will be colorful, and good. It will taste like corn. Can't go wrong.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments

The real fun of cooking is not (necessarily) the fancy stuff and trusted recipes, but instead just knowing principles that empower options.

I was in the supermarket and spied a piece of round steak, between a half and three-quarters of a pound, half an inch thick, and shaped like the lower half of Florida. With my club card, it was $3.74. I never buy "steak" steaks at the supermarket, but, at $3.74, I bonded with this unassuming standard-grade "Rancher's Reserve" bit of round steak. I was going to have it for dinner.

In my head, I had been thinking about one of my favorites, searing a steak in a black skillet, and sautéing some onions, mushrooms and fresh spinach in the same skillet. But this steak wasn't thick enough for that.

I thought about pounding it, breading it, and making a chicken-fried steak sandwich, which in Texas in the old days, we just called a "steak sandwich." In those days, you ordered a steak sandwich in any café, and you got a piece of chicken-fried steak open-faced on thick toast with cream gravy and fries on the side. My, my. In 2009, in many Texas cafes, you order a steak sandwich and you don't know what you'll get.

There would be enough of my $3.74 round steak to make two steak sandwiches, but I decided against it because we're staying mostly away from fried meats and gravy. I could make smothered steak, which involves less fat and healthier gravy, and as I was considering that, I wondered if there was a way I could make a kind of smothered steak in which a combination of meat and onions produced the gravy, without using any fat at all.

Well, I did use a scant tablespoon of olive oil, in a black skillet, to get things going. A black, cast-iron skillet is one of those cooking principles I mentioned above. If you understand a black skillet, you can get it to do some wonderful stuff with heat. A black skillet soaks up heat like a sponge, holds it evenly, and distributes it slowly, like there is a timer built into all the skillet molecules. It probably has something to do with quantum physics, but you don't need to understand the principle, just know it's there. (I was teaching a class once, making chicken-fried steak and gravy, and as I was making the gravy, a guy asked, "Why does it thicken?" "I don't know," I said, and everybody laughed.)

I got my nine-inch black skillet and put it on medium-high (7, on your electric-range dials) to take on a heat load. I splashed salt, pepper and garlic powder on the steak and put it in to sear, immediately turning the heat down to 5. I browned it for two or three minutes, checking underneath, and then flipped it over. After a couple of minutes I added a medium onion, chunked, around the sides of the steak, turned the heat down to 2, and covered the skillet.

Five minutes later I stirred the onions, which were already sweating their own juices and starting to caramelize. This is another principle. I covered it again and turned the heat down to 1. Ten minutes later I checked for dryness and added half a cup of water. Covered it again and left it for an hour. The onions were caramelized, the pan juices – the "gravy" – were dark and rich, and you could cut the steak with a fork. I love that kind of kitchen spontaneity.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments

This is more a reminiscence than a recipe, and you can blame – and ultimately thank – Ann Whitaker for it. Ann was an Abilene High classmate – a year behind me – and when she contacted me via Facebook, she flashed a huge credential: "My aunt and uncle owned Baum's."

Immediately, with those words, there appeared a complete memory of a Baum's No. 4. Baum's was a drive-in hamburger joint on South 7th, complete with carhops, at the corner of Ross or Meander, one of the streets in that stretch. This was in the era of 1957-61. The Baum's No. 4 was a hamburger with chili and cheese. The flat bun was six inches across and the meat was pressed flat and broiled. The complete name of the place was Baum's Broiled Burgers. Memory tells me that before it was Baum's, it was Buck's. But memory, half a century later, can be tricky. The No. 4 may in fact have been the one with barbecue sauce and thin-sliced onion. Which means the No. 1 would have been the chili and cheese. I ordered both, regularly.

You may have picked up on the adjectives "flat" and "thin-sliced" as signatures of stretch cooking. Profit margins being what they were – and are – you don't have to go any farther than a McDonald's or Burger King to see the principles at work. And they did work, at Baum's, or I wouldn't have this holographic vision, complete with aroma, of a No. 4, a hamburger I last ate in the Kennedy Administration.

At home, to this day, I always get flat, wide buns (my present bun of choice is the Orowheat Onion bun, eight to the package, and they freeze wonderfully) and 80 percent lean beef, pressed into flat patties. I slice the onions very thin, more for reasons of nuance than parsimony, and for chiliburgers and chili dogs, I use canned chili, no beans, Hormel or Wolf (the best, available online). You should never use homemade chili on hamburgers, hot dogs, or waffles. Canned has far the better generic texture and taste for mixed use.

The same holds with the barbecue burger. Homemade barbecue sauce is far too sophisticated to spoon onto a hamburger. The redder and cheaper the better. Smash the patty flat, season with salt and pepper, and either fry them in a skillet or grill them outside. It is a good idea to toast the bun, not for flavor so much as strength. These things can get soggy. Put some mustard on the bottom bun, then the patty, then chili (not TOO much) and then grated cheese, and also onion if you like. For the barbecue burger, you can use mustard or sauce on the bottom bun (Baum's always used sauce), then the patty, then some more sauce, then the thin-sliced onion.

Sorry, this recipe comes without carhops and real French fries, or 15-cent gas. In the Baum's days, four guys could chip in a quarter each for gas and we could cruise all night.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments

I grew up on basted eggs for breakfast. I have always called them ann-eggs, because Susie, my grandmother, would say every morning, "Do you want an egg?" "Yes," I would reply, and what she brought to the table was a basted egg, or two.

A classic basted egg is created by cracking an egg into a skillet with enough fat in it, either bacon or sausage, to spoon over the top of the egg. The hot fat cooked the raw white around the yolk and put a pale-pink, sexual sheen over the yolk, while leaving the yolk runny underneath.

You could always tell a plain diner from a great diner by the way it responded to your order for basted eggs. True basted would come out with that pink sheen over the yolks. Lazy basted would come out with yellow yolks, as if you had ordered them sunny-side up. If the yolks were runny and the white cooked, fine. Too often, the white would be cooked, but the yolks hard. That is because the diner cook put a pan lid over the eggs, clamped it right down on the griddle, so steam developing underneath would do the cooking. With this method, it didn't take any time at all for the yolks to get hard.

At home, I have always preferred basted eggs, but the tradeoff is frying enough bacon or sausage to accumulate the necessary fat for basting. Then you have to eat that bacon or sausage, which was not a bad thing 50 years ago in your outdoor years, but it is something I have moved away from in my mature years. For a long time, I have settled for over-easy, because there has been no way to do runny-yolk sunny-side-up without leaving some white uncooked.

But there IS a way to do that, and it involves a pan lid. Break the eggs into a medium-low skillet, let the whites cook a bit around the edges, then take a large pan lid and hold it a couple of inches over the eggs, for a count of 10. Then peek, and if the yolks look firm, the eggs are done. If not, give it another five seconds. The difference from the old, lazy, diner cooks, who would clamp the lid over the eggs and read a chapter of "Superman," is finesse. You hold the lid a couple of inches OVER the eggs, just long enough for heat, not steam, to collect, and cook the whites. The yolks remain yellow, without the alluring pink sheen, but they are runny, which is the point. You're welcome.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Comments

This is the only Mashed Potato Salad recipe that I know of. I always believed it was unique to Underwood's a chain of West Texas barbecue restaurants in the 1950s and '60s. Then, in the late '80s, when I was working on a cookbook about Texas cooking, a friend named Gene Ainsworth, a transplanted Texan living in California, gave me the recipe that I am using here. It looked like and tasted like the Underwood's salad.

The featured technique is the mashed potatoes, but the featured ingredient is yellow mustard. It has to do with barbecue. Potato salad is a classic side dish for Texas barbecue, particularly brisket, and most Texas potato salads have a good dollop of mustard in them, and also chopped sweet pickles. The sweet snap of the pickles and the mustard's tart bite (sounds like the rocket's red glare), stirred into the creamy potatoes work to complement the brisket's signature, smoked-savory goodness in what must have been, the first time, an accidental way. You couldn't have planned a partnership so agreeable.

As you eat, a little of the potato salad always gets swirled into the brisket juices and barbecue sauce in the bottom of the plate. I always finish everything else first, leaving a couple of bites of brisket with which to mop up this fabulous liquor.

8 medium potatoes, peeled and cubed
Milk
Butter
1 medium purple onion, chopped
5 small sweet pickles, chopped
1 ½ tablespoons vinegar
5 or 6 tablespoons yellow mustard
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
Salt and pepper to taste

Boil the potatoes until tender and mash them in the usual way, with enough milk and butter to make them creamy. Fold in the other ingredients. The salad should be a creamy yellow. If you need to, add more mustard. Refrigerate overnight, and let the salad come back to room temperature before serving.

Late add: Tom Perini was on the "Today" show this morning, competing with two other guys in a hamburger cookoff. All three were named by The Food Network for making the best, and most unusual, hamburgers in their state. It was interesting. One guy wrapped his burger inside pizza dough and grilled that. The second guy breaded his burger and deep-fried it. Perini's burger was routine by comparison: a half-pound of Angus beef, grilled, topped with cheese, mushrooms and onions, and served on a sourdough bun. The "Today" panel voted his hamburger the best. It would go great with Mashed Potato Salad.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments

I had a finger and spoon lunch yesterday that I immediately ranked in the Stretch Cooking Top 10 for bang for the buck, measured by the value of the experience against the cost of the preparation.

It was a chunk of leftover barbecued pork shoulder (the finger food) and a bowl of leftover greens (mustard, turnip, spinach, collards) with bacon and turnips (the spoon part). I heated both in a toaster oven at 325 for 20 minutes. The pork was pure carnivore candy. I broke it apart with my fingers and consumed it deliberately, one caramelized, tender, redolent, morsel at a time, a few of them with crispy bits of fat attached. The greens were perfectly cooked to death, Texas style, with a bacon spike, sweet bites of turnip, and peppery pot liquor, and a flavor depth that only four days of refrigerator time could provide. I used a couple of warm, tightly rolled flour tortillas to mop things up.

This pork was the very last chunk of a 12-pound package of boneless pork shoulder I bought at CostCo in May for $17.46. I made "Braised Pork Carnitas" with the first six pounds, for a dinner party. The next three pounds were an experiment, based on a recipe from the "Homesick Texan" blog of Lisa Fain, who has figured out a way to make genuine carnitas at home by letting them render their own fat, and then fry in it.

Last Saturday, I thawed the last three pounds and barbecued them the same way I barbecue ribs. Stack a fire of thirty mesquite charcoal briquets and a handful of hardwood mesquite charcoal, on one side of the Weber kettle. A drip pan on the other side of the grate, just to keep fat out of the kettle bowl. Season three one-pound chunks of pork shoulder with salt and pepper and place them on the grill over the drip pan. Place the lid on the kettle so the vent is over the meat. Every 45 minutes, flip the meat over and place the opposite side toward the fire, and add six or seven briquets. They will be done in 3 ½ hours. Don't bother with sauce; you can't catch enough drippings for the job, and the pork doesn't need it anyway.

You can use a rub on these, but I prefer just salt and pepper. The fattiness in the pork shoulder bastes the meat as it smokes, leaving a signature flavor that you really shouldn't mess with.

I got the mixed greens in a huge bag at Trader Joe's, plus three turnips from the supermarket. Trim and dice the turnips and cook in water just to cover until they are tender. Dice six slices of bacon and place in a large (8-quart) pot with water to cover and place over high heat until the water boils off and the bacon starts to fry. Add one medium chopped onion, cook over high until tender and a brown glaze is forming on the bottom of the pan. Add the turnips and their cooking water and use a spatula to scrap the glaze off the bottom. Turn heat to low, heap the greens into the pot, cover, and let simmer for an hour or more. After 30 minutes, when the greens have shrunk, stir the bacon, onion and turnips into them.

The turnips act like a sweetener. For the longest time, I tried to cook greens like my grandmother Susie used to, and they came out way sharper than I remembered, even bitter. Finally I figured out adding turnips to the greens, and that did the trick. The greens still have a strong flavor, but the turnips cut the sharpness. I think Susie mashed the turnips into the greens, which is why I didn't remember them.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments

In most meat-and-three establishments, you can expect the bill for two to run about $20. At Art Smith's place in Chicago, the bill for two was $200.

Smith was Oprah's personal chef for some time, then two years ago, he opened his own place, Table 52, on Elm St. just off State. It is not your classic meat-and-three; the setting is comfortable but refined, and the menu is definitely upscale and features entrees like Pistachio-Crusted Chicken Breast and Ancho Chili-Crusted Berkshire Pork Chop.

But there is an unmistakable meat-and-three presence in the place, as if Art Smith, a native Southerner, put it there so people could see it, if they knew what to look for. Reading the menu, I had the feeling that Smith put it there on some kind of a personal dare that went something like, "I bet I can open a Chicago restaurant where I can sell catfish and three sides for $26."

In fact that is where my eye stopped, on the menu, and would go no farther. I read: "Cornmeal Crusted Catfish with Cheese Grits, Bacon-Braised Collard Greens, Hush Puppy and Crispy Okra - $26." Art, my man, you did it. I will gladly go back any time to Table 52 and pay $26 for the catfish and three. The only thing missing was the muddiness of a river-caught catfish, which is impossible to find anymore; catfish are all farm-raised now. Art Smith, of course, would know this, and regret it; his biographical material says he grew up in northern Florida and learned to cook from an African-American woman who was his baby-sitter. If she is alive, she will roll her eyes at her protégé serving up farm-raised catfish, but there are some things in the modern world that you can't do much about.

Karen and I also shared fried green tomatoes ($9), gussied up and served as a starter: ""Fried Green Tomato Napoleon with Goat Cheese, Local Greens, Applewood-Smoked Bacon & Olive & Sun-Dried Tomato Tapenades." It was a cute stack of the fried tomatoes and the other stuff in between, which was tasty and didn't get in the way of the fried tomatoes.

Then, with our entrees (Karen departed the Southern mood with fresh Alaskan halibut, simply grilled), we shared a side of macaroni and cheese, which was $9 and worth it. We had seen another patron being served a large bowl with cheese crusted on the top and spilling over the sides, and we thought it was onion soup. It was macaroni and cheese, filled to overflowing, then finished off in a pizza oven that turned the overflow dribbles brown and crusty. If we had a pizza oven, I would try this at home, one or two nights a week.

I was chipping greedily at the cheese crust when a waiter passed our table with a slice of a towering, heavily frosted, three-layer cake, invoking visions of the Membership Luncheon of the Atlanta Woman's Club. This, we learned, was Hummingbird Cake, which we could neither pass up, nor finish. We took the last of it with us and stumbled out the door into a driving rain and a cab back to our hotel.

The bill would have been lower without glasses of champagne and a bottle of wine, but what the heck. You don't just drink iced tea at Art Smith's kind of meat-and-three.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments

Many stretch cooking recipes will yield some very nice leftovers, but several of these recipes actually yield two complete meals, the original, and then a second, which will be eaten the next day, or some day after that, but is too distinctive in its own right to be called a "leftover."

The most vivid example is ham. I love the definition of "eternity" in the classic "Joy of Cooking" cookbook: "Eternity is a ham and two people." The original recipe, of course, is baked ham. That one original recipe spawns a whole tree of second recipes, which take up several pages in the cookbook.

For the second recipe I am about to give you, the original is: spaghetti. There are a million original recipes for spaghetti, but the one I am referring to is the traditional spaghetti with meat – either hamburger or sausage – in a thick, rich, tomato-based sauce. That kind of spaghetti is very good, with garlic bread and a green salad, and its offspring recipe is just as good and totally different, even improved. In fact you will find some people – I am one – who would argue that the best reason for making spaghetti is so, a couple of days later, you can make Spaghetti Casserole.

You want to make enough of the original spaghetti to have plenty left over. After dinner, if you haven't already tossed the sauce into the pasta, do so. You should have at least a pound of pasta and three cups of sauce to put into the refrigerator.

When you want Spaghetti Casserole, dump the cold left-over spaghetti on a chopping board and chop it roughly. Place it in a large mixing bowl and add a can of drained corn, a 4-oz. can of button mushrooms, a quarter-cup of canned, sliced jalapenos (or more, or less, as you prefer), and a can of whole black olives, with the olives cut in half. Pour into a greased casserole dish, sprinkle liberally with cheese, and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

If you have leftovers from this dish, it is great for breakfast, spread cold between slices of sourdough, but that's another story.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments

I made corn bread thangs earlier this week for the first time in a long time, and it was a good reminder of how the simplest cooking techniques require practice, care, and, preferably, frequent repetition. Yes, Virginia, cooking a good corn bread thang IS like using a computer, or playing a piano. You don't want to let the principles gather dust, and the technique get rusty.

Hence a thang conundrum. I don't make thangs regularly, like I used to, because I can't eat them regularly, like I used to. Thirty years ago, a nice plate would be meat, pinto beans, sliced tomatoes and red onion, and six corn bread thangs. Those were the days, and I miss them. The other night, I had two thangs, with some leftover carnitas, some beans, and the famous black gravy. I could have gone a third, I guess, but it's just not a good habit.

I call them "thangs" because that's what my grandmother Susie called them. They are the essence of stretch cooking, going to the heart of survival, which during the Depression could be long stretches of beans, meal, and grit. All you needed then was water and a fire. I was not born until 1943, but growing up in Abilene, four blocks from the Texas & Pacific tracks, I would see hungry men all the time. I vividly remember seeing a man with a paper sack, and in the sack he had potatoes, some flour, and lard, and he was happy as a king. Other men would come to our back door – our house was "marked" by the hoboes – and Susie would always have something for them.

Inside, at our own table, I simply thought this crispy, savory corn bread was one of the best things I could put in my mouth. And it was great for pushing around beans, greens, and pot liquor, and slowly the pot liquor would seep into the dense, moist, mealy centers. I will be frank with you: you either like corn bread thangs, or you don't. They are like hoecakes, or pone, only denser, and crispier on the outside. One rule: you have to eat all the thangs as they come out of the skillet. If they get cold, you cannot successfully reheat them. You could freeze them and throw them at burglars, but that's about it.

Here is the technique. Put a cup or two of cornmeal in a bowl and season with salt and pepper, and some garlic powder if you like. Bring to a boil – really boiling – a pan of water. When you're ready, pour some of the water – not too much – into the cornmeal and stir with a fork. The meal will start to bind. Keep adding water, a little at a time, until the mix loses its graininess and forms into a thick, steaming mush.

Pour out the hot water and replace it with cold. Dip your hands into the cold water, then fork up a fat palmful of mush. Form it into a patty about three-quarters of an inch thick and about three inches across. Then, with your hands at right angles, press finger marks into either side of the thang. The ridges will then get crispy in the fat, and the hollows in between will be more tender, and not let the melted butter run off.

Make as many patties as you have mush, dipping your hands, and actually rinsing them, each time in the cold water. It keeps your fingers cool and slick, so the mush will handle easily and not be sticky. When the patties are made, using a fork, slip them into a half-inch of hot oil in a skillet. Don't crowd them. When the edges are golden and crispy, carefully turn them over. Fry the second side for a minute or two, lifting them with a fork to check for the golden, crispy look. Drain on paper towels or newspaper and serve immediately.

My two turned out okay, but did not have the exact crunchiness that a good thang always has. I left the mush a bit too grainy, but didn't have the old confidence, being out of practice, to add another splash of hot water. If you add too much water, the mush gets too thin and won't hold a shape. At that point, you have to start over, or serve the mush as polenta. It's the same thing.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments

I guess I didn't realize it, but Tom Perini has definitely gone viral. I was so impressed last week when Paula Deen on TV picked him as the king of Texas brisket barbecue, and when he gave her a sample, she kissed him FULL ON THE LIPS.

Then, today, I became aware of the new issue of Saveur magazine ("Savor a World of Authentic Cuisine"), with its cover story, "Twenty-Four Reasons Why We Love Texas."
No. 5: Tom Perini. If you missed my groveling blog about Tom last week, he and I grew up together (I was a year older) in Abilene, Texas, so I can truly say, "I knew him when."

A newer acquaintance, via the blogosphere, is Lisa Fain, a Texas native living in New York City, who does the "Homesick Texan" food blog. She has an essay in the new Saveur, which is how I came to know about the magazine in the first place. She also has at her site a recipe for carnitas, which I tried Sunday, which was the original starting place for this blog, until I looked at Saveur online and saw Tom Perini at No. 5 statewide.

The carnitas came out very nicely and there turned out to be a bonus. The recipe says to let the carnitas brown in its own fat, which has rendered out earlier in the recipe, and to stir the meat frequently so it doesn't stick to the pot. I didn't stir it regularly enough, and then I forgot to stir it at all, so when I came back, the pork was fine, but in the bottom of the pot was a dark layer that the chemists would call a tight lattice of fat, blood and sugar molecules forged by heat into an impenetrable mass.

And so a circle closed. When I was growing up, in Abilene, Texas, alongside Tom Perini, who at the time appeared deceptively ordinary, my grandmother Susie knew two ways to cook meat: well-done and weller-done. I loved the black objects she brought to the table, whether it was meatloaf, pork chops, or pot roast. They may have been chewier than most, but they also provided a unique intensity of meat flavor that I have never forgotten.

So I looked at the mahogany slag in the bottom of my pot after dinner on Sunday and saw opportunity. I turned the heat to medium-low and poured in a cup of water with a couple tablespoons of vinegar, and I let the liquid get steamy, and then I started to scratch at the slag with a spatula, gently scratching and probing, like an archaeologist. My goal was the black gravy that I remember gathered beneath Susie's roasts. It took about 15 minutes, but then I was able to pour a couple of cups of black gravy into a plastic container with the leftover carnitas.

All day yesterday, I was looking forward to dinner. I knew from experience that there was only one satisfactory accompaniment for the black gravy, and that was another Susie specialty, corn bread thangs. The thangs would be a bit of trouble, and hideously caloric, and during the afternoon I considered rice, or potatoes, or white bread, but I knew all the while what the deal was. I put the carnitas and black gravy in a saucepan to warm up, and I made a couple of big thangs, which are only cornmeal, salt and pepper, bound into patties with hot water and fried golden-crispy in oil. A good thang is crispy on the outside, steamy on the inside, and remarkably dense. If you let a corn bread thang get cold, you can drive nails with it. It was this density that the gravy's own flavor density required.

Karen walked past, pinched off a bite of warm, gravy-painted pork from the saucepan, ate it, and exclaimed in a rapturous tone how good it was, and I smiled at this latest evidence that I had married the right woman. But she only wanted a bite. I poured the gravy over the thangs, with some beans and the carnitas on the side. It wasn't a plate you would see a picture of in Saveur, but it sure was good, and totally Texan.

Labels: Roots, Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 2:26 PM | Permalink | Comments

For lunch today, I had leftovers: a chunk of braised pork, some black-eyed peas, and some green beans and new potatoes cooked together, with a piece of good bread to soak up the pot liquors.

As I ate, I kept thinking that the folks having lunch today at Mary Mac's Tea Room in Atlanta probably have no idea how healthy they are eating. Mary Mac's is a classic "meat and three" place, where you order a meat entrée and three vegetable sides. Thus the plate, geometrically, is one-quarter meat and three-quarters vegetables. This is the plate geometry, exactly, of a health program I have joined, and Karen has been following for quite some time, whose basic menu planning principle is: eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

I blogged about this recently, as I was discovering how difficult it can be to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, particularly when you are a man who does not much care for fruit in any of its raw or prepared forms. Luckily, I am a man who likes vegetables, even beets. As I have settled into the program, losing five pounds (so far) in the process, I have found myself cooking vegetables in ways I haven't cooked for years. They are old recipes, going back to my grandmother Susie's kitchen in West Texas. They are also the same recipes, basically, followed by the cooks in the meat-and-threes that you will find all over the South.

In the South, macaroni and cheese, corn soufflé, fried okra, and rice and gravy qualify as vegetables. At our house, on the program, some restrictions apply. Nothing fried, and minimal fat used in cooking. This is not a problem. I have already published my black-eyed peas recipe, which calls for two strips of bacon (for flavoring) per pound of dried black-eyes, and you can even get around that if you use the scorched (almost) onion and leftover coffee technique. The green beans and new potatoes act the same way. Ears of corn, you just shuck, boil, cool, and eat off the ears (I eat in rows, typewriter-style), or slice off the kernels and mix into all sorts of preparations. Spinach, you just soften some onion and garlic in a bit of olive oil, stack in the fresh spinach, and swirl it until it melts almost away.

I love spinach that way, and it is a huge bang for the buck in the program. A serving is one cup, and four cups of fresh spinach cook way down. Dried beans and peas are good, too, because they are half a cup per serving. I don't care how much you like them, three cups of vegetables on a plate is a lot of food, which is of course the idea. The more veggies you eat, the less meat there is room for. So things like spinach and beans give you a little wiggle room.

For green beans and new potatoes, I like to get the frozen package, about a pound and a half, of haricots verts, which are skinny, stringless green beans, at Trader Joe's. Then get a pound of small red potatoes and slice them in half, or three pieces, if they are larger. Dice two slices of bacon, barely cover them with water in a pot, and cook on medium-high until the water is gone and the bacon starts to fry. Add half an onion, chopped, and salt and pepper, and stir until the onion is soft. Spread the potatoes over the bottom of the pot, then mound the green beans, still frozen, on top. Turn to low, cover, and simmer for an hour or more (Southerners like their green beans mushy), stirring occasionally.

All of these things make great leftovers. For lunch I just piled the cold green beans and potatoes, black-eyes, and pork on a small plate and put it in the oven for a few minutes. When I was finished, even with the bread, there was still pot liquor in the plate. I lifted the plate to my lips and drank it off. Only do this at home. Of course in the cafes, the meat-and-three cooks realize the urge, and let you have your pot liquor and keep your manners, too. At Mary Mac's, you can order pot liquor by the cup.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 2:37 PM | Permalink | Comments

It's always fun to see a kid you have known since grade school get kissed full on the lips by Paula Deen on national television, and knowing he deserved it.

I am speaking about Tom Perini, of Abilene and Buffalo Gap, Texas. I have a black and white photo from the summer of 1955, showing a contingent of Abilene boys sitting on a diving board at Camp Rio Vista, Texas, down by Kerrville. Tom Perini and I are in the photo. I was 13, he was 12.

Tom has been in the cooking and restaurant business for 30-odd years. He is the proprietor of the Perini Ranch Steakhouse in Buffalo Gap, author of "Texas Cowboy Cooking," and a caterer of Texas-style barbecue whose business has taken him nation-wide. On the morning of 9/11, Tom and his crew were setting up on the White House lawn to do barbecue for the President and members of Congress later in the day. After what happened that day, Tom said it took him two harrowing weeks to get him, his crew and his equipment back to Abilene. It is an interesting story.

But not as interesting, this morning, anyway, as getting smacked a good one by Paula Deen. I wasn't expecting it; you can call it true serendipity. I was channel surfing Thursday night and got in right at the top of the hour for Paula Deen's one-hour tour of places offering signature versions of southern barbecue. She went to Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama and Texas, looking for just the right places to represent the particular style of barbecue for which each locale is noted.

In Texas, she said, it was brisket. There are probably 20,000 places in Texas she could have chosen to get her point across that nobody does brisket barbecue like Texans. Who did she choose? Tom Perini. God, I was proud. He came on-screen, wearing his familiar blue long-sleeved shirt and straw cowboy hat and I felt like Pavarotti's brother, sitting in the audience at the Met. He showed her the raw brisket, showed her how to season it, and put it in a portable pit cooker. Twenty hours later (10 seconds, in television time), he took out the brisket, sliced off a piece, and handed it to Paula. She ate it, moved in on Tom, and kissed him FULL ON THE LIPS.

The other experts on the show gave Paula that first bite, and they only got hugs or pats in return. Tom got the full Paula. I would like to say it was his personality, and he has a great personality. But Southerners and barbecue are like dogs and food. I don't care how affectionate the dog may appear, with him it is food first and people second. With Southerners, it is barbecue first and personality second. Tom earned his kiss the hard way, making perhaps the best case ever for Texas brisket as the king of barbecue.

The Food Network Website says the show is scheduled to air again at 6 p.m. Sunday, May 31. Tom's cookbook is available at amazon.com. There is one recipe in there, Jessica's Favorite Green Chile Hominy, on page 148, that is worth the price of the book. If you gave Paula a bite of that, you probably couldn't show the reaction on TV.

Labels: Cooking, Friends, Roots, Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments

This week's recipe isn't so much a stretch recipe as it is a seasonal one, and it isn't a recipe so much as it is a technique.

It requires a bit of planning. Go to Costco as soon as possible and buy a big, huge gallon jar of olives; jalapeno-stuffed are preferred. Relocate the olives into smaller jars and store for future use. There should be enough for about four months' of martinis.

Wash the gallon jar and the lid until it is free of olive aroma; this may take a week. When it is ready, wait for a sunny, warm-to-hot day. About 10 a.m., fill the jar with water. Place in the water four Lipton tea bags with the tags and dipping strings lapped over the mouth of the jar. Put on the lid and tighten it into the closed position, securing the tags on the outside.

Carry the jar outside and place it so it will always be in direct sunlight. Leave it there two or three hours until the tea is a very warm brown. During this time, do enough work to develop a sweat, a thirst, and a degree of fatigue. Carry the jar of tea inside. Be careful; it will be very warm to sort of hot. Remove the lid and pull out the tea bags.

Get a quart-sized glass; a Mason jar is best. Squeeze into it half a lemon, then fill it with ice. With one smooth motion, pour the glass full of the hot tea, and as soon as it is full, start counting to five, not slowly, but with restraint. As soon as you reach five, drink all the tea. The first couple of mouthfuls will be almost cold, but then will arrive swirls of cold and warmth, like an ice-and-tea parfait.

When you have drunk it all, you will wish it wasn’t over. You won't want a second glass. This is an experience unique to specific conditions. Refrigerate the remaining tea immediately, before it gets cloudy, and drink in the usual way.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments

Following up on last Thursday's Braised Pork Shoulder blog, it is turning out to be one of the all-time best Stretch Cooking recipes. The pork shoulder in the bag from CostCo turned out to be two six-pound hunks, individually wrapped. We were feeding eight people, so I only used one hunk. I cut the other one into entrée-sized hunks and they are now waiting in the freezer for future recipes, one of which will be "Carnitas Houston Style," that I found (and linked to) at Lisa Fain's "Homesick Texan" site.

Saturday's braised "carnitas" turned out to be fall-apart tender and (everyone said) delicious. I made one change to the recipe as I was cooking it. I bought a big bunch of cilantro for garnish, so I rinsed the whole bunch well, then cut off the stems below the rubber band and scattered these with the green pepper strips over the top of the pork. I wondered if the stems would lend their unique grassy pungency to the meat, and they did. I will never throw away cilantro stems again.

In the whole eight-quart pot, with six pounds of pork, a couple of onions, 10 garlic cloves, and the pepper strips and cilantro stems, there was only one cup of liquid at the beginning: the cup of leftover coffee I used to deglaze the pot. After three hours of simmering, enough pot liquor had evolved to almost cover the meat. There was at least two quarts. This liquid came from the pepper strips, the cilantro, and the pork itself. I took out all but one chunk of pork and broke it (or rather it fell apart in my hands) into serving pieces for the carnitas. Left in the pot was the one chunk, plus other smaller pieces that had fallen off during the simmering.

I put the whole pot in the refrigerator and next morning skimmed off a surprisingly thin layer of fat that had hardened on top. What was left was about two quarts of pork-studded, dark, savory, jellied stock that I froze in two batches with visions of some near-future stretch recipe involving potatoes, mushrooms, cabbage, zucchini, tortillas, or I don't know what.

One caveat. The stock is still a bit fatty, which is not necessarily a bad thing, if you are Texan. But next time I will go for a purer stock. Next time, I will strain the pot liquor, place it in a large saucepan, and refrigerate that. It will make for a much easier and more complete skim. The strained-out pork and vegetables I will have for breakfast the next day, migas-style. Let's see, for $17.46 for the meat, so far we have fed eight people at a party, have two quarts of stock in the freezer, had pork migas for breakfast, and we have six pounds of shoulder in the freezer, a couple of pounds of which are destined for Carnitas, Houston Style. What will I do with the other four pounds? Gives me something other than the economy to think about.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments

Braising is a great way to make a big, cheap hunk of meat go a long way. On Saturday, we are having friends over, and we are going to feed them braised pork shoulder, served carnitas-style, with tortillas and condiments. I love carnitas, which is also a classic stretch recipe, but hazardous. You need a big pot and boiling oil, which gets to be more trouble than it’s worth, especially for a man who recently positioned himself to be killed by a ceiling fan. Braising is easy, and the pork will be pull-apart tender.

I got the pork shoulder today, boneless, at CostCo, and a package of Porkyland flour tortillas. The pork was $1.39 a pound, and 12 and a half pounds (in one bag) cost $17.46. The tortillas are medium size, about eight inches across, just right for this particular feed.

The shoulder is very meaty, and flecked with fat, which provides flavor and tenderness during the long, slow cooking. When you’re finished, there won’t hardly be enough fat in the pot to skim off, but you can, of course, if you want to.

You need a heavy pot, 6 to 8 quarts. I have an 8-quart Le Creuset enameled pot, which is great, and an old 6-quart Club Aluminum pot, which is great too. If there is enough fat on the shoulder, trim it off and render it, just enough to wet the bottom of the pot to get things going. If the shoulder is very lean, use olive oil. Put the pot on medium-high heat. Cut the shoulder into big chunks, the size of your hand. Season with salt and pepper and brown the chunks on all sides. Place the pot lid next to the range, upside-down, and place the browned chunks in it. That way you save all the juices and just pour them back in.

Chop a medium onion and sauté it in the pot, stirring, until it starts to brown. Rough-chop a second onion and add to the pot. Let a dark glaze form on the bottom of the pot. Don’t let it scorch, but it should be dark. This “almost-scorching” step is a favorite of mine and provides deep, savory flavor. Throw in 10 cloves of garlic, smashed (peel the garlic by smashing it under the side of a large knife; the peel lifts right off). Stir the garlic and onions just for a minute. Add a cup of leftover coffee and scrape the bottom to de-glaze the pot; it will make a beautiful, dark sauce. Stir in a teaspoon of ground cumin. Turn the heat to low.

Add the browned pork chunks back to the pot and pour in the juices from the lid. Scatter a large rough-chopped green pepper on top. Cover and simmer gently for 3 hours. Let the pork cool on a platter until it is cool enough to pull apart with your fingers. Warm 2 medium-sized flour tortillas per person in a hot skillet and keep them warm in foil packets in the oven. Serve with condiments on the side: chopped green onion and tomato; slices of avocado; cilantro sprigs; quartered limes; and salsa.

Freeze the leftover pork in pint containers. It can be used all sorts of ways. With blackeyes, say. Yum.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 4:56 PM | Permalink | Comments

Of course in Stretch Cooking one good way to make a little go a long way is spend a little money for a big piece of meat. Like a brisket. Many supermarkets won't have the whole brisket, in the bag, but most meat markets do, and butcher shops in neighborhood grocery markets. They sell for around $2 a pound.

You can cook a brisket in several delectable ways, such as braising or baking, but these instructions are for turning a brisket into home-style Texas barbecue. When you say, "Barbecue," to a Texan, he or she will reply, "Brisket," whereas a Tennessean will say, "Pork," a Kentuckian might say, "Mutton," and a Californian will say, "Back yard."

When you drive through Texas, go slow through the towns, and in every one you will pick up the scent of barbecue, rising from the barbecue joints. Therein, the Texas masters barbecue briskets in huge pits, with a firebox at one end, from which smoke from smouldering mesquite is drawn through the pits and over the briskets for long, slow, magical hours. What I offer is a way to obtain a reasonable replication at home.

You start with a whole brisket, “in the bag,” as they say. You need one that is around 10 pounds, with a decent slab of fat on it. Don't be intimidated by the fat; some of it cooks away, and the rest gets trimmed off. The fat does the basting, and if you get a brisket that is too lean, it will be dry. Take the brisket out of the bag and sprinkle it liberally with salt and fresh-ground pepper.

My cooker is a 22-inch Weber. I can actually do two briskets on it, if you are feeding that many (one brisket is plenty for eight). Use a chimney fire-starter to make a fire of 35 charcoal briquets (I use Kingsford Mesquite) Pile it against one side of the fire grate. On the fire, place two or three chunks of lump mesquite charcoal (available at most supermarkets). On the grate opposite the fire, place a drip pan – I use a big, rectangular aluminum baking pan – lined with foil. Open the bottom vents all the way.

Start no later than 7 a.m. Place the grill so one handle is over the fire, providing briquet access. Place the brisket over the drip pan, and place the cooker cover so the vent is over the meat. This vent should be open no more than halfway. Every 45 minutes to an hour, flip the brisket, and add seven or so briquets and a couple more chunks of mesquite charcoal (break up the large chunks with a hammer). You want a fairly slow fire. If you can rest your fingertips on the grill behind the brisket for two or three seconds, that is about right.

Continue this way all day long. About 7 p.m., feed the fire one last time and let it die out overnight. In the morning, wrap the cooled brisket loosely in foil. Empty the drippings into a saucepan. Put a little water and vinegar in the drip pan and heat it carefully on the stove to loosen up burned-on drippings and add these to the saucepan. Place the saucepan in the freezer until the fat hardens on top. Remove the fat and discard, carefully warm the drippings, and strain them into a separate saucepan. Add a medium bottle of ordinary barbecue sauce (I use KC Masterpiece) and heat through to blend drippings and sauce. Add fresh-ground black pepper to taste, a splash more vinegar, and a tablespoon or so of oregano.

Trim the excess fat off the brisket. An hour before you're ready to eat, start a new fire in the Weber. Place the trimmed brisket on a sheet of foil on the grill opposite the fire and let it reheat. Slice it across the grain into long, thin slices (an electric knife is great for this). There will be "burned ends" that break off; pass these around as teasers. Serve the meat on a platter; it will be tender enough to cut with a fork. Gently warm the sauce and serve it on the side. Classic side dishes are pinto beans and potato salad.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments

I am a man in his 60s who is married to a gorgeous woman who tells me she wants me around for 30 more years. To that end, at my age, it becomes important to eat healthy. Eating healthy, she says – insists, actually – means eating more fruits and vegetables. They are not only healthy, she says, but eating five servings of them a day means less room for things like charred-rare ribeye and calamari fritti.

In decades prior, I would have argued that life was not meant to be spent in a way that on the day you die, you will be in a state of perfect health. In my 60s, though, I can start to see this lovely woman's point. Through no fault of mine, or hers, my appetite for death-hastening cuisine has declined in what I can only describe as a natural sort of way. No longer will my body let me consume six tacos for dinner. I can go two, at the max. If it is a natural thing, that must mean something.

I wouldn't have a problem if five fruits and vegetables a day left room for two tacos at dinner and a brisket sandwich for lunch, with a few chips. But they don't. A "serving" of fruits and vegetables is one cup. You'd be surprised (if you haven't tried it) how much focus is required to pack in five cups of fruits and vegetables a day and leave room in the 60-year-old appetite for just a little of the good stuff.

There is a secondary problem. I am a man who does not much like fresh fruit, or frozen, canned, jarred, dried, candied, powdered or juiced fruit, for that matter. Oranges aren't bad. Strawberries are okay, but NOT A CUP AT A TIME. After long consideration - months, she says - I decided I could probably handle one orange every morning, and some strawberries, if they were disguised, and so I would try joining her in the fruits and vegetables – aficionados call them F&Vs – routine.

After three weeks, I am holding my own, mainly because I like vegetables, even spinach. Three cups of packed fresh spinach cooks down practically to nothing and tastes great with a skillet-grilled steak with onions and mushrooms (which of course contribute to the F&V count). I realized that the F&V scheme can be connected to the traditional Southern "meat and three" (meat and three sides of vegetables) style of eating. This cheered me up.

Then, Tuesday afternoon (it was Cinco de Mayo), F&V merged with Stretch Cooking. In celebration of my new direction, Karen had given me a sturdy, skillet-shaped wire basket from Williams-Sonoma, with which to grill vegetables over charcoal. Last Saturday, on the Weber, I grilled a big batch of carrots, zucchini, summer squash, baby broccoli, onions, mushrooms, and green and red peppers, in batches, with this device, then dumped them in a baking pan and left them in the covered Weber (I was worried about the carrots being done) for half an hour. They turned out very nicely.

Tuesday afternoon, Cinco de Mayo, I contemplated enchiladas for dinner. I had half-pound packages of hamburger in the freezer, some great enchilada sauce from Trader Joe's, and Porkyland's tortillas, the best on the planet. Then I thought: how can you stretch that? I thought about the cache of grilled veggies. With the enchiladas, I had planned to scarf a mound of lettuce and tomatoes for my three evening V's. That is a lot of lettuce. And of course that is the purpose: eat more lettuce, less room for enchiladas. You see how Stretch and F&V were merging. In each, once they are opened in your life, there is a bit of the Pandora's Box.

In a 6-quart dutch oven, I browned the hamburger and added a bit of olive oil and half a chopped onion to soften the onion. I chopped and added two roma tomatoes (the V count was skyrocketing tonight) and let them cook, stirring, until they were mushy and starting to act as a thickener. I added half a cup of leftover coffee and stirred to deglaze the bottom of the pot. Then I rough-chopped and added the leftover grilled vegetables, probably six cups in all, and half a cup of the Trader Joe's enchilada sauce. I stacked four Porkyland's tortillas, sliced them into eighths, and threw them in, stirred the pot, and let it simmer for an hour.

The result was pretty darn good, packed in my three V's with ease, and made at least two meals worth of leftovers. Recipes are essential, of course, in the kitchen. But a lot of my cooking comes from head-doodling, of which this is an example.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments

Before chili became a culture unto itself, it was a stretch-cooking technique for making meat go farther, and for preserving the meat longer.

I have never made two batches of chili exactly the same way. Chili has only two constants: it never stops evolving, and you never put beans in it. You can put beans in it, but it changes the flavor of the chili, and of the beans, and that is something that a fan of chili, and of beans, would never want to do.

The basic chili recipe that follows originated with an assignment, in the 1980s, to write about chili for the food section of my newspaper. The food editor stood at my desk, brow furrowed in thought, and said, “New wave. Write a story about new-wave chili.”

Thus did “Bouillabaise Chili” come into being. More about that recipe another time. What it contributes to this recipe is the idea of broiling the peppers, peeling off the blackened skins, and pureeing the flesh in a blender or processor. It worked so well in the Bouillabaise Chili that I brought it into a new evolution of the basic chili recipe. Here it goes:

2 T whole cumin seeds
2 pounds chuck roast, on the lean side
2 pounds pork loin ($1.79/lb., in the bag at CostCo)
2 green bell peppers
2 red bell peppers
2 fresh Anaheim chiles
2 fresh jalapeno chiles (optional)
2 medium to large onions, chopped
1 T oregano
3/4 cup good chili powder (I like Eagle Brand)
1 T salt
Pepper to taste, about 1 t.
5 or 6 garlic cloves, chopped
1 8-oz. can tomato sauce
2 11-oz. cans diced tomatoes

In a small, dry skillet, toast the cumin seeds until lightly browned and fragrant. Put aside to cool. Crush the cooled seeds with a pestle or rolling pin, or whirl them in an electric coffee grinder.
With a large, sharp knife, remove excess fat and cut the beef and pork into small dice. This is an onerous chore, but so was the mixing of the paints for the Sistine Chapel.
Broil the peppers and chiles in the oven or, even better, over a hot mesquite-charcoal fire on the Weber. When the skins are blackened, close the peppers into a brown paper bag and let steam 5 minutes. Peel off the skins and seed them. On the blender’s lowest speed, reduce them to pulp. (When you are cooking with any hot peppers, such as jalapenos, remember to keep your fingers away from your eyes, or any other sensitive parts, for that matter. When working with quantities of chiles, wear rubber gloves.)
Render the fat trimmings in an 8-quart dutch oven, adding a little olive oil if necessary. Brown the meat a pound at a time over medium-high heat. Set the meat aside, add a little oil to the pot if necessary, and add the onions and seasonings and cook, stirring frequently, over medium-high heat until a brown glaze forms on the bottom of the pot. Add the chopped garlic and cook, stirring, another 30 seconds (don’t burn the garlic). If you have a cup of leftover coffee, add it to the pot and scrape up the bottom glaze (this is called de-glazing). If you don’t have coffee, use water. As I always say, this glaze is flavor gold.
Add the meat, pepper pulp and tomatoes to the pot. Add water, if necessary, to not quite cover the meat.
Simmer over low heat 3 hours, stirring occasionally. Makes 2 ½- 3 quarts. Freezes well.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments

When you take a piece of seasoned round steak, dredge it in flour, brown it nicely on both sides, then simmer it in its own gravy, you wind up with Smothered Steak, a staple in the Stretch Cooking repertoire.

The stretch elements here are the round steak, which is one of the cheaper cuts, and gravy, which makes all kinds of meat dishes go farther, and of course bread, to go with the gravy. The gravy can be made with water, or milk, or half of each. The gravy will have intense flavor, from being simmered with the steak, and the steak, in turn, will be remarkably tender. It is a nice partnership.

A pound and a half of round steak, an inch thick or less, and trimmed of its rim of fat, is fine. You don’t have to pound it, or tenderize it, unless you want to. Cut it into three or four pieces. Slice through any connective film around the edge of the steak, so it won’t curl in the skillet. Season the steak on both sides with salt, pepper and garlic powder. Dredge the steak in flour – a pie pan works nicely for this – and let the steak sit on a rack for five minutes.

Render the steak fat trimmings in a large, heavy skillet – I like cast iron – and add oil as needed to a depth of one-quarter inch. Bring the fat up to a temperature higher than medium, but not medium-high: 6, on a knob scale of 10. Give the steak a good browning on both sides. Place it back on the rack.

Pour off most of the fat, into a used coffee can, until the bottom of the skillet is three-quarters covered with fat – about three tablespoons. Be careful not to lose any of the browned bits in the bottom of the skillet.

Return to medium-high heat. Stir in three level tablespoons of flour, and stir constantly until the flour is browned and loses its raw flour scent. Add two cups in all of liquid – water, or water and milk, and a little cold coffee if you have it – and stir until the gravy starts to thicken. Salt and pepper the gravy. Place the steak in the skillet, turning it to coat both sides with gravy. Cover and simmer on very low heat for an hour and a half. Flip the steak a couple of times during this time.

Traditional with Smothered Steak are rice, turnip greens (or spinach), sliced tomatoes and plain white bread. Or choose your own sides.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 1:12 PM | Permalink | Comments

This is Recipe No. 1 in stretch cooking. When you want a little to go a long way, it can’t get more fundamental, filling, or satisfying, than beans. Or blackeyed peas, which is a slightly different recipe but spiritually generic with beans.

The beans are dried pintos. Southerners now in their 50s and 60s – and beyond – will remember that their parents called them “red beans.” Talk about red beans today, and the young people will probably think you are talking about kidney beans, which are about as different from red beans as a tire is from a tornado.

In the really hard times, beans would be the appetizer, the salad, the main course, and dessert. I have never lived or cooked in the really hard times, as my grandmother and stretch cooking champion Susie Grant did, so on my table the beans are a side dish 95 percent of the time. They go with anything, even fish, if the fish is fried. And they freeze well. If you cook two pounds of pinto beans, I guarantee you are going to freeze some.

So let’s cook two pounds of beans. At the supermarket, they come in two- and one-pound bags, so it’s easy to halve the recipe. Pour the beans onto a tabletop a few handfuls at a time and pick through them for rocks, or anything else non-bean, like small dried buds of mud. Sweep the beans into a colander as you work. Then rinse the beans and pour them into a large mixing bowl or pot and soak them in water – about two inches deeper than the beans – overnight. Or you can soak them from early morning into the afternoon.

Chop three-quarters of a pound of leanish bacon, place in a large cooking pot, and barely cover with water. Place over medium-high heat. Chop fine a large onion. When the water has cooked off and the bacon is just starting to sizzle (you don’t want the bacon to get crisp), add the onion to the pot. (If you want vegetarian, skip the bacon and add the onion to a couple of tablespoons of olive or cooking oil in the pot.) Leaving the heat medium-high, add two teaspoons each of pepper and salt, and stir the bacon and onion a minute or two until the onion is soft and a brown glaze is forming on the bottom of the pot. This glaze is flavor gold. Then, if you have some leftover coffee, add a scant cup to the pot, stirring and scraping to “de-glaze” the bottom of the pot. If no coffee, then pour in some water from the soaking beans to de-glaze.

Dump in the beans and add water, if needed, to just reach the surface of the beans. Stir the bacon and onions into the beans, turn the heat to medium-low and cover the pot. After 15 minutes check the pot and adjust the heat so the beans have a nice simmer. Stir them occasionally and with a spoon sample the pot liquor after about 45 minutes and add sprinkles of salt and pepper if necessary. Around 90 minutes, when the beans are starting to look done, get a couple of beans on the spoon and blow on them. If the skin cracks, they are done, or close to it. Chew the beans, and if they are soft, they are ready. If they are a bit firm, check again in 15 minutes.

When the beans are done, you can mash a cup of them in a bowl and add back to the pot to thicken the pot liquor.

Many cooks swear by a meaty hambone in the beans, but that is a different kind of beans, great eating, of course, but not as flexible as a side dish. You wouldn’t serve hambone beans with barbecue, for example. Plus you have to have a hambone, which ordinarily happens only after a holiday. I can’t think of a better stretch-cooking afterlife for leftover ham than in a pot of beans. We’ll talk about that on another day.

Dried blackeyed peas are cooked the exact same way as above, only they don’t take near as long to get done, about 45 minutes. At New Year’s, when the Southern tradition is to eat them for luck, you can find fresh blackeyes even in California. But you don’t lose a thing with the dried, if you ask me. And, if you’re doing a batch for visiting vegetarians, just leave out the bacon. I have to stop now. I am getting weak with hunger. Next Thursday, look for a recipe for Smothered Steak.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments

A majority of Americans, in the nation's 235-year history, have known times when it became necessary to eat low off the hog. Americans in the spring of 2009 were entering another such era.

American tables at dinnertime have always reflected the economy realities of the day. In the long run, this is not a bad thing, having to make a little go a long way. I call it "stretch cooking," whose principles I learned from my grandmother, Susie Foote Grant, who learned them the hard way. Her husband Roy dropped dead of a heart attack, at age 44, on July 4, 1929, not quite four months before the financial crash that began the Great Depression. Susie was left with six children, only two yet old enough to work, and she brought them through the worst years on a menu fashioned, on the worst days, from not much more than beans and meal and grit.

The worst days were over, by the time of my birth in 1943, and all the Grant children were old enough to work. But by then we were in the middle of a world war, the Grant sons were overseas, and the Grant girls were secretaries. The Grant table still featured stretch cooking, with certain luxuries. Susie could afford to put something new on the table almost every night. She set up a rotation of one new thing and three leftovers each day, with today's new thing becoming a leftover tomorrow.

I had no reason to complain. I loved that cooking. Still do. And that is the primary reason for this collection of recipes. Yes, you can survive, if you have to, with some dried beans, some cornmeal, some water, and salt and pepper. But the recipes in my collection are not survival recipes. They yield delicious meals for distressed times, or the best of times. Susie possessed survival, but also wondrous, skills. Every time I sit down to Smothered Steak, Pinto Beans, Corn Bread Thangs and sliced tomatoes, I consider myself a beneficiary of those skills.

I love to cook, and stretch cooking was not my starting point in the kitchen. But I have lived and cooked my way through several economic downturns, none as severe as the circumstances of 2009 and beyond, and every time I have returned to Susie's style, learning more and creating versions of my own. The results have been in fact cheap and also very, very satisfying.

In 1978, I began writing a column for The San Diego Union. Naturally I bragged about this kind of cooking. Eventually readers invited me to put up or shut up, and that is when one thing really started to lead to another. I wrote a cookbook, catchily titled "Michael Grant's Cookbook," which was published in 1987. Some of those recipes you will find here in weeks and months to come, and some are new. There will even be some vegetarian recipes, and technique breakthroughs such as scorching an onion. You can find them under the label: "Stretch Cooking."

I think about Susie a lot when I am cooking. I see myself standing by her electric stove in the early 1950s, watching her make beans and greens and Corn Bread Thangs. One afternoon, I looked up at her and said, "You know, Susie, someday I am going to live in San Diego, California, and write a newspaper column and talk a lot about Texas cooking. And then one morning I am going to cook your Corn Bread Thangs on a television talk show."

And she looked down at me and said, "You're crazy as a loon, boy." It turns out that I wasn't. It's the times that go crazy, sometimes. The cooking stays stable, and good.

Labels: Stretch Cooking

Posted by Michael Grant at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments