In our semi-anniversary post, we asked what you’d like more of on this blog, and two commenters said cooking posts. Truth is, I’m much better at ranting than cooking. I’m not completely clueless in the kitchen, I’m just wildly inconsistent.
Casting pride aside, I’m going to share last night’s disastrous meal. Man of La Muncha may believe that Ethicureans should “eat your mistakes,” but he’s never been confronted with some of my failures.
My main motivation was to use up as much stuff in the fridge as possible before we leave for Thanksgiving in Phoenix. I had some green tomatoes from our Eatwell CSA box that had been sitting on the counter for over a week slowly turning red: fried green tomatoes would be our salad course. I had bought button and shiitake mushrooms at the market last weekend that were starting to smell just a wee bit, uh, litterbox-y: they would go into a tried-and-true recipe of the Dairy Queen Mother’s for hearty mushroom soup.
Well, as often happens when I am too distracted by hunger, I screwed up the recipe.
I thought I was doubling the soup — it’s really tasty and the recipe never makes enough — but when I weighed my mushrooms, I only had enough for 1.5 times the recipe. Somehow I still added twice the stock called for, and then I accidentally added stock to the roué instead of the cream I was substituting for the milk we were out of. The soup was still pretty good, but it’s quite rich even with just milk, so with extra amounts of a cream-based broth it was a little over the top. (The recipe follows.)
The tomatoes were a different story. Even the endlessly supportive Potato Non Grata, who usually eats almost anything I make, was unable to choke them down. Mistake No. 1: the green tomatoes were not really green anymore, but somewhere between green and ripe. Mistake No. 2: I was following a recipe that came in Eatwell’s newsletter about breading them with cornmeal, but the only cornmeal I had was an unknown number of years old, most likely stale — and probably GMO in origin to boot. I was undeterred. However, when the cornmeal failed to stick to the tomatoes, I decided to add an egg to it. Half the tomatoes thus had a thick shell of bland cornmeal, while the other half were an oily mush.
Our friend Asa stopped by just as I was about to dump the tomatoes in the garbage. (We don’t compost because we don’t yet have a garden.) Asa is a hardcore SOLE warrior: he founded Berkeley’s Permaculture Army, lives in a semi-commune where chickens roost in the kitchen and volunteers frequently cook vats of rice for Food Not Bombs. Despite my warnings, he insisted on eating most of the tomatoes. I’m not sure anyone else could have.
Anyone out there have some idiot-proof recipes for them to share?
Dairy Queen Mom’s Mushroom Soup
(Makes about four small servings)
12 oz fresh mushrooms, sliced medium-thick (I use a mixture of button and small shiitake)
2 cups chopped onions
4 TB butter
3 TB flour
1 c. milk
2-3 tsp dill (dried)
1 TB paprika
1 TB tamari or soy sauce
1 tsp salt
3 tsp fresh lemon juice
2 c. stock
fresh parsley (optional, but a definite plus)
1/2 c. sour cream to top bowls
Saute onions in 2 TB of the butter and lightly salt them. Aftere a few minutes, add mushrooms, half the dill, half the stock, all the tamari or soy sauce, and the paprika. Cover and simmer 15 minutes.
Melt the remaining butter in a saucepan and whisk in flour, cook about 2 minutes. Slowly whisk in milk. Cook over low heat, stirring, for about 10 minutes until thick. Stir into the mushroom mixture and add remaining stock. Cover and simmer 10 minutes. Before serving, add salt, pepper, lemon juice, remaining dill, and parsley. Garnish with sour cream.
(Note: My lemons were “foraged” from a public tree that still has some.)
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November 19th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
I love fried green tomatoes. The ones in your picture look very thick—–I slice mine sandwich style, dip them in beaten egg, then dredge them in a mixture of cornmeal, flour, salt, and pepper. Shake a lot of the excess off so it does not gunk up your oil too quickly. Some folks like to make gravy with the drippings, especially if they use lard.
I used to eat a great fried green tomato sandwich at a little place we went to in college—–fried green tomato, swiss cheese, and bacon on a kaiser roll.
November 19th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
Thanks, Ness! I’ll have to try again. Egg first sounds much better; neither my box recipe or others I’ve seen have called for egg, but I don’t see how else the cornmeal is supposed to stick to the slices. A mixture of cornmeal and flour also sounds like an improvement, especially given my cornmeal sucked.
Fried green tomatoes and BACON, now you’re talking! If only I had some left to experiment on.
November 20th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
I had the same problem — too much Eatwell, too little time before vacation! I made a minestrone-style soup out of the savoy cabbage, baby chard, carrots, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes from Eatwell, plus non-Eatwell chickpeas, barley, onion, garlic, bacon, and taters (and yummy stock from a Marin Sun chicken). The only thing left out was a solitary green tomato, which I might try to prepare tonight.
May 18th, 2007 at 10:23 am
wow, sick man!