Little Susie Homebreaker

My Teeny Tiny Tasty Super Bowl Party

Let me introduce you to one of  the NFL's most  surprising fans: me. I barely know the rules of the game, but I am a total sucker for anything political, poignant, or scandalous about big league sports.

This year I'll be cheering  Eli Manning and the Giants— and the special note to my teeny tiny Super Bowl party, as usual, will be the food.

I know how to make a chili for people who hate chili. —A chili for vegetarians that the meat-lovers will demand for seconds. —A chili you can make in minutes but will make everything believe you toiled for hours. You can cook it as picanté as you like, but I know how to take all the heat out of it, and still make people feel rambunctious. And... my guacamole is the best.

These are not idle boasts. Here is my recipe, rudely adapted from Molly Katzen's Still Life with Menu. It's good for any winter day you wanna feel like a winner!

Black Chili with Pineapple Salsa

Sweet Plantains, Crazy Cuke Sauce, & The Best Guacamole

Ingredients on Hand:

 
Canned back beans
Olive oil/butter
Cumin
Salt and Pepper
Fresh Basil
Dried oregano
Limes
Small jar of diced jalapeños, or one fresh pepper
Any other peppers you like
Minced garlic
Canned chunk pineapple
Bananas or plantains
Avocados
2 big cucumbers, at least
Red onion
Cilantro
2 bunches of mint leaves
Plain yogurt

Black Chili

Put three cans of black beans, with their water, in a saucepan, Slowly heat them up.
In a skillet, on medium heat, sauté three or four minced garlic cloves in olive oil with a
little butter. For faster results, just spoon it out of those brilliant jars of crushed garlic.
(I told you this was going to be fast!)

Add in one of those small jars of diced jalapeño peppers. They’re perfect.

(You can also cut up a fresh one if you like. If you go with the fresh, and you want to
subtract the heat, be sure to remove all the seeds, and wash your hands with hot water
and soap afterwards).

If you want a hot chili, get out the Poblanos and Anaheims and go for it. 

To your sauté, add 3 T. of chopped up fresh basil,  2 tsp. cumin, 1 tsp. oregano, salt,
pepper You’ll get a nice hot paste with the peppers, until they’re wilted and soft. Add
the juice of one lime towards the end.

Add this mixture to the beans, along with a cup of any tomato, or marinara sauce, or— 
the Trader Joe’s roasted pepper and tomato soup in a box. 

Let that warm on low heat, while you make the salsa.

Pineapple Salsa

Get your Cuisinart out. If you don’t have one yet, sell some plasma and get one. It’s a
critical as  a wooden spoon.

Pour in a can of pineapple chunks, a couple tablespoons of diced fresh mint, a couple
more spoonfuls of diced garlic, a pinch of the cumin, and salt. You can add chilis of
course, if you want this to be hot, too.

The mint is the one part of this operation that has to be fresh. It comes in little
bunches and is easy to chop that way.  Don’t use the whole bunch in the salsa… you
need at least half of it for the Crazy Cuke Sauce.

Pulse the food processor a few times until the salsa is shredded and mixed well. It’s
nice to have a few chunks of pineapple bobbing around. Put it in a serving bowl in the
fridge to chill.

Crazy Cuke Sauce

Peel and coarsely chop up two cucumbers for your Cuisinart. Add 4 T. of chopped
fresh mint, a couple T. of chopped red onion and a cup or two of plain yogurt. Salt and
pepper!  Buzz it up good, and then pour it into a serving pitcher or cup to chill in the
fridge.

Plantains/Fried Bananas

Put these on before you make the guacamole so they have enough time to caramelize.
Get any kind of banana you like. Slice them in half length wise, and then maybe in half.
Melt butter with a little olive oil ( so it doesn’t burn) in your skillet, so you have a fine
⅛-1/4” coating.

Place the banana slices in the pan, and slowly cook them on medium low heat, turning
over when one side gets streaked with dark brown. In other words, you’re slowly burn-
ing them, and the sugar’s coming out.

When they’re done, turn the heat off and let them sit in the skillet until you serve them.
They taste great with sour cream or the Cuke Sauce.

Guacamole!

Get the best avocados you can find. Perfect ripeness. That’s the magic part.
Peel the green fruit out of their skins and drop into your serving bowl. Now add the
juice of one lemon per three or four medium avocados. This is what gives it the kick,
like it was just born.

Chop up a little cilantro, and smash it all up with healthy shakes of salt and pepper. 
Use a fork for this part, not the food processor.

That’s IT.

Yes, you can gum it up with hot sauce, onions, tomatillos, tomatos, sour cream— but
please taste it in its virginal stage and tell me if you aren’t quivering.

Extras

Grate or crumble up some of your favorite cheese. Yum goat cheese. Yum cheddar.
Scallions, peppers, sour cream, chopped up tomatoes, that sort of thing.

Serve It

Pour the hot chili ( which will have been gently simmering for a half hour or so)  into
bowls.

Drizzle Crazy Cuke Sauce over it, scatter some cheese, put a spoonful of Guacamole in
the center, festoon it with Pineapple Salsa. Get the chips out. Anything goes at this
point.

Photos: Cutiepie QB Eli Manning in the  Off Season On Smash blog, and all vegies from Mariquita Farms' Recipe Book!

The League of Amazing Latkes

I dream about potato pancakes. There aren't enough Hanukkah parties to sate my appetite; I always want more.

I used to cry like a spoiled brat because even though I have the perfect recipe— and I do mean "the best latke you've ever tasted"— my routine took a couple hours of numbing handwork to prepare, and ruined any possibility of a quick fix.

I don't like squeezing water out of potato gratings in cheesecloth scraps until my arms fall off. I don't care to spend all day grating a mountain of potatoes plus part of my knuckles. Yet nothing but my own recipe satisfies me.

It turns out that immediate gratification IS possible with the right equipment. It took me twenty years to realize this, but no one should suffer as long as I did. The tools are everything in this recipe. There are no substitutions!

Susie's Perfect Latkes On Demand

2 1/2 - 3 cups grated potatoes, grated in a Cuisinart

1 onion— the size of a tennis ball, grated in a Cuisinart

2 large eggs

3 tablespoons fine matzo meal crumbs from the box— no other crumb will do!

2 T. sea salt

Lots of black pepper

2 T. butter

2 T. canola or safflower oil

Sour Cream

Applesauce

Preheat your oven to 250 degrees— you won't be baking, but you need a warm place to store your piles of fresh-cooked latkes. You'd like to think you could cram them all in your mouth at once, but be realistic— you need a spot to keep them hot.

Re-Inventing the Onion

One odd thing about belonging to a farm share, or a "veggie scheme," is that sometimes you end up with a surplus of a seasonal item that you cannot seem to eat quickly enough.

I've had a couple of "red cabbage tantrums" that won't soon be forgotten.

This summer, the bountiful crop in my refrigerator has been the onion. I've amassed purplette cocktail onions, gold cippolines, blanco di maggio, Italian roasting onions, scallions, leeks, and Stockton Reds.  They are more than a simple martini and tomato sandwich could tear through.

I decided to make onion soup, and destroy three or four pounds of alliums in one giant chop.

But I couldn't remember how to make the classic French recipe, and when I looked it up, it all seemed like such a bother... straining out all the herbs, the toast and melted cheese, the perfect beef broth, blah blah. Plus, I didn't even have many of the essential ingredients they asked for, like beef broth, parseley, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I love gourmet meals in the style of Louis the XIV— I would just rather loll around on my satin pillow while someone else prepares them.

So instead, I decided to make a "quick" onion soup that was more in the style of making hippie lentil stew... and was I ever in for a surprise.

This was the best thing I have made all summer. This was one of those "you will see God" type soups. Actually it was practically a jam, it was so caramelized. Furthermore, I know the secret of not makign yoruself sick with onion-crying

Are you ready for love? Here it is:

3 or 4 pounds onions, any kind

1 quart of broth, fresh or organic canned (I used chicken broth stored in my freezer for months)

1 or 2 c. Arugula
4 or 5 T. Basil
1 T. of olive oil
Half a stick of butter
1/3 bottle of red wine (Some merlot that was sitting around)
Thyme

Get out your Cuisinart and put on the attachment they call the slicing disc. Stuff your onions in the tube and watch them get sliced to smithereens, without you shedding a tear. All you have to do is take the paper onionskin off first.

(Someone commented in this blog previously that a Cuisinart is a luxury item. I don't think it's any more a luxury item than a toaster or a coffeepot, and arguably more useful. There isn't a commercial kitchen in this country that operates without one. You can find them for as little as a dollar at a garage sale, and not much more at a discount shop.)

Melt the butter with a small amount of olive oil in a dutch oven. Add the sliced onions and cook down on medium high heat, stirring frequently. If you have to go out and make a phone call, just turn it down really low, and when you com eback to it, turn it up and keep stirring. You can do this several times, if you've got the time to keep making phone calls and talking to your neighbors and checking your email, which is what I did. The onions aren't going to fuck up on low heat.

Don't strain out any of the vegetables. You're going for a "jammy" look.

When ready to serve, ladle into bowls and then top with your favorite cheese: parmesan, Goat, gruyere. Or you might like Sour cream or yogurt, creme fraiche—oh, don't get me started, Sally!

You could add croutons, or just make butter yourself a nice slice of bread. You may not make it that far if you're too absorbed gulping spoonfuls out of the pot.

If I Could Have Stuffing Every Day

Why do we only eat stuffing once a year? Everyone says it's their favorite part of Thanksgiving, and yet we starve ourselves.

It's bread pudding, and that gives you a clue right there. I love bread. I love pudding. Pour on the butter and let's have a party.

I make two stuffings, one traditional and one for the vegetarians, although that's a bit of a joke because the carnivores eat all the veggie dressing too.

I used to buy loaves of bread and dry them out before cutting them into cubes by hand, but I decided that is not where the labor-intensive hours count. Instead, I support buying unseasoned bread crumbs ahead of time. The key is UNseasoned. Seasoning is an area where you can make your homemade stuffing shine.

Buy fresh herbs. Actually, if you live near me, come over and get some for free, because I have enough parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme to sink a dingy off of Plymouth Rock.

Just cooking up  fresh herbs in butter and garlic is enough to set the whole day right. Saute them with your onion, your celery, and if you want my other secret, diced fennel bulb. YUM. You can even skip the celery entirely if you want.

My famous star of the stuffing comes next:  I chop up oysters and saute them... more butter, please!  I love the taste of shellfish in poultry dressing. Of course you have the sizzling ground sausage mixed in there as  as well... pork, shellfish, and turkey flavors cannot be beat!  Sometimes I add baby shrimp, too.

I'm big on nutmeats. Pecans. I have a Cajun feel for stuffing. If I could come up with 'gator meat to throw in, I bet it would be heaven. Brazil nuts, or pine nuts work alright too, but remember this is NOT a candy bar. Peanuts and almonds are not your friend in the stuffing department.

I like raisins. I like capers. I like to throw everything in but the kitchen sink as long as I think it will harmonize.

I always buy a separate package of giblets and livers to cook, just for the stuffing. You can't get enough of that stoned turkey flavor.

I learned a great lesson from a Cauldron cooking class I took at Mariquita Farm: the most flavorful part of any bird comes from the gelatinous body parts. That's why chicken feet are the quintessential flavor orgasm of any hen. More than anything you can do to enhance your chicken stock, it's the feet that make it POP.

During class, we cooked in an enormous witch-size iron cauldron, so I cleaned about 100 chicken feet. Nasty things they are, especially for a sheltered city girl like me!  They made me think, "so this is what dinosaur toes must have looked like."

But the flavor of the broth was off the hook. I don't blame you if you use canned broth, but if you're determined to make homemade stock, get some of those feet from the butcher. Just a handful will make you a shaman in the kitchen.

What do you like in your stuffing? Are you a purist, or surrealist when it comes to additions?

I hope you are taking a slow weekend with family and friends, whether you're munching on bird or Sushi or Cadbury bars! I'm very thankful for all your support and good words this year, and I look forward to more of the same!

Some mad satire for you:

"Pardoned Turkey" to be He Held at Guantanamo

Scenes from a Bush Thanksgiving

The Best Spaghetti You Ever Had

I'm going to tell you how to make the best tomato sauce you have ever tasted in your life. This sauce has revived my body and spirit on the most inexplicable occasions.

Get a bag of fresh organic tomatoes, say ten to a dozen, a couple pounds. It's the season for it, so you won't have any problems buying  as many sacks as you like. Or come down to Mariquita Farms, in my neighborhood, and pick them yourself.

Cut them in half and drop them in a plastic zip lock bag.

Take two to four sweet peppers, any color, and cut those in half too. Pull and rinse out the seeds. Add them to the same zip lock bag. Cut up some garlic, and throw it in there too.

Cream of Whatever— I'll Take Seconds!

I recently attended a potluck picnic of slow food gourmets and wine snobs.

We gathered around one particular potato dish which was causing a sensation, licking our fingertips and screaming for more.

When pressed for the recipe, the woman who brought the casserole burst into blushing tears. She begged our forgiveness, and then told us the secret of Mother-In-Law Potatoes:

Mother-In-Law Spuds

1 32-oz. package of Ore-Ida Frozen hash browns (Don't defrost them!)

1 c. cheddar cheese

1 c. jack cheese

1 stick butter, melted

1 carton sour cream

1 can cream-of-whatever soup
(Campbell's cream of chicken, mushroom, celery, etc.)

1 bag of potato chips

Place the frozen potatoes in a 9 x 13 baking pan. You can break it up, but don't defrost!

Put all the other ingredients in a bowl, except the chips, and mix them up. Pour and slather the mixture on top of the hash browns.

Crumble about two cups of chips on top.

Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for 1 hour and 15 min.

It's soooooo yummy. And I'm sure we could figure out a "slow" alternative if we wanted to!

What's your favorite irresistible dairy/potato confection?

The Potato-Eaters, Van Gogh, Nuenen, April 1885

Eat Your Spinach, Honey

I belong to a C.S.A. called Two Small Farms. Every week, my family and a few hundred others share in the bounty of a couple of local organic farmers.

We pay a small sum to eat the best the California harvest has to offer, and I've never chowed down so well in my life. Yesterday, my weekly "box" arrived with tomatoes, garlic, sweet peppers, little gem lettuce, Carnival winter squash, artichokes, strawberries, and.... SPINACH. Lots of beautiful, Popye-lovin' green leaves.

I live in Santa Cruz county, the heart of California organic farming, and many of my friends and neighbors have been affected by the recent e-coli spinach scandal. Much of what you have heard from the FDA, and  the media, is unwashed bullshit, to put a bacterial spin on it.

I asked one of our farmers, Andy Griffin from Mariquita Farms, if I could reprint his story here about what is really going on in Spinach-Land:

Deborah Schot, a reporter from the L.A. Times, called me to ask for an opinion about the e-coli outbreak in prepackaged fresh spinach that has killed one person and sickened hundreds more.

And yes, I have an opinion. I think the F.D.A. employee that I heard on the radio yesterday urging people to play it safe and not eat fresh spinach is ignorant.

Although the victims got sick by eating spinach from a sealed bag it’s wrong to seize on spinach as the culprit in the controversy; it makes more sense to look at the processing and handling of pre-packaged greens in general.

Put another way, it’s the harvest procedures that were followed, the pre-washed claim made for the greens, and the bagged environment the greens are in that are the relevant issues, not the specific variety of leafy greens that were actually contaminated at some point during the harvest and post harvest handling. By fingering any spinach as suspicious, even bunched fresh spinach, the F.D.A. isn’t educating anyone, or solving the problem. They’re just spreading fear on a national scale.

The L.A. Times called me because I’m a farmer and I’m quick with a sound bite, but also because I have a background in the baby spinach and salad business. Back in the dark ages when I started farming organically people bought their spinach in bunches and their salad as heads of lettuce. My first career in farming was in the production of the then new baby salad greens and baby spinach. We harvested the crops by hand, washed them, and packed them loose in unsealed bags.

In 1996 my partners and I sold our company, Riverside Farms, to the company that became Natural Selections, which happens to be the company at the heart of the current controversy. Their packing plant was once the packing plant for our farm, though it was a lot smaller and less sophisticated back then. Our former label, Riverside Farms, was one of the labels pulled from the shelves this week. Ready Pac and Earthbound Farms, two of the other labels pulled, were labels that I once grew and harvested raw products for so, for me, this bad news has a personal angle.

When we harvested baby greens by hand at Riverside Farms the workers dipped their knives periodically in buckets of antiseptic solution to clean them. We were unsophisticated then, compared to the way the industry is today, but we knew that any bacteria on the knife could contaminate the wound in the leaf where it was severed from the plant at the moment of harvest.

We also knew that baby salad greens that were harvested by dirty knives were far more likely to break down quickly in the cooler, even after being washed, because the wash process, no matter how good, can’t really remove bacteria that has been introduced into the leaf by a dirty blade.

Riverside Farms had a state of the art wash line for 1995. but we went the way of the dinosaurs in part because we couldn’t afford to pay the escalating labor costs of a unionized crew of hundreds of salad cutters when our competitors were going to be harvesting tons of product cheaply with machines. Not long after we went out of business harvesting machines became the industry standard.

All in all, an argument can probably be made that the big harvest machines probably cut the product even cleaner than individual workers can, especially if some individual harvester is sloppy and careless. But, by the same token, if the cutting blade on a harvesting machine isn’t properly cleaned tons and tons of product can be contaminated by a filthy blade during the course of the day—not just tons and tons of baby spinach, but tons and tons of ANY PARTICULAR LEAFY GREEN VEGETABLE, ORGANIC, CONVENTIONAL, OR OTHERWISE, that is being harvested.

Let’s say some contaminated product makes it out of the field into the shed. The equipment in the large salad plant wash-line is all stainless steel, and the wash water that has been chlorinated to reduce bacteria levels. If the factory puts so much chlorine in the water that even potential bacteria pockets in the damaged tissue along the cuts of the leaves is killed the “fresh” salad greens will have been chemically contaminated into a swampy mess that smells like a municipal swimming pool.

(When I smell the odor of ammonia that comes out of the sealed bags of those nasty little carrot plugs that are so popular I want to gag. When the day comes that someone gets sick from eating them and the F.D.A. tells people not to eat any carrots I’m going to sue! Think of all the bunched spinach growers losing their shirts because some fool at the F.D.A. doesn’t distinguish between packaged spinach that’s “conveniently” been “pre-washed,” and a bunch of spinach that needs to be cut from the stems and cleaned in the sink before being eaten.)

If the wash line procedures manage to kill 99.9% of all the offending bacteria, there is still a real problem due to the tons and tons of greens being processed over a short period of time. Inevitably, a significant amount of contaminated product could go out to consumers.

A psychologist might be able to do a better job than I in telling you why so many people feel comforted when they see their food coming to them in sterile looking sealed plastic bags covered in corporate logos, nutritional information, legal disclaimers and “use by” dates.

“It’s convenient,” they say. It is true that the open piles of washed baby greens that were once the norm in supermarkets and farmers markets were vulnerable to post harvest/ post wash contamination. Those sneeze guards over the pizza parlor salad bar aren’t there for nothing.

But I’ll tell you that every sealed bag of pre-washed greens is like a little green house. The greens inside are still alive, as are the bacteria living on them. If the produce in the bag is clean, great, but if it isn’t the bacteria present has a wonderful little sealed environment to reproduce in, free from any threat until the dressing splashes down and the shadow of a fork passes over. Frankly, I think convenience is overrated.

When my partners and I sold our salad washing company we sold the assets, the equipment, the leases, the receivables etc. but we also sold the right to compete. For five years I was contractually obliged to seek a way in agriculture that didn’t have anything to do with my previous experience in baby salad greens.

I wasn’t sad to leave the big farm and the salad factory behind. Those years were fascinating for me, but stressful, and the more sophisticated everything became the more alienated I felt. I was out of my league. I turned to farmers markets and then, when that way of business didn’t prove to be sustainable Julia and I turned to the C.S.A. format, later joining forces with Stephen and Jeanne at Higher Ground Organics.

Maybe giving people a mixed box of seasonal vegetables that they have to wash and prepare isn’t “convenient,” the way shipping thousands of cookie cutter boxes of salad out of a factory door is. And maybe it isn’t “convenient” for our supporters to have to wash their carrots or trim the coarse stems off their chard. But that’s cooking, and cooking is a happy, healthy, balanced and therapeutic chore.

I will be curious to follow the news and see what the inspectors discover in their search. If it turns out that I’m wrong, and it was the spinach that was what gave shelter and sustenance to the e-coli—and the problem is not due to a slip-up in harvest or post harvest sanitary procedures on the factory farms— I’ll be the first to admit to ignorance.

But for now I’m going to call my seed dealer and order some spinach seed; it’s probably on special today, and it grows well in Hollister in the fall.

copyright 2006 Andy Griffin