Mayo Clinic

Let's face it: no matter how much we love our favorite ones, sometimes we feel the need to spice things up. I get bored with the same old thing. Come on, admit it—you do too. I mean, we've all tried to make it more exciting, haven't we? A little spice helps a lot, I think. I've been playing around lately, going farther than ever before, and I think I've found some tricks. So if you're tired of plain old mayonnaise, why not send your mayonnaise to the Mayo Clinic for a little lift?

Play With Your Food!

I don't think it's a secret that I like to play with my food. When I have the time and energy, I love to take something ordinary and make it special. A little fancy. Maybe even fancy pants. Like these sandwiches.

Blue Cheese, Cranberry and Pecan Lunch Quiches

Many years ago, when I was just starting to cook in my first tiny kitchen, I made a quiche. This was before the wave of quiche mania swept across the US in the late '70s. This wave was so ubiquitous that there was even a book called "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche". (Heh, to which a friend of mine replied that REAL men ate whatever they pleased...)

CLASSICS: Pimento Cheese

Having grown up in the Southern part of the US, I have some special food prejudices. I love spicy food. I will make a beeline for a coconut cake. I like my tea strong and iced. No sugar (I know). My lifetime ambition is to make good fried chicken (I'm not there, not by a long shot). In the summer, I could happily eat BLT every single day. And I love pimento cheese.

Pimento Cheese. Pimiento cheese. However you spell it, I like it. Dan, who grew up in San Francisco, looks at a Pimento cheese sandwich and says, “eh”. He doesn't hate it, but he wouldn't go out of his way to make it. Or to find it.

I think that's because he didn't grow up with it. The food of our childhood can take us back to happy times, to carefree days. So what if those days really weren't exactly carefree? In truth, while I was learning to love pimento cheese I was also learning to fear Sister Saint Dominic and Wednesday detention.

Today the good Sister is mercifully faded in my memory, while pimento cheese is crisp and clear. It speaks to me of picnics, of swimming holes, of summer. It's March and here in Belgium it's cold. Wet. Last week, I needed a blast of summer. I also needed to clean out the fridge before our trip. Looking around my kitchen, what did I find? Roasted peppers left over from Ajvar. Cheddar cheese. (OK, it's supermarket cheddar, and Belgian supermarket cheddar at that, but it's what I had.) Some pepper cheese from the cheese guy at my Sunday market. And mayonnaise. I always have mayonnaise.

So I whipped up a bowl of pimento cheese. It was very pretty. It was delicious. I ate it on sauerteigbrot―bread we get in Germany that's made with 100% rye flour. It's a dense bread, leavened with sourdough. When I lived in DC, I used to buy this bread at Wholefoods. I like bread that I can slice myself. I can make the slices thin or thick, depending on what I'm using them for. Here, I sliced them thin so that the pimento cheese shone.

If you didn't grow up with pimento cheese, you don't have to despair. You can start now to make memories with it. You can make picnic sandwiches. You can make fancy pants sandwiches too! Perfect for tea, or just to spoil yourself.

Pimento Cheese

1 red bell pepper

120 g / 4 oz sharp cheddar

80 g / 3 oz pepper cheese

2 – 3 Tablespoons good mayonnaise

• Pre-heat the broiler / grill of your oven.
• Cut the peppers in sections, and remove the membranes and seeds. You want these segments to be fairly flat, so that the heat will reach them uniformly.
• Arrange the peppers skin side up on a baking sheet. I used a non-stick baking sheet. If you don’t have one, you might want to line yours with aluminum foil. This gets a little messy.
• Slide the peppers under the grill and watch them closely. Mine take between 5 and 10 minutes to be done, depending on whether I remember to pre-heat the grill. They’re done when the kitchen smells like heaven and the pepper skins are lifted and blackened.
• Meanwhile, grate the cheeses.
• Put the peppers in a paper bag and close it up. Yes, they’re hot. Yes, there’s steam. Using tongs is highly recommended. Set aside to cool.
• When they’re cool, take the pepper pieces out one at a time and remove the skin with a sharp knife. Usually you can just pull it off, but if the pepper curved under away from the heat you may have to scrape it a little. If it’s really stuck, don’t worry, just leave it. You won’t notice it.
• When all the peppers are cleaned, put them on a big chopping board. Chop them fairly fine. At this point the peppers have been transmogrified into pimentos.
• Mix the grated cheese with the pimentos. Stir well.
• Add the mayo and chill until ready to use.

Serves 4 if they like it and 10 if they don't.

NOTES:

• Of course, these measurements are approximate. I used the cheese that I had. You can add more or less cheese, mayo, pimento. You're the boss!
• This is wonderful with whatever hard cheese you have. If I don't have a pepper cheese, I add a pinch or two of cayenne. Just because.
• For this, I think you need an old-fashioned box grater. You don't want this cheese to be finely grated, so this is not a job for a microplane.
• The cheese and pimento alone (without the mayonnaise) is excellent in a grilled cheese sandwich.
• Like many things, this is better next day. I just make a double batch so that there will be leftovers, because once this is ready I don't want to wait to eat it.

TRUFFLE MASHED POTATOES

One night recently we had (another) roasted chicken. We have this often, because we can get three or four meals from a chicken. I make it more or less the same way each time, changing the herbs or the lemon or whatever else makes sense given what I have. I like to slice the cold meat for sandwiches. A little mayo, a grind of salt, some good bread, maybe some lettuce and tomato, maybe just some pepper. YUM!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. When we had the chicken recently, I wanted to make some mashed potatoes. Not normal ones, but special ones. Fancy, even. So I looked around and found that I had some peccorino cheese with truffles in it. I know, it must seem that I eat truffles in EVERYTHING, but I really don’t. They’re not good in orange juice, for example. But they’re FABULOUS in mashed potatoes.

Normally I don’t peel potatoes that I’m going to mash, because I LIKE the peel. Our friends in Ireland are grossed out when we eat the peels of baked potatoes, but I think they’re nice with a little salt and butter. However, I didn’t want the peels in these potatoes, so I took them off.

This is a really great dish when you want something a little special to dress up a plate. Or a palate. (heh) It’s good for company, with quail sitting on it, or with just a little gravy. Oh, my. This is company food.

Before we look at the recipe, though, I want to mention again the Hope for Haiti raffle. The original deadline was tomorrow, Feb 28. It’s been extended to Sunday, March 7. This means that you still have a chance to buy a raffle ticket for cookbooks signed by the authors, for tote bags and jewelry, for gift certificates or a hand painted stole, or for some awesome Belgian Chocolates. Tickets are only $10 US. I know which one I would choose...

Truffled Mashed Potatoes

4 large floury potatoes

about 1/2 cup milk

knob of butter

1 cup grated peccorino cheese with truffles

salt and pepper

• Wash the potatoes, peel them and cut them in reasonably-sized pieces and boil them in salted water till they’re fork tender, about 10 minutes.
• Drain and mash them with a potato masher. Add the milk and butter and continue mashing till they’re fluffy. You can use a mixer for this, but the texture will be different.
• Add the cheese and mix until the cheese is melted.
• Serve immediately. Strap yourself in, you’re in for a real joyride!

Serves 4 if they like it and 10 if they don’t.

NOTES:

• This is one of those things that has to be done at the last minute. It doesn’t hold well. If you HAVE TO hold it, though, put it in a covered dish in a slow oven. Good luck.
• There is not a lot of truffle in the cheese, but it’s enough to flavor the potatoes. Truffle is wonderful, but too much is too much. This is just right, I think.

White Onion Soup

Cold, snow, ice. I had a whole day to cook, because I sure wasn’t going out in that stuff. I needed to go to the market, though, because we didn’t have much in the way of fresh fruit or veggies. But I decided that tomorrow is another day (as they say where I come from).

So I looked in the fridge, and I had a chicken carcass from one I had roasted a couple of days before. By now, Dan is well trained to put the bones back in the dish so that I can use them to make stock. I had the complete chicken in there. If the paleontologists come, they can create a replica of a chicken from these bones. Well, minus the head. And the feet.

Where was I? Oh, yes, trying to find something warming to cook. What I really wanted was a big steaming bowl of dark, rich onion soup, complete with a toasted crouton and melted cheese oozing over it. The problem was that I had no beef stock. All I had was chicken. And some onions. And some bread. And some cheese. Hmmm...(if I had had a beard I would have stroked it here)...I thought, can I make onion soup without beef stock? Can I make it with chicken stock? Well, of course I CAN, but will it be any good?

The answer is an unequivocal YES. I made the chicken stock and then made the onion soup in the normal way, but substituted white wine for the red and chicken stock for the beef stock. Not the traditional way, but it was really really good. The flavor was lighter, with a different kind of depth than the traditional soup. I’ll make it again. Because the color and the flavor were lighter than the traditional onion soup, I called it “white”. Also because “chicken onion soup” would have sounded like the onion was a coward, which wasn’t true. At least I don’t think so.

Because I had time on my hands while I waited for the onions to brown slo-oo-owly, I made some fancy pants croutons. That was almost as much fun as the soup, and I think that they made the soup taste better.

This is not expensive food, but it is food for someone who has time to spend with it, since a large part of the flavor depends on the quality of your stock. You can use canned stock if you need to--it’ll still be good, I think. I don’t see why you couldn’t even use vegetable stock for a vegetarian version, which would be even lighter. But there’s no hurrying the onions--they need to cook long and slow to develop their flavor.

I thought this would make more, but in the end it was enough for just two.

White Onion Soup

3 medium onions

2 Tablespoons olive oil

1 heaping teaspoon flour

1/2 cup white wine

salt and pepper

2-3 cups chicken stock

2 slices bread

1/2 cup grated swiss cheese

• Cut the onions in half, peel them, and slice them thinly.
• Heat the olive oil in a large pan and add the onions.
• Cook over medium low heat till light to medium brown and caramelized. This can take up to an hour, so be prepared to wait. Don’t rush this step--this is an important part of the flavor of the soup. Once they start to brown, though, they go pretty quickly so don’t leave them too long at that point.
• When the onions are browned, add the flour and stir to mix it well. Keep stirring to cook the flour for a minute or two.
• Add the wine stir well, and cook over medium heat till the wine is evaporated.
• Add the chicken stock, stir well and heat through.
• Meanwhile, toast your bread. If it’s larger than your bowls, cut it so that it will fit inside. Put the cheese on the bread and run it under the grill to melt the cheese.
• Ladle the soup into the bowls, top with the croutons and any leftover cheese. Enjoy.

Enough for 2

NOTES:

• I used Gruyere cheese, which is what I had. Emmenthal or any Swiss-type of cheese would do just as well.
• The traditional way to do the bread and cheese is to put them both on top of the soup and put the bowls under the grill to melt the cheese. I don’t do that because my bowls get too hot that way, and because I always spill the soup trying to take the hot bowls out of the oven. You might not be as clumsy as I am.
• If you decide to make fancy pants croutons like I did, I think you need a really strong bread. I used a sourdough rye which was even a little stale. It was maybe a little TOO hard to cut, but the flavor stood up to the soup well. I toasted the little stars in the oven and then put them on a baking sheet with the cheese over them. VOILA! I love stars.
• I also had some shredded chicken from the carcass that I threw in at the last minute. TOTALLY untraditional, but you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, eh? Next time I think I’ll leave it out, though.
• Note to self: When photographing hot soup from directly above, wait till it's stopped steaming.

FANCY PANTS POTATOES

Who says you can't play with your food?

I was roasting a chicken recently, and I wanted to roast some potatoes along with it. Normally I just cut them in pieces and parboil them about 5 minutes then just throw them in with the chicken. They’re always delicious!

The other day I thought I’d do something a little different. Something a little fancy.

I cut two large potatoes in slices and then cut out star shapes. I boiled them in salted water, wiped them with olive oil and put them in a roasting pan in the oven with the chicken for the last 30 minutes or so of cooking. The last time I basted the chicken I also basted the potato stars. Not too much, I didn’t want them swimming in the juice, but enough to moisten them and make them sizzle a little.

For a change, I timed it just right: the potatoes were done when the chicken was done. I sprinkled them with a little finishing salt and VOILA! They were wonderful--crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. The basting didn’t keep them from being crispy, it just added some of the chicken flavor to the potatoes.

YESSSSSS! I’d serve these to company!

Fancy Pants Potatoes

4-6 large potatoes

3-4 Tablespoons salt

approx. 2 Tablespoons Olive oil

Finishing salt

Cookie cutters in whatever shapes you like

Preheat oven to 200 C / 400 F. Wash the potatoes and cut them in slices about 1 cm / 1/2 in thick. Cut out shapes with the cookie cutters. Bring a large pot of water to boil and add the salt. Yes, all of it. Boil the potato pieces in the salted water for approximately 5 - 6 minutes. Drain and rub with the olive oil. Put in a single layer in a large, shallow oven pan, and bake for 30 minutes. Check them from time to time and shake them around a little. Turn them if necessary to brown all sides. Make sure that they’re in a single layer-don’t pile them on top of one another or they won’t brown properly. Sprinkle with finishing salt to serve.

Serves 4 if they like it and 10 if they don’t.

P.S. I put the potato pieces left over from cutting out the stars in the pan with the chicken. They were good too, just not very fancy. They could also be cooked separately and mashed.

Variations:

• Sprinkle potatoes with crushed rosemary before roasting.
• Use flavored olive oil: garlic, hot pepper, herb
• You can also do these on the stove top in a non-stick pan. Boil them about 10 minutes in salted water (to cook them through) and drain them. Heat some olive oil in a non-stick skillet and put the potatoes in the pan over medium high heat. Let them brown on one side and then turn them to brown the other side. This should take about 15 minutes total. Sprinkle with finishing salt and serve. I’d probably add some freshly chopped rosemary to the olive oil before I added the potatoes. (Of course, the sides won’t be browned with this method)