[ Home ] [ Home Town News ] [ The Home Front ] [ The Way of Things ] [ En La Cocina ] [ Garage Brewing ] [ Armchair Lit ] [ Plummet into Irrelevance ] [ Gentlemen's Club ] [ Unsettling Employment ] [ 'Where are they now' file ] [ Link Dump ]

 

¿Donde está Don?
¡Don está en la cocina!
   (-- adapted from that dialogue in the early chapters of the 
first Spanish textbook many of us ever used in school. The one about Susana.)

Recipes from the Frades kitchen

Go here if you want to see my GARAGE BEVERAGES.

King Olaf’s Traditional Viking Fishwife’s 
Rum-&-Brine Smoked Salmon

    This is an authentic recipe for smoked salmon passed down in the Swedish side of my family from King Olaf the Feebleminded to my grandfather, Sven Jorgenson. Unfortunately, because the recipe was passed by word of mouth in several languages, there’s no way to confirm its authenticity. Some aunts say this was originally a recipe for peanut brittle or baby formula that went terribly awry. Or maybe I found this recipe in a cookbook or on the Internet, or carved on a piling down at the pier. Nonetheless, it works and the final product is worth the time and trouble!

 INGREDIENTS:

  • At least a quart of water  

  • 1 cup of NON-iodized salt

  • 1-2 cups of brown sugar
  • 3-7 shot glasses of rum
  • 2-3 shot glasses of lemon juice
  • A couple bay leaves
  • A head of garlic (smashed)
  • A bag (or 2-3 shot glasses) of pickling spices
  • A spoonful of pepper, lemon pepper or whatever
  • Squirt of Tabasco
  • A little soy sauce if you want
  • As much salmon as you can eat, catch or afford (3-7 pounds?)
  • Charcoal briquettes and wood chips (try fruit woods, alder, hickory or whatever you can get. Mesquite’s okay too. Forget pine or eucalyptus. Oak might work; I don’t know)

INSTRUCTIONS:

  1. Dig a shallow, three-foot-wide hole in a clearing, line it with river stones and make a thatched cover of green alder bark and striplings, cover it over with mud OR buy a Coleman-style smoker. Do not even attempt this recipe indoors (You can probably do this with a barbecue if you keep the lid on).

  2. Put all the brine ingredients and water together and bring to a boil, then let cool.

  3.  Cut the salmon into four-inch strips and put in the brine in a shallow pan in the refrigerator for 6 to 12 hours.

  4. Remove fish and rinse with cold water. Discard brine, unless you can think of a use for it. Pat fish dry, let air-dry for one hour.

  5.  Put fish on aluminum foil poked full of holes on the grill rack and smoke it for a couple of hours. Throw wood chips, bark and even bay leaves on the fire every so often.

  6.  Serve on crackers or bread, or mash it up with cream cheese for a dip. It will not resemble store-bought smoked salmon -- this is the real thing! It goes well with most white wines, beer or more traditional Viking drinks, such as mead or juniper lager.

 

Butter

This is a pretty straightforward "recipe," but I found out a lot of people didn't even know they could make butter without owning a cow. And why would you need to? Well, first, because you CAN, and second, because it tastes better, has a more interesting texture and no colorings, salt, etc. I think it might almost be cheaper, not counting the labor. It's not "homemade," exactly, but you'll be surprised.

You need:

  • A little carton of heavy whipping cream
  • Electric beaters

Pour the whipping cream into a big mixing bowl. Start beating it as though you were making whipped cream. Check your beaters now and then for smoke, motor burnout, excessive heat, etc. I have the cheapest set I could find, and they had trouble running at high speed for so long. A little smoke, the smell of hot copper, the front plastic started to melt around the vent ... anyway, back to the recipe:

Pretty soon you should have whipped cream. Now just keep beating like crazy until it starts to separate. A little while more and you should start getting something that resembles bits of cream cheese in milk. It also tends to fly off the beaters around the room at this point. Good. Pour off the liquid (this, by the way, is "buttermilk," which you can drink or use for pancakes, etc.) and keep beating the rest until it looks like one of those rounded scoops of butter they put on pancakes at Denny's.

Scoop it into whatever kind of vessel you want and refrigerate or use fresh.

Consider this health tip:  You have turned a single carton of whipping cream into nearly a stick of butter. But it didn't seem like that much whipping cream, did it! Well, You might as well be eating a half-stick or more of butter every time you put a topping on that sundae. (Let's not even mention the ice cream) Instead, you shrewdly removed the healthy, thin part of the cream and now you're left with a solid lump of dairy fat.

Mmmm!
  

 

Now that you have a big dollop of homemade butter,
why not round out your food groups with a super-salty dose of ...

Homemade Corned Beef
(Not how to cook corned beef -- how to actually "corn" the beef
-- well, and then how to cook it)

If you're like most people, you don't know why it's called "corned" when there's no corn to be found. According to "The Joy of Cooking," the 1964 edition, which is the cornerstone of my cookbook library, it's because the salt that was used to preserve meat way back whenever in England  resembled grain, which was referred to as "corn" before the discovery of maize. Salt that looks like grain, grain that's called corn. Beef that is salted, hence corned.

Incidentally, Joy of Cooking's also where I got this recipe, more or less. The only cookbook I know that contains instructions for setting the table for formal banquets AND the most efficient way to skin a squirrel.

Ingredients:

  • A beef brisket

  • Several cups of kosher (non-iodized) salt

  • A little package of pickling spices

  1. Make a super-saturated salt solution with sugar too, if you want. I added pickling spices.

  2. Put the raw beef in it, cover and put it in the refrigerator for 48 hours.

  3. That's it. Corned beef, ready to cook.

Now you have to cook your corned beef. Rinse the salt off and boil it for a couple of hours until it's done. In the beginning, put in some cut-up onions, a couple bay leaves, a little beer, a little cider vinegar, a bunch of peppercorns and some more pickling spices. Toward the last half hour or so, add a bunch of whole, unpeeled potatoes, carrots, celery and hand-torn cabbage. Serve with beer on cracked plates in a working class home.

Quick disclaimer: I made this but I haven't cooked it yet. It's in the freezer. I checked it yesterday and discovered that the salt content had made the meat unfreezable by our equipment. It was actually flexible. Oh -- and it's not pink like store-bought corned beef;  it's gray. It looks like a cracked, cooked piece of gray meat. It's also smaller than it was when I put it into the brine. To be honest, I'm hoping I did it right. If you want to come by and help us eat this thing, give me a ring.

Health tip: I wouldn't recommend a diet consisting entirely of super-saturated salted foods, but every now and again can't hurt if you do the proper soaking first. And on the bright side -- at least it wasn't force-soaked in a chemical sluice of nitrates, corn syrup and red food coloring.

Follow Up: Okay, I cooked it up. It was more or less like corned beef, except it kept shrinking and was really salty. The cabbage turned out okay.

 
Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1