Posts

Posted on

Squash Crust Pizza

Any summer squash will do. The crust can be made in advance and refrigerated or frozen before lining a pan or casserole. You can bake smaller crusts on a cookie sheet.

Use 2 cups grated, drained and squeezed squash to one egg. Mix well with a good slug of olive oil, a half cup each grated mozzarella and Parmesan, and a little grated onion along with enough plain flour to make sticky dough. I like to use a little more Parmesan for a somewhat drier mix and add chopped mild peppers. Season with, salt, pepper, and a little basil and thyme. I do not recommend using rosemary as in the original recipe; it’s just too predominant. Roll out twist edges. Bake in a medium hot oven (375-400) for about 40 minutes, or until a bit browned. Brush with olive oil before cooling.

You can use whatever toppings you like. I recommend you forego meats, and go lightly on the tomato sauce, since too much will make the crust soggy. Bake in a hot oven, @450.

Posted on

Prime Rib

I once worked in a restaurant on the coast that regularly sold four roast rib loins in a day. During the tourist season we would keep eight loins in our big oven around the clock.

We’d take the loins to rare. The carving station was set up under a heat lamp next to the grill, where the meat would continue to cook in service, so we rotated sections of meat on and off the carving board. If someone ordered prime rib well done—and, yes, such people do exist in this world—we’d drop a cut into the well of warm au jus we kept at the grill station until meat was grey and the tip and cap had peeled away from the eye. Smart customers who wanted a slice on the done side ordered an end piece.

Our menu called this beef dish prime rib, but we rarely used USDA Prime beef. We most often used a Choice rather than the much more expensive Prime grade, but rib roast is usually called prime on menus because it is, after all, from one of the eight prime cuts in a whole beef (brisket, shank, rib, loin, round, chuck, flank, and plate), so you can bet a rib roast is expensive. Bone-in roasts usually have three to seven ribs and are slightly more expensive.

For an evenly-cooked rib loin, pat the meat dry, brush with oil, and coat with sea salt and minced garlic. Place on a on a rack in a heavy pan and cover lightly with foil. Leave it out while you preheat the oven to 500. When the oven is hot, put the roast on a middle rack for a half hour, then turn the heat down to 250.  In a couple of hours, begin checking with a thermometer. When you get a reading of 125 in the thickest part of the roast, immediately remove the meat from the oven, and let rest for a while before carving and serving.

Posted on

Historic Dishes of Oxford, Mississippi Restaurants

Long before Oxford became a locus of Southern foodie hype, the busy little city fostered and  sustained a lively variety of restaurants. The dishes, the places, the times themselves are loved by thousands of people from Lafayette County and Mississippi, as well as unsung millions of Ole Miss drop-outs and alumni. This definitive list was hammered out in a bickering, nit-picking, back-slapping parley of current, former, and native Oxonians.

The Beacon: Big Bubba burger, “meat and three”
Busy Bee Cafe: oven-fried pork chop
Café Olé: cheese dip, chimichanga
Dino’s: salad dressing, pizza
Downtown Grill: Eli’s praline pecan ice cream pie
The Gin: fried mushrooms, Bernice burger
The Harvest: black bean chili, vegetable lasagna
The Hoka: hot fudge pie and cheesecake, Love at First Bite
Holiday Inn: grasshopper pie, hot fudge pie
Hurricane Landing: fried catfish, hushpuppies and fries
Jitney Jungle/James’ Food: chicken salad
Kream Kup: grilled chili cheeseburger
Marie’s Lebanese: Marie Husni’s Lebanese casserole, baklava
Mistilis: hamburger steak smothered in cheese and onions
Ruby Chinese: hot and sour soup, twice cooked pork
Sizzler Steak House: steaks
Smitty’s: tuna melt, breakfasts
Starnes Catfish: fried catfish with hushpuppies and fries
Ruth & Jimmies:  meat and three
Pizza Den: muffuletta, sub sandwich, stromboli
Warehouse: snapper en Mornay, steaks, salad bar
Winter’s Store: hamburgers
Yerk’s: Philly cheese steak

Glennray Tutor
Posted on

4/20 Fudge

This Alice B. Toklas Cookbook recipe was omitted in the first American publication (1954) but was included in the second (1960). Here’s Alice’s recipe from the 1984 edition:

Haschich Fudge (which anyone could whip up on a rainy day)

This is the food of Paradise—of Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises; it might provide entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR. In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of hot mint tea. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by un évanouissement revelle’.

Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts; chop these and mix them together. A bunch of cannabis sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.

Obtaining the cannabis may present certain difficulties, but the variety known as cannabis sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognized, everywhere in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa; besides being cultivated as a crop for the manufacture of rope. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called cannabis indica, has been observed even in city window boxes. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green.

Posted on

Cat Cora Serves It Up

During a segment of “Iron Chef”, when one critic told Cat Cora that he didn’t care for her dish, she unhesitatingly asked, “Then why did you eat it all?”

Cat doesn’t pull any punches. Why she invoked Barbara Gordon’s 1979 memoir in this 2015 biography is perplexing; Cora has her own story, which she tells simply and honestly, the story of an orphan from Greenville who grew up in a loving, understanding home in Jackson where food took center stage and become a groundbreaking culinary superstar. Such a Horatio Alger-esque narrative often provides occasion for self-indulgent whining, but we make with it because Cat is smart, funny, and resilient. She  rolls with setbacks, admits mistakes, and does what she needs to move on.

The details of her culinary education and career as well as behind-the-scenes at “Iron Chef” provide a lot of interest for foodies as well as fans, who will also enjoy reading her honest–sometimes painfully so–account of her own personal journey. In a work of such candor, I expected details that perhaps only I would miss, like what’s the  dyke bar near the New Capitol. I particularly enjoyed reading about Jackson’s wonderful Greek community.

Mississippians, Cat is our daughter, our sister, let us embrace and celebrate her. But no matter where you’re from, you’ll like this fun, informative read.

Posted on

Tamale Pie

Tamale pie is made by all kinds of people for all kinds of occasions. The bones of controversy in this dish (and I assure you that there will always be an absolute skeleton in any given bowl, plate, or skewer of anything) involve the use of cheese in the bread and beans in the chili. Me, I bake plain cornbread batter over a pan of bubbling mild chili with beans, put it in a 425 oven until browned, and call it tamale pie. I also call it wonderful.

Posted on

Pepper Lime Pork Chops

Trim fat from bone-in center cut chops, brush with (in this order) lime juice, corn oil, and freshly-ground black pepper. Marinate for about an hour, then broil or grill until well seared. Do not overcook. Serve with black beans and rice.

Posted on

Twice-Baked Sweet Potatoes with Feta

Coat potatoes with vegetable oil and placie in a very hot oven for about an hour; bake an extra potato so you’ll have enough to over-stuff. Cool potatoes, slit and scoop out the pulp, mix with butter and brown sugar, honey, or molasses–my favorite–to taste, and about a tablespoon each of feta and chopped nuts per potato depending on the size of the spuds. Stuff skins with mix, top with more feta, and bake until browned. Sprinkle with pecans before serving.

Posted on

Poke Salad

In April, 2000, the Allen Canning Company of Siloam Springs, Arkansas processed its last batch of “poke sallet” greens. John Williams, the canning supervisor at Allen, said, “The decision to stop processing poke was because we couldn’t finding people interested in picking poke and bringing it to us.” Poke processing was never a significant item in their mult-imillion-dollar enterprise, but Williams mentioned that one of the best markets for canned poke was southern  California due to the Oakies.

Euell Gibbons lauds poke as “probably the best-known and most widely-used wild vegetable in America.” In Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Gibbons writes that Native Americans and early explorers were unstinting in their praise of this “succulent potherb.”

“They carried seeds when they went back home and poke soon became a popular cultivated garden vegetable in southern Europe and North Africa, a position it still maintains. In America it is still a favorite green vegetable with many country people and the tender young sprouts, gathered from wild plants, often appear in vegetable markets, especially in the South.” In the lean years before World War II, poke salad–like ramps–was one of the first edible wild herbs to appear in the spring, lending welcome addition to a winter’s sustenance diet of dried beans, cornbread, and salt pork .

The only drawback to poke salad is that it’s poisonous. The mature parts of the plant and the roots contain significant amounts of a violent but slow-acting emetic, phytolaccatoxin. Having said that, you’re probably wondering why in the hell anyone would even consider eating it, but prepared properly, poke salad is safe and delicious. Harvest only the youngest, tenderest sprouts of poke, no more than a foot or so. Wash, stem, and trim. Add to a pot of water, bring to a boil, drain, rinse, return to pot with water, and bring to simmer with oil, a slit hot pepper pod, and a big pinch of sugar. Drain and use much as you would spinach. Euell has a poke salad dip in his book. I like it with scrambled eggs and onion, and it’s wonderful in an omelette.

Posted on

Reviving Salmagundi

Claiborne and All Who Sailed in him (honestly, I can’t count how often I’ve wanted to kick that pontifical old queen under the table) declared, “There is something about the word ‘salmagundi’ that has an unmistakable appeal for savants with a leaning toward gourmandism.” I have no ambition of being a savant, much less one learning towards gourmandism. Like many others, I simply find salmagundi—like pettifoggery, kittywampus, or hullabaloo—a word I want to pick off the page, cuddle, and tease with a string.

The dish is just as playful, actually not so much a dish as it is a presentation like an antipasto or a smorgasbord, a selection of cold vegetables, pickles, meats, and fruit mounded on a tray. By precedent, you want cold poached chicken atop salad greens ringed with pickles, cooked eggs, raw or blanched vegetables, citrus, nuts, sausages, and cold fish—anchovies are a classic addition, but I like smoked salmon, too. Pretty much anything goes with the notable exception of cheese, which isn’t included in any reliable recipe.