Good Friend, Good Onions (Confit of Onions)

My friend Jim Holton is an interesting guy.  Look him up here.  He has an unusually wide range of things that charge him up.  Jim is a top jazz piano player, really one of the best in Philly, a historian of the piano, able to play anything called.  Like him on Facebook for information about current gigs.  Basketball and football are passions, along with Scotty the Deacon Dog and the beautiful Cindy LeBlanc.  With Christine Djalleta, Cindy and Jim are the music ministers at our church, St. John’s Lutheran in Ambler, PA, where he leads a monthly Jazz Vespers service along with the Jazz and Gospel service each third Sunday.  It would be foolish to miss Jim on piano, Hideo Morris (vibes), Paul Deck (drums), Christine (vocals), Cindy (flute) and the great Tyrone Brown, an absolute gentleman, playing bass.  Occasionally, a young guitarist on his way up named Patrick Farrell sits in with the group.  The service starts at 10:30.  Be there!

Whenever the phone rings, I’m happy to hear from Jim, although I never know where the conversation will go.  Social justice issues are a common topic.  Diet and weight loss, his success and my struggles usually come up.  Don’t get Jimmy going about global warming unless your afternoon is clear.  Yesterday, who knows why, we spent a bit of time talking about steaks and onions. 

The following is a recipe for onion confit, a kind of an onion jam with a rich sweetness that works well paired with full flavored main courses, particularly grilled foods.  Additionally, it can be served as a hors d'overe, cold as a canapé maybe topped with smoked chicken or grilled shrimp.  Here’s the master recipe.  Onions are fibrous things.  You'll have to slice them properly.  Here's how.

In order to break them down you cannot be in a hurry.  The key is long, slow, low temperature cooking that will turn the onions into jam.  Better yet, this caramelization process results in a sweet finished product, without the hot burning character of most quickly sautéed onions.  It also reheats well.  Resist the urge to cut corners and sneak in some brown sugar.  It isn’t necessary if you take your time, plus it reduces the depth of flavor you get from cooking the confit properly.  Also, do not think you will get a better confit by using sweet onions.  Vidalias are only sweet when raw.  Once you cook them, they taste like any other white or Spanish onion.

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Confit of Onions

3 large Spanish onions, thinly sliced with the grain

1 tbs. unsalted butter*

1/2 tsp. kosher salt

1/8 tsp, a few grinds, white pepper

In a heavy stockpot with a tight fitting lid, melt the butter on low heat.  When the butter has melted, but still looks creamy, add the onions, season with salt and pepper.  Stir to coat the onions with butter, then cover the pot and allow the onions to sweat.  Stir the pot every 5 minutes. 

After the onions have yielded their liquid and become translucent, about 20 minutes, uncover the pot and continue to cook the onions on low heat.  Over the next 15 minutes, liquid will slowly evaporate and caramelize.  Continue to cook the onions, stirring constantly  until they are dry and look like preserves.  Keep warm in a double boiler until it is time to serve.

Use the onion confit as a topping on grilled meats or sautéed liver.  Grilled steaks are a perfect match.  You also might want to serve the confit with grilled lamb shoulder chops.  If you plan to do that, add 1 tsp. curry powder to the onions halfway through cooking.

*There are two reasons that I use unsalted butter.  First, the only reason a dairy adds salt to butter is to preserve it.  If you buy unsalted butter, you may be getting a marginally fresher product.  Second, I’m cranky and I insist on controlling every aspect of my cooking.  If I want salt in a dish, I wanna be the guy who put it in there. 

Why You Must Know the Escoffier Classics (Mac and Cheese)

There’s a little book, only 239 pages, which all French chefs have secreted in their tool boxes.  It is a guide, kind of a cheat sheet, to the great Escoffier cook book.  Escoffier was the chef who codified French classical cuisine.  He also was the first to can tomatoes, but that’s another story.  Say what you will about old school French cooking, yeah it was heavy and far too elaborately garnished, but it was an expression of the people and place where it was born.  Le Répertoire de la Cuisine is a distillation of Escoffier’s book.  In those 239 pages are the outlines for the 7,000 recipes which defined the Golden Age of Gastronomy.

A Le Répertoire recipe is brief.  In just a few words, a reader with skills would be able to make even the most complicated preparation.  Here’s a good example.  To make Mornay Sauce, the only guidance given is “Béchamel Sauce mixed with butter, grated Gruyère and Parmesan.”  That’s pretty spare, consequently, a cook must know in his DNA how to make a Béchamel, how to enrich it with butter without breaking the thing and how much of each cheese to blend in.  Waverly Root’s The Food of France is a similar resource.  Recipes in the text are noted where a good cook should be able to reproduce the dish just from the description.

The Chefs knew Le Répertoire inside and out, so they would just bark out what was to be on the menu and an apprentice would be expected to make it, flawlessly and in the expected time.  Here’s where Le Répertoire becomes essential.  The apprentice would respond, “Yes, Chef!” then sneak a look at the book to figure out what the Chef had just demanded.  He would review the recipe, check out the kitchen’s inventory and equipment.  Only then would the apprentice carefully, fearfully approach the Chef to see what sort of personal spin he wants on the classic version.  Normally, the garnish would be adjusted and plating would be finalized.  This sounds more organized that it would be in actuality.  There would be lots of swearing, plenty of talk about parentage.  Farm animals would be mentioned, however if the apprentice knew the recipe and had completely remembered the psychotic outburst that was the chef’s final instructions, everything would be just fine.

The rigorous understanding of historical recipes still has value.  Let’s go back to the Mornay Sauce.  When they were growing up, my kids would often be horrified when mac and cheese was offered at their friend’s house.  Most of the time that evil stuff outta a box would be served.  My kids came up on mac and cheese made with a proper Mornay Sauce.  They were raised on the fringe and that is my fault.  But here’s the thing, when they have been away for a while, the first thing they want when they come home is mac and cheese with that Mornay Sauce.  And my cidre, the boys always drink up the cidre.   Maggie skips the booze and digs in the fridge looking for smoked salmon. 

So here’s the recipe for what is probably the most popular meal at our house.  It does make some changes in the outline in Le Répertoire, but that’s not a bad thing, since Mac and Cheese doesn’t need the butter enrichment and cheddar melts up smoother than Parmesan.  You’ll notice that I do not recommend baking the dish after assembling it.  This recipe is for sauced pasta.  If you want to bake it, you’ll have to make the sauce thinner by adding another cup of milk.  If you don’t, it will bake up dry.  One other thing, make large batches.  There won’t be leftovers.  Although this one makes a vat prefect for a church supper or when the kids bring a gang over on short notice, you can easily cut the recipe in half. If you want to get a little crazy, add 1 pound of diced ham to the sauce.  That's always a hit at our house.

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Macaroni and Cheese

2# elbow macaroni

3 qt. whole milk

1# cheddar cheese

1 stick unsalted butter

1 c. flour

2 tsp. salt

1/4 tbs. white pepper

1/4 tbs. nutmeg, freshly grated

pinch cayenne pepper

Boil a large pot of salted water. 

  Add the macaroni and stir occasionally, so that they do not stick together. 

 When the macaroni is cooked al dente, still firm, drain it in a colander.

 Return the pot to the stove.  Melt the butter over low heat.

 Add the flour.

 Stir the butter and flour together, making a roux, the sauce's thickener.  It should have the consistency of peanut butter.

 Add half the milk.  Whisk the sauce until it is smooth.  Add the remainder of the milk.  This way there will be perfectly smooth, with no lumps in the sauce.

 Season the sauce with the salt, white pepper, cayenne pepper and nutmeg.  Stir in the spices.

 Grate the cheddar cheese as you slowly heat the sauce. 

Simmer the sauce for 15 minutes, until it thickens enough that it won't run down you finger.  That means that it will coat the pasta, but will not be as thick as library paste, a common mistake.

 Add the grated cheddar.

 Stir it in until it is smooth.  Reduce the heat to low.  Never boil the sauce after the cheese has been added.  It will separate.

 Add the cooked macaroni.

 Stir the mac and cheese until it is smooth.

 Serve in LARGE bowls with more grated cheese.

Where We’ve Come From (Chicken Cynthia)

A full Fresh Fun Foods class schedule is posted.  I need your help spreading the word.  Feel free to spam all you friends with the link.

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Writing these blogs can be a trap.  I’ve been trying to document the good and the bad in my time in kitchens.  Consequently, there has to be time for reflection.  I’ve had to sort through a bunch of old bosses, recipes and bad trips, hoping to arrive at a coherent way to present my own culinary history in a way that is engaging, while also avoiding multiple statutes of limitation and never letting anyone know where all the bodies are buried.  It has not been easy.  I hope it has been fun for you.

I lived in Rochester, NY for a few years back in the early 80’s while a bunch of my friends were going to RIT.  At the time I was a competent American style cook.  I could use a knife, work a full board of checks, that kind of thing, but I really didn’t know much about real food.  I could make chili and thought that I was the man.  I got a gig working at a place called Casablanca, an odd hybrid rock and roll club/lunch spot/Greek restaurant.  It was run by three brothers, Bill, George and Chris Petsos.  Their father, Stavros cut meat and generally made himself useful.  Louis (use the French pronunciation) Bel Aire, a mean drunk, washed dishes in his Sméagol-like hole of a dish room.  His “precious” was the dregs of customer’s drinks which he would collect and swill, making him a meaner drunk.  As I hung around Casablanca, I learned their story and grew to respect them. 

Apparently their whole village in Macedonia had immigrated to Akron, OH on the promise of jobs sometime before WWII, a classic example of pull migration.  Like in The Grapes of Wrath the agent promised work never materialized, so the group packed up and moved to Rochester, where over the years, in spite of the difficulty of getting any decent fish, they pretty much took over the restaurant biz, running a few high end places on Park Avenue and dozens of bars and diners all over town.  The boys opened Casablanca in the late 70’s as a fancy place serving Mom’s recipes and stuff like flaming cheese.  Chris ran the kitchen, George the front of the house and Bill was the head guy.  They had a stipulation in their lease that they would be the only food service place in the big strip where they located, however landlords being the slime balls that they are, a TGI Fridays opened 20 yards away on a different parcel, immediately bludgeoning them with cheaper food, a shiny exterior and wall to wall advertising. 

They didn’t stand a chance.  Business dropped to zero.  Rather than pack their tents again, the Petsos brothers pivoted, opening a rock club that had surprisingly good food, considering that I was one of the folks making it.  They booked mid level acts like Johnny Winter, the Psychedelic Furs, John Hammond Jr. and the Legendary Blues Band on their tour after Muddy’s death.  Bands considered Rochester a payday between Chicago and NYC.  This is where I first heard Albert Collins, the Texas great, the “Master of the Telecaster” or “The Iceman” (because he cuts so deep into your soul), a beautiful, humble, sweet musician who toured with his wife.  She used to kiss me every time I visited backstage until Albert’s passing in 1993.  Most would have shuttered the place.  Within 6 months they were in the black.

The Chef, Christos, was demanding, however he treated me with great respect at a time when I was not as reputable as I am now.  I was not a very good cook at the time.  He went out of his way to teach me, helping me appreciate well-prepared food and by his manner demonstrating what it meant to be a cook.  I consider my time with Chris to be the beginning of my professional cooking trajectory and I’ll never forget his kindness when my closest friend died in a car wreck and I became completely unreliable for some time.  He continued to pay me, even when I didn’t show up for work.

I’d like to present one of Chris’s sauté dishes.  Even after all this time, it holds up well.  One time I heard an interview with Son House, the primal Delta bluesman who also spent some years in Rochester.  He was asked to play the song that reached furthest back in his memory and he banged out “Stack Lee,” about a paddle wheel riverboat from the 1840’s.  This is a dish that is imprinted in my DNA.  Like “Stack’ it is probably the earliest sauté that I remember and hasn’t lost its value.  Try it.  You’ll find it has simple ingredients, straightforward technique and a bright fruit flavor.  The recipe is for one, because that’s how we cooked at the sauté station.  You can easily expand the recipe. 

And thanks to Stavros and the Petsos brothers.

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Chicken Cynthia

1 5 oz. chicken breast, skinless

2 tbs. flour, seasoned with salt and pepper

1 tsp. salad oil

3 tsp. unsalted butter

6 green grapes, cut in half

10 orange segments

1 oz. white wine

1 oz. orange juice

1 tbs. chopped parsley (everything got parsley in those days)

salt and pepper

Deeply peel an orange, removing the zest and bitter white peel.  With a paring knife, segment the orange, cutting the fruit away from the membranes.  Reserve the segments, squeeze the membranes to get the juice for the sauté.

Preheat the oven to 400°.  Heat a 10 inch sauté pan on high.  Add the oil and 1 tsp. of butter.  Dredge the chicken breast in flour, coating it completely.  Brush off any excess flour.  Season it with salt and pepper.  When the butter has melted and turns a hazelnut color, you will know that the pan is hot enough to sear the chicken properly.  Add the chicken.  Cook on one side for 2 minutes, turn and cook on the other side for 2 more minutes.  Finish in the oven for a further 8-10 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through.

When the chicken is cooked, remove it from the oven and keep warm while you prepare the sauce.  Dab the grease from the pan with a paper towel.  Return the pan to the stove on high heat.  Add the grapes and the orange segments and the orange juice.  Reduce the juice by half, stirring to scrape up any browned bits stuck to the pan when the chicken cooked. 

Add the white wine and again reduce by half.  Remove the pan from the heat, put the chicken and any juice that has run out of it in the pan and stir in the remaining 2 tsp. of butter, slowly incorporating it with the pan juices.  Adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper.  Add the parsley and serve with rice pilaf.

GMOs and Why You Should Live On Only Popcorn (stove top popcorn)

I’m doing my best to understand Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) foods and determine whether they are safe to eat.  It is difficult to do, since the companies that produce GMO seeds assure us of their absolute 100% safety and the anti-GMO groups are hysterical about their danger.  I tend not to trust folks like Monsanto, Dow or Hooker Chemical based on their past history of deceit to protect profits.  The anti group likely has a valid point, but they are unusually bad at expressing it.  I often dismiss them, because they really don’t know how to present their argument in a cogent way, instead relying on fear and uncontrolled emotion to make their case.  For example, you just can’t scream “GMOS CAUSE CANCER” on a discussion board and fail to present any evidence showing how.  Similarly, you shouldn’t smear me with “YOU HATE THE PLANET” if you do not know my opinions, for certain and for sure, because actually I sort of like this planet and either way, it’s the only one we have.

We are stuck in a quandary.  The data from producers asserts that we should eat up all their GMO, trademarked foods.  We’ll live a long and happy and healthy and holy (since this is the American way) life.  On the other side, if you do a little digging, avoiding the crazies who troll the interwebs, you will find some pretty scary stuff about GMOs.  So, what is a person who wants to do the right thing for themselves and their family to do?  My best take on this is to avoid GMOs until the verdict is in. 

What does that mean?  You could do worse than follow the Fresh Fun Foods mantra of “When I die, I want to decompose.”  At the Farrell house we’ve been living this way for a long time.  Years back, when I was first diagnosed with diabetes, I took a diabetes education class at the local hospital.  It was enlightening, because I realized I didn’t need to know how many fats and carbs were in a Bigg Mack, since I literally hadn’t been in a McEvil for 25 years.  Most of the presenter’s recommendations did not apply to me or our family, you see we don’t buy any processed food, there’s little junk food around the house and we don’t drink soda, sticking almost exclusively to water, beer, cidre or wine.  I have never had a Hot Pocket.  Why would I buy DiGiorno when Vinny’s is just down the block?  

Since GMOs turn up in processed foods, almost all corn in the USA is GMO, the best way to avoid GMO until the research and legislation shakes out is to quit buying the frozen prepared stuff and cook for yourself.  That’s where I come in.  Cooking is a wonderful family activity.  You’ll need to shop and chop.  Kids should be taught to value fresh foods and need to learn the best way to prepare what they buy from local producers.  Why not buy good, healthy food and prepare it yourself, rather than let someone make it for you in a factory.

If you want to completely avoid GMO, there is only one way that you can and that would be to go on a popcorn diet.  If you only eat popcorn, you will avoid all GMO, since popcorn comes from a type of corn that has never been modified, at least for the moment.  Now, there has to be a couple of qualifications here.  A popcorn diet may not give you all the vitamins and nutrients necessary to live.  That’s a big downside.  Also, you will have to learn to cook popcorn on a stove, because as we have learned, microwave ovens are rotten and so is that sickly yellow “butter flavored” stuff they jam in the package.  While the corn in microwave popcorn is ok, everything else around it wants to kill you.  

You’ll need a heavy pot with a tight-fitting lid, unless you want popcorn all over your stove.  Don’t use enamel lined pots like Le Creuset.  They don’t hold up to the heat.  Use peanut or salad oil.  Olive oil might sound good, but it does not hold the high temperature that you need and will burn, contributing an acrid flavor.  Popping up just a couple of kernels lets you know when the oil is hot enough to pop the remainder of the corn quickly, without burning.  Butter added early will burn and should go in at the last minute, preserving its sweetness.  Yes, once again, technique matters, even with popcorn.

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Popcorn  (serves 4)

1 c. popcorn

1 tbs. peanut or salad oil

1 tbs. unsalted butter

1 tsp salt

pinch black pepper

In a heavy pot with a tight fitting lid, heat the oil and three kernels of popcorn on a high heat.  When those kernels pop, reduce the heat to medium and add the remaining popcorn to the pot.  It should cover the bottom in 1 layer.  More is not better.  Cover the pot and shake it back and forth while still on the heat to coat the kernels with the oil.

After a minute you will hear the corn begin to pop.  Resist the urge to look in the pot.  Shake it a couple of times.  After less than 5 minutes the popping will cease.  Give it another shake.  If there is no more popping, carefully remove the cover avoiding the burp of steam, add the butter, salt and pepper.  Recover the pot and allow it to rest one minute so that the butter melts.  Stir to mix in the butter and seasonings, turn the popcorn out into a large bowl and start fighting with the kids so you can get the chef’s share.

*If you want to play around with flavored popcorn, try adding a shake of paprika or chili powder with the butter.  Some garlic, finely chopped, could also work.  How about a squeeze of lemon and chopped fresh oregano?   If you want to get really crazy, skip the butter and season the popcorn with olive oil, garlic, finely chopped basil and diced sun dried tomatoes.