June 17, 2010
comments 2

The Comfort Food Diner

Tuffy P’s Kitchen Sink Salad

Tuffy P has in my mind revolutionized the salad. We call it her kitchen sink salad because she adds everything but the kitchen sink to it.

She starts with romaine hearts, cut up with scissors. Add lots and lots of veggies. Add black crinkly olives (pits included).  Add cherry tomatoes. Add crutons or perhaps jalapeno peanuts or some other crunchy item like that. Add a hard boiled egg, sliced. Don’t forget cheese. Add an insane amount of dried scotch bonnet chiles. Add a small amount of whatever commercial dressing you like. Think of something else? Add that too. Mix it up in a huge bowl and enjoy. Sometimes Tuffy adds kielbasa. I know, I know, she’s a vegetarian. I’ll let the secret out. Because of the high garlic content, kielbasa is now considered a vegetable. Trust me on this. I’ve even seen her cut up and add that close relative of the kielbasa root, the casalingo salami root.

Serious salad.

June 16, 2010
comments 5

The Comfort Food Diner

Pizza Many Ways

Sometimes nothing will do but pizza. Of course there is the pizza that magically appears on your doorstep when you call that special number. In my area we have a place that’s so fast I hardly put the phone down and buddy shows up at the door. “How did you do that?” I ask, scratching my head. Buddy just smiles. Their pizza is about as good as we can expect from a local delivery outfit, and that’s pretty good (and lots better than corporate pizza for sure).

Then there is the other pizza, the good stuff we make at home. I make a pretty standard crust. There are a squillion pizza dough recipes out there and they’re very similar so I’m not going to lay that out here. At one time I had a sourdough monster growing in a jar on top of the fridge and weekly I would either bake sourdough bread or pizza. If you have a problem with being underweight and want to chunk on a few pounds, I recommend this idea highly. I don’t remember exactly what happened to the monster. I guess life got complicated for a bit and I forgot to feed him, leaving me with an advanced science experiement. One day I’ll start another one. I always make my own dough. I know you can get pizza dough ready to go in some grocery stores and there are various flatbread options available too, but if I’m going to do that I might as well just pick up the phone and have my pizza delivered.

My mom made a fairly unique pizza when I was a kid. When she made pizza, she would make a bunch of them in pie plates and freeze them so we would have them available in the freezer at any time. My parents were of a generation of freezers. They and everyone they knew had big chest freezers and they watched for sales on meat and they prepared food in advance and froze it. I think living through the depression, they were determined their family would never go hungry. I have to admit that my mom’s frozen pizzas were very very tasty.

After rolling out the dough and placing into the pie plate, she would spoon some melted butter on the dough and then with her fingers spread it around and at the same time stretch the dough in the pan over to the edges. Then came the sauce, which was typically her home-made, preserved pasta sauce. She would add pepperoni and then lots of grated parmasian followed by mozzerella cheese. I think it was the butter that gave the pizza a distinctive flavour and texture, the butter and the parmasian.

I don’t put any butter or oil on my pizza dough. I will confess here and now I use store-bought sauce (red or green…sometimes I use pesto). If we have company, I’ll make two or three pizzas, each one different. I do have favourite ingredients. I like zucchini and I like leeks on my pizza, and I try different kinds of sausage and all kinds of different veggies and cheeses.

Tuffy and I have developed a taste for monsterously hot foods. I buy quantities of ripe scotch bonnet chiles, slice them up and dry them in the same dehydrator I use for mushrooms. So if the pizza is just for us, I’ll jazz it up by sprinkling some of these babies on – under the cheese is best in my opinion.

How do you like your pizza? Do you make any unusual or special ones? Now I’m thinking maybe tonight is a pizza night. Har!

June 15, 2010
comments 7

The Comfort Food Diner

Pierogi Two Ways

This is the first in a series of posts I have planned called The Comfort Food Diner. Come on in. There’s a table waiting for you. I’ll get you a beer.

Today we’re serving up pierogi, two ways. I say two ways because in my family we have different pierogi traditions. Perhaps this is because my family is of Polish ancestry and Tuffy P’s is Ukranian (on her mom’s side…Irish on her dad’s). I’m not up on my pierogi history.

Both sides of the family go about the dough more or less the same way: flour, salt, an egg, sour cream and butter. You need to be able to roll the dough out to an eighth of an inch thick. If you make your pierogi too thick, they become heavy like bricks. We use drinking glasses to cut the dough to shape. The size of the drinking glass obviously determines the size of the pierogi, and size matters. I’ve seen some people make giant dumplings and call them pierogi, but I know you would never do such a thing. I typically use a beer glass. It’s important to not flour the dough too much, or you won’t be able to seal your perogi, and that my friends would be disaster.

I like a potato/cheese filling and there are all kinds of good variations. I boil my potatoes and then mash them up with sauteed onions and mix in ricotta cheese. Curiously, I like the Italian ricotta rather than the cottage cheese. I’m not sure why. Feel free to grate in cheddar or other cheese you like. Fresh herbs and salt and pepper finish off the filling. When Tuffy was growing up, her family also enjoyed a filling they called kapustranica. This is pierogi filled with kapusta – or saurkraut. I had never tried them this way until just a few years ago and I have to say, they’re delicious. Some people make fruit pierogi too, but that just seems wrong to me so I don’t go there.

When my mom made pierogi, she would always make a lot and freeze them in one dozen bags. I still do that today. I’ll make a dozen, lay them out on a floured plate and put the plate in the freezer. By the time I’m ready with the next dozen, the first group is frozen enough that you can put them in a plastic bag for freezing without them sealing together into one giant pierogi mass. I don’t make them so often, so when I do, I’ll make 10 or 12 dozen and give away bags of them to friends.

Construction is the same wherever you’re from. You learn quickly how much filling to use. It should be enough to make a plump dumpling, but not so much that they burst during boiling. I used the tines of a fork to close them up. I recall my mom and my aunti making them together when I was a tot, and I think they used their fingernails to seal the pierogi. I seem to recall that my aunt Stella was the fastest pierogi-maker I had ever seen. I think she made them all the time, while we only had them around high holidays.

However you serve them, pierogi have to be boiled. I know there are people who deep fry their pierogi, but that’s just ugly, isn’t it? The water should be at a roiling boil and it should be salted. I drop the pierogi in a few at a time, adding a few more maybe 20 seconds later. They float when they’re ready and I take them out with a slotted spoon and drop them into a colander to drain. It’s what you do after this which separates the camps.

My mom would take ordinary salted butter in a pan and cook it until it was what we called “burnt”. That meant it had little flecks of brown floaties in it. She would then put a dozen or so pierogi on a plate, and drizzle them with the burnt butter. Add a dollup of sour cream and serve.

On Tuffy’s side of the family, they sauteed the boiled dumplings in a pan with onions. There are variations of this. Some people like sauteeing them in bacon fat and serve them with little bacon bits. Of course just about anything is tasty fried in bacon fat, isn’t it? At Anchovy World Headquarters, we like to sautee them with onions and mushrooms in a mixture of extra virgin olive oil and butter. They’re ready when the pierogi brown up a bit on each side.

There’s only one way to tell which way you like your pierogi best, and that’s to try them both ways. Curiously, I didn’t have a taste for pierogi when I was a little anchovy. I remember my brother and sister getting very excited when mom made up a batch, and I remember clearly the smell of the butter in the pan as it started to brown. Much later, I came to love them. Today we normally make them the way Tuffy’s family did, boiled then sauteed. Of course, pierogi both ways are on the menu at The Comfort Food Diner.