Coffee break

Coffee certainly wasn't invented by Mennonites, but I don't know many who don't enjoy it at some level. For some guys, however, coffee is something that women have to make because somehow it seems too complicated and fraught with potential for spectacular failure—like operating a washing machine, it's just something many guys are intimidated by and imagine that it must take years of practice. Remember Michael Keaton in Mr. Mom? I think this scene is emblazoned on my memory so I'll indulge myself and include it here.

Jack Versus the Appliances
Mr. Mom — MOVIECLIPS.com

But back to coffee. I know this french press preparation doesn't rival the complicated social ritual of Yerba Mate with it's bombillias and guampas and shared saliva (there's another post, but not from me), but it is a ritual nonetheless. You eventually get into a rhythm:

• Stagger out of bed before the kids get up and start the kettle
• Either set the whistle and go back to bed until the boiling kettle wakes you up again, or attend to other morning necessities; either way, when you get back the water's ready
• Turn off the heat to let the water come off the boil
• Measure out the grounds or grind your own (yes, purists, I do grind my own beans some mornings)
• Put your bagel in the toaster
• By the time your toast is ready, your coffee should have steeped
• Bring it all together in front of your favourite newspaper/website

Especially these days, all the various methods of coffee prep have their own cult-like defenders and detractors, but french press has gone form being a quirky "European" treat to being our mainstay morning appliance since our fancy coffee maker burned out six or seven years ago. We're going to visit Kristina and Johannes next week who have serious barista chops, and the last time we were there he made us coffe that was mind-altering in both preparation and execution. I'll see if I can get it on camera.

So, what do you use to make coffee? Do you drink it black like my father-in-law taught his daughter, who taught me —"You don't want to inconvenience people, asking for cream and sugar, yet!" Are you a Postum drinker? A Coffee Mate man?

Dinner tonight was makeshift again—leftovers, but not just cold things from the fridge. My wife's home again (huzzah!) so she was out picking up kids and stopped to get some fresh bread; and let me say, decent fresh bread can make almost any meal taste better. Especially a loaf of French bread is great on a Friday or Thursday evening because it's really only good that day, but then the crusty bits can be used for French toast Sunday morning—nice.

At home I started the water boiling, which you might as well do in advance, because it's not like it's going to go bad. Make a big pot of water and use more salt than you think you should. Anthony Sedlak at a Lepp Farms cooking night (my birthday present) said that pasta water should be as salty as sea-water! That's a lot more than I was used to, but it does give the pasta more flavour. A lid also makes a huge difference in the speed of boiling water (um, at least I think it does...I sense a mythbusters post coming on—maybe I'll test that sometime). I usually use cold water because it's fresher than tanked hot water, but certainly hot water will boil faster if you're in a pinch.

So spaghetti is the pasta option for the evening and I always used to be unsure how much pasta to use. My rule now for the whole family is as much as I can hold in one hand with my middle finger touching my thumb. Now, that depends on the size of your family (not to mention your hands, Leland Klassen), but it's a helpful guide. If you're really worried about the sauce:pasta ratio, maybe keep the sauce and pasta separate until you serve it up (that debate, by the way, is a perennial one in our house with me being a "mixer" and my wife being a "separator"). A bit of vegetable oil in the water helps keep the pasta from sticking together, but I still think fanning the pasta out from the centre when it first goes in the boiling water (like pick-up sticks!) helps a lot too. Fettuccini/linguini however, almost never works perfectly for me and I always end up burning my fingers trying to separate stuck together strands—suggestions?

The sauce for this was a real hodge-podge. I had half of jar of some Costco spaghetti sauce—not enough for everyone. I also had a small can of tomato paste (always good to have on hand), which I added to the sauce, but which made the sauce too thick. I could thin it with water, or a real tomato, NOT ketchup, or cream and, in the end I used all of those as well as an old jar of pesto that I found at the back of the fridge. We also had some cooked chicken that I browned in a bit in olive oil with a chopped onion and eventually added to the sauce. The chicken is, well, chicken, but I always like adding fried, chopped onion for its toothsome texture (and is there a better food word than "toothsome"). Finally I threw in a half bulb of garlic that I had roasted in the morning (while my dad helped me fix our fireplace—thanks!) that I originally thought I would use for a soup that never happened in the end.

Maybe tomorrow for Faspa.

The Skinny...

This picture is a bit racy—my mom even cautioned me against posting it—but I think it's amazing. For one, I can't believe I've never seen a chicken photographed this way before. It appeared at the head of a fascinating article in the New York Times dining section about the foodie crush certain (mostly male) chefs have developed for chicken skin. For example:

Nate Gutierrez, the chef and owner of Nate’s Taco Truck and Nate’s Taco Truck Stop in Richmond, Va., could not stop snacking on the skin left over from his roast chickens. So about six months ago, he decided to make the skin crisp on the flattop and offer it in a taco. The chicken-skin tacos sell out whenever they are on the menu.

Wow! So do you eat chicken skin? I know it's become very health-conscious not to, but my daughter absolutely loves it and I love that she does. Is it a texture thing, or does it have it's own special flavour? Does anyone have family dining traditions or personal preferences for this or any other chicken parts?
 
I was going to add that I also have a thing for necks and thighs, but I wouldn't want to cross the line on a Mennonite blog ;-)

Hey, big news! For the first time in the short life of this blog we have a second contributor—my brother, Clayton, better known to some as Yexter (you'll have to ask D. Kropp—another Menno cooker guy—for the story behind that name sometime). He's a firefighter who usually regales us all at Sunday lunch with tales of bravery, rescue, and general derring-do, but occasionally his exploits are of the culinary sort; he still deals with intense heat and flames, but in a less-destructive mode.

Clayton's also a former Earl's line chef from days of yore and he puts those skills to good use when he's not dousing "fully-engulfed structures" or falling in manure pits (another story, another post ;-). So without further ado (and refraining from all snarky comments about how much free time/resources firefighters seem to have), here is the recipe for Grilled Reubens.

P.S. the recipe is built right into the video—awesome! (and why am I surprised after all these years to have him outdo me again, given the first possible opportunity *sigh* ;-)

Breakfast this morning was a two-stage affair. Half the kids had a Pro-D day and I did too, so the morning seemed a little more relaxed. Cue porridge.

I have a distinct memory of never liking oatmeal or cream of wheat when I was a kid though I did have a brief but torrid affair with Red River Cereal—think warm, mushy Stoned Wheat Thins with brown sugar—after visiting Young Life's Malibu camp with Northview's Roaring 20's group one summer (I even bought a Red River T-shirt!) When my kids arrived I came to love oatmeal as a quick meal for toddlers, but it still never seemed appetizing to me until I started putting raisins in it. Preferably they go in early enough to get nice and juicy (like in plummi moos), though I know some people HATE "re-plumped" raisins.

The recipe here is:

• Boil some water (Element on Max.)
• Add instant oatmeal and raisins (turn down to less than half)
• Wait until it looks ready, stir if it looks like it needs it, add more of either water or oatmeal if it looks like one is lacking—really, this is not difficult.
• Serve

It's actually hard to imagine an easier thing to make. How much of each you ask? Just work it out. If it looks like oatmeal and it's been on the stovetop for 5 minutes it's almost certainly ready.

The interesting part is what you put on oatmeal, so that's what's in the video below.




So after this I went off to school for second breakfast where I met some of the gang of Mennonite men (and women) who I hope will be sharing and cooking for you all here in the coming weeks. I got quite the ribbing at this breakfast Pro-D for starting a blog about cooking, but I bet you'll see a few of them on here someday.

Sorry, no dinner vlog tonight as I went off to my Mom and Dad's with the kids and enjoyed a great meal together with them. It was a bit of a mix of old and new with the centrepiece being the classic Mennonite farmer sausage "imported" from Waldheim, SK (or is it Winkler?) courtesy of the trunk of Bob and Ruth Boughen's Buick. They're also a great local dealer for "cracklings" or yreva (or, as the blogger from Planet Borscht called them, Jreewe—weird). We can talk about cracklings some other time, but as far as I'm concerned, there's no sausage like the stuff from Bob and Ruth. The "Mennonite" farmer sausage that you get at the supermarket just pales in comparison. Store-bought sausage is just too ... smooth. For me it has to be basically crumbling when the casing's off.

So, what do you think? Do you have a preferred line on that most essential of Menno fare: farmer sausage? Can Rempel's go up against Funk's (from the old days)? Does Neufeld Farms even do their own sausage? Has Lepp's elbowed its way in over the last year or do you >gasp!< make your own? And do you peel the casing off of sausage or is that just too much hassle?

So tonight's dinner was a classic: a no-advance-planning, lets-see-what's-in-the-fridge, maybe-we-should-just-order-pizza kind of dinner. But there was a bag that I thought was leftover potatoes that turned out to be meat. And there were fresh-ish buns (from the Gesundheit Bakery no less, yet), and there was a can of beef broth. Sounds to me like beef dip.

Recipe:

• Preheat the pan to medium (half as far as the dial goes - do not "turn it to eleven", Nigel Tufnel!)
• Cut up an onion into strips, not tiny little pieces (use a normal, supermarket sized onion—smaller than a grapefruit, bigger than a golf ball)
• Put butter in your hot pan (less butter than a golfball, but not by much)
• Stir to cover the onions with butter and let cook 5-8 minutes (or until "golden brown" as they say on the cooking shows ;-)

Meanwhile...

• Cut the roast beef up into the thinnest slices you can manage, but don't worry too much about size—you're not competing with Arby's here yet.
• Once the onions are brownish and softish, add the meat—stir again.
• Once the pan recovers some of the heat it lost from the meat, add a can or two of beef broth.
• Salt and pepper—or just do your own later if your kids like it milder.
• Add a splash of soy sauce (maybe 1/4 of a shot glass) and/or Worcestershire if you have either on hand.
• Turn up the heat a bit to speed the boiling down of the broth. If you like dipping things (mmm, mushy bread—someday I'll do a whole series on mushy bread recipes), add more broth to make it a little juicier.

Meanwhile...

• Toast the buns, get the kids to set the table, open a can of veggies, make a salad ... or don't do any of these things.

Finally...

• Strain the beef/onion/broth mix into a bowl. Put the beef back into the pan to keep it warm. Pour the broth into small bowls. Add a slice of cheese or put mayo or butter on the buns if your kids are too skinny—not so much if they're not.
•  Enjoy, cause that's a MANwich.