Frankie Fights Food

My mother hasn’t acclimated to the idea of me in the kitchen yet, and to be honest, I can’t blame her. I was the daughter who, not as a child but as a full grown adult, was still messing up mac ‘n cheese from a box and calling her to figure out how you broil something. I have been a culinary punch-line for my small town, south Texas family. My saving grace was being able to bake chocolate chips cookies, reasonably well, most of the time. So it’s understandable that my mother will still think she’s talking recipes with her little girl who couldn’t even get Play-doh spaghetti right, not the full grown woman who has taken up her spatula like a knight on a quest.

Working together on a recipe is further complicated by the fact that when I did learn to cook it was while I was living in France. My mom and I come from different schools of thought when it comes to dinner. She is the queen of down-home, southern cooking where hearty portions of busy mother-of-three recipes rule. I’m obsessed with making everything tiny and beautiful and smothering it all in butter-rich sauces. She suggests a side of baby new potatoes, I have to make them dijon & white wine roasted potatoes. Mom says salad, I make buttered spears of asparagus. Mom is apple pie plucked fresh from the tree. I’m tarte tatin, with almost a full cup of French butter.
Continue reading “Vs. Venison Tenderloin Amuse Bouche” »

We had anticipated a 6 day, two thousand mile primitive camping adventure, from south Texas to Northeast Georgia with an old friend’s wedding wedged nicely in the middle. I planned a series of culinary delights, cooked on an open fire, to fuel one foodie and one charming bottomless pit/driver. Couscous and pan-seared potatoes. Venison sausage and lentils. Chuck-wagon breakfast tacos. It was a lofty goal, I know, but I was prepared.

I made a menu. I’m not even joking. I really am that neurotic. Every meal was carefully planned out for each of the national forests we’d be staying at. Various ingredients had been pre-measured, pre-cut, pre-seasoned. Our cooler was a colorful array of Tupperware and Gatorade. It was going to be, in a word, awesome. In several words, it would have been the most scrumptious, well-fed primitive camping trip in the history of man.

Silly me. I forgot one simple fact: this was going to be Brett and me camping. The same couple who, a couple spring breaks ago, turned what was to be a little trip to the Lincoln National forest into a 4 day, 1400 mile, “are we going to survive this?” fiasco. I didn’t think we could beat that trip’s freak snowstorm in the mountains, getting lost on rough gravel roads in the mountainous deserts of Big Bend National Park, and the subsequent well-mustached border patrol checkpoints.

Yet, in Louisiana we were deceived by a “forest”, which was beautiful during the day, but turned out be a swamp. Not just any swamp either. It was the home of every daddy-longleg spider in the state and when the sun fell, each one of them wanted to cuddle with arachnophobic yours truly. They were everywhere. Even big, tough “it’s just some bugs” Brett finally insisted we break camp and head north… to the seediest motel I have ever seen in my entire life. I was genuinely surprised we weren’t charged by the hour. In Alabama we pitched our tent at a rest stop at well past midnight, by the grace of a caretaker named Duncan, but had to be out by 7 a.m., when his boss showed up. Georgia’s wedding was a blast, and all the state’s chiggers were in attendance, comfortably housed in my legs. Clearly I underestimated our knack for chaos.

And that was just the first three days. The last thing I wanted was for it to be one of those “sandwich survival” trips, but, there we were: salami and jack. Well, more accurately, salami, jack, and these amazing granola bars I had cranked out the day before we left. We rationed them carefully, and, after everything that could go wrong just about did, and we opted to try the 18 hour, 900+ mile haul back to Texas in one day, they were the honey-sweet fuel that kept us trucking on home.

At the end of it, as we held our breath in the last thirty miles, praying that nothing would happen to the car (but not daring to say a word about it, for fear of jinxing our engine-trouble-free trip), I turned to Brett and said, “You know, babe, as much as we want to be camping/hiking/nature people, I think we have to face a hard truth.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“We’re hotel people. We’re air-conditioned cabin in the woods people. We’re hot shower people. It’s who we are, and you know what? I’m ok with that.”

Last two granola bars later, we were laying in bed, exhausted but completely unable to sleep, marveling at the sheer fact that we had survived yet another of our “adventures”… and looking forward to the next one. Why, you ask?

The answer is obvious: We are completely, incurably, unrelentingly insane. Duh.

The F&B Approved Granola Bar

2 cups rolled oats
1 cup crushed nuts
1 cup dried fruit, chopped
1 cup honey
? cup brown sugar
1 tbsp butter

Preheat your oven to 325. Spread the oats and nuts evenly on a rimmed baking sheet and toast for about 10 minutes. I went with almonds and pecans, which were delicious toasted, but I only used them because they were already in the pantry. Pour them into a bowl with the fruit (again use what’s around or what you like) and crank up the oven to 350.

For mine, I used a mix of papaya, pineapple, dates, melon and cranberries. You could keep it simple and stick with one or two, but I consider the granola bar a buffet-recipe. Pile it all on. Get your money’s worth.

Gently heat the honey and brown sugar in a pot and stir until the brown sugar completely dissolves. Melt in the pad of butter for a nice, shiny look. Don’t let the honey get too hot or it will start to caramelize. Once the butter is melted, take the pot off the heat and pour into the mixing bowl with the oats, nuts and fruit.

Keep mixing until everything is coated. It might seem like you need more honey, but trust me, it’ll moisten everything after a few minutes of stirring and mashing. Now line your rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper (trust me, do this bit) and flop your sticky mixture onto it, smoothing it out roughly. Cover the pile with another piece of parchment paper and roll the whole thing flat and compact with your rolling pin.

I just used my hands to square off the sides, as my mixture didn’t fill my whole baking sheet. Remove the top parchment paper and bake for about 30 minutes.

Let the giant granola bar cool to almost room temperature before you cut it into squares. At this point you can store them in an airtight container for about a week or so. I had them in Ziploc bags for our trip, in the sweltering heat, and they were fine for several days. They got kind of gooey, but held their form and were still delicious.

Bon voyage!

I’m a terrible southerner sometimes. I don’t watch football. I don’t eat grits. I don’t own a gun. And, until the other day, I didn’t eat cornbread. Every cornbread I had ever made was just too dry. I can find a bit of beauty in the dusty flatlands where my parents live, but I don’t want that kind of terrain in my mouth.

But I also don’t like to waste anything. When I went on a pizza marathon not that long ago, I bought some cornmeal for dusting the crust. Then I made those lemon muffins topped with blackberries and had a full pint of buttermilk left over. Corn meal and buttermilk? Cornbread seemed my only option, so I did what any good southerner would do: stuffed it with jalapeños and cheese. It was so moist and spicy and sweet, once I topped it off with some crumbled blue cheese, I was in hog heaven. Continue reading “Vs. Jalapeño & Jack Buttermilk Cornbread” »

So one day last month there was an emergency that sent Brett and I flying up Highway 35 to a Veteran’s Hospital and his father’s bedside. That day also happened to be my little brother’s 25th birthday. He was out celebrating with his girlfriend so I left a note on the kitchen counter, which, if you don’t know, is kind of like an email inbox when you live in a town that still largely uses dial-up. The note said:

“Happy Birthday! IOU one homemade cheesecake.”

It’s his favorite and I’m a woman of my word. So two nights ago, my very first attempt at cheesecake began. Plain, graham cracker crust cheesecake… except I didn’t bake the crust first, so it fell apart when you took a piece out and ended up looking like the Milky Way done in crumbs. And, after becoming so zealous with tarte tatin, I decided to flip it in order to remove it from the ugly aluminum pie pan and place it on a prettier plate for him. Just so you know, cheesecake doesn’t work like that. It stayed intact, sure, but the light, sponginess of the filling decided to adhere to the flipping plate and a huge section of the top was lifted right out of the pie when I flipped it back the other way. Put simply, it was hideous. Continue reading “Vs. Layered Blueberry Cheesecake” »

Me: “I can’t find a recipe that looks good.”
Brett: “Well, we can just get a box of mix.”
Me: … *glare* “‘A box’, he says? Did you forget who you were talking to?”
Brett: “Yes. Yes, I did.”

Sure, box mixes can be great if you’re in a rush/don’t care to make things from scratch/aren’t obsessed with being able to still make a barter-able muffin in a post-apocalyptic world where all the grocery stores have long been raided… but I am just not a “box mix” kind of girl. I think it drives my mother crazy. She was always that epitome of the busy home chef: the housewife trying to manage three kids, the house, all of our extra-curricular activities, and became the queen of the 30 minute meal. (Sorry, Rachel Ray. You’ve got nothing on my mom.) I have, thanks to her, countless quick side dishes, innumerable recipes that require a can of cream of mushroom soup, and cupcake decorating tips to disguise anything store-bought. Continue reading “Vs. Blackberry & Lemon Muffins” »

After traveling 5,000 miles over two days, with one unexpected, expensive and exhausting layover in Paris, and then quitting smoking upon my return to the States, nothing sounded like a better idea than hitting the kitchen and churning out coquilles St. Jacques for my mother: a dish I have never made, with ingredients I’ve never worked with, in a kitchen I’m not used to, and running on zero endorphins, mild jet-lag and one bad temper. Clearly, I’m a glutton for punishment. My mom, however, was a genius, carefully tip-toeing around me as I frantically stirred and poached and pureed. She learned quickly after I nearly bit her head off for suggesting onions in place of the shallots the recipe called for, which were inconveniently (and inconsiderately, I might add) still growing in the garden.

After a few deep breaths and having to step away from the stovetop a couple times, I started to find my zen-like swing and realized that this seemingly complicated recipe is actually, like most French food, rather simple. It just seemed complicated to the amateur chef (me) or to your everyday American gourmand who thinks everything in French cuisine is complicated (mom). Continue reading “Vs. Coquilles St. Jacques” »

I’m not even going to call this an official “Vs. Food” match. It might have been, about four months ago, when I was still hopelessly pouring vinegar into the water. Sure at one point I would have sat there, crossing my fingers, invoking any deity I could get my hands on, to try and get the egg to stay together. Even then, if I halfway succeeded I would have to rinse the semi-poached, kind of jack-looking egg in order to get rid of the vinegar taste. I hear some people like it… but I also hear some people buy ludicrously over-priced jeans that some celebrity pretended to design. All I’m saying is, it just goes to show you, there’s no accounting for taste these days.

So no more vinegar eggs for me. That dark era came to a close thanks to the wonders of physics. Did your mother ever tell you that tossing some salt in the water makes it boil faster? Mine did. I’m sure yours did too. And, of course, having the Power of Mom and all, we believed them. It’s a frightening thing, the day you realize your own mother can make mistakes. The world sort of comes crashing down around you, left is right, up is down, and then, like a light in the darkness, you realize that you can make a better poached egg because of it.

Salt raises the boiling temperature of water. Raises, not lowers. Which means the water is going to be hotter before it starts to boil, an absolutely perfect environment for poaching an egg. You never want to let the water boil. If you do, welcome to a frothy egg white soup and a (at best) mangled yolk. In the world of the poached egg, boil = bad! Got it? Alright, let’s review.

Continue reading “The Perfect Poached Egg” »

I love little food. Cute, individually-portioned grub makes my toes curl with glee. I’m beginning to think this is one of the dangers of nearing thirty: my biological clock is screaming at me, making me coo and giggle at the sight of any child, with their widdle fingers and toes, which I must threaten to eat at every opportunity. So I figure, my womb is spreading it’s pro-tiny-things propaganda to the rest of my body. Why else do women feel a need to nom down on baby hands and feet? I’m just glad something in my maternal instinct pulls me away from full-on cannibalism and opts instead for a little homemade haute cuisine.

I am also obsessed with poached eggs (Freud would have a field day with me, wouldn’t he?) and would eat them every day, with every meal, over anything if I had the patience and the time to make them. So, when I stumbled over Camino’s Eggs in Cream @ The Wednesday Chef, I felt compelled to make this dish a breakfast staple. Continue reading “Vs. Baked Eggs in Cream” »

I have a confession to make: I hate pancakes. I really do. They’ve always been too thick, to dry, to in need of mountains of syrup to be edible. I wasn’t raised on pancakes… I grew up with my very-not-French grandmother’s crêpes and have, in my adult life, bothered her to no end trying to get her batter recipe out of her. It’s not that she isn’t willing to tell me. If that was the case, I’d just sneak into her recipe box while she was napping or at church. No, the problem is this: she has no recipe.

“It’s just some flour, milk, butter and eggs,” she says, as though that explains it. Unfortunately, flour, milk, butter and eggs combine to make about one million different things! The only thing that matters is the proportions… and so in the crêpe batter department, I’m flying blind. Now, of course I’ve scoured websites and cookbooks. I’ve tried out different recipes and every time, my crepes are rubbery-looking and dry. But now, here I am, in the Land o’ Crêpes, with fingers crossed that some kind of French fairy god-chef is looking over my shoulder, silently guiding my spatula and sending agents to tell me things like, “Brown the butter first”, “Don’t forget to steam the milk” and “Let the batter settle in the fridge”.

When I heard these things, they were filled away under “Possibly more useless advice” but I was never given what I wanted: a ratio, a system, scientific reproducibility. So, one day, today in fact, I just sort of gave up on measurements, on tips and tricks, on cruising the internet for recipes to try. I stood up, walked into the kitchen and just started making crêpes. I decided that if an intuitive sense is good enough for my grandmother, come hell or high water, it was going to be good enough for me.

Continue reading “Vs. Crêpes” »

The very first time I had tarte tatin was at a small, sort of touristy restaurant at the Old Port of La Rochelle, France. It was one of those “typical” French restaurants that wanted to seem upscale and chic, but really just had an overpriced menu in a good location in a little seaside town that the all of England like to holiday at. It was also the first time I had braved the traditional french meal in all it’s fullness. Several courses down with only dessert remaining, I could feel the waistband of my jeans mounting a revolt. Mutiny was imminent, but when the waitress brought out this thin, delicate slice of what seemed to me to be just a gooey, messy, french apple pie, I thought to myself, “One bite won’t hurt.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever had one of those moments where you are so overwhelmed by emotions, often contrary to each other, all battling to be king of the emotion hill and then one comes out victorious and just sort of bursts forth from you. If you haven’t, well, it can lead to some pretty awkward moments, like bursting into laughing tears at the finale of Aida or, in this case, becoming righteously pissed off at my first bite of tarte tatin. I was furious at it for existing, at everyone who fed me apple pie instead of this slice of warm, buttery heaven. Protests had to be mounted, letters had to be written, impassioned speeches given in front of large, official-looking buildings… after I was done with my dessert, that is. Even my waistband seemed so overcome it was suddenly possessed by the spirits of every real estate agent in the world, casting aside words like “constrained” and “uncomfortable” for shinier adjectives like “snug” and “cozy”.

I was a woman possessed, convinced that if I didn’t learn to reproduce this masterpiece of caramelized-apple-tart heaven, my whole year in France would have been for naught. I scoured the internet in search of recipes and found quite a few. I consulted cookbooks around La Rochelle – never actually buying them on my English teacher’s salary, but I treated many bookstores like libraries and endured/ignored the saleswoman’s stink eye and back-handed comments about Americans. The one I finally settled on was from my favorite cooking blog, Smitten Kitchen. She had never done me wrong in the past so I opted to avoid grumpy clerks and just stick with someone I can trust.

Continue reading “Vs. Tarte Tatin” »