Galatoise Polonaise

Galatoise Polonaise is a mystery. It seems to be one of the few subjects upon which the Internet is silent.  Now, Polonaise means Polish in French. It is also a cooking term that refers to a vegetable dish garnished with breadcrumbs. However, this dish is not a vegetable dish, nor is it garnished with breadcrumbs. I inquired on epicurous.com where one may ask about dishes and recipes. If I get an answer before I finish this, I will share it with you. Perhaps some of you folks out there who are reading the blog may see fit to comment yourselves? Yes?
I think, but cannot confirm this on the Internet, that a galatine is something with layers. In his famous New York Times Cookbook, Craig Clairborne included a recipe for galatine of turkey. This insanely complicated dish involved skinning the turkey and stuffing the skin with various ingredients. Wikipedia confirms this.
Anyway, back to galatoise, which, first of all, requires an enormous pot, bigger than the one I had. I ended up having to leave off about a quarter of the ingredients, including all the cabbage because there was no room in the pot. This is sort of a layered stew, where the cook puts in a succession of what Bob thought were improbable ingredients including mushrooms and apples, (he thought they were improbable together.)
I have been looking for an excuse to make this for months. I virtually begged my son and daughter-in-law to have a tailgate party so I could bring this. No luck. Then, a friend's mother and mother-in-law died in the same week, and I thought I could bring this concoction to them as the New England requisite dish of food that neighbors bring when there is a death in the family. Bob talked me out of it. "A lot of people don't like sauerkraut," he said.
Then, we were invited to a friend's Inauguration party. Aha, thought I. This is definitely the kind of thing that needs to be served at a buffet. That way, those who like it can eat it, and the rest of the guests don't have to push it around their plates in a dispiriting way. My friend Mary Alice kindly allowed me to bring it, and now, it is upstairs cooling, having been taken out of the oven to await transport to the party.
Flash forward to the party. I try galatoise. In cooking, large quantities of liquids are released and  blend together in a piquant sauce.  The sauerkraut seems to have changed its texture and become smoother. This is a good dish, flavored by the various ingredients.  At least one of the guests at the party, a man named  Bill, absolutely raved about it. I was not in the room with the food, so I could not observe the reactions of other eaters.
Making it is a production. The cook has to fry the bacon, slice the pork, onions, frankfurters, olives, tomatoes, mushrooms, apples and cabbage. Then,  all this has to be stacked up in the pot in layers.  However, on the up side, he/she does not have a lot of fancy, fiddly cooking to cope with. Just pile it all in the pot, pour over the tomato juice and pop it in the oven while you read the New York Times.
If you like pork with sauerkraut and stew-y foods, and giving a tailgate or Super Bowl party for a large group of people, this is a good choice. It is hearty without being heavy and will stick to your ribs on a cold night.

Galatoise Polonaise

1/2 pound thin-sliced lean bacon, cooked  until crisp
1 pound fresh lean boneless pork, cut into thin slices
1/2 pound smoked ham, sliced
1/2 pound frankfurters, sliced
1 pound mushrooms, sliced
1 eight-ounce  bottle pitted stuffed green olives, sliced
3 to 4 tomatoes, sliced
1 1/2 teaspoon sugar
1  pound sauerkraut, rinsed and drained
2 juicy apples, peeled, cored and sliced
4 white onions, thinly sliced
1 small head cabbage, sliced, parboiled in salt water five minutes,
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
2 bay leaves crumbled
2 cups tomato juice
1/2 cup butter

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
2. Make an assembly line of the following ingredients; the bacon, pork, ham, frankfurters, mushrooms, olives, tomatoes, sugar, sauerkraut, apples, onions and cabbage. Starting with one-third of the bacon slices, make alternate layers of the ingredients in a four-quart to five-quart  baking dish, leaving plenty of cabbage and tomato slices for the next-to-last layer and a few bacon slices to top everything. As galatoise is being assembled, season each layer lightly with salt and pepper and sprinkle with  bits of crumbled bay leaves.
3. Pour the tomato juice over all, dot with the  butter, cover dish and bake one and three-quarter hours. Remove the cover, to brown galatoise lightly and bake fifteen minutes longer. Serve topped with sour cream and mustard sauce. Makes about 12 servings.

Cabbage Casserole (Gluten Free)

This dish is from the great state of North Carolina. I found the cabbage somewhat chewy. I would either reduce the heat and cook the dish for longer, or let it sit in the boiling water for longer. Other than that, there is not a whole lot more I can tell  you about it. It's a standard, somewhat bland casserole.

Cabbage Casserole


3 cups shredded cabbage
boiling water
1 cup shredded celery
3/4 cup soft breadcrumbs (I used a slice of gluten free bread buzzed in the blender.)
1 cup milk
1/3 cup heavy cream
1 egg lightly beaten     
2 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
2. Place the cabbage in a saucepan and cover with boiling water. Let stand about five minutes, Drain and blend cabbage with the celery.
3. Make a layer of the vegetables in a greased one-and-one-half-quart casserole. Sprinkle with a third of the bread crumbs. Make another layer of vegetables, another of crumbs and another of vegetables. Sprinkle each layer lightly with salt and pepper.
4. Blend the milk, cream and egg; strain over the casserole. Sprinkle with remaining crumbs and dot with butter. Sprinkle with the cheese. Bake fifteen  minutes. Serves four.



                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Bean Porridge (Gluten free)

Bean Porridge is amazingly universal. Recipes on the Internet come from all over the world including Nigeria, Korea and the Dutch Antilles. According to Brook Dojny, in her book New England Home Cooking, 350 recipes from Town and Country, Land and Sea, in early New Hampshire, bean porridge was cooked in huge kettles, which were then set outside to freeze. The settlers took the kettles into the New Hampshire wilderness where they cleared land all winter. They broke hunks of frozen porridge off the mass in the kettle and heated it up. Bean porridge seems to be an early frozen food.
Since most of us are not settlers in New Hampshire or anywhere else, I encourage you to think of this as soup. It makes an excellent soup, but frankly, trying to serve it for breakfast in my house would make for problems.
The most important ingredient is the meat broth. The recipe says it is traditional to use  broth left over from cooking corned beef. It is  more than traditional, it is essential.  So, if you want to make this, the day before, get yourself a hunk of corned beef and simmer it according to the directions. Have a wonderful corned beef dinner and save the broth for bean porridge.
One more thing. The directions tell you to mix the flour and cornmeal together and make a paste with cold water. Unless you want to have intractable yellow lumps in your porridge/soup, don't do it. If you have ever made polenta, or Italian cornmeal mush, you know that you should sprinkle very small amounts on the surface of the water. If you do that, the cornmeal will incorporate smoothly into the water. without lumps.

Bean Porridge

1/2 cup dried kidney beans
1 quart meat broth (from cooking corned beef is traditional)
1 tablespoon yellow corn meal
1 tablespoon flour (I used Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free flour)
salt to taste
2 cups milk (I left this out.)

1. Day before, wash beans, cover with water and let soak overnight. Next morning, place beans and soaking water in saucepan and cook thirty minutes, or until beans start to become tender.
2. Drain off water. Add the broth to beans and cook until they are very tender. Mash slightly to thicken mixture.
3. Mix the corn meal and flour together and then make a paste with a little cold water. (Bad idea. Sprinkle it on the surface of the liquid instead.) Stir into the bean mixture and boil until mixture thickens. Season with salt.
4. Add the milk and reheat.
Serves six.

Nutmeg Cake

On New Year's Day, I performed a ritual cleaning task. What I try to do every New Year's is clean something that never ordinarily gets cleaned. Any of my regular readers will know that this could apply to virtually any surface in our house. This year, it was the spice shelves. Our kitchen is approximately 25 years old, and in 25 years, spice shelves can accumulate a lot of ...grime.
 In the mid  80s when we moved into this house, the bottles of sesame seed oil and other exotic oils tended to leak. Add to oily surfaces, spices that spilled out of their tiny zip lock bags and random dirt and you wind up with a real mess. There was also a lot of duplication. Two bottles of anise? Three jars of nutmeg! Fennel seed. Two jars of coriander.  Two Tupperware containers, one filled with very old dried red peppers, the other with very old dried mushrooms. On and on it went.
Well, I started cleaning, and to give my brother something to do, I started cataloging the duplicates and asking him for recipes gleaned from the Internet. Some of them were unthinkable. Vegan eggnog? I beg your pardon. I think veganism is a perfectly respectable and healthy choice, but what drives me crazy is when vegans decide that what they need are fake meat, fake cheese and now, fake eggnog. If you want meat, cheese and eggnog, have it. If you want to be a vegan, there are plenty of cuisines out there to accommodate your choice. Leave the stuff you  have renounced alone.
Finally, I got all the grime scraped off, the oil mopped up and some of the duplicates, or triplicates fobbed off on the cooking club at my husband's office. Things that I either categorically didn't want, or were way too old got junked. Now, the spice shelves are lovely, clean, alphabetized, able to fit in the available space. However, I still had a lot of underperforming spices sitting up there. How to get rid of them?
With my brother's help in trolling the Internet, I conceived of the underperforming spice initiative. Make dishes that use these spices. Nutmeg cake seemed like a viable way to get rid of some of the nutmeg. This recipe is not from The New York Times Heritage Cookbook. I thought this might be a nice alternative to NYTHC, since this year, I plan to dedicate my time to trying to make all the recipes in the northeast, at least those where I can actually get the ingredients. On New Years Day, I counted 86 recipes left unmade. This is a manageable number, not something like it was two years ago when I calculated that it would take me 39 weeks of making two recipes a day, four days a week to clear up the backlog.
But, the leftover recipes are also the most unusual, not to say weird. There is a reason I haven't cooked them. So, since I have finally begun to acquire some readers, I would like to offer some more mainstream foods for the blog, and perhaps you will be sufficiently amused by my deathless prose to read the rest of it  even though you probably won't want to make many of these recipes.
I made this cake for a friend, and so have not tasted it. (It's also not gluten free.) I did taste the icing, which was astoundingly yummy. I would have eaten the whole thing, except for the fact that I was supposed to be fasting pending a medical procedure. It's easy to make, and uses two teaspoons of nutmeg. We'll be down to two jars in no time!
This recipe came from http://allrecipes.com. This website, although it has some delicious recipes, for some reason does not allow the user to print. A definite defect, in my book.

Nutmeg Cake

3 eggs, at room temperature
1/2 cup softened butter
1 1/2 cup sugar
1 cup buttermilk  (If you don't want the rest of the container of buttermilk lounging around your refrigerator for weeks or possibly months, use regular milk and put a tablespoon of vinegar in it.)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon salt

1. Preheat the oven at 350 degrees. Grease and flour two nine-inch cake pans.  
2. Cream the butter and sugar with an electric mixer until fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time and and beat thoroughly. Add the vanilla.
3. Sift the flour, baking powder and baking soda, nutmeg and salt.
4. Pour  one third of the flour mixture into the butter and eggs mixture and stir it to mix it in. Pour in another third of the flour and add half the buttermilk and mix together. Pour in the remainder of the flour and the rest of the milk and stir or blend with an electric mixer.
 5. Spread the batter into the cake pans and bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until a toothpick stuck into the cake comes out clean. Cool the cake in the pans for ten minutes and then remove and cool on a rack.

Caramel Icing

1/2 cup  brown sugar
3 tablespoons cream
1/4 cup butter
1 1/2 cups confectioners sugar

1. Put the  brown sugar, cream and butter in a heavy saucepan and melt over low heat. Gradually raise the temperature under the saucepan until the mixture boils. Let it boil for two minutes, then allow to cool.
2. Beat the confectioners sugar into the cooled icing. When the icing becomes stiff, add some cream and keep beating. Makes enough icing to ice the cake, but be sparing with the icing.

Veronica's Creamed Horseradish (Gluten Free)

No clue as to who Veronica is.  Her name does not show up in the acknowledgements. I'm guessing this is an old recipe, since prepared horseradish sauce has been around for years . In fact, I wasn't aware that you could actually buy raw horseradish until a couple of years ago when I bought it in Massachusetts for a relish.
However, it is now available at your neighborhood Safeway, (at least my neighborhood Safeway).
 About this recipe. It makes an enormous amount. Unless you are feeding the Chicago Bears at a bull roast, you will probably not need as much as it makes. I cut the recipe in half, and ladled it liberally on my steak, as did my husband, and we still barely made a dent in  the brimming sauce boat of the stuff. To make a half portion, one piece of horseradish root will be more than enough. I bought two pieces about 5 inches long, and only used half of one piece. I grated the horseradish on a regular kitchen grater, as you would grate cheese. Grating is a painful process, especially for the eyes. Raw horseradish is pungent stuff that made my eyes weep.  However, as the recipe says, the horseradish loses much of its force during cooking. If you like horseradish sauce and would like to take a stab at making your own, this is an easy recipe with a good product. It just makes a lot of it. To make the recipe gluten free, substitute gluten free flour for regular flour.

Veronica's Creamed Horseradish

3 roots of fresh horseradish
3 cups of milk
1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup flour (I used Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free Flour.)
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1. Peel the roots and grate the horseradish on a very fine grater. There should be about two cups. Alternately, the horseradish can be grated in an electric blender in small quantities, using one cup of the milk to give the necessary liquid.
2.  Melt the butter in a heavy skillet. Stir in the flour and cook, stirring until lightly browned. Add the horseradish and cook three minutes longer, stirring constantly.
3. Stir in the sugar, salt and (remaining)  milk (that's if you used some milk to grate the horseradish in the  blender.) and bring to a boil, stirring. Cover and simmer very slowly, stirring occasionally, or cook in a double boiler over boiling water, forty-five to sixty minutes, or until the horseradish is tender. Makes about 3 cups.

Candied Carrots for Passover

I know little or nothing about Jewish cooking. It is a whole area of cuisine that has just eluded me. I do know the basic stuff one can pick up from reading fiction, such as no mixing of meat and dairy, houses have to be cleaned down to the last crumb before Passover to rid the house of leavened bread, Jewish moms feed their kids chicken soup (I know. That last one is a stereotype.)  Readers will be seeing a lot of Kosher recipes in the coming months, since those are basically what is left in the Northeast section of the cookbook.
However, I suspect that enormous culinary changes took place in Jewish cooking between the 1960s when these recipes were compiled and now. This recipe is not, frankly, something that most home cooks would want to serve today, during Passover, or any other time. It calls for shortening, which makes the carrots greasy. The sauce congeals in an unappetizing way when it grows cold on the plate.
Clearly one cannot use butter, due to the prohibition against meat and dairy, since most people in the 60s served their veggies with meat. However, margarine, or, I would think, better yet, olive oil, would cut the grease substantially and improve health benefits. Other than the greasiness, these carrots are sweet, due to the honey, and flavored with cinnamon, which gives them a vaguely middle eastern taste. I would experiment with olive oil or margarine and see how it works out. It might be one way to get recalcitrant children to eat carrots. If anyone would care to comment on the recipes, if their mothers or grandmothers served them, etc., input would be especially welcome now.

Candied Carrots for Passover

3 tablespoons kosher shortening
4 cups sliced carrots
3 tablespoons orange juice
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
4 tablespoons honey

Combine all the ingredients in a saucepan, cover and cook, stirring occasionally, over low heat, twenty-five minutes. Serves six.

Mushrooms in Sour Cream

This Southern California recipe is sort of like beef stroganoff without the beef; shallots (or onions,) butter and mushrooms in a sour cream sauce. I made it on Thursday night because I had the mushrooms. I had intended to use the mushrooms for a dish involving breast of chicken,  but the unidentified item I took out of the freezer in the morning turned out not to be chicken breast after all, but instead,  pork loin.
The mild mushrooms went well with the spicy pork loin and was simple to make.

Mushrooms in Sour Cream

1/4 cup  butter
1/4 cup finely chopped shallots
1 pound  button mushrooms
2 tablespoons cognac
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 tablespoon freshly snipped dill weed
1 cup sour cream

1. Melt the  butter in a skillet and saute the shallots in it until transparent. Add the mushrooms and cook five minutes over high heat, stirring constantly.
2. Sprinkle with the cognac, salt, pepper and dill. Stir in the sour cream and heat, stirring but do not boil.
Makes four servings.