Smoked Haddock Flan

Hewitt says, in a New York Times kind of way, "Any good fish store can order smoked haddock." This may have been true in New York in the 70s, but the first couple of times I asked my fish store about it, I got blank looks. "We have smoked salmon," the man said. Last week when I was buying cod for the chowder, I wrote a note to the owners about it. On Saturday morning, as I
was juggling vegetables from the farmers' market, I found a message on my phone. The smoked haddock was in!
Then, as has been related, I fell off my horse. I actually tried to pick up the haddock on the way home from the stable, and got about fifty feet from the entrance before deciding I just couldn't walk the rest of the way. I sent my son to pick it up and was startled to find that two pounds of the stuff cost $37.
Having spent that much money, I wasn't going to let it go bad. I made the flan on Monday. This is not a recipe I would choose to make after suffering a collision with the ground, but if life gives you smoked haddock, make smoked haddock flan. It has several components, including a pastry shell, fish, filling, sauce and potato mixture, which needs a pastry bag.
Pastry, especially on hot days, has never been my strong point. But, this project is teaching me to follow the recipe and be exact. If it says ice water, use ice water. Even though I did not have wax paper I managed to roll out the dough and get it into the pie shell without tearing it or having it stick to the counter. My husband is better at this stuff than I am. He can do fluted crusts and little leaves. My crust is raggedly, but this time, it was edible.
I boiled the eggs ahead of time. I didn't mash the potatoes ahead of time, which would have been best. I also didn't have the energy to look in the cabinets over the stove for the pastry bag. So, my product did not look like the full color photo between pages 110 and 111. It probably tasted about the same though.

Smoked Haddock Flan

Pastry Shell:
1 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup butter or shortening
1 egg yolk
ice water
Fish:
1/2 pounds smoked haddock with bones (if salty soak thirty minutes in cold water)
1 cup milk approximately
Filling:
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup finely chopped leeks
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
2 hard cooked eggs halved
Sauce
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Potato mixture
3 medium size baking potatoes, boiled peeled and riced or sieved
2 egg yolks
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
6 tablespoons finely grated Gruyere cheese

1. To prepare pastry, place the flour and slat in a bowl. With the finger tips or a pastry blender, blend in the butter or shortening until mixture resembels coarse oatmeal. With a fork stir in the egg yolk and enough ice water to make a dough.
2. Roll out the dough on alightly floured board or pastry cloth and use to line an eight-inch or nine-inch scalloped pie pan or pie plate. Chill well.
3. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
4. Line the chilled shell with aluminum foil and fill with dried beans or uncooked rice. Bake eight minutes, or until shell is set. Remove foil and beans or rice, and bake shell three to five minutes longer or until done and lightly browned.
5. Meanwhile, place the fish in a large skillet. Pour in milk until fish is three-quarters submerged.

6. Bring to a simmer, cover and simmer eight to ten minutes, or until the flish flakes easily. Remove the fish, strain the liquid and reserve one cup for the sauce. Remove the skin and bones from the fish and flake it. There should be about two cups. Reserve.

7. To prepare filling, melt the butter in a skillet and saute the leeks in it until tender but not browned. Stir in the reserved fish and the parsley, season with pepper and keep warm. Reserve the hard-cooked egg halves.

8. To prepare sauce, melt the butter in a small pan, blend in the flour and gradually stir in the reserved cup fish stock. (milk). Season with salt and pepper.

9. Bring to a boil, stirring until sauce thickens. Hold over hot water until needed.

10. To prepare potato mixture, place the hot riced or seived potatoes in a bowl and beat in the egg yolks, salt, pepper and four tablespoons of the cheese.

11. Place the filling in the bottom of the baked pie shell and embed the hard-cooked egg pieces in the filling in a pattern like spokes in a wheel. Pour the sauce over all.

12. Fit a pastry bag with a star tube. Pipe the potato mixture through the pastry bag around the flan and make a wheel pattern.

13 Sprinkle with the reaining cheese and brown unter the broiler.

Serves four.

Fresh Tomato Soup

Something that you invisible readers may not know about me is, I have a horse. I go horseback riding every week. My aim is to compete in dressage. Dressage, for those of you who have never heard of it, which I hadn't really four years ago, is horse dancing. If you watched the equitation competitions in the Olympics, dressage is the fancy footwork, where the horse aims his rear end at the rail, and trots or canters along in unison with other horses, and makes a fan shape. Think Lipizzaners. Now, my horse, who was highly trained, can do that. I am just learning the basics.
This Saturday, I was full of plans. I stopped at the Bethesda Farm Women's Market, and bought fabulous ripe tomatoes, corn on the cob, basil and one of the tastiest, juiciest peaches I have ever eaten. After my lesson, I was going to join my son at an auto dealership, and we were going to look at new cars. However, fate, in the shape of a tall chestnut gelding, intervened.
My horse is somewhat unpredictable. After three years, I can predict his unpredictability. He will start out his lesson half asleep, and about half way through, turn on the afterburners and start tearing madly around the ring. If I take him out on trails, he will act like a complete fool, and shy at blades of grass, hay bales, trees, and other non threatening objects. If I try to ride him over poles, he will jump three feet into the air over each three inch obstacle. But, up until now, when he's in the ring, the main thing I have to worry about is his racing around at top speed and me losing control.
Saturday, after my lesson, I was letting him walk around the ring with loose reins. This is part of the dressage test. It's called the free walk. I wasn't particularly paying attention, as there was nothing in the ring to pay attention to. Or so I thought. Suddenly, my horse jumped two feet to one side, and I found myself face down in the dirt. I wound up with a cracked pelvis, a pulled muscle in my left leg, and very sore, but not broken ribs.
Two days later, I am hobbling around the house with a cane, swearing when I have to get up or sit down. But I still had the three pounds of tomatoes, and two highly expensive pounds of smoked haddock. So, this afternoon, since the emergency room doctor said to resume my normal activities as much as possible, I knuckled down and cranked out Fresh Tomato Soup and Smoked Haddock Flan.
Reaching over my head caused me to either gasp in pain, or yell one of the two basic explatives. However, the maneuvering required to cook could be done without too much discomfort. I hobbled from the sink to the counter to the stove and back again with sweat trickling down my face..
Fresh Tomato Soup is an excellent recipe, since it does not require peeling the tomatoes, which usually ends up with burned fingers. Nor does it require seeding them. You just chop them up and throw them into a pot. After cooking, you grind them through a food mill, and peels and seeds are scraped out and dumped in the trash. The recipe says reheat, but we had it cold.

Fresh Tomato Soup

3/4 cup butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 large onion thinly sliced
2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme or one-half teaspoon dried thyme
2 tablespoons chopped fresh bsil or one teaspoon dried basil
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
3 pounds ripe tomatoes, cored and quartered
3 tablespoons tomato paste
1/4 cup flour
4 cups chicken broth ( or vegetable broth)
1 teaspoon sugar
1 cup heavy cream

1. Heat one half cup of the butter and the oil in a heavy kettle. Add the onion and cook until tender but not browned.
2. Add the thyme, bsil, salt, pepper, tomatoes, and tomato paste. Simmer ten minutes.
3. Mix the flour with six tablespoons of the broth and stir into the tomato mixture. Add remaining broth and cook thirty minutes, stirring frequently.
4. Pass mixture through the finest blade of a food ill or through a fine sieve. Reheat and stir in the sugar and cream. Do not boil. Swirl in remaining butter.
Makes 8 servings.

Chicken and Corn Soup

Despite the fact that it has been hotter than the hinges of hell the last few days, I made more soup. This soup isn't the light and delicate cream soup that readers might be accustomed to in the summertime. It's hefty, hearty soup more like a stew than anything else. It's definitely a cold weather kind of a soup, except it calls for the corn from six ears of corn. That is a summer thing. The wise person will not buy corn on the cob in January. The stores carry it, sometimes, but the results are awful.
This is farmer food. Tables laden high with biscuits and corn on the cob and three or four different kinds of vegetables. But, thanks to air conditioning, it is also good for dinner in August as a main course. The recipe says to cook the corn on the cob in the chicken broth. My pot wasn't big enough, and there wasn't enough chicken broth. I just cooked the corn separately and scraped it off the cob, burning my fingers in the process.

Chicken and Corn Soup

1 five pound chicken, cut into serving pieces
salt to taste
12 peppercorns
2 ribs celery, chopped
2 carrots quartered
1 onion
6 ears of corn on the cob
2 hard cooked eggs, chopped
1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley
1 cup cubed cooked ham

1. Place the chicken in a kettle. Add water to cover, salt, peppercorns, celery, carrots and onion. Simmer until the chicken is thoroughly tender.
2. Strain the broth and pour it into a clean kettle. Simmer while preparing the remaining ingredients.
3. Remove the chicken from the bones and skin and cut the chicken meat into bite-size pieces.
4. Shuck the corn and drop it into the kettle. Bring just to a boil. Scrape the kernels from the cobs into the soup. Add the chicken and remaining ingredients. Serve piping hot.
Makes eight to one dozen servings.

Rhode Island Fish Chowder

School started Monday, and the week before that was devoted to teacher planning, so I haven't had a lot of time to devote to anything but the most automatic cooking. Also, I was out of money, so I had to resort to pawing through the refrigerator and the closet to see what I could cook with the minimum amount of expenditure. I didn't even open the cookbook. But, with things settling down a bit, I thought I could make one or two things this week. Those of you invisible readers who actually thought I would make two dishes a night four nights a week to knock out New England, dream on. I'm not that disciplined.
I never thought of Rhode Island as having a unique cuisine. However, I understand it's a pretty unique place, so why not? This dish is interesting, because it does not conform to what I understand the basic principles of chowder to be. Now, understand that even though I am from Massachusetts, I was actually 18 before I went to Cape Cod. You are not talking to some one with a lot of experience with coastal cooking, here.
As I understand it, and I would like nothing better than to get a debate going, the basic principles of chowder are A. milk, B. potatoes, C. other stuff. This chowder contains neither milk nor potatoes. It does have other stuff, namely fish. It's more like a solid than a liquid, although it does have liquid in it. What take the place of potatoes is what they call split pilot crackers or cream crackers. I interpreted that to mean oyster crackers. I have seen cream crackers. Nabisco markets them, or did. However, I forgot to look when I was in the cracker aisle at Safeway, and in fact, had to send my husband out to get them. So, do not overlook the crackers when making this dish. They are an integral part and not a garnish.
There is a question about the quantity of crackers. We got a 10 ounce box of oyster crackers, which, between the recipe and people eating them, got all used up. And we cut the recipe in half. So if you wish to make the entire recipe, you will probably need a 20 ounce bag of oyster crackers, or similar.
There is another question here, and that is, the chowder pot. I googled chowder pot and discovered that my pot was not unlike the one presented as a chowder pot by the first vendor on Google. It's a stew pot. I thought possibly a real chowder pot would have a smaller diameter than mine and be taller. This particular brand of chowder pot did not seem to fit that model. Any ideas, readers?
The verdict from my husband Bob was, bland. The only spices are summer savory, which I was finally able to find, 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper which is so microscopic an amount it is practically below Alvogadro's number, and 3 tablespoons chopped parsley. Bland. But, good.

Rhode Island Fish Chowder

1 pound salt pork, cut into strips, soaked in boiling water five minutes and drained
4 pounds cod or sea bass fillets, cut into four inch squares
3 cups finely chopped onions
1 tablespoon chopped fresh summer savory, or one teaspoon dried savory
3 tablespoons chopped parsley
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
split pilot crackers, cream crakers or ship biscuits or any plan, unsalted crackers that have not been oil-dipped
3 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon flour

1. Make a layer of the salt pork in the bottom of a chowder kettle. Top with layer of the fish, then the onions and season with some of the savory, parsley and cayenne.
2. Make a layer of the crackers. Repeat layers until all increadients are used, ending with crackers that have been spread with two tablespoons of butter.
3. Pour water down the sies of the kettle until water almost covers top layer of crackers. Bring to a boil, cover and simmer one hour. Replenish water level with boiling water if level sinks too low.
4. Decant the liquid into a saucepan. Blend together the remaining butter and the flour and gradually whisk the mexture into the simmering liquid.
5. Transfer solid part of chowder to a tureen or soup bowls and pour thickened liquid over.
Makes eight to ten servings.

Braised Lettuce with Rosemary

There's a theme here. August is cooked lettuce month. This recipe comes just ahead of Wilted Lettuce.This is a somewhat imprecise recipe. It uses words like cook briefly. How the hell long is briefly, if you don't mind my asking? We know briefly is not very long, because the recipe says sternly, "Do not overcook." However, we really don't know what overcooking is, when dealing with this recipe.
As opposed to the wilted lettuce, which had the same texture as spinach, this lettuce retained its raw lettuce shape and most of its texture. At least, the way I cooked it. I would say briefly means two or three minutes. Probably, what the directions considered overcooking would render it limp. My interpretation consisted of slightly softer lettuce, served with very good sauce. I certainly did not dislike it. The cookbook said to serve it with poached or stuffed chicken breasts. I served it with broiled chicken breasts.

Braised Lettuce with Rosemary

1/4 pound mushrooms, sliced
6 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
2/3 cup chicken broth
2/3 cup light cream
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon fresh rosemary
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
2 tablespoons Cognac
2 large or three small heads Boston lettuce
2 tablespoons chopped chives

1. Saute mushrooms briefly in four tablespoons butter. Sprinkle with flour. Gradually stir in the broth and cream and bring to a boil, stirring.
2. Season with salt, pepper, the nutmeg, rosemary, parsley and cognac. Hold over hot water. (This means keep it hot over a saucepan of hot water. Do not leave it on the stove to keep it hot.)
3. Shred the lettuce into very wide ribbons and saute very briefly in remaining butter. Do not overcook.
4. Toss lettuce with sauce, sprinkle with the chives and serve immediately.
Makes six servings.

Manicotti with Veal and Ham

Back on Tuesday, August 3, before we left for vacation, my son and his fiance were invited to dinner. When you left us, my son and I were making pickles, he having some extra time since he has taken the bar exam, but his job hasn't started yet. After the pickles, we got down to the manicotti. Dishes have various parameters in this family. As stated, my husband can't eat shellfish. My daughter is a vegetarian, and the fiancee doesn't like ground beef, or apparently any kind of ground meat. She was too polite to tell me about this, but my son told me. So I made two batches of manicotti, one with meat, and one with ricotta cheese.
I put the water on to boil for the manicotti tubes, and started making the fillling. The recipe calls for ground ham. Now, as near as I can make out, one cannot buy ground ham. Requests to the butcher guys at the supermarket to grind same are met with refusals. So, if you want ground ham, I suggest you do what I did. Buy a slice of ham. Cut it in chunks and put it in the Cuisineart. The Cuisineart renders it ground, or close enough.
The recipe says cook the manicotti tubes until half done, about 12 minutes. I don't know what I did, but the tubes were fully done, and limp. They split up the sides which made it difficult to fill them. I just sort of spread the filling on one side of the opened tube and folded the other side over the whole thing. Tomato sauce covers up a multitude of sins.

Manicotti with Veal and Ham

1/2 pound ground veal
1/2 pound ground cooked ham
1 tablespoon finely chopped onion
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon rosemary
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
1 egg lightly beaten
2 tablespoons Marsala wine (I used red.)
1 cup soft bread crumbs
1 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
8 four inch pieces manicotti
6 quarts boiling salted water
3 to four cups tomato sauce, preferably home made marinara sauce

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
2. Saute the veal, ham and onion in one tablespoon of the oil until lightly browned.
3. In a bowl, combine the meat mixture, salt, pepper, rosemary, nutmeg, egg, Marsala, bread crumbs, and two tablespoons of the cheese.
4. Cook the manicotti in the boiling salted water until half done, about twelve minutes. Draine and rinse in cold water. Add remaining oil.
5. Cover the bottom of a shallow baking dish with half the sauce. Fill the manicotti with the meat mixture and arrange in a single layer on top of the sauce.
6. Cover with remaining sauce, sprinkle with reamining cheese and bake about thirty minutes or until tender and bubbly hot.
Makes four servings.

Ernie's Mustard Pickles

On Sunday, August 1, Bob and I trekked back to DC. It was hot, although not insanely so, but the traffic in Delaware was truly insane. It took us 10 minutes to get out of the Delaware Reststop on 95, and another 10 or 15 to get to the first exit, which said Route 301. Now, I knew that 301 went through Maryland, and could be used to get to DC. So, seeing an out, I took it. This is called not thinking very clearly, because if I had taken any time at all to ponder this option, I would have realized that 301 goes over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Anyone who has ever lived in DC or on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and I have lived in both places, will tell you that the Chesapeake Bay Bridge is a place you don't want to be on a weekend in the summertime.

We drove through a lot of pleasant countryside, and pleasant countryside that was getting ready to have the shit developed out of it. But, as predicted, when we got to where 301 joins Route 50, we hit the bridge traffic. The bridge traffic goes faster than it did when I lived there in 1978, but it isn't what anyone would call speedy. So we got home around 8:00 pm having left the Berkshires at 10:30..

Because we were turning around and leaving DC on Thursday, I figured it might be nice to have my son and his fiancee over to dinner. Tuesday was the appointed day. I also decided that if I ever want to finish this chapter, I'd better do some more canning. I settled on Ernie's Mustard Pickles because the recipe didn't make too much. Our family has a history of canning things, and then putting them up in the closet to molder. Winchester Center Bread and Butter Pickles came before Ernie in the book, but it made five quarts. Ernie's recipe made two quarts. Less was better.

So, Tuesday morning, I started cutting up cucumbers and onions. The recipe calls for 1 1/2 quarts of cucumbers, and six cups of onions. Well, I cut up the cucumbers into my measuring cup and dumped them into the big ceramic bread bowl, where they were to soak for three hours. It wasn't until I had cut up all the cucumbers and an entire bag of onions that I realized that my measuring cup held two cups, so I had doubled the recipe.

Just as I was finishing up the chopping, my son came in with a bag of groceries. He had found a recipe for chocolate cake to be cooked in a slow cooker and volunteered to make it for dinner. Now that the bar exam is over, he has some time on his hands. I gave him a brief lesson in separating eggs, volunteered to lick the beaters, and left for the gym.

When I got back, he was still there, and offered to help me with the pickles. Things went better than they had gone at Mommio's, because I had my canning equipment and I felt free to sterilize the jars in the dishwasher. We put all the spices and vinegar into the pot, boiled it briefly and loaded it into the hot, sterilized jars. They were good. Son liked them and ate an entire half jar. Husband likes them too. These particular pickles can be termed a success. Maybe doubling the recipe by mistake wasn't such a bad thing after all. One thing. It called for turmeric. I didn't have turmeric. However, since turmeric is a prime ingredient in curry powder, I put in 1/2 teaspoonful of curry powder. It seemed to work.

One other thing. Jean Hewlett is really not the cookbook editor for a novice pickle maker. The recipe does not say how one seals jars, for example. Here's what you do. Y ou must sterilize the jars, the new, out of the box lids and the bands in boiling water. After you fill up the jars, put on the lids and then keep them in place with the bands. Then, boil up your enormous pot of water. What you really want here is a canning pot, with a rack on the bottom. The rack is to fish the hot jars out of just subboiling water without burning your fingers. Once the water in your huge pot is boiling merrily, put the jars in the rack and lower them into the water. They should be submerged in the water. Then, put a tightly fitting lid on the pot and let it boil for 15 minutes. This is according to The Joy of Cooking, which is a good cookbook for the novice pickle maker. It gets pretty steamy, but that is how you seal the jars. The boiling process forces all the air out of the jar and creates a vaccum.

Ernie's Mustard Pickles

1 1/2 one-inch chunks halved, peeled cucumbers
2 large onions chopped (about six cups)
3 tablespoons salt
1 quart water
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/4 cup flour
1 1/2 teaspoons celery seeds
1 1/2 teaspoons dry mustard
1/2 teaspoon turmeric

1. In a crock or earthenware bowl, combine the cucumbers, onions, salt and water. Let stand at room temperature three hours.
2. In a saucepan, mix together the sugar, flour, celery seeds, mustard and turneric. Gradually stir in the vinegar. Heat, while stirring, until mixture thickens and is smooth.
3. Drain cucumbers and onions, rinse brefly and add to boiling mustard sauce. Bring to a boil again. Pour into hot sterilized jars. Seal. Cool and store in a cool, dark, dry place.
Makes about 4 pints.