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.

Spit-roasted Saddle of Venison

Before I tell you all about the venison, I want to send out a thank you to Heidi Kenney, who mentioned     the always fantastic Fraiser's Cheaters on the Christmas cookie page of her blog, www.mypapercrane.com. So far, this has generated 58 hits. Amazing.
We had the venison on Christmas night. I ran it to earth at Eastern Market, when I went up there to buy the ingredients for the Danish Liver Pate. I asked one of the butchers at Union Meats about venison, also deer liver, which is needed for Deer Liver Pate. Deer liver does not seem to be available locally, unless you happen to know someone with a 30-06. Union Meats does not carry venison, but when I turned around and surveyed the poultry place across the aisle, I saw a small cooler off to the side labeled venison.
Be warned. Venison is not cheap. This particular piece cost $27 a pound.  But, hell, Christmas comes but once a year, so into my shopping bag went three pounds of frozen venison. I had wanted to make Venison Supreme, which appears in the New England section. Imagine my disappointment when at some point on the 23rd, I actually looked at the recipe for Venison Supreme and discovered it was covered in pastry.  Pastry, not being gluten free, was nixed and I moved on to the South, where I discovered this recipe from the great state of Tennessee.
I must confess, I did not use a spit, not having one easily to hand. It was more oven roasted.  I also didn't have juniper berries, which used to be sold  by Spice Islands. Or crushed sage, or fresh rosemary.  However, it all came out fine, regardless. We had a terrific Christmas dinner, which was much less complicated than the one the year  before. Christmas afternoon was spent dismembering a pumpkin for pumpkin soup. For dessert, we had a  store bought plum pudding. When I told my husband that I could have made one, he pointed out that I always said I hated plum pudding. I didn't see what that had to do with it. I could  have knocked off another recipe. But no.
But even without the fresh rosemary, the crushed sage and the juniper berries, the venison was good. I advise all of you carnivores to try it next fall.

Spit Roasted Saddle of Venison

1/2 cup wine vinegar
2 carrots coarsely chopped
1 onion chopped
3 sprigs parsley
1 clove garlic, crushed
10 juniper berries
1 sprig fresh rosemary
1 teaspoon crushed sage
1 five-pound to six-pound saddle of young venison
1 bottle dry red wine
 salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
cranberry and horseradish sauce    

1. Day before, combine the vinegar, carrots, onions, parsley, garlic, juniper  berries, rosemary, and sage.  Bring just to a boil and pour the mixture over the venison.   Add the wine, salt and pepper and let stand overnight.
2. Next day, drain the venison and wipe it dry, reserving marinade. Sprinkle venison with salt and pepper. Place on a spit and roast, basting with the marinade, until dark brown on the surface and rare within. This will require about thirty minutes to one hour, depending on size of venison and proximity to the heat. Serve with cranberry and horseradish sauce.  Serves ten to 12.
          

Carrot Tzimmes

Tzimmes is an eastern European recipe for honey baked carrots, according to http://www.about.com  The Yiddish word "meren" means carrots and to increase. Carrots symbolize our hope that we increase our good deeds in the coming year. Some tzimmes recipes add prunes, sweet potatoes or even meat to the sweet carrots.

I had read of tzimmes somewhere, possibly in a book by Philip Roth. I knew it was a Jewish dish. I didn't know it was served for Rosh Hashona.

We had it for Christmas Eve for no particular reason except that I had a lot of carrots and all the rest of the ingredients. Christmas Eve in our house has always followed a pattern set down by my parents back in the early 1950s in the Berkshires. We had a semi special dinner. Then, we went into the library. This, in itself was special, because we normally sat in the living room. However, on Christmas Eve, the tree had been set up with all the presents around it, and to add to the suspense, the door was closed until lunchtime on Christmas day.

My mother sat on the sofa and chose one of the five enormous, crumbling Bibles that sat on the shelf next to the floor, and read Saint Luke. "There went out in the days of Caesar Augustus a decree that all the world shall be taxed...." It was very solemn, and living on a farm, I had a clear mental picture of Mary and Joseph and the manger, and the animals all around. In my mind, the manger was in the red barn on the Curtiss's property.

Then, my father read The Night Before Christmas by Clement Clark Moore and the atmosphere changed dramatically. When he got to "... Away to the window I flew like a flash, Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash," he gave a realistic imitation of being sick, much to our childish, teenagerish and young adultish delight. After that, we all simmered down again, and he read The Tailor of Gloucester, by Beatrix Potter. When my father read the Beatrix Potter books, he read every page. "Copyright 1903 by Frederick Warne and Company, Copyright renewed 1931," he intoned.  Then, we hung up our stockings.

That, as far as I was concerned, was what one did on Christmas Eve. When our children were born, we did that for Christmas Eve, every year except the year that we went to London to visit our daughter and ate takeout Chinese food while lying on the bed in our hotel room. However, when children grow up and get married, allowances have to be made.  So this year, things were kind of confused. My brother George was going to come from Arlington some time in the afternoon. My daughter, who had just gotten home from London, had gone off to visit a friend with a vague promise of coming back before we went to church at 5:00. The young marrieds were coming from Alexandria around 3:00 "to spend time with us."

What with having to use the Volvo, now driven by the yms, to pick up George at the Metro in a filthy driving rain, and my daughter saying she would meet us at church, we ended up reading a Revised Standard (unacceptable) version of the Christmas story and having my son read The Night Before Christmas off his cell phone. A total ham, just like his grandfather, he pretended to barf when he got to "...and threw up the sash."

And after early church, I made tzimmes. Apparently it traditionally is served with beef brisket. I served it with a very rich spinach and cheese casserole.

 

Carrot Tzimmes

 

10 to 12 medium-size carrots, diced

1 tablespoon chicken fat or kosher shortening (I used Crisco.)

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon sugar

1/2 cup raisins

1/4 teaspoon ginger

3 tablespoons water

 

1. cook the carrots in the fat in a skillet for one minute, stirring constantly.

2. Add the remaining ingredients, bring to a boil and simmer, covered until tender, about fifteen minutes. Evaporate any liquid remaining by boiling. Makes 6 servings.