Red Snapper Grenobloise (Gluten Free)

Let's start off by saying Red Snapper is on the Monterey Bay Aquarium  Seafood Watch "avoid" list because it is over fished. I apologize to my readers and to the existing Red Snapper population, which has declined dramatically since the 1990s. If you want to use this website yourself to check whatever you plan to eat, it is at www.montereybayaquarium.org.. Also, you can google sustainable fishing. The Seafood Watch will come up right after the paid sites.
Red Snapper Grenobloise is an easy recipe, if you have the $25 a pound this stuff costs. Whole Red Snapper was not available at the Fishery, the market in Northwest DC where I usually buy fish. I got a huge slab of it instead, which negated the need to scale and clean the fish. I've done that a couple of times. It is not much fun.
Back in our prechild lives, during one of my sustained periods of unemployment, our friend Bruce showed up and invited me on a bicycle ride. We went down to Southwest, where the fish market boats were and still are parked. We bought a fish for a joint dinner with Bob and Bruce's wife, Sally. Bruce wanted to get the fish cleaned. I, always cheap, said, no, we can do it ourselves. Why pay?
I found out why that night, when Bruce ushered me into the kitchen and indicated that I could make dinner. He and Bob settled down for a nice chat and a glass of wine, while Sally, who was in law school, studied in the bedroom. I remember a lot of blood, some of it mine, and a big mess. So now, I have fish cleaned. I won't say always have fish cleaned, but I will say, have fish cleaned unless you are prepared to cope with a lot of blood, scales and fish guts.
My son and daughter in law came to dinner, the same dinner where I served fried oysters. They approved of the snapper, even though, confession(!) I couldn't find the capers, which I believe is what makes it grenobloise. I did not tell them that, however. My son, who is actually an extremely nice guy, can be rather censorious when it comes to leaving out ingredients. The capers showed up on the kitchen counter later on in the week. Who knows what could have happened to them?
The recipe calls for cooking the fish on the top of the stove in a skillet with an ovenproof handle. Well, a skillet with an ovenproof handle was somehow lacking in our repertoire of kitchen equipment. So, I transferred the fish to a glass baking pan for its 25 minutes in the oven. I also left out the lemon cubes because it sounded like way too much work for a little effect. However, it's your call.

Red Snapper Grenobloise

1 lemon
1 one-and -one half-pound red snapper
salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup butter
2 tablespoons capers
lemon slices (optional)

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
2. Peel the lemon, removing all the white pulp. Cut the lemon into thin slices and remove the seeds. Cut each slice into small cubes, discarding the membranes between sections. Reserve lemon cubes.
3. Thoroughly clean and scale the fish, but leave the head and tail intact. Rinse the fish under cold water and pat dry with paper towels. Sprinkle the fish inside and outside with salt and pepper.
4. Melt the butter in a skillet with ovenproof handle large enough to hold the fish. When skillet is hot, put in the fish and cook only on one side for about five minutes. Tilt the pan occasionally and spoon the butter over the fish.
5. Place the fish in the oven and bake, basting occasionally, for about twenty-five minutes, or until fish flakes easily when tested with a fork.
6. Remove the fish from the oven and transfer to a serving platter. Sprinkle with the capers, reserved lemon cubes and butter from the skillet. Garnish with lemon slices if desired.
Serves three.

Fried Oysters (Gluten Free)

When I sat down early in 2013 and looked over the list of recipes from the Northeast I had yet to make, it seemed like a doable list. There were some 80 recipes on the list. Unfortunately, I have been making very slow progress. Even though I cook and blog, I do not focus on the Northeast. It's a three part problem. A. I can't get the ingredients. (I may never make sauteed dandelion flowers.) B. There's the shellfish problem. My husband doesn't eat shellfish, and is rebelling against having a separate dinner cooked for him. C. The recipes are seasonal. I have two Christmas pudding recipes, which I guess I can get cranked out by the first of the year, but I'm not making them in October.
Well, Wednesday night, my son and daughter-in-law came over. I was able to cross one lowly item off the list, Fried Oysters. I love oysters. I confess that I first tasted them as a teenager in the Harvard Club in New York City and have been hooked on them ever since. I even risked getting beaten up for them. Here's the story.
One foggy winter day back in the 70s, Bob and I were cruising around the less fashionable parts of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Down somewhere south of St. Michael's, we came upon a roadside diner with a hand lettered sign. "Oysters," it said.
"Yahoo," I said, and proceed to make a u-turn and park. We blithely walked in the door and stopped short. Even I, the oblivious one, could see that this was a mistake. The place had been taken over by what looked like a gang of Hell's Angels. They were drinking at 11:30 am, shouting at the one rundown looking waitress, and shooting pool. They hit the cue ball so hard the balls jumped off the table. What to do?
The obvious choice was to run like crazy. But, this did not seem like such a great idea. I did not want to be picked up by the scruff of the neck by some drunken, enraged biker inquiring why I did not care for his company. So we sidled into a booth, slid down in the seats so as to make ourselves invisible, and ordered our oysters in a whisper. When they came, we bolted them down and got the hell out of there.
These fried oysters are supposed to be deep fried. Well, when I was copying down the ingredients, I failed to check for oil. We were, in fact, nearly out of oil. It was like the legend of Hanukkah, except that the oysters did not fry for nine nights. Instead of being deep fried, these were sauteed, I guess. But they were good. Plump, moist, yum, yum yum. My son and I ate an entire 16 ounce jar of fried oysters between us. His wife tried one, praised it and left most of it on her plate. This woman is a trooper.

Fried Oysters

2 twelve ounce containers oysters with liquor or about 36 shucked, fresh oysters with liquor
1 1/2 cups dry bread crumbs. (I used gluten free breadcrumbs, available at Giant Food)
1 1/2 cups flour. (I used Bob's Red Mill Rice Flour, available at Safeway and other locations.)
1/4 cup milk
2 eggs lightly beaten
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
fat or oil for deep frying.
lemon wedges or tartar sauce

1. Drain the oysters
2 Combine the bread crumbs and flour.
3. Combine the milk, eggs, salt and pepper.
4. Roll the oysters in crumb mixture, then in egg mixture and again in the crumb mixture.
5. Fry a few at a time, two to three minutes or until they are golden, in a fry basket, in fat or oil heated to 350 degrees. Drain on paper towels. Serve with lemon wedges or tartar sauce. Makes six servings. 

Quince Marmalade

Quince Marmalade is the last of the unusual and may I say daunting, marmalade recipes in the Northeast section of the New York Times Heritage Cookbook. Whoever heard of cucumber marmalade, or carrot marmalade or tomato marmalade? Not me. Marmalade came from Dundee, in Scotland,  in those white ceramic jars which one then appropriated to put one's pencils in.
Quinces present their own special problem, namely, what are they, and where do you get them? I thought quinces were bright orange, had a smooth skin like a tomato, and sort of a star shaped stem end. I thought I had seen them at Magruder's grocery story in Chevy Chase a couple of years ago. I had  inquired of a fruit and vegetable man at Whole Foods as to when they were available. He told me quinces come in the fall.
When it got to be fall, mid September, I started scratching around grocery stores and the Internet looking for the things.
They were tougher to run down than I would have thought. Harris Teeter might have them in a few weeks. Whole Foods didn't  have them at all. I was shown some uninspiring specimens at the Davenport Safeway and rejected them. I finally found what appeared to be good quality quinces at the Safeway in Potomac. Yay Safeway. They weren't what I had expected at all. They were a pale green with a shape like a lemon on steroids. The fruit and vegetable man told  me they turned yellow when they ripened.
I stuck them in the ornamental fruit bowl on the table and waited to see if they would ripen. Wikipedia tells us that they do not ripen on the tree unless they are frosted and subsequently decay (Huh?). Wikipedia also refers to their strong perfume. I don't have the sharpest nose on the block, but these quinces were not particularly fragrant. Wikipedia also says that quinces, which should properly be referred to in the plural as quince, are not usually eaten raw. I'm  not surprised.
On the first of October, just before we were due to leave for Massachusetts, I decided I had better deal with the quince. I did not want to return to a bowlful of rotten quince.
This recipe, as always, presents certain problems. First of all, it says, four to six medium size quince. Okay. I suspect my quince are bigger than the ones the cook had in mind. I used six. "Put them in a pan" the recipe says.  I guess the author of the recipe had her quince jelly pan in mind. I used the big saucepan. Even then, the quinces wouldn't all fit. One sat on top of the other four. The recipe instructed me to cover it three-quarters of the way with water. Well, in order to have any water at all touching the quince perched on top of the others, I had to use more water than the recipe inferred that I should use.As a result, I had to boil it longer to get the fruit to "jam." But that is getting ahead of myself.
First I had to scald the quince in order to peel them. Peeling my quince was unlike peeling any other fruit, such as peaches, where if one scalds them, the peels slide right off. After doubling the boiling time to account for the quince on top of the other four underwater, I ended  up peeling them with a potato peeler.
Boiling took longer than anticipated. After all, it always does when I make marmalade. I believe in this case the cause was I used more water than the author of the recipe used. Since I don't know how much she used, it is impossible to use the same amount. But I do think I used more because I covered my quince in order to partially submerge the one sitting on top of the others.
How does it taste? Sweet, but without a definite fruit flavor. Even though it contains orange juice and orange peel, it does not taste of oranges. If you want to try this, now's the time, while quince are somewhat available. You do not need a boiling water bath. To can it, one need only boil the clean jars to sterilize them,  put the hot jam in the jars and cover the jam with melted paraffin.

Quince Marmalade

4 to six medium-sized quinces (Sorry, can't help you there. I would say, get what you can.)
grated rind and juice of one orange
2 apples, peeled, cored and sliced
1 teaspoon finely chopped yellow part of lemon peel
sugar (a lot. Buy a five pound bag) 

1. Wash the quince. Place in a pan and add water to three-quarters cover. Bring to a boil and simmer ten minutes.
2. Remove the quince from the cooking liquid. Peel and core the quince, returning the skin and cores to the cooking liquid. Chop the quince and reserve.
3. Cook the skin and cores slowly thirty minutes. Strain and reserve liquid.
4. Place the chopped quince, grated rind and juice of the orange, apples and lemon peel in a heavy pan. Add reserved liquid until pulp is covered by one-half-inch liquid. Bring to boil and simmer gently until fruit is very tender. Mash the fruit. (I used a potato masher.)
5. Measure the pulp into a pan and add three-quarters cup sugar for each cup of pulp. Heat and stir until the sugar dissolves. Boil rapidly until a set is reached, about ten minutes. (It took me over an hour.) )To test for set, put a drop of mixture on a saucer, refrigerate and push your finger into the cooled drop of marmalade. Your finger should leave a clean path when the marmalade is done.)
6. Pour the marmalade into hot sterilized jelly glasses, pour a thin layer of paraffin over and cool. Cover and store in a cool, dark, dry lace. Makes  about 6 six ounce jelly jars.

Green Beans with Ham Hocks

Green beans with some kind of pork product are a regular visitor to our Thanksgiving dinner. My son calls them "Beans cooked until they're dead." This just goes to illustrate cultural cross pollination, as no one from New England would dream of cooking string beans for three hours with a half a pound of bacon. But, Southern Ohio, where Bob's family came from, is or was a little slice of the South, and he likes them too. I like them once in a while.
So I knew they would be pretty popular at a Southern dinner. I got the beans at the Bethesda Women's Farm Market. They were delectable looking, crisp and totally fresh. I had examined the string beans at Safeway a day or two earlier and found them slimy and not fresh. Uninspiring, in fact. This is one of the all time easy dishes. It's mainly boiling, and surely, anyone can boil. It's basically, boil beans, let them sit, and boil them some more. It is not a dish Michelle Obama would be pleased with, but, you know, once in a bloody great while, it won't kill you. Just don't make a habit of cooking your beans until they are dead. If you want to make this before all the beans are killed off in a frost, go to the farmers' market this weekend.

Green Beans Southern Style

2 pounds green beans 
1 ham hock
2 teaspoons salt
1 small hot pepper (bird's eye peppers are best). (I used a long skinny chili pepper from my neighbor's garden. Worked fine.)

1. Wash the beans, cut off the ends and snap beans in two.
2. Place the ham hock in a large kettle, cover with water and boil fifteen minutes. Add beans, the salt and hot pepper and more water almost to cover the beans.
3. Bring to a boil, cover and boil forty minutes. Add more water if necessary. Turn off heat and let rest several hours. (I have no idea what this is about. Anyone who does, please comment and tell us why the beans have to rest.)
4. Simmer thirty-five minutes longer before serving. Serve beans with pieces of ham from hock. Makes six to eight servings.

Cheese Grits Casserole

On Sunday, the YMs, our friend Tim, Bob's old colleague and friend Kathleen  and my brother George came to dinner. I decided to have Southern dinner, especially because the New England choices are kind of thin. Tim, who comes from Alabama, was especially pleased.
"I like to know what I'm eating," he said. Apparently, he doesn't always know what he's eating when he comes to our house.
Since the beans had to cook or set for hours, I started them around 2:00. About 5:00, it was time for the grits. I had had my eye on this recipe for several weeks, since I bought the grits for something else. I bought several iterations of sharp cheddar cheese that got eaten or made into some other dish. However, when I opened the cookbook, I couldn't find it. My eyes fell instead on a recipe for grits souffle. I started the grits with the intention of making the souffle. Immediately, I sensed a problem. The directions on the grits box tell you how to make various numbers of servings, not, how many cups of uncooked grits one needs to produce a certain number of cups of cooked grits.
Since time was passing, I winged it. I figured that if one cup of uncooked rice and two cups of water produce two cups of cooked rice, something like that would work for grits. It did. I put two cups of grits and four cups of water in the saucepan. Then I came to my senses . This dish had cheese in it, I said to myself.   I  looked in the index. I hadn't been able to find Cheese Grits Casserole because it was under main dishes at the end, with cheese concoctions.
I scraped the large amount of grits out of the sauce pan into a greased baking dish, mixed in everything but the beaten egg white and set it off to the side while I went to work on the fried chicken. I am not giving you the recipe because I made it once before, sometime in the 1980s. When the chicken was soaking in the milk, I went back to the grits. My husband Bob beat the egg white with a whisk. For some reason I had reached the state of malaise, or fatigue that made taking out the hand beater too much effort.  The whole thing went into the oven and came out onto the plates of the delighted diners.
My son pronounced grits much better as a side dish than as a breakfast food. I have to say I agree. The first time I encountered them was on a ski trip for teenagers in Vermont. I thought it was cream of wheat and put milk and sugar on them. Cheese and butter makes virtually anything downright tasty.

Cheese Grits Casserole

5 cups water
1 cup hominy grits (I used regular grits. I prefer not to use quick cooking anything.)
1/2 pound sharp cheddar cheese, grated
1/2 cup butter
1 egg separated
1 teaspoon salt

1. Bring the water to a boil and gradually stir in the grits. Simmer, covered, twenty five to thirty minutes, stirring often.
2. Stir in the cheese and butter until melted. Spoon a little of the hot mixture not the egg yolk, return to the bulk of the mixture, add the salt and mix. Cool to room temperature.
3 Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
4. Beat the egg white until stiff but not dry and fold into the cooled mixture. Spoon mixture into a greased baking dish and bake, covered, forty minutes. Remove cover, turn oven heat to 375 degrees and bake until top of casserole is slightly browned.
Makes six servings.

Blueberry Upside-Down Squares

Today we travel to the far northern fastnesses of Alaska to bring you Blueberry Upside Down Squares. We had a dinner party for some old friends on Saturday night. I paged through the book for a recipe that could be made ahead of time and wasn't too complicated or require chilling. In the New England section, all I have left is two kinds of plum pudding and mince pies, also Passover cheese blintzes. I'll get to the blintzes at some point, and the plum pudding and mince pies closer to Christmas. But mid September is not the time.
I finally found this, which I highly recommend. Go out to the store right now and buy the last of the highly expensive blueberries. It's a snap, and extremely tasty.
Hmm. While reading the recipe over in order to write this, I just discovered why it was so tasty. The recipe calls for 1/2 a cup of brown sugar and 1 tablespoon of butter. My eyes ran the two lines together, and I thought it said half a cup of butter. A tablespoon is just fine. However, I would advise upping the amount of grated orange peel. I needed two oranges to obtain the required 1/3 of a cup of orange juice, so I grated both the oranges and obtained two to three teaspoons of grated peel. It gave a nice tang to the pastry.
The finished product has a blueberry glaze on top, (if you are successful in inverting it over a plate and getting it to plop down neatly on said plate) and a sort of crispy shortbread on the bottom. I made the squares ahead of time. When I came to get them out of the pan, there was some resistance, so I just left them in there and served them with a mound of whipped cream on top. With all the whipped cream, it really didn't matter what was on top because the diners couldn't see it. Everyone seemed to like the squares, so I hope you will too. Let me know if you make them.
By the way, in my neck of the woods (Washington, DC) blueberries are now being sold in small containers, the size of a container of raspberries. One of these containers seems to hold about one cup of blueberries. I don't think you need to buy two containers (at $4 a clip) to get the proper effect. One will do, in my humble opinion. 

Blueberry Upside-Down Squares

1 1/2 cups blueberries
1/2 cup light brown sugar 
1 tablespoon butter
1/4 cup shortening
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 egg beaten
1 teaspoon (or more) grated orange rind
1 1/4 cups cake flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/3 cup orange juice
whipped cream

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Combine the blueberries, brown sugar and butter in a saucepan. Bring to a boil and simmer five minutes. Turn into a greased eight-inch square baking pan.
3. Cream the shortening and granulated sugar together until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg and orange rind.
4. Sift together the flour, salt and baking powder and add to batter alternately with the orange juice. Spoon batter over berries. Bake forty-five minutes or until done. Invert onto a plate. Cut into squares and serve warm, with whipped cream. Makes six servings. 

Cape Cod Lobster Soup

With Cape Cod Lobster Soup, I am officially finished with the lobster recipes. Unless someone in my dear family requests lobster for a birthday dinner or other celebration, I won't be cooking them again anytime soon. I like lobster well enough. We don't tend to go to places where they serve it, but I would eat it. What I don't like is killing the things. Lobsters are slow diers. In terms of drama and flailing about, they could give  Richard Burton int the role of Hamlet a run for his money.  In this recipe, the cook is supposed to leave the lobster in a shell and let the diners dig it out. So, if you followed those directions, you would have pieces of lobster shell floating around in hot milk.  I used poultry shears and dug out the lobster meat. Doing that made it seem unnecessary to buy a third lobster to get the cup of cubed lobster meat.
Lobsters, although they are supposedly in plentiful supply in the bays of Maine, are expensive. My local purveyor of what Bertie Wooster would call the finny denizens had not lowered the prices any. I just hope some of this money is going to the lobster man.
Another ingredient in the soup is pilot crackers. These are not sold in stores. If you want them, you can order them on the Internet from survivalist stores like. www.pioneerliving.net . Survivalists like them because they have a shelf life of 25 years. One could also use oyster crackers. I would say two cups of oyster crackers equals three large ships' biscuits or pilot crackers. I used Kebler crackers. They worked fine.
I served the soup at a dinner party on Saturday night, where four old friends and shellfish lovers came to talk about what people our age talk about, our trips, our kids, how messed up our past employers are, and the fact that NPR seems to have fired all their editors. The lobster soup was a hit. If you decide to serve it, take the lobster out of the shell. It's unfair to make the diners work so hard for soup. I discarded the tomalley and coral, aka lobster guts.

Cape Cod Lobster Soup

2 one-pound to one-and-one-half-pound live lobsters
5 tablespoons butter
3 large ships biscuits or pilot crackers
4 cups milk, scalded
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 cup diced cooked lobster meat

1. Plunge a knife into the thorax of the lobsters where body and head join, to kill them. Discard head and thorax, but retain tomalley and coral. With a cleaver or large chef's knife, cut tail and claws into small sections.
2. Heat two tablespoons of the butter in a heavy saute pan. Add lobster sections and cook, stirring, until pieces turn pink.
3. Crush the biscuits or crackers and mix to a paste with remaining butter. Mix in the milk and pour over the lobsters in the pan. Season with salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, stirring. Grate in the coral and add tomalley.
4. Add the cooked lobster meat and serve. Makes four servings.