Tuna Stuffed Peppers a la Sarda

I have always had a prejudice against cooked tuna. Anyone who attended low budget camps and programs in the 60s will understand this. In fact, my husband has been begging for years for tuna noodle casserole, and I have said, olvedate, or words to that effect. That means fuggedaboutit in Spanish. It's pronounced ol-ve-da-tay. So, Jean Hewitt induced me to eat cooked tuna in peppers, and it is surprisingly good. I didn't get dinner started until after 7:30, due to having to walk the dog. The dog, like everyone else around this place who is not an adult child, is old. He has a wheelchair. (No joke.) It's a little cart that his hind legs go into, with shafts that run along his belly and a yoke type thing across his back. But, he still tools around the neighborhood, and since spring is here, we went out and enjoyed the azaleas and the dogwood and the tulips.
The recipe starts out with sauteeing 4 cloves of garlic in oil, and then throwing out the sauteed garlic, and having mildly flavored oil. I think it would have been even better if I had just chopped up the garlic and sauteed it. Then you mix up bread crumbs, anchovies, tuna, a cup of canned tomatoes, capers, basil, pine nuts, and currants and stuff it all into the peppers. Bake for an hour while you do something else, like pick up the two weeks worth of newspapers that have accumulated in the dining room.


8 large green peppers
4 cloves garlic
olive oil
1 can anchovy fillets, chopped
1 1/2 cups soft bread crumbs
2 seven ounce cans tuna fish, flaked
1 cup peeled seeded chopped tomatoes
1/2 cup capers, drained
1/4 cup finely chopped parsley
1 teaspoon chopped fresh basil
1/4 cup pignoli
1/2 cup currants

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

1. Cut a slice of the stem end of each pepper and remove core and seeds. Set peppers in a baking dish.
2. Saute the garlic in one-half cup oil until brown. Remove garlic and discard.
3. Add the anchovies and bread crumbs to the boil and saute briefly.
4. Add the remaining ingredients. Mix well and use to fill peppers. Spoon a little oil over each one. Bake, uncovered, about one hour or until tender.

Blender Hollandaise

Last night, we had salmon, just salmon, not cookbook salmon, and I made Blender Hollandaise. Why anyone would make regular hollandaise, messing around with a double boiler, and all the rest of it, is beyond me. This took about four and a half seconds. It isn't perhaps as thick as regular hollandaise should be, but it is amazingly delicious. Why wouldn't it be? It has half a cup of butter in it. I ate what was left with a spoon.

3 egg yolks
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 cup butter, melted

1. Warm the blender container.
2. Place the egg yoks, lemon juice, salt and cayenne in container. Cover. Switch the blender on and off.
3. Turn blender to high speed and add the butter in a steady stream. Keep warm by standing container in hot water.
4. Makes about one cup.

Lime Marmalade

I had intended spring vacation to be marmalade week, and thus bought a sack of limes. However, time and events got ahead of me, and the limes sat on the kitchen stool for a week. Finally, Thursday night, irritated by the fact that the limes were still sitting there, potentially rotting, I opened up the cookbook and started chopping.
Now, I am entranced by the names of foods. When I was in sixth grade, I used to check out the F-G volume of the World Book Encyclopedia during study hall and drool over the entry on food. In 1973 the first time I went to England, I encountered egg mayonnaise on a menu. Egg Mayonnaise! What a wondrous sounding dish. It sounded delicious and fancy and sophisticated. Well, at the bottom of a mountain in Scotland, I stopped at a sort of food stand that was selling the fabulous egg mayonnaise sandwiches. I was so disappointed to find that it was only egg salad. Not only that, but some git had put margarine on the Wonder Bread they used to make the sandwich.
And so it was with lime marmalade. Back at the beginning of this enterprise, in February, when I started it all by making grapefruit marmalade, I consulted my New York cousin on how to get the stuff to jam. She told me that her mother, my mother's sister, (not the one who shot a tiger, but the other one) used to make marmalade from one of those ladies' auxilliary cookbooks, sold as fundraisers. "She even made lime marmalade," said Cricket.
"Wow," I thought. "lime marmalade!"
I imagined it would be lime green, the color of that horrible mint jelly restaurants used to desecrate perfectly decent lamb with. I imagined beautiful, artistic, thin slices of lime floating in the jelly. And I imagined it would taste....ethereal.
So, I was definitely looking forward to lime marmalade. And, you have to admit, it won hands down over the four other marmalade recipes on the same page, New England Carrot Marmalade, Cucumber Marmalade, Quince Marmalade, (What the hell are quinces, anyhow?), and Tomato Marmalade. There is also Rhubarb Marmalade. (That goes into the head cheese category of things I'd better make when husband is out of town. He despises rhubarb.) In fact, there are two recipes for Rhubarb Marmalade, and Lemon Marmalade. Now, that sounds good. Hmm.
Also I had hit upon using these jams and jellies as a way to market the blog. I would get stick on labels and write the blog address on them. Then I would stick them on the jars. If some dude from Ecuador could get 9,000 readers a month for his blog that consisted of pictures of everything he ate every day, as reported by the NY Times, somebody must be interested in this besides my cousin Cricket, my one devoted reader.
Be warned, lime marmalade takes time. The stuff has to sit over two nights. Thursday night, I cut all the limes in chunks and ran them through the food processor. Then, I measured the resulting, somewhat lime green mass, and did multiplication, which you do in everyday life!! Sorry, as a teacher, one of my daily struggles is to try to tell my students that there is a point to all this information we are attempting to convey to them. I multiplied the six cups of lime moosh by three cups of water and got 18 cups of water. I added same to the lime and let all sit in the big ceramic bread bowl on the counter.
Friday night, after we got home from the cabaret at church, and dinner, I boiled the stuff for twenty minutes, and at 5 to midnight, put it back in its ceramic bowl and went to bed. On Saturday afternoon, after forgetting to buy five pounds of sugar at the first grocery store I went to, and buying it at the second, I was ready to boil.
I also needed jars. On the metal shelves in the corner of our basement, neatly arranged by my husband, are five boxes of mason jars. Or, upon further investigation, shall we say, five boxes that once contained mason jars. Shit. That's somewhere in the vicinity of 45 jars gone missing, over 25 years. Well, if you put it that way, it'll happen. The recipe said it makes 20 six ounce jars of marmalade. (It didn't, but it made enough to fill way more than the number of six ounce jars I had. So, I combed through the shelves, and found some 12 ounce jars, dragged them upstairs, washed them and plunged them into a boiling water bath to kill all the lurking microbs.
By now, having added a huge quantity of sugar, the lime mass was no longer green. It was instead a dark, marmalade color, sort of a browny orange. Disappointment number one. So, I boiled, and boiled and boiled. What these recipes leave out of the cooking instructions is the phrase, "for several hours." Once you know that, making jam, etc is a breeze.
I also learned a new technique for determining whether the stuff is done, or not. Listen carefully, children, because I'm going to explain what the cookbook was talking about. What it says is, boil..."until a drop chilled on a plate leaves a track when pushed by the finger." What that means is, you glop a little on a plate, and put it in the refrigerator. Clear there. Then, you take it out and run your finger through it. When it is done, the marmalade stays parted, like the waters of the Red Sea. You have a little road through your marmalade.
Around 7:00 pm, I ladled the marmalade into various sized hot jars, burning myself at least once in the process, poured melted paraffin over the top, and cleaned up. It does not taste ethereal. It is more tart than grapefruit marmalade, because limes have more of a distinct flavor. If you want to know how many six ounce jars this yields, I would say, around 15.

.
Lime Marmalade

12 large or 18 medium-sized limes, washed
sugar

1. Two days before, put the limes through a food processor. Measure the resulting pulp and add three cups water for each cup pulp. Set aside overnight in a pottery or ceramic bowl.
2. Next day, transfer the mixture to a kettle and bring to a boil. Simmer gently twenty minutes. Let stand overnight again in the bowl.
3. Next day, measure the mixture into a large kettle and add one cup sugar for each cup lime mixture. Bring to a boil, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Boil rapidly, stirring to prevent sticking, until the marmalade sheets from the spoon, a drop chilled on a plate leaves a track when pushed by the finger, or the mixture registers 220 degress on a candy thermometer.
4. Let cool in the kettle about twenty minutes and then ladle into hot sterilized jars. Top with two thin layers of melted paraffin and allow to coll. Cap and store in a cool, dark, dry place.

Tacos and Taco Sauce

From Minnesota, we travel to New Mexico. These tacos are not terribly spicy. In fact, the taco meat has no spices at all, only oregano. Also, the recipes call for fresh tortillas, not dried tortillas, so the tacos do not stand up. The recipe says, cook five minutes or until crisp. They were not crisp after five minutes, but the cheese was melted, so I took them out.
Cooking the meat was fairly standard, but filling the tacos was something else. The tortillas were dipped in hot melted shortening to soften them. This required a pair of tongs and a certain amount of speed, because if I left the tortillas in the shortening too long, they would become crisp. Tortillas had to be flicked out of the hot shortening, and put in the baking pan, with a glass to prop them up so they didn't flop over. Then I had to fill them, and flick the next one out of the shortening. Flick, fill, spread. Hunt for the tongs. Flick, fill, spread, fry. Hunt for the spoon.
Soon, all nine tacos were filled, and put in the oven. The sauce just required mixing up the ingredients, although I did heat it.

Tacos

1 pound ground beef
1 small onion finely chopped
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
2 large tomatoes, peeled and chopped
2 teaspoons oregano
shortening
9 corn tortillas
2 cups shredded sharp Cheddar cheese
1 small head lettuce finely shredded
1 recipe taco sauce

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
2. Fry the meat in a skillet until well browned and cooked. Add the onion, garlic, tomatoes and oregeno and cook five minutes longer.
2. Melt shortening to a depth of one-quarter inch in a skillet and heat. Dip the tortillas in the shortening just to soften. Do not allow to become crisp.
4. Fold tortillas in half. Fill with meat mixture and the cheese and place on a baking tray. Heat in the oven five minutes or until crisp. Top with the lettuce and serve with taco sauce.

Taco Sauce

1 eight ounce can tomato sauce
1 clove garlic, finely chopped.
1/2 teaspoon cider vinegar
1/2 teaspoon oregano
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
3 teaspoons chili powder

Combine all ingredients.

Boiled Beef with Stappa (Mashed Rutabagas)

Since this dish is from Minnesota, I'm guessing that stappa is the Norwegian word for rutabagas. If you know better, weigh in with the ethnic derivation of stappa. Rutabagas may have gotten a bad rap. They're not bad. This book contains a very good cream soup which I foisted off as potato soup one Thanksgiving. My son, who at that point was 22, informed me graciously that he wouldn't not eat it, meaning that he would eat it. Somebody must cook the things. They continue to sell them in the grocery store along with parsnips. Now, I can tell you about them. The British are very fond of parsnips, and french fry them, which actually renders them tasty.
Actually, there are three more rutabaga recipes in this book, which theoretically will be passed on to you lucky readers in time. To whit, rutabaga pie, crisp rutabaga salad and cheese scalloped rutabagas. So, perhaps in time, the rutabaga mystery will unfold.
This dish was not a hit with my family. The general consensus was, why did I want to mess up perfectly good mashed potatoes with rutabagas.
"I don't like this much," Son said, laying down the law as usual. (Isn't it lucky for him he's going to be a lawyer?)
The meat was a challenge . The book called it beef shin. The butcher at the grocery store knew not of shin. "It's for boiled beef," I said.
"You're not giving me much to work with," he said.
Finally I said brisket.
"Do you have brisket that isn't corned?" He indicated it in the meat case.
A caution. The recipe says simmer for two hours and a half. Make sure you do. That may have been part of the problem, since the meat was tough. Probably horseradish sauce would be a good idea too.

Boiled Beef with Stappa

1 large beef shin (brisket)
3 carrots, quartered
2 ribs of celery
salt to taste
20 peppercorns
2 rutabagas, peeled and thickly sliced
3 large potatoes scrubbed
Fresh ground pepper to taste
1/4 tablespoon ground ginger
4 tablespoons butter

1. Place the beef shin in a kettle and add water to cover. Add the carrots, celery, salt and peppercorns. Bring to a boil, skim the surface to remove foam and scum and partly cover. Simmer about two hours.
2. Add the rutabagas and potatoes and cook until tender, thirty minutes or longer. When the rutabagas and potatoes are tender, remove them. Peel the potatoes and put both vegetables through a food ricer. Season with salt, pepper and ginger and stir in the butter. Serve with beef shin, sliced.

Orange Marmalade

Since it's spring vacation, I had enough free time to consider more marmalade. This book is full of marmalade recipes, so I figured I had better seize the day. This recipe had a terminology problem, or I had a terminology problem. The first instruction was to remove the rind in strips from four oranges and two lemons. I interpreted this to mean the peel, and set about removing same with my thumbs. After I had six naked citrus fruits on the counter, my husband wandered over, and explained that what they probably meant was to remove the colored part with a peeler.
Marmalade not being a delicate dish, I pressed on. Put the one third of strips (blobs) into an electric blender with 1/2 cup of water, it said. Well, what you end up with is a lot of white stuff, and little flakes of the rind. Use the food processor, husband suggested. In order to get the white stuff and flakes out of the mixer, I added more water.
After food processing the rest of the rind, which became rind by using a sharp knife to remove the white stuff, the book said to put it in a sauce pan and boil it for twenty minutes. Since what I had was mildly moist bits of rind, which was clearly not going to boil, I added five cups of water.
The next instruction was to scoop the pulp out of the oranges and lemons. Since you can't scoop pulp out of a naked orange, I sliced them and popped the slices into the water-peel mixture with the sugar.
The final ingredient was 1/2 bottle of liquid fruit pectin. Now, liquid fruit pectin may be available in the summer, in canning season, but, not in late March. So, I boiled. The boiling went on most of the afternoon, during dinner, and after dinner, to no avail. Today, I went out in the morning, planning to return and boil in the afternoon. When I came back, lo and behold, what did I find, but the completed marmalade, ready to put in jars and cover with melted paraffin.
I don't know how this recipe was really supposed to work out. It doesn't seem like it called for enough liquid to really make marmalade. But here it is, and if anyone tries it and gets it to work in the manner intended by the author, let us all know.

Orange Marmalade

4 large oranges
2 lemons
1 1/2 cups water
1/8 teaspoon baking soda
5 cups of sugar
1/2 bottle of liquid pectin

1. Remove the rind in strips from the oranges and lemons. (Rind means just the colored part. Use a potato peeler.)
2. Place one third of the strips in the container of an electric blender. (Use a food processor.) Add one-half cup of water, cover and blend on high speed seven to ten seconds. Pour into a saucepan.
3. Repeat the process twice, using the remaining fruit rinds and water. Combine all the blended mixture in the saucepan.
4. Add the baking soda. Bring the mixture to a boil and simmer twenty minutes.
5. Scoop the pulp and juice from the oranges and lemons and add to the saucepan. Cook ten minutes longer. Add the sugar, bring to a full rolling boil and boil one minute.
6. Remove from the heat and add the pectin. To keep fruit rinds from floating, let marmalade cool ten minutes before bottling.
7. Pour into hot sterilized jelly glasses. Pour two thin layers of melted paraffin over. Store in a cool dark, dry place.
Makes 5 to six six ounce glasses.

Avocado Pecan Bread

I actually made this a week ago, and did not have time to report to you. It's one of those "One Hundred Ways to Use Avocados" type of recipes. One imagines that 50 or 60 years ago, when Southern California had actual towns and not a collection of shopping centers tied together with freeways, that the Southern California Avocado Growers had a competition for new ways to use avocados. All the avocado growers' wives beavered away, and developed recipes. This one, and Avocado Meatloaf, were handed down to us.
If you think about it, you can put any kind of fruit or vegetable into a sweet bread. It just can't have too strong a taste. Avocados do not have a particularly strong taste, so this bread is akin to any other sweet bread, like banana bread. Except it doesn't taste of bananas. It does retain the color of avocados; i.e. it's green. It would be a good thing to serve on Saint Patrick's Day, if you don't like Irish Soda Bread, which I don't.
I took it to school and served it to my colleagues. These are either an incredibly polite bunch of people, or else they don't habitually ask questions. Not until the 7th person I offered it to did someone inquire as to why it was green. They seemed to like it. My family, as has been mentioned, are all on diets, so I wanted to get it out of the house.
This is easy to make. It does call for buttermilk, which I did not have. However, in some Craig Claiborne cookbook of the 60s, I learned the trick of making sour milk by adding a teaspoon of vinegar. So, if you don't want to have most of a quart of buttermilk cluttering up your refrigerator for 3 weeks until you finally throw it away, use vinegar.

Avocado Pecan Bread

2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg lightly beaten
1/2 cup buttermilk or sour milk
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1 medium sized avocado, mashed

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and sugar.
3. Combine the remaining ingredients and add to dry mixture; mix. Pour into a greased 9-5 by 3 inch loaf pan. Bake one hour. Remove to a rack for cooling.