Cheese Blintzes (Gluten Free)

Dinner with  son and daughter-in-law turned out, unintentionally, to be a New York kind of meal, except for the country ham, that is. Dessert was cheese blintzes, another dish that I had read about but never eaten. I knew cheese blintzes were little pancakes with some kind of cheese in the middle, but that was all I knew. I had also heard somewhere that they were to be served with jam. I rummaged through the refrigerator and came out with a jar of blueberry jam of unknown provenance. It didn't have mold in it, so it couldn't be that old. It made a delicious combination.
Blintzes are from Poland, the website theblintzblitz.com tells us. They are traditionally eaten by Jews to celebrate the holiday of Shavuot, which occurs in late May or early June. Shavuot commemorates God giving the Torah to the Nation of Israel at Mount Sinai.
The Torah commanded the Jews to cook meat and dairy separately. Legend says the Jews opted to eat dairy foods. (Maybe they had no meat.) It would certainly have been too hot to butcher animals at that time of year. The Blintz Blitz has more stories about blintzes, including one involving Stalin, which seems to be true.
I made my blintzes gluten free by using Pamela's Baking and Pancake Mix. Pamela can be contacted at www.pamelasproducts.com. if you want to know where her mix can be found. I followed the directions on the package, and so did not use the directions in the recipe, which called for flour.
As a dessert, the blintzes are rendered slightly sweet by the raisins and vanilla mixed in to the cottage cheese.

Cheese Blintzes

Filling:
8 ounces cottage cheese
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg well beaten
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 cup raisins

Batter:
l cup sifted flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup water or milk
2 eggs well beaten

1. To prepare filling, cream the cottage cheese with a fork. (That means squash the lumps out of it.) Stir in the remaining ingredients.
2 to prepare batter, sift together the flour and salt. Stir the water or milk into the beaten eggs and add gradually to flour mixture. Beat until smooth.
3. Butter a seven-inch frying pan or griddle and heat. Drop enough batter into hot pan just to cover bottom. As soon as edges of pancake begin to curl away from side of pan, turn out onto wax paper and spread with a spoonful of the cheese filling. Fold sides over to make a neat package.
4. Make additional blintzes with remaining batter and filling.
5. Place blintzes on hot buttered frying pan and fry until browned. Turn and fry on other side. Serve at once. Makes six servings.

Chicken Loaf (Gluten Free)

 Chicken loaf is like meat loaf. Diced chicken, bread crumbs,eggs. No onion, probably could have benefited from same. One might wonder, why chicken loaf . Ehh, why not? It's not grand cuisine, but I guess it makes a change from chicken breast. It is good cold in sandwiches and certainly not difficult to make. The only advice I would give is to chill your cooked chicken ahead of time before dicing it up for the loaf. This makes the chicken firmer. I ended up with lumps of shredded chicken which I had to then redice. I did not get around to making the mushroom sauce, which probably would have zapped the dish up a bit. We had this for a weeknight dinner for the two of us. There were no comments one way or another. "A bit on the bland side," says Bob

Chicken Loaf

1 cup soft bread crumbs (I used gluten free bread. I have seen gluten free bread crumbs at Giant Food in Friendship Heights in DC.)
1 1/2 cups warm milk
2 eggs lightly beaten
3 cups diced cooked chicken
1/2 cup chicken broth
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon celery seeds
Tabasco sauce to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
2. Place the bread crumbs in a bowl and pour the milk over. Let stand five minutes.
3. Stir in the eggs. Combine the chicken and broth and add to crumb mixture. Season with the salt, pepper, celery seeds and Tabasco.
4. Pack into a greased loaf pan and bake forty-five to sixty minutes, or until set. Serve with mushroom sauce. Makes four to six servings.

Chipped Beef Rarebit

Boy, just when I was getting what might be known as a following for this blog, I had to spend the first two weekends of May at my high school reunion, which actually helped boost readership, and then in Charleston, South Carolina with my cousins. Then for the remainder of May, I wasn't even in the US at all, having given it up for a trip to the White Cliffs of Albion, aka the soon-to-be disunited kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland and Wales.
So, sorry, readers, even though all you ever seem to read is about Rival Soup, Avocado Meatloaf, and Maple Frosting, I am grateful that anyone reads at all. I am back in the kitchen, wooden spoon in hand, ready to take on the challenges presented by the The New York Times Heritage Cookbook, the modern agricultural-industrial complex and the dietary guidelines established by my dear family. (No eggplant, rhubarb or shellfish, no how, no way.) Every so often, I threaten my husband with eggplant-rhubarb-crab pie or some such delicacy.)
So, Bob and I came back from London on Saturday evening, unable to even turn on the car radio, or at least tune it to an actual station that might give us the news. On the one hand, we didn't have to experience the kind of horrific headlines we heard in April when we arrived ten minutes after the Boston Marathon bombing. On the other hand, we like to listen to the news. On Monday, I sat down and made up a shopping list. We had eaten out Saturday night and Sunday, and clearly this couldn't go on.
I was back to finding things that could be eaten by two people in the course of a normal dinner, so hence, the Chipped Beef Rarebit. I would like to stop here and give you a couple of paragraphs from Wikipedia about why Rarebit is called Rarebit, the history of Rarebit, etc., but I am using Bob's new computer, which is equipped with some excrescence called Windows 8, another plot by those who invent computers to make them impossible for the rest of us to operate.  I cannot figure out how to open another screen to consult Wikipedia.
Now I am on my computer. Wikipedia posits that rarebit is a corruption of rabbit. Welsh rabbit may have been a slur against the Welsh, who were "notoriously poor," Wikipedia says. Poor people in England could not afford butcher's meat, so they ate rabbit. Poor people in Wales were too poor even to afford rabbits, or possibly the bullets to hunt them with, so a melted cheese dish was their rabbit.
This calls for jars of chipped beef. The last time I made something that called for chipped beef, which might have been a year or so ago, chipped beef still came in jars. Well, now, it comes in plastic packets and can be found in the processed meats section. Maybe the meat barons are preparing to reposition chipped beef from some poverty strickened food that the aged, like me, used to eat at school, to some sort of delicacy, like swiss dried beef. Stay tuned.
This is the kind of meal you might want to eat on a cold night, but it made a good dinner on a wet evening after I came back from attempting to ride the horse. He turned out to be lame so it was just an attempt rather than an actuality. Bob made dinner. There is nothing in this recipe that needs particular insight. When it says do not boil or the eggs may curdle, it means it, so watch the heat. That's about the only thing that needs to be emphasized.

Chipped Beef Rarebit

3 tablespoons butter
one packet chipped beef
1 teaspoon prepared mustard, preferably Dijon or Dusseldorf
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon chili powder
4 cups Italian plum tomatoes
freshly ground black pepper to taste
Tabasco sauce to taste
3 cups grated sharp Cheddar Cheese
3 eggs well beaten
4 slices buttered toast

1. Heat the butter in a large saucepan. Pull the beef apart with the fingers and add beef to the butter. Cook, stirring, until meat frizzles. Add the mustard, Worcestershire, chili powder, tomatoes, pepper and Tabasco. Do not add salt. Simmer about thirty minutes to make a sauce.
2. Remove the sauce from the heat and stir in the cheese. When the cheese melts, add the eggs. Cook, stirring, just to the boiling point when the rarebit thickens. Do not boil or the eggs may curdle. Serve hot over toast. Makes four servings.

Sour Cream Pastry Turnovers

I made these for the second dinner party of the weekend. After the unexpected dinner party of Saturday night, my son and daughter-in-law called and said they would come to dinner on Sunday. Son had just gotten back from another European trip on behalf of the United States Government. Bob, my husband, had instructed him to bring back fancy chocolate from a specific chocolate shop so we were eagerly awaiting that.
I enjoy cooking, but spending the entire weekend cooking isn't that much fun. I kind of had trouble getting myself in gear. After church and lunch, I sat down with the Sunday papers. I don't know what it is about modern life. My parents got the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune and read most of them. My mother sat down with the Times crossword puzzle around 10:30 every Sunday, and usually had it finished before lunch. I'm lucky if I read a couple of stories off the front page.
Bob kept politely prompting me to start the pastry, since it was supposed to chill for two hours. Finally, around 3 o'clock, I got to work.
Now, pastry is not my thing. I can never get it to hang together. Before I started this cooking marathon, I just used to add way too much water, make it into a mushy mass and then piece it into a pie pan. Sometime before I started this cooking blogging thing, I read a statement in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in which Julia Child said, basically, follow the directions. Don't whine and fuss when things don't come out right, follow the directions. I have tried to take these words to heart.
As you can see by the ingredients, the directions say nothing about water. The pastry is supposed to hang together using no more moistening than half a cup of sour cream. Well, I mixed it all together, and what I got was what the cookbook authors call "coarse oatmeal."-flour with flaky bits of butter and flour mixed in.  I put an ice cube into a tablespoon of water, because pastry directions always say add a small about of cold water. I put the tablespoonful of water into the coarse oatmeal-like pastry dough and mixed. It was not noticeably more together. Just before I was about to add a quarter of a cup of cold water, I remembered Julia. Okay, I would try it without the water. Obviously it must be possible somehow.
I laid down two sheets of waxed paper to roll the dough out on, and dumped the snowy, fragmented pile of dough onto the sheets, and laid a second pair of waxed paper sheets on top. I then began to roll out the dough with a rolling pin.
It actually worked. It was not entirely what you might think of as dough. It was a little flaky around the edges, but in general, it hung together. I rolled it out into the 18-by-9 inch rectangle as instructed, wrapped it in aluminum foil and put it in the refrigerator.
Two hours later, after washing the kitchen floor, which badly needed it, I went back to the pastry. I put down more waxed paper and started to roll it out. Now, I would advise cutting the refrigerated dough in half and rolling out each half individually. That way, the pastry chef would have space to roll the dough out to a thinner consistency.
My dough was too thick. The instructions say to make many small turnovers. I elected to make one large one per person. I put a small metal bowl on the dough, and cut around it with a knife. I ended up with five turnovers. Daughter-in-law got a second one. Some of the dough found its way into my mouth as well.
I filled the dough circles with the apple slices, sugar and cinnamon. Note that the apples do not have to be cooked. They cook inside the turnovers. They were well received, and I braved inflammation to eat one myself. I should have taken more care to seal the edges with a fork, but I didn't. There was a certain amount of leakage, but it was okay.

Sour Cream Pastry Turnovers

Pastry:
2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup butter
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup sour cream
Filling:
2 tablespoons flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
4 tart green apples, peeled, cored and thinly sliced
1/4 cup butter

1. To prepare pastry, sift the flour and salt into a bowl. With a pastry blender or two knives, cut in the butter until mixture resembles course oatmeal. Mix in the sugar and sour cream.
2. Roll out the dough on a lightly floured pastry cloth or board into an approximate 18-by-9-inch rectangle. Fold lengthwise into three. (What I interpret this to mean is, fold it like a business letter going into a business envelope.) Wrap in aluminum foil and chill two hours.
3. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
4. To prepare filling, combine the flour, sugar and cinnamon and toss with the apples.
5. Roll out the chilled pastry to one-eighth-inch-thickness on a lightly floured pastry cloth or board. (Or use waxed paper.) Cut into four-and-one-half-inch rounds.
6. Place a tablespoon or two of apple mixture in the middle of each round. Dot with the butter. Moisten the edges of each round, fold over and pinch with a fork to seal.
7. Place on an ungreased baking sheet and bake twenty minutes, or until golden and done. Makes one dozen to fourteen.

Clam-Stuffed Baked Rock Fish (Striped Bass) Gluten Free

For the main course for our dinner with the yms, I skipped the Northeast and went to the South. What's left in the Northeast for meat is mostly game and something called jellied veal, which I plan to make when the weather gets hot. In the fish department, what's left is mainly all shellfish recipes. Bob is getting testy about not being able to eat what the rest of the guests eat, so I avoided the two recipes for clam pie, the clam souffle and the gefilte fish, which is not shell fish. On the first page of the fish section of the South, I discovered Clam-Stuffed Baked Rock Fish (Striped Bass.) The stuffing could be served separately, Bob could eat the fish. It was all good.
I went to our neighborhood fish store, The Fishery, to get the striped bass. I had the fish guy gut it, chop off the head and tail and take off the scales with something that looked like a curry comb for a horse. I was pretty sure we had a can of clams left over from my other adventures in shellfish, but I had to find it. The closet in our kitchen where we keep canned goods, etc, is jammed with Trader Joe's Pickles, Trader Joe's
Mustard, boxes of pasta that we no longer eat because it isn't gluten free, etc. etc. I moved cans of tomatoes, bags of rice and bottles of vinegar around to no avail. Finally, Bob waded in and discovered the canned clams.
The stuffing is nothing special. It has all the same ingredients as turkey stuffing for Thanksgiving, except for the clams. I used gluten free bread to make the recipe gluten free. (At Thanksgiving, you can get gluten free stuffing at Whole Foods.) I put the stuffing into a small baking dish and covered it with aluminum foil before putting it in the oven. The fish got two slices of bacon laid over it. I did not make gashes and fit the bacon in the gashes. Intellectually, I understand what the author is talking about here, but I can't really picture it. If you can, send us a picture when you make this.
Aside from Bob asking plaintively what he was going to eat when he saw the clam stuffing, everything was fine. He snapped out of his deprived routine and made  excellent rice pilaf. Daughter-in-law was impressed. "Two sides!" she said.
"Hey, we're all about the sides," I replied.
As seafood recipes go, this one is fairly cheap. I think I paid around $38 for a four  pound fish, sufficient to serve five people. Beats crab all hollow. This is no more difficult than your Thanksgiving turkey and looks impressive. If you want to move away from eating meat, but are concerned about putting pressure on the fisheries,  striped bass (rock fish) are rated best choice, according to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch. There are large populations of the fish.

Clam-Stuffed Baked Rock Fish (Striped Bass)

1 eight pound or two four-pound rock fish, heads and tails removed
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1/2 cup butter
1 onion, finely chopped
2 tablespoons finely chopped green pepper
1 rib celery, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
2 cups shucked soft-shelled clams with liquor (clam juice)
1 teaspoon plus one tablespoon lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon oregano (I used more)
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
8 slices stale white bread, finely cubed (I used gluten free bread.)
8 slices bacon.

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Season the fish inside and outside with salt and pepper.
3. Melt half the butter and saute the onion, green pepper, celery and garlic in it until tender. Add the clams and liquor and cook until edges of clams just curl.
4. Add one teaspoon of the lemon juice, the oregano, parsley, bread and salt and pepper to taste.
5. Stuff the cavity of the fish with the stuffing. Sew or skewer to close. Make gashes on top of fish and fit the bacon in the gashes. Set fish in a greased baking dish.
6. Sprinkle with remaining lemon juice and dot with remaining butter.
7. Bake about one and one-quarter hours for an eight-pound fish and forty-five minutes for two four-pounders, or until fish flakes. Makes eight servings.

Roast Young Capon with Wild Rice and Almond Stuffing

A capon is a castrated rooster. It used to be available in the supermarket when I was a child. Now, apparently, you have to go someplace like Eastern Market in DC, or a "heritage poultry producer" to get one. I just went with the Purdue Oven-Stuffer-Roaster. Capons are more juicy and tender than regular poultry. They are not aggressive, so they are a real addition to the chicken yard. Although I hate to plug part of the agribusiness industrial complex, Oven-Stuffer-Roasters are pretty tender and juicy themselves.
As far as the wild rice, I don't know where ours came from. Bob dug it out of the depths of our pantry. I do my best to clear the pantry out, either by outright throwing things away that are way beyond the pull date, or by eating them. But it's a losing battle. I imagine you can get wild rice at Whole Foods or your local health food store.
If this dish catches your fancy, you should know a couple of things. A. Wild rice takes forever to cook, at least an hour. One cooks it like regular rice, in boiling water. (B) Capons, and Oven-Stuffer-Roasters are big. They take longer to cook. So if you want to eat at 7:00 or 7:30, start the wild rice around 3:30.
This recipe would be a good option for Easter dinner, or even Thanksgiving if you had only a few guests. It is time consuming, but is not fussy. You stuff the chicken, put it in the oven and set the timer. We had it for an unexpected dinner party on Saturday night. I had invited my brother to come over and see Bob's photos of Italy. Then Bob invited three more friends, so I had to jump to and make appetizers and dessert.
I kind of blitzed out on the fact that wild rice takes forever to cook, and didn't put the chicken in the oven until around 6:00. I cranked the heat up to 400 degrees. We ate around 8:30, which made Bob nervous. If I had had any intention of taking the chicken out early, it was quashed by Tim, who inquired what the meat thermometer had to say, and announced at 7:45 that the indicator had not reached the required temperature for poultry.
At 8:30, after the oysters in cream, the temperature inside the chicken had reached 180 degrees as required and we ate. The guests were all compliments and we had leftover chicken to make creamed chicken Parmesan. Yum.

Roast Young Capon with Wild Rice and Almond Stuffing

1 five-pound to six-pound capon
8 tablespoons butter
salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 clove garlic, finely minced
1 large onion, finely chopped
1/2 cup finely diced green pepper
1/2 cup finely diced celery
1/2 cup sliced mushrooms
2 cups cooked wild rice
1/2 cup toasted almonds
1/4 teaspoon ground sage
1/4 teaspoon thyme

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
2. Rub the capon inside and outside with two tablespoons of the butter. Sprinkle inside with salt and pepper.
3. Heat four tablespoons of the butter in a skillet and cook the garlic, onion, green pepper and celery in it, stirring, until onion is translucent.
4. In a separate skillet, cook the mushrooms in remaining butter until mushrooms are wilted.
5. Combine the wild rice, onion mixture, mushrooms, almonds, sage and thyme. Add salt and pepper. Stuff the capon with the mixture. Truss capon.
6. Place the capon, breast side up, on a rack in the roasting pan and place in the oven. Immediately reduce the oven heat to 350 degrees. Bake capon, basting frequently with pan juices, twenty to twenty-five minutes to the pound. Six servings.

Cazuela (A Casserole Pudding) Gluten Free

Cazuela means cooking pot in Spanish, according to Wikkipedia. Recipes seem to be for a kind of chicken stew using squash or pumpkin, cooked in the pot. Apparently, this kind of cazuela is a Chilean speciality. If the searcher uses his or her brains and puts in Puerto Rican dessert, one discovers almost the identical recipe that appears in the NYT Heritage Cookbook. The brains come in where we make some connections, as I used to say at school. The recipe sounds Spanish, and is from New York. Who spoke Spanish in New York in the 50s and 50s? The Puerto Ricans.  So, rather than a stew with squash or pumpkin, you have a dessert of squash or pumpkin.

One of the lessons of this blog activity is, things that have been overlooked can be really good, like cazuela, the dessert.

Over the years. I looked at the first couple of lines of the recipe and turned the page. Canned pureed sweet potatoes and canned pureed pumpkin. Meh. But we are getting down to the wire. I was not going to make, for example, plum pudding. It is also a somewhat stick to the ribs kind of dessert, not something for the hot months. Although it has been warming up in recent days Saturday, it turned cold again, so I figured cazuela would be a perfect dessert for our unexpected dinner party.

If you are reading this, you may be scratching your head and saying, "Canned pumpkin? You can't get canned pumpkin in April."  Correct, gentle reader. But you can get butternut squash, used as a substitute for pumpkin by a gentleman who runs a wonderful Afgani restaurant in the Virginia suburbs. And, if he can use it, so can I!

Saturday afternoon after riding and lunch, I went to the fish store for Sunday night's dinner, and the oysters, and thence to Safeway for the rest of the Saturday meal. When I got home, I set the butternut squash to steaming, using a metal bowl turned upside down in a saucepan. The squash rested on the bowl and steamed nicely.

In a leisurely sort of way, I made the dessert and put it in the oven, then, around five o'clock,  turned my attention to the main course, which was chicken stuffed with wild rice.

Wild rice? Holy shit. Wild rice takes hours to cook. I should have started it along with the butternut squash. Also, the chicken, which was a Perdue Oven-Stuffer-Roaster, not a capon, but basically the same thing, was a hefty little number, weighing in at some five pounds. The instructions said cook for 25 minutes per pound. We wouldn't eat until after 9. Well, we ate the main course around 8:30, which was remarked on by my brother, the rest of the guests being too polite to mention it. I turned up the oven to 400 degrees and speeded up the cooking.

Back to the cazuela. I cut the recipe in half because we did not need to serve ten people. One butternut squash and a large can of sweet potatoes did the trick. This is definitely a dish made for the Cuisineart.The directions say put the cooked pumpkin and potatoes through a "food ricer." I have only the vaguest idea what that might be. Use the Cuisineart.

 Buzz up the sweet potatoes and the squash and mix all the rest in. It has a sweet taste because of the sugar and the coconut milk. Because the spices are infused rather than just added, the seasoning is

rather, shall we say, subtle. In the future, if I ever made this again, and I might if I had leftover sweet potatoes and canned pumpkin, I would just add the powdered spices and zap it up a bit.

  This recipe requires parchment paper. Parchment paper is stuff that comes on a roll, like wax paper, and is used occasionally for baking. You can get it in the aisle along with the aluminum foil, plastic wrap and wax paper. That is, of course, if you don't have plantain leaves, having not returned from the islands recently.

This is what a baking pan lined with parchment paper should

look like.

Cazuela

4 cups pureed fresh or canned sweet potatoes

4 cups canned pureed pumpkin or pureed fresh pumpkin

1 cup coconut milk

1/4 cup butter

3 eggs, lightly beaten

2 cups sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup flour (I used rice flour, which is gluten free.)

1/2 cup water

1 small piece fresh ginger, mashed or one-half teaspoon dried ginger

1 four-inch-long stick cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon aniseed

5 cloves

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Combine the pureed potatoes and pureed pumpkin with the coconut milk, butter, eggs, sugar, salt and flour. Blend well.

3. Combine the remaining ingredients  in a saucepan and bring the boil. Simmer five minutes and strain into pumpkin mixture. Blend well.

4. Butter an earthenware casserole or baking dish. Line it with plantain leaves that have been rinsed and dried or with parchment paper. Butter leaves or paper generously. Pour in pumpkin mixture and fold leaves or paper over the top.

5. Bake about one and one-half hours. Let cool completely before unmolding. Remove leaves or paper and serve. Makes then servings.