Labor Day Recipes

 

For the family cookbook I'll probably never get around to compiling, here is a Labor Day barbecue recipe that we love. Also for Independence Day cookouts along with the salmon that my wannabe New England side loves.

Barbecue Spareribs prepared following Judith Huxley's superb method in her Table for Eight...

 But following the recipes in Mary Emmerlings' American Country Cooking for the sauces...

I begin 3 days ahead by making the Mopping Sauce:

Combine and simmer over low heat in non-aluminum saucepan for one hour, stirring when you think about it:

2 sticks unsalted butter

4 cups apple cider vinegar

2 cups vegetable oil [I now use avocado oil]

2 cups fresh lemon juice

2 cups Worcestershire sauce

1 cup prepared mustard

1 medium onion, minced

2-3 garlic cloves, minced [germ removed]

1 tablespoon cayenne pepper

2 tablespoons salt

1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper

That is the only sauce we mop the ribs with while cooking and if it's just RH and I eating we no longer make the sauce below to serve with it. I'm including it here because everyone loves it.

Barbecue Sauce for Eating, makes 2 quarts:

Melt 1 stick unsalted butter in non-aluminum saucepan over moderate heat and sauté 1 medium onion, minced. Then add 1 garlic clove, minced.

Add: 2/3 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons prepared mustard

1 5 oz. bottle of A-1 sauce

8 oz. tomato sauce

14 oz. ketchup

Cook, stirring occasionaly for at least 3 hours.

Cool both sauces, cover and refrigerate. Warm both up to use. 

 

Now to Judith Huxley's directions. Her wonderful book, which I wrote about on another post here, is a little pricey now. If you can find one for less than $50, grab it even if the cover is missing as the hardback is beautiful.

The 2nd day: wash the spareribs, as many as 7 pounds, pat dry with paper towels. Marinate in stainless steel roasting pan, or enamel bowls, with:

2/3 cup fresh lemon juice, about 6-7

2 teaspoons Hungarian paprika

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Cover pan with plastic, not foil, and refrigerate overnight, turning the ribs as you can.

On morning of 3rd day: Remove the ribs from the pan or bowls and drain marinade into a saucepan. 

Put metal rack in bottom of large roasting pan and arrange ribs in single layer if you can, fat side up.

Bake uncovered in 250 degrees F. for 3 hours. Remove from oven and let cool.

Very important--cut into SINGLE rib portions! The picture below is before they were cut. You want all the crispy edges you can get.

Finish over a charcoal fire on medium heat, basting often with the Mopping Sauce and turning with tongs for about 40 minutes. 

One rainy day I did skip the grilling and finished them off in the oven at 350 degrees F. for an hour. 

Serve with the Eating Sauce!

When RH and I are eating these by ourselves now we just fix corn on the cob to go with the ribs and I make a wedge salad based on Xavier Faucan's famous recipe that is still served at Jimmy Kelly's and Belle Meade Country Club here in Nashville. 

I wash Iceburg lettuce and soak it in ice cube water early in the morning, drain and refrigerate, wrapped in towels.

The Faucon Salad has traditionally been served with blue cheese or Roquefort dressing. I used to make a wonderful Roquefort dressing but RH can no longer eat it so instead I mix up a dressing that was in the Tennessean newspaper, I think back in 2008. It is by Elizabeth Cole and Kris Geist who served it with their Tomato Salad at the Tomato Arts Festival in Nashville. It is our favorite mayonnaise based dressing.

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1 1/2 teaspoons Maille mustard

1/2 teaspoon curry powder

1 1/2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

1 small garlic toe [germ removed], minced.

Then I prep the rest of the ingredients of the wedge salad:

hard-boiled eggs, crisp bacon, minced green bell pepper, sliced scallions, thinly sliced radish, sliced long sweet peppers, tomatoes

A well-deserved Labor's Day rest to my U.S. and Canadian friends and others enjoying holidays around the world. We all need them, don't we?

My apologies for a long post that perhaps no one but myself may be interested in. I've felt as if I couldn't stop writing simply because there was one subject, one dear lady, that I couldn't yet bring myself to write about. 

This has been a brutally difficult week for friends of my dear friend Tammy who has commented here and at my other blog for almost ten years now. Poppy and I and other blog friends are trying to adjust to a world without our dear Tam who passed away after a recent stroke. 

As her wonderful brother kept a group of us informed and updated we truly felt that our feisty friend would have the strength to fight her way back to our world once again. It was not to happen this time. 

Tammy was a loyal little soul who championed those in pain in our world, whether animal or human. Sometimes she had to withdraw even from us for a short while when the world's pain became too much for her.  

Tammy might have even skipped commenting on this post because she just could not have let herself think about an animal having given its life to provide our Labor Day menu. I always wanted to apologize to her when I published a post like the one above. 

I miss Tammy so much. I miss knowing that she's there, a few states away from me. I miss getting emails that nearly always ended in her asking me to hug BreeBree and James Mason. 

In the group of friends of Tam who got emails from her brother about her progress or lack thereof, one thing that we all told him (the brother Tam always called the Marine) was that our world, each of us, would not be the same without his precious sister but that we would treasure the sweet memories of what she meant to us.

Please forgive the mixture of the mundane of this post with the message of loss. I didn't think I could yet write about my friend and then I went ahead and did it and I don't have the heart or brain energy to do them both over separately. 

It's been that kind of a week.

 

Sometimes You Just Gotta Laugh

 

 

Sometimes all you can do is laugh. 

You get up that morning with the best intentions to make a special dinner and set a pretty Christmas table for the two of you.

 

 You hand wash the old Spode Christmas Tree plates and the pretty glasses with white Christmas trees and take out your wedding silver.

 

 

You spend hours chopping three kinds of peppers, celery, scallions, Italian salami, capers, and garlic, and boiling, peeling and chopping eggs, thawing shrimp, washing and drying lettuce, mixing a dressing. You both have a hankering for Mama Leone's Shrimp Salad and the special shrimp sauce that she was famous for in NYC since 1906, ever since Enrico Caruso urged Louisa Leone to open an Italian restaurant in her living room. 

It is the salad you made so often back in the 1960s when you were young marrieds. 

 

And you make another old favorite, Cucumber Aspic, more chopping, another dressing. You feel so lucky that your husband loves aspics as much as you do.

And you sit down to eat after taking hot French bread out of the oven. This is going to be so good. And there will be leftovers for your lunch the next day.

 

Your husband prays, giving thanks for the meal you're about to eat and then he takes the first bite.

You put a bite in your mouth and then your husband asks: "Did you cook the shrimp?"

You spit your bite out on your Spode Christmas Tree plate. 

You don't cry. Not like the time you were eight months pregnant with your third child, and your daughter and husband go to the best pizza place in town and they come home without the best pizza in town and say they dropped it on the sidewalk. 

Now you groan, thinking about all that time spent in the kitchen when you could have been working on a blog post. 

And then you just laugh, dump it all in the trashcan and eat all the French bread and lots of the Cucumber Aspic and wish you'd made baked potatoes to go with the meal.

And you remember that it is 2020, after all.

 

'Maters!

 

 

For five years I've saved this cover of Garden & Gun magazine's Aug/Sept issue, from their annual "The Southern Food Issue." 

 

 

And each summer I wait until a nice person gives us homegrown tomatoes and then make a tomato sandwich, something that was a favorite of my father's. No, I don't use Duke's mayo for it; Hellman's is my brand.

 

 

This summer two nice people have kept us supplied with homegrown tomatoes and they've been a delicious part of my menus. We've only grown cherry tomatoes for years now; just no luck with any other kind.

 

 

I made a small pot of tomato sauce to freeze for pasta with a few that were extra ripe. You can see a couple of Trader Joe's products behind the bowl that are favorites of mine. RH just made his first visit to TJ's since before the shut down happened and he found almost everything on my long list. 

 

 

Last July, Garden & Gun had an article about sterling silver tomato servers and I got out my only one and polished it up. The top one in their picture was valued at $500! Mine was much cheaper but pretty.

 

I use mine every time I make tomato aspic.

 

 

We've only had one good tomato so far off the one tomato plant our daughter planted for us but it was so good! I forgot to get a picture of it but I used it in a salad this week.

 

It was one of those nights when we were both exhausted. RH grilled two rib eye steaks that I'd smeared with brown sugar the night before and refrigerated uncovered [it seems to help]. I baked two large baking potatoes in the oven and added our lone tomato to the store-bought bagged salad.

 

That was it and we were almost too tired to eat. Almost.

There's an amazing tomato recipe I wanted to make this summer.

 

 

It's the Hot & Hot Fish Club's Tomato Salad and it looks magnificent!

Not sure I'm up to the challenge of this dish but if you are just Google it and take lots of pictures and let me know how it was. 

Meanwhile, let's keep enjoying homegrown tomatoes as long as we can! 

 

 

MFK Fisher's Gazpacho Salad

If it's still in the 90s in the daytime and 70s at night, it's still Summer and it's hot, I don't care how many Autumn pictures I see on Pinterest.

It's still aspic weather in the South and will be in my house as long as the hot weather lasts, although I've been known to serve tomato aspic on Christmas Eve.

I did one post on it at my other blog back in June but MFK Fisher helped me take my recipe to a whole new level when I made her Gazpacho Salad this week. 

It turns out that hers was just a fancier name for it and I guess that gazpacho salad does sound more gourmet than tomato aspic.

The recipe for the basic tomato aspic is back on my blog post here but I updated it with Fisher's recipe in Joan Reardon's delightful book on her called M. F. K. Fisher among the Pots and Pans.

I added 1 cup of beef consommé, 1 red sweet bell pepper diced, 1 sweet red onion, chopped, and 1 cucumber peeled and diced. And I added a couple of chopped jalapeños from my garden. All of these chopped vegetables were so good in the salad!

And I added a cup of chili sauce, something I saw somewhere, can't remember where, and thought would be good and was it ever! Extra spiciness!

I didn't make her dressing of 1 clove garlic mashed into 1/2 cup olive oil with salt and pepper because we love my own dressing of mayo with a little olive oil, lemon juice and snipped basil so much.

I know from emails on my other post that very few of you like aspics. But I stand with Julia Reed (I love her column in Garden & Gun) when she wrote in her cookbook Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Specialties that we congeal everything in the South. 

Her mother once "had a four-day house party during which she served an almost exclusively gelatin-based menu...crabmeat mousse, a strawberry mousse, two kinds of tomato aspic, and a charlotte russe."

I would have been a happy member of that house party! 

Now I can just bet that no one is going to try the Gazpacho Salad recipe and I'll put money on not one of you trying the entree of our meal. But you might just like my dessert recipe, so stay with me, please.

Are you asking what in tarnation is that ugly entree? I never said I was a food stylist but believe it or not this was good.

On a slice of pumpernickel for each of us I spread avocado mashed with a little lemon juice, next I put on some good wild caught canned sardines, next went thin slices of cucumber with black pepper and a squirt of lemon juice and then I topped it off with jalapeño slices. 

And there was our dinner. I know that Poppy loves sardines, although hers are fresh caught ones from Crete. Anyone else out there like these protein packed little fish that have the same omega 3 that salmon does?

Enough of that, let's have dessert! What about pecan pie? 

That purple is just a sprig of Joe Pye Weed hanging over the pie from a vase on the table. 

Have you ever tried an Authentic Pecan Pie? One without nasty corn syrup in it? 

I've had this recipe for years and the clipping said it was by a Carolina cook. "And don't ever use corn syrup! That ruins the consistency. Authentic pecan pie is jelly-like, translucent with sparkle. Just start with a pound of brown sugar, then add three eggs, about two eggshells of milk, a big splash of vanilla, some salt, and a lot of pecans."

I baked it at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes.

Easiest pecan pie ever and you wouldn't believe the good flavor. I have several recipes for pecan pie but RH says this is his favorite. I only had a small piece of the pie and left the rest for RH, and he took a slice to Zack.

Besides, my favorite dessert is another serving of aspic. And I'll take fish and seafood any day for my protein rather than poultry or beef or pork. 

Maybe, just maybe, I've been influenced by MFK Fisher's thoughts in Serve It Forth.

For many old people, eating is the only pleasure left...And between gobbling down an indistinguishable mess of heavy meat and bread, or savouring a delicate broiled trout or an aspic full of subtle vegetable flavours, how few of us would choose the distressful insomnia that follows the first for the light easy rest of the second?

Okay, I really don't think of myself as old yet but I'm already finding that I sleep better after a supper of vegetable stuffed aspic and fish or seafood than red meat. Wild caught Alaskan salmon is usually my choice but I think that Rainbow or brook trout is my very favorite fish and I have an excellent recipe from Judith Jones for that. 

I wonder if RH would agree to trout and pecan pie for Thanksgiving Dinner? 

Oh, and thank you so much for ideas for using the copper gutter in the garden! I think that RH is now thinking about making it into a water fountain if he can find a pretty basin for the water to fall into.

Ever Feel Like Eating Grass?

Our Mr. & Mrs. Smith do.

But do you ever feel like this?

"I feel like a sick dog that wants to go out and eat nothing but grass--only I would prefer asparagus, green peas, green string beans (small kind--no strings), green spinach, Brussels sprouts, broccoli."

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

in Bring Me a Unicorn

Spring does this to me, does it you?

I crave asparagus...

I crave Florida green beans

(with new potatoes)...

Most of all I crave broccoli,

and broccoli salad too...

Let's throw in some scallions, bell peppers,

and jalapenos with the broccoli florets.

Then add some dried cranberries, crisp bacon,

juicy little tomatoes,

and while we're at it saute pecans

with a little sea salt. 

Don't forget to stir a little dressing into it

of mayo, drizzle of olive oil, a little champagne wine 

vinegar, salt and pepper.

This recipe is from a favorite cookbook,

Nathalie Dupree's Matter of Taste.

What else did we have?

A simple recipe from my trusty
Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook,
that I made long ago as a newlywed.

A hamburger pie topped with mashed potatoes

cooked in a black iron skillet.

Man cannot live by greens alone,

at least my man can't.

Here's something else green we can make a meal on.

Do you love guacamole as much as we do?

I'm craving greens lately almost as much

as Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

How about you?

Anyone already have salad makings

growing in your garden yet?

Almost forgot to add this recent pic of me with my sister Teresa when we took a day of sister time.

We wore blue, not green.
And we talked and talked and talked.
Aren't sisters wonderful?

Pinecones and French China

I've long wanted to do a table around this pinecone pitcher we

found years ago in the mountains of East Tennessee.

These pinecone hurricanes that we got years ago in the

Bob Timberlake store in Blowing Rock, NC go nicely with the pitcher.

I use battery operated candles with them now.

Why buy flowers when the Kousa dogwood outside is still glorious?

But pinecones and fall leaves aren't all I'm thinking of as I set this table.

As we all have been, I'm thinking about Paris too.

I don't have many French dishes but I pull out what I do have.

These French faience plates we found in a Goodwill one day go on the bare table.

I posted about finding them one serendipitous day HERE.

We found these little bowls over 40 years ago in a restaurant supply store.

They aren't French but they read Petite Marmité Restaurant

and are perfect for the first course of Consomme Creams.

It's from Mildred O. Knopf's excellent 1986 Memoirs of a Cook.

She was wife of movie producer Edwin H. Knopf who was brother to

Alfred A. Knopf who published the cookbooks of a nice lady by the name of

Julia Child. Mildred was a star in the kitchen too.

We must have bread, so let's have a baguette.

And let's make it a baguette from France, non-gmo

with only flour, water, yeast and salt in it.

Costco carries it!

For our entree I followed Dorie Greenspan's recipe for Sheet Pan

Chicken with Apples and Kale.

The pictures on the right are before it went in the oven,

and the finished dish was delicious, as are all of Greenspan's.

She and her husband landed in France the night of the horrible attacks

and only heard the news when in their taxi.

HERE is a link to her recipe.

For our salad we'll have an avocado bacon salad from one of my favorite

regional cookbooks, Southern Sideboards. It's served on a French ironstone platter.

The dressing is yummy!

Juice from a lime or two, 1/4 cup olive oil, 1/2 cup of sour cream,

1/4 cup mayonnaise, and 2 cloves of garlic, minced.

Thank you for letting me make like a tablescaping and food blogger!

Don't you find that it's comforting to lose yourself in homey things

when your heart is heavy? I do.

I hope to post the dessert to this meal next.

It's by a French actress who is not so well known in this country.

I'll save her name for the post but she was "strongly considered for the lead

in Casablanca."