Ruby's Effervescent Peach Cobbler

Zola: This story is so touching; it really needs no introduction. I will say that I made the peach cobbler at the end of summer, choosing only the best peaches to honor this dish in the way it deserves.

Cyre: I have had a difficult time trying to describe this cobbler of my youth...as frankly...I've never had anything even close to it and have given up hope that I ever will. Ruby was a house parent at the Hutton Settlement, a children's home located in The Spokane Valley. She was also the BEST COOK EVER!!!
There were 4 cottages on campus, 2 for girls and 2 for boys. Ruby almost always worked in the boys cottages, but on very rare occasion we were delighted to have her cooking for us! My very favorite recipe of hers, is indeed her Peach Cobbler.
It stood 4-5 inches tall! Stretchy, chewy and white like unbaked bread dough! It magically sputtering in our mouths with the explosion of tiny effervescent bubbles! When I first tried it, I thought it uncooked! But I sure wasn't gonna tell Ruby that! It was AMAZING! The peaches and syrup sank deep into the dough making it even gooey-er!!! I honestly don't remember the crumbly topping as indeed it was all about the huge mouthfuls of sparkling dough. She always served it with fresh whipped cream and let us eat to our hearts desire. Ruby was not a woman of many words...but managed to make every one of us feel very special, and very loved with her cooking. Talk about a good memory!

Zola: For the biscuit topping, I used a recipe with baking soda to try to get that 'effervescent' quality. I almost think, to really recreate this, one should make a lot more biscuit so you could really lay it on.
For the biscuits:
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons packed light brown sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
4 tablespoons unsalted butter (1/2 stick), frozen
1/4 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons heavy cream

For the peach filling:




Get enough peaches to fill your pie pan, remove the skin
add white & brown sugar to taste
add flour (when you can *just* taste the flour, that's enough to act as a thickening agent)
I like to add a little lemon juice & cinnamon but that's up to you
sprinkle the top with small butter pieces before putting your biscuit topping on
brush your biscuit top with cream & sprinkle with sugar

Bake at about 375 until the peach juice is thick and bubbling up under your biscuit topping & the topping is brown. Say a special thanks to all the Ruby's of the world!

Bacalhau e todo bem!

Yes indeed Portuguese salt cod and everything is good! For many years now Zola and I have traveled and enjoyed the wonder that is salt cod in a number of preparations, in a number of countries. A magnificent fillet with white bean casserole in Barcelonetta,  Barcelona. Brandade du Morue in our favorite french bistro in Seattle (Le Pichet). Acorda (pronounced Ashorja) and other Bacalhau delights in Lisbon. And finally many various preparation (pastels, fritters, stews and croquettes) in the food menagerie that is Brazil.  Long has been the passing time from the first tasting to the fateful day last week when finally Bacalhau was discovered at PFI grocery in Seattle's international district! And indeed purchased by this very writer. 

Having just returned from an invigorating trip to Brazil, Zola and my interest in preparing our own bacalhau was rekindled, and what follows is two recipes The first is borrowed from Anthony Bourdains "Les Halles Cookbook", it's a french bistro standard/classic called Brandade Du Morue.

 Essentially a baked dip of salt cod served in its baking apparatus, a ramekin. As the preparation of salt cod is an undertaking in it's own right, I took the opportunity to double-up if you will, using half the cod prepared to make a Brazilian lunch counter mainstay, Bolinhos de bacalhau, literally "little balls of salt cod". These are essentially small croquettes of  potato and salt cod, deep fried and served through out the day as a snack. I'll begin with the Brandade as that was how the Cod was prepared, the left over was used to make the Bolinhos. 

First things first, salt cod is a 24 hour preparation. The fillets will come frozen in the USA due to this country's bug phobia and strict quarantine laws. The whole idea of Bacalhau is so that Portuguese fisherman in the north sea could preserve their catch centuries before the invention of refrigeration. I digress, essentially you treat your frozen fillet the same, place in cold tap water for 24 hours, changing the tap water every hour for the first few hours. We let ours sit overnight and did a couple of changes the next morning and everything was fine. It's fine to taste your uncooked bacalhau along the way to see if it's too salty. 

One pound of cod was enough for both dishes. The initial cooking of the cod was used for both dishes. Bring a 1/2 cup of full cream to the boil with 4 crushed cloves of garlic and a bouquet garni (that's 2 sprig of Thyme, 1 sprig of flat parsley and a bay leaf tied up in a cheese cloth parcel). At the boil, add the fish (1/2 lb) and reduce heat to a simmer, poach the cod like this for 6 minutes, it should be a little flaky by this point, so retrieve from the pot with a slotted spoon. The Bouquet and the garlic stay in as you continue to reduce the cream at a boil for 10 minutes. Set the cod aside.

 After the reduction, fish out (ha, ha!) the Bouquet and the garlic, combine the reduced cream with 1/2 cup EV olive oil. Add this liquid to the cod that you have mushed up with your fingers (hmmm, cod finger smells). Slowly mix the liquid and cod with a wooden spoon. Add in some cracked black pepper (and maybe some salt if you de-salted your cod too aggressively). Stir in 2 sprigs of chopped parsley, portion out into a couple of mid sized ramekins top with bread crumbs, and head for the oven. Our method, bake at 500 degrees for 10 minutes, finish under a low broil until bread crumbs are brown. Serve with sliced french bread. Swoon with delight!

Now the Bolinhos! You've still got a 1/2 pound of cod if you did a whole pound. An option would be to poach the cod in a cup of water with the same herb preparation, if you were doing separate dishes. For the bolinhos make two dry cups of mashed potato (use a russet it's good and starchy). Shred the cod with your fingers, stir into the mash potatoes with some chopped flat parsley, some cracked pepper and salt if needed. I had quite a few of these while in Brazil and salty was the apparent preferred savour. 

Now the trick is to roll the balls into 2 inch diameter spheres, roll them in some bread crumbs and deep fry 

until golden brown. We endorse the Cuisine Art mini deep fryer in the Maddison household.  Serve to friends as we did at a suitable festive occasion. Ours went down a treat at a joyous party celebration of Barack Obama's monumental election. It's true they go great with champagne!

Updates & Apologies

Hi everyone. I know we've essentially fallen off the radar. Things have been a little hectic in the Maddison household. We've been doing quite a bit of traveling and I'm finishing up a big grant application. We've received some great stories and recipes and we'll be back online *very soon*. In the meantime, I wanted to share some crappy footage of an amazing meal I had in South Africa. Enjoy!

Patatas a la Riojana

Zola: Maybe a little over a year ago, I found myself in one of those terrible not-for-credit Spanish classes. If you've ever taken such a class, you know what I'm talking about. You've got the dude who is struggling to understand the concept of masculine/feminine nouns AND the chic that spent two years in Argentina and just wants to "brush up" in the same room. It's ugly. Much to my relief, my friends, Lauren & Garth, were in there, too; getting ready for their honeymoon in Spain. Here's their story. Might I just say that this recipe TASTED like Spain. It filled our little place with the SMELL of Spain. Thank you for that.

Lauren: You had just posted a plea for more contributions, which my husband Garth and I had both read, and he was opening a bottle of Rioja wine as I sliced chorizo and lamented, "I need to write something for Zola, but I just can't think of what. I wasn't really paying attention to food when I lived in Belgium; it would be great if we could send her something that we ate when we went to Spain, but ..." and then I dropped my knife and he dropped the corkscrew and we stared at each other, and then at the cookbook on the shelf -- we had already memorized the recipe; it's quite easy -- and laughed hard about how long we had overlooked this totally obvious story.

We took a vacation to Spain right after our wedding. We wanted to go somewhere neither of us had ever been, and we wanted to go somewhere with good food. We found it! We had reservations for an apartment for a week in Barcelona (which we found with your help, Zola! Thanks!), and then we had tickets to fly out of Paris several days after that, and nothing else planned for sure. After our week in Barcelona, we spent a day taking the train across the country up to Bilbao. We spent 3 nights there and then several more days in San Sebastian/Donostia before heading to Paris for 2 nights and coming back home. Bilbao was our least favorite time of the trip. It was colder than Barcelona, and somewhat rainy; I got a bit of a cold, and we were cranky, and other than the Guggenheim and some small local museums, we didn't really find that much to do.

We had heard that the restaurant at the Guggenheim was good, but unfortunately we got there just a few minutes after they closed for lunch. We wanted to go to the museum but first we really needed to eat, as it was like 2pm and I was blood-sugar-crashy. We bickered all the way back towards town from the museum, and then we bickered about the first restaurant we came to, looking at their menú del día on the chalkboard, until we realized it sounded fabulous and we were super hungry anyway.

I chose the roasted quarter chicken and fries, I believe, which was great, and a completely non-memorable starter. Garth's starter, however, was this warm, salty, just-the-right-amount-of-spicy, nourishing potato stew with chorizo. We made note of its name on the chalkboard -- patatas a la Riojana -- Potatoes, Rioja style. I googled extensively when we got back, but didn't find much that looked like what we had had, until I remembered that we have paper cookbooks, too,
such as The Basque Table, by Teresa Barrenechea. I leafed through it hopefully, and sure enough, page 90: Potato and Chorizo Stew, Rioja-style, or, patatas a la Riojana.

The recipe we use now is somewhat simplified from that described in the book, but it still tastes fabulous.

You need:

Some good olive oil
A large onion, or two small, chopped
Two hard Spanish chorizo*, removed from casing and diced -- in Seattle we buy ours at De Laurenti in Pike Place Market; for this recipe we use 1 spicy (red string) and 1 mild (white string)
Some potatoes, chopped -- the recipe in the book calls for 2.5 pounds of russets, but we just use ... whatever. For this evening's batch, we used 3 pounds, 2.2 ounces of reds (http://www.dropstonefarms.com/2008/08/lord-potato-and-his-underlings) that we harvested from the garden last week.
Hot paprika
Salt to taste (you might not need any)

Feel free to play around with the ratios to make more or less potatoey, or oniony, or meaty.

* Distinct from ground chorizo, as in South America (that's my understanding of the geographical distinction, anyway) -- Spanish chorizo is firm like a salami or similar.

Heat olive oil in a good, large, heavy-bottomed pot. Add onion and saute until soft. Add chopped chorizo and brown briefly. Add the chopped potatoes, and water to cover. Use wine (preferably Basque, like a Rioja) in place of a cup or two of water if you like, but no need to use stock; the chorizo will add plenty of flavor. Add slightly less water if you want a thicker dish, or more if you want it soupier. You can also reduce it further or get more potato starch by smashing them, if you want a thicker stew. Also, add the paprika, cayenne if you want more spicy, and salt if you need it. (It's best to add salt after you have let it simmer, though, since the liquid will concentrate as it evaporates and you might end up making it too salty if you add it before then.)

Simmer until potatoes are done.

Serve with a good crusty baguette or other bread to soak up the delicious juice.

This will last you several dinners; by the end of the pot, the liquid will have thickened a lot with the starch from the potatoes. It changes from soup to stew as it progresses, which I like a great deal.

Don't forget to drink the rest of the wine you opened to add to the stew!

Zola: Pictures coming soon! I need to put one of those beep-y key finder trackers on my effin' USB plug.

Say cheese!

Zola: On a fairly regular basis I like to remind Guy that when we retire, I will need my own cheese cave. I like the idea of being old and tending to my cheeses (preferably in Spain or Portugal), and of course, enjoying them often with a glass of wine. I was talking about this with my friend Rachel and she came up with a rather novel idea--that we start our cheese education right now. So we started simple, with some fresh mozzerella. We took the recipe from the Cheese Queen's website.

Her recipe is great, and she provides step by step instructions with pictures--so I can't add much to her great work (Cheese Queen rocks!) There is definitely some practice involved. While our cheese was good, it wasn't what I expected--much harder than mozzerella should be (we got a little over-zealous with our kneading) so I found myself this morning thinking about when I could make it again and perfect it. We both had the sensation of falling down a cheesey rabbit hole. It's a whole other world to explore and I'm already thinking about all the equipment I need to get and what I want to make next. Here's our photo journal of the day. On top of being a great culinary companion, I discovered that Rachel is an amazing photographer.

French Comfort Food: Chicken Fricassee

Zola: Sorry about my little outburst. But it's true. We really do need you to submit your stories so we can keep this project going through the end of the year. Mary Beth came through for us--in spades.

Mary Beth: I’m an American mutt. Ethnically, I’m German, French-Canadian, Irish, Norwegian, American Indian (two tribes) and Scottish. In that order. Needless to say, the food I grew up with was as mixed a bag as my heritage.

My mother is half French and brought the Norwegian heritage to the dance, so meals were either marvelous French peasant fare or American Norwegian: Stuff Covered in Cream of Mushroom Soup. There was one dish in particular that remains my favorite comfort food: Chicken Fricassee.

I’m the oldest of five, so I was helping Mom in the kitchen from a fairly young age. I learned to cook Chicken Fricassee when I was in my early teens. It wasn’t until years later, when I fashioned myself as a bit of a gourmet cook, when I fully realized what I was doing when I cooked this dish.

You see, one of the steps in the creation was to take the nice crusty bits from the bottom of the pan, add water, and create a roux. I had no idea that’s what I was doing. It’s just how I was taught. So one evening, as I was making Chicken Fricassee for dinner at my folks’ house, I paused, startled, as I realized what I was doing.

I asked my Mom, “Where did you get this recipe?”
“From my Mother,” she replied.
“And where did SHE get it?” I asked.
“From her mother,” Mom said.

Holy Cow. My great-grandmother, Marisa Desoutel Dubruiel, was about as French as it gets. Born in Canada, she immigrated to the Minneapolis area in the early part of the 20th century. Her family had immigrated to Canada from France in the mid-1700’s. This was a recipe that had been handed down from my French ancestors, to comfort me on those hard days when you need a hug. (My husband knows I’ve had a hard day when he comes home to Chicken Fricassee.)

Chicken Fricassee
• Chicken, cut up .
• Flour
• Butter
• Onion (or two or three) thickly sliced
• Bay leaves
• Chicken broth
• Milk/half & half/cream

The original recipe calls for bone-in chicken, which yields the best sauce. On days when I don’t have much time, I use boneless chicken breasts as they cook faster. This works best with a heavy cast iron pan - my Le Creuset French oven works beautifully.

Melt butter in the pan. Flour the chicken and sauté until lightly browned; remove to a plate. Add broth and a dash of flour to the crusty bits at the bottom of the pan and deglaze, forming a roux. Add a bit more broth to create a sauce, then layer onions and chicken into the pan. Add a few bay leaves and some milk (or half & half, or heavy cream if you’re feeling particularly decadent.) Cover and simmer until the chicken is tender and the sauce is thickened, about 45-60 minutes. Serve with mashed potatoes and a crusty bread to soak up all the sauce.

We need yer stories!

Zola: So do you see the worry in my comic strip eyes? We need your stories, plain and simple. If we're going to keep the foodchains blog going through the end of the year, you have to submit your story about food. Okay, I just looked at our stats and--how cool is this?--people from 30 countries around the world are checking out our site. Cool, right? It's only one person here in Macedonia and one person there in Peru, but too me, that is super cool and really the whole point of this blog... the way we're all connected by food. But we're running out of stories. So c'mon people! As the kids say, "Represent!" Send us a story, an anecdote, a whatever --we'll post your words and try our best to cook your food.

We've got peeps in: US, Canada, Australia, UK, Spain, South Korea, Germany, Panama, Columbia, Netherlands, Argentina, Macedonia, Brazil, Malaysia, Italy, Bulgaria, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Czech Republic, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Peru, Finland, Israel, Philippines, Egypt, France, Guam, and New Zealand.

You've read my stories and clearly I'm not setting the literary bar very high. For christ's sake, we're not asking for Joyce or anything here -- just send your food stories to foodchains@gmail.com! We're stoked to hear from you. Oh, and we'll send you a bacon bumper sticker from the Bacon Council of Seattle, if that kind of thing appeals to you.