Tag: cooking

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Letter From An Editor Opinion

An Untalented Chef and Lent: A Recipe for Catholic Guilt?

Photo: Abigail Morici

Editor’s Note: Flyer writers will occasionally share this space.

I have a few good cooks in my family. My grandpa mastered a recipe for red gravy, passed down through generations of Sicilians — yes, red gravy, not red sauce. My mom has her signature chocolate chip cookies; my dad has perfected his crab and crawfish boils, and he also makes red gravy now. And my sister, as much as I hate to admit (because of sibling rivalry and all that), can make a mean red velvet cupcake. Today, my cooking set off the smoke detector. I burnt butter. It’s fine. It’s whatever. I’m definitely not insecure about my apparent un-inherited culinary skills.

I was also told that the way I was holding the knife was wrong and that I was bound to slice a finger off. My “nice” cooking knife privileges were swiftly revoked before I was handed a less nice cooking knife. But it’s fine. It’s whatever. I definitely didn’t take it personally.

I also might have let a few chickpeas explode in my boyfriend’s oven. But, again, it’s fine. It’s whatever. He said it was, as he ushered me away from the kitchen. I’ll make it up to him one day, perhaps by sticking my head in the oven. To clean it.

These days, I’m trying something new: cooking something other than pasta with three ingredients. You see, I’ve got about three recipes I know — three recipes that, for the most part, are harder to mess up than to get right, yet somehow only come out right for me about 75 percent of time. But there’s only so much pasta a human can/should consume in a given week, at least that’s what the internet says, so I’ve enlisted my boyfriend into a Hello Fresh trial as advertised in every true crime podcast you could listen to. Three packages of ingredients come delivered to the door, and it’s up to us to assemble them into something edible. A bonding experience that hopefully won’t make him think less of me. It’s fine.

So far, I’m mostly the sous-chef … or the anti-sous-chef, more of a menace in the kitchen than anything. (It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem.) I’m not sure where my culinary incompetence stems from — if it’s a nature vs. nurture thing. I guess it doesn’t really matter because the problem is here nonetheless. Growing up, I never really wanted to be in the kitchen to learn to cook; that was my sister’s thing (and we couldn’t possibly like the same things, God forbid), and I was (am) a picky eater, so there was no way I was going to touch half of the stuff that was being prepared. Rolling up meatballs with my dad might sound like a charming generational memory, but that is one my sister can cherish ’cause I won’t, just won’t do that. I don’t eat meat, never had, couldn’t tell you why, but I can tell you that the thought of rolling ground beef between my knuckles makes my skin crawl. (It’s just one of those things, okay?)

But I eat seafood. And for most of my life that’s been the caveat that restarts people’s judgy hearts and unrolls their eyes after they hear that I don’t eat meat, especially since I’m from New Orleans, land of the seafood fanatics.

This is why I love Lent, which is coming up in about a week and means no meat on Fridays (or Ash Wednesday) for us Catholics. Growing up, Lent for me was a certified guarantee that every Friday no matter what we were eating as a family it was going to be something I liked. Alleluia. Red gravy without meatballs? Hell yeah! Boiled crabs? Music to my ears! Grilled cheese? Sure thing! Crawfish? Yes, please! Shrimp? You know it!

Sure, Lent is supposed to be a time to reflect on the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ and to pray and make your own sacrifices, blah blah blah. Like, my dad would give up sweets for those 40 days, so that just meant more dessert for my sister and me (score!). I did do my own sacrifices, too, like giving up meat on Fridays (score!). For a few years, I gave up watching the Disney Channel. It was hard. I missed my Suite Life of Zack & Cody and Hannah Montana, but I lived. Obviously.

The idea of Lent is nice, though. It makes you see what you can live without, makes you respect the important things and practice gratefulness. Could you go without TikTok for 40 days? What about cursing at traffic? My fourth-grade teacher once told us we could also commit to do something extra every day instead, like saying the rosary (what fourth-grader is going to do that?) or picking up an extra chore (nah). I think my new 40-day commitment might be cooking a new recipe on the weekdays/not burning the house down (whichever ends up less ambitious). The great thing about it is that it’s only 40 days to give something up or add something new, and it’s only your relationship with God on the line, which is fine. It’s whatever. If you’re not Catholic, it’s a nice challenge for mindfulness.

But the best part of Lent has always been gathering for meals on Fridays, usually seafood boils back home in New Orleans, and since I’m not in New Orleans, these mostly edible meals with my boyfriend will do. It’s better than fine.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

A Feast with Flair

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Doug Ruddle, owner of Chef’s Palette catering, enjoys combining his experience as a corporate trainer with his passion for cooking. When he decided to study the culinary arts after retiring from a 25-year career at FedEx, his goal was to open a gourmet cooking store and give lessons.

Attending Memphis Culinary Academy was the culmination of an interest in cooking that began with his first job at Shoney’s where he worked as a cook.

“I continued cooking during my career at FedEx,” he says. And though he hasn’t opened a shop (yet), he’s had plenty of opportunities to teach people about cooking.

After he finished culinary school, he gave cooking demonstrations at Williams-Sonoma. Most recently, Ruddle has been teaching at a monthly luncheon at Prairie Life Fitness Center in Collierville. He’s developed quite a following. More than 80 people attended last month’s luncheon. The modestly priced gatherings ($10) feature a cooking lesson followed by lunch.

“We’ve done them poolside, where I showed grilling techniques,” Ruddle says. He’s also covered topics such as Mexican food and cooking with herbs.

With one of the biggest holidays of the year just around the corner, Ruddle is sharing his expertise to show people how to use elements of typical holiday favorites to create unusual Thanksgiving feasts.

It’s all about creating new flavors and adding a little flair to a traditional meal — “anything that steps outside the boundaries of a baked turkey and cornbread dressing,” Ruddle says. “You can enhance any traditional holiday food with the extra things you put in it.”

If scrapping the entire menu for a more modern version is too extreme, Ruddle suggests substituting one dish at a time.

For instance, instead of pumpkin pie, try white-chocolate and cherry bread pudding with vanilla cream sauce. This easy recipe is served in a large glass casserole dish that can feed an army. Also, it can be served warm, which is just the thing people are after on a chilly fall day.

Other departures from the usual approach might include cooking a turkey breast instead of the whole bird. “It’s a really good option to the whole turkey, and it takes a lot less time to cook it,” Ruddle says. “If you’re not comfortable with carving at the table, you can just slice the breast and you’re good to go.”

Modernizing a menu doesn’t mean doing away with all the old favorites. “I may do green beans because everybody loves green beans, but let’s do some slivered almonds in there. Let’s do some pancetta. We’ll do it a little bit healthier. We’ll sauté it.”

Then there’s the cranberry sauce. Is it really that much of a sacrifice to do away with the gelatinous blob that comes out of a can? Ruddle says fresh cranberry sauce is the way to go. Add a little Amaretto for a different flavor.

To switch things up a bit, instead of traditional sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows, try a sweet potato trifle for dessert. Or add chestnuts and dried cherries to cornbread dressing.

One of the more practical tips Ruddle offers is to keep things simple. “I would suggest not serving such a huge variety of things. There’s no need to make six side items,” he says.

Before any big holiday meal, Ruddle recommends skipping the appetizers: “You don’t want people filling up on finger food.” He suggests starting out with a nice soup, like wild mushroom or squash, then skipping the salad and going right to the entrée.

“I love the wild mushroom soup,” he says. “It’s really earthy and good. This time of year it will warm you.”

And even though everyone wants to get through the holidays without going up a pant size, menu planning is not the place to save a few hundred calories. It’s better to watch the portion size and use smaller plates, Ruddle says.

“People can always get seconds,” he explains. “If you give them a big plate, they feel like they have to fill it up.”

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Food for Thought

CREDIT: Andrew MacNaughton | dreamstime.com

Learning how to cook is always such a hit-and-miss experience. It requires very patient and tolerant people around you, who are willing to wait long, hungry hours while you figure out just how long to cook lentils or bake a 10-pound roast.

I was born into a family of very understanding people. There was one time, though, when I decided to make garlic bread with roasted garlic. I found a recipe and proceeded to follow the directions to roast an entire head of garlic. As I started to spread the soft white garlic meat onto a loaf of French bread, my mom suddenly got up from the kitchen table. “You are using way too much garlic,” she said. I adamantly declared I wasn’t, I had followed the recipe, and it was going to be amazing. She was still skeptical, but, luckily for me, the garlic bread ended up being delicious. The garlic, a drizzle of olive oil, salt, and pepper all saturated the white bread.

Trying out a recipe that uses an entire head of garlic takes some faith and some guts. Sometimes, making healthy eating choices is the same way. You know you want to eat healthy, you try to eat healthy, but everyone else is going for that Swiss cheese and bacon hamburger with a side of fries. So why not you?

Subway has these great commercials going right now. A guy asks his co-workers if they want him to bring back lunch. The co-workers are all gung ho and start putting in their orders. “I’ll have the I-ate-so-much-I-just want-to-sleep-for-three-days platter,” one guy says. “I’ll have a bucket of please-keep-your-shirt-on,” says another. They go on and on.

Although the commercial is a good laugh, it also has a more serious message. What we eat is reflected in our bodies. And when you look around, you will see that what we are eating is fat and sugar and lots of it.

The thing that most people miss is that eating healthy doesn’t have to mean eating blandly. Take, for example, the two recipes in this article. Both are healthy, low in bad fat, high in flavor, and relatively simple to throw together.

The recipes were adapted from Food for Thought: New Southern Classics Blended with Stories from Celebrated Birmingham Authors, published by the Junior League of Birmingham, Alabama. It’s a great read, full of unique recipes and musings on food.

Garlic Stuffed Potatoes

The great thing about this recipe is that it uses no butter or extra salt. All the flavor comes from the garlic and olive oil. You might feel like you are using too much garlic, but roasted garlic is quite mild and creamy in texture. You can easily use a whole head in this recipe and not be overloaded with garlic flavor.

4 medium red potatoes

3 tablespoons olive oil

¼ cup soy milk

1 head of garlic

2 tablespoons Parmesan cheese

Rub potatoes with 2 tablespoons olive oil. Bake at 400 degrees for 1 hour. Cut one-quarter inch off the top of the head of garlic. Roast at 275 degrees for one hour. Scoop out potato pulp and save potato skins. Scoop out garlic pulp. In a bowl, combine potato pulp, 1 tablespoon of olive oil, soy milk, Parmesan cheese, and roasted garlic pulp. Stuff potato shells with mixture. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.

Pecan-Crusted Tilapia

This tilapia is amazingly flavorful and crunchy, but not fried. Much to my surprise, tilapia is a healthy powerhouse. One serving of tilapia has 10 percent of the recommended daily intake of potassium. It also has lots of those good Omega-3 fats and is low in calories. A bit low in taste, too, so that’s why you have to do something a little bit fancy with it. Also, tilapia is farmed in the United States and is an easily renewable resource.

½ cup pecan pieces

½ cup seasoned breadcrumbs

2 eggs

¼ cup soy milk

2 tilapia filets (6-ounce each)

1 tablespoon olive oil

Cajun seasoning

Place pecans on cookie sheet; broil for 30 to 60 seconds. Do not burn. Let cool. Beat eggs and milk together. Combine roasted pecans and breadcrumbs. Dry tilapia with paper towels. Sprinkle both sides of tilapia with Cajun seasoning. Dip each filet into egg mixture; dip both sides into pecan mixture. Repeat with other filet. Place on greased baking dish. Bake at 350 degrees for 8 to 10 minutes.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Another What?

If there’s anything the world didn’t seem to need, it was another Southern cookbook. Grits, buttermilk biscuits, country ham, sweet potatoes — we get it. But the Lee Brothers, Matt and Ted, think there’s something new to say, mainly because there are new things to use.

“The spirit of resourcefulness, using the ingredients you’ve got, has always been part of Southern cuisine,” Ted says in a recent phone interview. “People always say, ‘Don’t mess with Grandma’s recipes.’ But it’s very likely that she messed around with other people’s recipes to get hers. There’s no reason to put Southern food in a museum.”

The Lees will be at the Beauty Shop restaurant on Friday, May 4th, signing The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-be Southerners (W.W. Norton). But what’s new enough to merit yet another Southern cookbook? It’s simple, Ted says: We have access to ingredients that Grandma didn’t.

“Consider fresh tarragon,” Ted says. “Back in the 1980s, you couldn’t find it anywhere, but now it grows like heck in Southern gardens. And it’s great with crab. Smoked paprika is another one. It’s made in Spain and just in the last few years become available across America. It adds so much smoky flavor, which is key because we all have vegetarian friends who want to eat tasty collard greens but can’t eat a smoked pig’s foot.”

The Lee Brothers would seem the perfect tour guides in this new world — although Ted admits his culinary training consists of “maybe one knife-handling class.” Nor did they grow up writing. Ted and Matt arrived at their first cookbook after a trip that started with a bout of homesickness.

They were born in New York, but the family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, when Ted was 8 and Matt was 10. They were immediately taken with Southern cooking, especially the direct connection between people and their food. Ted remembers learning how to tie a string around a chicken neck to go crabbing, exclaiming to his new friends, “Whoa — you catch your own food?!”

After college, the Lees resettled in New York and took “dead-end jobs.” They missed the food, specifically boiled peanuts, and during what Ted calls “the dark winter of 1994,” they decided to cook some up. Then they decided to sell what they presumed, in a fine bout of 20-ish male grandiose thinking, would be “the snack of the ’90s.”

But all the trendy “Southern” restaurants in New York at the time were owned, Ted says, “by guys from Long Island.” Still, Southern ex-pats in the city were interested, and a business was started in the brothers’ tenement apartment. Again thinking big, they sent a batch of the peanuts to a New York Times food writer, who hated them but whose husband, from Virginia, vouched for them. She put a few words in the Times, and 100 orders came in that day.

A few days later, the Lees made plans to go back to Charleston and make a go of it. Thus was born the Lee Brothers Boiled Peanut Catalog (boiledpeanuts.com), which soon came to include baked goods, preserves, pickles and relishes, sorghum, country ham … basically everything former Southerners need to stay in touch. The site won awards, which led to writing assignments, and here we are: two guys hip to the restaurant scene, cooking trends, food writing, and old-style Southern cooking. Ted even says things like “Allan Benton’s is the country ham everybody’s groovin’ on right now.”

“We are obsessed with authentic Southern recipes,” Ted says, “especially the ones from those community cookbooks. Part of me understands the impulse not to change these things. But at the same time, there’s all these new ingredients, so let’s use them.”

The book ranges from “super-traditional recipes” like fried chicken with ultra-thin crust all the way to the “kid-playing-with-the-chemistry-set” stuff like chocolate grits ice cream, which was inspired by a French chef in New York who hardly knew what grits were but made a chocolate soufflé with them. “That one really gets the traditionalist’s hackles up,” Ted says.

But this is not a novelty book; there’s no “country-ham cotton candy,” Ted says. Instead, for example, the brothers took inspiration from the famous buttermilk pie at the Hominy Grill in Charleston and created a sweet-potato buttermilk pie. They separate the eggs, whip the whites, and fold them back into the batter; that, plus a little buttermilk in the puréed potatoes gives it what Ted calls “a chiffon-like texture with a sweet-potato cheesecake flavor.”

“We make this thing for grandmas all over the country,” Ted says, “and they don’t say, ‘What have you done to my pie recipe?'”

The Lees won’t be cooking in Memphis, but they will be signing their book, and Beauty Shop owner Karen Carrier is putting on a prix fixe menu of dishes from the book, including butter-bean pâté; cold rice salad with country ham, English peas, and fresh mint; pan-fried soft-shell crab wrapped in prosciutto and sage with chow chow and muddled horseradish blueberry sauce; and fig preserve and walnut cake … and, of course, boiled peanuts.

Matt and Ted Lee will sign their book at the Beauty Shop on Friday, May 4th, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Dinner will follow the signing. The prix fixe menu is $55 with wine pairings, $40 without. Diners can also order from the à la carte menu.