Month: December 2023

Making blue cheese dressing

Blue cheese dressing is really easy to make, and a lot tastier than packaged dressings. It only has 3 main ingredients, and perhaps three or four possible additions. Here’s our recipe, culled from several we looked at. We adjusted the flavor a bit using the additions, and you can do the same. Just taste the dressing and decide if it needs any more enhancement.

¼ cup sour cream
¼ cup mayonnaise
2 oz blue cheese
1 Tb chopped Italian parsley or celery leaves
1 tsp white vinegar
Dash of Worcestershire sauce
¼ tsp garlic powder
(buttermilk)

Start by mixing the sour cream and mayonnaise in a small bowl and add the blue cheese. Using a wooden spoon, press some of the cheese pieces against the side of the bowl to dissolve them and give the dressing more flavor. Mix in the parsley.

Taste the dressing. It would probably benefit from the tartness of white vinegar, Add the vinegar, and taste again.

If you think it needs a bit more edge, add the Worcestershire sauce.

Taste again. If it still seems a bit bland add half the garlic powder, and the rest after tasting again.

Feel free to experiment to get the taste you prefer. The proportions above lead to a nice, tangy sauce. If you like it a little thinner, stir in some buttermilk. We liked it the way it was.

You can get a more full-bodied flavor by using Gorgonzola over plain blue cheese. But in any case, you have made up your blue cheese dressing in about a minute. Enjoy it.

Buttery crusted chicken pie

We have written several times about making a chicken pot pie using an Instant Pot. Briefly, you steam the chicken under high pressure for 15 minutes, and then cut the meat off the main pieces and refrigerate it and toss the bones back into the pot with the backs and wings, add 4 cups or so of water, a leek, carrots and celery and pressure cook for 30-40 minutes more to make the chicken stock.

Then making the stew itself amounts to cooking some carrots and celery pieces in butter for 10 or so minutes until soft, sauteing a few mushrooms in butter in a large pot, adding veggies and making a flour-butter roux and slowly adding broth from the pot until you have a nice thick gravy. Then add a little cream for richness and throw in the chicken meat. Then you bake it to make a pie.

If you make biscuits and put them on top of the chicken stew, it’s a pie or chicken ‘n’ biscuits. If you make biscuits and serve the stew over the biscuits, it’s chicken a’la King. And if you put the stew into little casseroles and top with a puff pastry crust, it’s a chicken pot pie for sure!

But what if you want a pie with a nice flakey, buttery crust? Well, this doesn’t take a lot of time except that you really must chill the pie dough for an hour to keep the butter from melting prematurely. The rest is easy.

You can find a bunch of buttery piecrust recipes by a simple search, and they all more or less require 2 sticks of butter, salt and 2-1/2 cups of flour and some ice water. But there are some differences. The important advance in ideas about butter crust came from a relatively recent article by Kenji Lopez-Alt in Serious Eats. In it, he theorizes that the flakiness of piecrusts come from fat coating the flour, rather than the other way around. And, that you should coat the flour with fat and then add the rest of the flour to interleave flour and butter in the crust. This works really well. One writer, writing for Inspired Taste, explained this recipe quite clearly.

Making the piecrust

½ lb (2 sticks) very cold unsalted butter, cut into little cubes
2-1/2 “scant” cups of flour (see below)
1 tsp Kosher salt
6-12 Tb ice water
(for dessert pies add 1 Tb sugar)

The real trick here are those scant cups of flour. One way to achieve it, is to spoon the flour into a measuring cup and then level off the cup with a table knife. That means you have to repeat this 3 times: 2 for the cups and one for the half cup.

A better way is to just weigh the flour out, and forget all that spooning. If you just scoop flour out into your measuring cup, the flour will weigh just about 5 oz or 142 g. If you sift the flour, 1 cup will weigh about 120g. But if you use that spooning technique, you will have only about 112 grams in a cup. This is about 4 oz instead of 5. So, it really is a scant cup.

But instead, why not just weigh it to start with? Let me note that I use King Arthur flour which may be more or less dense than some other flour, But the weight will still be what you use.

Use a food processor

The easiest way to make this crust is in a food processor. If you don’t have one, you can use a pastry blender for about a minute instead. I did it both ways. They both work fine.

Add 168 g (1-1/2 scant cups) of flour to the food processor (or bowl).
Add the salt (and sugar if a dessert) and pulse or stir briefly to mix.
Lay the cubes of very cold butter on top of the flour and mix it in by running the food processor for around 15 seconds. You now have the fat coated flour. You should be able to pinch some together and have it hold its shape. Lacking a food processor, just work the butter into the flour with a pastry blender.
Add 112 g more flour (another scant cup) and pulse for a few seconds to mix the buttery flour with the new flour. (Or mix with a fork or pastry blender.)

Turn the flour mixture into a bowl and sprinkle ice water over it, starting with about 6 Tb of water. Mix together with a fork or rubber spatula.
Keep adding tablespoons of ice water and mixing until you can press the dough together in the bowl with your spatula and it will hold its shape. Depending on the flour and the humidity, this may take 12 or more tablespoons of water. In a warm kitchen in warm weather, you may have to refrigerate the dough during the ice water mixing process.
Take the flour out of the bowl and mound it into a ball. If it crumbles, put it back in the bowl and work in a little more icewater.
Cut the ball in two, press each one into a thick pancake, wrap with plastic wrap (or use a zipper bag) and refrigerate for at least an hour. The dough will keep for several days, and you can freeze if you want to.

When you are ready to make the pie, take the dough out of the refrigerator and let it warm for a few minutes. Preheat the over to 375˚ F (206˚ C).
Then place it on a floured surface or pastry marble and press it slowly across the dough with a rolling pin until it begins to give. Then start rolling it out until the dough is wider than your pie pan. Fix any cracks by pinching them together.
Then fold the dough into quarters and lift it into the pie pan and arrange it with the extra dough hanging outside the pan. Don’t cut it off yet.

Pour the chicken stew into the pie pan, roll out the top crust and lay it on top of the pie. You may not need all the stew. Freeze the rest for another pie later.
Fold any extra dough from both crusts under the top crust and then go around and pinch the border to look a little decorative.
Cut a couple of long slits in the pie and put it in the oven.
Bake for 15-20 minutes, until the pie filling is bubbling. Serve hot.

You will have made a delicious, flakey, buttery piecrust that your diners will love. Serves 3-4 people.

Apple’s “Lessons in Chemistry” made my skin crawl

You probably know that I am not a fan of Bonnie Garmus’ error riddled book, but I thought maybe they would clean up all that mish-mosh in the TV series. After all, there are probably hundreds of people working to produce this series based on the book. Foolish me. It’s worse.

I admit I could barely get through one episode, not only because of the scientific errors, but because Elizabeth Zott’s overwhelming paranoia about being mistreated as a woman is so overplayed. And all of the men in the lab are treated as ignorant, overbearing boors, laying it on pretty thick.

The scientific babble about phosphate rings and the like is better than her talking about covalent bonds in the book. But it’s pretty clear that the actress (Brie Larson) has no idea what any of that babble actually means as she races through it.

The writers took an incident from later in the book where she is a TV cooking show host and moved it into the preliminary scenes as a teaser of what is to come. In the book, she tosses out some canned soup because it if “full of chemicals,” but in this scene she adds “bad chemicals” and implies they will kill you. This is utter nonsense, of course, and nothing but pandering to the fears of the uneducated. The FDA regulates additives and preservatives, and no one is going to die!

Zott tells people that she is interested in abiogenesis, or how life began. But she never mentions that we have a pretty good idea how it began. She should know as every chemist does, about Wohler’s syntheses of urea from inorganic starting materials in 1828, showing that there is no difference between living and non-living compounds.

Soon after that, she is shown beginning her own after-hours research and discovering that the bottle of a compound she needs is empty. So, she sneaks into Calvin’s lab to get one of his. We soon learn that she needed some ribose (a simple sugar) for her experiment. But the bottles they show are narrow necked brown bottles, which would be unlikely to be the container for ribose, a white powder. And, in fact, it would be in a commercially labeled wide mouth bottle, because it was easily available from chemical supply companies. Today, it is sold as a dietary supplement, so anyone can see that it is a powder by a simple search.

Just to extend Zott’s humiliation, Garmus throws in a beauty contest for the secretaries, and Zott is asked to join. All of the secretaries are portrayed as ridiculously stupid, which is simply unreasonable. They are working in a research lab and have to know what they are doing. This would never happen in any company, not even in 1951!

Zott and Calvin join up in the same lab before the first episode is over, and Zott reorganizes the lab to make things easier to find. She put all the spatulas in a beaker near the sink. But the spatulas they show are the kitchen spatulas that you might use to spread cake icing. Lab spatulas are considerably smaller, like these:

You’d think someone would check on that sort of thing.

Calvin’s lab is decorated with huge 1-liter and 2-liter round bottoms and Erlenmeyers, all perfectly clean, because the kind of biochemical research they are interested in is actually carried out in very small flasks with milligrams or micrograms of material.

He is also shown eating food (mostly peanuts) in his lab and leaving them on lab benches, where both he and Zott help themselves. This is a lethally dangerous idea and again would never happen in any real lab. You don’t eat on the lab bench (or preferably at all) in the lab!

Calvin is also shown showering under the lab safety shower. This is very cute, but they don’t work that way. Once you pull the chain, they stay on until you reach up and turn off with the lever. They are made to drench you if you spill something dangerous on yourself. And they can’t be enclosed like that: they have to be accessible from anywhere in the lab within 10 seconds.

And finally, Larson mispronounces citrate with a long “I,” saying sy-trate instead of sit-rate. Surely someone on the staff would know better than that. This is just embarrassing.

“Fun Home” opens in Brookfield

Fun Home is a delightful musical by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, also called “Fun Home.” The musical won 5 Tony’s in 2015, including Best Musical and Best Score. It’s about Bechdel’s like growing up adjacent to the funeral parlor her father runs and about her coming out as a lesbian, and her father discovering he is gay. (The family refers to the funeral parlor as “Fun Home.”)

The Brookfield production is simply outstanding, with a 7-piece orchestra directed by Sarah Fay accompanying the cast of 9 actor/singers. We saw the preview performance last night. For us, Tesori’s music was the best part, with complex choral lines and harmonies throughout, as well as a few lively comic numbers like ”Come to the Fun Home” sung by the kids, and “Raincoat of Love,” sung by the whole company.

The story is led by Janice Gabriel as the grown-up Alison, who plays a warm and relatable character who describes her profession as “lesbian cartoonist.” She comments on the various scenes and offers captions, as if they were her drawings, joins the cast in singing several numbers.

The show also has a Small Alison, who is Alison at around 8 and Medium Alison, just off to Oberlin College. (Bechdel graduated from Oberlin in 1981 with a degree in Fine Arts.)

Harriet Luongo as Small Alison leads several numbers with enthusiasm and a strong, clear voice. And Hannah Rapaglia as Medium Alison has two lovely solo numbers as she begins to discover her sexuality and falls for her girlfriend Joan, played with outgoing honesty and charm by Erin Walsh.

Tony Bosco-Schmidt excels as Alison’s father Bruce, who varies from kind and fatherly to impatient and unforgiving as he deals with his own coming out problem. He has a lovely singing voice in the group numbers and in his closing song “Edges of the World,” just before he dies.

Denise Milmerstadt is a strong player and singer as Alison’s mother Helen and is especially affecting in “Days and Days” near the end of the show.

Mason Sacco does quadruple duty in several small parts including being the teenager Bruce seduces, but as Bobby Jeremy, he leads the company in the delightful crazy, jazzy number “Raincoat of Love.”

As Alison’s two younger brothers Christian and John, Jack Hoyt and Sawyer Delaney are lively and vivacious, and sing very well in numbers with Small Alison.

Every cast member in the production is top-notch in their singing and acting, and the directors (Bennett Cognato and Rob Bassett) should be congratulated in putting together this complex show so well.

Fun Home at the Brookfield Theatre is an absolute delight, and you shouldn’t miss it! Performances begin tonight, December 1, and play Fridays and Saturdays for 3 weekends and Sundays at 2pm on the first two weekends.

[Pictures by Stephen Cihanek of the Brookfield Theater]