This recipe from Joyce Chen doesn’t actually contain any lobster: it’s just that the sauce is the same one that she served with lobster. She called this an Americanized Chinese dish.
But it is quite simple to make, and you can have it on the table as soon as the rice is ready. This recipe calls for ground pork. Often you can find it in the supermarket, but if not, you can chop up some pork in a food processor or by hand using a large knife. For black beans, ideally you should use fermented Chinese black beans but we used Goya black beans with sea salt as a substitute.
1 lb raw shrimp
½ cup ground pork
2 tsp dry sherry
2 Tb cornstarch
4 Tb cooking oil
2 slices ginger root, minced
1 ½ Tb black beans, minced
2 cloved garlic crushed and minced
½ tsp salt
2 Tb soy sauce
¼ tsp MSG
¼ tsp sugar
1 egg, beaten
Rinse and shell the shrimp and remove the intestinal vein. In these pictures, we used Vietnamese red shrimp, which are not yet cooked, but come already peeled and deveind.
Mix the shrimp with the sherry and ½ Tb cornstarch.
Mix the remaining cornstarch into ¼ cup of water.
Heat the oil in a skillet or wok to high heat and add the shrimp. Cook and stir for about 2 minutes and remove from the pan, and keep warm. Keep as much oil as possible.
Reheat the oil and add the ginger root, garlic and black beans.
After stirring for about 30 seconds, add the pork, salt, soy sauce, MSG, sugar and 1 cup of water. Bring to a boil, cover and simmer for 2 minutes.
Mix in the shrimp and the stirred cornstarch mixture, after heating, stir in the beaten egg.
A Patty Melt is the classier diner version of a cheeseburger, and you can find recipes galore. Rather then using a standard hamburger bun, the Patty Melt used bread, usually rye, and they generally use Swiss Cheese and top the burger with caramelized onions. The version published by The Seasoned Mom even suggests adding Russian dressing and sharp cheddar.
The Food Network version from Ree Drummond adds Worcestershire sauce and Simply Recipes adds apple cider vinegar and suggests mustard.
But the one I really liked the best is the Serious Eats version by Kenji Lopez-Alt. In his version, he adds American Cheese as well as Swiss, both made up of a number of torn up slices of cheese.
Our recipe is a small variation on Lopez-Alt’s recipe, where we speed things up by using our electric griddle. Lopez-Alt suggest just using a cast-iron frying pan, but this limits you to one sandwich at a time, where on a griddle you could make 4,6 or even 8 sandwiches at a time! And making the caramelized onions is way easier on the griddle.
Ingredients for 2 sandwiches
2 hamburger patties (about 4.5 oz)
6 Tb butter
4 slices rye bread (swirled)
3-4 slices Swiss cheese torn into pieces
3-4 slices American cheese torn into pieces
1 medium to large yellow onion, sliced
4 oz water
The whole trick to making these sandwiches is grilling the inside of the bread on the griddle to keep the bread from becoming soggy.
Heat the griddle to hot (375˚ F)
Melt 1-2 Tb of butter and place the 4 slices face down in the butter until they are brown, Don’t toast the other side yet. Remove the bread to a warm plate.
Make two somewhat oblong patties, weighing bit more than 4 oz. (This is a great use for a little kitchen scale.)
Melt 2 oz of butter, and cook the patties until they are brown. Add more butter and flip the burgers and let them brown until the patties are at about 140˚ F inside. Remove the patties and keep them warm. Leave and meet juices or residue on the griddle.
Add 2 more oz of butter and add the sliced onion. Cook the onions until they soften. Add an ounce or two of water and cook them down. This will aid in browning, and incorporate any meat residue with the onions.
When that water cooks down, add another ounce or two and cook the onions down again, until the are soft, brown and caramelized.
Lay out the 4 bread slices, browned side up, and add pieces of torn up Swiss cheese to two of the slices, and pieces of torn up American cheese to the other two
Place the burger on the American cheese and the browned onions on the Swiss cheese.
Carefully close the sandwiches, and add about 1 Tb butter to the griddle. Toast the sandwiches on that side, and remove them.
Add another Tb of butter and toast the other side of the sandwiches on the griddle in this new butters.
Remove, cut each sandwich in half and serve at once.
You will have melty American cheese and softly melted Swiss surrounding your delicious burger. Serve with French fries.
You can make these simple cookies in little more than half an hour, and the ingredients are pretty easy to find. Note that when we say “Eagle Brand” condensed milk, we mean the thick, sweetened condensed milk that Borden’s has made for years, not the thin unsweetened evaporated milk you might use in sauces.
And, while you can use any butterscotch chips you can find, the Nestle ones taste pretty artificial. Trader Joes and Whole Foods and other specialty grocers have better varieties. You can also order them from King Arthur Flour. This time, we discovered that you can buy crumbled Butterfinger candy, and we used that for the “butterscotch” layer..
1/2 cup butter (1 stick) melted
1 cup graham cracker crumbs
1 cup sweetened shredded coconut
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1 cup butterscotch chips (here we used Butterfinger crumbles)
1can Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk
1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts
Preheat the oven to 350º F
In an 10 x 13” pan, arrange the ingredients as follows
Pour the melted butter into the pan, and tip to see to covers the entire pan bottom.
Sprinkle in the graham cracker crumbs, distributing them with spatula or spoon if need be.
Add the coconut, chocolate chips and butterscotch chips one after another.
Pour the Eagle Brand condensed milk over the entire surface.
Add the chopped nuts.
Bake for about 25 minutes and cool.
Cut into bars or squares once cool, and store in a sealed container.
Not only are these bars delicious, so are the little pieces left over after carving, which invariably are snarfed up by the cook!
Here’s a stir fry you can make in less than half an hour and serve as a festive weeknight dinner. You can use almost any vegetables you like in the stir fry along with the chicken, or you could add more veggies and omit the chicken if you want.
1 lb chicken breasts or boneless thighs
Cornstarch
Olive or vegetable oil
½ cup sugar
6 oz walnuts
½ lb snow peas or sugar snap peas with strings and ends removed
3-4 green onions, cut into short lengths
¼ lb mushrooms, sliced
Teriyaki sauce, bottled, or any other favorite sauce
Rice
Cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces and shake with the cornstarch. Shake off the excess cornstarch into a bow using a colander.
Saute the chicken in a wok or pan with some oil. Set the chicken side and wipe the pan clean.
Heat several more Tb of oil in a pan or wok and saute the mushrooms, onions and peapods. The pods should remain somewhat crunchy.
In a smaller cast iron pan, add the sugar and heat over medium high heat until the sugar has melted. Stir in the walnuts.
Add the chicken to the sauteed veggies and stir to warm through.
Warm the walnuts in their pan so the sugar softens and add them to the chicken and vegetables.
Add about half a cup of Teriyaki (or other ) sauce and stir and heat to soften the candied coating on the walnuts.
Several weeks ago, Genevieve Ko published a fascinating recipe for Lemon Ricotta Pancakes in the Sunday New York Times. She used superlatives like “most tender,” “fluffy,” “light” and “comforting,” and we just had to try them.
The pancakes are light because the recipe has 3 eggs, buttermilk, ricotta and only ¾ cup of flour. And the unique part of her version is that the batter also has some grated lemon zest. To counter that, she recommends serving them with a blueberry sauce. Here is her recipe:
Ingredients
¾ cup flour
1 ½ tsp baking powder
¾ tsp salt
¼ cup sugar
1 lemon
1 ½ tsp vanilla extract
3 large eggs
¾ cup whole milk ricotta
¼ cup buttermilk
2 tsp melted butter
Lemon zest in sugar
Bubbles forming on lemon pancakes
Heat a griddle to “medium low.” We chose 350˚ F.
Whisk the flour, baking powder, and salt in a small bowl.
Put the sugar in a large bowl and grate the lemon zest into it, Work in with your fingers.
Mix in the vanilla
Add the eggs and whisk until foamy on top.
Add the flour, ricotta and buttermilk and whisk until uniform.
Butter the griddle generously and drop ¼ cup portions onto it. Cook 2-3 minutes until bubbles begin to from. Turn each pancake gently and cook about 2 more minutes.
Serve with butter and blueberry sauce.
Blueberry sauce
! pint blueberries
½ cup sugar
½ cup water
2 tsp cornstarch
Place all ingredients in a saucepan, mix and heat to a boil. Cook for about 5 minutes, until thickened.
Stack cut open
There is no doubt that these are light, delicious pancakes. Ko says the recipe makes 12-14 pancakes, but since they are so small and not all that filling, this recipe serves just a bit more than two people. We each ate two stacks of 3 pancakes without any trouble. You could have to double it to serve four. And, of course, you could omit the lemon zest if you wanted to serve them with maple syrup.
Grandma’s recipe
This is our old family recipe that was handed down from my mother’s mother, Edna Neely, who probably learned the recipe in the latter part of the 19th century. The copy I got came from her daughter, my aunt Elsie, many years ago. It is a simple recipe that you can remember as 2-2-2-1-1-1/2:
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
1 Tb sugar
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
Buttermilk
Over time, I’ve reduced the baking soda to about ¾ tsp so that the buttermilk flavor comes through more strongly.
Mix the dry ingredients together.
Break the eggs into the mixture and add buttermilk to make a “thickish batter.”
Cook on a griddle at 375˚ F until bubble form and then turn them and cook another two minutes.
Buttermilk pancakes rising
Stack of buttermilk pancakes
How they differ
We usually make bigger pancakes, using maybe 1/3 of a cup of batter each, but you certainly can make them smaller like the ones in Ko’s recipe. They are nearly as light as Ko’s and much less work. It is also easy to make, say a 1-1/2 recipe to serve more people, but the basic recipe will serve 3-4.
I’ll probably make Ko’s recipe from time to time because they are really good with blueberry sauce, but it is so much more work than Grandma’s recipe and if you put a stack of 3 ¼-cup sized pancakes from each recipe side by side, the difference is relatively small.
We tried cooking this recipe at the lower temperature as Ko recommends, and this works fine too. They just take slightly longer to cook. However, we did find that the lower temperature cooked those frozen sausage patties more uniformly without burning them.
We make scones for breakfast fairly often, because as we showed earlier, you can make them quickly and they are quite delicious.
But, a couple of days ago, we made some of the worst scones we’d ever made.
As you can see, the recent scones were a flat-out disaster. We had used new baking powder and everything, but they were a flop. What had gone wrong?
Well, the immediate suspect was the baking powder. Baking powders sometimes fails because it was stored improperly: in a hot warehouse or truck, for example. Let’s explain how this works here.
Baking soda is just sodium bicarbonate, NaHCo3. You use it when acidic ingredients such as buttermilk, sourdough or yoghurt are included in the batter. The baking soda will react with any of those acids to release carbon dioxide, CO2, which causes bubbles that make the dough rise.
Baking powder is sodium bicarbonate mixed with one or more acids in dry crystalline form, such cream of tartar (tartaric acid), monocalcium phosphate, sodium aluminum pyrophosphate, or a couple of others. Double acting baking powders (and most of them now are) contain two acids, one that reacts immediately when liquid is added and one that reacts only when heat is also applies. In all cases, the baking powder also contains cornstarch, to help keep the mixture dry and add bulk to make it easier to measure.
But you can easily test baking powder by putting a couple of teaspoons in a bowl, and adding boiling water. Just microwave a cup of water in a pitcher for a minute or so until it bubbles a bit, and pour it over the baking powder. It should foam up right away as you see below.
New baking powder foams up in hot water
But let’s look at that suspect baking powder: no foam at all, it scarcely breathes a word!
Suspect baking powder
In fact, it doesn’t really look at all like the other sample. In fact let’s look at the package:
Taking a tip from my friend Robert Lortz, I made square (or rectangular) biscuits today.
There are no scraps that you have to re-roll and the biscuits rise higher because you didn’t force them into a biscuit cutter. You just cut the dough with a table knife or sharp knife and move them onto a cookie sheet with a spatula. You can see the results.
My biscuit recipe is slightly different than Lortz’s but it is pretty similar. Rather than shredding the butter, you cut the stick into little slices and blend them into the flour with a pastry blender. The real difference is that you fold the dough into thirds and roll it out three times to make some buttery layers.
Ingredients
2 cups flour
1 Tb baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
1/3 cup cold, unsalted butter (2/3 of a quarter pound stick.)
1 cup plus about 2 Tb buttermilk
Butter incorporated into the dough
Fold into thirds three times
Preheat the oven to 450˚ F.
Mix the flour, baking powder, soda and salt in a bowl.
Cut the butter into thin slices and put them all into the flour.
Using a pastry blender, cut the butter into the flour until uniform, but with some small butter lumps remaining.
Add the cup of buttermilk and mix in with a fork. Add a little more buttermilk if all the flour isn’t all incorporated.
Roll out the dough on a floured board or pastry marble.
Fold the dough and thirds and roll it out again three times to form some butter layers in the dough.
Cut the dough rectangle into squares (or rectangles) using a knife.
Then use a spatula to move them to a cookie sheet.
Bake for 10 minutes.
Dough cut into squares
Dough on cookie sheet
The result is tall, fluffy, buttery biscuits. Enjoy them!
This midwestern favorite wouldn’t exist without the historic contributions of the Campbell Soup company. Campbell’s was founded in 1869, selling canned tomatoes, fruits and vegetables, but in 1897 the company’s manager, Arthur Dorrance, hired his nephew, Dr. John T Dorrance, to join the company. John Dorrance was a chemist by training and developed a method to eliminate much of the water in canned soup, making it much easier to can and ship. These canned soups in the familiar 10 oz cans would serve several people when the water was added back in and sold for about a dime per can. This revolutionized Campbell’s entire business, and Campbell’s became the Campbells Soup Company.
In 1913, Campbell’s introduced the a condensed Cream of Celery soup, which along with the 1934 introduction of their Cream of Mushroom soup became the basis for “America’s bechamel,” a simple sauce base the led to thousands of convenient recipes.
In the Midwest, people developed untold numbers of casseroles that they could quickly make for dinner or bring to pot-luck dinners and other social events. In the northern Midwest (Minnesota and North Dakota) these were just called Hot Dishes and their variety is legion.
The tuna-noodle casserole is one surviving casserole from the 1950s that people like me still make. This recipe is more or less the one my mother made, and is much like one in the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook.
There are a wide number of variations on this recipe: many use Cream of Mushroom soup as the sauce base, but we’ll stick to the 1913 version that used Cream of Celery. Some people add green peas or broccoli to their casseroles: you can adulterate them any way you like, but we’ll stick to the original recipe. You can make it in 10 minutes plus a baking time of around 20 minutes.
We make this casserole using half of a 12 oz package of noodles, which works out to about 3 ½ cups. And be sure to use Albacore tuna for the best flavor.
3 1/2 cups dry egg noodles
2 5 oz or 1 12 oz can of albacore tuna
1 cup sliced celery
1 medium onion, diced
½ green pepper, cut up
½ cup mayonnaise
1 can cream of celery soup
½ cup milk
1 cup cheddar cheese, cut into small cubes
Salt and pepper
Slivered almonds or crushed potato chips for the topping
Preheat the over to 425˚ F.
Cook the noodles according to package directions, about 9 minutes, and drain into a colander.
Put the canned soup to a small saucepan and add the milk. Heat through and add the shredded cheese. Cook until melted.
In a large mixing bowl, combine the celery, onion, pepper, and mayonnaise.
Add the tuna and break up any large lumps.
Add the soup mixture and the noodles.
Season with salt and pepper.
Put the contents of the mixing bowl in a large over proof casserole and top with slivered almonds. To honor the decade, we used a Corning ware casserole dish from that period.
Bake for about 20 minutes until bubbling throughout.
The idea behind this recipe in Bon Appetit is a good one. Making mushroom puree to go with chicken breasts (which are less flavorful than thighs) is a good one. But this is another case where the recipe just doesn’t work out at all like the photo: a problem we have with most recipes in Bon Appetit.
The complete recipe is linked here, but amounts to browning bone-in chicken breasts and then cooking them in the oven at 350˚ F for about 25 minutes.
Meanwhile, you make the mushroom puree from
4 Tbsp. unsalted butter
8 oz. button mushrooms, halved
2 shallots, finely chopped
3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 sprig thyme
1 bay leaf
2 cups low-sodium chicken broth
1 cup heavy cream
2 Tbsp. crème fraiche
2 tsp. truffle oil (don’t do this!)
Kosher salt, freshly ground pepper
Just as you’d think, you sauté the mushrooms in the butter until they give up their water and
add the shallots and garlic, and saute them.
Then you add the chicken broth, thyme and bay and cook it down at least by half.
Next you add the cream and cook that down by half or more
Skip the truffle oil: it always has a chemical taste since it isn’t truffles at all but 2,4-dthiapentane, and tests pretty fake.
Remove the bay and thyme leaves and blend the whole thing until smooth..
Ideally the breasts are done now, and you put the puree on each plate and top with the sliced chicken breasts and a little sauteed Swiss chard.
I can tell you that the puree is really delicious and would work with any sort of chicken as a sauce.
But there are problems
The BonAppetit recipe doesn’t stop there. It has you sauté more shallots and garlic in butter and then boil down 2 more cups of chicken stock and strain it to make a sort of gravy. This is utterly superfluous, because it has the same flavors as the mushroom puree and runs off into the puree anyway.
Serving the chicken breast sliced but with the bone still included makes it very hard to eat the chicken. You should debone it before slicing and serving.
Cooking store-bought chicken breasts is not that simple since most of them are huge and hard to cook through without drying out.
The puree in the BA picture is very thick and creamy. Despite our boiling it down a lot more than they say, we never got it to be that thick. Perhaps they used some arrowroot as well?
Our puree had black flecks in it because most supermarket mushrooms have black gills. They call for “button mushrooms,” which may be whiter, but weren’t in our stores.
Our conclusion is that a simpler version of this recipe has real promise, but we’d not go through all those steps again.
Toad in the hole is a classic British dish, made up of sausages embedded in a Yorkshire pudding batter and baked. The name comes from the ends of the sausages peeking out of the baked batter. In the U.S., the name has been used to describe eggs cooked inside bread or toast as well as sausages. That version is sometimes called “egg with a hat” to describe the little circle of bread you cut out for the egg. In fact, the beavers at Myrecipes.com found that there are 66 different names for this dish.
So, with that in mind, we decided to make one more. Suppose you are making pancakes, as we often do on Sundays. Why not add an egg into those pancakes and make a Pancake Toad in the Hole?
So to try this, we made buttermilk pancakes using this heirloom family recipe (which is much like everyone else’s.)
Then we cooked one side of a pancake with a little melted butter on the griddle for flavor, and then turned out over.
About 1 minute later, we used a biscuit cutter to cut a hole on the pancake. The pancake will still be doughy in the middle, but you can cook that little “hat” while you make the main event.
Break an egg into a cup and pour it into the hole you just cut.
Let the pancake/egg cook until the egg is cloudy, and then flip it. This may take two spatulas (spatulae?) to keep the uncooked egg from weeping out. Cook the egg for 30 seconds or more and flip the pancake back over. Serve the “Pancake toad” right away with the little hat alongside.
Cut open
This sweet/savory combination could have syrup added, or your could just eat it the way it is, using the pancake to sop up the egg.
Pancake benedict?
One variation we tried was to cook a small slice of ham in a little butter, and then put it in the hole of a pancake, and then add the egg. Again, cook until the egg is cloudy, flip it, cook 30 seconds, flip it back and serve.
Pancake Benedict?
In this case, syrup might be overkill. We suppose you might add hollandaise instead, but that might be ever more overkill.
You could also add a slice of sausage, but make sure it is a thin slice, or there may not be room for the egg.
A delicious breakfast addition to impress your family and friends!
Food Science Institute 