I came across this really simple recipe for a savory tomato pie, published in Sarah Leah Chase’s newspaper column in the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror. Chase and others trace the recipe back to Ruth Reichl, but I haven’t found anything with Beard’s imprimatur. However, a lot of Beard’s writing was collections of other people’s recipes, so we may never know who first made this really simple and delicious pie, which amounts to a biscuit dough crust and about 4 other ingredients. All I can tell you is that it was a hit at a group picnic/party I took it to recently, and so I’ll pass it on to you.
Basically, you make a batch of buttermilk biscuit dough and press it into a pie pan as the crust, fill it with a layer or two of sliced tomatoes, and top with a mixture of mayonnaise and cheddar cheese and bake it.
This recipe works fine with ordinary hothouse tomatoes, but it will probably excel with fresh garden tomatoes as well. We’ll soon find out!
First make the biscuit dough
2 cups flour
1 Tb baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
6 Tb cold unsalted butter (3/4 stick, or 3 oz.)
1 cup plus 2 Tb buttermilk
Chopped parsley
Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl. Then cut up the butter into little cubes by slicing the stick of butter lengthwise along two long axes and then cutting it into slices along the short axis, which will each fall into four pieces. Then blend the butter into the flour with a pastry blender and toss in a small handful of chopped parsley, and mix in the buttermilk. No need to roll the dough out: just press the whole ball into a 9-inch pie pan and spread it to fill the pan and up the sides.
Then make the tomato pie
4-6 ripe tomatoes, in thick slices
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1 ½ cups mayonnaise
Fresh basil leaves, chopped
Salt and pepper
Preheat the oven to 375˚ F.
Spread the tomato slices on top of the biscuit dough, filling the pan, and sprinkle with salt and pepper, and sprinkle the chopped basil on top.
Mix the mayonnaise and cheddar cheese and spread over the top of the tomatoes.
Spread some more chopped basil leaves on top.
Bake about 35 minutes.
Let it rest for 10-15 minutes and serve warm, or chill it and serve it cold. Cold, it is a great addition to a picnic or party.
Even though popovers are really easy to make, they have the reputation of being difficult and in the domain of expert chefs instead of a simple dinner roll anyone can turn out in very short order.
For some years, we have been using this somewhat elaborate recipe by Marlene Sorosky Gray first published in Hearst papers some 10 years ago. It even requires overnight refrigeration, but makes great popovers. However, Gray’s text suggest that almost any of a dozen common variations work just as well, so we set out to find the easiest one.
We started with this really simple King Arthur Baking recipe, since their bakers have a way of simplifying things for the average user. And we must say that recipe is a winner too, and terribly easy to follow. There are only 5 ingredients in their popovers (and ours) and the recipe is so simple, you’ll have it learned in no time.
4 eggs
1-1/2 cups milk
1-1/2 cups flour
3 Tb melted unsalted butter.
1 tsp salt
There are three tricks we use to make these popovers work.
Start with warm ingredients, no cold milk or eggs.
Use non-stick spray on the popover or muffin pan.
Cook at 450˚ F and finish at 350˚ F.
Making Popovers in a Popover Pan
Preheat the oven to 450˚ F. Place an empty cookie sheet on the very top shelf to keep the tops of the popovers from burning.
Place the 4 eggs in a bowl of hot tap water for 10 minutes, to bring them to room temperature.
Heat the 1-1/2 cups of milk in the microwave for 75 seconds to make sure it is warm.
Melt the 3 Tb butter in the microwave for 1 minute at 50% power.
Empty water from the bowl, dry it slightly and reuse it to mix the batter.
Break the eggs into the bowl, and beat them with a whisk, and then add the milk and beat briefly to mix the eggs and milk together.
Add the flour and salt and mix with a whisk until uniform. Small lumps are OK, but beat the mixture for a minute or so until the batter is somewhat foamy.
Mix in the melted butter.
Spray the popover pan cups with non-stick spray and then fill each cup about ¾ full.
Bake at 450˚ F for 20 minutes, without opening the oven.
Reduce the heat to 350˚ F and bake for 20 minutes more, without opening the oven. If you bake them at 350˚ F for only 15 minutes, you will get fluffy popovers that deflate a bit as they cool, but are very tender. At 20 minutes, you get a firm shell that will hold its shape.
Take the popover pan out of the oven and serve the popovers hot, right away, with butter or butter and honey.
If you must let them sit and cool, you can reheat them in the microwave for 1 minute (this keeps them soft) or in the oven for 5 minutes (this hardens the crust somewhat.)
Some people serve popovers with things like chicken salad and scoop the salad into the popover shell. We think that’s nuts. Serve the hot popovers alongside the cold salad, so they stay hot to spread with butter (and honey).
Leftover popovers, still make a nice shell for breakfast and lunch dishes. We reheated a popover, split it open and filled it with scrambled eggs.
We also make a nice cold meatloaf sandwich with a cold popover. You could even use them as hamburger rolls! They are also great snacks with jam or with peanut butter!
Cooking time in various pans
We baked popovers countless times in various pans to give you the details. We used three different sized pans.
The standard popover pan holds 5 oz. of batter and makes six towering popovers. Just follow the recipe above.
The large muffin pan holds 2.5 fluid oz. of batter and makes a dozen moderate sized popovers.
The small muffin pan has 2 oz. cups and makes a dozen modest popovers.
Large Muffin Pan
Making popovers in a muffin pan with only 2.5 oz. of batter is much the same as using the big popover pan: you just get smaller popovers. Be sure to spray the pan well with nonstick spray as the nonstick coating is probably not as effective as the popover pan’s is.
350 for 10 minutes
350 for 15 minute
350 for 20 minutes
We found that you need to reduce the cooking time at high temperature (450˚ F) from 20 minutes to 15. We tried several different times at 350˚ F: 10 or 15 minutes gave you light puffy popovers that sagged a bit as they cooled. But at 20 minutes, we got a firmer shell that is probably better for serving a group, or for filling the inside.
Smaller Muffin Pan
2 oz muffin pan for 15 minutes at 350
2 oz muffin pan for 20 minutes at 350
In the small 2.0 oz. muffin pan, you have a lot less leeway, since the muffins are smaller. As before we found that 15 min at 450˚ F worked well, and 15 minutes at 350 ˚F gave you nice puffy popovers that deflated a bit when cooled. But if you went to 20 minutes, the popovers were quite dark and firm although not quite burned. Stick with 15/15 for this size pan, although you could try 15/17 if you wanted to experiment. Of course, ovens vary and these times may be different in your oven.
Minimuffin pan
Our minimuffin pan holds 24 small muffins, with each cup containing only 1.5 oz. So after a couple of tries, we found that you get perfect mini-popovers by baking for 15 minutes at 450˚ F and for 10 minutes at 350˚ F. They are puffy but fairly firm and would be great for a party.
So, you can see that it’s easy to make popovers in any kind of pan and the baking is little more than half an hour. Have fun impressing your friends!
Croque Monsieur is just a grilled ham and cheese sandwich with a little extra love. It’s quick enough for a weeknight dinner and way better than your boring ham and cheese sandwich. You make it using white bread: either a crusty French-style loaf or good old Pepperidge Farm hearty white. You want to stay away from whole wheat and sourdough, since the bread flavor will cover the delicate flavor of the sandwich itself. Using good French bread will result in crusty sandwiches, with a bit of crunch: that is what croque means!
The whole secret of this sandwich is the simple bechamel sauce you spread on the bread. It is particularly helpful if you are making these sandwiches from left-over baked ham, which may have dried out a bit. The bechamel brings it back to life!
You can make these sandwiches in a sandwich grill, a griddle, or a cast iron frying pan: use whatever works best for you.
1 Tb unsalted butter
1 Tb flour
¾ cup milk
Sea salt
Freshly grated nutmeg
4 slices country white bread
4 thin slices of ham
2 thin slices Gruyere cheese
4 Tb melted unsalted butter
The bechamel sauce
Melt the 1 Tb of butter in a saucepan until it’s bubbling but not browing.
Stir in the 1 Tb flour and cook for a minute.
Add the milk and stir with a wire whisk.
Cook it down until the bechamel thickens.
Add a dash of sea salt and a pinch of fresh nutmeg.
The sandwiches
Spread two slices of the bread with the bechamel.
Add two slices of ham to each slice of bread.
Add cheese to cover the ham.
Top the sandwich with the other slices of bread.
Melt the 4 Tb of butter in a microwave at 50% power for about 1 minute.
Brush the ham sides with the melted butter and put the buttered side down on the grill or griddle. Brush butter on the top sides, as well, and close the sandwich grill, or cook on the griddle and flip the cook the second side.
Cook until the cheese is melted and serve at once.
Variation
Some people like to spread the bechamel on the top of the sandwich, and sprinkle it with grated Swiss or Parmesan cheese, and brown the sandwich under a broiler. This is delicious as well, and since the sauce and cheese are browned, it is not particularly messy to eat. Make me another one, please!
With the great success of the Pressburger chain, where they cook the burgers on both sides at once, in a big press, we wondered if we could do something like that at home.
Well, we have a sandwich grill where both sides are heated, so we tried to cook our burgers on it. Our grill is a Cuisinart Griddler, but any sandwich grill will do.
We set the grill to 375˚ F, and let it heat up. Then we buttered a couple of hamburger buns and toasted their insides on the griddle, and then set them aside to keep warm.
Then we weighed out two burgers. We like our burgers at a little more than ¼ pound, so we weighed two lumps of meat to about 4.25 oz. Then we seasoned them with salt and pepper and put a little pat of butter on each one.
Then we flipped the two of them onto the griddle and closed the lid, pressing down on the meat to form it into patties. We set a timer for 1 minute and opened the grill. If you like them a little darker, 90 seconds is plenty.
We checked the interior temperature with an instant-read thermometer, finding it already about 152˚F. We put a slice of cheese on one and let it cook another 15 seconds or so and then put them both on buns.
The burgers were tender and juicy, and delicious. By cooking both sides at once, you loose less moisture and get a moister burger!
They were so good, we’ll probably continue to cook them this way.
But what if you have a crowd? We’d suggest toasting all your buns ahead of time and keeping them warm, while you cook the burgers 2 or 3 at a time. Since they take only a minute, you can have them all on the table before the first one comes off the gas grill!
Of course, if we’re in a hurry, we’ll still go to Pressburger!
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:
