In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
When I was a kid, the end of the summer brought with it a painful, unpleasant tradition. Every August, when the farmers' market was filled with tomatoes, my parents would buy a few bushels, and the whole family would spend a couple of days blanching, peeling and processing the fruits. Every time, the process resulted in clothing and skin that reeked of tomatoes, fingers that stung and a freezer full of watery tomato sauce that we would defrost throughout the year.
As an adult, I have continued the tradition, although I make my sauce in the fall, when cooking pleasantly warms and perfumes the house, rather than turning it into a sweatbox. I also prefer using canned tomatoes, rather than fresh ones: In addition to sparing my fingers from burns, they produce a sauce that is richer, more flavorful and has a better texture than my parents' marinara. On the other hand, I still use my mom's recipe, which she learned from her Italian godmother, although I add a little bit of red wine vinegar, which gives the sauce more depth. Ultimately, it's a spicy, fennel-accented marinara that freezes well, tastes delicious and is inexpensive to make.
Get the recipe for all-purpose marinara after the jump.
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
My father loved to cook, but few of the recipes in his regular repertoire could really be described as "gourmet." The major exception was his vichyssoise, a cold potato-and-leek soup that he would pull out when the weather got hot and he was in the mood for something refreshing.
Of course, "refreshing" is a relative term; after eating a bowl of his rich, cream-laden soup, I would usually feel like I'd covered my lips in a thick layer of grease. While my version could hardly be described as "low fat," it uses a fraction of the heavy cream that his required and is a lot lighter on the palate. Best of all, it really lets the flavor of the leeks and potatoes shine through. Although this requires a lot of advance time, it refrigerates beautifully and makes a great summer soup!
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
In the mid-1970s, when my mother put "Margaret's Hot Crab Dip" in our family cookbook, the recipe seemed exciting and somewhat exotic. After all, the simple combination of crab, scallion and cream cheese was basically a reverse engineering of the kind of appetizers that upscale restaurants were serving in Maryland and Washington, D.C. at the time, and its simple-yet-spicy flavor made it a hit at parties.
However, years later, when a girlfriend took me to meet her family in South Carolina, it took all of about 10 seconds to convert me to the wonders of chilled Carolina crab dip. This was lucky, as it seemed like every restaurant carried the stuff and passed it out with every meal. My girlfriend's mother's recipe changed depending upon the day, the amount of crab on hand, and whether or not I was taking notes. What follows is a pretty close approximation of her concoction.
Get the recipe for South Carolina-style crab dip after the jump.
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
Going through my old family cookbook, I came across my Aunt Renie's recipe for blue cheese meatloaf. Like many of Renie's recipes, this one has a long pedigree and an old school gourmet touch. However, the original had a heavy touch of sage, which made the loaf fairly bland.
Experimenting with various sauces in my kitchen, I found that the meatloaf tasted amazing when served with a hearty dollop of barbecue sauce. My modified version, featured below, integrates the barbecue sauce into the meatloaf, along with a huge amount of blue cheese. This, combined with a shorter cooking time, yields a finished product that narrows the distance between meatloaf and paté. With that in mind, you might consider serving this dish with sliced pickles, mustard or other paté accompaniments!
Get the recipe for barbecue blue cheese meatloaf after the jump!
Hydrox is one of the ingredients. Photo: Chazz Layne/flickr
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
When I was a kid, Creme de Menthe was a pretty big deal. A local restaurant used to make parfaits that were loaded with the stuff, and the mix of vanilla ice cream and super-sweet mint liqueur soon entered my pantheon of top childhood delights.
When it came time to update my Aunt Evie's recipe for Grasshopper Cake, I played with the idea of kicking it up a notch, but higher level mint liqueurs and Godiva chocolate liqueur seemed excessive, like putting truffles on a hamburger. In the end, half of the joy of this boozy, sweet concoction lies in the humble nature of its ingredients.
While my family traditionally made this dish in a pie plate, I opted to go for a springform pan. The crust, which I deliberately left uneven, rose and fell to reveal the bright green filling, and the crumbled cookies on top offered a coarse yet tantalizing finish. Needless to say, this one disappeared pretty quickly!
Get the recipe for Grasshopper Cake after the jump.
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
When I was a kid, pea season was a mixed blessing. On the bright side, it meant that we would get fresh sweet peas on the table. Whether from our family garden or from a local farmers' market, the just-harvested peas were invariably sweet, crunchy and delicious. On the other hand, our regular servings of fresh peas translated into hours spent on the porch shelling the bright green pods. Even under the best circumstances, it was dull, tedious work.
My mother's pea salad recipe, which combines the sweetness of peas with the light flavor of dill, tended to overshadow the peas with a heavy helping of sour cream, mayonnaise and scallions. My modified version, included below, lets the flavor of the peas shine through, but retains the original's cool summer flavors.
Get the recipe for dilled pea salad after the jump.
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
Over the last few years, Korean barbecue has gained fresh relevance in the United States. Whether served on hot dog buns in Manhattan, tortillas in Los Angeles or rice in Korean restaurants around the country, the sweet, oniony flavors of bulgoki, japchae and galbi are incredibly delicious and increasingly popular.
When I was a kid, bulgoki (also spelled bulgogi, pulgoki, pulgogi and any number of other ways) was a staple in my house. My parents, who lived in Korea before I was born, loved the stuff and would cook it on an electric griddle at our dinner table. As my sisters and I got older, we got involved in the fun; some of my first cooking experiences involved flipping bulgoki with a pair of bamboo tongs.
I've played with amounts and ingredients, but my mother's basic bulgoki recipe is fantastic. In fact, my only major change is in the dipping sauce: while my parents used light soy sauce with a sprinkle of pepper, I prefer a more traditional garlic/vinegar sauce, which I've included below. Get the recipe for bulgoki after the jump.
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
When I have access to fresh produce, cucumber season becomes one of my favorite times of the year. Although it runs from May to August, the wonderful green beauties won't reach their full flourish until later in the summer. Still, it's hard to resist the cool, summery flavor of the first cukes of the season. With that in mind, I decided to flip through my family cookbook in search of some great cucumber recipes.
My Aunt Renie's cucumber salad manages to halve the distance between sharp and smooth, sweet and sour, creamy and intense. In my adjusted version, I cut back on the onions, switched in Greek yogurt and tossed in some fresh dill.
The final version had the soothing coolness of a traditional cucumber salad, but also retained a nice vinegar tang that keeps me on my toes. This is great by itself, or as an accompaniment to barbecue or any other strongly seasoned dish.
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
Beets are funny: while they are among the hardiest of winter root vegetables, their gorgeous color brings to mind the energy and exuberance of early summer.
In our family cookbook, my Aunt Evie tipped her hat to this weird dual nature with her recipe for pickled beet dip. Filled with the earthy flavors of winter vegetables, the dip's brilliant pink color suggests the joy of Easter eggs, cotton candy and sunsets. Pairing the coarseness of winter with the energy of summer, it's the perfect spring food!
While most dips tend toward blandness, this one has a nice kick. It goes well with crackers, but really shines as the centerpiece on a tray of crudite. Although the ingredients may sound odd, they blend nicely and the finished product is one of those rare beet dishes that even avowed enemies of the dark red vegetables will love. One warning, though: be sure to let everyone know that it's beet dip. Given the color, some people will assume that it is a cherry or raspberry dish!
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
When I came across a recipe for "Swiss Squares" in my family's cookbook, I got excited. Although the dish seemed like a basic chocolate cake recipe, it used sour cream for leavening. As this is a pretty uncommon choice, I wanted to see its effect on the product.
Overall, I found that the bars were a bit richer than expected, with a nice moist crumb. In my finished version, I massively increased the chocolate and dolled up the frosting. Still, at its heart, this is a recipe for a rich chocolate cake. Then again, even the simplest cake can be pretty profound!
In the 1970s the handy little ovens we now use to reheat leftovers and frozen dinners experienced a brief golden age, with folks employing them for cooking everything from turkeys to cheesecake. This recipe dates from the glorious reign of microwaves.
Like many of Aunt Evie's recipes, her microwaved sweet-and-sour chicken is easy, convenient and surprisingly flavorful. However, it relies on hard-to-find, annoyingly coarse-textured pickling spice and employs an unnecessary amount of margarine. For the modern incarnation we selected only certain pickling spices and ground them up, resulting in a far more evenly flavored and pleasantly textured dish.
This was an interesting experiment with the tiny oven: Microwaving, which essentially cooks meat from the inside out, didn't really yield chicken that has fully absorbed its sauce (or its savory flavor). Consequently, this recipe yields meat that is tender but bland. With that in mind, stove-top directions are at the end of the recipe. Regardless of which cooking method you use, this is a fun, easy and surprisingly tasty dish. Go, Aunt Evie!
Recently, as I was dipping through a copy of my family cookbook in search of one of my mother's favorite recipes, I took a good, long look at the book itself. In addition to being a nice resource, it is also something of an heirloom: in the early 1980's, flush with the joy of culinary experimentation, my mother and my aunts compiled their favorite recipes into the slim volume. Titling it Beyond Rice Krispie Treats, they dedicated it to my grandmother Ida, who famously "couldn't cook, but loved to eat."
The cookbook is heavily influenced by Seventies-era foodways. The recipes are full of fat, sugar, and sodium, and their seasonings tend to be a little mild for contemporary tastes. On the other hand, they also reflect those days immediately after the release of Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking, when average housewives began to explore the wonders of gourmet cookery. In some ways timid, in other ways bold, Beyond Rice Krispie Treats is a hell of a lot of fun.
Flipping through the book, I decided to do my own version of Julie and Julia, trying out some of the Carter-era cooking that my mom's family compiled. When I ran the idea by my Aunt Evie, she was immediately helpful, sending me almost 30 years worth of notes and updates. With Evie's advice, and my own experimentation, I'm hoping to resurrect some seventies classics.
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
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