Brandon Eats

Child of the Sixties

An oldie but goodie: hang tough, I'll be back soon.

Rabid foodies, beware: what you're about to read will revolt you and utterly destroy any shred of respect you might have had for my culinary acumen.  You're better off clicking over to Chocolate & Zucchini and seeing what Clotilde is up to these days.  This post is an exercise in pure, unapologetic nostalgia for a time before a lot of my readers were even born.

But don't you wish you were born in the sixties, you youngsters?  I know you do; you yearn for the days when a four-year-old and her mother could sing "Feelin' Groovy" without irony, and when "Leavin' on a Jet Plane (Don't Know When I'll Be Back Again)" sounded like the height of sophistication (I want to ride on a jet plane!). You'd beg your mom for candy cigarettes and drive home from the grocery store without a seat belt pretending to flick your imaginary ash out of the front-seat window just like your mom was doing that very minute.

Kellog's Frosted Flakes with an additional spoonful of white sugar on top were part of a balanced breakfast, and later on, if your mom would let you back in the house (come back when it gets dark!), you'd guzzle Kool-Aid by the pitcherful.  And that same beautiful mom would talk to guys at parties with enormous mustaches and a compulsion to clash patterns and stripes in the most annoying way possible while your dad snapped photos with his Instamatic.

It was fun and kind of dangerous to be a kid in the sixties.  Our parents were way too young to have children and, looking back, we're all lucky to have survived to adulthood.  Although my mother experimented with Julia Child and went through a long, long love affair with a box of curry powder she found god knows where, she also served a lot of beeforoni casserole (don't ask) and my all-time favorite, Swedish meatballs.

I think my mom first started making Swedish meatballs as party food but it quickly became a staple at our house.  It was a big Sunday night dish, and she inexplicably served it with mashed potatoes instead of noodles, which just ramped up the richness factor.  Only three or four of these meatballs each, swimming in their thick, creamy, salty gravy and topping a mound of fluffy mashed potatoes, would send the entire family reeling to the living room, where we children would collapse, stomachs distended, full-length on the floor to wait for The Wonderful World of Disney to come on at 7:00.

It's still a sure-fire recipe for kids.  I've lightened it a bit and injected a modicum of healthiness into my mom's recipe by replacing the evaporated milk with fat-free evaporated milk (you can't tell the difference), reducing the amount of sodium-laced beef bouillon, and sneaking in 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup of shredded zucchini (children will think the green flecks are parsley--especially if you tell them that's what they are).

And although I love the mountain of mashed potatoes with a crater of pooled sauce and meatballs, whole wheat egg noodles (tossed with a little butter and fresh Parmesan) are a healthier choice (I hope).  My 21st century Swedish meatballs still retain their sixties' glamor, however, and they put me right on a jet plane back to childhood with the first bite.

Recipe after the jump.

I Like Meatloaf

Take my word for it, it tastes better than it looks.

I haven’t made meatloaf in twenty years, probably. You have to compromise when you’re in a relationship, and these are the foods that I like but rarely, if ever, cook because my husband doesn’t like them:

Meatloaf
Pot roast
Beef stew
Peas
Lima beans

His compromise? No Indian food, not ever, not even a walk past an Indian restaurant on the way to somewhere else to have dinner. And green peppers. It seems fair to me — I get to eliminate an entire country’s cuisine (and green peppers) in exchange for giving up some pretty unexciting food.

(However, I have held firm at asparagus. Like a ROCK. I will never give up asparagus nor stop cooking it once a week while it’s in season even if I’m eating all of the leftovers on everyone’s plate each time. Commonsense might suggest that I simply make myself an extra, extra-large helping of asparagus and leave everyone else alone, but I’m convinced they’ll come around one day.)

I make beef stew once in a while when my husband goes out of town in the winter, and he likes this one okay. I really didn’t think too much about the other food I don’t make anymore, until I started flipping through Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs’ The Food52 Cookbook.  If you don’t know about the Food52 site, head over there right after you finish reading this post. If I let you leave now, you won’t come back. It’s a community-based food site — home cooks contribute recipes, others try them out and then everyone votes on them in weekly contests. The winning recipes were compiled in this cookbook (actually, the site’s second). It’s social, there’s lots of food porn-y photography and the recipes are excellent. I spend far too much time there.

So, I’m flipping through the cookbook, and I came upon meatloaf with blackberry barbecue sauce. And my mouth began to water. It also made me think — because it’s topped with an unusual, spicy blackberry sauce, the meatloafiness of the meatloaf might be mitigated, and with the word “barbecue” thrown in, possibly the first word, “meatloaf,” would be forgotten about entirely.

More (plus a link to the recipe) after the jump.

Cracking the Pie

Fuck crack pie.

Although I shouldn’t have been surprised, Christina Tosi’s recipe is one of the most time-consuming, odd ingredient-demanding culinary enterprises I’ve embarked upon lately.

Probably the most frustrating thing about it is that I knew it would be like this before I began. All you have to do is read the recipe, which is, in fact, three recipes nested within one.

David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook is exactly the same — filled with recipes that involve making at least two or three other things and that send you to several different stores to obtain all of the different ingredients before you can even start making it. I once made kimchi soup (first I made my own kimchi two weeks before) which involved visits to the Korean market across the river, Belmont Butchery, and the regular old grocery store. It then took two days — and my family said it was “fine.” Same with Chang’s fried chicken; they liked it okay, but they liked regular fried chicken much better, they said.

I knew this starting out. But I was dying to try Milkbar’s crack pie.

More after the jump. Lots more.

Sipping the South

I may be from the South, but I never was a bourbon drinker. Actually, I don’t drink a lot of liquor because I’m a relative lightweight when it comes to alcohol. I’m a sipper — a serial sipper, and if I get drunk too fast, then I have to stop drinking long before everyone else does. I will then start to demand to go home because I’ll be getting sleepy and also why continue to stay out when you could be at home in your pajamas?

And you know, that’s annoying.

However, a few years ago after Christmas, I began to go through eggnog withdrawal. I started searching for other recipes like the Tom and Jerry  or the flip, sort of ur-nogs.  After trying them, I realized that what I liked about eggnog wasn’t the nutmeggy milkiness I expected, but the bourbon — which was missing in the drinks I'd found.

With that realization, I became a convert. Much to the astonishment of my husband, who thinks bourbon is moderately vile (although he drinks his share of eggnog) and unnecessary. From his perspective, throughout most of our marriage I've been a person who didn't drink brown liquors, and now, without warning, I’ve become a bourbon drinker. He sees it as an affectation, I think.

More (plus a recipe) after the jump.