A Cooking Life

Some Serious Baked Beans

Yeah, I know it's been a while (uhhh...looks like three months to the day). I'd like to be able to say it's been all fun and games. We did get away for two glorious weeks on a deserted beach in the Bahamas. And I had Lasik surgery on my eyes. And I turned 50. Beyond that, it just hasn't been that interesting. I sent out an invoice last Friday for the draft I put together in June; I averaged 71 billable hours a week at the computer. That's really all you need to know.

So, beans. Baked beans. I love them. When I was a kid, one of my favorite dinners was franks and beans and brown bread. As a young bachelorette, when I could afford to be less cautious about my caloric intake, I would occasionally make my entire dinner of a can of baked beans – B&M, heavily doctored with chopped onion and strong mustard. Then one day, I learned to make them from scratch.

Garden Report: April 8

Hard to believe, but it's almost that time again. Winter held on pretty tight until a few days ago, but the sun finally came out and it warmed up to seasonal levels – and all that snow finally started to melt away in earnest. If you can imagine, the chair in the garden was totally buried in snow for a good part of the winter.

Planning the garden is one of the things that keeps me from going nuts during the long grey cold months. Seed companies have it just right that they start mailing their catalogs just after the first of the year – they know forlorn housebound gardeners will leaf through the pages of bright photographs and lusty descriptions and drive themselves mad with desire for green leaves and dirt. And then order lots of seeds.

Chocolate Chip Cookies for Grown-Ups

Who am I kidding? Most of the grown-ups I know would eat any chocolate chip cookie that happened to find its way into their personal airspace. Given a choice, though, most will express a firm bias on a number of variables, chewy vs. crisp being the most hotly contested. Secondary considerations include whether or not to add nuts, the supremacy of milk chocolate over dark (or vice-versa), the tyranny of including oatmeal, the imperative to underbake, size mandates, eat them warm? Serve with milk?

My personal preference is for a nicely-browned cookie with a satisfying crunch, nuts included, ample but not super-sized, and a little on the salty side. With bittersweet chocolate chips. To my taste, chewy chocolate chip cookies are tantamount to raw cookie dough. Nothing wrong with it in small doses, of course (a fingerful while mixing, licking the beaters & spoons), but it's not a food in and of itself (and don't get me started on the grotesquerie that is raw cookie dough ice cream).

Pig Fat Follies

My quest for real lard began about 7 years ago, when I decided to learn myself some Mexican cooking. I'd spent a few days eating my way around Chicago with a bunch of girlfriends, and a raucous dinner at Frontera Grill pointed up a glaring gap in my culinary repertoire (I'd wanted to cruise the Maxwell Street Market for the real deal, but our travel schedule got us into town too late on Sunday).

So I did what any reasonable cooking obsessive would do. I bought a cookbook on the subject (Rick Bayless's Mexico: One Plate at a Time) and invited a bunch of people to dinner. Finding ingredients wasn't too hard. For one thing, it was early September and I had a surplus of tomatoes, hot peppers, cilantro, and tomatillos growing in my garden. And I was able to order corn husks, dried chiles, and masa harina online (from the late, lamented CMC Company). The one thing I couldn't lay hands on was the lard required for the tamales and refried beans.

Sure, even the groceria up the road had turquoise boxes of Sno-Cap “Manteca”, but oh, my brothers and sisters, that crap bears about as much resemblance to home-rendered pig fat as Bud Light® does to a cask-conditioned bitter ale. It's an exemplar of the processed, sanitized, hydrogenated, industrialized “food” that's overtaken this country.

I thought I could just buy some pork fat from the butcher counter and render it myself, but at every grocery store in a 30-mile radius (and there are at least 3) my request for pork fat was met with laughter or incredulity or both. You think we actually butcher pigs here?

In the end, I stooped to the industrial lard and baked some country-style spare ribs in it to impart some flavor. The dinner was a huge success, and I even scored a husband out of it (a story for another time). But finding pig fat became my Quest.

A Word from the Management

I just want to mention that I've tweaked the design and configuration of the blog slightly; you may need to clear your browser's cache to experience the new look in all its magnificence. Be back with a real post shortly.