Jenmenke

Road Warrior

Food

Granny Sue’s Rhubarb Cake

My First Rhubarb Love

That, of course was before I fell for Al Sicherman. But I recently made this cake, after about a year hiatus. Morgan declared it her personal favorite. I suspect that’s mostly because she always sides with my mom. They have this little thing going. Have I ever mentioned that Morgan and my mom are very much alike? Yes, well, they are — and it makes my life very difficult.

Anyway, now, every time I will want to make Al’s Rhubarb Pudding Cake, I’m going to have to listen to her bellyaching that she wants me to make this one. I hate when kids have opinions. Children should be seen and not heard. Remember being told that as a kid? I think we should bring that adage back into use.

If you read the other rhubarb cake recipe, you will know that I also love this cake. It is very, very good. Especially still warm from the oven. Seriously. I might even like it more than the other one at that perfect point in time. But if you are wanting to pick at it over the next few days, it just isn’t as good for keeping.

I think I might have solved that problem, though. I halved the recipe and made it in a 9 x 9 pan and it worked great! I’m going to give you the recipe for a regular 9 x 12 cake, but just know that halving it worked really, really well and was just perfect for the four of us and breakfast the next morning! (I am conjuring up a post about why we should consider cake and pie breakfast foods.)

One other note: It calls for buttermilk. I never have buttermilk. Well, I do right now, but that’s a rarity. In the event that you do not have buttermilk, add 1 tablespoon white vinegar to 1 cup of milk and let stand about 15 minutes. The flavor of the substitute is great. The consistency is more thin. Whether that affects the final cake is a matter for debate. I think it does, while others claim not to be able to tell the difference.

OK, I do have one more gripe. At the end of this recipe you are required to mix powered sugar, milk and butter into a glaze. I hate making the glaze. Why?  Because I am feeling lazy at that point and I just want to eat the damn cake, not make the glaze. Second, no matter what I do, my glaze is lumpy. My mom’s is always perfectly smooth. My glaze makes me feel like a failure. What’s your secret, Mom? What are you holding back on me? Is this one of those potato soup recipe secrets? Anyway, I have come to blame the cake for my glaze-making failures. Of course, in true Morgan fashion, she claims it’s the glaze that makes this cake her favorite. And lumpy or not, it still tastes great.

Actually, even though it’s thundering, raining, windy and a cold 58 degrees (while my Weatherbug iphone app tells me it’s sunny and fast approaching 83 degrees), as soon as the storm passes I’m going to out and pick more rhubarb and use the rest of my buttermilk to make this cake.

Mom’s Rhubarb Cake

Preheat oven to 350. Grease 9 x 12 pan. (Recipe may be halved: use a 9 x 9 pan)

  • 1/2 c shortening
  • 1 1/2 c sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 t vanilla
  • 1 cup buttermilk*
  • 1 t baking soda
  • 2 c flour
  • 1/2 t salt

Topping

  • 2 T softened butter
  • 1 cup powdered sugar
  • 2 T milk
  • 1/2 t vanilla (optional: my addition)

Combine the buttermilk with the baking soda in a 2 cup container (sometimes it will bubble over a 1 cup measure, sometimes not), set aside for 5 minutes.

In a mixer, cream the shortening and sugar together. Add egg, beat on high for about a minute. Stir in vanilla. In a small bowl stir the flour and salt together. Take turns adding some of the flour mixture, then some of the buttermilk mixture to the mixing bowl, mixing on medium-low until all is added. When well combined, gently fold in 4 cups of cut rhubarb with a rubber spatula. Pour/spoor into a greased 9 x 12 pan  and smooth with a knife. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes.

For the topping, combine butter, powdered sugar, milk and vanilla. Mix well and drizzle in lines across the warmish (not hot) cake.

* Buttermilk substitution: you may substitute scant cup of milk combined with 1 T vinegar for buttermilk.

Asparagus, Week Four

For the uninitiated, this is better known as: Stage Three.

“Dave,” I ask, “Is there anyone you want to brown-nose at the office?”

“No, not really.”

“Charlie. Do your teachers want more asparagus?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Morgan?”

“NO MOM!”

I rack my brain… Who has told me they would do anything for fresh asparagus? I can’t remember.

Something tells me that everyone must be as sick of it as we are. Fickle, us human beings, aren’t we? How long ago was it that I was laying on my belly, scrounging around looking for those first tips to emerge from the soil? And it’s come to this?

I walk out to the garden and instead of jumping for joy, I am filled with dread: MORE ASPARAGUS!

It doesn’t help that every time I go to pick it, I am faced with this type of debauchery:

A threesome, no less!

Ugh. Asparagus beetles. Striped. Spotted. I’ve got ’em all. And the same winter that had such a nice insulating blanket of snow for my plants, also protected the pests. At least that’s my suspicion. I have never had this many beetles. Not even close. In the past, I’ve pretty much ignored them as they were more of a nuisance than anything. But this year, they are actually damaging the spears. Chewing right into them. So I go out there with my gloves and crush as many as I can. It’s pretty gross. Not as bad as decaying worms swimming around in green slime on top of the pool cover, but right up there.

Stage Three Asparagus meals are…

Oh Gosh, I can hardly even write about it. I’m so sick of asparagus.

Stage Three Asparagus meals are roasted or grilled. Tonight I’m roasting it. For the life of me, I can’t imagine why anyone would ever want to cook or eat asparagus. Ever. Again. But for the sake of  formality, I bring to you this insipid Stage Three Asparagus recipe.

Oven Roasted Asparagus with Balsamic Vinegar
  • 1 bunch, or 3-4 spears per person, asparagus
  • 1 T olive oil
  • 1 T balsamic vinegar
  • lots of kosher salt and fresh ground pepper.

Preheat the oven to 475. In a perfect world, you would heat the pan in the oven as it preheats and add the asparagus to the hot pan. I didn’t do that tonight. You can use a baking sheet or a cast iron pan. Put the asparagus in a single layer in the pan and drizzle with olive oil, roll around to coat.

Pick off any stray maurauders:

Put in the oven. After about 5 minutes (it should be sizzling pretty good), use a spatula or an oven-mitted hand to roll across the top of the asparagus (to turn them all at once) it and cook another 3-5 minutes. Drizzle with balsamic, salt and pepper. Bang it down on the table with dinner and tell them they have to eat it. You don’t care how sick they are of it. Fresh asparagus is a gift from GOD and dammit, they better ENJOY it.

Meatless Monday Twenty!

So, I had bookclub on Monday this week. Didn’t prepare ahead and have Meatless Monday on Sunday. Didn’t cook meatless for my family before I left. Didn’t do much of anything, really. Except have a rotten, horrible day. I can’t remember everything that happened, but Monday was bad, bad, bad.

I was late to bookclub as usual, but what to my wondering eyes should appear?

But a Sheilabird cooking Meatless Monday for Jennie, so dear!

Yes, it’s true. My friend Sheila cooked a Meatless Monday meal in my honor! Well, I don’t know if it was really in my honor, but she said it was, and I am choosing to believe her. Of course, I didn’t have my camera. And of course everyone was freaking out about me taking pictures with my iphone. So they all stink. The pictures, I mean. Not the guests. But really! What’s so bad about a nasty picture on my blog? No one reads the stupid thing except you guys, and you don’t care, do you?

Anyway. It was lovely. Sheila’s bookclub dinners always are. She served something she made last fall called Indian Relish (Is that right, Sheila? I’m too lazy to call you) over cream cheese with those wafer-thin crackers that remind me of ice cream cones. The relish reminds me of pepper jelly, sort of sweet/onion/hot… So good

And she had an awesome zinfandel.

Which I promptly spilled on her brand-new-not-even-finished-quilted tablecloth.

So uncouth.

The main event was what she calls Green and White Pasta, even though we all know pasta isn’t really white. Maybe the white should be the green onion. Anyway, it’s a recipe that originally called for broccoli that she has morphed into a conflagration of green veggies. Any you have on hand, really. She used asparagus (AND DIDN’T CALL ME FOR ANY!), peas, thin green beans and green onions.

Yuk! I just found a wood tick stuck into my shoulder blade. I saw it in the mirror last night and thought it was a zit. Sorry. I guess I thought you’d want to know that…

This is how you make it:

Green & White Pasta, serves 8

  • 1 lb Pasta. Pick a fun shape. She used Campanelle, but also likes Gemelli.
  • 6-10 cloves garlic minced (to taste)
  • 4 T olive oil, divided
  • 1-2 t red pepper flakes (to taste)
  • 1 small bunch asparagus (figure about 12-16 spears)
  • 1 cup green peas
  • 1 bunch green onion
  • 1 small bunch chives (if you haven’t killed them all with Round-Up yet), chopped/minced.
  • 1 small bunch haricot vert (thin green beans)
  • juice from 2 large lemons
  • 1 cup shredded parmesan cheese, plus more for garnish
  • 1/2 cup pine nuts, toasted. (to toast, spread on cookie sheet and bake at 350 for about 8 minutes. WATCH CLOSELY! better to under-toast than to over-toast.)
  • salt and pepper to taste

Blanch the asparagus and beans till just tender crisp and chill in an ice bath. Drain and cut into approximately 2-3″ pieces. Cook the pasta in well seasoned water until just al dente, drain. In a large heavy bottomed pot, big enough to hold the entire dish, heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil over medium heat and add garlic. Saute until fragrant, about a minute. Add green onions and pepper flakes, saute another minute. Add the beans, asparagus, peas and chives to the pot. Saute until warmed thru. Add the cooked and drained pasta to the mix, gently stirring to combine. Add another 2 tablespoons (or more to taste) of olive oil. Add the lemon juice and parmesan cheese. Stir until everything is hot and combined. Top with toasted pine nuts and serve with more parmesan on the side.

Enjoy!*

* I hate when waiters say “Enjoy!”

Meatless Monday Nineteen!

Steamy Kitchen’s Shrimp Fried Rice

It’s another recipe from The Steamy Kitchen’s cookbook. But in the text, she credits Elise from SimplyRecipes.com for the recipe. It’s all so confusing! Either way, it was easy and delicious.

I got a new rice cooker for Mother’s Day. An expensive Neuro Fuzzy to replace my very old $25 one. The old one worked fine, but the teflon interior was all peeling, which — if you ever read my post about switching to cast iron pans, you’ll know — freaks me out.

So I got the cadillac of rice cookers.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I didn’t get the induction model. Still not real sure what that does for you. This one is complicated enough to keep me busy for a while. (Seriously. It’s insane.). I’m hoping I can eventually do all sorts of stuff in it, like barley and Israeli cous cous, etc. We’ll see.

Anyway, I was keen to try it out, so on Sunday night, I made a big batch of rice to cool in the refrigerator overnight to use for fried rice on Meatless Monday night. I’ve been making fried rice forever. My mom made it way back in the 70’s. And her’s is the recipe I still use for the most part. But I’m always up for something new. And shrimp fried it was, since I actually had shrimp. [but if you must know, it was the shrimp I stole from my Dad a couple Meatless Mondays ago]

I also served the Salmon with Kabayaki sauce that I made a few weeks ago at Dave’s request, but I already shared that recipe. You can click on it if you are interested. (It is quite good!)

Shrimp Fried Rice
  • 4 cups white rice, cooked and cooled at least overnight
  • 1/2 – 1 lb raw, shelled & deveined shrimp
  • 1/2 t salt
  • freshly ground black pepper
  • 1 t cornstarch
  • 1 t sesame oil
  • 2 T vegetable oil, divided
  • 3 eggs, beaten
  • 2 green onions, cut into 1/2″ pieces on diagonal
  • 1 t fish sauce
  • 2 t soy sauce
  • 1/2 – 3/4 cup peas
  • drizzling of sesame oil

Separate the rice grains before starting recipe. Toss the shrimp, cornstarch, salt and pepper and 1 teaspoon sesame oil together and let marinate at least 10 minutes at room temp.

Heat a wok on high. When it is smoking, add 1 tablespoon oil, swirl to coat and add the shrimp, spreading out into a single layer and not moving for 30 seconds. Flip over and let other side cook for 30 seconds, then remove to a plate.

Turn the heat to medium and add the eggs to wok, spread out and scramble. Remove eggs to same plate as shrimp when eggs are just barely, barely cooked.

Wipe wok out and return to high heat. Add remaining tablespoon of oil, swirl to coat and add green onions. Stir fry about 15 seconds, then add the rice, spreading out in an even layer. Cook about a minute. Use a spatula or wooden spoon to toss the rice, spreading out again and cooking for another minute.

Drizzle the fish sauce and soy sauce all around and toss the rice again. Add the peas, the eggs, the shrimp and drizzle with about 1/2 teaspoon of sesame oil. Salt and pepper to taste and serve immediately. Serve with additional soy sauce if desired.

[I used a bit more sesame oil than the recipe calls for. I didn’t use carrots, because I didn’t have any. If you want the recipe exactly as Jaden writes it, you’ll have to buy it for yourself — which I highly recommend!)

Meatless Monday Eighteen!

Morel Mushroom and Asparagus Risotto

If you haven’t read the Morel post from yesterday, please do. It gives background information necessary for truly understanding the nature of this very special Meatless Monday meal.

No, I’m not talking about the asparagus, that I’m ready to plow under. I’m talking, of course, about the two-year wait for morels fresh from our own woods. I liken it to the meals you eat while camping. Nothing tastes better than anything you make to eat when you are camping. And morels that you found yourself, in your own barren forest, taste better than any other.

I also — finally — made my own vegetable stock. I didn’t open any books to guide me on this journey, mind you. I just threw some veggies in a pan.

Roasted them at 450 for about 30 minutes.

Added water and simmered for an hour or two…

And just like that I had vegetable stock that tasted exactly like… water.

It was a beautiful golden brown color. It had a good aroma. But it tasted like water. And so it began, the random dumping of ingredients into the pot. I added tons of garlic, bay leaves, a sprig of rosemary, another onion, another carrot, two more stalks of celery, some wine, a splash of balsamic.

No, I’m not kidding. I really did add all that stuff. And in the end, it tasted like very weak vegetable stock. Which was actually perfect.

Because, have I written about making risotto before? How I love it so much, but when I make it it always seems so cloyingly rich? How I used to use my homemade chicken stock, but have eventually gravitated toward watered down store-bought Swanson’s broth? I think I might have, but if you didn’t read it, now you know.

So, I really was after a weak-tasting stock. Still, I was shocked at how many vegetables you actually have to use in order to get any flavor! I thought the roasting of them would combat that, but it didn’t. It just gave it a deeper color.

Anyway. Enough of that. I made it, it was delicious and I didn’t miss chicken broth one bit in this recipe. In fact, it was so good, I just might make the risotto this way always. Well, when I have the time to be farting around all day, that is.

For the four of us (and this left two servings of leftovers), I used 1 1/2 cups of arborio rice and about … I’m thinking back here…. about 8-9 cups of liquid. I could not believe how much liquid I needed. 3/4 cup of it was white wine, about 6 cups of it was the stock and the rest was water I kept adding at the end to get it the consistency we like — more soupy, less dry.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, I made the risotto to just-short of being done and finished it two hours later. If you don’t know me personally, you will think the unforeseen circumstance was something like : the dog got hurt and had to go to the vet. Or, a friend called and asked for my help with driving her kids around…

But you’d be wrong. The unforeseen circumstance was soccer practice, which has been on the calendar for weeks. It was unforeseen in my own mind only. Dave was looking at me like I had three heads when I told him we were eating before practice. Of course, he was right and I was wrong.

But things happen for a reason, I like to think. And in this case it was the marvelous discovery of risotto being ‘par cooked’, or whatever the hell those Top Chefs call it on TV. I think this is what restaurants must do, as they can’t possibly be making risotto to order from scratch at a restaurant because it would take too long. It suddenly makes risotto a viable dish to make for company if you don’t want to be standing at the stove for an hour while guests stand around saying things like “Isn’t there something I can help you with?” …As you run around like a chicken with your head cut off, plunging your dirty hands into the food they will be eating later. Always a little disconcerting…

Oh my gosh. I talk/write too much. I’m not even at the damn recipe yet… I’ll just get to it. Sorry.

Morel and Asparagus Risotto (vegetarian)
  • 6-8 cups weak or watered down vegetable stock
  • 3/4 cup white wine
  • 1 1/2 cup arborio rice
  • 2T butter or olive oil
  • 1 small onion diced (I used frozen chopped leeks)
  • 1 large clove garlic, pressed
  • large bundle of asparagus cut on the diagonal into 2″ pieces, blanched
  • 2 cups (or whatever you can manage) washed and dried morel mushrooms, cut in half and sauteed in butter till browned
  • 1 cup finely grated pecorino or parmesan cheese

I put much of the prep instructions up there in the ingredient list. I wanted the asparagus to look perfect in the rice and not be overcooked, so I opted to blanch it rather than to cook it in the risotto. I think this is worth the extra dirty pan because with fresh garden asparagus, the tips would look mutilated from the stirring.

I also wanted the morels to have as much flavor as possible. I’m often disappointed when putting morels in with other foods, because you miss them in the other flavors and then they seem wasted. It is why I far more often just saute them in butter and eat them out of the pan. So for this recipe, I sauteed them in butter until the edges started to brown and crisp, salted and peppered, ate a few and saved the rest for stirring into the almost finished risotto. When I realized I needed more liquid than the vegetable stock I had ready, I deglazed the mushroom pan with water and used that for the liquid. It worked great and I would recommend it if you find yourself in a similar situation. OR, if you use dried mushrooms, save the soaking water and add to the risotto. It has a lot of flavor. (see? I’m still talking too much)

Bring the stock to a simmer in a sauce pan. In a separate large dutch oven or pan large enough for the finished risotto, heat the butter or oil over medium heat, and saute the onion until soft and translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the rice, stirring constantly, and saute for another couple minutes. Add the wine, stirring, until mostly absorbed. Add the stock, 1 cup at a time, stirring more often than not, as the stock is absorbed and is mostly absorbed by the rice (when you stir there isn’t liquid sitting on the bottom of the pan anymore), add another cup of stock. Occasionally take a bite of rice to see what stage it is at. Mine took about 25 minutes to get to the point that I ran out of time. At that point, I had added all of my 6 cups of stock and  the mushrooms. I covered it so the cats wouldn’t eat it and left. When I came back two hours later, I heated up 2 more cups of water (I do think that par cooking the rice and finishing later uses more liquid, so if you are making it to eat right away, you will use less), and finished cooking the risotto. Stir the blanched asparagus into the rice. Stir 3/4 cup of the grated cheese into the rice. Put into a big pretty bowl and top with remaining cheese.

In retrospect, I think a squeeze of lemon juice would have been really good, but by this time, it was about 9:20pm at our house and my kids would have stabbed me in the eye with a fork if I had told them to wait. This also explains the rather horrible photo, too, which for me has now become a tradition for Meatless Monday posts.