12 oz / 355 mL Coca Cola
1½ c / 355 mL Heinz ketchup
1 medium onion, chopped fine
¼ c / 60mL cider vinegar
¼ c / 60 mL worcestershire sauce
1 t chili powder
1 t salt
hot sauce (Tabasco, Texas Pete) to taste

Bring ingredients just to boil, then reduce to simmer for 30 to 45 minutes as sauce thickens, stirring occasionally.

Each batch makes 25 nine-and-a-half-pound loaves of carrot cake. The kitchen crew at Rikers apparently make 2,500 loaves of this cake a year, which is served on holidays. Each loaf serves 20 inmates. As for the quantities, I don’t recommend down-sizing the quantities and hoping to get the same results. My grandmother-in-law, Edna Macnamer, used to run a bakery in rural Tennessee, and she’s been frustrated trying to replicate some of her favorite recipes scaled down for her own home kitchen. Still, if you should happen to have access to an industrial mixer and 200 eggs, you might consider whipping this one up.

25 pounds sugar
3 gallons vegetable oil
25 pounds flour
8 ounces salt
1 pound baking powder
8 ounces baking soda
6 ounces nutmeg
6 ounces allspice
4 ounces clove powder
4 ounces ginger
8 ounces cinnamon
25 pounds carrots
25 pounds eggs (about 250 large eggs!)
8 pounds walnuts
20 pounds raisins
8 ounces vanilla extract

• Place in a mixing bowl – sugar, flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, clove powder, allspice, baking powder, baking sods, salt. Using a paddle mix on slow for five minutes.
• Add raisins, carrots, walnuts, eggs, vegetable oil and vanilla extract mix on slow speed for an additional five minutes.
• Increase speed to medium for 10 minutes.
• Pour into loaf pans. Pans should be three-quarters full.
• Bake at 400° for 20 minutes, then lower the temperature to 350° and bake for 20 more.

Source: New York Times

Update: GOOD NEWS! The New York Times has published a scaled down version of the recipe more appropriate for home cooks.

The best apple in the whole world is back for the season… the HONEYCRISP. I spotted it at the Alexandria Farmer’s Market this past Saturday sold by a West Virginian farmer. I’ve already eaten all the ones I bought for myself, so I’m hoping that I can score some more at the Whole Foods. It used to be this apple was scarce and only around for a short while, but last year, I was able to find them from early fall all the way into late winter. If you’ve not tried it, look for it. It’s the best eating apple I’ve ever had.

I ended up getting a bumper crop of red plum tomatoes from my garden this week, so I made this sauce. I prepared the tomatoes by peeling the skins off (dip into boiling water for 30 seconds), then cutting them in half, removing the seedy goo inside, and dousing them with a little balsamic vinegar on sheet pans, and then roasting them in a very hot oven. When they were done, I ran them through the food processor. But you could whiz a couple cans of plum tomatoes if you want. The trick about reducing the wine and adding it as a syrup is probably cheating, but it cuts down on the cooking time by 45 minutes. Overall, expect this sauce to take 2 to 3 hours to make. Freezes well.

1 onion, cut into 8ths
½c baby carrots
2 stalks of celery, cut into 3rds
2 T butter
½ lb ground beef
½ lb ground pork
½ lb ground bison (or ground veal)
2 T tomato paste
1 pint whole milk
2 c red wine
3 cans San Marzano plum tomatoes, whizzed in the food processor, or fresh tomatoes, treated as described above.
2 cups chicken stock

Run the vegetables through a food processor until they’re chopped quite fine. Put into a preheated, thick bottomed pot (over medium heat) with the butter and cook until softened and fragrant. Add the meat and break it up with your spoon. You’re not really trying to brown anything, just get it all into smaller pieces. Mix in tomato paste. Add the milk and bring it to a boil, then simmer until most of the liquid is evaporated, stirring occasionally. Meanwhile, in a separate sauce pan, reduce the red wine to a syrup, then add it to the milk and meat mixture.  Add in the tomatoes and then simmer, simmer, simmer. Low and slow, with the lid off. You want it to barely bubble. Stir it often, and cook it until it’s thick.

5-6 lbs pickling cucumbers
1 c pickling or kosher salt
3 quarts (12 c) water
1 quart (4 c) white vinegar
crushed garlic
fresh dill
black peppercorns

Cover the cucumbers in a large non-reactive bowl with water, and add ¼c salt, and let them soak for 8 to 12 hours. Sterilize 4 or more jars in the dishwasher. In a pot, bring 3 quarts of water and the 1 quart of vinegar and ¾ cups of salt to a rapid boil. While you’re waiting for that, crush 1-3 cloves of garlic in each jar, along with a couple of fronds of dill and 5 or 6 peppercorns. Rinse the cucumbers, and slice each in half or quarters, or slice into rounds, and fill each jar with as many as you can. Ladle the hot liquid into each jar to cover, and apply the lids. Allow the jars to cool a bit, and then let cool in the fridge.

Technically, the recipe says that you let the pickles cure for 2 weeks, but I can never wait that long, and they taste great immediately. The recipe also claims that they’ll last for a month or two, but I’ve never had them last that long. A variation on the recipe has you add a hot pepper to each jar for a little spice.

Caught a random episode of Cooks Country this weekend where they made an unusual barbecued chicken recipe. I tried to replicate it, though I didn’t follow the recipe exactly.

The weird part about the recipe is that the barbecue sauce is mayonnaise based, as opposed to ketchup based, and it was quite tasty. The real recipe has you smoke a chicken cut in half over hickory chips. I used apple wood. The real recipe has you rub the chicken with a mixture of salt, black pepper and cayenne, and let it rest in the fridge for 30 minutes (or up to 8 hours). I don’t use cayenne because the people I feed don’t like the heat of cayenne, so I made a bit of a mix of salt, pepper, smoked paprika, and adobo seasoning.

The sauce is made up of a quarter cup of mayonnaise,  what was left over from the spice mixture I didn’t rub on the chicken, and a tablespoon of jarred horseradish.

So you cook the chicken (3 to 4 lbs., cut in half with the backbone removed) over an aluminum pie pan, with a chimney full of fully lit charcoal distributed evenly on either side of the pan, and then the soaked wood chips over top of the coals. I cooked it 45 minutes, skin side up, and then 20 minutes with the flesh side down. Then you remove the chicken and brush the sauce over top.

Hot pastrami – one of the best sandwiches in the world. Fragrant, spicy, thin cut hot meat heaped onto rye bread, slathered with mustard, melting in your mouth. That and a kosher half-sour pickle is all you need. In the book Save the Deli (which you are advised not to read on an empty stomach), David Sax details how some of the best delis in the world make their pastrami. A recent New York Times article claims that an artisan approach to deli food can produce the best possible results. So is it possible to make your own pastrami at home?

Yes, but apparently only if you know what you’re doing. Inspired by a small shop in Squirrel Hill Pittsburgh and various blogs, I decided to give pastrami a try. I have been brining my own corned beef for some time now (both literally and figurative). Pastrami is just smoked spiced corned beef, right? So I took my corned beef out of its brine, covered it with pastrami spices, and smoked it in my smoker. The result: smoked corned beef. It wasn’t exactly awful, but it definitely was not pastrami. It tasted like roasted sauerbraten and had the texture of corned beef. My family wouldn’t touch the stuff – especially not after they were expecting the taste of pastrami.

Back to the drawing board. More research. It seems like most pastrami is dry cured and that we have come to associate the taste of nitrates with pastrami. How does a home cook dry cure brisket? With something called Morton’s Tender Cure. Trim all the fat off a brisket (or whatever cut of beef you are trying to turn into pastrami). A few tablespoons of Tender Cure , a few spices and 3 weeks in the fridge yield a beautiful dry cured piece of meat.

What next? Cover the brisket with pastrami spices (paprika, salt, ground black and white pepper, ground yellow mustard seeds, ground coriander seeds, garlic, a little brown sugar) and put it in a smoker over water to cold smoke for 4 hours. Then into a slow oven over boiling water to steam for maybe 2 hours.

The result: delicious! Hot pastrami, better than anything you can get in the grocery store. Hot through and through, fine textured, no collagen, with a peppery bite and a fragrance that’s out of this world. Is homemade better than the pastrami in a great deli like Katz’s? Dunno … we’d have to do a blind taste test. But then again, who cares unless you live in NYC or Squirrel Hill and have ready access to fine hot pastrami. What came out of my oven was better pastrami by far than anything I can buy here in Northern Virginia. David Sax was right (of course).

Anyone spending time on Cape Cod knows that the small roadside stands serve some of the best restaurant food available anywhere. Lobster rolls overflowing with sweet juicy lobster meat, crisp fried clams (not the strips), crunchy onion rings, hot sweet potato fries … delicious! All washed down with a milkshake or float. Everyone has their favorite hangout – these were served at Kate’s in Brewster.

There’s no food more comforting than macaroni and cheese.

When the world seems to be falling apart, when the stock market loses 1000 points in 2 minutes, when Labour and Tories have just as much trouble figuring out who’s boss as do Democrats and Republicans, when the car payment is due and you can’t get your kids to do their homework or even get out of bed in time for school, when the county makes you tear down your beloved backyard shed due to zoning laws and your bicycle gets a flat tire two miles from home, when your spouse’s whole family is coming to visit for a week – that’s when it’s time for Comfort Food. And there’s no food more comforting than macaroni and cheese.

Not “collegiate mac ‘n cheese” — that unnaturally goldenrod-colored aggregate of powdered milk and microscopic noodles that spills out of boxes you can buy 4 for $1. Real homemade macaroni & cheese. The kind they serve in real English pubs. In a pudding dish. With complex cheddar melted over beautifully textured noodles, bubbling out of the oven with a crispy crunchy top. The universal food, loved by Labour and Tories, Democrats and Republicans alike, cherished by Wallace & Gromit (at least if you use Wensleydale).

The ingredients are simple:

macaroni
good quality sharp cheddar cheese (grated)
butter
milk
salt
white pepper
flour
bread crumbs

Cook the macaroni. Drain. Make a béchamel (white) sauce by melting butter in a saucepan and mixing in salt and flour until foamy (4 mins), then gradually add (hot) milk and constantly stir over medium heat until thick (don’t let it boil). Stir some grated cheese into the sauce. Well grease a casserole dish, and layer the macaroni, the sauce and the grated cheese. Sprinkle top with sautéed breadcrumbs and some white pepper. Bake for about 30 minutes at 350 degrees until bubbly. Or, if you are twenty-something, impatient and/or really hungry, skip the baking step and eat immediately after adding the cheese.

This week’s People Magazine (the ultimate real mag for real people?) had a variation attributed to Alton Brown: add some powdered dry mustard, ½ cup finely diced onion, a bay leaf, paprika and an egg to the white sauce, and use sauteed panko bread crumbs for the topping.. Alas, our kids wouldn’t eat this recipe. Too many onions?

Cheryl and Bill Jamison’s American Home Cooking advises you to add some buttermilk with the milk to make the white sauce, and to add some Tabasco sauce and a pinch of nutmeg. The Lee Bros. recommend 3 bay leaves and Gruyere or Swiss cheese. The White House Cookbook uses ¼ cup chopped onion, liquid Butter Buds (whatever they are – I guess some low cholesterol butter substitute), whole wheat flour, dry mustard, some swiss cheese mixed in with the cheddar, and fresh parsley. Other variations add minced ham or bacon. But the more complex the ingredients, the less comforting the result?

Garmey’s Great British Cooking has an even more basic, super-comforting recipe that leaves out the pasta. Put layers of buttered white bread (crusts removed) into the casserole dish, sprinkle cheese and a little salt and pepper over the bread; cook 3 beaten eggs with 2 cups milk in a saucepan until almost ready to boil; pour over the bread, top with bacon or ham slices and some more cheese (Wensleydale?), and bake for 45 minutes after letting stand for 15 minutes.

Saveur Cooks Authentic American (a wonderful cookbook if you’ve never seen it – it will make you so hungry just looking at the spectacular photos) suggests adding a small amount of cayenne and pouring ½ cup of heavy cream over the whole mixture after assembling just before topping with sauted bread crumbs. Not something for every day. But it’s not every day that you need to comfort food before curling up under the afghan in front of a warm fire with hot cocoa and a tearjerker (book or film). Don’t forget the chocolate.

So, in this clip of Jamie Oliver’s new television show, he demonstrates to the kids how processed foods are supposed to be awful and terrible.

He cuts up a chicken, removing all the normal chicken parts, and is left with a carcass. He tosses it into a food processor and turns the carcass into a paste. He puts it through a sieve to remove any really big parts of bone and gristle, and then he adds flavorings and stabilizers … they sort of look like flour and chicken soup mix … forms them into patties, covers them with bread crumbs and puts them in a frying pan. Then he asks the kids if they still want to eat it.  Their reaction seems to surprise him. The kids say that they would still eat the bogus chicken nuggets.

And why not? In this age of recycling, and over-population, why shouldn’t it be acceptable to eat all of the “nasty bits,” especially if you can make it more palatable? Of course, he’s very careful to point out, in the voice-over, that this isn’t the way chicken nuggets are allowed to be made in this country. The implication, though, is that other countries — England? — might allow this sort of thing to go on.

They say that the pig is a magical creature. That everything can be used for food except for the oink. In other countries, they eat all sorts of parts of all sorts of animals that our culture has been taught to shun. Aside from whatever is in the stabilizers and the flavorings that he added, I can’t really see anything wrong with making the stuff most people would toss away into something useful and edible. (Even if, I must admit, I’m not sure I’d be willing to eat it.)