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.

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).

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.

3 or 4 thick cut natural pork chops, rib cut, on the bone
1 onion
whatever fresh herbs you have on hand (rosemary, thyme, sage)
3 tablespoons salt
1 tablespoon sugar
water
2 tablespoons oil
ground black pepper
2 ounces port wine
¼ cup of your favorite bbq sauce

In a zip-top bag, combine the sugar, salt and about a cup of warm water. Mix to dissolve. Cut the onion into quarters or eighths, removing the papery skin. Add the pork chops and the fresh herbs. Zip the bag mostly closed and remove as much air as possible before closing it completely. Toss it around a little, then put in a shallow pan and let sit in the fridge, turning it after 4 hours. After 8 hours, remove the chops from the brine, and refrigerate until ready to cook.

Preheat oven to 350°. Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a frying pan. Dry the pork chops of excess surface moisture, pepper each side, then fry in the hot pan, 5 minutes per side. Pour off excess fat, and replace with port wine. Put on the lid, and put it in the oven for 30 minutes. Remove lid, and baste with bbq sauce, return to oven for 10 more minutes. Remove from oven, and let rest for 10 more minutes.

This jam in midwinter tastes as fresh as the berries tasted the previous summer. The secret is to make small batches and to not overcook. The jam tends to be thinner (excellent for pancakes or ice-cream topping!) and less gummy than store-bought, but the fresh flavor cannot be beat. If you prefer thicker jam, you might experiment with adding some pectin.

1 lb. fresh strawberries, blueberries, raspberries or other berries
2 cups sugar

Wash and clean berries, and place whole (do not crush!) into medium sized saucepan with 1 cup of sugar. Warm over low heat while stirring gently and occasionally until the sugar melts and forms a syrup. Turn heat up to medium high and bring to a boil until foam appears on the top. Skim the foam, add the second cup of sugar, and boil just until jam forms a sheet on the end of your spoon. (Do not overcook — if you do, the jam will slowly transform itself into something that tastes no different from store-bought!) Pour into sterilized jars (leave enough headroom for ice expansion), seal jars with sterilized jar lids, cool, and store in the freezer.

Through much experimentation, I have managed to duplicate an incredible scotch shortbread pie crust used by an Oak Bluffs bakery on Martha’s Vineyard.

1 pound of flour (about 3 to 4 cups)
1 or 1½ sticks of cold butter or margarine
¼ pound (about 1/3 cup) sugar
½ teaspoon salt
glass of ice water

In a deep mixing bowl, mix together by hand the flour, sugar, salt. With  a pastry cutter (though a butter knife will do), thoroughly cut the butter or margarine into the flour mixture. (The flour mixture will turn slightly yellow overall.) Add ice water, a sprinkle at a time, and mix with your hands into the flour mixture until it holds together and forms a doughball.

If you are very cautious, you might want to refrigerate the dough for 30 minutes (but no longer! It will get to hard to roll out!), but I usually proceed immediately to the next step.

Gulp down some of the ice water, cross yourself, then turn slightly more than half of the dough onto a flat surface and roll out with a rolling pin (or a wine bottle, in a pinch — tall german riesling, preferred), big enough to fit your pie pan with overflow. Position the bottom crust into a (glass) pie pan, by loosely rolling the dough onto the rolling pin, lift it over the pan, and carefully let it unroll into the pie pan.

Fill with your favorite pie filling, and top with the remaining dough. Bake in a 375° oven for 45-50 minutes. Let the pie cool completely.

This crust is excellent with any fruit filling, but it’s especially great as an apple or a peach pie, or in early summer, filled with tart pitted cherries, sugar, and tapioca. In midsummer, try freshly picked raspberries or blueberries, sugar, lenom juice, and lots of tapioca.