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.

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 midsupper, try freshly picked raspberries or blueberries, sugar, lenom juice, and lots of tapioca.

1 cup sugar
1 cup light corn syrup
1 cup smooth peanut butter
6 cups Rice Krispies^® cereal
1 small bag (12-16 oz) semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 small bag (12-16 oz) butterscotch chips

In a 3-quart saucepan, combine the sugar and the corn-syrup and bring to a boil. Remove from the heat, and stir in the peanut butter, and mix well. Add the cereal, stirring until blended. Press the mixture into a buttered 13×9x2-inch sheet pan. Melt the chocolate and butterscotch chips together in a double-boiler, or use a microwave: half power for 3 minutes, stirring, and then up to another 2 minutes. Spread melted mixture over the Rice Krispies^® mixture in the pan. Cool until firm, and cut into squares. Do not refrigerate!

1 slightly beaten egg
1 10 oz. package of frozen chopped broccoli, partially thawed
1 8½ oz can creamed style corn
1 cup herb-seasoned stuffing mix
1 tablespoon grated onion
¼ teaspoon salt
dash of pepper
3 tablespoons butter

In a greased 2-quart casserole dish, combine egg, broccoli, cream corn, onion, salt and pepper. In a small sauce pan (or in a bowl in the microwave), melt the butter; add the stuffing mix, and toss to coat. Stir three-quarters of the stuffing mixture in with the vegetables, and then top with the remaining quarter cup. Bake uncovered, 35-40 minutes in a 350° oven.

Please refer to the Cooking Monster contest rules.

Contest ends APRIL 15, 2010.

My grandpa, Aaron Jelliff, 1906-1971

My grandfather loved to cook, even back in the Eisenhower days, where the men went out to work, and the women stayed home and kept the house. He was a fabulous bread maker and started my mother on her endless cookbook collecting. He is also very much remembered for this recipe. It dates back to the 60’s, so the only kind of parmesan cheese Grandpa knew of came in a green can. The recipe also doesn’t take advantage of many fresh herbs or the new no-boil kind of pasta either, though I’m sure it couldn’t hurt at all to make those replacements. Rinsing pasta is usually frowned upon, but it’s important to do it in this recipe, otherwise the noodles will stick together and become completely impossible to handle.

1 lb. sausage (sweet italian or bulk)
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tablespoon basil (dried)
1½ teaspoons salt
1 can of chopped tomatoes (16 oz)
2 cans tomato paste (6 oz. each)
10 oz. lasagna noodles
3 cups ricotta cheese (whole milk is best)
½ cup grated parmesan cheese
3 tablespoons dried parsley
2 eggs, beaten
2 teaspoons salt
½ teaspoon black pepper
1 lb. mozzarella, sliced thin (or same amount, shredded)

In a large frying pan, brown the meat slowly. Spoon off the excess grease. Add garlic, basil, salt, tomatoes, and tomato paste, and simmer uncovered for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Cook the noodles according to the package, drain, and rinse under cold water until you can handle them. Combine the ricotta, parmesan, parsley, eggs, salt and pepper. Put half of the noodles in a 13×9x2 baking dish, spread half of the cheese mixture on top, and a layer of 1/3rd of the mozzarella cheese, and half of the meat sauce. Repeat the layers, finishing off with the rest of the mozzarella. Bake at 375° for about 30 minutes. Let it stand 10 minutes before serving.

If any of you have had to deal with a short sale, especially with Bank of America, I feel for you. We put our offer in on a house in June — an offer about $10k more than the asking price. And we waited, and waited, and waited. More than six months, we waited. Every week, asking our agent if there was any news, and never getting any answers. Every few months, we’d get a panicked email from our agent telling us that the house had gone back on the foreclosure list, and that we had to scramble to get paperwork out to prove that we really did want to buy the house. (Come to find out, we learned later that this was usually caused by the seller not providing the bank with some paperwork in a timely manner, and when those deadlines expired, the bank would start the steps towards foreclosure.) The bad part about that was that though we were able to take the house off the foreclosure list, the short-sale process would start back to point zero.

In the end, the only thing that seemed to work to get the ball moving was an email I sent to the office of the President of BoA. I told him about the nightmare process we’d been going through. It seemed to work, because a month later, I got a phone call from a representive of the President of BoA, and while she couldn’t discuss details on the mortgages the seller had, she assured me that she’d oversee the process to completion. Three weeks later, the bank finally did approve the sale. I can’t say whether this tactic would work now, though. The then CEO Ken Lewis stepped down in the beginning of 2010, and I don’t even know who the new one is or how responsive he or she would be. (I can tell you that the address of the old CEO was ken.d.lewis at bankofamerica dot com, so maybe you can figure out their email address naming convention to figure out the address of the new one, if you ever need to.)

So, after many months of waiting for the bank  to process the short sale, we were finally granted permission by the bank to purchase the house we wanted in early January, 2010! BUT…

But, we were undone by the neglectful and idiotic seller.  Even though he apparently lived less than a mile from the property, it seems that he long ago gave up any emotional attachment in his property because he failed to winterize the house, allowing a pipe to burst. The water damage went undetected for several weeks, and a crop of nasty toxic mold grew. Even though my wife and I had invested more than six months of our lives in waiting for the property at 4300 Rock Creek, we decided to walk away from it. Inevitably, the house will now fall into foreclosure, and some investor will buy it for a song, fix the mold damage, and probably never tell buyers that the house was tainted.

So it was, in mid January, that my wife and I joined our agent on the house hunt again, looking at all the properties in our area that were for sale in our price range. One Sunday, we went to 16 different properties. Ugh. We settled on making an offer on a recently remodeled three-bedroom, two-bath house 15 minutes south of where our apartment is now. Our agent set up a rigorous closing schedule, and I’m happy to report that as of February 18, my wife and I became proud home-owners!

The kitchen was completely remodeled, with all new appliances, and it’s quite big, too. We’re doing a little more remodeling now, and scheduled to move in at the end of March. So, if you don’t hear much from me in the next few weeks, you’ll know why. Wish us luck!

Foodoir n. A memoir that includes recipes or that is focused on food, meals, or cooking. [Blend of food and memoir.]

Whole Foods Republicans n. “Independent-minded voters who embrace a progressive lifestyle but not progressive politics. These highly-educated individuals appreciate diversity and would never tell racist or homophobic jokes; they like living in walkable urban environments; they believe in environmental stewardship, community service and a spirit of inclusion. And yes, many shop at Whole Foods, which has become a symbol of progressive affluence but is also a good example of the free enterprise system at work.”

Koodie n. slang. A kid keenly interested in food, especially eating, cooking or watching reruns of Julia Child. A kid who has an ardent or refined interest in food; a mini-gourmet; usually trained by one or both parents to have an unusual, and sometimes fanatic, desire to eat unusual foods. Evolution from the now defunct word “foodie.”

TweetWhatYouEat, n. (commonly known as “twye“). A Twitter application that helps people track what they eat, thereby encouraging them to eat more healthily.

Men-tertainers n. an increasing number of males are spending their free time organising dinner parties for their friends.

Courtesy of The Double-tongued Dictionary, Word Spy, and Schott’s Vocab.

First, salt and pepper the bird, inside and out. If you want to get fancy, put a couple spoonfuls of compound butter underneath the skin of the breast. Then put the 3 to 3½ pound chicken on a roasting pan that’s preheated in a hot oven (425°), but put it in on its side, and let it cook for 15 minutes. Then turn it on its other side for another 15 minutes. Finally, roast it breast side up for 25 to 35 minutes more, basting the bird every 10 minutes. You should hear the chicken sizzling the whole time while it’s in the oven. (You know it’s done when the joints move easily.) Then let it rest outside of the oven for 15 minutes more, covered with foil.

The result is an very moist and completely cooked chicken. What’s more, as with other roast chicken recipes, it’s just as easy to cook two chickens at the same time, either to feed a crowd or for copious leftovers. And though it’s a little more work, and I can’t wander far from the kitchen, it’s definitely going to be my go-to way to roast a chicken from now on — or, at least until some novel method presents itself.

I next tried my standard pie crust recipe, which ended up quite flaky and delicious, but was still way, way too fragile.

I finally settled on a pocket pie crust recipe as described on Alton Brown’s Good Eats show. This all-shortening dough recipe is incredibly easy to work with. Unlike other pie doughs, you want to build up the gluten in it, which makes it more durable, capable of standing up to — well — carrying a pie in your pocket. So rolling the dough out, and then rerolling it and re-re-rolling it, to use up all of the remnants to make more pies won’t hurt it a bit. (Try doing that with a regular pie dough.) Granted, it’s quite a long way from the shortbread little cups with stars in it, as described in Nigella’s television show, but these are much more practical. Of course, the proof will be in the pudding. I mailed off several packages today with a couple of these pies inside. We’ll see how well they hold up.

In addition, the way you cook the dough is very versatile. You can bake it, like I did, or pan fry the pies in a little butter (like a pot-sticker), or you can deep fat fry them. And apparently the dough works equally well for sweet or savory fillings, though I personally think the addition of a little sugar to the mix might go a long way to improving the crust, as well as perhaps adding a little more browning in the oven.

And I have a few more distant friends and relatives who I plan on sending some belated Christmas cheer to, so I’ll be making at least one more batch. This time, though, I intend on making smaller, more bite-sized pies than the ones described in the recipe. And I might even try deep frying them. We’ll see how they turn out.

If you’d like to watch the episode where the recipe is demonstrated, it’s been uploaded to Youtube and is in 2 parts — below.

Part 1 : A Pie in Every Pocket , Good Eats, S09E12

Part 2 : A Pie in Every Pocket , Good Eats, S09E12