I’ve been experimenting with new methods for making French fries.
This recipe makes French fries for two or three people.
Ingredients:
3 medium russet potatoes
Oil for cooking
Directions:
Peel the potatoes and soak them in water for a few minutes.
While the potatoes soak, add some oil to a skillet and bring it up to medium heat.
Slice the potatoes into 1/4 or 1/2 inch sticks.
Soak the potatoes in clean, cold water for 5 minutes. The water should become murky from the starch in the potatoes.
Strain the potatoes and soak them again in fresh, cold water. After 5 minutes, strain the potatoes in a colander and allow the potatoes to air dry for a minute or two.
Add the potatoes to the oil. Let the potatoes fry for at least one minute before adjusting them. Stir occasionally and fry until the potatoes are golden brown.
This whole stay-at-home stuff is really weird. I’m adjusting to it but I have to admit that it’s really hard to break the habit of trotting down the grocery store every time I want something that I don’t have in the kitchen.
This time it was fresh baked French bread.
I wanted a Po’ Boy sandwich and perhaps the single most important ingredient of a Po’ Boy is an excellent loaf of French bread. I could have jumped in the car and raced down to the store to get a loaf of bread but I decided to resist the urge and improvise. Thus, the Po’ Boy burrito was born!
What I find interesting is that I had every other ingredient for a Po’ Boy, except the French bread. Go figure.
This recipe makes 3 Po’ Boy burritos.
Ingredients for the remoulade sauce:
½ cup mayonnaise
2 Tbs dill pickles, chopped
1 Tbs lemon juice (I used lime, since I didn’t have lemon on hand)
1 tsp Louisiana hot sauce
1 tsp capers, mashed and minced
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp Dijon mustard (or creole mustard)
½ tsp Worcestershire sauce
1 garlic clove, minced
1 green onion, chopped
Ingredients for the pickled cabbage:
½ cup cabbage, sliced thin
½ tsp cayenne pepper
¼ cup vinegar
2 tsp sugar
Ingredients for the fried shrimp:
15 medium shrimp, peeled, deveined and butterfly cut
1 cup flour
½ cup corn meal
Oil for frying
Additional ingredients:
½ cup lettuce, sliced thin
1 sliced tomato
3 large burrito sized tortillas (9”)
Directions:
Prepare the remoulade sauce.
In a mixing bowl, add mayonnaise, chopped pickles, lemon or lime juice, hot sauce, capers, paprika, Dijon mustard, Worcestershire sauce, garlic and green onion. Set aside.
finished remoulade sauce
In a separate mixing bowl, add the cabbage, lettuce, cayenne pepper, vinegar and sugar. Swirl to mix. Set aside.
Prepare the shrimp.
Mix the flour and corn meal in a bowl and set aside.
Lightly beat two eggs in a bowl and set aside.
Dredge the shrimp in the flour/corn meal mixture and tap off excess flour. Dip the shrimp in the egg wash and then dredge in the flour/corn meal again.
dredging station
In a medium sized sauce pan, fry the shrimp in hot oil. I fried the shrimp in batches of five.
Remove the fried shrimp to a bowl and keep warm.
Once the shrimp are cooked, assemble the burritos. Add remoulade sauce, lettuce, tomato, shrimp and pickled cabbage.
Oops…I forgot the remoulade!
Serve with hot, crispy French fries. See, I found a way to have a little French after all!
Way, way back in my formative years I was a Boy Scout. I didn’t stay with the program very long. In fact, I was only in Scouts for less than two years. But, in that time I learned more about being a good citizen and l learned more valuable knowledge than I ever learned in school.
I learned and practiced teamwork. I learned about nature, and how to survive in the wild. But most importantly, I learned how to prepare myself for anything.
The Scout motto is simple and wise: Be prepared.
Being prepared doesn’t mean you have to prepare for a doomsday event and it doesn’t mean that you have to lay your clothes out on the floor each night, like a fireman, waiting for a four-alarm fire. It means you should prepare your mind to accept and deal with anything that comes your way.
Now that I think of it, being prepared, is really a state of mind akin to Zen Buddhism…don’t fixate on thoughts or emotions. Allow yourself to rely on your skills and instincts. Let the world come to you and embrace it.
This particular crisis, the one surrounding the covid-19 virus, is serious, to be sure. But, the decisions we make and the actions we take shouldn’t be any different than any other moments in our lives. We make decisions every day and we choose actions every day. Every decision and action we have made in our lives has brought us to the place we are now. All we have to do is see a clear path, in our mind, to guide us.
If you are wondering what that clear path might look like, take a look at the Scout Law:
A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.
If every decision we make aligns with the tenets of the Scout law, then we should make good decisions.
On my never-ending quest to reinvent leftover food I was recently faced with a dilemma.
To be honest, the root of the problem can be traced back to me. I made two large pizzas for three people. What was I thinking?! All of the leftover pizza was portioned in sets of three slices, wrapped in foil, and placed in the refrigerator. And, there it sat, practically untouched, for three days.
It wasn’t bad pizza…at least I didn’t think it was bad. The problem was, there was too much of it and I shouldn’t have expected people to eat leftover pizza for days on end. If I was still in college, then yes, leftover pizza might be all you get. Be happy to have something to eat. Live with it.
So, I either had to eat all of the leftover pizza or figure out a way to reinvent it.
Pizza Salad
(serves 3)
Ingredients:
3 slices of leftover pizza (with various toppings)
Iceberg lettuce (one third of a head of lettuce, rough chopped)
1/3 cup Kalamata olives
¼ cup Dried Parmesan cheese
Vinegar and Oil dressing, to taste (I used store bought Italian dressing)
Directions:
Slice the pizza toppings away from the crust with a knife. Allow the pizza topping to warm to room temperature.
Cut the thick crusty edge from the pizza and toast briefly in an oven.
Fill serving bowls with cold chopped iceberg lettuce.
Drizzle salad dressing on salad.
Rough chop the toppings and scatter them across the salads.
Add chopped Kalamata olives and top with parmesan cheese.
Serve the salad cold with warm breadsticks (formerly known as pizza crust).
Here’s one of my many mottos: If it’s spicy, there’s a good chance I will like it.
Having lived most of my life in the South, I have had the joy of eating some excellent Tex-Mex and Cajun food. Both cuisines tend to lean toward the spicy side and I like to make it lean just a little bit more!
Etouffee and gumbo are similar in that they are both served over rice but gumbo is more like a stew, comprised of various types of seafood, meats and vegetables. Etouffee usually only has one type of meat and the sauce is thicker than gumbo. Crawfish Etouffee is the quintessential Etouffee but don’t rule out the shrimp or chicken versions. Use what you have in your kitchen.
Etouffee, which means “smothered” in French, is a classic Louisiana dish. There are two basic types of Etoufee: Creole and Cajun. The Creole variety uses a dark roux and the flavors are deep and complex. The Cajun variety uses a light roux and is spicier than the Creole version.
30 minute Crawfish and Shrimp Etouffee
Yes, this only took 30 minutes to cook from start to finish. But, here’s the catch. I did a lot of prep work a few days before I made this dish. Previously, I cleaned and de-veined the shrimp, parboiled them and stored the shrimp in the refrigerator. I peeled the steamed crawfish and stored them in the refrigerator.
I made stock reductions from the crawfish and the shrimp and then I made compound butter using the crawfish and shrimp reductions. All of that work took a considerable amount of time, but it was worth it.
The rest was easy.
Ingredients:
1 ounce compound shrimp butter
2 ounces compound crawfish butter
2 garlic cloves, mashed
1 Tbs unsalted butter
½ onion, chopped
3 ribs of celery, chopped
2 ounces flour
3 green onions, chopped
2 Tbs tomato sauce
1 ½ Tbs Cajun seasoning
1 cup water
½ lb raw shrimp (peeled and deveined)
½ lb crawfish meat
Directions:
In a large skillet, add the shrimp butter and crawfish butter. Turn heat to medium/low.
As the butter melts, add garlic and sauté for about one minute.
Add 1 tablespoon of butter and the onion and continue stirring for another minute.
Add the celery and stir. Reduce heat to low and simmer for about 5 minutes.
Add the flour and whisk or stir, to form a roux.
Add 1 cup of water and stir until a thick sauce forms.
Add tomato sauce, green onions and Cajun seasoning. Stir to combine.
Fresh shellfish can be pricey so I like to get as much bang for my buck as possible. One of the easiest ways to extend the value of shellfish is to make a stock from the heads and shells. Once the stock has been made, it can be stored for later use and can be used in many different dishes. The unique flavor of shellfish can turn a mediocre dish into something exotic.
Making stock can be as simple as boiling the heads and shells in water and then straining the solids and reserving the liquid. Spices, herbs or vegetables can be added to give the stock extra depth of flavor.
I plan on making some seafood pasta dishes so I made stock from shrimp and crawfish shells. I bought one pound each of crawfish and shrimp. One pound of crawfish results in a paltry amount of crawfish meat and the majority is shells and heads. Shrimp produces a little more meat but you’d be lucky to get half a pound of cooked shrimp from a pound of whole, raw shrimp.
So, with that in mind, I made crawfish butter and shrimp butter. The flavorful compound butter can be stored in the refrigerator for several days, or in the freezer for months.
Ingredients:
1 lb fresh shrimp (these were Gulf shrimp)
1 lb steamed crawfish (crayfish, crawdads, mudbugs…whatever you wish to call them)
½ cup unsalted butter, divided in half
Directions for the shrimp:
Remove the heads from the shrimp. This can be done by gripping the head and pulling away from the rest of the body. If you are squeamish about this sort of thing, get over it. It becomes an automatic process after a few decapitations. Toss the heads into a bowl and set aside.
Peel and devein the shrimp. Rinse the shrimp under cold water and store in an airtight container. Add the shells to the bowl containing the heads.
Put the heads and shells into a skillet. Cover with water and simmer for about 30 minutes, stirring and pressing the shells occasionally.
Strain the solids and discard. Pour the stock into a container and refrigerate or freeze, if desired.
Directions for the crawfish:
Unless you go gigging for crawfish, which is to say, catching your own live crawfish, you will either get them freshly steamed and seasoned or refrigerated, after they were seasoned. Either way, they are probably going to be seasoned with Cajun spices, and that’s a very good thing.
I prefer to eat steamed crawfish while they are still hot, but this time I only snacked on one and used the rest for an Etouffee.
Remove the heads from the crawfish and peel the shells. Reserve the meat.
Not a lot of meat, but ohhh, it’s so good!
Add the heads and shells to a skillet and cover with water. Simmer for 30 minutes and strain the solids. Discard the solids.
Save the stock in the refrigerator, or freeze.
Making compound Butter
If you want to make compound butter with shrimp stock or crawfish stock, simmer the sauces further. Simmer at high heat and whisk constantly. Reduce the sauce until nearly all of the moisture is gone.
I reduced the shrimp stock down to about 3 tablespoons and I reduced the crawfish stock down to about ¼ cup.
Turn the heat off and add ¼ cup butter. Whisk to incorporate. Pour the butter into a small bowl, cover and refrigerate. Once the compound butter solidifies, turn it out on some plastic wrap. Fold the wrap over the butter. I like to add extra layer of plastic wrap to get a good seal. Refrigerate or freeze until needed.
As I mentioned recently, my wife and I are working for “essential” industries. We are still putting in regular hours at our respective companies. Working in an environment that involves close human contact at a time like this can be nerve racking. Sure, when we are at work, we focus on the jobs that need to be done. But, when we come home we think of the risks we take each day we go to work.
We are not exceptional. Many people are experiencing similar types of anxiety. We all deal with it in our own ways.
A few days ago, after a mere 4 hours of sleep, my wife awoke at the crack of dawn and went straight to the kitchen. She spent the next 10 hours baking. When my wife bakes, or cooks for that matter, the result is always impressive. This particular baking marathon was fueled by her love of our family and her need to occupy herself with something meaningful. It surely wasn’t fueled by a good night’s sleep!
It was therapy. It was determination. It was well-honed skill mixed with passion and promise.
I hate to say it but, it’s the weekend and I have too many leftovers in the refrigerator. That’s a great thing for a weekday, when time is precious for us working folks, like us. Yes, my wife and I have been deemed “essential” by the powers that be, but it drives me nuts when the weekend arrives and I discover that leftovers have overtaken the fridge . This is my weekend crisis, along with worrying about the ever-expanding, impending virus.
A good weekend, for me, is when I get to play in the kitchen and make some food that can turn into leftovers for the upcoming week.
But, today, it’s necessary to scoop together a meal from all of the leftovers.
How could I possibly tie all of these leftovers together to make a single, cohesive meal? There’s shrimp in a garlic butter sauce with noodles, scalloped potatoes with ham and a chicken salad, intended for sandwiches. Three mish-mash leftovers with only one or two servings each, among them.
I say, tie them together with some fresh bread. Garlic bread should work. Half of the bread for a small bread loaf and the other half for garlic knots, or in this case, a braided garlic loaf. Add some fresh lettuce and we have a brand new meal! Leftovers can always be boosted by adding a splash of something fresh.
Garlic Bread / Garlic Braid
Ingredients:
1 cup warm water
2 Tbs yeast
1 tsp olive oil
3 cups flour
2 Tbs garlic powder
Pinch of salt
1 quart prepared shrimp with pasta, with garlic butter sauce
1 pint prepared ham and scalloped potatoes
1 pint prepared chicken salad
Fresh lettuce, (any kind will do)
¼ cup olive oil
5 garlic cloves
Directions:
Prepare the bread dough by warming a cup of water and adding yeast and olive oil. Set in a warm place to allow the yeast to activate for 20 minutes. Add water and yeast to a large mixing bowl and add the flour and salt.
Mix and knead for a minute. Sprinkle garlic powder over the dough ball, cover with a towel and allow the dough to rise for 15 minutes in a warm place.
Knead dough again to incorporated the garlic powder. Cover and keep warm for 30 minutes.
Heat an oven to 400°.
Knead the dough and divide in half. Set one half aside.
Take one half and divide into thirds. Roll each third into ropes, making one rope slightly larger than the other two.
Lay the ropes of dough on a clean surface, with the longest rope in the middle. Braid the dough in a French braid.
Lay the braided dough on a baking sheet and bake in the oven.
Take the remaining dough and form into an oblong loaf. Place on a baking sheet and place it in the oven.
Bake for 20 minutes.
While the bread bakes, add chopped garlic to the olive oil and heat in the microwave for about 1 minute. Carefully remove the olive oil and set aside.
Pull the braided loaf out of the oven and leave the other loaf in the oven for another 5 minutes.
Heat the shrimp and pasta in a covered pan, with a little splash of water.
Heat the scalloped potatoes and ham in a microwave oven for a few minutes.
Add the chopped lettuce to individual serving bowls. Top the lettuce with the chicken salad.
Cut the braided loaf into bite sized portions and put the pieces in a mixing bowl.
Pour the garlic and olive oil over the bread pieces and toss.
Place the braided garlic bread pieces in a serving bowl.
Slice the bread loaf into 1” slices.
In a large pan, heat about 1/3 of the scalloped potatoes and ham, with a little water.
Add the sliced bread to the pan and let the bread absorb some of the liquid. Turn the bread over and turn the heat off.
Assemble individual serving plates by adding portions of the shrimp and pasta, along the with the scalloped potatoes and ham on bread slices, and braided garlic bread. Serve with the a side of chicken salad and a sample of the daily news.
Well, it’s official. Our worldwide dilemma has caused the train to jump of the tracks. The Catholic church announced that we can stop abstaining from eating meat on Fridays for the remainder of Lent. At least, that is what one bishop from New Jersey has decreed.
It seems that we have suffered enough. Maybe a delicious hamburger and fries will pick up our spirits.
Lent is one of those old-world traditions that I actually appreciate. Fasting and simplifying our lives through meditation and reverence for 40 days each year seems like a healthy practice.
So, let’s prepare a nice salmon filet, shall we?
Ingredients:
2.5 lb fresh salmon filet
3 Tbs Dijon mustard
3 tsp lemon juice
3 tsp mayonnaise
1 ½ tsp chili sauce (spicy ketchup)
¼ cup capers
Directions:
Set oven to 375°.
Lay the salmon, skin-side down, on a parchment paper lined baking sheet.
Combine Dijon mustard, lemon juice, mayonnaise and chili sauce in a small bowl.
Spread the mixture across the top of the salmon. Make sure to coat the entire surface to prevent the fish drying while baking.
Sprinkle capers across the top of the fish.
Bake uncovered at 375° for 20 to 25 minutes. Remove and allow to rest for a few minutes before serving.
Toothpick Tales 