Several years ago while recovering from a traumatic head injury, one of my rehab efforts involved word games, lots of word games. The therapists and fellow patients came to know my unique word knowledge (thanks to an ever-present dictionary in my English teacher aunt’s “loo”) as Dee-isms. Every single word from epêe to gewgaw, checked out but was still questioned.
Why not extend that to my cooking as well. My husband likes chicken pot pie and became somewhat a connoisseur of the frozen kind. I never made it because even though I’m a good cook, I’m notoriously bad at pastry and generally don’t cook desserts. Trifle doesn’t really qualify as cooking, save for assembly and whipping cream. I have what’s called in the restaurant biz “hot hands.” Nothing to do with overall body temp, it’s just that some folks are great with pastry, and when I touch anything with cold butter in it, it melts. My “hot hands” techniques are better used getting an aspic out of a mold.
So I decided to make chicken pot pie. I had some small boiled red potatoes, a large roasted chicken breast and frozen peas and carrots on hand. Also some caramelized onions in the frog, and some milk and chicken broth. I decided to make a full recipe of basic baking powder (lots of butter) biscuits, baking half of them while I prepped the pot pie and rolling and cutting the rest to put on top to bake later. For the sauce I used a roux mounted with 2:1 milk and chicken broth. Some fresh sage and thyme and the pot pie went into a 2 qt. Pyrex baking dish for 45 minutes to cook the raw dough and heat the filling and, voilà, a one-dish wonder. He loved it, and I was able to control the fat and salt content. A true Dee-ism.
Here’s another: one-pot macaroni and cheese. Cook a pound of shells, and make a béchamel with 3T butter, 3T seasoned flour and 2C milk. Add cheese of your choice, I add a melty Colby-Jack. Add fully cooked, sliced (slices quartered) of cooked sausage like Kielbasa or I like a new Tuscan sausage found at Whole Foods by Gilbert’s and use two of those, cubed. Then I buzz up a big handful of fresh spinach, mix noodles, sauce and add-ins in a 2 quart bowl and bake at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes. Yum, and yes, my husband will eat spinach if it’s baked in this.
Now that summer is over, I learned a couple of things cooking-related. Some years are good for tomatoes, some not. I had three plants outside on a balcony that faces northeast, a Roma, beefsteak and cherry tomato. We had very few tomatoes over the summer, the Roma got a fungus and was a goner. The beefsteak and cherry plants started growing fruit in September (they were started after the last frost in early May) and I had to move them inside last weekend. Now I’m getting tomatoes! Another few weeks and they’ll go outside to die.
This was my first year with flowering climbing plants, Manzanilla. Yellow and orange, two small plants. I bought a small (1′ wide by 3′ high) for them to share. Live and learn. I should’ve splurged on the trellis. Instead, they used their tendrils to hurt themselves and practically did in my pansies and impatiens. Live and learn! Cheers! Dee
Cooking with Dee 