Thanksgiving: Hasselback Scalloped Potatoes

This Thanksgiving is the first year I won't be cooking in three years. I'm going to my sisters. To play with her baby and to make small talk with her in-laws. I like it there, no pretense and a lot of disruptions. We laugh. I take her elderly dog outside, then sit by a heater to keep my feet warm. 

I like it there. I share a cigarette with her husband and I'm bringing a 12-pack with me. I know how it goes, she'll cook for four hours and we'll eat in 20. I'll help clean up, take a nap with Lana. I'll bring a side dish, the potatoes below. I'll make myself useful but stay out of the way. I'm still a voyeur in some senses of the word; watching the world I left four years ago and still trying to grow accustomed to it now. I hope I'm not too deer-legged in trying.

Hasselback Scalloped Potatoes

A better alternative to the boxed scalloped potatoes your mom has probably tried to doctor up with peas or ham. These are simple to make and nearly foolproof, yet still a fun play on a classic. My favorite kind of recipes these days.

Ingredients:

• 10 Yukon Gold potatoes, washed and dried
• 1 yellow onion, cut into chunks
• 6 cloves garlic
• 3 TB unsalted butter
• 3 TB flour
• 2 cup whole milk
• 1/2 cup cream cheese
• 2 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese, divided
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon paprika
• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1/3 cup breadcrumbs
• 4 strips of bacon

Directions:

1. First, grease your pan with butter. Use a shallow casserole dish, such as the Falk pan pictured here
2. Preheat oven to 400*F
3. Next, using a sharp knife, cut your potatoes into thin slices, but not going all the way through the skin on the bottom, so they are held together by a brown tendon of flesh
4. Arrange your potatoes in your prepared pan, putting chunks of garlic and onion in between the spaces the potatoes have made
5. Now, in a saucepan, melt your butter on medium-high heat
6. Whisk in your flour and continue whisking until it is slightly browned and aromatic
7. Slowly add your milk in and continue whisking for a good minute, until the edges bubble and the sauce begins to thicken
8. Now, add your cream cheese and one and a half cups of your cheddar and continue whisking to melt them
9. Take off heat, whisk in your spices (to taste)
10. Pour over your potatoes. Do this slowly and completely smother them, fanning the potatoes to get in each slice
11. Top with remaining cheddar and breadcrumbs
12. Cover tightly with aluminum foil and bake for 1 hour covered
13. While potatoes are baking, fry your bacon and cut into small "lardons"
14. After one hour, remove foil, top dish with bacon and continue to bake, uncovered, for an additional 15 minutes or until a fork can easily pierce the potatoes
15. Allow to cool before serving

Wild Berry Shortcake: In Partnership with Nordic Ware

My sister was supposed to swim today. She’s 6 months pregnant and hot all the time. To stretch, lay out, relax, she said it would be heaven to her. Instead, it rained, so she fell asleep on the couch, curled up in an old blanket a great-aunt made. The room is dark and the light through the lace curtains is grey. Summer is fickle and sometimes you can only lie down for an hour and wait out the storm.

This morning we talked about two uncles we had. One died in a war, the other died from smoking a pack a day. I don’t miss either anymore, really, but we live in the shadows of their totems: tan lines from mowing Tanglewood Baptist Church’s cemetery, a gold ring one wore on his pinky finger, the distrust of feminine men and women who don’t put wear makeup. We live in these totems and don’t talk of them much. My dad keeps a used shell from his brother’s 21-gun salute. My mother had a bumper sticker on her Nissan for the longest time: “All gave some, some gave all” for her brother, too.

They were uncles with nothing to do with one another, but we visited both in one day. One July in Indiana, a few days in the Midwest so we could visit our family there. We played basketball with John and picked blackberries with Mike. I remember the clouds were as curt and monosyllabic as their names. The sun was hot, no shade out in farm country. We rode our bikes to Dairy Queen and John sang “Sex and Candy” under his breath the whole way there.  I remember it because later, on the way to my uncle’s to pick berries, I said her brother said a curse word.

It stormed when we got to Mike’s. Summer is fickle and so we made dessert. He kept an old ice cream bucket in his fridge that was full of bruised berries, smashed and crammed to close the lid. We stayed there for two hours, my mother made a yellow cake. We ate it with ice cream and those bruised and bleeding berries. I remember it all so vividly, a world I was only acquainted with. One July when the summer was still fickle, too.

Wild Berry Shortcake

Inspired by my summers in Indiana and Nordic Ware's Shortcake Basket Pan. Makes 6 shortcakes or 2 8-inch square cakes.

Ingredients for Shortcakes

• 1 ¼ cup AP flour
• ½ cup corn flour or a fine-ground cornmeal
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• Pinch of salt
• ¼ cup half ‘n half
• 1 TB pure vanilla extract
• Zest and juice of 1 lemon
• 1 cup butter, softened
• 1 cup white sugar
• 5 egg

Directions for Shortcakes

1. Preheat oven to 350*F
2. Prepare your NordicWare shortcake pan with vegetable shortening and flour, as recommended by the care instructions
3. Sift together flours, baking powder, and salt four times until very airy and light. Set aside
4. Whisk together half ‘n half, vanilla, and lemon until well-mixed. Set aside.
5. In the bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with a paddle attachment, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy
6. Add eggs, one at a time. Make sure you turn off mixer once in a while to scrape the edges and bottom with a rubber spatula. Mixture will look curdled, but it is just fine
7. With your rubber spatula (not with the stand mixer), lightly fold in flour mixture, a half-cup or so at a time
8. When all flour is incorporated, your mixture will be pretty thick. Thin it out with your milk mixture and beat for fifteen seconds with the stand mixer on medium-high to aerate slightly
9. Split batter between your 6 prepared shortcake cups
10. Bake for 24-28 minutes or until tops of cakes are golden and slightly puffed (while this is baking, make your whipped cream)
11. Allow to cool completely before removing from pan and assembling your desser

Ingredients for Cream

• 1 cup heavy whipping cream, cold
• ½ cup confectioner’s sugar
• 1 TB pure vanilla extract
• Pinch of salt
• ¼ cup crème fraiche (or  Greek yogurt)

Directions for Cream

1. While cakes are baking and cooling, work on your cream
2. In the bowl of your stand mixer, now fitted with the whisk attachment, whip your cream until soft peaks form
3. Add your vanilla and continue beating on medium
4. Slowly add your confectioner’s sugar and your pinch of salt
5. Turn mixer off
6. Gently fold in your crème fraiche or yogurt. The whipped cream will deflate slightly, but the added dairy will thicken the mixture to a nice, heavy consistency
7. Set aside until ready to assemble cake

Assembly: When cakes are cooled, top each with a couple tablespoons of your cream mixture and a few wild berries (as I did in this recipe) or blackberries (really, though, any berry will work). Sift a little more confectioner’s sugar for good measure and enjoy! 

A special thanks to Nordic Ware for sponsoring this post. Nordic Ware has been producing quality kitchenware products in their 70 years and are now one of America's most beloved and iconic brands. For more information or products, check out their website!

Heritage: A Savory Dutch Baby with Onion-Apple Relish, in Partnership with Lodge Cast Iron

On Sunday, I went to my sister’s home. A place I’ve only been to twice. A duplex on hill, a ten-year-old Golden Retriever to greet us. We met at a McDonald’s and followed her past a lumber yard, a gas station that still showed gas at a dollar-sixty, and a fencepost where a wreath was nailed on.

I’ve only hung out with my sister once or twice. We smoked a cigarette in her old Mustang in high school and she bought me beer one Fourth of July. We met in a Walmart parking lot and I never paid her back. But it’s different now, we’ve grown up. Had to. Wanted to. Her husband still plays video games and they had their honeymoon in Niagara. They live a good life and I’m happy to witness it, even if it’s just for a couple hours. Going to the outlet malls and sharing nachos for lunch.

She’s precious cargo now, she sat in the backseat. Thirteen weeks along, she’s having a baby come October. Niece or nephew, boy or girl. It’s changed me on a molecular level. I think of a future now. I put money away for her, I paid for dinner. She gave up caffeine, Keith still smokes, though. It’s okay. There’s love there. I give her a hug, a kiss. I tell her I love her so much.

These are hungry words, hungry for the eight years since we last sat in a car together and got food. Hungry for a connection. We share a mom, a handful of aunts and uncles.  A tendency to hold a grudge, react and then apologize. We demand apologies in my family, but we ask for hugs and forgiveness on our own time. They were hungry words and I’m excited to learn how to be a brother again and to go fawn-legged into helping raise her child when she needs me.

We talk about ordinary things. Vacations we used to take in the Smokies. If it will be a hot summer. We talk about sad things, the uncle we lost in Afghanistan and the dog we had growing up. We talk about scary things, blood tests and airbags. We drove forty more miles and talked about baby names. 

 We don’t mention my grandmother’s name, but it’s in the running. So is Elliott. Cash for a boy. Something simple, classic for a girl. She liked Rachel and then she didn’t. She liked Nora and then she didn’t. She never liked her own name. She said she didn’t like mine too much either. But we think, make lists on an old envelope I found in my glove compartment.  We laugh, stop for gas. She said she’d like to think of a name that’s in the family, something strong, something from Indiana. She said we didn’t have a lot to remember from back there, so it’d be nice to remember it now.  

I thought about that the rest of the day. How names become heritage, relics. Antiques and heirlooms. I think of the way my sister and I are different, but how we are the same. How there’s a bit of dirt under our fingernails from our farmer uncles and diesel in us from our truck driver grandfather. How our eyes are shaped the same but hers are hazel and mine are blue. How we are just tattooed skin stretched over cast iron bones. How we don’t say sorry much and crush the cigarettes we used to smoke under the same rock by the creekbed. Those were our traditions. And we think back on all the traditions we missed from our relatives in the Midwest. Bundt cakes cooling on a rack and gone by midnight. The tire swing in the woods behind my aunt’s doublewide trailer. And the collection of Lodge cast iron pans that’s been passed between us all at one time or another. Seasoned and still black as coal. That’s how tradition works, rough on the hands and it’s got some weight to it. And in forty years’ time maybe going to the outlets on an ordinary Sunday will seem like a tradition, too.

Savory Dutch Baby with Onion-Apple Relish

This recipe was inspired by my heritage--easy comfort food, cooked with butter and in cast iron. The Dutch baby can be made in a skillet of 10-12" and is best served hot. The relish can be made ahead and kept for up to two days. 

Ingredients for Onion-Apple Relish

• 1 medium-sized apple, cored and chopped
• ½ of a yellow onion, chopped thinly
• 3 tablespoons butter, divided
• ¼ cup beer
• ¼ cup brown sugar
• Salt and pepper to tast

Directions for Onion-Apple Relish

1. Preheat oven to 425*F (this is not for the relish, but you want your oven hot for the Dutch Baby)
2. In your Lodge 11” cast iron skillet, heat 2 TB butter on medium until melted and hot
3. Toss in your onion and apple and stir occasionally for 8-12 minutes, until apples are tender and onions are translucent
4. Turn heat up to medium-high and add beer, which will steam immediately
5. Add brown sugar and last TB of butter and continue stirring until all liquid is cooked off and you are left with a soft and tender mixture of onion and apples
6. Salt and pepper to taste, reserve in a container, scraping all bits of the relish out of the pan and set the pan aside for the Dutch baby without washing (you want some of the savory flavors to mix into the batter while it cooks!)

Ingredients for the Dutch Baby

• ¾ cup AP flour
• Pinch of salt
• 2 eggs
• ¾ cup whole milk
• ½ tablespoon finely chopped rosemar

Directions for Dutch Baby

1. While skillet is still hot from making the Onion-Apple Relish (above), you may want to rub a TB of butter around the pan to grease it a bit more
2. In a bowl, sift flour and salt and set aside
3. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together eggs and whole milk
4. Slowly add the flour mixture, whisking continuously to avoid lumps
5. Sprinkle in the rosemary when all flour is incorporated
6. Whisk vigorously for about 30 seconds to create some air and form bubbles on top of the batter

7. Immediately pour into prepared skillet and place in preheated oven

8. Bake for 14-18 minutes or until puffed and golden brown. Begin checking at the 12-minute mark for any burning

9. Remove from oven, top with relish, and enjoy. Best results are immediately from oven.

Thank you so much to Lodge Cast Iron for sponsoring this post with your amazing products. We have used cast iron in our family for generations and I am proud to work alongside Lodge in creating this post. All opinions, recipes, and photos are my own.  For this post, I used their 11” rust resistant cast iron skillet. For more information about Lodge, please visit their website, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. 

Tahini Coconut Donuts - a devotion to our love of food

The food I eat is hardly ever beautiful. The food I eat is simple, sometimes processed. It’s comfort food by definition; a de facto reason to live. I eat then I work. I snack, then I play with my dog. I never stop to enjoy my meals but I always put the dishes away for my mother.

The food I eat is hardly ever beautiful, with its lumps of gravy and powdered mashed potatoes. Earthen hues on dishwasher-safe plates. I don’t eat like this by choice; I was much healthier in California. It’s the way my parents cooked for us since we were young. Economically, full-flavored, guiltless and large-portioned. My dad has three helpings of spaghetti on Monday, he liked the way my mother made the meatballs this week.

There is no pretension when it comes to eating here, no need for living beyond the means. How fate dealt my parents a handful of aces and the rest were duds, we eat out sometimes and other times eat vegetables that still taste like the aluminum they were canned in. And in the vacuum where pretension and theatre of cooking should be, the void fills with love. A deep love of food, of butter, of mass and quantity and warmth. How shameless my mother is as she eats her birthday cake with a fork before slicing it for anyone else. How wonderful it was to see her smile while doing so. Food in this sense, in the rawest sense of enjoyment—unfettered by diets and fads and fear of its pleasure—is a sense of home I hadn’t realized before moving back.

I see it now. I embrace it now. I eat what my mother cooks and I’ll gladly sneak a bite of her birthday cake when she’s not looking.

I wrote of my dad’s love of food in Snacks Quarterly, and I wanted to create this recipe for them, for their love of food. For their genuine relationship to eating. Omnivorous, shameless, and always asking if I’d had enough to eat before she puts away the leftovers.

Tahini Coconut Donuts

Yields 12 in a standard donut pan

Ingredients for the Donuts

• ¾ cup whole milk
• 1 tablespoon white vinegar
• 2 eggs
• 2 tablespoons shortening, melted
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 2 cup cake flour, sifted
• ¾ cup sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• ½ teaspoon sal

Directions for the Donuts

1. Preheat oven to 415*F and grease your donut pan
2. In measuring glass, whisk together milk, vinegar, eggs, shortening, and vanilla
3. In a large mixing bowl, sift together flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt to combine
4. Create a well in the center of the dry ingredients with a wooden spoon. Slowly begin pouring in wet ingredients, mixing slowly
5. Mix until all combines
6. Gently spoon into prepared donut pan (about three-quarters of the way full in eat round)
7. Bake for 8-10 minutes, checking at 7 for browning
8. Turn onto a cooling rack while you prepare the tahini icin

Ingredients for the Tahini and Coconut Topping

• 2 tablespoons tahini
• 1 tablespoon melted butter
• 1 1/2 cups confectioner’s sugar
• 2 tablespoons whole milk or heavy cream
• 1/2 tablespoon orange zest
• 2 cups sweetened shredded coconut (or as much or as little as you prefer!)

Directions for the Tahini and Coconut Topping

1. In a medium-sized bowl, combine tahini butter, and sugar with a fork. Mixture will be lumpy and dry
2. Add milk to wet and smooth out mixture. You may need more, depending on desired consistency. You do not want it too runny that it is more of a glaze on the donuts than the preferred icing
3. Pour coconut onto a plate and spread out slightly
4. To finish donuts: Once donuts are cooled, dip one side into tahini icing and then immediately into the coconut, pressing slightly for coconut to stick. Set aside and repeat for remaining donuts
5. Donuts keep for 2 days in airtight container, but best fres

Where I Was From.

I believe in second chances and the inevitable twentieth. I believe the proverbial inch has always been the mile. I believe in exhausting those chances and believe in finding reasons to renew them. I don’t believe in falling in love, but I believe in sticking it all out until you can’t stick it out no more. You have to find a way to reinvent yourself and I have been reinvented over and over these last few months. I’ve been unemployed, a salesperson, and an administrative manager. I’ve been really shitty to myself, really shitty to others, and at times negligent of everything. Bills and housework, dogs and boyfriends. All my relationships kind of crumple when I don’t tend to them, they end up like flowers in the kitchen windowsill—swollen and hot, then brittle to the touch. But I’ve learned to brush the dust off my hands and work harder at the goals I have. And that is the Protestant work ethic. My reward will come from work, not by the grace of your God or mine, not by the outstretched hand of a friend or an acquaintance.

That work ethic has run deep and has presented itself in unlikely ways. It’s intravenous and liminal, static and electric. It’s down in my gut when I’m guilty of sitting on the couch too long and painstakingly obvious when I fall asleep with another To-Do list in the works. It will all make me a better person, every last drop of sweat. Every last missed opportunity. Every last night in and early mornings and missed vacation. It will all pay off, because you gain pride from the aceticism of owing someone else so much, too guilty to ever give yourself too much credit, buy yourself too many clothes, put a little back in your own bank account for that proverbial rainy day fund that disappears before that rain every dried up.

When everything is communal, you start to lay claims. And I thank whatever God that’s been bred into my consciousness that I can still hold onto that.   And I owe it to my roots, the kinds that haven’t taken hold. The kinds that are telephonic and casual, the kind I can pick up or ignore at will. The kind that still live in Pennsylvania, Indiana. North Carolina and West Virginia.   The kinds that inspired within me to be truthful of my intentions in this world and truthful to the person I’ve become.

My mother has arthritis at 43, deep in her clavicle. She said it came from working “hard jobs”. She’s been a janitor and a candy-maker, she worked in a deep-freeze at a Wal-Mart distribution center in eastern Kentucky once. She comes from a German stock; we’re all flat-boned and broad limbed. My dad never had to go to war, but he served our country just the same. My aunt has worked at the same factory for 15 years. My uncle drives trucks for a living and my sister makes coffee for truck drivers off an interstate near Maryland. They’re hard folk who eat hearty. They’re heavy folk who eat light in the summer until dusk and then they feed heavy. Meat and potatoes, biscuits and gravy. Dough fried in reserved bacon grease, informal dinners around the TV.

All this I recognized from my trip to North Carolina, all this I recognized in myself. And I can’t deny it any longer how my Midwestern values took root somewhere in my soul, and I can’t deny the satisfaction of having people like me exist in different circumstances that I could never see myself in. When everything is communal, I lay claims to my family and my pride in being from the salt of the earth.

And, in doing so, I have become so inspired by the every day. The roadside produce stands and the chainlink fence. The rope-tied dog that howls at the open moon and the crawdads you never knew could be eaten. The marriage of eating-this-because-we-have-a-coupon and eating-this-because-my-mother-made-it-this-way. Seeing beauty in that. Or how there are town-wide parades to celebrate the anniversary of my uncle who died in Afghanistan. Seeing beauty in the years of the hardworking middle-class that gave me my bone structure and reaping the benefits of those farmers and military men to move to California and willingly quit law school to find myself the hard way and know what it’s like to be really, truly poor for the first time ever and learning to cook because of necessity and not as a hobby.

The Protestant work ethic. The marriage of Southern tradition and Midwestern values. The sense of accomplishment at not losing my mind and finding a place in my family in June. It was all so holy to me. I didn’t know it was going to mean so much to me, but it was a pilgrimage, a Hajj, a Junrei of self-acceptance vis a vis familial acceptance. Where I was from, where I am going. Who I am. These are no longer existential cries of understanding, they are part of my here and now.

And in celebration of that knowledge, I cooked. I cooked with love, with honor and tradition. With understanding that these would be hearty ingredients, that the cast iron was necessary and not accessory. That the fatty dairy would have been pure, like how my grandmother Ruth would have made it straight from the cow (how maybe I would have, too, if my grandfather hadn’t sold the farm in the 70’s). I made this meal to honor every composite of myself. And it’s simple: meat, potatoes, and pie.

Steak and Buttermilk-Herbed Potatoes

This is a casual meal, thrown together without discretion for any kind of culinary know-how.  Love it for what it is, for where it came from.

Ingredients:

        For the Steak:

• 2 rib steaks, 6-10 oz
• Olive oil
• Cayenne pepper
• Salt
• Black Pepper
• Garam masala
• Paprika
• Garlic salt
• 2 TB Butter, softened

For the potatoes

• 6-8 small to medium russet potatoes, sliced as thin as you can (do this before beginning cooking the meat.  If need be, place in cold water to keep)
• 1/3 cup buttermilk
• 4 TB butter, melted
• 1 TS salt
• 1 1/2 - 2 TB Herbs de provence
• 2 cloves garlic, finely minced

Directions for Steak:

1. Completely thaw steak until malleable and soft, completely sandwich between paper towels and pat dry
2. Brush with olive oil and rub in softened butter (the butter will give flavor, the olive oil will help to sear) and set aside, making sure to not wipe off the butter and oil.
3. Use two separate plates for the rub.  On the first, pour the spices.  I would say I used 1 1/2 TS - 1 TB per spice (be cognizant of the flavors, for obvious reasons.  I used less salt, but knew the steak--and my tastebuds--could hold up to a more seasoned and spicy meat with garam masala and cayenne pepper).  Combine with a fork.
4. Place oiled and buttered meats into spice plate and rub completely around.  Place on reserved plate.
5. Heat skillet (definitely prefer cast-iron here, but make sure you have some ventilation for it).  Use additional oil and butter until the pan starts to smoke a little to enhance the sear of the meat.
6. Put meat on skillet and let it sizzle.  As a general rule, do not touch meat until it voluntarily allows itself to be pulled from the metal.  Let it sear and cook for 3-4 minutes.  Check readiness.  Flip for additional 3-5 minutes, depending on how done you like your meat.
7. Reserve steak grease for use. Wrap in aluminum foil and let sit while you prepare the potatoes.

Directions for potatoes:

1. Place potatoes in bowl (dry them off as much as possible so the herbs and butter can stick).
2. Melt butter in small saucepan or microwave, pour over potatoes along with buttermilk
3. Add salt, garlic, and herbs
4. In the same skillet you cooked the steaks, add additional oil or butter and heat back up.  Does not have to smoke-to-sear here.
5. Pour potatoes in and stir constantly until all edges are crisp and inside is softened.  Some will be burnt and blackened, some will be soft and baked.
6. Allow to cool for a minute.  Plate with steak.  (Additionally, enjoy these with a little cheese while still hot, if desired).
7. Enjoy!

Buttermilk-lemon Pie

And finally, for you, I have a buttermilk-lemon pie that truly invoked my newfound love of the South.  So pretty, so simple.  So versatile.  And did I mention pretty?

Ingredients:

• A good quality store-bought pie crust (okay, okay, I cheated here a little)
• 3 eggs
• 1¼ cups granulated sugar
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• ½ cup melted butter
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon lemon zest
• Pinch of salt
• 2 TB raw organic sugar (not super-fine, but you want crystals) or brown sugar
• 1 TS instant espresso

Directions:

1. Prepare 9-inch pie crust per your own recipe or the package directions
2. Mix all ingredients (save the organic sugar and espresso) until well-combined.  It will be pale yellow and delicious.  ((I mixed all of mine in a Pyrex liquid measuring cup for ease)
3. Pour into prepared pie shell
4. In a small bowl, mix organic sugar or brown sugar and espresso with a until well combined.  With a spoon, gently shake and pour sugar until covering pie.  Use more if not enough (I eyeballed)
5. Bake for 45-50 minutes until cracking and caramelized on top.
6. Allow to cool in fridge for about 30 minutes for best consistency for slicing and taste.