Paprika Chicken a la Viennoise: or, It's a beautiful day for those who love onions

They had me at "The correct frying of the onions is very important."

Paprika Chicken a la Viennoise 1 chicken (or 3 to 4 pounds of chicken meat) 1 pound onions 2-3 tbsp chicken or bacon fat* 1 cup water 1 clove garlic, pressed or chopped ½ cup tomato puree, fresh or canned 1 tbsp flour 1 tbsp paprika Cut chicken into serving pieces. Rub it with salt, pepper, and other seasonings to taste. Set aside. Cut onions in half from top to bottom. Then slice diagonally as thinly as possible. Heat chicken fat in a large skillet. Add onions and cook, stirring constantly, until lightly golden brown. Then add water, bring to a simmer, and cook over medium-low heat for about 5 minutes. Add the chicken, garlic, and tomato puree. Stir constantly until the chicken takes on a reddish brown color. Then cover the pan and allow to steam over low heat until chicken is tender. Stir in the flour, beating very hard where it lands in the skillet so that you break it up before it can form lumps. Then add the paprika and any other seasonings desired. Allow to simmer for another ten minutes. *If you don't obsessively save your bacon drippings like it's still 1935, cooking oil will obviously be fine. Note: This is also very good made with stewing pork, cut into 2-inch-ish pieces before cooking. Mrs. Florence Sokol; 836 Washington Street, Cape May, New Jersey; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; 30 August 1935; page 12

I do like a good onion or five, and Mrs. Florence Sokol's "Paprika Chicken A La Viennoise" promised to deliver. 

Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; 30 August 1935; page 12

I don't know if this recipe has any connection to Vienna, but it looked too good to care. A lot of recipes begin with an offhand "brown the beef and onions," but today we are told that the correct preparation of the onions is crucial to Chicken Paprika A La Viennoise. I've never met Mrs. Sokol, but I like her after just one recipe.

Lately, I've been using frozen chopped onions in all my recipes so I can skip the business of cutting them up myself. But slicing them into rings is a lot faster than chopping them. I may not have managed to get my onions as "like fine noodles" as Mrs. Sokol specified, but I didn't skimp on the onions either.

If in doubt as to the weight of your onions, always round up.

It turns out that onions expand a lot when you cut them. Our onion rings overflowed the bowl.

Even though we cut the onions a lot faster than usual, it still threatened to be an eye-watering task. Fortunately, a friend of a friend gave me this charming fan from his shelf of unfinished projects. (The phrase "just get it out of here" was deployed.) It needed nothing more than a new power cord and a new motor wire to blow my tears away.

Reading further down the recipe, tomato puree gets involved near-ish to the end. The grocery store didn't have any, so we got canned tomatoes and blenderized them.

Having gotten all out preparation done, it was time for the bacon drippings to meet the skillet. Before the pandemic, I would never have bacon drippings on hand. But as I have mentioned (often), the ever-rising price of food has caused me to obsessively save all the pan-drippings that I threw out in happier pre-pandemic times.

I soon found that I did't melt enough bacon fat for a Mrs. Sokol-approved deluge of onions. I say this in the most excited way possible.

We carefully watched the pans and got the onions to a golden color. After all, as Mrs. Sokol says, "the correct frying of the onions is very important."

 

Mrs. Sokol calls for one tablespoon of "imported paprika." But since she sent this recipe to the newspaper during the Depression, hopefully she would understand why I used store-brand paprika instead. I made sure to use a lot, though.

 

At last, we were ready to get everything into the pan. I didn't buy a whole chicken but a tray of leg quarters. They nostalgically remind me of Canada. Restaurants on this side of the border rarely serve whole leg quarters that you have to cut up for yourself. 

At this point, we only needed to cover the pan and let it mind its own business while we loaded the blessed dishwasher.

I regretted using chicken leg quarters as soon as I served this. I don't mind cutting meat at the table (after all, I chose to cook it like this), but today's chicken skidded all over the tomato-lubricated plate and pushed the correctly-fried onions onto the tabletop.

 

Self-inflicted inconvenience aside, the chicken was tender and tasted exquisite. We served the tomato-sauced onions on the side as a vegetable. Even the people who aren't onion fanatics liked them. 

But with that said, all of the spices (including the paprika) cooked out during the long simmering time. The kitchen smelled really nice, but our dinner just tasted like chicken, onion, and tomato. For a later batch, I waited until the last ten minutes of cooking before adding the spices. That gave them enough time to meld with everything, but not enough time to boil away. One might argue that we lost something when we didn't dry-cook the paprika with the onions. But I argue that spices are a lot more effective when you can actually taste them.

Spices aside, the tomato sauce in which everything swam became marvelously rich as everything simmered. I think leaving the bones in the chicken helped a lot. As you can see, it became quite gelatinous in the refrigerator. Twenty years after she got her recipe in the paper, Mrs. Sokol could have unmolded this onto a plate of lettuce and called it a salad.

The gelatinized leftovers unnerved everyone. They remained leery of the Paprika Chicken a la Viennoise even after the microwave made it look normal again.

I made this again a week later, but I used stewing pork (which I cut into small-ish pieces) instead of chicken. I figured the recipe's long simmering time would cook the meat until quite tender. Also, it seemed like a welcome change from the usual crock-pot pork we've been having every week since pork got so cheap. And... it's divine. I cannot recommend it enough.

In closing, this recipe is delicious regardless of whether you use pork or chicken in it. Just as I hoped, you absolutely cannot go wrong with a recipe from someone who gets opinionated about onions.

One-Pan Roast Chicken and Crispy Bread, Mushroom, and Apricot Stuffing: or, Cooking our birds the modern Canadian way!

You know how at Thanksgiving, some people bake extra stuffing separate from the bird- but with slices of raw turkey laid on top before baking? Someone in Canada decided to turn that into designer recipe.

Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

One-Pan Roast Porcini Chicken With Bread, Mushroom, and Apricot Stuffing       Chicken: ⅕ oz (6 g) dried porcini mushrooms* ¼ tsp (1mL) fennel seeds 3 chicken leg quarters 1 tbsp (15 mL) olive oil 1 tbsp (15 mL) butter Salt and pepper to taste       Stuffing: 8 oz sliced mushrooms 1 tbsp (15 mL) chopped garlic ½ cup green onions, cut into ½-1 inch pieces† ¾ cup (2 hectograms) dried apricots 1 cup sodium-free chicken stock 5 cups (12.6 deciliters) Italian or French bread, cut into 1½ inch (4cm) cubes 1½ tsp dried parsley‡ 1½ tsp dried thyme‡ 1 tbsp olive oil Heat oven to 425°F or 220°C.       To prepare the chicken: Grind the dried mushrooms and fennel seeds in a spice grinder to a fine powder. Mix with salt and pepper, then rub it into the chicken pieces. Heat the oil and butter in a large, oven-safe skillet over high heat. Place the chicken skin-side down in the pan and cook until golden brown, 4-6 minutes, spooning the fat onto the exposed side of the chicken pieces as they cook. Set the chicken pieces on a plate, and cover them with an upside-down bowl. Set aside. Leave the juices in the pan for the stuffing.       To prepare the stuffing: Add the mushrooms to the skillet and cook for 3 minutes, or until they begin to brown. Add green onions and garlic, reduce heat to medium, and cook 2 minutes or until softened. Add the chicken stock and apricots, bring to a boil, and simmer for 6 minutes or until apricots are plumped. Remove from heat. Add bread, parsley, and thyme. Mix well.       To assemble and bake: Spread the stuffing out so that it is in an even layer in the skillet. Lay the chicken on top. Bake for 35 minutes, or until a meat thermometer reads 165°F or 78°C. After removing from oven, cover tightly with foil and allow to rest 5 minutes before serving. *Didn't have this, so I omitted it. † The original recipe used sliced leeks. ‡ Or 2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley/thyme if you want to strictly follow the original. Adapted from Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Today, we are returning to that fascinating Canadian food magazine I found in the airport! When the pickier members of the household are away overnight, I tend to foist the more... shall we say, unconventional recipes on those who remain. With that in mind, we're going to put dried fruits into chicken.

You can tell the editors really thought this was one of the recipes that would sell magazine. They used it as the lead photograph for their article of one-pan dinners. (For whatever reason, they then stuffed the recipe in the back of the magazine instead of putting it on the next page.)

Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

I would like to note at the beginning that we modified the recipe due to grocery prices. So instead of following the recipe as professionally developed in Canadian test kitchens, we're really testing the theory behind it. Well, the magazine article was called "Simplifying Supper" (emphasis mine), and you don't simplify supper by driving to every grocery store in town purchasing one ingredient at a time from whoever was selling it the cheapest. Also, since I'm not feeding a whole family, I halved the recipe and decided how much chicken to cook by laying the raw pieces in the pan to see how many would fit.

As we seasoned the chicken, we arrived at our first budget cut. We did not have any dried mushrooms. I know that dried mushrooms are very common in other parts of the world, and it would have been quite easy to drop a few into the spice grinder. But apparently none of the people who routinely cook with dried mushrooms get their groceries from the store near me.

To reduce mess and, dare I say, simplify supper, I rubbed the seasonings onto the skin side of chicken, then put it in the hot pan, and seasoned the exposed nonskin side last. That way none of the spices got left behind on the cutting board, and I had less mess to contend with later. The chicken turned a nice shade of golden brown, though it took a lot longer than the 4-6 minutes specified in the directions. That's probably not a recipe error so much as the result of using a heavy cast-iron pan which needed to heat up before the food in it could start cooking.

We've talked previously about how a lot of the recipes in this magazine seem like no one tested them in non-professional kitchens with non-professional equipment. Today I would like to add another delicate criticism to the writing and editorial staff: they omit a lot of crucial recipe steps. For example, after we've browned the chicken in the frying pan, we are told to set it aside. But they don't mention that we should cover it. Perhaps this magazine is aimed at experienced cooks who don't need every step in recipes spelled out in detail. Or maybe Canadian cooking magazines assume you know more about cooking than Americans do.

But now that the chicken is ready to set aside, it's time to move on to the stuffing. You can tell this is the big feature of the recipe. Without the stuffing, we're just making a pan of baked chicken pieces- which is fine but doesn't sell magazines. When we added the mushrooms, they absorbed all the dang oil like little fungus sponges! Look at how dry the pan was. Our mushrooms kept trying to stick to the pan and burn.

We are now directed to add the leeks, which brings us to our next budget cut: we used green onions instead. The leeks were unexpectedly expensive, and only sold in very large bunches. If we wanted to buy leeks, we had to make a commitment and swear to love them in dinner every night for the rest of the month.

Before we added the stock to the vegetables, the contents of the pan looked like something you'd see on someone's social media postings. It's so colorful, with so many different textures, and just so dang pretty.

I have noticed that this magazine uses a lot of dried fruits in savory recipes. Is this a trend now, or a Canadian idiosyncrasy? Maybe dried fruit in supper is today's equivalent to the chicken-and-grapes fad from the 1970s.

After we added the apricots and the stock, it looked like we made soup out of bong water.

In our next budget cut, we were not using "rustic Italian bread." We had hamburgers last week, and the surplus buns were still sitting on the countertop and looking lonely. I tried to convince myself that the sesame seeds would add extra flavor. The original recipe uses ten cups of cubed bread. That's over half a gallon of bread cubes. (For those in metric countries, we're talking 25ish deciliters.) While that seems overwhelming at first, it turns out that bread expands a lot when you cut it up. One hamburger bun yielded 2½ cups (that's 6ish deciliters) of bread pieces.

Truly the beginnings of the highest cuisine.

I dumped the bread in, and suddenly the contents of the frying pan looked just like the magazine photo-- aside from the presence of sesame seeds and other signs of ingredient fudgery. I don't always get my recipes to look like the professional photos, and it's very reassuring when they do. It suggests that someone tested the recipe at least once (even if they didn't imagine people making it at home without restaurant-grade pots and pans). 

At this point, it was time to add the half-cooked chicken. And so, after a surprisingly long prep time for a recipe that is supposed to "simplify supper," we were ready to insert the pan in the oven and come back when it was ready to eat. 

As it baked, we could see the fat dripping out of the chicken skin and onto the meat. I don't mean a few small trickles of fat and juices. This chicken bastes itself. For all the fat and juices that melted and dripped down the meat, I may as will have completely covered it with raw bacon. 

While the chicken baked, the stuffing beneath it began to soften and lose its crispness. I won't fault the recipe writers for that. They said to spread everything onto a big pan, and I didn't. After the pile of dirty dishes got unexpectedly high, I really wanted this to be a one-pan recipe. But whether it's my faulty pan selection or a recipe error, our meant-to-be-crispy bread was soon bubbling like a merry stew.

To my surprise, the bread shrank a lot in the oven. I expected to end up with chicken perched on a mountain of bread and dried fruit, but the bread compacted into a surprisingly thin layer beneath the bird.

As they say in some parts of Canada, c'est pret! Going back to what we said about omitting a lot of steps in the recipe, the directions do not mention letting the meat rest after cooking it. Did the writers have any non-professionals test the recipes before printing them? Were they meant to be "inspirational" (read: unrealistic) rather than cooking instructions you can actually follow at home?

After ten minutes of resting time, the chicken was absolutely amazing. Even the "I don't like bones in my chicken" people got over their complaints. The stuffing had a lot of complex interlocking flavors. You'd think I spent a lot of time fussing over correctly-balanced seasonings. For whatever reason, it also tasted like I dumped in a lot of wine even though I did not use any. 

I liked the stuffing, but others did not. However, I could have done without the dried apricots-- or at least reduced the amount. They made the stuffing almost syrupy. If you want dried fruit, I think figs or dates would be a better choice- or better yet, dried cranberries. One person said "That is some good chicken!" and hoped I didn't notice that the stuffing remained on the plate.

However, the chicken was so good that I didn't want to make this recipe one and then close the magazine pages forever. Furthermore, we had some stale French bread laying around the countertop because there just aren't enough people in the house to eat a whole loaf of it. And so, hoping that was close enough to the "rustic Italian bread" I could apparently just grab at any supermarket in Canada, we made the recipe again. 

But this time, we left out the dried apricots. I know the apricots are one of the title ingredients, but people aren't always thrilled about "unusual" recipes- even if they're developed by actual professionals and not by me. But to make up for the apricots' absence, we added chopped celery. I honestly don't like celery on its own, but I think it adds a wonderful flavor to so many things.

Well, aside from the lack of bright orange discs of dried fruit, this one looked almost like the cover photo!

While this was advertised as a simple one-pan dinner, I think that "simple" a bit of a reach. You will end up serving this out of a single pan, but this recipe leaves behind a tall pile of dirty dishes. Granted, if one has a dishwasher it's a simple matter of filing the dishes on the machine's racks and pushing the magic button, but the cleanup is always worth keeping in mind.

But I'm actually kind of impressed that they came up with a recipe for chicken and stuffing that doesn't involve waiting all day for it to cook. When we actually used the type of bread specified in the directions, it came out wonderfully crispy on the outside and soft in the middle. I've never had white bread stuffing before, and it was really good.

With that said, perhaps I just can't be bothered to stay up-do-date with the latest in semi-upscale foods, but I liked the stuffing better without the titular apricots in it. Without the apricots, the stuffing tasted like it came right off the Thanksgiving table (appropriate since this was the magazine's autumn issue). I liked the recipe as written, because a lot of times it's nice to make something a little different. But if you want something a bit more "normal," you can't go wrong with celery.

Chicken-Artichoke Soup: or, It's not a casserole if you can pour it

I had to make this because it's written on a giant chicken.

Chicken-Artichoke Soup 16 oz. sliced mushrooms Small amount of cooking oil 2 medium cans quartered artichokes, drained 5 boneless chicken thighs, chopped 2 or 3 medium potatoes 16 oz sour cream 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce Seasonings to taste:    -Salt    -Pepper    -Paprika    -Chili powder Boil or microwave* the potatoes. Then cut into small cubes and set aside. (You don't need to remove the skins unless you don't like them.) In a large pot, cook the mushrooms in a little cooking oil, adding pepper to taste. Cover the pot when about halfway done to retain juices. Then, add the chicken and cook done. Stir in the sour cream and the parsley. Bring to a simmer. Then add remaining seasonings to taste. Simmer for a few minutes. Buttered rice goes really well with this. *While microwaving potatoes does dry them out a bit, that won't matter after they've simmered for a while. Therefore, I recommend cooking them the quick way. Adapted from an anonymous recipe card on Mid-Century Menu

First, we needed to retype the recipe. Some people can cook with the recipe on a laptop in the kitchen, but I have an unfortunate history of irreparable damage caused by splashed gravy. Oddly enough, we do not have a working printer in the house (though we have three dead ones that just sort of stayed parked where they printed their last) but we have multiple typewriters.

This is on the back of a receipt because I only use index cards if I know I'm keeping the recipe.

The recipe starts with cooking the mushrooms in enough butter (sorry, oleo) to make a batch of cookies. But rather than make something with a thoroughly unnecessary amount of grease, I used a much smaller splash of cooking oil instead. You will also notice that I am forgoing all this business of separately cooking everything and then adding it to the pan. Just because we have a machine to remove the drudgery of handwashing dishes does not mean I want a mountain of them piling up in the sink. Also, the skillet is the least-used of all the pots and frying pans. It's also a really nice one, and this seemed like as good a time as any to actually get it out of its usual perch and use it. 

At this point we made a short revision to the recipe: adding chicken to (hopefully) turn it into a one-pan dinner.

That was quick enough! And since we didn't use gobs and gobs of butter, we don't have to drain away all the flavorful mushroom juices in the pan. Ever since Fanny Cradock taught me that I actually like mushrooms when they're not boiled until quite dead, I think less of any recipe that would have me cook the mushrooms and then drain them. 

But to the ruin our merrily undrained pan, resplendent in its mushroom juices, we added a mistake. Unfortunately, one person in this house really likes marinated artichokes, so I got those instead of the artichoke-flavored artichokes. They would end up tasting like leafy balls of concentrated salad dressing.

Blissfully unaware that I had ruined dinner (or at least made it a lot harder to voluntarily go back for seconds), I blithely proceeded with the recipe, adding an entire carton of sour cream as is written on the card.

After turning what had looked like a lovely pan of chicken and mushrooms into an extra-large batch of not-quite-white glop, I realized I forgot to add that last ingredient: parsley! The parsley is a sign that this is a gourmet recipe. 

I think parsley is very underused in cooking. A lot of people seem to think parsley only exists as a garnish for Italian(ish) food, and that you're not supposed to eat it even though it's right next to your lasagna. They don't know that parsley is actually a lovely and flavorful seasoning. Hence, we are adding it to the casserole, in perhaps a more generous amount than the recipe writer intended.

At this point, we were ready to top the casserole with breadcrumbs and bake it! Most people would have breadcrumbs on hand since they are one of the cheaper items on the baking aisle. But I forgot to get any. So, to attempt to make do with what's on hand, I put the heels of the house's ever-present sandwich bread on the bare oven racks to (hopefully) dry out enough to crumble while the oven heated up.

A sumptuous supper awaits!

I really should have put a few more bread slices in the oven than just the heels. It took a lot of careful scattering, but I got this sad ration of crumbs to actually cover the entire casserole. I shook some Parmesan over everything to make the top of this casserole less... halfhearted-looking. 

We baked the casserole until bubbly, as people fondly love to say, and it came out completely unchanged (though it was nicely warmed through). As you can see, when you spooned out some of this, it looked the same as before it went into the oven.

Aside from my ill-advised choice of marinated artichokes, this tasted like something that someone would fondly remember Mom making when they were growing up, starting their reminiscing with "it wasn't fancy, but it was good!" And it would have been very good in a comforting way had I just used the plain canned artichokes the recipe calls for. But no, I thought I should fancy it up with marinated artichokes, which made it taste like Italian salad dressing. Sometimes you should just stick to the recipe and not assume you know better than someone who made it enough times to justify writing it down.

But with that said, no one really objected to making this recipe again. The next time, I decided to round the recipe out by adding some potatoes to it. Because I didn't want to wait a long time for the potatoes to cook in the soup pot, I just put them in the microwave first. I also (and this is important) did not use marinated artichokes. I used plain canned artichokes instead. They taste like artichokes instead of salad dressing. Marinated artichokes are a nice (if somewhat spendy) addition to a lot of foods, but they're just not right for this.

We then learned that we should have done this in the soup pot. The skillet was not prepared to contain this much chicken-artichoke-spud soup.

When we served it out, it looked just like the last time despite never seeing the inside of the oven. I guess baking this will warm up the kitchen if it's cold out, but it does nothing else. The only difference between the stovetop-only version of this recipe and the baked casserole is the presence or absence of breadcrumbs. If we happen to have stale bread I might turn it into croutons for this- they'd go well with the soup.

By request of others, I have already committed this recipe to a typewritten card. It's quick, easy, and really good. It's simple, and it's not an experience of gourmet ecstasy, but it hits the spot.

Hump-Day Quickie: The easiest way I know to prevent a dry baked chicken

This one comes from one of my online friends:

 

Baked Upside Down Chicken Season, stuff, and otherwise prepare the chicken as you normally would. Then, place it backside-up and breastside-down in the pan. Bake as you were already going to. After the chicken is cooked, be sure to let it rest 10-15 minutes before carving and serving.

I think we've all been baking our chickens wrongside-up all this time! 

We wanted to bake a chicken but did not have the mushrooms to give it the Fanny Cradock treatment. I don't know about grocery stores outside of my current region of occupation, but around here the big cuts of meat have been far cheaper than the pre-sliced ones that get sold in shrink-wrapped trays. (I will also note that briskets, rib-racks, and any other cut of meat commonly used for showoff grilling is as expensive as ever.) 

The other week, beef chuck roasts were cheaper than hamburger. The store practically had to give away the uncut extra-long pork tenderloins that can barely fit in the average home freezer. I remember pot roast night being, if not an extravagance, at least a bit of a splurge. But these days, the "fancy" and impressively big cuts of meat are the cheap ones you serve every day. I can't believe it's cheaper to serve slow-roasted chuck than meatloaf.

With everything getting more expensive, it's hardly a wild guess that a lot of people are trying to cook for themselves what they used to either purchase ready-made or eat at restaurants. And also, we all need something to do! Some people have long wanted to learn more ambitious cooking, others said "Why not?" after getting enough downtime that for once they were rested enough to do things. 

I think the peculiarities in meat pricing make sense after a few moments' thought. For every person who went from making baking-powder biscuits in the Before Times to creating artisan sourdough in the Facemask Era, there are a lot of people taking their first steps beyond browning the beef for their Hamburger Helper. Prepackaged boneless skinless chicken breasts and pre-sliced pork chops seem a lot less daunting to new cooks than a whole chicken or a meat slab the size of a toaster. The big roasts seem like more ambitious kitchen projects, the little ones seem like they just need to be seasoned and put in a pan. So, I think that demand (and therefore the prices) for the big roasts just hasn't gone up as much as it has for the easy-looking pork chops. Of course, I should also note that it takes more time and effort to cut those boneless skinless chicken breasts and neatly sliced pork chops than to get a whole chicken or tenderloin packaged and out the factory door.

With that in mind, whole chickens were astonishingly cheap the last time we went to the grocery store. So, I decided to try what my friend did by accident. All I did was get the chicken nicely seasoned (I rubbed the seasoning under the skin instead of on top of it so that it would go right into the meat), put some salted and peppered potatoes around it, and let our single-pan dinner bake unattended in the oven. One cannot deny that a prostrate baked chicken looks odd no matter how perfect and crispy the skin is. 

In full disclosure, I should admit that when we flipped the chicken over, it looked like this.

No one will know after you've carved it.

But you could see the juices bubbling under the skin when we took it out. After flipping it back over so it could rest in the same position as it baked (Delia Smith lets her meat rest and therefore so do I), the meat was so moist it was practically wet. Chicken juices actually exuded out of the meat as we cut it. As Fanny Cradock might have said, the chicken was marvelously lubricated. 

So if you want to forestall dry, underflavored chicken breasts but don't have any mushrooms to shove under the skin, just flip that bird over and bake the chicken prone!

Happy Anniversary to Us!

Today, February 18th, marks six(!) years of writing about what we hath wrought in the kitchen. I first started writing this sitting on my dorm room bed, and didn't even know what to name it. So I named it after the cookbook that happened to be nearest to me on the bed: a 1591 book I had found transcribed online that I printed at work and sewed together using an old folder for the cover. Ever since, I've thought that I should have used English spelling from this millennium.
But, as a special anniversary treat, I thought I'd share some fondly-remembered culinary delights that I never quite got around to writing about.

We Attempted Extremely Rapid Tea
A while ago, some British company devised a tea machine that could supposedly make tea within seconds of adding boiling water. In the promotional video, even they seem unconvinced in their own adorably awkward way. If you didn't watch the full thing, this should tell you everything you need to know:

We took offense at the thought of paying Sur La Table prices for a tea whirligig when we could do it with things already handy in our own kitchen.

Yes, this is a teabag lashed by its own string to my mixer.

If you try this at home, use a narrow cup rather than a bowl. In just three very intense seconds, we burned ourselves and send boiling-hot water all over the kitchen. Also, you're going to need something a lot sturdier than a paper tea bag. Witness the paper shards and tea dregs sitting in what tea remained in the bowl.

Fortunately for us, it turns out that if boiling water is atomized into little flying drops, it will (barely) cool enough to not burn your skin on contact. The idea of motorized tea does have premise, though. The remaining water had in fact turned into a decent puddle of tea.

Ranch Meatloaf
Remember when we swiped food from the wee children? By which I mean we helped ourselves to the surplus lunches they had from kiddie engineering summer camps? To the engineering department's credit, they didn't throw away the extra food, but left it out on tables for who might soever need it. However, they had thought that a bunch of kids stuck in math class all summer would be happy with low-salt pretzel sticks, miserable puny baby carrots with ranch dip, and dried cranberries. The last one is particularly galling in retrospect as I have since learned that since the cranberries are cooked in syrup before drying them, all the vitamins and other nutrients are mostly leached out and replaced with sugar. Rather than give the wee ones candy disguised as healthy snacks, why couldn't they just give them chocolate?

When you're nine years old, this is not an acceptable substitute for caramel sauce.

We at A Book of Cookrye, ever short of funds, did not throw any of this bounty away. We had scored some extremely discounted ground beef and decided to try an old church-lady cooking legend: dump ranch into your hitherto unexciting main dish for a zippy, peppy supper!

Yes. That is ground beef and ranch dressing. Since ranch is mostly mayonnaise (or some synthetic mayonnaise-style product), the meat technically has egg in there to bind it together. Or some petroleum-derived equivalent. This is something I only realize in retrospect. At the time, I just dumped salad dressing onto beef and made meatloaf because after eating mostly vegetables due to funds, I wanted a big log of dead cow.

No, I did not buy the ketchup squirted on it, though I did think that diamond pattern was oddly adorable. Someone left it in the refrigerator with no name on it. And as we repeatedly mentioned, if you left something in the fridge with no name, it was community property.

The pan was also abandoned in the kitchen cabinets by some previous student. I still use it as the tray for my tea-making alarm clock.

I do not like ranch most of the time because it totally obliterates the taste of whatever you put it on. This would explain why it's been used by generations of people to get vegetables into their children (and sometimes themselves- some of us never learn to like lettuce). However, mixing the ranch into the meat and baking it toned down into a nice mellow seasoning mix. If you're doing meatloaf, hamburger patties, meatballs, or anything that involves molding ground meat into shapes and cooking it, try adding a generous squirt of ranch dressing into it.

This turned up in the dorm microwave

Colleges should require students to pass a microwave proficiency test before being allowed to have one in their rooms. It would prevent having to march down the stairs at least once a week for yet another fire drill.

Lemongrass Tea
We at A Book of Cookrye have rarely featured drink recipes. This was something we made when we visited back home over one summer.

When we joined Our Mom of Cookrye earlier in the springtime on the annual pilgrimage to the plant nurseries to choose what would grace the flowerpots that year, we got a few lemongrass plants. We had thought they would add vertical interest and look really nice when surrounded by creeping low flowers. The lemongrass promptly spread like grass and took over every flowerpot it was in. Upon hearing how we had an unexpected and undeserved bumper crop, our grandfather said when he was growing up in Mexico, lemongrass tea sweetened with honey was very popular in the summer.

The first batch was watery and sad. So, as you can see above, we made it again with a lot more grass in the pot this time. The result? Something so refreshing you really should make it by the pitcher instead of by the cup. Just be sure to use a lot of lemongrass when you're making it. You need to really crowd and cram it into the water.

Lemon-Makgeolli Beef Slabs
Much to our delight, the grocery store near our school often had big hunks of beef on clearance. Having made meat loaf of one, meat balls of another, and senior-citizen potluck sandwiches of a third, we one day decided to slice one into steaks.

We never cooked with expensive beef because of money. But we had read in Miss Leslie's Directions for Cookery that laying frozen meat in water was "the only way to extract the frost without injuring the meat." And so, having absolutely no other advice to go to, that's what we did. I'm sure that modern food safety inspectors would have absolutely no objection to leaving beef all day in a bowl of water on top of the refrigerator.

In retrospect, we could have just bought a bottle of lemon juice and saved time. But we didn't, and when the lemons failed to give enough juice to immerse the beef, we dumped in the last of a bottle of makgealli. That's this stuff right here:

We often got our vegetables, tea, and rice from the Vietnamese supermarket nearby, which made things like this cheap rather than priced like rare foreign delicacies. I'm still not quite sure what makgealli is. But I do know that while I didn't like it when I tried just drinking a little, it made a really tasty meat marinade.

On the bright side, since we weren't using the marinade after taking the steaks back out, we didn't need to bother taking out the lemon seeds.

And so, having soaked the meat all day in water to extract the frost, we soaked it all night in this boozy lemon stuff. We even threw the peels back in with the beef in case they had any flavor to add.

All I did to cook them was put the clay pot they'd been marinating in over the stove and come back in a few hours. I didn't get any tempting pictures after I cooked them. But, this marinade turned some sliced chuck into some outrageously tender steaks. Before the rare-meat-is-the-only-meat crowd comes in here a-grousing, I was not about to eat rare beef that had sat out in room-temperature water all day, singing its siren song to all our microscopic friends.
I never eat steaks these days because whenever people cook them, they dogmatically leave them raw in the middle which I don't like. So, rather than being burned at the stake for blasphemy whenever I tell people I want the entire steak cooked rather than just the outside of it, I just say I don't like steaks.
Anyway, these were actually tender all the way through despite being fully-cooked. I'd do them again, but I still don't go around buying steaks.

Our First Cake We Decorated After Taking A Class

They said we could write whatever we wanted on top. Everyone else got to take their cakes home. Ours was requisitioned by the teacher for a faculty prank.

Impossible Coconut Pie
Impossible pies are one of those corporate recipe inventions that became popular enough that they still show up in fundraiser cookbooks thirty or forty years later. The batter supposedly separates into multiple layers as it bakes. In theory, the magic of kitchen science gives you both a crispy top crust and a delightful filling from a single mixture. This didn't work, but it was a decent if somewhat eggy coconut cake.
When we gave the recipe a go, we were so impatient to see if the self-layering gimmick worked that we we made the cake cool off faster than the people in the General Mills test kitchens probably intended.

Would you believe someone tried to throw that amazing fan away?

Apple Skillet

It's apple pie in cast iron. I don't know why I felt that the pie needed to be in a skillet, but it seemed adorable and homey at the time. Unfortunately, I made it as a present for someone and thus needed to bother an unsuspecting recipient to give me the pan back.

Chickpea and Spinach Salad with Pumpkin Chips

You know how we cut two whole pumpkins into tiny slivers and candied them? Well, we ran out of friends we could dump the jars of sugary lemon-flavored pumpkin on, and had to get really creative when using them up. This was actually really delicious. The hypersweet, lemony pumpkin, when cut into little bits, made a nice counterpoint to the bitterness in the fresh spinach. Spoon on a little extra syrup from the jar, add a shake of garlic salt, and it's absolutely exquisite.
We found that cut-up pumpkin chips go really well on any bitter salad greens. The concentrated tartness and sweetness are a perfect flavor counterpoint.

Banana Frozen Custard
Remember when we tried the Depression-era banana mousse, which ended up being far too runny to call a mousse?

We ended up freezing the goop so we could just claim it was supposed to be ice cream the whole time, and it was in fact quite lovely.

We thought to ourselves, what would happen if we just froze it in the first place instead of pretending it was supposed to be a mousse? Or perhaps Mrs. George Thurn intended for that recipe to be frozen, and we would have known that had we attended any of her music-hall cooking classes.
Anyway, we further decided to make it extra-smooth by putting the custard and the bananas into a blender.

After we boiled and cooled the custard, we just dumped everything into an ice cream freezer.
When it was ready, it was so rich and smooth that I'm still not sure why I haven't made it again and often. We would not encounter a better frozen custard until we got a brief string of jobs in Wisconsin- they're pretty big on dairy there, you know.

Sometimes Recipes Come Back Around Again
Remember when we cracked open our 1920's cookbook and made apples-and-meatballs? We were surprised to find a near-identical recipe in one of those foofy, ultra-trendy food magazines.

The only real difference is that they didn't bother making meatballs, instead taking the easier route of just cooking it in a frying pan.

There may be a way to make a pretty picture of cooked ground beef, but we haven't found it.

This tastes astonishingly like sausage. If you added a few spices (maybe nutmeg, mustard powder, and a little sage) it would be near-indistinguishable. We were surprised at how good it was, and we've already made the recipe before.

We Found Flatbread That Fit Our Waffle Iron Perfectly

We then had to forbid ourselves from buying it because we got fat on novelty grilled cheese. This is not the first time we have needed to restrain ourselves from buying flatbread that exactly fit our pans...

This skillet is about the size of a pizza.

Sandwich Recipes Found in Random Comments Sections

It was indeed delicious, and that's without bothering to butter the outside.

Speaking of ham sandwiches...

We Made The Oldest Written Recipe for Sandwiches

Miss Leslie, Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, 1837

It was after Easter. There were leftovers.

Consoling a laid-off friend with cake

Like many people looking to help others in their bad times, we default to bringing unsolicited desserts.

Fortifying Cornbread in our Blender
You know how we had to replace our wedding blender with a 1970s survivor? Well, we decided to add calcium to a batch of cornbread the modern way with modern appliances.

Yes, that is a whole egg in there. The eggshell would in theory be pulverized to powder, which apparently is a good source of calcium.

Dumping in the remaining ingredients, we had what almost passed for normal cornbread batter.

Looks nice and innocent, doesn't it?

To the surprise of no one, it turns out that blenderizing eggshells into your bread gives you the same result as dumping in sand. Take our advice and find better ways to be sanctimoniously healthy. Speaking of using our blender for bad ideas...

Sauerkraut Casserole
These are the things I make when no one else is home to whine about the kitchen fumes. We start with this kale no one has eaten...

Add a lot of sauerkraut and all its vinegary juice...

I really like both sauerkraut and garlic, so much so that I use things like this to test potential dating partners.

And then we decide to add this bell pepper that has reached the end of its shelf life.

We could have cut it up, but we were too lazy. We were planning to use eggs (without their shells) in this baked mess anyway.

The blender also contains like 5 garlic cloves.

And so, we start filling the pan with these frozen chicken hunks.

That's what's reassuring about a lot of these questionable casseroles. You at least know there's meat in the middle and cheese on top. This is what you remind yourself as you cover the chicken with this mess.

And so, with the help of some cheese nearing its expiration date, we have a casserole ready to bake!

It looks like cafeteria slop and tastes like concentrated kraut. I regret nothing.

And so, here's to a wonderful future of cooking adventures! We've gathered over recipes with friends, and discovered horrors and delights. And remember, as we said to a music-major friend who needed post-ordeal brownies on jury day...