Chamita Meatballs: or, You can't hide economization with potatoes

Autumn is officially here! Even though the nighttime temperature has barely dipped to 70 degrees (that's 21 degrees for our Celsius friends), people are determinedly going through all the rites of the season. This includes lighting their fireplaces, overworked air conditioning be damned. The whole neighborhood has that faint smell of woodsmoke that permeates the air when the frost really sets in. Of course, we at A Book of Cookrye aren't so cavalier about running up the electricity bill as to light a fire when our jackets are still in the closet from last winter. But we are letting ourselves get a little bit more carefree with the oven. 

It feels almost strange to turn on the oven in the midafternoon, but the lower temperatures allow us to do so without destroying the air conditioning or breaking the entire Texas power grid. Also, I don't need to fret so much when I find myself baking meatballs for an entire hour while the sun is out.

Chamita Meatballs ¼ cup milk 1 onion, finely chopped 1¼ teaspoons salt ½ teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon chili powder 1½ cups grated raw potatoes (no need to peel them) 1½ pounds ground beef ¼ cup shortening Place milk, onion, and seasonings into a large mixing bowl. Grate and add the potato. (You want to wait until you've got everything else in the bowl and ready before grating the potato, because shredded spud does not like to sit out in the open air.) Add the meat, mix well, and form into small balls. Put the shortening in the skillet and brown the meatballs. Cover and steam one hour. They may be steamed with spaghetti and tomato sauce. If desired, you can bake them instead (it's a lot easier). Place meatballs into a 9"x13" pan coated with cooking spray. (Don't bother to brown them first.) Cover tightly with foil and bake at 350° for 1 hour. Keep the foil on after removing them from the oven, and allow to rest for 5 minutes before uncovering and serving. Source: A program for a cooking school hosted by Mrs. George O. Thurn, sponsored by the Salina [Kansas] Journal, circa 1940-1941, via Yesterdish

Today, we are once again hearing from Mrs. George O. Thurn! But this time, we're not making a recipe from her book. For those who don't recall, a friend stopped at an antique store when taking a road trip and got me "the most ancient cookbook" (those were the exact words) on a rack of cheap ones. 

I had never heard of Mrs. George O. Thurn before getting her book. So naturally, I looked for whatever traces of her career were floating around the internet. There's not a lot, but I did find a handout from a cooking class she did in Kansas about six years after my book was printed. The person who posted it dates it from 1940-1941, because we see the World War II "Pledge of Health" but we haven't yet started rationing.

Conveniently, today's recipe is right next to her portrait. Source: Yesterdish

1940 must have been a rotten year (aside from the diversion of a music-hall cooking class). The news was full of the war brewing in Europe in a time when many people still were still on postcard terms with relatives "in the old country." Meanwhile, the Depression was still ruining everyone's lives. 

Even though no one was doing any wartime rationing yet, these meatballs are half beef and half economization by volume. Mrs. George Thurn's meat-stretching may prove timely again today, given how beef prices have shot through the stratosphere.

I had to ask: what is a "Chamita?" When I looked up the word, I only found a tiny town in New Mexico. Perhaps the recipe comes from the town of Chamita. Or, western/southwestern recipe names may have been code for "this is cheap," in the same way that the word "Hawaiian" means "contains canned pineapple." In other words, these meatballs might be as Chamita-related as Mrs. Wilson's economical sausages are Chinookan.

Depression-era budget concerns aside, potatoes seemed better than breadcrumbs or other fillers that go into a lot of meatballs. "Meat and potatoes" is a cliche for a reason.

I was going to cook these exactly as the recipe directs: browning them in a frying pan and then steaming. But these were the mushiest meatballs I have ever made. Any attempt to push them around a frying pan would have led to squishing them into the beginnings of Chamita chili (which is an unexpectedly catchy name). Apparently, the economizing (barely-)prewar housewife had to be very skilled with a spatula if she wanted meatballs.

In an act of self-kindness, I decided skip the frying pan and go right to steaming. Our rice cooker came with a steamer basket, which seemed perfect until I saw how many meatballs the recipe made. Keep in mind that since we only had one pound of beef in the freezer, I reduced the recipe by a third. Clearly, Mrs. George O. Thurn did not endorse wasting kitchen heat on tiny batches.

Cooking these for one hour (as specified in the recipe) seemed excessive. Perhaps this ensures that we don't have any raw potato in our beef?

Speaking of spuds, I didn't want to waste the potato after grating half of it into the meatballs. But as we all know, potatoes have absolutely no shelf life after cutting them. So, to economize on time and get the most use out of the oven heat, I plonked the half-spud onto the oven rack next to the pans of meat. It wasn't nearly as good as when we baked potatoes in an extra-hot oven for nearly two hours, but the weather isn't cold enough for that yet.

After baking, I peeled back the foil and unveiled... um... this.

Back when we made porcupine meatballs, I knew the raw rice would expand into bristly protrusions (as if the name doesn't give it away). But potatoes tend to stay the same size when you cook them. I therefore had thought these meatballs would look normal.

Perhaps the potato shreds didn't expand, but the meat shrank away from them as the fat rendered off. After all, we had a lot of melted fat in the pan by the time these were done. I saved it for future use in frying pans. (We don't throw away seasoned beef fat.)

Something tells me I should have served these with gravy.

The meatballs were unbelievably soft and moist. I almost thought they weren't fully cooked until I remembered that they baked for a full hour. 

They taste like a really good meatloaf. Unexpectedly, you can barely taste the potatoes. They certainly add, um, visual interest to the meatballs, but they don't alter the flavor at all. So while the hourlong baking time gives me pause during most of the year, I won't mind making these again as the nights get chilly.

Red Velvet Brownies: or, A delicious excuse for food coloring!

Sometimes an innocent recipe wedges itself into my mind.

Red Velvet Brownies ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 tbsp cocoa powder, or 2 tbsp powdered instant coffee* 2 tsp vanilla 1 tsp cinnamon 2 tsp red food coloring 2 eggs 1 cup flour Heat oven to 350°. Grease an 8" square pan, or a 9" round. Line the bottom with a piece of parchment paper cut to fit. Press the paper into place, squeezing out as many bubbles as possible. Then coat the top of the paper with more cooking spray.† Melt the butter. Stir in the cocoa powder (or instant coffee), vanilla, cinnamon, and food coloring. Mix well. Whisk in the eggs, one at a time, mixing each in well before adding the next. Then beat the whole mixture very well. Add the flour, gently stirring just until it is mixed. Pour into the pan and bake 28-30 minutes. A toothpick in the center should come out clean. When cooled, top with either cream cheese icing, or white icing flavored with a very generous splash of vanilla. Recipe can be doubled and baked in a 9"x13" pan. *You can turn instant coffee granules into a powder by pouring them into a bowl and pressing them with your thumb, or by putting them into a spice grinder. They may not be perfectly ground, but they will be good enough. Or, you can purchase powdered instant espresso. †This pan preparation may seem excessive, but these really wanted to stick to the pan when I made them. If you bake them on paper, they cannot possibly stick to the bottom of the pan since they don't touch it. You simply need to cut around the sides of the pan, and they will free-fall out of it no matter what. Source: Harris Teeter

My minor obsession with Harris Teeter dumbfounds my friends who live in their market territory. I recently visited a longtime acquaintance in Raleigh for the weekend. Even though no one needed to get groceries the entire time, I confused him with an excited shout of "You didn't tell me your neighborhood is right next to a Harris Teeter!"

He was like "I didn't think that mattered...?"

Anyway, when we remade the Harris Teeter lemon squares, I couldn't resist wandering towards their website. I soon ended up flipping through their other recipes, which led to today's adventure in excessive food coloring.

The idea of red velvet brownies intrigued me. But I didn't want an entire pan of them tempting me from inside the house. The brownies therefore had to wait until the next time I went out to visit people. (As we all know, the best calories are the ones we share.) As soon as some friends and I got together, I couldn't rush to the red food coloring fast enough.

After stirring everything together, our batter-in-progress looked astonishingly like that shampoo that adds a magenta tint to your hair. (The hair color is temporary, but it permanently stains your bathtub.)

I've never baked brownies that were so aggressively brick-colored before.

On a mathematical note, the original recipe tells us to use an 8" square pan. I don't have one of those. But a little bit of math told me that a 9" round pan (which a lot more of us have in the kitchen) has almost exactly the same area. Therefore, the batter would have the same thickness after pouring it into the pan. The only downside: no one gets a corner piece if you bake your brownies in a circle. Anyway, here is the mathematical proof:

I haven't used calculus since I spite-burned the textbook, but it turns out you use middle-school math a lot in daily life.

As we cleaned the countertops, I was reminded that there is absolutely no way to wipe up splatters of red food coloring without looking someone had a nosebleed. When the top of your trash can has a pile of paper towels that look like this, kitchen visitors get nervous.

While we were wiping red food coloring off of the countertop, the batter had baked into a beautiful-looking batch of brownies with a subtly sparkling top.

As much as I like cream cheese icing, I didn't use it today. I know cream cheese icing is a traditional part of red velvet cake, but saying something is delicious with cream cheese icing on top is like saying vegetables are delicious if you deep fry them. I wanted to know if the brownies can stand on their own merit.

So, I made plain white icing instead (though I was deliberately heavy-handed with the vanilla). Of course, this raises the question of whether the brownies were a highly-dyed substrate for vanilla icing instead of cream cheese. But I decided to let that conundrum join the eggshells in the trash.

The brownies tasted absolutely wonderful. The cinnamon is a downright inspired addition. I may put it into all my future red velvet cakes. Unfortunately, one of my friends said "I'm allergic to chocolate,"  and I can't bear to deprive people of dessert because of an allergy.  

Omitting the cocoa seemed like a trivial alteration. Red velvet cake only has a slight whisper of chocolate, anyway. The chocolate is only present to darken the cake. I argue that the food coloring, with its synthetically bitter undertones, is a more critical component of red velvet's distinctive flavor. 

With that in mind, I didn't need to come up with a counterfeit chocolate. I just needed another edible brown powder. Instant coffee seemed like a perfectly fine substitute. We had one minor difficulty in obtaining any: no one in the house drinks it. Because I absolutely hate when grocery money goes rancid on the back of the shelf, I refused to purchase an entire jar of the stuff. Fortunately, Mom generously donated these packets to the cause.

Of course, no one wants gritty granules of instant coffee in their brownies. Also, we wanted to evenly darken the batter, not bespeckle it. So, I needed to turn the coffee into a powder.

I first tried pressing the coffee granules into the side of a bowl with my thumb, but they were surprisingly hard. After more minutes than I expected (and a slightly sore thumb), the coffee still looked like this.

I next tried putting the coffee into the electric spice grinder. While we did manage to pulverize most of the coffee, a lot of the crystals remained stubbornly intact. So if you use instant coffee instead of cocoa powder, you may want to choose a different brand.

The coffee batter was a little runnier when we used cocoa. Maybe cocoa powder absorbs more water (or "moisture content" if you want to sound like an expert) than instant coffee. Also, if you look closely at the surface, you can see the infuriatingly intact coffee granules floating in the artificial red.

The finished brownies somehow had an even shinier top than when we made the recipe as originally written.

It turns out instant coffee tastes a lot stronger than cocoa. Fortunately, the coffee went perfectly with the cinnamon already in the recipe. (If cinnamon and coffee didn't go so well together, pumpkin spice lattes wouldn't exist.) I think I may actually prefer the coffee red velvet brownies to the cocoa ones. 

But whichever brown powder you choose, I definitely recommend making these.