Harris Teeter Brownies

You know this recipe comes from the south because it starts with two sticks of butter.

Brownies 1 cup (2 sticks) butter ½ cup cocoa powder 2 cups sugar 4 eggs 2 tsp vanilla 1⅓ cups flour ½ tsp salt (omit if butter is salted) ½ tsp baking powder 1 cup nuts, if desired Preheat oven to 400°F. Grease a 9"x13" pan. If you really want to guarantee these won't stick, cut a piece of parchment paper to fit the bottom of the pan before greasing it. Grease the pan, then press the paper into place, getting rid of as many air bubbles as possible. Then spritz the top of the paper with cooking spray. Melt the butter, getting it very hot. Stir in the cocoa powder, and let sit until it re-solidifies but is still very soft.* (Or just let sit for five minutes or so to draw out the chocolate flavor. These brownies didn't seem to mind if it's still melted.) Thoroughly beat in in the sugar. Beat in each egg one at a time. Add the vanilla with one of the eggs. Then mix in the flour, baking powder, and salt. If desired, mix in the nuts. Pour and spread into the pan. Bake at 400°F for 25-30 minutes, or until a toothpick in the center comes out with no hot batter on it. (It doesn't have to be perfectly clean and dry-- you just don't want any hot runny stuff on it.) *Steeping the cocoa in something hot is called blooming it. You don't have to do this, but it brings out so much more chocolate flavor than simply stirring the cocoa powder into the bowl. Source: Harris Teeter flour bag

I cannot justify my love of Harris Teeter. It's just an ordinary grocery store in a region I don't live in. But dang it, the name sounds so adorable. I had to try the brownies on the side of their flour bag.

Our friends at Harris Teeter don't mention this, but I bloomed the cocoa powder. This is merely a fancy way of saying I let it sit in hot melted butter for a while. It makes such a big difference in flavor. These days, I always make a recipe detour to bloom the cocoa.

Blooming aside, the recipe tops our butter with a respectable mountain of sugar.

Gaze upon the sugar and keep in mind I halved the recipe. 

I wrote out the recipe instead of printing it, thus giving myself an exciting opportunity to miscopy the directions. This time, I melted the butter instead of softening it. (Perhaps I can say I very thoroughly softened the butter?) Anyway, we didn't manage to beat anything "until smooth." However, we did achieve "uniformly gritty." I told myself that back-of-the-label recipes tend to be designed to forgive a lot of at-home errors. So today, we're inadvertently testing the durability of this recipe.

I tasted the batter (as one always does), and... well... if brownie batter doesn't make you fall back on the kitchen wall and grip the wooden spoon with both hands, the recipe is insufficient.

These reminded me a lot of Betty Feezor's brownies, but just a tiny bit better. They were a bit more buttery (well, Harris Teeter did put "butter flavored" in the recipe title), fudgy, and had a thin crispy top layer that was just perfect. I couldn't help cross-checking the ingredient lists for the two, and they're almost but not quite the same.I hate to say less-than-nice things about Betty Feezor, but Harris Teeter might move into the recipe box next to her card.

Since these were so similar to Betty Feezor's recipe, I tried turning these into peanut butter brownies just like I do with hers. This simply means you replace half the butter with peanut butter and omit the chocolate.

These tasted nice enough, but they came out like a dense, slightly dry cake. The first one didn't make me want to keep the rest. But I can't snipe at Harris Teeter for a recipe that isn't good after ignoring the ingredient list. But for the record, Betty Feezor makes better peanut butter brownies.

Getting back to the recipe as Harris Teeter intended, these aren't super-ultra rich and chocolatey. They taste more like a sweet chocolate toffee. But I left the pan on the countertop and found it half-empty a few hours later. You can't argue with empty pans.

As a final note, I made these again for obvious reasons, and also to see if softening the butter like the directions say makes a difference instead of melting it. Does this batter look different to you?

After baking, I really couldn't tell the difference between the batches. Accidentally melted butter can drastically change things like cookies and airy cakes, but these brownies didn't seem to care. So if you forget to soften your butter, just melt it and you'll be fine. 

 

Fish Pie: or, Never underestimate potatoes and cheese

Anyone care for fish?

Fish Pie 3 tbsp. minced or dried parsley 1½ cups white sauce (from your recipe or mix of choice, or see below) 3 cups mashed potatoes 2 cups cooked, flaked fish 1 to 1½ cups grated cheese (I used Gouda) Heat oven to 425°. Mix the parsley into the white sauce, set aside. Chop or break the fish into small pieces. Grease a 9" square baking dish and line it with mashed potatoes. Make the potatoes come up about half an inch above the edge of the pan if you have enough to do it easily. Sprinkle half of the fish into the potatoes. Pour half the white sauce over the fish. Then sprinkle with half of the cheese. Repeat the layers with the remaining ingredients: fish, then sauce, then cheese on top. Bake for twenty minutes or until the cheese is browned. Leftover fish of all kinds can be used in this recipe. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

Standard White Sauce 4½ tsp butter (aka 1½ tbsp) 4½ tsp flour 1½ cups milk ½ tsp salt Scald the milk and set aside. (This is easiest if you put it in a microwave-safe measuring cup, pop it in the microwave, and then let it cook until it just starts to bubble.) Melt butter in a saucepan or small skillet. Add flour, salt, and pepper; mix well. Add the milk one small splash at a time, beating very hard with each addition. The butter and flour will "seize  up" the first few times; beat out any lumps. After all the milk is added, bring to the boil, reduce heat, and simmer two minutes. Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book again!

I really like pre-breaded frozen fish fillets when no one is around to whine about the smell. They're like fish sticks (or, as I hear they delightfully call them in the UK, fish fingers) but with slightly more dignity.

Pre-breaded fillets also mean I don't have to try to competently cook fish. Fish is the least forgiving of all meats. Dry chicken is passable even if no one likes it, miscooked beef is a still-edible disappointment, but badly cooked fish cannot be salvaged or choked down. But anyone can put frozen chunks of pre-breaded fish on an oven rack and set a timer.

I could have baked the fillets one dinner at a time, but I decided to cook the entire package (it was a small one) and make a fish pie the next day. 

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

I love how basic this recipe is, right down to the last sentence: "Left-over fish of all kinds can be used in this recipe." Mrs. Mary Martensen's recipes have such a realistic aspect to them. She and her staff knew that no one had the time for carving radish roses or the money to throw out last night's dinner with a depression on.  

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book

Because this recipe is clearly meant to economize, I figured Mrs. Mary Martensen wouldn't mind if I used dried parsley instead of paying for fresh. Besides, this cookbook came out during the Depression. Few people had the means to side-eye economization. I didn't expect the parsley to make our white sauce look like I was making the brownies of sin.

We're told to line a pan with mashed potatoes, "allowing the potatoes to come about one-half inch above the dish on the sides." I imagine this is so that you get a lot of crispy potatoes on the rim of the pie. Since I halved the recipe, I would have needed to get the potatoes about as thin as a pie crust. And I think we can all agree that trying to use a rolling pin on mashed potatoes is not worth the unrepeatable language that would ensue.

And now, as Mrs. Mary Martensen promised, here is the leftover fish!

This recipe both was and wasn't quick to make. On one hand, it is just a creative assembly of fish, potatoes, and white sauce (with some cheese to make it all better, of course). On the other hand, mashed potatoes and white sauce both put a lot of dirty dishes in the sink.

I'm not surprised this was good. I'm pretty sure you can put almost any protein in this and it would be delicious. (Imagine it with mushrooms...) The parsley sauce did wonders for the fish underneath it. I don't mean the parsley hid the fishy taste-- instead, it somehow made it work with everything else.

In full disclosure, we didn't always get nice slices of this pie. Some portions came out looking like messy glop.

Now, fish is somewhat infamous for befouling microwaves. This pie didn't make the kitchen air unbearable, but it did smell just as strong in the microwave as when it was in the oven. So I wouldn't reheat this in a breakroom (or any other shared microwave), but it's fine to reheat at home.

In closing, this is a lot better than I expected it to be. A lot of times, those leftover-based recipes are a bit underwhelming in a practical-minded way. But this was plain (very plain) good.