Chee Whiz

Everyone has some dirty food secret.  Some processed nastiness they can (or more than likely cannot) admit to liking.  I don’t care what kind of food hipster you are, you’ve got a hang up:  Kraft mac-n-cheese, Hostess pink plastic sno-balls, baloney on Wonder bread, a Taco Bell addiction, something.  Children, however, are less discriminating.

Last summer I promised the kids ‘junk food Saturday’.  If you read this blog regularly you know this is breaking all the rules for me. But the great thing about kids is you get to re-live some of your own childhood and rediscover some of the confections you may have forgotten on your way to middle age.  Jim was out of town on an annual business trip to Chicago and I was looking for a new angle on entertainment.  The mid-summer 98 degree heat certainly did not encourage the kids to get out their bikes and ride around the park.  So ‘junk food Saturday’ was christened:  the kids were each allowed one manufactured snack they are normally prohibited from eating and two movies.   The PJs would stay on and after a heathy breakfast the sloth would begin!

First we had to pick their poisons and these selections did not come easily.  Picking which item of forbidden junk takes an epic amount of time and emotional investment.  Apparently, over the past 30+ years, I had failed to see that the grocery store is nose to tail filled with Vegas style flashy food crap. The kids almost had nervous breakdowns from the pressure.  There was nail biting, bargaining and almost tears.  It was UN negotiation worthy. Finally after the threat of no junk food Saturday decisions were made.  The results: our son picked some waxy brown rectangle imitating a pastry and our daughter selected two tone pop tarts of a flavor not found in nature.  I selected crab chips.  

A couple months ago the kids started trash talking what they were going to eat for junk food Saturday this year.  Our son had even remembered the actual date and placed it firmly on his mental calendar.  The lists started to get long, clearly they had been thinking about this for the past eight months, like a Christmas list, only oddly more detailed than their Christmas lists.  As the train picked up momentum Jim could hold back his inner Ohio no more.  He chimed in, ‘Well, we are going to change the date of junk food Saturday this year so I can participate!  We’ll do it the week before I go to Chicago AND I am going to pick out the best stuff, not that old lady stuff you amateurs select.  Oh yeah!  In fact,’ He was revving up now ‘In fact, this year we are all going to be allowed to get two things instead of just one!  Yup.’  He beamed from across the table with a grin that said ‘I’ll show you who knows how to have a good time’.  He had upped the ante and affectively lost his mind.  Squeals of delight.  

‘Well then, I’m sure you will be happy to take the kids on that trip to the grocery store.’ I guess I got wrapped up in the emotion as well because I continued with ‘And I’ll place my order now: EZ cheez and a bag of Chex mix.  And I plan to take that EZ cheez and squirt it into a ball and roll it in the Chex mix and pop it in my mouth.  That will be my snack.’  Three sets of eyes blinking at me from the dinner table. Finally our daughter offered a very small ‘Ew?’ Followed by our son ‘Yeah, ew.’ and Jim ‘Who are you?’  ‘EZ cheez, it’s delicious.  Kids do you know what it is?  It’s a can and you squirt it like, well, like a whipped cream can and a cheese product comes out.  Some people squirt it on crackers but some people...’ Jim finished my sentence ‘squirt it directly in their mouths.’  Larger ‘Ews’ all around.

EZ cheez was my Dad’s dirty little processed food secret. I can honestly say with the exception of the EZ cheez I have never seen my Dad eat anything more processed than a pretzel.  My Dad is no hippie, he missed that generation by a generation and he certainly doesn’t buy in to all this slow food (as he would say, ‘horse-shit’), but he is the original whole foods man. And it’s probably and quite simply because when he was a kid such things did not exist.  If he wants a snack he eats peanuts or pistachios.  He doesn’t even eat cereal.  But he likes EZ cheez.  He has a traditional pastime of sitting on the couch drinking wine while writing a book about wine and watching Monday Night Football with the cat on his lap squeezing that EZ cheez onto a club cracker, and of course, occasionally straight in to his mouth.  How could you resist?

And the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.  The other day I made the mistake of going to Trader Joe’s hungry.  I came home with something called ‘Pub cheese’.  It should have been called ‘tub cheez’ because that’s what it was; a tub of EZ cheez with some horseradish.  It was de-freaking-licious.  Jim had a hard time staying out of it too.

So I have a very easy cheese recipe, but it’s elegant and comes with a Jaques Pepin pedigree. I came across this in Food & Wine years ago and it solves many problems.  First; what to do with all those tiny bits of leftover cheese in the fridge.  And second; how to make a ‘wow‘ appetizer in no time.  I find it works best with part stinky cheese, like blue, part creamy, like goat or fontina and a little salty cheese, like parmesan or feta.  But any combination of cheese scraps will work fine.  

Frommage Fort - from Jaques Pepin

1 cup cheeses, shredded or crumbled

3 garlic cloves (I roast mine first because I do not like the sharp taste of garlic)

1/4 cup dry white wine

pepper

Roast the garlic. I place them in a 350 oven tossed with a little olive oil and roast for 15 minutes.  Mince the garlic.  Place cheeses, wine, pepper and garlic in a food processor and process until smooth, about 30 seconds.  Fill two 4 ounce ramekins with the mixture, place on a cake sheet and place in the broiler for about three minutes or until bubbly and browned.  Serve with table water crackers or crostini.

Click here for the original recipe.

CSA Dilemma

Our friends are vacationing for 10 days in London; we are watching their Chihuahua, Roadie. Roadie is not your typical Chihuahua; he's a lover not a fighter. He's friendly, he's ridiculously cute, missing his tail and he does this funny little shake with his left paw when he's walking fast. Roadie is something of, shall we say, a Don Juan. He has no problems sleeping with strangers. I know because he spent the night curled up on Jim's sister's pillow after having met her 2 hours before. The next morning he casually trotted out of the bedroom at 10 AM. If his parents take him to a party my money says by the end of the night Roadie will be situated in a pretty girl's lap and she will be feeding him pinch after pinch of barbecue. The dog's social mores aside, our reward for hanging out with Roadie is that we get our friends' CSA baskets while they are away.

I have been bugging Jim about participating in a CSA for years and he's been hesitant. I suspect based on up front cost, stringent rules and in spite of his title of Mr. Spontaneous, the unknown factor of the basket contents. The first CSA basket arrived chock full of everything, enormous amounts of organic fruits, veggies and popcorn? I could barely carry it. Jim was so excited when he saw this windfall of food he washed everything one at a time and displayed them on our counter Cezanne-like only with 30x more food than Cezanne would have used. He took a picture and posted it to his Facebook. Feel free to check out his still life. He then jumped in and made us dinner making a small dent in the mountain of food.

The next day Jim went to California and I went to New York. When I returned 2 days later the food mountain was still there staring at me. I didn't know where to start, which I suspect, participants in CSAs across the country go through weekly. It was like a Chopped basket except without the cotton candy or the bison sausage, still equally baffling. It had items I cook with often, like butternut squash and sweet potatoes, it also had slightly eccentric cousins to other loved vegetables, like white radishes, but it also had an over abundance of items I rarely use, such as green peppers.

I'm not the biggest green pepper fan; while I don't dislike them and I'll gladly eat them, I don't seek them out either. I find green peppers misappropriated quite often. A giant chunk thoughtlessly plopped on a salad. Or constantly paired with onions, the perpetual wingman. Unlike peanut butter and jelly, who seem to do fine without one another, green peppers don't seem to have much of a social life without onions. I really like other types of bell pepper. Isn't there more for this vegetable? So I thought, well, what about green pepper Harissa? And you know what? It works.

The green peppers also came with Anaheim peppers and jalapeños. Surely you could use any type of pepper that appeals to you.

Green Pepper Harissa

4 small or 2 large green bell peppers

3 Anaheim peppers

3 jalapeños or 1 large

1.5 teaspoons caraway seeds, toasted

1.5 teaspoons cumin seed, toasted

6 +1 tablespoons olive oil

Large pinch of salt

Tiny pinch of cinnamon

1/2 cup cilantro leaves

Juice of 1/2 lemon

Pre-heat broiler. Place peppers and garlic on a baking sheet, sprinkle with salt and drizzle with about 1 tablespoon olive oil. Roast the peppers in the broiler. Time will depend upon your broiler. My broiler is in the top of the oven I placed the peppers about 7" from the flames, my broiler is not particularly potent and it took me 5 minutes rotating the peppers every minute. Keep your eye on anything in the broiler at all times. The garlic may finish sooner.

Place the peppers in a paper bag for about 5 minutes. Making sure they are cool enough to handles peel the skins off of the peppers. Slice them in half and discard the seeds and stem. This should make about 2 cups of roasted peppers.

Put the peppers, spices, cilantro and 2 tablespoons of olive oil in the food processor, process and stream in the remaining 4 tablespoons of olive oil until desired consistency. Finish with lemon juice.

Notes: Use as you would regular Harissa. I'm showing it as a dip but we also marinated and baked chicken in it. It's also great on eggs.