“Is it Spicy?”
AdventureMan and I have wide ranging taste in dining out, as you know if you are a regular reader of this blog. We like Barbecue, we like Mexican, we like Vietnamese, we like Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Seafood. There is one food we do not like – tasteless food. We like TASTE.
Living here in the South, we will often see a group come into a restaurant, and one person – always a lady – will ask the waitress “Is it spicy?”
Spicy doesn’t mean fiery hot, spicy means pretty much anything other than the food’s natural taste plus salt – they do use a lot of salt in food here. At one restaurant, the waitress said “no, it’s not spicy, but there is a little bit of horseradish in the cocktail sauce” and the little lady said “oh, then I had better order something else.”
It’s all a matter of taste, what your palette is used to, and what it craves.
I wonder, too, if it isn’t what we are trained to expect – for example, some Nigerian friends once told us that from the time their children are babies, they give them little bites of hot hot pepper with their food. I think many of our restaurants add sugar, as well as salt, so that we have become more and more addicted to sweetness.
How To Be a Southern Lady
You’d think moving back to your own country would be a piece of cake, wouldn’t you? We nomads know better. Young people who travel to other countries to go to school know better. Military people know better. Missionaries know better. Diplomats know better. Anyone who has spent time living abroad know that it works both ways – you have an impact where you are living, and where you are living has an equal impact on you. You may go back, but you are never the same.
With this move, AdventureMan and I have been too busy trying to get settled and to take care of the incredible amount of bureaucratic detail it takes to relocate. Even with AdventureMan ‘retired’, the days are flying by, and we don’t know why we are so busy.
For one thing, I am doing my own housework, and I am finding I am not very good at it. Like I am good at getting laundry done, and even folded, but I haven’t ironed in a long time, and the things that need ironing are stacking up. I have bought a beautiful new ironing board, and a beautiful iron . . . and some starch, the liquid kind I like, not the spray kind. . . but I haven’t set it up, and I haven’t ironed, not a thing. I have discovered that all my packed things looked a lot better after hanging in the closets for a week, most of the wrinkles fell out, lucky me. But . . . the day of reckoning is coming.
The worst part, for me, is cleaning my floors. My floors are supposed to be beautiful; wood and tile floors. They actually ARE beautiful, maybe two days a week, the day I clean them and the next day, but five days a week, they need work. I wish I had asked my cleaning lady in Doha how she got my floors so beautifully clean. I wish I had paid more attention. I keep looking in the store for some miracle, a machine that will clean them in a heartbeat and make them all shiny. . .
The wonderful thing about moving into this culture – and it truly is a different culture from the one in which I was raised – is that we have our wonderful son and his wonderful wife to give us hints on what to do and not to do, and we have his wife’s wonderful family.
Mostly, I try to keep my eyes open. Southern women admire things extravagantly, and after living for so many years in the Middle East and Gulf, learning to admire extravagantly goes against all my instincts.
In the MIddle East, when you admire extravagantly, you can make people nervous. Some people worry about attracting “the evil eye” of jealousy, evil intentions, people who envy you and wish you harm. Some people, if you admire something, will give it to you! It’s true, those stories, it has happened to me. So now I have to un-learn my lessons in retraint and learn to appreciate, if not extravagantly, at least enough to be polite.
One of my wife’s relatives gave us a house-warming gift, an iced-tea maker, with a darling card that states Rule #1 is that every Southern Hostess knows that a pitcher of iced tea is a MUST for all occasions. I like iced tea, but I have never kept it on hand to serve, and I guess I need to start!
Her second rule was one that made me burst out laughing – “A Southern Lady, the most interesting ones anyway, know that rules are made to be broken.”
“Just be prepared for people to leave your home saying “Bless her heart, she must be getting forgetful. There was no iced tea!”
And then rule #3 – “The only correct and acceptable way to criticize anyone is to add ‘bless his/her heart!’ and then, anything goes!”
At a party at her house this weekend, I learned a couple more – the first rule being that when you are invited to a great big family dinner, bring dessert! Thank God, I did take a little guest gift, but now I know – bring dessert! And it had better be sweet!
The next rule is would make any Kuwaiti or Qattari feel right at home – spare nothing in making our guests comfortable. This Southern Hostess had seating areas inside the beautiful air conditioned home, and also seating outside for those who don’t mind a little heat. She had a big basket loaded with all kinds of insect repellents to keep her guests from being bitten. She took time with each guest, and although she was running her little bottom off getting everything organized, she made it all look easy, and as if she was having a good time. I have a sneaking suspicion the truly was enjoying having all the people around and that her great big heart loves taking care of the crowd. She was the essence of gracious hospitality. Did I mention she has also lived in Kuwait?
Dinner was “Perlow” an old Southern tradition, made in a huge old kettle from her husband’s mother, and hung from a tripod over a roaring fire to cook. The actual cooking was the men’s work as they sat outside drinking iced tea:
Home grown peas and beans mix – delicious!
Serving up the perlow:
My Middle East / Gulf friends would be comfortable eating this meal – Perlow is a variation of Pilaf, and very similar to Biryani. No alcohol served. No pork. Lots and lots of fabulous sweet desserts.
It’s funny, I used to tell people in Kuwait and Qatar that it was a lot like Alaska; when the weather got too bad, you just stay inside most of the time. When the weather gets good, you go outside as much as you can. When it’s too hot/cold, you run from your air conditioned/heated car to your air conditioned / heated store or movie theater, or restaurant, and then back to your air conditioned / heated car and back to your air conditioned/ heated house.
In the same way, I am beginning to wonder if the South and the Middle East know how much they have in common? In Pensacola, on Saturdays, we have the religious people on the corners shouting at passing cars, not a whole lot different from the volunteer morality police in Saudi Arabia. In the South, as in the Middle East, ‘family’ isn’t just blood, it’s also who you’re married into, and there is a lot of emphasis on family getting together and spending time together. In the South, as in the Middle East, men tend to gather in one area, women in another.
In the South, they drink iced tea; in the Middle East, it’s hot tea. Both have passionate patriots, fundamental believers and a tradition of gracious hospitality. Both have a passion for hunting and fishing. Nobody much likes obeying the rules in either culture. Maybe I’m still in the MIddle East?
AdventureMan Cooks a Florida Bouillabaisse
One of AdventureMan’s retirement dreams was to have time to cook. There have been two times in our lives together when he has had the time – one, when our son was born and he learned Chinese cooking so he could stir-fry while I held the squalling baby (he had colic, and squalled from about four in the afternoon to eleven at night. Do you know how long every single minute is when you are holding an inconsolable baby?)
The second time was when he retired from the military, and spent several months at home, keeping house, taking our son to visit colleges, and serving up some of the most fantastic meals we have ever eaten. (I was working; it was a total role reversal. Kind of fun to shake things up, do things differently in a relationship now and then. 🙂 )
So when he started thumbing through cook books, I started grinning to myself. This man is very talented, and while I am very good at ‘survival cooking’, i.e. getting a meal on the table that will nourish and quell hunger pains, AdventureMan takes cooking to an art form.
First we had to make a trip to the grocery store for some basics. When you set up housekeeping after a (yet another) move, you are missing some of the most basic things – like cayenne pepper, or garlic.
Then – oh heaven! – we visited Maria’s Fresh Seafood Market, heaven on earth for this little old Alaska girl.
Fresh, fresh seafood, and people who know how to cut it. The prices are good. As we entered, a drama began, a woman buying a lot of (something) picked a fight, first with the man serving her and then with the cashier. We were there about half an hour, and during this time, she complained, loudly and vigorously, to anyone who would listen. I think she wanted her purchase comped.
AdventureMan bought what he needed, got it cut mostly how he needed it, and also got a fish head and tail for making stock – a great big grouper! He said as he cooked it up, the head and mouth were sticking out of the pot like “Help me! Help me!” but I wouldn’t know because I was upstairs minding my own business while he worked his magic on the Florida fish bouillabaisse. 🙂
Soon, tantalizing odors drifted upstairs, rich, complex odors, with a hint of sherry . . . it was divine. I had to pop down to let him know how much I was appreciating his efforts.
“Do you think it’s a little too thick?” he asked.
“I think it’s like a fish stew; I think thick is OK. You can add a little more liquid if it seems to need it,” I added, but actually, he is doing just fine without any input from me.
Finally, it was time to eat. AdventureMan dished the concoction into some shellfish soup bowls I found many years ago at that exotic resource store, TJ Maxx (LOL) and dinner was served.
Total YUMMMMMM. Bravo, AdventureMan, Bravo! I am having a lot of fun with your retirement! 🙂
Slow Cooker Cassoulet
When I first saw this recipe on allrecipes.com I thought “this isn’t right! Where’s all the fat?” Cassoulets we have eaten in the high plateau central southwest part of France had duck in them, and goose fat, and some mutton, maybe a little pork. They have elaborate rituals, where you boil it in a large enamel pot for hours, then bake it, pulling it out now and then to break and stir in the crust that forms, baking again, breaking the crust, for hours. Cassoulet is a ritual, not just a dish.
But I saved the recipe, because our son and daughter-in-law have gotten us intrigued with slow cooker cooking, and this week, I gave it a try:
The hardest part of this recipe is finding cannelini beans. After I finally found dried beans (at the Four Winds International Grocery at 9th and Creighton) I actually found canned cannelini at WalMart. (I know! Whoda thunk?) I wanted to go ahead and try it with the dried beans, so I soaked them overnight, cooked them, and then went ahead with the following recipe:
Cassoulet Slow Cooker
• 2 pounds skinless, boneless chicken breast halves, cut into chunks
• 1 onion, quartered and thinly sliced
• 2 large cloves garlic, minced
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 2 (15 ounce) cans cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 pound turkey kielbasa, cut into 1/2-inch slices
• 1/3 cup dry white wine
Directions
Place the chicken into the bottom of a slow cooker.
Stir together the onion, garlic, parsley, salt, pepper, cannellini beans, and turkey kielbasa in a large bowl. Pour the mixture over the chicken in the slow cooker, and pour the wine over all the ingredients.
Cover, set the cooker to Low, and cook until the chicken is very tender and the cassoulet is thickened, 5 to 6 hours.
This recipe perfumed the house with rich aromas. We could hardly wait to eat. Such simple ingredients, so easy to fix! Toward the end, I had to add a little more wine and I also added about a teaspoon of Herbes de Provence. If you live in Kuwait or Qatar, or don’t use alcohol in your cooking, you can substitute chicken broth for the wine, or an unsweet grape juice, or one of the non-alcoholic wines available in some supermarkets.
Here’s how it looked close up, shortly before serving. 🙂 Hope you try it, hope you like it. 🙂
The Shrimp Basket
Even though The Shrimp Basket has specials like 25 cent oysters all day on Tuesdays, and even though the first time, I really did order the steamed shrimp, it is hard to walk into the Shrimp Basket and not to order something fried.
I can go for years most of the time and never eat anything deep fried. It just isn’t that important to me. I can see that living in Pensacola, it is going to be a serious challenge, because so much is deep fried, and holy tomole, it all smells so good. Fried onion rings. Fried fish. Fried shrimp. Fried seafood platters. Fried grouper sandwiches. Stop! Stop! You’re killing me!
Pensacola is a real military town, and loves their Blue Angels, the Navy stunt flying team. The Blue Angels practice on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, and have autograph signings after the practice and anyone in Pensacola can go and it’s FREE!
There is often a waiting line to get into the Shrimp Basket because of their specials. On Fridays, the special is all you can eat Fried Fish for $7.99.
When you finish the first batch, you just tell the waitress you want some more. We ordered it, but we could only eat the first batch, there was so much fish. They also have very cool and colorful T-shirts for Shrimp Basket fans:
Taste of India in Pensacola
I had just finished doing the laundry at our son’s house when AdventureMan came back from the YMCA, where he had been trying out a series of their exercise machines trying to exorcise a demon caught in his back muscles.
“I have two suggestions for lunch,” he began, “you choose.”
OK. I can live with that. “What are my choices?” I ask.
“Taste of India or The Cajun Cafe with the lunch special for $4.99?” he responded.
“I’d like to try the Taste of India. It’s gotten some great reviews. It’s hard for me to believe an Indian food restaurant is doing well in Pensacola; let’s go see.”
I will tell you honestly, I did not have high hopes. We have been so spoiled, living in the Gulf countries, where real Indian food has been available, and inexpensive. Even better, we have had Indian food in homes, where it doesn’t get any better or any more authentic. I’ve been shown how to make some dishes (wooo HOOO!). So I was prepared to be a harsh critic, and – even worse, in our book – it is a lunch buffet.
Buffets just don’t put out the quality of food we seek. They seem to focus on quantity, at the expense of good ingredients, superbly prepared.
Not this time.
The food was awesome.
They didn’t have a lot of dishes, maybe nine or ten, plus condiments and dessert. The dishes they had were excellent, and the kinds of dishes we use to determine whether we like a place or not. Vegetable pekoras. Chicken Korma. Biriyani. Dal Makhani. Chicken Tandoori. Delicious.
And there was HEAT! They had a very hot red sauce you could use; there was also a little heat in the korma. I was impressed. I can’t wait to go back and order off their menu, which you can also do.
I was also delighted to see that they had a steady stream of committed customers; you could tell most of them come there often and love the food.
No, no, I did not eat two plates of food. One was mine and the other was AdventureMan’s. And the plates look so huge because I had the camera right down next to the plate, so you could get the textures. It was SO good!
Yes, we are eating out a lot. It’s because we are living in a hotel until we can get into our house. Soon, we are assured, very soon. By the date they promised!
Easter Dinner
I can’t remember when I was last in the United States for Easter, but it was probably back when our son married . . . I remember a church service held at the hotel where we were staying, just down below our room, and I remember Easter Brunch, but barely – the wedding had been held the day before, and everything is a little blurry in my memory, it all happened so fast!
So this year was a lot of fun. We had a small family dinner, with all the traditional foods.
My son’s wife loves sweet potatoes; these are baked in balsamic vinegar and olive oil with a topping of pineapple:
We all love a green salad with roasted walnuts:
Cole slaw, oil, vinegar, poppy seed, no mayonnaise:
Yummy green beans (my favorite):
And after dinner, we had the traditional clogged sink, and spent hours running to the only store open (Easter Sunday in the South, remember?), first for plungers, then later for a plumber’s snake. We tried Liquid Plumber – nothing worked. So I am waiting this morning for the plumber to come and do his magic so our water will run out of the sink again. 😦
If you think you hate cole slaw because of all that mayonnaise, try this dressing – we love it!
Poppy Seed Cole Slaw
1/2 cup sugar
1/3 cup vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup oil
1 Tablespoon poppy seed
1 teaspoon dry mustard
1/2 teaspoon onion juice
Bring all to a boil. Cool before using. Enough for one medium large head of cabbage, shredded thinly.
Publix Helps Us Cook At Home
Through blogging, I became a fan, and then in the way things happen in this wonderful virtual world, a friend of another blogger, John Lockerbie, who writes about many things, my favorite of which is Islamic design. He writes about the architecture, the boats, development in the Gulf, and behind the blogs, we have had our own correspondence.
Recently he commented on the post I wrote about how American health problems are mostly self-inflicted, and could be turned around with proper diet, exercise and preventive visits to the doctor to deter the serious illnesses from showing up. He sent me a reference to a speech made by Jamie Oliver, when he won the TED prize, on changing one small thing in the modern world – teaching us to cook once again in our own homes instead of eating out, eating highly processed, highly salted, highly sugared and highly fatted foods.
There is a Florida chain of supermarkets called Publix, and they are marvelous. Publix is making it easy for people to cook at home. They have a program where they do cooking demos, give out the recipes, and have all the ingredients gathered in one place – at the same price as throughout the store, just located conveniently in this one place – to encourage people to cook at home.
All the ingredients for several recipes:
Close up:
The signage:
Pick a recipe!
I find I am enjoying cooking a lot more here, where shopping is so easy and everything looks so good. Oh yes, and the prices are so low!
Thanks Mom: Bread and Eggs / Pain Perdu
Sometimes when my daughter in law is nursing, she gets very hungry. So while she is feeding the baby, I spoon or fork-feed her. It is a wonderful time for me, to be able to nurture and nourish this dear woman who loves our son and bears and nurtures his child. This morning, it was Pain Perdu with little slices of cantaloupe. (I had to look up ‘cantaloupe’ twice. I had no idea spelling cantaloupe was so difficult!)
Thanks, Mom. Bread and Eggs was a big hit. (I also notice that the majority of entries under Pain Perdu look more like what we call French Toast than bread and eggs.)
When I was little, we always loved it when our Dad went away on a trip because he hated eggs, and when he left, Mom would make Bread and Eggs, something they used to make in her family to use up bread which may have gone stale and hard.
It is delicious, but you would not want to eat it often. You start by melting butter РI used about half a stick of butter Рand saut̩ing small bread cubes at a moderately high temperature. Throw in some fresh chopped parsley, or cilantro, keep stirring until the bread cubes are browned. It will smell delicious!
Meanwhile, mix four eggs with a little non-fat half and half, and when the cubes are browned, turn down the heat to moderately low and pour in the eggs. Let them cook for a good minute before you stir things around, and I even use a pancake flipper to flip entire portions while the top is still liquid, so the bread cubes get entirely encased.
Serve when fully cooked.
Mac and Cheese Weather
I was visiting my sister, and our children were all very small. It was a cold day, a very very cold, snowy, icy day in Iowa and I told the kids I would make macaroni and cheese like my Mom used to make.
Their eyes got big and round and all day they went around saying “she’s making Macaroni and Cheese like Mom used to make!”
When I finally dished it out – there was utter silence as they stared at the macaroni and cheese – made from real macaroni and REAL CHEESE in a real, home made sauce!
They didn’t look delighted. They looked horrified, and like they didn’t want to embarrass me, but something was terribly wrong.
My sister started laughing.
“I think they all expected it to be orange,” she said, and I started laughing too – orange is also what my son grew up on, it was so quick and easy.
Mom’s Mac and Cheese was not a big hit.
But with the semi-chilly weather of January, I found this fabulous recipe for Macaroni and Cheese that sounds like it greatly ups the taste factor. I found it on allrecipes.com, one of my favorite recipe websites and it is called Kicked up Macaroni and Cheese:
Kicked Up Macaroni and Cheese
1 1/2 cups rotelle pasta
4 tablespoons butter, divided
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
3 cups whole milk
1 teaspoon dry mustard
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper
3 teaspoons hot pepper sauce
1 cup shredded pepperjack cheese
1 1/2 cups shredded sharp Cheddar cheese
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/3 cup dry bread crumbs
2 teaspoons chili powder
Directions
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C).
Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Add pasta and cook for 8 to 10 minutes or until al dente; drain.
In a large saucepan over medium heat, melt 2 tablespoons butter. Whisk in flour and cook, stirring, 1 minute. A little at a time, whisk in milk, mustard, salt, pepper and hot sauce. Bring to a gentle boil, stirring constantly. Boil 1 minute, then remove from heat and whisk in pepperjack, Cheddar and Parmesan until smooth. Stir in cooked pasta and pour into shallow 2 quart baking dish.
Melt remaining 2 tablespoons butter. Stir in bread crumbs and chili powder. Sprinkle over macaroni mixture.
Bake in preheated oven 30 minutes. Let stand 10 minutes before serving.
Gotta go now. My tummy started rumbling when I read the recipe!
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