Quarantine Kitchen: A Sauce That Goes With Everything (Except Maybe Dessert)

Do you know what this is?

I’ve decided not to number each dish or recipe or even each Quarantine Kitchen post individually. What if the numbers reached triple digits? That would be disheartening, wouldn’t it? So I’ll just go along from now on, one day at a time, combining more than one experiment into each post. Today, for example, I have to report one blazing success, one save, and one near-complete flop. I’d call that last a complete flop, except that my quarantine partner was happy with the results, and we did eat them. First, however, the success.

“What is it?” neighbor Therese asked during our walk with dogs, when I told her neighbor Dorothy had suggested I make a batch of chimichurri with parsley from her, Dorothy’s, greenhouse. I’d never heard of chimichurri before and was reminded of a song from the “Mary Poppins” (the movie) sung — well, performed — by Dick Van Dyke. 

I packed that quarter-cup measure full

When you look up chimichurri, as I know you will and I encourage you to do, you’ll learn that it is an Argentinian sauce, used as often in Argentina as red and green salsa are here in the borderland, though it has more in common with Italian pesto. You’ll also quickly realize that there is great controversy about which ingredients may be included, which must be, and which would make any self-respecting Argentinian roll over in his or her grave. For instance, one recipe I read online got five stars and raves in the form of “I love this recipe!” from several readers, while others were outraged and said it was “not chimchurri at all!”

Maybe mine was "not chimchurri at all" — who am I to judge? — but I can tell you that we loved it!

I have no food processor but am now possessed of a simple blender, and that would have to do. Chopped fresh parsley (1/4 cup), chopped garlic (4 big cloves), balsamic vinegar, salt, crushed red pepper, and oregano went into the blender. 

Right from the start, though, I had to make adjustments in the basic recipe I'd chosen to follow: (1) With no red wine vinegar on hand, balsamic vinegar would have to do; however, it is a very strong-flavored vinegar, so (2) I reduced the three tablespoons to two tablespoons and added a tablespoon of water to make up the difference. Also, (3) as I had no oregano leaves but only ground oregano (oregano molido), I cut that amount in half as well. (4) Olive oil was to be added only when the parsley mixture went from food processor to bowl, but in my case, as it began in the blender I added some of the olive oil then and there, for the sake of consistency. 

Getting all that in the bowl at last, I added the remainder of the olive oil, after which it had to sit 10 minutes before being stirred. The suspense was nerve-wracking! After stirring and a tiny, tentative taste, there was still the suspense of how the sauce would work to complement the evening’s chicken. 

With olive oil floating on top before stirring

The photo at the top of the screen today is the final product. 

I neglected to photograph the plated dinner but can report that the the sauce was delicious not only on the chicken but also on the sweet potato and steamed broccoli! And that the following evening it brought a fresh tomato salad to sparkling life! Dorothy tells me it’s good simply spread on bread, so there’s something we can try in the days ahead.

Chimichurri — resounding success in the quarantine kitchen and something that will spark up our meals for, I hope, many years to come!

Something else, an experiment that was disappointing on the first day, turned around and became (surprisingly) glorious by the second. I had been preparing an entire post on bananas and how there’s more you can do with them than make banana bread. For example (and I have photographs for these), banana pancakes. For a more obvious example, fruit smoothies.

Handy new blender again

I make my own yogurt at home during the months my bookstore is closed, but one of the tricks of making yogurt is to avoid ultrapasturized milk. Sadly, the last time I shopped, all I could find was ultrapasteurized. What would happen? I tried and found out. The yogurt did not set up but had a runny, gooey, gluey consistency. Oh, well, I could put it on my granola, couldn’t I? And how could it hurt a fruit smoothie?

Substandard homemade yogurt, a couple of very ripe bananas, mango-coconut juice, a handful of blueberries and a handful of raspberries from the freezer all went into the blender. The result was drinkable. The taste was all right. The consistency, however, was disappointing. Not like a smoothie at all. My quarantine partner (known in my main blog as the Artist) turned down the offer of a disappointing smoothie, and I couldn’t blame him at all.

Not the best I've ever made

But waste not, want not. I am my grandmother’s daughter! Into the fridge it went. And lo and behold! The next day the consistency and texture had undergone a transformation! My smoothie (and it still tasted good) had become rich and thick and velvety smooth. Very satisfying!

A miracle!

I’ll note one more experiment but without a single image and without detailing the foolish improvisation I made that led to failure. The experiment was cheese popovers. Cheese popovers were one of my mother specialties, and for years someone has entreated me to make them for him. Okay, it felt like the time had come. We needed a treat. Long story short: they didn’t pop. I have figured out what I did wrong, though, and the next time will be a success — with pictures.

Thanks for visiting. Hope you are managing to enjoy a few experiments in your quarantine kitchen. -- I should say "sheltering-in-place kitchen" but the sound works better with the stronger word.

A New Year 1, 2, 3

A small kitchen is necessarily kept simple. There is no room for a dishwasher, for instance, and nowhere to stack all the bowls and utensils for one big wash-up later on. Instead the cook is motivated to keep dishes washed up, a few at a time, by hand, during the food preparation and cooking process. Washing dishes by hand can be meditative. For me it’s often time to begin planning out a blog post, writing and rewriting in my head before sitting down to look at words in sentences.

Limited counter and storage space keep electric appliances to a minimum. Having dishcloths, towels, spices, and utensils close at hand is a higher priority, and often, from years of simple habits, I reach automatically for a hand whisk rather than hunt up the electric mixer.

But there is no substitute for a waffle iron.

My mother, my earliest teacher of kitchen wisdom, knows this well, and it was she who gave me my waffle iron. Most of the time, it’s hidden away in the back of a cupboard, but a couple times a year, on special occasions, out it comes, and New Year’s Day morning was one of those special occasions. A holiday, of course, meant a relaxed morning at home, but besides that, I’d fallen behind in my bread baking over a stretch of unusual holiday scheduling at the bookstore. No eggs without toast for David! But he loves waffles.

For some home cooks, simplicity means mixes and frozen entrees. For me it usually means cooking slowly, from scratch, with fresh and organic ingredients, but I have to admit that on New Year’s Day I had a box of pancake mix in my cupboard -- pancake mix, not pancake and waffle mix, though. So out came my oldest and most trusted cookbook, because I was going to be improvising and needed to check several recipes, both for pancakes and for waffles, to see what I would need to add to the mix. And if not for that need to improvise, I would never be writing about my New Year’s Day waffles at all. From a mix? Please!

The most basic difference between pancakes and waffles is that the eggs are separated in the making of waffles, the egg whites beaten stiff and gently folded into the other ingredients at the very end. A bit of shortening is also called for in waffle batter. So I melted a couple tablespoons of butter and separated three eggs (I was flying by the seat of my pants, but two just didn’t feel like enough), and also substituted whole milk for the water called for on the pancake mix box. It all seemed reasonable, but would it work?

The moment of truth is opening the waffle iron to take out the first waffle. It is an anxious moment! Will the hoped-for waffle stick to the iron? Will it tear apart? Or will it retain its integrity but be disappointing in texture or taste?

Practically perfect! The kitchen new year is off to a good start!

Number 2 kitchen project of the day was hoppin’ john. Good ham, chopped finely, cooked up with chopped onions. (How can any dish fail when it begins with an onion?) Chicken broth from the freezer. White and wild rice. Organic (yes, canned) black-eyed peas from a company right here in Leelanau Township.

Black-eyed peas always make me think of my mother’s stepfather, who grew up in northern Florida. Wild rice carries my mind up to the Upper Peninsula, the birthplace also of the maple syrup on the morning’s waffles, gift of a writer friend. And of course I’d already been thinking of my mother, who gave me the waffle iron. So you can see, what with all those memories, it was pretty crowded in my tiny kitchen on New Year’s morning. Fragrant, too.

We were invited to a neighborhood party in the late afternoon, inspiring me to undertake NYD kitchen project #3, sour cream pumpkin cake, made entirely from scratch, with no canned ingredients or mixes. I had frozen the excess cooked, mashed pumpkin from my Thanksgiving Day pie and had everything else in the refrigerator or cupboards.

I rarely bake cakes. Pies, yes. Cakes, seldom. Consequently, every cake project is a learning experience for me, and one lesson I learned the last time around was that mixing cake batter by hand with a whisk or wooden spoon is more than I can successfully manage. My arm would fall out of its socket before the batter achieved desired smoothness, the necessary prelude to a light finished cake. 

Out came that electric hand mixer, after all. Oh, my god, the roar! I felt as if I were standing on a helicopter pad, in a war zone, surrounded by menacing airborne machines! The front of the mixer even looks menacing, doesn’t it? 

But the batter grew smoother by the minute.

I love the moment, not captured here on camera, where cake batter is poured into a pan, falling from bowl to pan in a series of graceful folds. That is a moment of grace, full of promise. And then the pan goes into the oven. A twist of the timer. (Simple, in the Paris kitchen!) [photo of timer] And gradually a spicy aroma emanates from the tiny kitchen and fills the old farmhouse. Waiting, writing....

The toothpick (test for doneness) comes out clean. The cake smells delicious. It looks a bit pale and plain, but I don’t feel like making streusel topping. Perhaps a dusting of brown sugar? Or cinnamon sugar? Let is cool and sift on powdered sugar? How about sifted powder sugar and cinnamon. I think I’ll go that last route.

Well, it’s been a good morning in the kitchen. Now it’s early afternoon and time for tea.

Postscript: Was that cake not strangely pale? Oddly flat? When it was cut into at the party (luckily, I had also taken my hoppin’ john), the peculiar texture was not at all what I’d hoped or expected. People liked it anyway, most for being “not too sweet.” But what went wrong? Baking powder too old? Around 5 a.m. the answer came to me. I remembered photographs, in that oldest of my cookbooks, of popovers at different oven temperatures. I must have bumped into the dial on one of my passes through the doorway. Oven temperature too low would give exactly the result I got.

Which goes to show that no kitchen is so small that it will not yield failures as well as successes. In that the kitchen is a microcosm of life. And in the kitchen, as in life beyond it, failure usually has something to teach. Good reminder for the first day of a new year, which will no doubt bring new challenges on many fronts.