Wow, three times in the kitchen today. I wonder what's gotten into me.

On weekends, I usually make up some sort of hot breakfast at least one day if not both. It's questionable whether I'll bother to cook anything for any other meal though, as the living alone thing means that cooking can create a righteous mess in the kitchen for only one person to get the benefit of it. Plus there's the whole question of leftovers. So I eat a lot of near-instant foods.

Anyway, this evening I decided to take a crack at a chicken-fried steak, as it's impossible to get one with proper cream gravy in the DC metro and I've had a hankerin' of late. (Note: while it is not necessary to speak in vernacular when referring to such foods as chicken-fried steak and chili - the foods of my people, as it were - it sometimes will seem more funny to the author to write it out that way). When I was at the Harris Teeter I picked up a couple cube steaks, figuring I might as well see about integrating meat back into my home "cooking." They've got a really nice butcher counter but I don't tend to cook frequently enough to buy meat and use it on time. It takes actual thought, something not likely to be present during my usual trips to the grocery store. Since said trips take place at the infrequent interval of once a month, maybe (with the occasional quick nip in for milk not counting for much) any meat consumption would necessarily take place in the first week afterwards. For whatever reason I no longer believe in freezing meat for later use, possibly as a result of chronic freezer burn caused by the fridge of my youth.

Anyway. I had a hankerin' for a chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, and cream gravy. The only nod to an advance of my tastes was that the green beans were fresh and ended up steamed, instead of being the canned variety (Green Giant French Cut Green Beans, inevitably) overcooked with onion salt in my dad's favorite way. Green beans so cooked are one of dad's excuse foods, since his doctor has warned him numerous times to curtail his sodium intake. What this means is that mom doesn't cook with salt anymore, and salts her own food indiscriminately, and dad has a selection of overly salted dishes he now favors but doesn't eat all that often. The aforementioned green beans are one, hearts of palm salads another. Dad even used to put a little salt in his beer, a habit that merely confused me as a child but that in retrospect confounds and horrifies me. After the first sodium warning the salt in the beer trick ceased. I digress already, so I won't go any further into how odd it is he likes the green beans overcooked with onion salt when he claims not to like onion.

Anyway, hankerin' for chicken-fried steak. I have a fantastic cookbook called Texas Home Cooking that includes not only great recipes, but all sorts of obsessive information on the actual preparation of those recipes - the stuff you'd get if you learned to cook by hovering around your grandmother, but a lot of which I didn't manage to pick up from mom. Mom's not a bad cook, but the strain of cooking for three kids and a husband who never were happy with what was in front of them took its toll, and her heart never seemed in it by the time I was paying any attention. There are several things she produces very well every time (chicken-fried steak being one) but other dishes always seem to come out mediocre. Anyway. Cookbook. Recipes. There's a chapter on chicken-fried steak and other "chuck" in there, so I took the recipe they call "Braggin'-Rights Chicken-Fried Steak" and slapped one together tonight, along with their "Prime-Time Mashed Potatoes." I didn't deep-fry the steak, instead pan-frying it (the way mom does) but in peanut oil because that's what I had (somehow a chicken-fried steak done in olive oil seems way wrong).

Notes: next time more pepper. Lots more. Don't be afraid to put enough milk in the gravy (it was too thick tonight). And good &deity; were those potatoes good. I thought tonight as I was getting out the pots that I could actually use one of the two potato ricers I own instead of hand-mashing the potatoes. This turned out to be an excellent idea.

I own a potato ricer not because of potatoes, but because I read somewhere that it's a handy way to make spaetzle (it is. The other way is to press the batter - the very runny batter - through a colander by hand. It's an ungodly mess). I own two because mom forgot she bought me one and bought me another. Until tonight I'd never actually used either of them for potatoes. Tonight's potatoes were so good I'll tell you how they were prepared:

• Two russet potatoes, of the smallish baker size
• Water to cover the potatoes
• Salt, about one tsp
• Milk, somewhere between a quarter and a half cup (whole, I only buy whole milk)
• Butter, about a quarter stick*

Clean and peel the potatoes. Normally I leave some if not all the skins on when preparing potatoes, but tonight I figured the peels would clog the ricer. Put them in a medium saucepan, cover with water, add salt. Place on medium-high heat (hot but not boiling) and cook until soft, 25-30 minutes. In another pan, scald the milk (the recipe calls for milk and half-and-half, but all I had was milk. It worked fine) and keep it warm. After the potatoes are cooked, drain them and let them cool - this is apparently an important step. Once cool (or at least just warm), use a ricer to mush the potatoes back into their original saucepan (or just mash them, but the ricer works quite well for this task, as the ratio of lumps to mashed is optimal, and the lumps themselves are limited in size by the diameter of the holes in the ricer). Once the potatoes are back in the pan, return it to medium heat to dry them out more - another important step, as it increases their ability to absorb milk and butter. After several minutes of that (turning them to keep them from burning to the pan) add the milk, stirring rapidly to mix it in. The potatoes will fluff up quickly as they absorb the milk. Add butter and mix it in as well. The amount of milk and butter your potatoes will absorb depends on a lot of things, so use your judgment in order to avoid adding too much and getting a sloppy mess in the process. Serve hot.

Mine tonight were light, fluffy, mmm-buttery (hoo-boy) and possibly the best mashed potatoes I've eaten.

All in all a nice meal. I've got another steak left to cook so I'll probably try again in a couple days and see where experience gets me.

Odd note here: my welcome page at Amazon (seen when I went to look for a link for the cookbook) lists the following Quick Picks for me:

• Elvis Costello, Brodsky Quartet, The Juliet Letters (Featured item with description)
• Love Thinketh No Evil ~ Peter Himmelman
• Figure 8 ~ Elliott Smith
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville

I already own all of these. Amazon recommends so many things I already own, it really makes me wonder about the other things they recommend. This is tempered by the presence, for about three months after its release, of the Titanic soundtrack on that list - an item I have not even the slightest interest in owning. If they hadn't shot themselves in the foot with that, I'd probably buy the things they recommend a lot more often.

Anyway, the third time in the kitchen today was to bake some cookies tonight. I made snickerdoodles, as I haven't had any in a couple years and I'd never made them myself, so I wanted to see how they'd turn out. They're okay, but I think I need to adjust the recipe a little, as they came out too salty and didn't seem to want to cook all the way through. I think my oven's not as hot as it says it is, and the saltiness I'm sure is a result of using baking powder (which I had) instead of cream of tartar (which I didn't). The flavor is alright though. I might add some vanilla next time, as I saw it in one recipe but not the one I eventually used. I think it'll help.

* I originally misremembered this as being a half stick, forgetting that I'd used quite a bit of that stick of butter in the batter for the chicken-fried steak. If you read this entry before I edited that, I apologize for the heart failure you will suffer if you use that much butter in your potatoes on a regular basis

(2000-08-05)