Scott Hutcheson

Flirting with Spring (and recipe for BLT Soup)

Originally published in quality newspapers the week of March 27, 2011

There is a fine art to flirting and frankly I was never very good at it. The most effective arrow in my flirting quiver was that of humor. I could almost always make a girl laugh; but hey, so could Rodney Dangerfield.

Author Fran Greene wrote the book on flirting. Actually, she wrote the Bible. In The Flirting Bible she reveals all the flirting secrets: the smile, eye contact, maintaining a proper distance, body language, and the flirtatious touch with tips for both men and women. I could have used this book back in the day.

Springtime, it seems, is a time of year where flirting is at its peak and not just among humans. In my neck of the woods, the earth itself flirts with us during these early days of spring, teasing us a bit with a warm day here and there and giving us just a peek of color.

Warm spring days have me anticipating the bounty that will soon be growing out of our small backyard garden and a day in the 70s last week had be standing in the yard envisioning the tomatoes that will go into the ground in a few weeks. Unable to get tomatoes out of my mind, I settled for the next best thing to garden tomatoes, the canned versions at the grocery store.

One of my favorite ways to eat tomatoes is in a BLT but I will only eat them when tomatoes are in season. The produce-isle versions just don’t match up. Canned tomatoes, on the other hand, usually have great tomato flavor but you can’t exactly use them on a sandwich. I decided on a BLT soup instead, incorporating all the elements of the sandwich.

A conventional BLT is still a few months off but in these early days of spring, this soup fills the void.

 BLT Soup

• 6 strips of bacon
• 2 28-ounce cans of diced tomatoes
• Olive oil
• Kosher salt and freshly cracked black pepper
• 1 medium yellow onion, chopped
• 2 stocks of celery, chopped
• 2 medium carrots, chopped
• 1 quart of canned chicken stock
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
• 8 thin slices of a baguette
• Arugula

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line a baking pan with parchment paper and place a wire rack on the lined pan. Lay the slices of bacon on the rack and place in the oven to cook for 20 minutes or until the bacon is crisp. Remove the bacon and the rack. Once cooled, crumble the bacon and set aside. While the bacon is cooking open the two cans of tomatoes and pour of the juice, reserving it for later. Using the same baking pan and parchment used for the bacon, pour off all but about a tablespoon of the bacon fat (you may not have more than a tablespoon). Dump the diced tomatoes onto the parchment-lined sheet and spread out into a single layer. Add salt and pepper and a drizzle of olive oil. Place back into the 375-degree oven to roast for 30 minutes.

While the tomatoes are roasting, heat a Dutch oven to medium-high. Add a tablespoon of olive oil and sauté the chopped onion, carrots, and celery. Add salt and pepper and sauté until beginning to turn golden. Add the chicken stock and reserved tomato juice and bring to a boil then reduce to simmer. Once the tomatoes are done add them to the pot along with the tablespoon of sugar and the basil. Add additional salt and pepper if needed.

Use an emersion blender to puree the soup to a smooth consistency. Switch the oven to broil and place the bread slices on a baking sheet, drizzle with olive oil, and broil until golden. When ready to serve ladle soup into bowls, top with one or two pieces of the toast, a few leaves of arugula, and crumbled bacon. Makes about six servings.

Games, Grub, & Gladiators (and recipe for Spanakopita)

Originally published in quality newspapers the week of March 20, 2011

It is in our nature to love a good story and most of us got an early introduction to storytelling because of some adult in our lives who read to us or spun yarns of their own. Often our play took the form of story, imagining ourselves as the hero in some epic tale playing out in our backyards.

As adults, stories still play a prominent role in our lives. We learn about what’s going on in the world through stories reported by news outlets, we entertain ourselves with television and movies that makes us laugh, cry, and jump out of our seats. Friends tell each other stories, about our weekend adventures, what’s going on with our kids.

This week we find ourselves in the middle of what’s called March Madness and when it comes down to it, it’s the stories we’re mad for. Without stories there’s just a ball going through a hoop.

At its essence, a sporting event is a story that unfolds over the course of a couple hours and the NCAA tournament packs a lot of stories into just a few days. We’ll get caught up in the tales of heroes and villains, decades-old rivalries, emotional highs and lows, unexpected twists and turns, victories and defeats.

Like for the Super Bowl and other big sports events, many of us will be gathering with family and friends around our living-room big screens to experience together the thrills of victory and agonies of defeat and of course you can’t have a crowd without feeding them.

Food, sports, and great stories go back for centuries, even to the days of the Roman Coliseum. The Roman’s loved great drama and stories quickly spread about the feats of gladiator bravery. Like a Saturday in March, these tournaments were all-day affairs and the people got hungry. One crowd favorite was sold by Coliseum vendors was a savory Roman pastry similar to what we know now as spanakopita.

Fortunately our sporting amusements are less barbaric than they used to be and fights to the death don’t usually occur even among the greatest of rivals. Still, however, there is a great deal that is Roman-esque about March Madness. New heroes emerge, former victors fall, spectators demand sustenance, and great stories are born right before our eyes. Maybe a taste of ancient Rome will should find a place among our game-time snacks.

Game-Time Spanakopita

• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 large yellow onions, chopped
• 2 (10 ounce) packages frozen spinach thawed, drained, and squeezed dry
• 1/4 cup finely chopped fresh parsley
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 8 ounces feta cheese, crumbled
• 4 eggs, beaten
• Kosher salt and cracked pepper
• 1 24-ounce package phyllo dough
• 3 sticks of butter, melted

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Heat a nonstick sauté pan to medium-high and add olive oil. Once the oil comes up to temperature sauté the onions until softened. Add the spinach, parsley, and flour and cook for ten minutes or until most of the moisture has evaporated. Remove from heat. In a mixing bowl combine the feta, eggs, and salt and pepper to taste then incorporate the spinach mix.

Unroll the phyllo on a flat surface and keep it covered with a damp towel so it doesn't dry out. Cut the phyllo lengthwise into 3-inch strips, and recover with the towel. Use a pastry brush to brush a strip with melted butter. Place a spoonful of filling an inch from one end of the pastry then fold the end over the filling to form a triangle. Continue folding up the strip in triangles, like folding up a flag. Repeat using all the strips and filling keeping the triangles covered with a damp towel until all are ready to bake.

Brush the triangles lightly with butter, then bake on a parchment-lined baking pan for 20 to 25 minutes, or until golden and crisp. Serve hot. Makes about 60 triangles.

St. Patty Melt

If you don't have the four hours it takes to make Corned Beef and Cabbage you can try this St. Patty Melt, a variation on the classic Reuben.

 

Another Biscuit Please, Dr. Pavlov (and recipe for Charleston-style Cream Cheese Biscuits)

Originally published in quality newspapers the week of March 14, 2011

You’ve heard, I’m sure of the Golden Age of Hollywood, the 1930s and 40s, in which movies really came into their own. I wasn’t around during that time but I was for another era of pop-culture significance, the Golden Age of Saturday-Morning Cartoons. In 1966, the year I turned two, all three of the major networks began a four-hour block of children’s program each Saturday morning.

This was before the days of 100s of cable channels, which now includes entire networks devoted to children’s programming. Many a Monday-morning conversation around elementary-school water fountains were about the antics of Bugs Bunny, the Road Runner, and the other characters that inhabited that colorful world.

During the 1980s other programming began to slip into Saturday mornings and soon the era came completely to an end. For those of us of a certain age, however, Saturday mornings will forever be associated with cartoons.

For me, the Saturday mornings of my formative years have another association – biscuits. My stepfather, a Baptist minister, made biscuits by the dozens to take to the weekly Men’s Prayer Breakfast. I have a photo or two of me, sleepy-eyed and footie pajama-ed, sitting atop the kitchen counter helping him cut out the doughy disks. He would leave a few for the family, and my mother would bake them and serve them with gravy or sometimes apples fried in a cast-iron skillet.

Somehow, in someway, it seems my mind got hardwired, like Pavlov’s dog, so that cartoons remind me of biscuits, and biscuits of cartoons. With the first whiff of a hot-buttered biscuits, I think of Scooby, Shaggy, and the gang, in the Mystery Machine, careening down a winding road to go solve a caper. It works the other way too. If I walk through the room while my children are watching Hong Kong Fuey on the retro channel, my first impulse is to head to the kitchen to preheat the oven.

As a result of my obsession with biscuits I’ve catalogued a great many variations, found all across the U.S – flaky and cakey, lard and butter, thin and thick, buttermilk and regular milk? I’m an equal opportunity biscuit lover, rarely encountered a freshly baked biscuit I don’t like. I won’t even turn my nose up and some canned biscuits. Don’t, however, try to fool me with some sort of pre-baked, then frozen version. 

Last week life took me to Charleston, South Carolina, where I discovered yet another variation, the cream cheese biscuit. The other ingredients and overall technique is not unlike most other biscuits except that cream cheese is substituted for some of the butter. The result is a light and cakey biscuit with a double-doze of tang coming from the buttermilk and cream cheese.

The little King Street café in which I ate these delicious biscuits, had a TV turned to CNN. I asked my waitress if they got the Cartoon Network and if she would mind changing the channel. They did and she obliged.  

 Charleston Cream Cheese Biscuits

• 1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1-1/2 cups cake flour
• 1-1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• ¾ tablespoon baking soda
• 4 ounces cream cheese, chilled and pinched into small pieces
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter cut into small pieces
• 1 cup cold buttermilk

Preheat oven to 450 degrees and line a baking pan with parchment paper. In a large bowl mix together the dry ingredients. Add the cream cheese and butter and use your fingertips to work it into the flour until it takes on a sandy look. Add the buttermilk and use a spatula to fold it into a dough. Turn dough out into a floured work surface and roll out to ¾ inch thick. Use a biscuit cutter to cut out biscuits, trying to use as much of the dough as possible. You can re-roll the scraps but the second batch will likely not rise as much as the first. Place the biscuits on the baking sheet and back for 12-14 minutes or until golden brown.

Wanted: An Irish Friend (and recipe for Irish Stew)

Originally published in quality newspapers the week of March 7, 2011

These last few weeks our family has spent a good deal of time going through all our stuff in an attempt to get our house ready to go on the real estate market. When my wife and I bought our two-bedroom, one-bath 1910 home it had plenty of room because it was just the two of us. We’re now a family of four and as our boys get bigger, the house seems smaller.

Fortunately, we’ve been pretty disciplined about not accumulating too much stuff. None of us are collectors. There are no porcelain figurines occupying every nook and we toss most of our children’s school papers each day, saving only a representative sampling. My respective childhood and adolescent belongings fill one small box that includes odds and ends as well as a few dozen baseball cards and few old Sports Illustrated magazines.

The one thing I do enjoy collecting is not something I can keep in the basement. Well, not unless I become some sort of sociopath. I like to collect people. Not just any people, but people who come from different places in the world.

Having a melting pot of friends has enriched my life in so many ways, my culinary life included. Back in graduate school I befriended a group of young women who shared my love of great food. They came from all over the globe – India, Korea, Turkey, Spain. For several weeks, we spent every Tuesday evening at one of their apartments cooking together. Those were great times.

Having done a bit of international traveling I’ve also picked a few friends along the way and would love to do more of that. On my bucket list is to spend a week in the French Countryside shopping the markets, and befriending the locals.

As we look ahead to St. Patrick’s Day next week, I’m reminded that I really need someone Irish to add to my collection of friends. Each year I experiment with an Irish dish like soda bread, champ, or corned beef, but I know I’m missing those hints, advice, and stories that only a true Irishman or Irishwoman could provide. 

In the mean time I’ll continue to make my versions of these dishes but make no claims to their authenticity. I’m Scottish but my people arrived in the new world was 300-plus years and although the Irish and the Scots are neighbors, neither want to be lumped together with the other.

So, here’s the recipe for the faux Irish Stew I’ll be making this year. It’s delicious and a favorite of my family, but I’ll be eating it half-heartedly hoping that by next St. Patrick’s Day, I will have made an Irish friend.

Irish Beef Stew

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon black pepper
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 2 lbs beef stew meat
• 1 large yellow onion, peeled and chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
• 3 bay leaves
• 1 teaspoon dried thyme
• 1 teaspoon dried rosemary
• 4 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 cup beef stock
• 1 cup Guinness Stout
• 2 cup baby carrots
• 2 medium peeled, chopped (about 1 inch square) potatoes
• 2 tablespoons chopped parsley

Preheat the oven to 275 degrees. On the stove, heat a six-quart Dutch oven or oven-proof pot to high heat and add the oil. Dust the stew meat with the kosher salt, black pepper, and garlic powder. Add the meat to the pot and brown on all sides. Reduce heat to medium-high and add the onion and crushed garlic. Cook until onions are clear.

Reduce the heat to low and add the bay leaves, thyme, rosemary, and flour. Stir with a wooden spoon for about a minute. Next, stir in the beef stock and. Keep stirring until the liquids begin to thicken. Add the carrots and potatoes.

Cover the oven or pot with a lid and place in oven for 90 minutes. Just before serving, add the chopped parsley.  

Feeding a Revolution

Originally published in quality newspapers the week of February 27, 2011

"Koshari El Tahrir is passing out free food.” This is just one of the millions of “tweets” sent during the 18 days Egyptian demonstrators were gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Reports of the actual numbers of demonstrators range from 100,000 to 2 million. Even on the low side of those estimates, that’s a lot of people and one of the ways they organized and communicated with one another was by using social media like Twitter and Facebook.

These methods of communication were used to help tend to those who were injured or became sick during the protests, to spread bits of news, and to help each other find where they can get their basic needs taken care of – location of operational restrooms, drinking water, and food.

The free food served by Koshari El Tahrir, a restaurant near one of the campuses of the American University in Cairo, is also called koshari. If Egypt has a national food, this is it. Recognizing an entrepreneurial opportunity, many restaurants and even home cooks prepared koshari and bicycled it into Tahrir Square to sell to the masses.

Koshari has lots of variations but its basic components include a starch (often elbow macaroni or brown rice), lentils, chickpeas, a spicy tomato sauce, vinegar, then topped with fried onions. This is a perfect food to feed a revolution – complex carbohydrates, protein, bold flavors, and enough different textures to keep things interesting. It is also a food that is probably equally delicious hot and when it has cooled off a bit.

Whether its civilian demonstrators or soldiers, masses of people on a mission, usually can’t accomplish that mission without food. Napoleon said, “armies march on their stomachs” and offered a reward of 12,000 francs to anyone who could come up with a better way to preserve food for his troops. Nicolas Appert, who had experience as an innkeeper, brewer, and chef came up with a method, collected the reward, and set up the world’s first bottling factory. Appert is known as the “Father of Canning.”

Feeding the Continental Army during the American Revolution proved to be a considerable challenge. At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, each of the colonies took on the responsibility of feedings its own militia but as the army grew, that function became centralized and the Continental Congress created new post, the Commissary General of Stores Provisions. James Trumbull, the first to hold this position, oversaw the process of putting the system into place.

During these war years, the ration for each soldier changed a bit, but much of the time it included a pound of bread, a pound of meat, a gill (4 ounces) of dry beans or peas, and a gill of rum. The bread was made with just flour and water so it was very hard and needed to be soaked in water before it could be chewed and the meat was salted pork or beef. Most soldiers cooked their salted meat and beans or peas together over an open fire to create a hearty stew. Often extra rum was provided on holidays and to celebrate significant victories.

Even demonstrators closer to home get hungry. Teachers assembled at the state capital in Madison, Wisconsin have been well fed thanks to hundreds of supporters from all over the world, including Egypt, calling in and paying for pizzas to be delivered from Ian’s Pizza, located near the capital. 

The instances of democracy at work in our own country have been inspiring. Union members voicing their concerns, legislatures fleeing their own states, Tea Party rallies – these events have been peaceful and the fact that their greatest physical needs of the people involved have been for pizza, rather than stretchers, is yet another reasons to be thankful we live where we live.