Sunday Cooking Thread – 01/09/2022

Yeah, I know. It’s another Sunday in Buck’s kitchen when you were really hoping for a visit to CBD’s kitchen. It’s kind of like being told you’re going to your grandmother’s house for dinner, and you’re excited about roast beef, gravy, mashed potatoes, and ears of corn, but instead you’re going to the other grandmother’s house, where a typical meal is canned corn, canned peas, and that wheel of ham that comes in airtight plastic.

I apologize. But CBD will be back next week. Meanwhile, let’s try to have some fun.

So now that we’re in the bleak mid-winter, it is chili, gumbo, and crockpot season. I’ve made my first batch of chili this year, so next I need to make some…

GUMBO

I love seafood gumbo, as does my wife, but she gets nervous because I don’t have a set recipe, so there’s no guaranty that it will turn out the same each time. (I threw some flounder in once and it came out too fishy.) I kind of wing it every time. By contrast, she’s very much an exactly-by-the-recipe person in the kitchen.

While I confess that I use canned okra and roux-from-a-jar, the trinity of vegetables (onion, bell pepper, celery) is always fresh from the produce section, and the shrimp and oysters are from the meat case. If I can find frozen Louisiana crawfish, I’ll chuck them in too. (It will not surprise y’all that I will not use Chinese crawfish.) Good andouille can sometimes be hard to find, so I generally use Texas smoked sausage. And just how much file’ and spices do I add? I have no idea. I keep adding until it’s right.

RECIPE FOR AN OLD COMFORT FOOD

Have you ever had the good fortune of being provided a recipe to a dish you used to love but thought was gone? My wife had that good fortune recently, and I got to enjoy it.

There was a deli in a neighborhood we used to live in that had some made-from-scratch comfort foods that were quite popular. It closed down several years ago, but one of my wife’s old friends knows the owner, who gave her the Chicken Tetrazzini recipe, which she recently shared with my wife. As I mentioned, my wife is an exactly-by-the-recipe person. This recipe listed certain ingredients such as parmesan cheese and white wine, without specifying the volume. This unnerved her, of course. I recommended that she simply be aggressive with the cheese. As for the wine, I recommended that she drink while cooking, then add whatever wine she didn’t drink to the tetrazzini. It turned out great.

CZECH CHICKEN EGG DROP SOUP

Speaking of resurrecting old recipes – I am excited about having possibly discovered a recipe to an old family comfort food that had gone extinct in my family.

My grandmother was of Czech lineage, and she made some wonderful Czech foods and pastries. A staple was a soup that we all pronounced “kuh-PAWN-knee” which was a chicken soup, but instead of having noodles, it had a batter made of flour and eggs drizzled into it. There was no written recipe, so when she died, the recipe went with her. We didn’t even know how it was spelled. My siblings and I occasionally tried to search for the recipe under names such as “capony” or “kappony” but we never had any luck.

But now – I think I found it! At www.texasczechs.com/recipes. It looks like the soup we loved was chicken “capanka” soup. (“Capanka is a Czech term for a mixture of eggs and a little flour.”)

I don’t really have any old laying hens that I can boil into soup, but I’ll still give this recipe a try using a regular store-bought chicken.

Do any of y’all carry on some Czech cooking traditions? Are any of you familiar with capanka?

And speaking of Czechs, Iowahawk once provided a helpful primer on the regional differences of Czech Americans.

• Texas has Moravian Czechs
• Nebraska has Bohemian Czechs
• Iowa has drunk Czechs
• Illinois has bounced Czechs

CORKSCREWS

Can I pscircle back to wine for a moment…specifically corkscrews? I prefer corkscrews with two arms that pull down after screwing the end into the cork. I have never mangled a cork with one of those. But I have definitely had some bad wine-opening experiences using those difficult corkscrews that restaurants use, where you have to wrestle the cork out.

Are those restaurant corkscrews actually better, but I just don’t know what I’m doing? Or is it another form-over-function thing, where the waiters have to put on a show with an inferior, but more pretentious tool?

That’s it for this week. I’d be delighted to hear any stories y’all have of finding old recipes and/or resurrecting dishes you once loved but thought you’d never get to enjoy again.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 04:00 PM

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