Wasted Away Again in Margaritaville.

Everyone has a favorite version of this classic Mexican-restaurant/tailgate party/barbecue elixir.

Cheryl likes them simple. No salt, and on the rocks, made from a mix of:

2 shots good gold tequila (she likes Sauza Hornitos)
1 shot orange liqueur (triple sec, Grand Mariner, etc.)
in a shaker with a couple of cubes of ice.
Shaken and poured in a 12 oz tumbler full of ice, topped off with Mr & Mrs T's sweet & sour, and the juice of a lime.

Easy and good.

I'd love to see yours. Post in the "comments".

Soup For You!

I love soup. One of my favorite things about the weather getting cooler is that I get to make soup.

In this edition, I will post two of my favorites -- French Onion and Tomato.

I made French Onion Soup last night. I used a beef stock I made the other night while making another soup -- vegetable beef.

Here's your "bonus" soup: I chunked up a chuck roast, with the bone, and boiled it for an hour - skimming the scum, and then added cabbage, carrots, potatoes and onion, and a bouquet garni of garlic, sage, rosemary, tarragon and thyme. But I used about 4 cups more water than I needed. I took out the extra liquid, and the bone, then added salt and pepper to taste and cooked another 30 minutes.

What liquid I took off, along with the bone and bouquet garni, went back into a pot, and cooked, covered, another 45 minutes to render the stock.

French Onion Soup

In a large enameled iron pot,
Sautee 4 large vidalia onions, sliced thin, pole-to-pole, in 3 Tbsp unsalted butter until cooked down and caramelized to a mahogany brown (about 45 minutes).
Add two cloves of minced garlic
Add 1 Tbspn salt and a dusting of flour to onions, stirring to make a roux
Pour in enough dry white wine on to cover the onions, and cook down to a thin syrup consistency (another 30 minutes).
Add three cups of beef stock
Add 1/2 tsp black pepper
Add 1 sprig of fresh tarragon,
Add 2 Tbsp cider vinegar
Add 2 Tbsp worcestershire sauce
Bring it to a boil, reduced it to a simmer, coverand cook for 15 more minutes
While soup is finishing, slice a baguette on the diagonal and toast, and shred 1 cup of aged gruyere cheese.
Splash the soup with a jigger of cognac
Pour into large soup mugs, place a toasted baguette on each and cover with the cheese and broil on high for another four minutes, until the cheese was melted and starting to brown.
 
"Thomas" Tomato Soup
There is a nice little restaurant by the hospital that I go to all the time. It's called "Thomas". The guys who own it are really cool. They play great music overhead -- in fact that's where I heard "Pickin' on Zeppelin". The waitress is a Celtic music groupie, and cute as a bug.

They have a house tomato-basil soup that rocks. They have menu item that is a grilled cheese (ciabatta, grilled in a panini press with olive oil, filled with four cheeses - havarti, brie, cheddar and gouda), served with a bowl of this soup. It is one of my favorite meals anywhere. I asked Brian - one of the owners - for the recipe, figuring he'd laugh and tell me it was a big secret or something. Instead, he wrote it on a napkin and gave it to me, and told me to share it.

Here it is:
Thomas Restaurant Tomato Soup Recipe

1 can of #10 tomatoes (San Marzano tomatoes with basil)
½ pint of heavy cream
1 cup (handful) of fresh basil leaves (coarse chopped)
1 yellow onion diced very fine
1 pint chicken stock (boxed or fresh)
1 teaspoon garlic (powder, or 2 cloves finely minced)
2 oz olive oil
1 tablespoon of freshly grated Parmesan cheese (add more to taste if you like)
1/8 teaspoon chili power

Sautee onions and garlic in olive oil until translucent/soft, but not brown
Add 1 can of tomatoes, chicken stock, fresh basil and bring to a hard boil.
Reduce to simmer and add chili power and Parmesan cheese. Simmer 20 minutes. Adjust salt to taste.
(At this point, you can can it, freeze it, or whatever, and reheat later, if you want)

Add heavy cream. Puree with immersion blender, garnish with grated Parmesan cheese and serve.

What are your favorite soups? Post in comments.

I'm FRIED.

My stomach may bark, but sometimes nothing beats fried food. A light breading and a hot oil bath brings out a character in food that no other preparation can match. And if you want to meet the king of the deep fryer, you must take a convoluted route, 2 hours and 20 minutes south of I-70, close to the geographic center of the State of Missouri -- to a quiet no-wake cove, at Shawnee Bend 2, off the 11-1/2 mile marker of the main channel of the Lake of the Ozarks -- to Castaways Resort.  There you will find the humble home of a boisterous and most entertaining giant of a man, Bill Bowen. A big man, in every sense of the word. His balding head is leathered by life at the lake, and his sun-darkened complexion almost makes his closely-cropped white beard glow.

Bill is a salesman's salesman. He represents a company that provides paper and plastic disposable products to the food industry. Whether you need to buy paper napkins and sacks for a fast food joint or the foam trays and shrink wrap used by the grocery butcher, Bill is your man. For many years, Bill was in sales management for the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company. The proverbial "beer that made Milwaukee famous". And, to this day Bill Bowen has a copious gut made of boiler plate, which contains voracious appetite for food, for beer and for life. Especially beer. Or food. Or life. I can't decide.

Bill is well traveled. His jobs have taken him all over the country. Bill has lived a full and interesting life.  And Bill is a guy who can weave a great story that makes you walk away shaking your head, just knowing as fun as that tall tale was, there is no way it really happened. Until you talk to someone else who was there, who corroborates the whole thing. At which point you realize that Bill is just one of those guys who seems to have a knack for always being around when amazing things happen, and he has a gift for retelling them that makes you sure you were there too.

Friday was Bill's birthday. Saturday afternoon was his party. People came from hundreds of miles to celebrate with Bill and his amazing frying rig. Set up outside his free-standing garage, a tier off the lakefront, Bill - son Mark at his side - behind a barrier of benches erected to keep the kids and the dogs out of the danger zone, donned gloves and carefully inserted a long instant-read thermometer to verify the oil was exactly 375 degrees.  The radio blared out the Missouri Tigers football game. The sky threatened, but the rain held off until later. Bill was his jovial self. Brimming with a sense of confidence, bordering on, but just short of cocky.

On the tables behind and to the side were an uncanny array of delectables awaiting their turn in the pool of smoking fat. There were secret-Cajun-spiced cornbread-coated crappie and catfish bits, that he and his neighbor, Paulie pulled from the lake just a 100 feet away. Other options included slices of chicken breast, with a light breading, pie-dough pockets, stuffed with cheese and sage sausage (thanks to Curtis & Marg), spears of Idaho potatoes, battered Vidalia onion rings, dill pickles and even what he calls "dough balls". The latter being an interesting hush-puppy substitute that involved simply snipping canned, "butter flavored" biscuit rounds in to six pieces and dropping them in the oil. As pedestrian as that sounds, they are quite addictive.

Bill boasts that he has deep fried steaks to medium-rare perfection, hamburger patties, hot dogs and even prime rib! 

I ate. A lot. No, I mean a really lot.

I have eaten fried candy bars in London, fried cod in Galway, Ireland, and myriad other deep fried delicacies in my life, but I'd be hard pressed to beat the feast at Bill Bowen's birthday bash. And never accompanied by the great tales of adventure, and genuine family hospitality, I experienced on Saturday. 

Bill Bowen's secret to perfect deep frying almost anything that will hold still long enough:

1) Never fill the fryer beyond 1/2 full of oil

2) Always use good quality, clean oil - like canola or peanut


3) Make sure the oil has reached 375 degrees before anything goes in. He used a splash of beer, to double-check.


4) Keep breading light. Let the food shine on it's own. 


5) Mind the store! Do not walk away from food in the fryer. 


6) Remove it with a wire "spider" to a rack or paper towel, when it's golden, but maybe looks a bit lighter than you prefer, otherwise the carry-over heat will over-cook it. 


7) Season it the moment it comes out of the fryer. Whether salt, Cajun spice, barbeque rub, anything dry you can shake on -- always do it while the oil is still hot. 

Share your favorite fried recipes in the comments!

Tailgate time

This has always been my favorite time of the year. The days grow shorter, the air cools, the mornings are crisp and foggy. The sweaters smell like cedar from their long summer in storage.  It reminds me of college. Of walking the quad, with the changing leaves crackling beneath your feet. The most pressing things on your mind are a chem exam and that cute girl at the party last night who talked about art and music and philosphy with you until 2 am. And, of course, FOOTBALL!

My love of football started at the age of 4, when the Kansas City Chiefs moved to my home town from their orgins in Dallas. I still have vivid memories of the first Super Bowl, played when I was 6 years old. The fourth one when former USC Heisman wnner (and current USC AD) Mike Garrett scored a TD on the immortal "65 toss-power-trap". When Lenny Dawson threw a little hitch on the sideline to Otis Taylor (it's a crime he's not in Canton), which he broke and took to the house. The heartbreak of Christmas Day, at age 12, when I sat in front of my Grandma's blond-wood, Danish-modern Grundig stereo, to listen to Bill Grigsby and Dick Carlson call the longest game in the history of the NFL.

Football may not have invented tailgating, but it is a marriage made in heaven. In Kansas City, it is a religion. Even when the Chiefs are down, as they are now, Arrowhead is still the best smelling stadium in the NFL. But that is not to say they don't do an amazing job, elsewhere, too. Really, any blue-collar town, like Pittsburgh, Green Bay or Indianapolis is going to have good tailgate grub. And the South is famous for college tailgating -- the big dog daddy being in Jacksonville, Florida, with outstanding parties at places like South Carolina and LSU. We can't leave out the Big 10, either. Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State are all known for their parties in the parking lot. In fact PSU tailgating was so notorious, the school had to draft new rules to calm them down.

I have hundreds of tailgate recipes, but this one is the one most often requested for me to bring. My bloody mary that has been nicknamed "DAD's BM". There's a story. I was invited to one of those hauty corporate, multi-RV and tent tailgate parties at Arrowhead. My price of admission was a jug of my famous bloody marys. I labeled the bottom of my Coleman jug, so I wouldn't loose it. I put my initials "D.A.D." and for bloody mary, "B.M." The jug was nearly empty when someone wanted to know who made it, they turned over the jug to find "DAD BM". And the unfortunate name stuck.


Here's how you replicate "DAD's BM":

1 - 46oz jar of tomato juice
1 - 750 ml bottle of good vodka (pepper or citrus vodka are an interesting change up)
1/2 cup - Worchestershire sauce
2 Tbsp - grated horseradish (not sauce - just plain horseradish)
1 Tbsp - celery seeds
1 Tbsp - Tabasco sauce (I sometimes use a mix of regular and chipotle Tabasco)
1 tsp - fine salt
1 tsp - fine black pepper
The juice of one whole lemon

Mix all ingredients well, pour over ice and garnish with celery or green onion and a jalapeno-stuffed olive.

I'd love to see your favorite tailgate recipes! Post them to "comments".  GO TEAM!

The Humble Dill Pickle...The summer gift that keeps giving all winter.

I love dill pickles. I could sit and eat an entire jar by myself for dinner. But I noticed the ones I bought in the store, while certainly serviceable, didn't really taste that much like the pickles my grandma used to make. I remember watching her make them. She didn't need a recipe card. It was all in her head. She had made so many dill pickles, over so many summers, that it was as natural to her as getting dressed in the morning.

I tried many times to duplicate her recipe, from my fragmented childhood memories, but never quite stuck the landing. I recall they were a Kosher-style pickle, although she used fine pickling salt, rather than Kosher salt. She said the main thing was to never use iodized salt. I started googling for recipes that seemed similar, and trying them out. One day I happened upon one, tweaked it with a few tricks I remember she shared with me, and, "Voila!" The taste of the Thanksgiving dinner's relish tray came flooding back.

Grandma's "Kosher-style" Dill Pickles:

You can do them whole, spears, slices, or whatever you want. I use a mandolin, most of the time. Just cut them right before you put them into jars. I will even put them back into the ice-water bath after I cut them. You want them as cool as...well, as cool as possible before they get hit with the brine. This is the secret to crunchy versus mushy pickles. 

For an extra kick, toss in a split hot pepper into each jar.  

• 7 pounds 3 to 4 inch long pickling cucumbers (always trim off the ends - enzymes in the flower-end can make your pickles funky - I like my George Clinton funky, but not my pickles.)
  
• 4 cups white vinegar
• 12 cups water (filtered or bottled is much better than tap - but don't use distilled)
  
• 2/3 cup pickling salt (or Kosher salt would work, too)
  
• 14 cloves garlic, peeled and halved
• 35 black peppercorns (5 per jar)
  
• 7 sprigs fresh dill weed
• 7 heads fresh dill weed

1. Wash cucumbers, and place in the sink (I use a giant metal roasting pan) with cold water and lots of ice cubes. Soak in ice water for at least 2 hours - 4 is better. (DO NOT OMIT THIS STEP, or even try to short-cut it!) Refresh ice as required. 
2. Sterilize 7 (1 quart ) canning jars and lids in boiling water for at least 10 minutes. (My canning sterilizer only holds 7, so that's why the odd number.)
   
3. In a large pot over medium-high heat, combine the vinegar, water, and pickling salt. Bring the brine to a rapid boil, then reduce heat.
4. In each jar, place 2 half-cloves of garlic, one head of dill, 5 peppercorns, then enough cucumbers to fill the jar (about 1 pound). Then add 2 more garlic halves, and 1 sprig of dill. Fill jars with hot brine. Seal jars, making sure you have cleaned the jar's rims of any residue with a paper towel.
5. Process sealed jars in a boiling water bath. Make sure the water covers the lids completely. Process quart jars for 10 - 15 minutes.
6. Store pickles for a minimum of 2 weeks before eating. They are best after 8 weeks. Refrigerate after opening. Sealed jars of pickles will keep for up to 2 years if stored in a cool dry place, out of direct sunlight.

Simpler is better.

This is a truism that came to me from my beloved grandmother, Geneva Wright Thomas. I credit much of what I love and believe in to her. She taught me to garden. She taught me to cook. She taught me the joy of food, and the passion she learned from her parents for the land, and God's bounty.  My personal environmentalism is an out-growth of that. She didn't use the term "green". But she was green. She composted and recycled. She used local and seasonal ingredients, and preserved for the winter months. To her, it was done out of the necessities of a humble farm upbringing.  She was just demonstrating good stewardship of her limited resources and proper respect for the Earth's divine balance.

Her cooking was simple. Her recipes were simple, and for the most part, mine follow suit.  Here is one of my favorite summer harvest recipes that was inspired by her motto. 

Sweet & Sour Cole Slaw: 

This recipe is perfect for hot summer barbecues, tailgating and picnics, because it won't spoil in the heat. It is probably my most requested recipe. Even my farm-wife mother-in-law now uses it as her "go-to" salad for pot-luck meals at her church in rural Kansas. Nobody 'pot-lucks' like a Kansas Methodist. 


Salad:
1 small head of green cabbage, cored and shredded
1 small red, orange or yellow ripe bell pepper, seeded and diced
1 small green bell pepper, seeded and diced
3 medium carrots, pealed & shredded
1 small sweet onion (Vidalia, Walla-Walla, etc.), diced

Mix together, cover with 3/4 cup sugar and refrigerate while you make the dressing.

Dressing:
2/3 cup cider vinegar
1/3 cup salad oil (canola, etc.)
2 tsp non-iodized salt
1 Tbsp celery seeds

Mix together in pan, stirring until salt dissolves. Bring just to a boil. Pour over salad, stir and refrigerate at least an hour - preferably overnight.  I usually like to drain off some of the liquid after it sits overnight, so it doesn't get soggy.

Feel free to post your favorite simple recipe or simple food memory....

Welcome Food Eaters!

The purpose of this blog is simple. Three or more times every day, we are compelled to eat. More than we perform any other biological act other than breathing. And more enjoyable than any of them, save one or two.

This is about the joy of food. I believe that you do not have go to a good restaurant to eat a great meal, nor do you have to go to grandma's house. You can and should make them yourself. That said, I still love to eat the cooking of our wise elders, and our great chefs. I want to know your favorites -- your favorite grandma recipes, and your favorite restaurant meals.

In other words, I want to know where you love to eat out. I want to see decscribed in pornographic detail what you love to eat. Sure, I live in Kansas City, but I travel, and so do others. Your bests, from your towns, no matter where they are.

But more importantly, share your great recipes. And those of your parents and grandparents, and other friends and family members.

My best memories in my youth were at the family farm, in St. Clair County, MO, when the rain was drumming the tin roof, and grandma and I were cooking pork hocks and greens with peppers and onions. And spending our Augusts making dill pickles and spiced peaches. Or watching the snow pile up with a roaring fire in the hearth as we made made fresh bread in the wood-fired oven. She taught me to garden, to pickle, to smoke meat, to bake. Tell us the stories of those who inspired you to cook.

It is about eating, sure. But it is about family. About history. About culture. About America, in all her wonderful diversity.

I love food. From pot roast to sushi, from cioppino to pulled pork, from rare prime rib to salad nicoise.

I don't care if you are vegan or carnivore. Give us your best. I love it all, and love great meals of all kinds.

Food is life.