Making Viennese Bread Dumplings

Scoots moves into his new place

Picking up the story from the upcoming "the goulash backstory" below, I need to start at the very beginning. Sometimes a meal begins with a story. In the case of this goulash, that's particularly true.

I arrived to help Scoots move into his new place and found myself making him goulash with bread dumplings.

Trust, the experience of making dumplings is actually really fun, and it made me want to eat them all the time.

Yum!

They have a completely homey, welcoming feel and make you want to eat stews all the time! I’ll preface the recipe by saying that, ideally, you want to be able to cook the well-formed dumplings in the stock of the stew you are making as you go. However, often chips of bread will pop off into the stew, so in order to avoid the stew becoming full of pits of bread, you can boil them separately.

This action will make for a clearer stew, but not necessarily as flavorful of a dumpling. I tried doing something in between: boiling them first, letting the bread flake off in the rolling boil, and then placing them with a gentle “plop!” into the simmering goulash. The results were outstanding, and Scoots informed me that days later he ate the goulash and dumplings for lunch, and the meal reheated just wonderfully tasting like a million bucks! Gotta love feedback like that.

Boil Them Loosely in Your Pot

Viennese Bread Dumplings

Ingredients

2 c of diced white bread, use more or less in order to ensure consistency. Read rest of recipe of better detail. (I’ll be honest, I used all sorts of different dry/stale bread I had and it came out just beautifully; no need to obsess about the color of the bread, unnecessarily).

3 tolive oil

2 eggs

¾ c milk

3 T freshly chopped parsley

1 small onion

Freshly ground salt and pepper to taste

If really sticky, boil separately in a pot of water. If the dumplings are holding together well, then place gently in the goulash. As the goulash should be simmering nicely, they can sit in there for the last 10-20 minutes of cooking, so long as you keep turning them.Soak the bread cubes in a mixture of the eggs and about half the milk for at least 30 minutes. Be aware that depending on your bread, the dumpling “batter” can get soggy, so adjust the amount of milk based on how soggy the mixture gets as you add in the liquid. If after 30 minutes you can easily form balls of bread dumplings from the milk-soaked bread cubes, you are on the right track. If not, do what I did: add in bread crumbs. It was a messy job.

Well-formed Dumplings

Arriving with Bread Dumplings—Soaked for at Least 30 Minutes, I made my way into Scott's new kitchen to destroy it with the mess that is Viennese Goulash. 

The dumplings will soak up much of the liquid as you cook them, becoming really tasty. An added benefit? As they cook in the stew and stock, they will thicken the soupy flavorful liquid, making it into what you may know as goulash. Take the time, get creative, and make bread dumplings out of a bunch of old bread you have lying around or on your counter or in your freezer. It’ll surprise you how tasty you can make bread that starts out so stale and lousy.

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Here's the goulash backstory:

Again, Scoots found himself in need of a new apartment. After sending out an email announcing he’d be having a housewarming party on Feb 18th, I replied back, “Does this mean we won’t be seeing you until mid-February?”

No reply.

That’s because he is so busy running his own company that he basically only texts now. This modern technology thing has gotten waaaay out of hand. But after three days of texting back and forth, it became clear that he had moved into his new place ages ago, hadn’t really unpacked, and frankly, needed a hot meal and someone to help him put the giant, heavy top on the base of the dining room table and begin unpacking tons of shipping boxes. A cold December night seemed like the perfect opportunity to help out.

So I texted that he should pick something he’d like to have me make and then we’d cook it on the new stove in his rental. Turned out he secured a unit with a gas stove, and it was a fine kitchen for making bread dumplings. I mean, really! Who asks for Austrian Goulash and Bread Dumplings!?

Scoots has a penchant for that sort of hearty meal, probably because he’s an amateur competitive swimmer, so he can really work up an appetite. I usually can only bring myself to walk to and from the car, so I was less than compelled to make such a huge meal, but onward and upward I always say. I never make Germanic cuisine, and frankly, with THE SUDDEN RISE OF THE SCANDINAVIAN RESTAURANTS AND CUISINE, I figure Germany/Austria/Hungary are next on the food writers’ “discovery” tour, so I decided to get a jump on the competition.

German/Austrian/Hungarian cuisine is the next big thing. You read it here first.

At any rate, a few texts later, and I was off to the store to purchase what I needed for…

Viennese Beef Goulash/Wiener Rindsgulasch

Ingredients for the Goulash

3 T Olive Oil

1 ¾-2 lbs. shoulder or shank (beef cubed for stew, basically)

1 c finely chopped onions

1 T fresh chopped garlic

2 T tomato purée

2 T Hungarian paprika

1 t freshly ground caraway seeds (use a mortar and pestle for the best results)

1 t marjoram

2 bay leafs

2 c stock (I used chicken, but you could probably use beef as well)

freshly ground salt and pepper

zest of ½ lemon

Heat the oil, brown the beef. With a slotted spoon, remove the beef, brown the onions. At the end of the browning, toss in the garlic. Grind the caraway seed and marjoram. Add the ground spices, paprika, and tomato purée directly into the pot with all of the stock. Stir well, add salt and pepper to taste, grate in the zested lemon as the stock comes to a boil. Turn down to a simmer once it reaches a boil. Let the goulash simmer slowly until the meat is soft (approximately 1-2 hours, depending on the meat/fat content ratio).

At the end of the cooking, you will have a liquidy soup. This liquid may have boiled off a bit, so you can feel free to add in more stock, if you need to in order to make the dumplings, and in so doing, thickening the goulash.

Scoots can attest that it was a real wintery treat. The only thing that would have made it better would have been to have been out hunting rabbit in the Tyrolian hillsides, opening the cabin door, dusting off the powdered snow from our boots, and sitting down to a piping hot bowl of this treat.

Oddly, this meaty bowl serves really nicely with crisp, fresh greens.

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Toddy’s Fabulous Flan

Brown 'n' Bubbly Quiche

Women’s lingerie probably rarely figures largely in blog posts about quiche-making. But years and years ago, Jet Setter Jon and his friend Toddy the Underwear Lady were in the kitchen making Sunday lunch.

Seeing just how incompetent Jet Setter Jon and I were in the kitchen, Toddy took the helm. She said making a quiche was easier than everything we’d been led to believe. She turned out to be right.

Toddy was often right; hell, she made a career for herself in lady’s lingerie and that was before Victoria’s Secret’s rise. As I recall and I suppose I’m really no expert, women’s lingerie was a thing hidden away in the upper reaches of department stores. Since the decline of the department store and Victoria’s rise, well, it strikes me as quite an achievement. That’s gotta be a tough field to compete in, let alone excel in before these shops appeared on every corner, next to every Starbucks in America. I remember living in L.A. when there was only porno shops and Fredericks of Hollywood where women could buy lingerie that was anything but utilitarian.

I also recall that traveling with Toddy in France was quite a daily round of random shopping experiences: food, lingerie, ice cream stops. That’s because she only needed the slightest provocation to stop everything and upon seeing a lingerie shop in a small country town, disappear for an hour or so until she’d bought bags full of the most exotic things–for work! She’d miss entire afternoons at the shore with us digging deep into the knowledge banks of the ladies who worked inside these shops.

Lingerie Lady in Brittany

I think that’s what I most loved about her–her ability to get lost in the fine detail and be as happy as others who’d gone on holiday in order to get away from it all. Simplicity drove her days. And simplicity drove her cooking.

Basically, for those of us who are neither fine French chefs nor willing to fill our bodies with tons of cream and cheese, I bring you “Toddy’s Fabulous Flan.” This quiche is basically a tasty mix of spinach with a bit of onion, garlic, tarragon, mustard, and Gruyère. The process only really requires that you cook up everything before it gets dumped into the pie crust, and ensure that you have eliminated as much of the water from the spinach as possible.

I begin by chopping spinach, quick frying it to reduce all the water out of it, and then setting aside. Fry up half an onion and a small squirt of garlic clove and again, quickly fry in the pan. In a mixing bowl add the milk, grate enough Gruyère to your liking, a touch of salt and pepper, mustard and tarragon, and pop in the hot oven.

In 40 minutes at 425 degrees, adjusting the temp in case the oven runs hot, like mine does, you have a bubbly browned quiche that is the hit of the Sunday brunch set.

It is a little tricky to reheat at work the next day, however. I have tried six ways to Sunday to figure out an ideal reheating strategy for these little 1/8th cut pie slices, but to no avail. Best bet is to reheat for about 30 seconds on high, then let sit for about a minute, then another 30 seconds on high. Place on tin foil and put in a toaster oven on medium to dark and toast. That will bring a little firmness to the soft quiche slices that the microwave has made. Because this is a spinach quiche, I usually serve with some fragrant basmati and my all-purpose soy/mirin/sesame oil sauce (2 parts to 1 part to 1/2 part) and with a drizzle of that on the rice, you have a simple, but fragrant lunch.

Toddy’s Fabulous Flan

Ingredients

2/3 c milk

3 medium eggs, beaten

1/3 c Gruyère cheese, grated

1/2 medium yellow onion, finely diced

1 small garlic clove, minced

1 t dry tarragon

1 t dry mustard or about 1/2 t Dijon prepared mustard

12 oz. baby leaf spinach, chopped well

1 pie crust

salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

Assemble the cheese, tarragon, mustard, beaten eggs, and milk with salt and pepper in a mixing bowl. Fry the chopped spinach in a tiny bit of oil and a little salt in a non-stick pan until all the water cooks off. Remove the spinach, throw the onion in the pan and brown, in the last two minutes of browning, add the garlic. Mix in with the spinach, set aside to cool.

When cool, add into the egg, cheese, and milk mixture and then pour into the frozen pie crust. Pop in the preheated 425 degree oven. I have often found myself putting it in at 425 for about 5-7 minutes, and then turning it down to 350 for about 40 minutes. Then if the crust isn’t sufficiently browned, I turn it back up to 425 until the crust looks the way I most want it. Again, depending on the oven, I’ll turn off the heat and let it sit in the warm oven after I open the door for about 2 minutes or so.

Et voila! perfect “quiche” every time. Although, since it’s not really a creme-filled heart-clogger quiche, it’s really Toddy’s Fabulous Flan! Enjoy and share with friends. Bring to a brunch and impress your friends.

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Mom's Scalloped Potatoes from 1955

Ever wonder why those scalloped potatoes that you used to get at those old “bring a covered dish” dinners your parents dragged you to as a kid?  Meet my mother and her flawless recipe from the Good Housekeeping Cookbook’s 1955 edition–easily replicated in your 21st century kitchen.

This Christmas will be an exercise in getting my mother to and from her various holiday parties with her pals. This means making successful “covered dishes.” 

Mom's go-to dish for something that can be easily reheated once you arrive? Old Fashioned Scalloped Potatoes from the Good Housekeeping Cook Book 1955. 

After having watched her make it twice, I have concluded that it’s the scalded milk and the Gruyère that really makes the dish. Here is the most successful crowd-pleaser you’ll ever cook.

Ingredients

1955 Good Housekeeping Cookbook

4 c potatoes, thinly sliced

2/3 c minced onions (my mom slices them thinly and doesn’t mince them)

1 1/2 c scalded milk (you can do this in the micro or on the burner, entirely up to you)

1 c  Gruyère cheese (Mom relies on  Gruyère over Swiss for this dish)

2 T butter

2 T flour

1 t salt (Mom used Lawry’s seasoned salt, so she doesn’t add in the paprika separately)

1/4 t pepper  

Mom has found that you don’t really need to follow recipes precisely. In fact, it’s absolutely not required in order to make this recipe shine. This fact may explain the tenor of my website—make recipes your own and you’ll feel much more confident in making your own dishes.

In this instance, you can switch out the lousy cheeses available to Americans in the 1950s, and jazz it up with Gruyère. Just layer the potatoes, onions, cheese, and seasoned flour (Flour, salt, and pepper) like you would a lasagna as evenly as possibly.

If you run out of the flour mixture too soon, create a little more to finish the preparation. The key is to tuck in the onions throughout evenly, so all parts receive the tang of the sharp yellow onions.

My mom then bakes at 375 degrees for 40-45 minutes.  She uncovers the dish to brown the top for about 15 minutes.

Layered and Ready for the Oven

For the record, the leftovers are great because it reheats like a dream in the micro. Remember my microwave reheating rules: 

• First, take the chill off it for about 30 seconds.
• Let it sit for a minute.
• Then depending on the portion size, reheat covered for about 2 full minutes.
• It’ll be like hot lava when you take it out, so let it sit for a solid minute, once it hits the table.

Good Housekeeping's Finest

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Doing the Butternut Squash Two Step

Not that everyone isn't making butternut squash soup weekly these days, however, my friend Scott had some good fortune with it this one from the BBCGoodFood site the other day, and he sent pics to prove it! I liked this recipe, because it looked like "a recipe even the braindead can execute," so I knew it was right for me and my bloggette.

Oh, and there’s only two steps required to make it!

It's any wonder that I don't make soups that often. Inevitably, they require puree'ing, and nothing annoying more than trying to clean those damnable blades and the odd nooks and crannies of the food processor. Even in a blender, I think, "Did I actually get at all the little pieces in there? I bet there are going to be errant chunks of glop that are somewhere between soup and food." Blech.

But Scott says it's a cinch and well, Scott's a busy man, so it's probably highly likely this is true.

As it is the time of season to be puree'ing squashes and sweet potatoes and all things beta-caroteney, I will add here that last night my friend Emily did this soup as well. And in order to provide some panache on top, she sizzled about 10 sage leaves lightly in butter (low simmer/sizzle, not high heat) and then drizzled over the top creme fraiche which had been seasoned lightly with ground nutmeg from her grinder. It too was terrific.

Scott's key takeaways:

• It is tasty—definitely rich. (Yet as I review the ingredient list, there's no creme in there, so the richness must mean thickness, I think).  
• It took a much shorter time to cook the squash by simmering in the stock then I would have thought.  
• I think it takes a little longer the first time you do any recipe, but if you buy the butternut squash already seeded and sliced at the store, or even better the smaller cubes, the cooking goes much faster.

A couple of things I perceived from his photos provoked me to ask some questions you might find helpful as you consider going out to purchase butternut squash soup ingredients: 

1. Scott, this is a super pretty final dish. But is it as tasty as the visual is pretty?  
>> Tasty yes, but looking at other recipes. I’d probably want to add some other spices to cut how rich it is.

2. Did you find it took a long time  
>> no, I would say normal to sauté the onions, prepare the stock, cook the squash for about 10-15 minutes on simmer.

3. What was the best part about the cooking?  
>>The feeling that I created this nice looking/tasting soup on my own. It was not that difficult, nor time consuming. And I had plenty leftover and have frozen two 500 mL containers for eating at a later date.

4. What was the worst part?  
>>Having to use a wok pan, because I did not have a big enough pot

5. Was clean up a bitch?   
>>Nope, all items go in the dishwasher other than the wok.

Ingredients:
1 T olive oil
1 T butter
3 medium onions, chopped
2 T chopped sage
3 lbs. peeled, de-seeded butternut squash 
1 T clear honey
6 1/3 c vegetable stock


(toppings: 1 bunch chives, snipped over the top, cracked black pepper, to taste)

1. Melt the oil and butter in a large saucepan or flameproof casserole. Add the onions and sage, and gently cook until really soft—about 15 mins. Tip in the squash and cook for 5 mins, stirring. Add the honey and stock, bring to a simmer, and... 



...cook until the squash is tender.

2. Let the soup cool a bit so you don’t burn yourself, then whizz until really smooth with a hand blender, or in batches in a blender. Season to taste, adding a drop more stock or water if the soup is too thick. Reheat before serving, sprinkled with chives and cracked black pepper.

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The Secret Behind America’s Test Kitchen Cornbread

Since reading Michael Pollan’s books, I do realize that American Agri-business-produced corn is a giant conspiracy to kill off people and destroy “the family farm.” This admission aside, reading his book, I realized just how much I love cornbread, and subsequently, ended up going on a search for the kind of cornbread worthy of my childhood memories.

This desire stems from my memories of chili dinners where neighborhood moms would bring freshly made cornbread and delight everyone with little rectangular yellow cake cutouts from either a cast iron skillet or a 9”x 9” baking dish. Slathering pats of butter and thick, viscous honey (the kind that the bees we do have left seem to not be producing anymore) makes me salivate slightly from the sides of my mouth. Like a big, dopey dog hanging his head out the window of a car drool a-flowin’, I deliver to you the discovery of the month: the great American cornbread secret.

Corn—actual room temperature—corn ground up in a food processor or mashed with a ricer. It’s probably not a particularly surprising secret, but the key ingredient missing from all those cornbread boxes—those just add an egg and water boxes of Jiffy cornbread—is that they lack corn in any other form than powder/flour. 

America’s Test Kitchen did a scientific study and figured it out—add in corn, and you add in the flavor you are otherwise missing from cornbread. 

Here’s how you make it:

Ingredients

1 ½ c unbleached white flour

1 c yellow cornmeal

2 t baking powder

¼ t baking soda

¾ t salt

¼ c brown sugar , packed

¾ c corn

1 c buttermilk

2 large eggs

8 T unsalted butter—melted and cooled slightly (1 stick))—I always use less, more like 4 T of butter.

Adjust oven rack to middle position. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Spray 8-inch-square baking dish with nonstick cooking spray or rub down with butter.

Whisk flour, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in medium-sized mixing bowl until combined, or you can sift these ingredients. If you mix your flours, adding in whole wheat (which, I warn you will change the yellow color to a lighter, browner color), be aware that the sifting will really help. Set aside.

In food processor or blender, purée the brown sugar, thawed corn kernels, and buttermilk until combined, about 5 seconds.

Add eggs and process until well combined (corn lumps will remain), about 5 seconds longer. Using rubber spatula, make a well in the center of the dry ingredients. Pour wet ingredients into well. Begin folding dry ingredients into wet, giving mixture only a few turns to barely, but thoroughly combine.

Add melted butter and continue folding until dry ingredients are just moistened. Pour batter into prepared baking dish; smooth surface with rubber spatula.

Bake until deep golden brown and toothpick inserted in center comes out clean, 25 to 35 minutes.

Cool on wire rack for about 10 minutes. You might want to brown the top by turning up the heat to 425 for about 5 minutes. Best served warm with your favorite chili recipe (see future posts here for the best chili recipes); leftovers can be wrapped in foil and reheated in a 350 degree Fahrenheit oven for 10 to 15 minutes.

Read more here.

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