American Cheez

There is one day a year when you get to eat — are required to eat — the most low-brow of low-brow cuisine. While the Superbowl Sunday menu includes some strong suggestions (Buffalo wings, chips and dip), what it essentially calls for is cheesy, all-American food.

So this year I constructed a baking dish of that all-time winner, layered Mexican dip. Unable to find a recipe that worked for me, I devised my own, and for the first time ever, bought a jar of cheese.

In developing the recipe, the only real questions were what the layers should consist of, and in which order they should lie in the baking dish. Sour cream was out, as I find it obliterates all the other flavors. Refried beans, cheese, guacamole, and salsa were the obvious participants. As for order, I went with specific gravity, figuring the beans were the heaviest, followed by the Cheez Whiz, Cuisinart guacamole, then Safeway's fresh salsa.

It was a great hit. Be sure to serve it with hearty chips (Casa Sanchez thick and crispy worked great) as it's dense.

Layered Mexican Superbowl Dip

Two cans refried beans
I jar Cheez Whiz
About 2 cups guacamole
2 cups salsa

Shmush the beans into the bottom of a 9-by-13-inch baking dish. Microwave the Cheez Whiz until it's melted and spread over the beans. Let it cool a little, then spread the guacamole over the Cheez Whiz. Pour salsa on top.

The Leftover Challenge

Articles about Thanksgiving leftovers usually talk about turkey. But their focus is misguided, because cooked bird is easy to find uses for. The mild meat takes on almost any seasoning, and it can be repurposed into all kinds of dishes: enchiladas, salad, soup, mole, casserole (if you’re so inclined), hash, and pasta. And hardly anyone’s going to thumb their nose at a turkey sandwich.

Here’s the real challenge: cranberry relish (from Joy of Cooking: grind 1 pound of cranberries with 1 orange, add 2 cups of sugar and let it sit in the fridge for two days). Every year I make the cranberry relish, and for that reason, it always comes home with me. Because no one takes more than a tablespoon, I leave with nearly as much as I arrived with.

So this year, on that nothing-to-do Friday after Thanksgiving, I got to baking and created this recipe. It’s a sweet bread whose slices are dotted pink and orange. I’m guessing it will work with any leftover cranberry dish as long as it’s well sugared and has a texture of thick tomato sauce.

Mandy’s cranberry relish bread

2½ cups flour
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ cup salad oil
1½ cups cranberry relish
2 eggs

Preheat the oven to 350°. Grease and flour a regular-sized loaf pan.

Sift the dry ingredients together. In a separate bowl combine the oil, relish, and eggs until well blended. Add the relish mixture to the flour and stir until just combined.

Pour the batter into the pan and bake for 50 minutes. Let it sit until it’s completely cool before cutting.

Mystery Menu

Several years ago, I took a UC Extension class with food writer Jeannette Ferrary. Our assignment for the Tuesday before Thanksgiving was to describe a typical Thanksgiving meal at our childhood home. The class would then try to figure out where each of us had grown up.

The class performed fairly well, accurately pinpointing one member from the South (Knoxville, Tennessee), whose family always served cornbread dressing and biscuits; and another from Hawaii (Honolulu), who never served a Thanksgiving meal without a bowl of white rice.

They were pretty stumped by my family’s menu, however. My childhood Thanksgiving dinners weren’t the same every year, but my best approximation was the following: barbecued turkey, Paul Prudhomme’s sausage and cornbread stuffing, homemade rolls, homemade cranberry sauce, baked Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie made from the recipe on the can. The only thing they could figure out was that I grew up somewhere warm enough to barbecue a turkey.

Their confusion makes sense. My parents were raised in Portland, Oregon, which lacks a distinct cooking tradition. After moving to Berkeley, they were swept up in the cooking revolution of the Gourmet Ghetto, which erased their 1950s sensibilities. So we created our own Thanksgiving traditions—a combination of haute cuisine and kid pleasers.

Photo by Tom Curtis

The Good Friday Baking Curse

On Good Friday, following a centuries-old European tradition, I make hot cross buns. They’re simple sweet rolls dotted with currants, scented with cinnamon, and topped with an X of vanilla icing. The recipe is really a no-brainer, but almost every year something goes wrong.

Frequently the buns mysteriously fail to rise; other years I can’t get the consistency of the icing right — either it adheres to the buns in globs or it melts into a shiny coating. I’ve overproofed the dough so it exhausts itself in the first rising and has nothing left for the second; I’ve undercooked them so they’re still raw inside.

This year, I left them in the oven too long, and they produced a hard, chewy crust — great for sourdough bread, not for a sweet roll.

The curse of Good Friday haunts my baking, yet still I try for a decent batch of hot cross buns. It’s a tradition, after all.

Basic Mixology

Occasionally I find myself in need of a cocktail, and it’s at these times that I open up the venerable Mr. Boston or the Trader Vic’s guide and try to find something that’ll hit the spot. The problem is that we never seem to have all the ingredients the recipe calls for.

So I experiment, and it’s invariably a disaster—too sweet, too watered-down, too strong, too boring. I finally called my friend Erick, a bartender-writer-personal trainer, and asked for some guidelines. He gave me some simple mixology tips and formulas, which seem appropriate to share on New Year’s Eve. If you keep it simple, these drinks work.

The ingredients

Alcohol Because they’re nearly flavorless, vodka and white rum will mix with just about anything. Tequila goes well with citrus juice. Whiskey, dark rum, and gin have more personality and are tricky to combine.

Mixers Try flavored water, soda, fruit juices, or iced tea—herbal or black.

Flavorings Citrus peels, bitters, herbs, jalapeño slices, or spices: a little goes a long way.

Liqueurs Made with sugar and fruit, herbs, or spices, these are the secret behind the ’tini drinks.

Three basic recipes

Highballs (gin and tonic, rum and coke, greyhound) all follow the same formula. Fill a tall glass with ice, add 1 jigger—1 and 1/2 ounce or 3 tablespoons—of alcohol, then fill the glass with a mixer and any flavorings. You can add an ounce of liqueur along with the alcohol.

The ’tini recipe is 2 ounces of vodka and 1 ounce any flavor liqueur, shaken with ice, then strained into a martini glass.

To make a margarita, you can shake 2 ounces of tequila, 1 ounce sour mix and 1 ounce liqueur with ice, then strain into a glass. You can also serve the mix over ice, or you can blend the whole thing into a slush, if you have a powerful blender.

Happy New Year!

Photograph by Suat Eman

Bûche de Noël

The bûche de Noël, an edible Yule log, is France’s greatest contribution to the Christmas season. A sponge cake baked into a thin layer is topped with chocolate buttercream and rolled up—then decorated with more buttercream, meringue mushrooms, and perhaps a marzipan mouse—to resemble a log that happens to be lying on the forest floor. 

My 15-year-old niece Isabel created this bûche de Noël as extra credit for French class. I remember when her mother, Anna, made a similar one at the same age. It reigned over the holiday sweets during a Christmas party until someone couldn’t stand it anymore and snuck a slice.

Canned-Pumpkin Pie

Several Thanksgivings ago, I headed down a path of twisted logic that went something like this: Fresh berries make a better pie than frozen berries. Therefore, fresh pumpkin will make a better pie than canned pumpkin.

Because I had won the annual family fight over who brings pie to Thanksgiving dinner, I had an opportunity to showcase the best pumpkin pie ever. I announced to everyone that I’d be making a real pumpkin pie. This meant, of course, that I’d need to buy a pumpkin and process it myself.

I purchased a cooking pumpkin at the farmers market and went through the hell of hacking it up, scraping out the seeds, steaming the flesh, and mashing it to a pulp. I then added the usual ingredients—evaporated milk, eggs, sugar, and spices—as I’ve always been fond of the recipe from the pumpkin can label and didn’t see a need to monkey with it any further.

I proudly transported the pie, which came out a lovely burnt-orange, to my parents’ house. When the main course was finished and it came time for dessert, my sister produced another pumpkin pie. She diplomatically explained that her children, being kids, preferred the canned variety.

Alas, my pie was a bust. The pumpkin was stringy, and raw-tasting, and altogether too squashy. I set my slice down and fought for a sliver of my sister’s pie. My nieces and nephews knew the truth all along: Canned is the way to go. I haven’t veered from that path since.

I’d include the recipe for best-ever pumpkin pie here, but you can find it on the can label. If, that is, you can find one during the expected canned-pumpkin shortage. I’m going to stock up.

It's Lutefisk Season

Fish Jell-O. It’s the best way to describe lutefisk, the butt of many jokes, symbol of Scandinavian identity, and implement of childhood torture.

We Ericksons were dutifully downing it at the Sons of Norway Bjornson Hall in Oakland, which hosted its annual lutefisk and meatball fundraiser Saturday. Younger members of the family had their first taste and declared it “interesting.”

Eating lutefisk is a ritual that connects us Scandinavian Americans to the homeland (Swedes and Norwegians eat it less than their New World cousins). We like to serve it up during the holidays, mostly as a joke. Some cruel parents have been known to require their children to eat lutefisk before they are allowed to open gifts on Christmas Eve.

When it’s swimming in melted butter or cream sauce, lutefisk is usually palatable. I’ve had it fishy, when it’s truly disgusting, and merely tasteless, when it’s OK but I’d still rather be eating meatballs. There are people, however, who claim to enjoy its taste. Some even asked for seconds at Bjornson Hall.

It’s not clear how or why lutefisk got its start, but the Scandinavian countries have long produced and exported dried fish, so perhaps cooks were looking for ways to add variety to their monotonous winter diet.

Preparing lutefisk is a weeks-long process. Unsalted dried fish sits in a water bath for several days; then soaks in lye, which softens it; then spends several more days in water to rid it of the caustic lye. It’s boiled before eating. Properly prepared, lutefisk is off-white, translucent and gelatinous. It should wiggle as you carry your plate to the table.