Sunday, October 30, 2011

TGICFS.

Chicken-fried steak and eggs @ Trudy's. © Ryan Schierling
One of my favorite things about living in Austin is eating breakfast at Mexican restaurants. The nine-year-old in me absolutely loves the concept of starting your day with a basket of warm tortilla chips and a variety of fiery, cobweb-clearing salsas. 

We've been stepping out quite a bit for chilaquiles, unofficially looking for the best in town, so my chicken-fried steak streak has wavered. Recently, we were feeling conventional (read as: chain restaurant) and tried Trudy's, a Tex-Mex joint more famous for their syrupy-sweet Mexican Martini than anything on their food menu. I was a little bit wary when we walked into the place. If Jim's Restaurant was a respite for oldsters and nostalgia over coffee on a Sunday morning, Trudy's seemed to be the place where every good-looking twenty-something was sipping their Bloody Mary breakfast at the enormous bar, and the only nostalgia was in trying to remember last night. Our very cool waiter didn't hesitate to enthusiastically mention the six different incredible drink specials they had, but when I ordered black coffee and asked how the CFS was he could only shrug and say "Yeah... it's alright?" 

I wondered if maybe I'd be better off with chilaquiles? 

Chips and salsa arrived with our black blood of the gods, and I set aside my reservations and hesitations. When the CFS came, it looked promising – a generous portion of round steak with all the requisite nooks and crannies that a hand-breaded CFS should have. Jalapeño cream gravy was served on the side. The over-easy eggs were over-cooked, the hash-browned square of potatoes looked crispy but were sadly soggy. The pico de gallo side baffled me a bit, and I wasn't quite sure what to eat it with. The steak itself was better than the waiter had let on, and certainly not the worst I've had on this quest – properly cooked, a touch tough, but seasoned well. It would get me by for a bit (and my chips and salsa-stuffed inner nine-year-old) until we could wrangle and round up the next breakfast CFS.

No, NO. I don't want
the Mexican Martini.
I'm old, humor me.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Mary's Coffee Cake

Coffee cake with cherries and macadamia nuts. © Ryan Schierling
Right up front – I don't know Mary or her personal story about this coffee cake. What I do know is that my man likes it a whole lot. In fact, the day I casually mentioned wanting to bake a coffee cake, Ryan suddenly lit up and said "I love coffee cake!" Such strange words to hear from someone who generally prioritizes sweets at the very bottom of his list of guilty food pleasures.

So, yay! I get to bake something sweet that I know he will eat. Funny that he's never mentioned this particular affection to me in all the time we've been together. I think it sort of sprang out of his childhood memory bank like a jack-in-the-box retrieved from burial in a forgotten toy bin. As it turns out, his mom, Sandy, makes one that he ate for 18 years before he ever drank a cup of coffee.

Hearing this and not having a recipe that I was particularly fixated on, I immediately contacted Sandy for this magical formula with its powers to elicit such emotional response. Lucky for me, it was also just the type of coffee cake I was imagining – one with a nice moist muffin crumb and a healthy layer of sweet cinnamon crumble on top.

But... my idea for this coffee cake came to me before the recipe and I am simply not one content to leave well enough alone...

You see, there was a rather large bag of frozen cherries in the freezer begging to be used. Not just any cherries, mind you. These are a mix of beautiful little Bing and wild Rainier cherries which were personally gathered from family trees in Idaho, then kept safe in an ice chest all the way to Austin by our friends Dawn and Jay when they moved here in July. The day they arrived we all sat around the table on the back patio and busied our hands with slicing and pitting buckets of these cherries as we caught up and enjoyed tales of their adventure moving across the country.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Braised beef and boiled bread.

Sauerbraten, with semmelknodel and rotkohl. © Ryan Schierling
Friday night cooking show / with a horse meat dish / I had to stay in the freezer / all Thursday eve talking to that horse – The Dead Milkmen, "Dean's Dream"

I've never been known to skimp when it comes to the authenticity of a dish, but I swear there was no horse involved in this meal. Historically though, horse meat (or venison) was used when preparing sauerbraten. Maybe horse is how they did things in Germany when it's longingly, nostalgically referred to as the "old country," but I'm betting they go for das Rindfleisch nowadays.

This is a traditional meal that your Oma might cook from her grandmother's recipe cards, that you – being four generations removed from the Fatherland – give a wrinkled nose and a sideways glance before pushing it around on your plate for half an hour because German food is just so… bland.

Really? What do you need? An Oktoberfest oom-pah band, a 72 oz. Spaten and a busty beer wench that looks like the St. Pauli girl slugging you in the belly with a bratwurst brickbat?

Don't be such a tourist. Mass-market ethnic cuisine is so diluted in the United States that we're already beginning to associate the lowest common denominator with authenticity. On The Border = Mexican. Olive Garden = Italian. P.F. Chang's = Chinese. Where do you go for American food? Old Country Buffet?

German food is not easy. Most times, it is not pretty. 

It is, for the most part, a heavy, filling cuisine that American restaurants do poorly. It's difficult to find homemade pungent, puckering sauerkraut, fresh caraway-flecked sausages, sinus-imploding mustards... and when's the last time you saw choucroute garnie on a menu? We tried... but disappointed by German fare in Fredericksburg, Texas (a bastion of German-Texan heritage) on more than one occasion, I decided we were going to do this on our own – starting with sauerbraten. I consulted dozens of recipes and tried to distill the essence of what really made sauerbraten so special. What were the historic similarities? What were the regional differences? Why were there differences?

When the roast went into the Dutch oven to brown, the olfactory nostalgia began. Adding the marinade the beef had rested in for the last three days filled the kitchen with a memory for me. I don't know if I really recall eating sauerbraten as a child, but if I did, it was probably at a Schierling family gathering and the preparation smelled exactly like this – rich, savory, sweet and full of red wine and vinegar.

All afternoon the house felt like Fall married with the scent of comfort food, and I couldn't wait to tuck into a plate of beef and gravy.

Friday, October 7, 2011

MSOMS (Modified Shit On Modified Shingle).

Shit on a...toad in a hole. © Ryan Schierling 
The dish has throngs of fans and legions of detractors. It has an oft-edited expletive in its name. The acronym SOS has some pretty legendary U.S. military history and gravitas, and I'm not talking about the Morse code distress signal.

I struggled with this one for a while, because I love a good doody reference (see Caddyshack) but I'm extremely wary of over-processed, pressed, salted, sugared and sorbitol'd beef simulacrum. I also have a Navy boot-camp association with this bastardized biscuits & gravy that is less than favorable.

The edited, safe-for-children name is Stuff On a Shingle, Same Old Stuff or the puritanically-unimaginative "Creamed Chipped Beef on Toast." Toast is toast. The gravy base is a classic French mother sauce, a delicate béchamel beaten over the head with bits of bad beef.

It has been on all branches of the military's menu, in various incarnations, since the early 1900s. The chipped beef version officially entered the Army’s recipe database with the 1910 publication of the Manual for Army Cooks, calling for dried chipped beef, beef stock and evaporated milk, a flour and butter roux, chopped parsley and ground black pepper.

The current creamed chipped beef recipe, straight from the Armed Forces Recipe Service Index (# L 052 00) calls for chipped beef, a margarine and flour roux, nonfat dry milk (reconstituted) and ground black pepper. Having – like every other shell-shocked new recruit – fervently and indiscriminately shoveled SOS down in Navy boot camp, I can tell you that this was not the version served. Instead, we apparently got AFRS #  L 030 00, which has no roux but is 90% lean ground beef, onions, flour, salt and pepper, warm water, Worcestershire sauce and nonfat dry milk. Sounds yummers, right? I ate it a few times, and the disgust with the glutinous, chalky mess (imagine choking down beef-flavored Elmer's Glue on thick cardboard) compounded until I decided to skip subsequent breakfast servings and just go hungry until lunch.

So why bring this egesta back to the fore? Why pick at the edge of a malicious, malignant food memory? Because I believe in second chances, and I also believe that just because something is entrenched in culinary history (even bad military culinary history) doesn't mean it can't still evolve into something delicious.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...