tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1814870954112858902024-02-19T04:32:17.717-05:00It's How I CookHipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.comBlogger36125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-89656749240087086832010-06-01T11:19:00.025-04:002010-06-01T13:32:14.637-04:00I'm BAAAAAAAaaaack! And I have some Black Forest Cake for you, little girl -- you want some cake, little girl? (I don't know what this costs...)Hi everyone! I've been on unannounced hiatus, I guess. But I'm back, and I'm cooking, and I'm posting, and I know you're hungry.This morning, I have what I've long promised: Maria's Black Forest cake. I don't know why it's called a Black Forest cake, though I know that there's a black forest in Germany, and I suppose it's named for that place. Because of the kind of cake it is, I suspect it's a Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-9461011016692956042010-03-06T20:33:00.008-05:002010-03-06T21:16:43.346-05:00Eggplant You Can Spread on a Pita (a couple of bucks, maybe an hour including pre-baking the eggplant)This is a recipe I owe to Manjula, sort of -- it's Manjula plus Bombay Cafe minus oil plus a cuisinart (this is exactly the low-rent one I own), which, trust me, makes it all so much easier.The first thing you need is two medium eggplant, maybe a couple of pounds at the store. Buy the big ones, not the little Asian or Indian ones. When you're buying eggplant, make sure you get unbruised, shiny Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-54054632043625935182010-02-20T10:45:00.012-05:002010-03-06T21:32:18.080-05:00Cheap, Easy Bread (30 cents a loaf; preparation takes 15 minutes max, baking about 30)You'd think that a post with the title "Cheap, Easy" and "Bread" -- well, it would inspire me with my most risque content, my most glittery, tube-toppy, lucite heeled (with a slot for tips!), dominatrix-centered prose. Yeah, okay, it did. I am now picturing Denzel Washington in drag on the Vegas strip, leaning over in a mini-skirt, his stockings just run enough so that we know he's cheap (as if Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-73950109701841085242010-02-12T08:26:00.013-05:002010-02-12T09:20:25.589-05:00Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite Toast ($3 or less, fifteen minutes)This is not a picture of food. It is, instead, a painting by Delacroix, called "Liberty Leading the People," or more correctly (sans accents) "La Liberte guidant le peuple."See, what's really funny in a not-pleasant way about all the franco-hysteria of 2003 and/or -- oh, now -- in which legions of people were introduced to sliced, deep-fried potatoes as "freedom fries" and battered, pan-fried Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-68578066559598776052010-02-12T04:25:00.012-05:002010-02-12T08:23:05.669-05:00Sweet Potatoes ala Davidson sort of (less than a dollar, a little more than half an hour)Danielle Davidson was one of the finest students I've ever had the privilege to teach.No, she's not dead. She just graduated and got a job. What were you thinking?Anyway, she wrote me a while ago with a recipe, which like a terrible self-replicating virus (not the kind I was envisioning, but oh well), I read, punctured the membrane of, wrote my genetic code into, and began merrily to change. I'm Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-20255233412472815002010-02-09T09:13:00.011-05:002010-02-09T11:17:06.682-05:00Grits (Geez, I don't know: 50 cents?; about half an hour)Technically, these are jalapeno cheese grits (milled locally). And what about those pasty white crap grits you might find at, oh, Waffle House, that were made about 4 in the morning in a huge vat and have been cooking now for about ten hours -- if, by cooking, you mean "sitting over a moderate heat and stirred when one of the toothless but nice waitresses remembers they're there" -- into Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-61497232610669335142010-02-05T06:02:00.011-05:002010-02-05T06:46:15.493-05:00Okay, Yes, Technically it's Fried (under one dollar; about fifteen minutes)Fried okra.My first marriage didn't work out. However, I learned some things about cooking in the eight years of that relationship. Banana pudding. Beans and peas. Cornbread. Fried okra.Right now it's dark outside, raining in spits and volleys, and about, oh, forty degrees. If that. I'm in flannel and a sweatshirt, shivering uncontrollable, though the furnace is going full blast and I'm indoors. Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-36863827539561878982010-01-30T08:11:00.011-05:002010-01-30T09:15:10.036-05:00The Fungus Among Us (about $4, about 40 minutes including baking time)Mushrooms are not a fungus. They're flowers. The fungus is underground, and the mushroom is its...Sigh.Well, that doesn't make them any more palatable in theory, does it? I mean, is it better to think you're eating a fungus (images flash by: someone's nasty fungal toenail; the gunk in the the crevices between tiles in the shower; the largest living organism on earth, which is now taking over an Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-85827132220290493672010-01-27T06:43:00.010-05:002010-01-28T17:07:48.321-05:00Jambalaya; Or, The Inauthenticity Continues ($3 or so, when the okra's out of season, cheaper when it's in; about an hour, including the chopping)It is not okra season. I confess. I bought okra from Honduras. Bad locavore. BAD. It was just that I had a sort of craving, or maybe it was that someone else had mentioned okra to me, or maybe it was a longing for high, hot summer, the time when okra is in season. I used to grow okra (it was vegetable of the month at the CDC!) when I lived in Athens, more okra than I knew how to eat. It's not a Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-81419983393853252342010-01-26T07:45:00.009-05:002010-01-26T08:26:58.448-05:00Bread Made with Bananas (maybe $5, about an hour and forty-five minutes including baking)When your bananas look like this, it's time either for the Banana Angel to descend, wrap your bananas in a cloud of glory, sing hosannas, and lift them miraculously into banana heaven where they hang, forever green, under the dancing, fat green leaves of their mama tree (which is actually apparently a grass, but well, what does it matter in the banana afterlife?), dreaming of uncorrupted Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-41128242987101227532010-01-22T05:27:00.012-05:002010-01-22T10:43:00.215-05:00Your Basic Lasagna (about $10/pan; about an hour, including baking)Did my mother know what ricotta (look! it's easy to make!) is, or was cottage cheese (look! it's hard to make!) just easier to find? It's an eternal question. One that right now you have no context for, I realize, but I'm about to rectify that.When I was growing up in suburban Florida in the 1970s, my mother made big dishes of lasagna periodically, I think to please my brother who thought lasagnaHipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-80506183535921663942010-01-13T09:08:00.014-05:002010-01-13T10:08:43.619-05:00Cream Puffs are Not for Every Day (maybe $3, about 45 minutes)The danger here is that you will eat them all.I know, having womanfully tried to resist. Then halved the recipe, having failed. Then quartered it, having failed again. Now I just make these for VERY special occasions, and say: oh, what the hell. Better to die relatively quickly of a heart attack with the taste of cream puffs on my tongue than cream-puff-less, shriveled, incontinent, and telling Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-81892589044674003042010-01-09T08:43:00.010-05:002010-01-13T08:04:25.505-05:00Soup with Strange Ingredients like Peanut Butter (maybe $3 for a potful; about 45 minutes)I forgot to ask Santa for an immersion blender (immersion blender discussion, no less). It was an incredible oversight on my part. I have hopes, though, that with my birthday coming up, he'll make a little flight to Georgia next month and correct things.But seriously folks. Why do any of us have to write letters? Isn't it sort of pathetic, and -- I don't know -- a little condescending? I mean, Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-78233422716768927052010-01-09T08:13:00.007-05:002010-01-13T08:20:37.560-05:00Easy Mac (less than $2; about 15 minutes)Seriously. Does anyone know what that orange powder is that comes in a box of mac and cheese you buy when you need comfort food? Specifically, where the hell does the orange come from? It's neon, it's weird, it probably sneaks around in your cupboard at night, inviting the marshmallow cream to help out in its seduction of the brownie mix. It probably has one of those round, rotating beds. It Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-28250300206790896112010-01-05T07:56:00.010-05:002010-01-07T12:02:24.580-05:00Because You Can Never Get Enough Squash in Your Dessert (maybe $10 for a whole pan; about 40 minutes)These are pumpkin-based dessert objects that I could sit and eat forever, except that if I did I would also feel shame forever, have to go to my first confession (this is a story [not by Frank O'Connor] for another time), and spend too much time atoning.That Catholic thing never leaves you. The Jesuits were right. I haven't been to mass since the last Catholic dead person forced me there, but I Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-89738967852279642022010-01-03T08:50:00.008-05:002010-01-03T09:35:22.655-05:00Chicken, Peas, White Sauce (under $10; about 15 minutes)This is not really Chicken ala King. I've looked it up. That dish is way harder. This you can do in your sleep almost. So if you want ACTUAL Chicken ala King, sorry.I made a big pot of this stuff for a grieving friend recently, called it "chicken in white sauce with peas and biscuits." She said, "Oh, you mean Chicken ala King." I nodded. Um, okay. If you say so.That may be the first time I heard Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-68560268618578402582009-12-31T06:47:00.015-05:002010-01-03T03:21:53.574-05:00My Nana Calls This Gravy (about $15 makes two lasagna's worth; about 20 minutes)My Nana. She's 91. Born in Italy, I think outside Rome. Her father was a scholar, then a coal miner. One of her sisters died in the flu epidemic in 1918; she still has two brothers living, one older, one younger. My Nana has lived on Long Island (good lord, it has its own website!) for half a century or more, in the same house facing the neighborhood school. She had three children after the war: Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-11713273070815281562009-12-30T08:59:00.014-05:002009-12-30T10:13:49.032-05:00Burritos for Breakfast (maybe $5; about 15 minutes)I preface this whole entry with the caveat: we are not Southwesterners. These are as inauthentic as any other ethnic recipe here. As I say this, I wonder: what is authentic Southwestern? A hybrid of Mexican and American food? What is authentic Mexican? A hybrid of Spanish and indigenous food? And which indigenous food? And which Spanish cuisine? And how long does a cuisine have to be itself Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-74226716784082594272009-12-24T16:11:00.014-05:002009-12-30T08:59:01.671-05:00Stone [Soup] Salad (virtually free; less than fifteen minutes)This is virtually free, since what you're doing is using the odds and ends you have left over in the fridge to make the salad. You may have to buy some lettuce (you know you want the vegetarian starter kit, right?). Or maybe you have some, or some spinach, or something leafy and green? That's where you start.Chuck can make two meals: this, and a pasta dish he calls carbonara, but it's really justHipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-39308131502140222742009-12-21T06:10:00.016-05:002009-12-23T07:57:12.468-05:00Turkey Shaped like a Football (under $15, about an hour)I have the lyrics to "Secret Agent Man" (I know I used this in the last post, but it's just SO good) stuck in my head this morning. Only they're the wrong lyrics, they're the classically wrong lyrics: I'm hearing, secret... ASIAN man, secret... ASIAN man over and over again. It's a mystery. Can you be a secret Asian? Why would you keep that a secret, even if you could? Why can't the singer sing Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-29375742137202641922009-12-20T06:57:00.007-05:002009-12-21T06:10:06.552-05:00Smashed Potatoes (under $3; about 25 minutes)There is almost nothing more unpalatable to me than the mashed potatoes of my childhood. My mother used to peel and boil chunks of potato until they fell into powder. Then she'd get out the electric mixer, add margarine and some milk and mix until she could nearly pour the stuff. Babyfood. The consistency of vomit-froth. Insubstantial and unchewable. Gah. Yuck.I encountered these again in Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-30953332789154913212009-12-17T06:17:00.012-05:002009-12-21T06:10:33.148-05:00Cornbread (about $2; 40 minutes)I was reading something the other day -- don't ask me what -- and someone was complaining that she couldn't make cornbread because there wasn't any buttermilk. That got me to wondering what the heck she was talking about. I guess you could use buttermilk. I'd never used it. But I guess you could.And anyway, the chemistry of using buttermilk in baking is easy enough that you can substitute spoiledHipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-33618447956151033742009-12-16T07:43:00.009-05:002009-12-16T09:03:14.705-05:00Locked and Loaded, Sir, Yes, Sir (less than a dollar, 1 minute or less)[No, you've come to the right blog: I changed the colors because, much as I loved the way the black looked with the pictures, the letters swam and danced and I was getting a headache trying to read the thing. Let me know if this works better for you, or if you really want to be back in black again. I'll listen, my disciples. My precious.]Okay, today: weapons. Specifically, habaneros, jalapenos, Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-47326880833780462009-12-13T07:54:00.022-05:002009-12-16T11:16:15.763-05:00Collards Are Not Nasty Tasting (about $10; prep, 20 minutes; cooktime, 4-6 hours)I don't remember if I've always been a fan of green stuff. I can remember a time that I ate only Egg McMuffins (college) and a time when I ate a lot of Hamburger Helper (someone needs to make a horror movie with that little hand thing) and London broil (age whatever to 18). Given my druthers, I'd probably sit down to a bowl of homemade mac n cheese every day -- though now I like it weaponized, Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181487095411285890.post-66267033354894143182009-12-13T06:49:00.010-05:002009-12-13T07:51:16.092-05:00Curried Potatoes and Cauliflower (under $10; 30 minutes)This is Aloo Ghobi. I learned to cook it after I got home from India, from a website called Manjula's Kitchen. Manjula uses consistently good recipes, and her videos are excellent. This is her recipe, lightly modified for my taste. Adjust the heat (spiciness) in this by adjusting the amount of jalapeno paste you use. You can make it perfectly mild if you leave most or all of it out.Some of the Hipbohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800623887275873667noreply@blogger.com0