Snacking State-by-State: Maryland I - Crab cakes like mah great-great-aunt used tah make, hon

Well here it is.  I have reached that point in this series where I finally, at long last, make it home.  These next few posts should not be as intimidating as they seem to be, and yet they are.  Here I am, representin' the Old Line State: the land of the Chesapeake, the Potomac and the Mason-Dixon Line - the state that no one can quite figure out if it is in the South, the North or somewhere else.

And because I know my home state better than any of the others, there is a great bit of pressure not to mess it up.

Official Name: State of Maryland
State Nicknames: The Free State; The Old Line State; America in Miniature
Admission to the US: April 28, 1788 (#7)
Capital: Annapolis (24th largest city)
Other Important Cities: Baltimore (largest); Columbia (2nd largest); Germantown (3rd largest); Frederick (8th largest)
Region: Mid-Atlantic, South, Northeast; South Atlantic (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Crabcake; Clambake; Chestnut; Maple Syrup
Bordered by: The Mason-Dixon Line (north and east); Pennsylvania (north); Delaware and the Atlantic Ocean (east), Virginia and the Potomac River (south and southwest); District of Columbia (southwest); West Virginia (west and southwest)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: blue crab (crustacean); rockfish, aka striped bass (fish); Diamondback terrapin (reptile); Smith Island cake (dessert); milk (drink)
Some Famous & Typical Foods: Chesapeake Bay foods, especially based on blue crab, oyster, clam, shrimp & fish; historically, foods of the Upper South (especially fried chicken, stuffed ham, beaten biscuits & Brunswick stew); cuisines that reflect a broad multicultural landscape closer to Baltimore (Italian, Polish, Ukranian, German, etc) and Washington (Latin American, West African, Southeast Asian, Korean, etc)

If someone had to ask me to describe Maryland's cuisine, I would be hard-pressed.  The best way to put it: look at every other Southern cookbook.  I say that because out of all of those I have looked at (including various Southern Living recipe compilations), recipes from Maryland pop up in about half of them.  Historically, recipes from Maryland - having at one time been a Southern state if not so much of one now - paralleled those of Virginia: hams, terrapin stews, beaten biscuits, fried chickens, not very sweet corn breads, and Brunswick stews.  In a serious discussion of the culinary history of Southern food, Maryland is going to make an appearance.  The Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans would say as much, since they have a small exhibit about Maryland on display.

What complicates this picture is the increasing "Yank-ification" of Maryland over the last century or so.  Our patterns of immigration are certainly more like those of Philly, New York and Boston than Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans: immigrants bringing in Irish, Italian, German, Jewish, Polish and Russian foods (to name but a few), and later immigration from Asia (Korean, the Philippines and South Asia).  With its proximity to DC, Maryland is now one of the most culturally diverse states in the country, with immigrant communities from every continent and almost every country.  Coupled with a more historically Northern pattern of industrialization, Maryland winds up in a unique position among the states: no longer completely "Southern" but still not exactly "Northern".  We are in a perpetual limbo between the "Proper South" (which roughly starts somewhere around Charlottesville) and the "Proper North" (which starts, neatly enough, at the Mason-Dixon Line).  Everything in the middle is a region-less mishmash.  It was into this mishmash that I was born.

So what about the food here?  Helping to clarify a bit is fellow Baltimorean John Shields, cookbook author and proprietor of Gertrude's Restaurant near Johns Hopkins University.  In his foreward to Lucie Snodgrass' Dishing Up Maryland, Shields points out what is the quintessence of Maryland's culinary flavor: the Chesapeake Bay

Maryland cuisine is one of the oldest and simplest of North America's Regional cuisines...  The Chesapeake Bay's abundant shellfish are prepared in ways that preserve their delicate flavor.  The classic crab cake calls for lumps of blue crab, lightly bound and spiced, to produce a scrumptious mound of crab that can be fried or lightly broiled.  The legendary Chesapeake oysters are served au natural on the half shell or are bathed in hot milk enriched with butter in a sublimely elegant stew... All manner of fish, fowl, and game are featured in a tremendous number of one-pot meals.  [Shields, in Snodgrass 2010: 9]

Yes, Shields and Snodgrass display the dizzying array of complexity in the foods of Maryland, but we cannot escape the Bay in our cooking. And really, why would we want to?

Shields notes in another cookbook, his Chesapeake Bay Cooking, that above all creatures that inhabit the Chesapeake, it is the blue crab that has really taken a hold here.  "As each Memorial Day approaches, Chesapeake Bay folk emerge from our winter hibernation filled with a sense of excitement that is almost unbearable" [Shields 1998: 16].  Everything from steamed crabs to crab soups to soft shells are important here and in Virginia (also note Virginia she-crab soup, which I will examine in this series sometime around mid-2012), and crab shacks can be found on almost every other block in Baltimore.  But among the most iconic of Maryland blue crab recipes is the Maryland crab cake.  True, there are several types of crab cakes even in the Chesapeake - Shields [1998: 29] notes variations on Delmarva, in Baltimore and throughout Virginia - but the one most people here think of as the crab cake is heavy on the crab meat, light on the binder, which is almost always on the inside and not the outside.  From there, the crab cake may be fried, broiled or sautéed.  I have found that I prefer broiled ones myself, but I will never turn down one prepared the other ways.

Again as John Shields notes, "[t]ucked away in each family's archives is The Crab Cake Recipe.  It is the only one; it is the best; and all the others are wrong.  Period." [Shields 1998: 29].  It sometimes bothered me that I never really knew what "The Crab Cake Recipe" was in my own family.  My Uncle Eddie had a recipe for Crab Imperial that my family just raved about.  But the crab cake seemed elusive.  In trying to suss out if such a crab cake recipe even existed, I asked my mother, who let me know that as a child growing up in the 1940's and 50's, she often stopped at a restaurant along Ingleside Avenue (Mom grew up in South Baltimore but apparently went to school closer to Catonsville) during lunch break from school.  Her mother worked in the restaurant's kitchen.  Mom often ordered the crab cake, which her mother made.  She doesn't remember the recipe, but I loved hearing about just how important the crab cake was in her childhood!

Perhaps the closest thing to The Crab Cake Recipe that my family has comes from Mom's great aunt Florence - who passed sometime in the 70's.  In a seemingly ancient ledger book of hers are written out by hand recipes for everything from fried chicken to meatloaf to Dream Whip cake.  There are at least two crab cake recipes, and the first one is on the very first page. 

Recipe: Aunt Florence's Crab Cake

I have been loathe to post whole recipes from any source, for copyright reasons.  However, this is a family recipe, so I can do that now if I want.  Why, then, am I not doing so?  Because I don't want it floating around those blog post aggregating sites where someone can pass off my family recipes as his or her (or its) own.  So I am posting it as a photograph.  Here is my Great-Great Aunt Florence's recipe for crab cakes:

Now unless I start up a séance or ask a medium or something, I can't say if this recipe came from somebody else in her family, from an outside source or from her own brain.  I simply don't know.  But I will give Aunt Florence the benefit of the doubt here.  One thing I only noticed as I was making the crab cakes: she offers no cooking times, no suggestions on broiling or frying other than "Fry in small amount of hot fat", and no suggestions about chilling the crab meat first for easier cooking.  So maybe this was her own recipe that she wrote out without bothering to note the stuff that anyone would just know.

I made two versions of this, first done to the letter, and the second with a few tips and tricks that I had forgotten to do for some reason, but which makes the art of crab cake preparation that much easier for the cook.

* blue crab meat - and none of that "non-Chesapeake" stuff.  Here's a funny vignette: I was looking at crab meat in the supermarket, picked up the enticing pound, and saw that it was not Chesapeake Bay crab - in this case, like the crawfish I bought a few weeks ago, they were from Southeast Asia.  I put it back down, and looked for other stuff.  One of the employees remarked to another - assuming, for some odd reason, that I didn't hear her at all - that "the customers just pick it up and put it back down!"  Her coworker noted that people in Baltimore just don't like the Southeast Asian crab as much (or for that matter the stuff from New England or the Gulf Coast - I had some massive steamed crabs from Texas on a winter trip to Philly several years ago.  To me, they were big, juicy and somewhat flavorless).  While the best crab cakes tend to be made from big "lump" pieces of crab, I actually prefer the meat from the backfin of the crab, for its flavor.  I ended up making crabs out of both.
* egg (had it)
* two slices of white bread
* salt
* Old Bay (okay, it doesn't have to be Old Bay, but it must be some variety of Chesapeake Bay seasoning.  There are many other varieties to choose from - Wye River, Phillip's, J.O. Spice Company's, etc..  But most kitchens in and around the Chesapeake will have, if nothing else, a can of Old Bay.  This is in particular a Maryland thing, but Old Bay is well known all over the East Coast, especially throughout the South - look in the background next time you see the kitchen at Merlotte's Bar on some episode of True Blood.  And in the kitchen of my mother and her mother-in-law (we lived with her while I grew up), there were a few cans of Old Bay in the cabinet, a newer can that had more inside it, and a much older can, probably from the 60's or 70's that was no longer of use but still managed to hang around all this time.  And when I finally moved to California, I had to bring a can of Old Bay with me, just in case I couldn't find it there (I could but it's pricier).  I even brought it as a gift to my foster family in Morelia when I went to Mexico on a language school in 2000.
* mayonnaise (had it)
* baking powder (not all crab cake recipes have this, but I asked my mother if she had ever heard of such a thing, and she said, "Yes, I have heard about it sometimes being put in crab cakes".  So there you go.)
* dry mustard (Aunt Florence's recipe calls for either this or Worcestershire)
* dried parsley flakes (had it)
* oil (if you want to fry it, that is - but if you broil it, you should at least lightly grease the skillet or pan before broiling)

Though people certainly do it, I have only seen one person make a crab cake from crab meat that she picked herself.  My sister, now settled in Savannah, did this once for my father when he was in the hospital.  I have yet to ask how tedious it must have been.  Not that I am a stranger to picking crabs myself.

 Awww, innit he cute?

If for some reason you do decide to make a crab cake from meat what-you-picked-yourself-hon, remember the fine art of crab pickin', to wit:

 1. Flip the little guy or gal over and rip off the apron (for a male, or jimmy, this apron is T-shaped - or shaped much more like, well, genitalia; for a female, or sook, this apron is triangular).

 2. From where the apron came off, reach into the middle with your fingers and pull off the top of the shell.

 3. This is what you find in the middle.  Again, notice the mustard - analogous to the "fat" in the crawfish and the "tomalley" in the lobster.  I have seen crab mustard in a can in one Filipino supermarket in Los Angeles County, California.

 4. Pull off the feathery, spongy things.  These are the gills, and you should not eat these.  Just don't.

5. Here's what slows me down - and if "expertise" in crab picking is measured solely in terms of speed then I am no expert: snap the body in half, and break each half again in half.  I do this by pressing down on the top and bottom until I hear a snap, so the shell breaks and I can pull it apart to get to the lumps of crab in the main part of the body.  Many people use a knife here but I have rarely done this, which is probably why it takes me so much longer.

6. Pull out as much crab meat from each part of the body as you can,  Repeat with the other half.

7. Don't forget the legs, especially the claws.  A good way to get the claw meat out in one fell swoop is to hit the top of the claw once, with force but not too much force, and crack it.  Carefully bend back and forth until loose and then pull it out.  This won't always work, but it often does.

In case you were wondering, a small-to-medium male crab will yield about 1.5 ounces of crab meat.

Even back in her day, Aunt Florence probably wasn't picking all the crab meat herself.  But she was probably using the local stuff.  I don't know about my fellow Bawlamorons, but as long as it is from some part of the Chesapeake - Maryland or Virginia or one of the tributaries therein - it is "local" crab meat, as far as I am concerned.  When out of season, Marylanders usually have to rely on crab meat from North Carolina, which we don't like as much but we like it enough, and at least it isn't "crab in a can from Southeast Asia".  And not to dog on Southeast Asian crab meat, but here in the Chesapeake we really prefer the flavor of our own.  There, I said it.

To interpret her recipe, I did the following:

First, I ripped up the slices of white bread into little pieces.  Use white (or gluten free white) bread.  I've heard of panko but never used it, and I've never heard of anybody using whole wheat.

Next, add the mayo, the dry mustard (or Worcestershire) and the baking powder to the bread crumbs

And also add the Old Bay (or other Chesapeake Bay seasoning), the salt and the parsley.

Finally, add the egg and the crab meat.

Unless you've got a wash basin full of crab cake to deal with, use your hands when you mix it all up.
 

Here's where you form your crab cakes.  Some people use their hands, others prefer an ice cream scoop (thanks to John Shields for this idea).  I used a heaping ice cream scoop.

Though you don't have to do this - and Aunt Florence never really said - your crab cakes will hold together much better if you chill them first.  The first time around, I made massive crab cakes and fried / broiled them up quickly.  They fell apart.  Yes, a rookie mistake, so I'm not sure what I was thinking there. 

If you fry them, you can either fry them in an inch or so of oil or sauté them in a little oil.  For a smaller crab cake such as what you would get from an ice cream scoop, 2 to 4 minutes on a side works just fine.

Just make sure you watch over them.

If you choose to broil them - the easier path, I think - preheat the broiler completely.  Cook four minutes to a side.

 

Fried or broiled, this makes a nicely crabby cake, light and fluffy, with not too much filling or, for that matter, seasoning.  I have eaten many crab cakes, and have had lovely ones and dreadful ones (even in Baltimore).  This was one of the lovelier ones.  Unlike the other recipes I have made for this series, I have to say - somewhat cornily - that making these crab cakes was in fact a spiritual experience for me.  Why do I say something so silly?  One reason: this is family history I'm interpreting.  I kept thinking back to Terri Pischoff Wuerther and her cookbook In A Cajun Kitchen, which I used for my Louisiana posts a month back.  That cookbook was formed from the author's family recipes - her aunts and grandmothers, her uncles and mother.  This recipe, and this post, is in a very real way in the same vein.  John Shields also shares many recipes from many families in Maryland and Virginia in his Chesapeake Bay Cooking.  As for me, I had to give my mother some of the crab cakes I made.  I asked her if it tasted familiar, since this was her great-aunt's recipe. She said it was, with a smile on her face.  That made me feel so good.

Sources:

"Crab Cakes".  Recipe from the author's family.
 
Fowora, Simbo.  "Jollof Rice".  Featured on the episode "Nigerian Dinner" of the show Sara's Secrets (Sara Moulton, host).  Food Network, 2006.

Gibbon, Ed.  The Congo Cookbook.  1999-2009.  Available as a downloadable book from lulu.com and reprinted on the website http://www.congocookbook.com.

Hafner, Dorinda.  A Taste of Africa.  Ten Speed Press: Berkeley, CA, 1993.

Kitching, Frances.  "Smith Island Ten-Layer Cake-Mrs. Kitching's Original Recipe". Reprinted on the "Fun Stuff" page at the website VisitSomerset.com (website for Somerset County, Maryland).  2007-2010 Somerset County Tourism.

Shields, John. Chesapeake Bay Cooking. Broadway Books: New York, NY, 1998

Shields, John. "Foreward".  In Dishing Up Maryland by Lucie Snodgrass.  Storey Publishing: North Adams, MA, 2010.

Snodgrass, Lucie.  Dishing Up Maryland.  Storey Publishing: North Adams, MA, 2010.

Walter, Eugene.  American Cooking: Southern Style.  From the series Foods of the World.  Time-Life Publications: New York, NY, 1971


Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Maryland" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Maryland".

Family History through Cooking

I was just scrounging around in a room in my parents' house through a big Rubbermaid container of family recipes, both clipped and handwritten/typed. Right on top I found the cookbook that my mother's Aunt Florence wrote out in an old ledger book. It must be at least 70 years old, probably much older. Right in the front was a recipe for crab cakes (it looks as if Aunt Florence fried hers). Deep in the middle was a recipe for fried chicken. The way the recipe reads, it is clearly Maryland Panfried Chicken, with the gravy and everything. I smell another project in the works, but not until well after this State-by-State thing is done. But at least one of Aunt Florence's recipes will pop up here in the near future.

Because it's (the end of) Soft Shell Week

I have been busy lately, planning a bacon recipe for next week's bacon cookoff with Kit (Mango & ginger) and Kathy (Minx Eats) at Great Grapes (will be posting about that soon), as well as prepping a class to teach this week and, well, recovering from my vacation. But I forgot to mention that this week is SOFT SHELL CRAB WEEK here in Baltimore, hons! This article from the Huffington Post's Max Watman talks about his favorite way to grill softs.

Wait - GRILL!? Yes, he grilled them. He had a dozen softs, and separated them into three groups. From the article (his bullets):

• I left the biggest and best crabs almost plain, with only a generous sprinkling of kosher salt.
• Another four were soaked in a mix of 1/2 teaspoon of crushed ginger, 1/4 teaspoon Sriracha, 1/4 teaspoon fish sauce, and 2 tablespoons of seasoned sushi vinegar.
• The last four were soaked in a more classic mix of the juice of half a lemon, a few dashes of worcestershire sauce, and 2 teaspoons of Old Bay.

His favorite was the simple crab with salt.

I dunno, dude. I still stick by the method my grandmother (God rest her soul) chose to fry up softs, and it isn't that messy: just clean the crab, dredge it in flour or fish fry (I always like to add some Old Bay) and fry it in butter. Put it between two slices of bread (preferably white) that has a little mayo or salad dressing on it.

Stuffing-Dressed (or Dressing-Stuffed) Mushrooms

I am the last person in my family to get through his or her Thanksgiving leftovers. The food was good, at least, and the turkey was delicious if I do say so myself. We didn't eat much, and we did not have all the leftovers we figured we would. Thank God for that!

It's quite easy to find recipes for leftover turkey, leftover vegetables, leftover cranberry sauce, etc. But one thing that is almost impossible to find recipes for is stuffing, aka dressing, which I will use interchangeably.* This staple of many a Thanksgiving meal reared its delicious head in two forms this year, as my grandmother's traditional dressing and my sister's father-in-law's sausage dressing with butter. But Google either "stuffing as ingredient" or "dressing as ingredient" and the only thing you get is 10,000 pages of recipes for dressing and stuffing.

So how the hell do you use it as anything other than stuffing!?!?

One commenter on one Thanksgiving website had a solution. She noted that she uses hers to stuff mushrooms. It's so simple! Just take mushroom caps, stuff them with dressing, and bake them. I baked mine at 350°F for half an hour and that was all. The stuffing is crispier on the top, even if you stick a little piece of cheese in the middle. Fried onions on top are also a good addition. And unless it's a rather big mushroom cap, you need to pop the whole thing in your mouth. Just make sure it cools down a little bit first.


* I'm sorry I keep going back and forth between "stuffing" and "dressing". I have always called it both and used them interchangeably. Technically, it's my Nana's dressing, because it never goes into a turkey - in fact, that is anathema to my family, stuffing a bird with anything. But we also ate so much Stove Top growing up that I've become used to calling it stuffing. I'm not even sure what we call it locally - dressing is more traditionally Southern, and stuffing is more traditionally Northern. And of course, Maryland, being smack dab in the middle, seems to call it both. Native Marylanders specifically, what do you call your dressing/stuffing?

Anatomy of a Thanksgiving Dinner (or, I STILL have leftovers)

I know this is kind of late, but I've been so busy this last week, and only just had a lull today (don't worry, it'll pass). Since I didn't really share my Thanksgiving like so many of y'all did, I thought I'd take this time to post about some of the stuff that wound up on my and my family's plates (except, my niece, who has autism and will not eat anything but pizza. **SIGH**).

Let's go clockwise, shall we?



1. My fork - inedible.

2. Eastern Shore Cornbread - Not quite a Southern cornbread, not quite a Yankee cornbread, but a "light cornbread" because it is not savory and crumbly (Southern) and not sweet and cakelike (Northern). Nope, this one's kind of in the middle - a little sweet like a Northern one, a bit crumbly like a Southern one (apparently this is popular in the Upper South and Civil War border states, such as Maryland). I adapted this from the book Explore the Tastes of Maryland (Maryland Dietetic Association, 2002), with one big change - I replaced the milk with buttermilk, awww yeah!

3. Your standard pop-tube biscuit - I hardly finished it. But here's some advice: get one of those pop-tube croissants and wrap it around a piece of smoked salmon and a small slice of brie, then bake it for 10 minutes. Yummmm...

4. Balsamic Veggies and Portabellos - My sister made these and brought them along. I liked them. Very balsamic-y

5. Pomodori al gratin (baked tomatoes) - an antipasto that I made for the family. About a quarter of my ancestors are from Naples, where this recipe originates (I Googled it and all the recipes are in Italian; I linked above to one that I translated through Google). I felt the need to honor the ancestors. From one of my favorite cookbooks, Naples at Table by Arthur Schwartz (1998), which I originally bought for $25; I recently found it in Books-A-Million or Daedalus Books (one of those places) for about $8.

6. Louisiana Sweet Potato slice with brown sugar - I put it in too late, so it wasn't nearly as done as I wanted it. It should have stayed in a good hour and a half, minimum.

7. Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes - I got this recipe from Paula Deen's Lady & Sons Savannah Country Cookbook (1998), with some constant accessing of the internet. Ah, so lucky to have internet access while cooking. I originally screwed them up and whipped them until they were stringy and gooey (um, ick). So I gave up and took out of the trash the bag of Yukon Golds with the occasional green spot (cut off, yes), and did them right this time. Of course, a potato ricer or masher would be a good solution to that. I just bought the latter, used, with lots of other kitchen utensils, at at Ryan's Relics on Belair Road (love that place - they have a working upright Victrola for $50; you just have to find a head for it).

8. Jellied Cranberry Sauce, out of a can - Hey, I like it, alright? Though I did slow cook some with red wine, cinnamon, and oranges studded with cloves (recipe from Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook by Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann, 2005). It's going very well with the salmon that I bought for Thanksgiving but never used because we already had too goddamn much food as it was! (Oh, here's how I wound up preparing that salmon.) This is the first year I have even considered making a cranberry sauce. It's very tasty, but I still prefer the jellied kind a wee bit more.

9. Freshly steamed broccoli, next to a hunk of Classic Green Bean Casserole - Mom brought that. Again, I like it.

10. Another pomodoro al gratin (see #5), next to my grandmother's dressing, which we make every year. Very simple and tasty. I like it a lot because it's traditional and reminds me of her. We don't stuff our birds - nothing against it; we just don't. (To give credit where it's due - my sister made this, too)

11. French bread that I cut up to eat with #5 and 10, as well as some of that salami I got from Molinari's in Frisco and some cheese I got from the Wine Source (no, I wasn't also serving my damn finger).

12. Emeril's Funky Turkey - a little drier than in year's past, but everybody liked the flavor. The rest of it is becoming turkey soup at my parents' house, while a bit rests in my freezer waiting to be turned into something weird. For turkey instead of just turkey breast, I doubled the amount of brine, and substituted Emeril's Essence with Old Bay (duh). I also ran out of chili powder, so I had to use more Old Bay - oh well, I gladly made the sacrifice.

And that's about it. I must've made ten trips to the supermarket last week. This week? One. I no longer had the time, the money, the energy or the need to go.

Nana's Dressing

Maybe some would find it silly to commemorate someone who passed so long ago, but every January 22 I remember my ever-resilient grandmother, my Nana (we pronounced it "Nah-Nah," accent on the 1st syllable). Born in Little Italy in 1919, she was 100% napoletana. And she passed 17 years ago today. Wow, 17 years ago! Hard to imagine.

But she's still around in the little ways - most notably her food. Odd, but most of the Neapolitan, Campanian and otherwise Southern Italian food I have in my recipe kit actually don't come from her, but from my own research. The foods I most remember from her are good old American comfort food. One recipe I remember most fondly is her Thanksgiving dressing. She had a recipe for, oh, twelve to people. These days, Thanksgiving for my family requires half the amount. I made it for my landlords in California for Thanksgiving. And we still make it every year. So this is in Nana's memory, in what is certainly her first ever appearance in a blog. Wow, she'd be amazed at this technology we have today.

There are no specific serving sizes and no measurements on some things, so I am trying to estimate. [Items in brackets are mine]

- - - - -

Turkey Dressing [serves 4 to 8, depending on how much you like stuffing]

1 1/2 cups finely broken bread crumbs [I usually use unseasoned bread cubes these days]
1 cup diced celery [2 stalks]
1/2 cup chopped onion [about 1 large onion; we use yellow or Vidalia onion]
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. paprika [the paprika is important]
2 Tbsp. butter
enough water or broth to soften the mixture to a dough-like consistency [we eyeball it; usually about 2 cups]

Use HOT (Heated) Water or Broth. Chicken broth or Turkey broth are best to use. Put bread in huge bowl or pot. Pour heated liquid over bread and mix until like dough. Let sit. Put Butter in large frying pan and saute celery and onion until slightly brown (Just saute it). Add to bread mixture and add Paprika and Salt to desired taste.

Bake in 13" by 9" pan or 8" by 8" pan for 1/2 to 1 hour. Cover Last 10 minutes or so. If small amount i.e. Regular or 4 times recipe, use 8" by 8" pan or 10" by 10" pan and bake on 350 degrees for 30 to 45 minutes. Cover with aluminum foil the last 10 minues so the top doesn't burn. Just lightly brown the top.

Creamed Chipped Beef and Grits

I don't know why more people haven't done this, but creamed chipped beef and grits has to be my fave breakfast.

I have eaten creamed chipped beef my whole life. I just thought it was big everywhere, but no, outside of the military. And I've never been in the military so I don't know (they wouldn't want me anyway). Apart from the Stouffer's frozen creamed chipped beef (which tastes pretty good), I rarely have seen it outside of Bawlmer. In fact, I don't think I've seen it outside of Bawlmer. They certainly hadn't heard of it in California when I lived there. Whenever I asked if they'd heard of it, most people were like "What the hell is that?" Maybe if I called it "shit on a shingle" people would know what I was talking about.

My mother makes it with the local brand, Esskay.* She cooks it in butter, or a reasonable facsimile, adding milk and flour, until the edges curl. Other than salt, that's it. The recipe behind this link at About.com's Southern food website calls for onions, mushrooms, Cheddar cheese and sour cream, but I prefer mine much less fancy. Again, that's the only way I know it. Not that I wouldn't try it with the other stuff at some point.

Said recipe also calls for toast or rice. I have always eaten it on bread or toast if anything; my father prefers it on mashed potatoes. But only recently, thanks to my slightly unhealthy obsession with Paula's Home Cookin', have I thought to put it over grits. I love grits, but I admit I hadn't eaten much of them, er, it - I'm surprised I haven't seen it much around here, or maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. That is, I hadn't eaten much until I visited my cousin and his wife in Augusta a few years ago. She made cheese and grits for the girls and I had some. Yum! So I love the stuff. But I have little patience to do anything in the morning, so the quick grits is the only type you'll find in my kitchen cabinet. And it's so easy to make in the microwave! Merely put 3 T of quick grits to 3/4 cup of water or milk (I prefer milk - hey I wonder how cream woul make it taste?), stir and microwave for 4 minutes. Yes, I then mix in butter or a reasonable facsimile. And I do like mine thicker than not.

So there you have it: my favorite morning meal. I can't get enough of this stuff.

* Tried to put a link but their page is down right now. See if it's up yet at http://www.esskaymeat.com.

More Thanksgiving Mayhem!

Here I am, watching Ace of Cakes (can't get anymore Bawlamoronic on cable, food-wise at least) recovering from Thanksgiving dinner. Actually, it was Thanksgiving nibbling. My sister, mother and I are all the Thanksgiving cook, and with my father home from work (he runs his own bar) and my brother-in-law back for the weekend from his Army training, we have food to make for several people (including one other sister and my niece). The centerpiece was, of course, the turkey, marinated from 5:30 in the morning from a fabulous recipe from Emeril Lagasse -his Funky Turkey. It's a recipe I have been using for a few years, since I made Thanksgiving dinner with my landlady when I lived in California. I brought the recipe back to Maryland, and I still use it!

I only noticed as I started cooking that we had a veritable Atkins' Nightmare. Lots and lots and LOTS of starches and carbs. We are not a carb-counting family; we're closer to the Paula Deen school of cooking. But they were tasty carbs! Among them:

• Two variations of my Grandmother's (may she rest in peace) stuffing - the woman was 100% napolitana and yet the recipe I remember most of hers is her very un-Italian stuffing. Technically, because it never sees the inside of a bird, it's dressing and not stuffing - and we use the words interchangeably in our family. But oh well. My brother-in-law likes sausage in his stuffing. The rest of us prefer it plain.
• Ccornbread! Oh yum, cornbread! This recipe comes from a book by Baltimore chef John Shields, his Chesapeake Bay Cookery - a Bible of Maryland and Virginia cookin'. I made his Two O'Clock Club Corn Bread. Yum!
• Mashed sweet potatoes, a recipe from the Food Network. Not among the most exciting recipes I've had - it could've been more so. What I did was basically roast sweet potatoes in the oven, in their skins, for about an hour at 375 degrees. Then I peeled them, added butter, orange juice, salt and brown sugar (the original called for maple syrup, but I wanted brown sugar), and mashed it all together. Then I topped it with marshmallows and more brown sugar, and baked it again for abot 375. Everyone else liked it more than I did - maybe I was just too full by that time.

We never even got around to making regular mashed potatoes, we had so much to eat! And I was hoping to make shrimp and grits - I've had alot of each, but never together, which is more of a Deep Southern thing (not much shrimp and grits up here in the Shallow end).

I was stuffed, and I hadn't even had any turkey yet! And to make matters worse, we had conveniently forgotten any vegetable dishes (well, other than any type of potato). We almost made that world-famous green bean casserole eveyone loves, but it wasn't meant to be. We are a family that procrastinates, and didn't get the turkey in the oven until 3:30! Nothing wrong with eating late, mind you. And the family was happy and saisfied, which is the only really important thing anyway.

Still, we did get around to the turkey about 7:30. No lunch, no dinner, just constant noshing and nibbling all day. Ugh, I feel stuffed. But wait, do I smell pie now?