Chef Bennieman

It has come to my attention that my own fate has potentially had something to do with me developing this cooking project. Well, sort of. I seems my father got wind of what I was doing, and sent me a short line of encouragement as well as a small token that he said he would like to offer for a “historical perspective”. My jaw gaped open upon opening the pic to find myself staring at a child version of me cooking. About 5 years old I reckon. In the kitchen in the house on Hawthorne Road. Cracking eggs that I had collected from the chicken coop in our back yard. They were probably still warm. Yes, a chicken coop. My parents were not your typical Heights parents, and had a streak of back to the land in them. It seems I therefore was destined for these things for some time.

Oh, and one other thing. I’ve been asked to reveal for the world to know that my father, contrary to popular belief, did in fact have a great to deal to offer my culinary education. At a very young age he taught me how to make Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and (frozen) Broccoli “Barbarian Style” as my mother used to call it. In other words all just mixed up in the pot and together like pig slop. Often eaten out of the pot I might add, if she wasn’t looking. Good stuff. Wish I had some now…

AFMFL Dinner Report - #1

A good first night indeed. I cannot thank everyone enough for making it such a great evening. X for helping me cook and keeping me from going somewhat insane. Davina for helping with assorted last minute tasks and always offering a cheerful smile. Craig for stepping in when necessary to shake a smoking pan. Joe for keeping his new best friend Dim Sum occupied and happy with lots of human love. X’s cousin Bird, for running to get more ice at 7-11. And even A, for coming all the way over to dinner even though he has been quite ill and wasn’t feeling so good the previous days. Thanks to all of you for making it a great first dinner in what will hopefully be many.

Originally it was only going to be for Craig and Davina. With X and Joe, that meant 5 altogether. Ended up at 9 when X’s cousin Bird stopped by with his wife and Joyce and A were able to make it last minute. As stated it went off a bit late, but mostly good. The main dish chicken spaghetti turned out pretty much well, a bit on the soupy side. Not that I had any. It had chicken, pork and beef in it, none of which I eat. But it looked pretty. Had to instill from the beginning a recurring theme of the project which puts my guests preferences and concerns first before my own. My grandmother Helen (also known as Yaya for those who know her) always prepared what you wanted and never had an opinion. Therefore making something everyone loved trumped me actually wanting to eat it. Always thought it was a noble way to approach feeding folks.

The chicken spaghetti took a real long time to prepare, but that’s no surprise. I remember it always taking my mom the greater part of a day. But that’s also because you have to prepare it almost like a lasagna and then it must sit for 4 hours minimum before baking.

The beans were a great hit, especially with A, who kept getting more and more. J I’m thinking it had something to do with the bit of salt pork fried up with the shallots.

The soup rocked indeed, and even though it was served in water glasses, it was slurped with abandon. Lots of folks seemed to enjoy dipping their hot bread in it. I guess since the soup was cold, the juxtaposition of hot and cold is always good.

The mushrooms, while simple were great. Let’s just try not to set off the fire alarm when preparing them next time kaa.

Moroccan salad was interesting. Never made anything like that before. Sort of a kitchen sink of sorts. It looked pretty.

The pie was nearly all devoured. Clearly a winner, and the butter instead of shortening in the pie crust resulted in more of a shortbread crust which was thicker and more substantial.

10 Bits of Wisdom

One dinner down. Only 49 to go. The ship that is my culinary adventure has been launched and has set sail for her destination on the rosy horizon. Only thing is that it sorta resembled a Bass Tracker than the swank yacht I had envisioned. But nonetheless it has begun. The food was enjoyed heartily by the guests, and that’s the important part. An intimate evening for two turned into a few more, which is good considering the ridiculous amount of food I had prepared. I’d like to make some observations. Ten to be precise. After all, this whole project is one big learning curve. Improving my cooking skills, but more importantly learning to throw a good dinner party—two separate goals. I’ve always been a big fan of incremental improvements and linear progression, so I guess the best way forward is to document the good things and the bad things, take note and move on.

1) Multi-tasking in cooking is not my forte. Let’s admit that and get it out there and over with. Much improvement could be made here. Not counting the pie which I had made most of the night before, I began cooking for last night’s launch even dinner at 10:30AM. Yes, a full 8 ½ hours before stated “dinner time”. Oh, yeah. And we didn’t eat until more like 8PM, which meant I was an hour late. No biggie, but clearly I gotta figure out how to gracefully pace and plan things so that they roll off like a tidy assembly line instead of in fits and starts. This means a lot more prep-work should be involved in the future. Who the hell really knows how long it takes to cut up all these ingredients all ahead of time? But the more mis en place the kitchen is, the easier the cooking part is. No servants in my house except sometimes my boyfriend, should he be looking to do something. Definitely screws things up when you’re trying to cut up stuff in the middle of cooking something else and then you have to keep running back between the stove and chopping board and you end up with a half burnt pot of this and still unfinished chopped up pile of that. So I shall endeavor not only to prepare ingredients so they’re ready to go, but also try to actually put a timeline of how I’m going to cook each dish so they all end up being ready effortlessly (yeah right—whatever) at the appointed time.

2) Make the bread to be done more than an hour ahead of dinner so it doesn’t hog the oven when other things might need going in and also so it can cool and is easier to cut. Enough said.

3) Make a playlist of music and have it already worked out so folks aren’t forced to watch crappy Thai TV soap operas that happen to be on or listen to whatever some guest wants to pull up on Youtube. Ambience is clearly affected by music and keeps things flowing.

4) Get some easy snacks out for folks on the table when people are having their drinks and waiting for dinner to be served. None were had and therefore some people were starving, especially after the dinner didn’t start until late.

5) Recipes can be adjusted. Follow your instincts. When you think the chicken spaghetti has enough broth in it but the recipe insists that it should be enough to cover the top layer, maybe meet somewhere in the middle. The soupiness of it didn’t detract from it per se, and might have made it easier for my Asian friends to palate (i.e. less rich/dense), but it was still a bit much liquid for me.

6) Do not set off the smoke detector in the room which is connected to the building’s fire alarm monitoring system. The maintenance man knocking unexpectedly and then coming in with a ladder to reset the damn thing really puts a buzz kill over a dinner. Especially when said building employee then has clear sight of my explicitly banned but otherwise dear four legged daughter Dim Sum. Hope he didn’t report her to the powers that be, or the puppy police will be on us! And all this from some smoking butter when sautéing the mushrooms. Looking back on it, it was a bit of a hoot, but not cute, nonetheless.

7) Hey buy some plates, bowls and glasses fool. Pretty much ran out of everything. Dessert was served on paper plates, and soup out of small water glasses. So much for presentation. Still tasted good, but still. Duh.

8) Perhaps making a point of NOT slicing the side of your hand open with a crappy knife so that blood runs down your arm. OK, so good knives are on the way, but was it really the best way to crush a clove of garlic banging it with the flattened knife, when I had just bought a perfectly good stone mortar and pestal? Use the things you’ve got mary! Blood sucks. And wet bandaids aren’t cute. Thankfully this was hours before anyone arrived, so I was free to cuss myself in solitude.

9) Take note that a dinner at the last minute can always get bigger with the addition of a few more guests. It didn’t cause a problem last night but still, worth remembering.

10) Never ever underestimate the wonderful feeling you get when your good friends are being happily fed with food they really enjoy. It’s all about the food yo.

Let the Games Begin!

Well, I guess it's too late to back out now. The response from the folks I've informed about the project so far has been nothing less than ebullient. At this point still having a hard time discerning exactly who is excited about the actual project and who is just psyched about the prospect of home cooked free food, but I digress. :)

Have gotten into high gear and done a lot of brainstorming about different dinners and topics, themes, holidays, etc. I won't give away too much as I would prefer this to be a slowly unfolding flower if you'll excuse the saccharine metaphor. I can already tell that this is going to be an extreme amount of fun, at least for me. The countdown has begun in earnest for a week and a half already and I have yet a single dinner to show for it, so I thought I'd better get on the ball as my dear grandmother would say.

As mentioned, I've had to order the cookbook that the project is based upon from the good folks at Amazon who incidentally have taken my cash but failed to get the thing in a box much less in the mail to me yet. They claim it should be departing "any day now". The good news is a lot of the other items I ordered together with it are already on the way and most likely gonna be starting to arrive next week. So I'll have new toys to play with. Yeah for that.

Tomorrow evening shall be the opening event: a very intimate and small gathering of two close friends who I trust to go easy on me as I do my first test run on them. I was lucky enough to find a scanned digital copy of the entire cookbook on the interweb and this has allowed me to start in advance of me holding the real deal in my hands. Don't tell the folks at the NYT or I'm sure they'll sick their lawyers on me.

A sneak preview of tomorrow's menu:

Spicy Tomato Salad Moroccan-style
Cold Zucchini Soup
Haricots Verts a la Paysanne Landaise
Sauteed Mushrooms
My Mother's Chicken Spaghetti*
Sour Cream Lime Pie
Fresh baked boule (my own, not from the NYT Cookbook)

*note this is the exact name of the recipe, so this refers to Craig Claiborne's mom, not my own. It's interesting to note that I chose this because my very own mother is rather famous for her chicken spaghetti, so there's some connection here, but just wanted to clarify for the record.

Trying to get the pie together tonight and although bought everything I needed for the dinner (and more!) at the grocery this afternoon, they failed to have ready made pie crust. I was trying to cut corners and the universe obviously wanted to voice it's displeasure. Not a problem to make by scratch until I realized I had no shortening. So I did what Julia Child's would do: I used butter. Sure it can't hurt, right?

Pictures and other observations on the launch event shall follow tomorrow I'm sure, so stay tuned......and wish me luck!

Southern Food

Craig Claiborne, upon whose cookbook this project, and by extension this blog is based was a boy raised in the south. Sunflower County, Mississippi to be exact. And in reading up on him and his childhood, it made me reflect on how growing up in the south affected the way that I saw food. I was born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. I figure it's mostly referred to as the "mid-South", whatever that means. I mean, don't get me wrong. It's squarely what I would categorize in the South, but it's not the deep south of Spanish moss draped live oak trees leading up to the plantation house that you would find in Louisiana or Mississippi. But nonetheless, I was brought up a southern boy.

Food is a central force in the south, and manages to run pretty much every social interaction. Things revolve around food. When you go to someone's house the first thing they wanna do is feed you. Food brings people together. Food is there when we celebrate. Food is also rolled out in copious amounts when we mourn. And specifically what you eat and how you eat it reflects very much on your place in society.

I can't say I was raised in some high-brow social circles, but then again I wouldn't say I was forced to live in back woods squalor either. My life growing up had a bit of everything in it and allowed me to see how folks of all walks of life viewed and shared their food and their lives. I think your beliefs about food reflect a lot about how you were raised and the experiences you had in life. The South very much influenced me in that way.

There's a lot more about Craig Claiborne's experiences growing up that I have in common with. Although from a very different time period (that of my grandparents), there are still lots of issues that he dealt with and (consequently helped shape him into who he was to become) that I would say were part of my life as well.

This project is about food, and friends and my life. But I'm going to use it as a way to learn about him and his life as well, in a parallel fashion. You'll learn more about him as I do. :)

The Project Begins

So it's been about 24 hours since I formally got this little idea off the ground and I figured I'd better order the cookbook already or I would quickly find myself in a pickle. Amazon order placed and supposedly en route across the wide wide sea to yours truly. How convenient this world is that we live in.

I was getting a bit worried really and had to get things moving, lest I put the cart in front of the horses on this one. I've gotten nothing but really positive response from the friends whom I've told about the project. Indeed I might have to remind people that not everyone will be able to be invited to the first dinner, whenever that might be. :)

And speaking of the first dinner, I guess I shall have to rely on recipes available online that are reprinted from the original cookbook until such time as the hard copy of the sacred tome arrives in the post (late January). I actually went quite overboard on above said Amazon.com order, buying quite the number of things which will come in very handy during this year's marathon of cuisine. Most of it consists of things I have wanted for a very long time but haven't bought due to the fact that they are not available here, or if they are they are so ridiculously overpriced.

Knives. *sigh* :) I shall finally at long last have real knives for my kitchen. And hopefully I'll never have to buy another knife. I splurged and went for Henckels new "Twin Cuisine" line. Got a really good deal on them actually. Got the 8" Chef Knife, 6" Utility Knife and 4" Paring Knife, which came in a set as well as an 8" Bread Knife which is serrated. I'm a total newbie to all things cutlery, but I quite like that these knives have what's known as a full horizontal tang and are traditionally forged with cold dipped steel process from a single piece of metal. Yeah, baby! If anyone has seen my heinously dangerous utility drawer in my kitchen where all my current crappy knives and tools live, you will be pleased to know that I also went ahead and purchased a wall mounted magnet strip to put these babies out of harms way and to keep them sharp. This makes me very happy. I like looking at things on display. Anyone who's been in my kitchen will know this given the amount of dried foods and pantry items that I have in glass canisters.

I also have added to the heavy cast iron family in my kitchen. I already had a 6" old school cast iron skillet that my mother hand carried in her suitcase last year over here for me, god bless her. But I didn't have a big Dutch Oven. Now I do. Cast iron and enameled 6 quart dutch oven. I didn't go for the Le Creuset for all you purists out there. I just couldn't pay that much for a dang pot. But she sure is a beauty with a gorgeous Caribbean Blue enamel. Same company that my cast iron skillet is from: Lodge (a company that's been cranking out cast iron cookware in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee since William McKinley was in the White House). Again, hope this purchase will outlast me as I don't intend on buying another one.

That pretty much wraps up my kitchen for the most part. I'd love a new cookware set in general like All-Clad or something but I'll let that wait for the time being and make do with what I have.

The rush from pushing the "purchase" button is wearing off, and I reckon I'd better get back to the "real world". But rest assured my loyal followers, the mission has been officially launched now and the wheels are in motion to bring it all together. Let us reflect on my loot being packed by the little elves at Amazon and put on a big plane one day soon to arrive in my arms. Safe travels!!!

The Mission

Well, here I am. It's January 13th, 2010. The new year has arrived and it's newness is already fading. Didn't bother to make any resolutions. Never tend to keep them or even remember them anyway, so why bother? I don't even know why I'm doing this. I've never had a blog in my life. Not really sure how to do it, so bear with me. It's gonna be a learning curve.

But why am I here you might ask. Well, that's simple. I need to document something. A project of sorts. Something I've thought up and decided I needed to do. Or try to do anyway.

Food: I love it. It's a passion for me. To cook it. To eat it. To share it with good friends. I recently was struck off guard by how much a movie I saw called "Julie & Julia" spoke to me. And somehow it planted a seed in me. And here I am.

So this morning I sent out the following message to 77 of my friends:

January 13 at 9:54am

Good morning. The reason I’m writing you this morning is to share with you a bit of a project I’m working on. As many of you are aware, I have in recent years taken a rather unnatural interest in cooking. Many of you have tasted something I made or even just read about the endless things that come out of my kitchen and suggested I should start a café or bakery or something. I’m sorry but I just can’t do that—take something I love like cooking and turn it into just another job. Not right now. The bottom line is that I just really love food, and I love sharing it with my friends.

I recently saw an amazing film called Julie & Julia. It is a story about a girl who makes a personal project out of cooking through every recipe in Julia Child’s classic cookbook “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in one year and writing a blog about it. I loved the idea that you could take a rather impossible sounding task and make a really fun adventure out of it. But it wouldn’t be very rewarding to simply copy this (arguably noble) feat of culinary artistry. I need a challenge of my own. Something that suits me and is my own thing.

And let’s be honest folks: I just don’t think I could live a year on French food (no offense to Julia or French cuisine). At any rate, with me eating only seafood and not meat, I wouldn’t be able to complete such a task, so why try? So I needed to adapt this and come up with something better. The year has already started. The clock is ticking. What to do?

Here’s the challenge that I’ve chosen to take. There are 50 weeks left in the year. I intend to have 50—yes, 50!—dinner parties for my friends before the year is up. They might not happen every week and some weeks might have more than one, but 50 must be completed before December 31st. All of the food will come from another amazing person in the history of American food: Craig Claiborne. And the recipes shall all come from his 1961 classic which has become a staple in homes across America for generations: The New York Times Cookbook. 800 pages and over 2000 recipes. No way to get through all of them, nor do I wish to. But 50 dinners shall allow us to know hundreds of dishes throughout the course of the year.

Some dinners might be small intimate affairs and others large banquets. They might be served on paper plates on the sofa with others being formal black tie haute affairs. It’s quite possible a number of them will center around themes: a particular type of food, a color, a movie, a particular era in history, etc. Sometimes costumes might be involved. Booze/wine will always be involved. Some rare dinners might even have performances, or multimedia features.

You received this email because you are part of the group of people I have come to call my dear friends. That means over the course of the next year, you will most likely receive a number of invitations to my house for dinner. And therefore you all will be part of this project. Attendance will never be required, but you might be requested to RSVP in some cases. My place ain’t that big, especially for sit down meals at a table, so I doubt if each one will have more than 4-5 people max. But I shall make the rounds and make sure that everyone has a chance to participate. I have wonderful friends, and in this way I can make sure I see all of them and spend a lot of time with them in what will hopefully be an incredible marathon of dinner parties.

I’m going to keep a record of the project, which I’ve entitled “A Feast Made for Laughter”, taking the name from the autobiography of the cookbook’s author, Craig Claiborne. By the way if you don’t know about him, by the end of the year, you shall. He’s a southern queen from Mississippi who was brought up in the Great Depression and after traveling the world in the Navy ended up becoming one of the most powerful people in the world of food as Food Editor of the New York Times from 1957-1988. His friends were among the most influential people in the 20th century.

At the end of the year, hopefully with a heart full of great memories and a belly full of even greater food, I want us all to be able to look back and say that for 2010 we enjoyed life. So here we go my dear friends. I haven’t worked out any of the details, but wanted to give you a head’s up to know what’s in store. And who knows, once all this is said and done maybe I’ll write a book about it and get on Oprah. :) Bon Appétit!