O'Gara's Jambalaya or laissez les bons temps rouler

So I was thumbing through the recipes the other day and I found one for jambalaya.  I actually have a very good recipe for jambalaya given to me by my cousin who lived in New Orleans.  I love it so much the printed out email is crackly from greasy water damage.  I don’t really need to look at it, honestly.  She gave it to me seven years ago… and it’s a favorite dish to cook at this time of year or in the last waning days of summer.  My favorite part of that recipe is the suggestion to have a beer while cooking it.

But this is the recipe that I found in Gram’s box.

O’Gara’s Jambalaya
(Only Gram would have an Irish version of jambalaya.  Though to be fair, O’Gara is specifically Diane O’Gara from 1972)
1 lb. sausage
1 lb. cooked ham
2 c. cooked shrimp (or frozen fresh)
1 clove garlic minced
2 tsp salt
2 Tbsp. butter
1 onion chopped
1 bunch shallots (minced with tops)
1 green pepper chopped
4 tomatoes chopped and cut down
2 c. rice (vary as to occasion)
3 c. water

Brown sausage.  Cut sausage and ham into pieces.  Melt butter in heavy saucepan or Dutch oven.  Add onion, garlic, green pepper, shallots, and cook 10 min over medium heat, stirring frequently.  Reduce heat to low and add tomatoes, sausage, and ham.  Stir until all ingredients are blended.  Add shrimp, water, rice – judge for amount of rice needed – salt.  Stire 1-2 times.  Cook slowly!   1 hour or until water is absorbed and rice is tender.

I adjusted this because I make jambalaya often enough.  Firstly, I used expensive ham to avoid nitrates.  I eat ham like twice a year, so I figured whatever.  I used Andouille sausage because that’s what I always use for jambalaya.  Then rather than use butter, I just cooked the veggies in the juice/oil from the sausage.  Instead of salt, I used a Cajun seasoning mix I had.  I also don’t much like rice, so I cut it in half.  It’s still cooking slowly (!) now… but smells sooo good.

This time of year, actually, is the reason I have any mind to cook jambalaya.  After Hurricane Katrina, I started hosting Mardi Gras parties.  It was my first committed effort to hosting theme parties… and also a desire to take my career in fundraising home.  The first year was a pretty decent affair, with food from NOLA.  The next year I took the party up about five notches, when my cousin’s husband brought his band to play in our living room. 

We charged a cover and sent the money to support jazz musicians still recovering from Katrina.  I had intentions of growing it… but I moved, life changed… and I got sidetracked by other things.

But that party in 2007 was a helluva party.  One very special night I will always remember on so many levels.  Probably the highlight of my life at the amazing apartment I had in Washington Park, the highlight of time with that group of friends, and a memory of my grandmother... wearing a boa.

I thought of this photograph the minute I saw that recipe for jambalaya.  I thought of how she came to my party, supported my evening, supported my cousin’s band, and… even at 86 years, she liked a night out.

As I was thinking about what I would write in this blog, I heard her telling me – as she often did – that her grandchildren and children made life interesting.  She did say that or some other version of that phrase often.  I often nodded and shrugged, not convinced my life was that interesting.  There was a variation to that statement about how she learned things through us.  I thought about that statement and how willing and appreciative she was to come to our parties, our concerts, our plays, our graduations, our homes across the state… the country… a book signing, a fundraiser, a new home, to see a new baby, go to a museum, a garden, a favorite restaurant… and always with such joy and gratitude.  There were often hand written notes of that appreciation the week after.  Or a newspaper clipping… because she was always thinking of us, always proud in her own way of what we did… and glad to be a part of it.

When we cleaned out the pieces from her house a few weeks ago, there was a newspaper from 1996 folded up with the pictures of our little Olson family.  It was from a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which I played Helena.  She kept that all those years.  And I know there was something from all of us, whether it was a program, a recipe, a photograph, or something with which to remember a small adventure she took to learn more about the world and the world of her grandchildren.

A phrase that is often used in Mardi Gras is “Laissez les bons temps rouler (let the good times roll).”  I think Gram did that with every day of her life.  She let them roll with every patronage to her offspring’s homes, performances, and celebrations.  And they keep on rolling.

Rice Pilaf, Sunday Dinners, and Mashed Potatoes

I had intentions of making a decadent sweet yesterday to bring to a New Year’s Eve party.  But then the end of the year just plum wore me out and I decided to be under the covers before midnight and skipped the party.  I also skipped the baking, knowing full well I didn’t want to wake up on the first day of a new year with a whole pan of chocolate to myself.

I did, however, have a whole day of time to myself… so it seemed rather a waste not to pull a card out of the box.  There was a snow day on Sunday, when I decided to roast a chicken so I’d have some lean protein to start off the new year… as well as the bones with which to make my own chicken stock.  So I skipped passed the recipes with chocolate chips and sugar and shortening and started looking through chicken recipes to see what would match my kitchen’s stores.

Then, as the smell of my crock pot steeping chicken bones, carrots, and onions filled the house, I found an index card with very teacher like cursive writing in red ink with the recipe for Rice Pilaf.

My mom has always made rice pilaf.  Not the Near East stuff you get out of a box with lots and lots of sodium.  Okay… she did start doing that later on… but it’s still a pretty basic staple from childhood family meals.  It’s also something that reminds me of Sunday dinners at my grandparent’s house.

I don’t know how long this was a tradition in my youth.  But I do have very vivid memories of going to church at St. Mary’s and then staying at my grandparents to have dinner.  And I was little.  Of this I am most sure because I was seated at the corner of the table next to my grandfather’s chair, in the not so baby high chair with olive green, orange, and yellow 1960’s patterned flowers on the vinyl seat.  I was probably one of – if not the only child seated at the table then.  Maybe there was another baby… but if I was at the table, it meant the little table and chairs did not leave the attic to share with my other little cousins.  And I got to sit next to my grandfather.

I remember this rice pilaf.  I remember dishes like lamb and maybe roast pork or some other rich meat.  There was my uncle Andy’s broccoli.  Maybe some green beans.  And baked potatoes.  I would watch my grandfather with awe as he practiced the ritual of cutting open his potato and scoop out the innards to go on his plate.  He added butter and then salt and pepper with the tiny clear glass shakers, then mashed it all with a fork.  The skins he saved and passed to the opposite side of the table for my grandmother.  I was impressed by the artistry of this ritual… but also by my grandmother for eating the uglier skins.  And maybe that’s why I like potato skins… because they were a gift from my grandfather.

So we apparently served rice and potato at the same meal.  Or maybe the meals all just blend together in the weird little box of images from my childhood memory.  But there is definitely something about smelling those tablespoons of butter melting and browning the rice that makes me think of an electric fry pan in my grandmother’s kitchen, being served in a Corning casserole dish around that table in the dining room, as I sat in that higher chair in the seat of honor next to my grandfather.

The recipe card is not, apparently, my grandmother’s hand.  Her hand gives credit to Ann Deroches?  This blog is going to need an appendix of recipe sources soon.  

Rice Pilaf

2 Tbsp butter
1/3 c. thin spaghetti, broken in small pieces
¾ c. white rice
¼ c. diced onion
¼ c. diced celery
1 ½ c. chicken broth
salt and pepper to taste
½ c. toasted almonds

Melt butter over moderate heat.  Cook onion and celery until translucent.  Add spaghetti bits and rice and brown for 3-5 minutes.  Add broth and salt and pepper and bring to a full boil.

Cover pot and reduce heat to simmer and cook for 18 minutes.  Fluff with a fork and add almonds.

It didn’t taste exactly as I remember… probably because I used my own chicken stock which had no salt.  But… the smell of the butter melting, the softness of the onions with the rice… it was very similar to what I remember about sitting rosy cheeked next to my grandfather on a Sunday afternoon, watching him mash a potato. 

A Little More About Slop

I feel badly that Slop did not get its just desserts last weekend.  It was a bit of an afterthought to my manic weekend, when I hastily wrote my blog in order to claim it accomplished for the end of Sunday.

In truth, Slop does deserve a vignette of its own… and not just as the footnote of weirdness and a supper club menu.  Slop is, afterall, a Brennan family tradition.  Well… sort of.

Anyway, I decided to make it again.  Mostly because I’m trying to empty out my refrigerator this weekend and I had the pineapple, cherries, and whipping cream to use.  So why not make some more and actually take pictures this time?

As I mentioned, my only real memory of having it myself was at one of my grandmother’s birthday celebrations, when many of these ‘traditions’ were placed on a spring buffet in the dining room.  Never you fear, I will explain some more of those in essays to come.  But this was both amusing… and kind of a flop.  I think the whipping cream wasn’t whipped and just added… so it was really, really sloppy and unappealing.

But I revisit this intriguing recipe not merely as a way to give it a more just due, but to reflect on the fact that some of these ‘traditional’ recipes come from frugality.

It is something that is frequently laughed at now.  Something that is amusing in the retrospect of my mother and her siblings.  But you figure, this family had to live off the income of my grandfather (and he was very enterprising, not to mention HARD working - but just one man).  This family consisted of seven kids and four adults.  Not to mention continual visits from cousins of various degrees and other children in the neighborhood.  Slop was undoubtedly an easy way to satisfy the sweet tooths of many a child who settled in one of the kitchen red chairs at Mt. Pleasant Ave.

I think about how they made it work when I am just one person contemplating how I can splurge on an iPod or a nice pair of shoes… and I think wow, they had seven pairs of feet for whom to buy shoes.

When I sat down with my grandmother last spring to go through some of the pictures, every once in a while she would point to a dress and say she got it from a friend of my great aunt Marga or some other friend of the family.  It was kind of humbling and equally admirable to hear her talk about that… especially when it was pointed out in my absolute favorite picture of her and my grandfather.

But the thing is… you look at this picture and you see it doesn’t matter what she’s wearing, or that this bar is in the basement of a three decker haphazardly decorated to hide the fact it’s a cellar.  What takes my breath away every single time I look at this picture and several other pictures of them together is how much love there is between them.  And that, a lesson I am feeling leak into my soul quite a bit this year, is a wealth that is very very simple to attain… and yet one we overlook so often.

So back to Slop aka Rice Delight.  I didn’t type out the recipe before.  Here it is in simplicity.   

Rice Delight
(the parenthetical notes are hand-written on a weathered and somewhat dingy typed recipe card – mis-spelling of Marshmellow intentionally kept)
½ c. uncooked rice
½ c. sugar
Whipped cream (1/2 pt all purpose)
Marshmellow fluff (1 jar – which I discovered is SMALL jar)
Crushed pineapple (small can drained)
maraschino cherries (6 or 8 cut up)

Chill

(Additional handwritten instructions on the back)
Heat 2 ½ cups water, dash salt.  Add ½ cup regular rice when boiling (cook on low heat for 20min).  Stire rice after coming to boil.  Cover and simmer on low heat until tender.  Drain.  Stir in sugar, pineapple (drained) + marshmallow fluff when warm.  Chill until cold.  Add whipped cream and cherries.

It is simple and pretty basic to make.  A very good thing to make life sweeter.  But isn’t it the most basic and simple things that make life sweet?  Not to mention,  with whipped cream (REAL whipped cream – none of that squirts from a can crap) and cherries on top, how can you go wrong?

Recipes of the Weird or Adventures in Kugel and Slop

In spite of it being the thesis of this blog, I am continuously fascinated by how making my way through recipes my family has eaten and continues to eat, I stumble upon bits of history.  And sometimes history no one has thought to talk about for several years… because the food is as much a piece of the present, why question how it got to be tradition?

Indeed, the regularity of a few dishes makes me forget that it is odd we serve something… like noodle kugel at our Irish/French Canadian Catholic Christmas feast.  And Easter feast for that matter.  I think I’ve been aware it is a traditional Jewish dish for a while – maybe not always – but long enough to know that it isn’t… well… as logical as boiled dinner or meat pies.  But whatever, we do have a lot of varied dishes at each and every one of our holidays.  We have a lot of good cooks.  Cooks who like to venture outside of the comfort zone. 

My grandmother definitely set the bar for that one.  Last week when I made the dressing in her kitchen and was looking for the bread crumb grinder in all the drawers, I found a whole drawer of cookbooks in that pantry closet.  So many many cookbooks (in addition to the recipe cards I make my way through now).  Some were just binders of magazine clippings.  Things that may have been foreign to our heritage… but are now typical entries in the sweets category.  

But kugel?  There isn’t a Jewish cookbook in that drawer.  And, it is something that amused my cousin’s husband on his first Christmas feast… and provoked a conversation that inspired my December supper club theme.  That family dish you have every year but have no idea why or where on earth it comes from.

So I made noodle kugel… or as my grandmother’s recipe card says, Noodle Pudding (which is pretty much a translation of kugel).  This dish is not my grandmother’s recipe.  It came to us from my aunt… but has been around so long I forgot (or maybe never knew) the reason why.  A quick conversation with my mother today reminded me that my aunt was married to someone from a Lithuanian family… and the big mystery was solved without a lot of hoopla.

Anyway, it is definitely not a typical Irish or French dish.  It definitely has that Eastern European quality of lots of sour cream and butter.  My grandmother’s recipe card calls for Velveeta, but the idea of touching Velveeta makes me gag, so I substituted a package of cream cheese and half a container of ricotta.   My milk had also turned a little past a decent aroma, so I substituted almond milk.  It didn’t make the flavor suffer one bit.  These substitutions also didn’t really do much to make it healthier – because did I mention a whole STICK of butter.  

Noodle Pudding (Kugel)

½- ¾ lb egg noodles (one typical package)
1 16 oz. large curd cottage cheese
½ small package velveeta cheese (which I did not use.  Blech)
1 c. sour cream
¼ lb melted butter
Cook noodles as directed and slice or grate cheese and mix with other ingredients.  Pour into greased 9x13 pan.  Then mix 4 eggs (beaten), plus ½ c sugar, 1 ½ cups milk, 4 tsp vanilla.  Pour over first mixture.  Coat heavily with cinnamon and sugar.  Bake 1 ¼ hour in 350° oven.  Bake about 1 hour then shut off oven and leave in oven for 10-15 minutes.  Freezes well (also good cold)

Optional: Eliminate sugar, add more velveeta (really?  Gross)  for less dessert like taste.  Or add 1 box raisins to mixture.

This was a huge hit at the dinner table.  Not that I’m shocked, really.

And seeing that the theme of dinner was weird traditions, I thought I would take out a weird dessert. – something that we don’t have regularly, but is somewhat legendary.  There was an ill-fated attempt at one of my grandmother’s birthday parties a few years back.  I don’t remember thinking it all too appetizing.  But I figured I would challenge myself with a classic recipe of the 1950’s Brennan household, affectionately known as Slop.  

Sounds appealing, no?  Yeah, I pulled out the typed recipe card and laughed at myself for deciding to subject my guests to this after dinner concoction.  I mean… I’m the one who refused to use Velveeta, but sure, why not Fluff?

It is actually a pretty easy recipe.  Basically, you cook the rice, add the fluff and pineapple.  Let it chill out in the fridge.  Whip up some cream and add cherries.  It looks like rice pudding and the weirdness had a lot of hesitant first bites (myself included).  But, there were several second helpings… enough that the bowl was almost empty when I cleared all the dishes at evening’s end.  Go figure.  It was indeed delightful.

 

 Not really the best picture of the finished product, as the whipped cream decided to reflect the flash in the most blinding way, but it is actually kind of pretty with the cherries.  One could almost say festive for the holidays.