AUNTIE ARWEN'S NEWSLETTER
APRIL, 2005

Well, here we are again. I am going to really really try now to get a newsletter out once a month. It sure makes it easier posting it to the website, and not to individually e-mail it out to everybody. Most folks have batch excluders, or get so much spam coming in that anything remotely looking like spam gets chucked into the virtual black hole, er, trash bin. If you’re like me, you do a global "delete" on anything SpamKiller (or whatever else you use to filter out spam) collects. There might be legit e-mails in the stack of dreck, but I don’t have time for sifting through a coupla thousand suggestive, lurid, drug-peddling, highly misspelled urgent business opportunities, the phishing attempts, and the perennial Nigerian prince’s widow who wants to transfer money stateside. So in lieu of e-mailing a gazillion individual copies of this deathless prose, we’re putting it on the website for you to access at your leisure. And choice.

Computers. Either you love ’em or you hate ’em. Yin and yang, black or white, up thumb or down thumb (thinking of the Circus Maximus and the Roman love of massive entertainment). There’s vacuuming cat hair out of the keyboard (yes, it’s shedding time), finding out that your laptop suddenly doesn’t want to save to floppy after having done same a zillion times before....but usually turning it off, letting it think about it, and then waking it up again seems to cure the problem. Even a machine needs a "time out corner" every so often, I guess.

Auntie has a new used laptop, which is smarter than some people I know. Unfortunately, the previous user must have spilled some sugared beverage on the keyboard, because the "control" button sticks, likewise the left arrow key on the right side of the keyboard. But soon I will be seeing Mike, my computer hardware fixit geek, and he’ll make everything better. Thank heavens he loves Auntie’s organic coffee beans and various spice and herb blends. Mike works out of his central New Jersey home as Keltic Consulting. My webmaster, of course, is Tom Hufford at www.crystal-owl.com. It is soooo nice having talented computer geeks (and I use "geek" as an honorific!) who will take the time to fix the imponderable with sometimes creative and wild applications or approaches. It’s all a big mystery to me, though.

Spices and herbs, however, are another story. Annnd it’s April (actually today it’s 30 March, but it feels like April!).

Spring. Fishing season begins on April 1. Auntie loves to fish, and she loves to eat fish, too. That’s one reason why she has a varied batch of fish blends. Sometimes I simply get out a gallon size Ziplock baggie, toss in a cup of flour, a cup of yellow cornmeal, a tablespoon or so of Heavy Creel Balsamic Fish Rub, about 1/8 c table grind black pepper and the same amount of salt, mix it up, and I have a ready-made instant fish flouring apparatus. Toss in your fillets or butterflied fish (either caught by you, or purchased at your local fish store), seal the baggie, and then roll it around in your hands until the fish is coated. Then toss it into bubbling melted butter in your skillet (I use a cast iron skillet and unsalted butter. Oleo does not cut it.) Use enough butter; skimping on that is not the way to a hedonistic piscine experience. Then I saute the fish until it’s getting brown on the one side, flip it with a spatula and saute the other side.

Meanwhile, I have a nice tossed salad ready with homemade garlic croutons (per 1/2 cup good olive oil, you’ll need about 4 mashed garlic cloves and about 8-10 slices of fresh or stale or rock-hard very stale bread, cubed into approximately 3/4" squares).. Put the oil in a skillet, heat it up so’s when you toss your garlic in, it sizzles (use a wooden spoon or flat stirring tool). Let the garlic saute briefly, and then add the bread squares and stir them into the oil. If the bread is very stale, it will suck up more oil than fresh, moist bread. Then let the skillet sit on LOW heat, stirring occasionally, until the bread squares are toasty crisp. You may have to test them occasionally for quality control. Yum. When done, they will get scattered on top of the salad, and only mixed in when the salad is served. That way, they retain their crunch. Any extra croutons can be put into a sandwich sized Ziplock baggie and kept in the ’fridge for the next salad or a sudden attack of the munchies.

Salads. Auntie loves Caesar’s salad, and despairs that any restaurant will ever get it right. For one thing, you must use Romaine lettuce. Not Iceberg. The original Caesar’s salad left the leaves whole, but in polite society it’s a bit challenging to nibble on a whole hand-held lettuce leaf while discussing the inner meaning of Mozart versus Bach, so I hand-tear my lettuce leaves up into smallish pieces.

Use a wooden salad bowl. Split one garlic clove (after peeling it from its papery outer covering, of course). Then put about a quarter teaspoon of salt (a dash) in the bowl, and massage it into the wood with the cut part of the garlic clove. If it’s a big bowl, use both garlic halves. Then after the bowl is done, mash the garlic halves for the dressing. Put them into a smallish bowl along with a dollop (OK, for you measuring freaks, about 3 tbsp) of decent olive oil. The greenish extra virgin stuff. Don’t bother with the other, lesser, more inexpensive offerings; the taste of a quality oil is worth the price. Also put in your bowl: 1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce, 1 tbsp lemon juice, and anchovies. I use anchovy paste from a tube; squeeze about 5 to 6 inches into your bowl. If you use anchovy fillets or rolled anchovies, about 4 to 5, mashed well (OK to include the caper for the rolled fillets) or coarsely chopped. Eat the rest of the anchovies on crackers for cocktail hour; they don’t keep once the can is opened. They get very fishy. So sit down, pour yourself some Adult Beverage, and enjoy your leftover anchovies while you watch someone else continue with your dinner cookery.

Now, get a small saucepan of water (salt it well) to a boil. Put your torn-up lettuce in the salad bowl and drizzle the well-mixed-up dressing over the lettuce. Toss lightly

Now, your water should be boiling. Put in one egg (I usually put in 6 eggs, since I want hard boiled eggs on hand) and time it for 3 minutes. Pull your selected egg out (for hard boiled eggs, let the others cook for an additional 7 minutes and then take the pan off the burner and let it cool. The egg for your salad will be hot, so cradle it in a potholder, whack it with the edge of the bowl of a spoon, and then pour the egg into your salad. Scrape the cooked white remaining in the shell halves into your salad, too. After discarding the empty shell, toss the salad. Then take a good palmful or two (depending on the size of the salad) of grated Parmesan or Romano or a blend of the two and scatter it over the salad. Toss it to blend, and then put your lovely croutons on top, and serve right away.

Caesar’s salad is garlicky and anchovy-y, the way I like it. If you don’t like anchovies, you can delete that part. But the soul of the salad will be compromised. If you put in even a little bit, you won’t taste anchovy per se, but it will add depth to the salad.

Serve with a grilled steak, or your fish that you caught. A nice white wine, say, a Chablis or a more fruity Chardonnay will go nicely with your feast. A simple salad, fish, and wine dinner can be the most elegant, hedonistic thing on earth, especially if there’s a lit candle on your dinner table, and you use cloth napkins. For even more hedonism, douse the electric lights and turn off the TV. Some restaurants charge plenty big bucks for a similar offering, and here you can do it in your own home.

Now, for something more in the recipe department.
Basic French Bread

1 2/3 c warm water
2 1/2 tsp (or 2 pkg) active dry yeast
1 1/2 tsp salt.
3 1/2 c high gluten flour (for really good flours, check your local health food
store or talk to the folks at King Arthur Flour; they do mail order)
Notice that there’s no dairy (butter or milk) in this. No sugar, either. You folks who are dairy-challenged and/or diabetic, here ya go. Now, put the yeast and 1 1/3 cups of the water in a bowl and mix; let sit 5 minutes to wake up the yeast. Put the flour and salt into a large mixing bowl, make a well in the flour-salt mix, pour the yeast-water into that well, and stir enough flour into it to make a paste. It won’t take all of the flour. Let it sit about 25 minutes. Then mix in the rest of the flour and add bit by bit the remaining water, adding only enough to form a soft sticky dough.

I use a well-floured pastry cloth at this point. Lay it on the counter, and then turn your dough out onto it. Scatter some more flour on top, and then start kneading. You will want to knead until it’s smooth and elastic (about 10 minutes, but it can be done in 5), re-flouring your hands as necessary to keep dough from sticking to them. Good for upper body exercise.

You should have an oiled large bowl handy. Put the kneaded dough in it, and oil the surface. I cheat; I use an aerosol cooking oil spray. Cover the bowl with a tea towel (linen dish towels are ideal) and let the bowl sit undisturbed in a warm place for 30-45 minutes, until doubled in bulk.

Punch the dough down and return it to your floured cloth, and cut it into 2 pieces. Roll out each piece into a rough rectangle with a rolling pin (I simply pull it out with my fingers) and then roll it up like a jelly roll. Then roll it back and forth on the floured cloth to the desired baguette size (ficelle is skinnier). Now, if you have a French bread pan, which has long gutters, as it were, for your bread, use that. Failing that, pick up some good quality unpainted metal gutter troughs (ideally flat-bottomed) from Home Depot or Lowe’s or your local roofer, line it with parchment paper, and then lay your long bread rope in that. Hey, a French bread pan isn’t something in everyone’s kitchen! Be sure to grease it and scatter yellow corn meal on it, so that the loaf won’t stick to the pan.

Cover your bread with your tea towel and let it rise until twice in bulk. Preheat your oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit, and then put a small pan (I use a jelly roll pan, which is like a big cookie sheet with a one inch high rim) on the lower rack. When your bread is ready to go into the oven, take the tea towel off it and cut diagonal slashes in it with a verrrryyyy sharp knife or a new single-sided razor blade or with one of those fancy French bread slashers (also available from King Arthur). Brush the loaf top carefully with water, and bake (on the higher rack, which should be just above the pan with the water in it) until a deep brown, and they sound hollow when rapped. Baking time is about 20-25 minutes. Check the water level in the pan under the bread every so often, adding more as needed. Cool your baked loaves on a wire rack, and devour them the same day, If you bring it warm to the dinner table, snug in a basket with a spread-out cloth napkin in it folded over the loaf, you will get killer big brownie points from your co-diners/"audience."

Note: you can make your dough ahead of time, take to the second rise stage. Put ’em into a freezer Ziplock, and toss in the ’fridge or freezer. That way, when you want to impress the heck out of someone’s tastebuds, pull the package out of cold storage, thaw, then knead into the long shapes and let rise, slash ’em, bake ’em and bask in the compliments your cookery will bring!

Taking a little time to produce and enjoy a really good meal is such a pleasure to the senses, as opposed to ripping something out of a box, nuking it, and serving it in front of the TV. Auntie says "Please take some time to focus on your food, to enjoy the textures and colors and interplay of flavors. Take time to have a TV-less dinner, where everyone sits down together and chats as they dine. We used to take turns reciting poetry...including doggerel for us kids...at our dinner table. Or we’d have spelling contests, discuss the World Series (it wasn’t so commercial back then), or regale everyone with a successful (or not) fishing trip which provided the feature item for the night’s dinner."