greens and cornbread . . . deconstructed!

it occurred to me that if you made teeny tiny corncakes, you could make a nice down home appetizer with them. just put a spoonful of greens on top. i actually tried mixing some greens with cream cheese and then spread it on a pita chip - very yummy and that gave me the idea for the corncakes. if you don’t have a lot of meat in your greens you could top the stack with a little piece of smoked turkey or ham. or mix the cream cheese with some hot sauce and then spread that on the corncake and put the dab of greens on the top.

haven’t actually tried any of these ideas so if you get to it first please let me know how it works.

and Cornbread

well, they just go together, right? can’t have greens without cornbread, at least around hyah. but sometimes you don’t really need a whole pan of cornbread. for instance, sometimes i make greens just for the house - not for any big dinner. so i freeze some of the greens in small containers (like margarine tubs), and then whenever i want some i can thaw them out and heat them up.

there’s a simple solution to the cornbread crisis in that situation . . . make corncakes! of course corn griddle cakes are a staple, too, and i actually think they are easier to make. if you make your cornbread from scratch (and i’m talking regular -- not hot water -- cornbread), just add an egg to it and a little more water and you’ve got the batter for corncakes. if you want to add some frozen corn to it, i suggest thawing the corn first. you can zap a little in the microwave or put some hot water over it and then drain it before adding to the batter, but if you use the hot water defrost method add the corn to the batter before you adjust the amount of water.

then just cook them like pancakes except remember that if you are using corn, they can take a little bit longer. and don’t use too much corn or they may stay raw in the center when they are done at the edges. just a hint of corn, please.

now i think most people use a very popular cornbread mix and add egg, oil and milk or water. hey - i remember when that stuff was 20 cents for a box during the holidays. if you use it (okay, it’s Jiffy), then make it up as usual and just add a little more water until it’s pancake batter consistency.

but if you can, then look for Krusteaz corn bread and corn muffin mixes. if you can find a restaurant supply that sells retail, they will probably have it or something just like it. it makes a good product and the beauty of all Krusteaz mixes is that they are formulated so you only add water. i go ahead and add an egg because the griddle cakes come out a little better, but you don’t really need to do that to get a good corncake.

which brings me to a related subject and that’s griddle cakes in general. don’t know why but when i am watching tv and there are lots of food commercials, some of them might make me go “hmmmm, do i want that?” but there is only one kind of commercial that will - at least some of the time - send me to the kitchen, and that’s commercials featuring PANCAKES. like i said, i don’t know why the pictures of big stacks of fluffy pancakes make me want them, but it does.

maybe part of it is memories of childhood - both my own and my kids’ childhoods. i was listening to a friend describe memories of his mother, who had recently passed, and he was talking about how she would cook breakfast for dinner. and he and his brother and sisters thought they really had something going because they got to eat breakfast for dinner. well, as he grew older he realized it was because they were broke and that was all his single mother of five could afford. plus breakfast is not only cheap, it’s quick, and when his mother got home from her shift at the plant, putting pancakes on the plates of her hungry family seemed like the best idea.

well, i ate pancakes for dinner plenty of times growing up and i fed them to my own kids, too. plus they are kind of like instant gratification . . . you see them in the commercial and then you go into the kitchen and make some in a few minutes.

and there is no need to go to the store. i’m not saying you have to make them from scratch (unless you really, really want to). no, what i’m saying is that if you have ANY kind of baking mix, you can make pancakes.

i talked about making corncakes from corn muffin mix. but i’ve made pancakes from biscuit mix, scone mix, blueberry muffin mix, banana bread mix, and even plain old cake mix! admittedly the cake mix pancakes were pretty sweet, but you didn’t have to put syrup or jam on them.

same thing - just add an egg and some water or milk and maybe a teaspoon of cooking oil (just not olive oil unless you are making non-sweet pancakes). if you are desperate and don’t have the egg, just use the mix and water. one thing to remember is that for tender cakes, you don’t want to mix the batter too much - just until you have got most of the lumps out of it. i use a whisk and just mix it for 10-20 seconds.

if you have never actually made pancakes, it’s not that hard if you have a nonstick pan. just don’t make the pan too hot. i like the little pancakes myself - just ¼ cup batter. a little cooking spray for the first batch helps. or if you have some oil just put a little on a paper towel and wipe it over the pan. put in the batter. let it cook on the first side until there are little bubbles over the surface and then turn. cook on the second side about half as long as it took for the first. if they burn, turn the heat down. if they seem to be cooking really slowly and don’t brown very well, turn the heat up JUST A LITTLE.

if you are using cast iron then i assume you know how to use it - let it heat slowly and just put a little whisper of oil on it for the first round. after that, you don’t really need any grease. when i was feeding lots of kids, i would use a big cast iron frying pan AND a cast iron griddle.

and here is one more tip: if you are serving directly from the pan to the plate, you can skip this. but if you want to hold the pancakes until they are all done, try keeping them in a tortillera. that’s the plastic or styrofoam lidded containers that they use for tortillas in Mexican restaurants. if you have a lot of Mexican and Chicano people in your area, you can find inexpensive tortillerra at Mexican stores. If you live in a place with lots of people from lots of tropical areas, the bigger supermarkets that serve those populations tend to have sections for everyone - Asian, Caribbean, Central and South American, African, etc. For instance, the big Asian supermarkets here also have Mexican and Indian and Filipino and African and Middle Eastern sections. ANYWAY, a tortillera will keep your pancakes perfect and warm until you are ready to serve them. i’ve even nuked the leftovers and enjoyed those, although they aren’t quite as good as they were hot from the pan.

wait - i mentioned “not sweet” pancakes. yes, there is such a thing and if you have been broke enough you may have tried them. i think they work well with gravy or “creamed” whatever you have. creamed tuna on pancakes is better than creamed tuna on toast (in my opinion). or mackerel (pilikaki) with coconut cream and onions. or leftover bits of canned meat. if you don’t have any meat at all you can put creamed onions over them. if you have an egg to put on top you have poor man’s eggs benedict! but even if you don’t it’s a satisfying and filling meal. (i guess this means i’m going to have to talk about how to make gravy and cream sauce, huh? was going to anyway because if you are broke there’s nothing like some biscuits and gravy (or something similar) to stretch out your food budget.

so here is to all of the mom’s (especially the single ones who managed to work and take care of their homes pretty much on their own) who manage somehow to get some food into their kids. and here’s to all the kids who haven’t forgotten their mother’s sacrifices.

Greens Greens Greens

been thinking about greens and then someone shared the “Lead Me to the Greens” song on Facebook and then i HAD to write something about tastiness of greens! now when i say greens maybe some people think i am talking about kale or chard or even some of them really country greens like salsify or fiddleheads or lambsquarters or dandelions -- the kind of greens that people used to gather in the wild because they didn't have anything else to eat and now they have been “discovered” by the modern foragers and the more adventurous foodie crowd.  

nooooo. when most folks say “greens” they mean the holy trinity of soul food’s green leafy vegetables: collard, mustard, and turnip. i am not saying that all of those other things aren't any good. it’s just that “greens” pretty much means the same thing to most people.

and one of the best things to me about greens is that everyone (including me) cooks them differently and, mostly, however you cook them, they are delicious. some people like to cook them quickly, like until they are just done enough to eat. my son-in-law cooks greens like that and they are very tasty. my friend Momo cooks her greens a little longer - for a couple of hours. they are tender, but she doesn't like to cook them too much longer or they seem mushy to her. I, on the other hand, usually cook my greens like your great-grandmother cooked hers. that is, i cook my greens pretty much to death. probably the main difference between my greens and your grandma’s is that i don't have too much juice in the pot for mine. it turns into a trade-off: my greens don’t have a mushy texture, but there isn't much pot liquor to soak your cornbread in.

and you can season your greens with all kinds of things. i used to always cook greens with fat back or salt pork or ham hocks or smoked neckbones (my favorite). then more people started eating less swine and started cooking greens with smoked turkey. in my opinion, this works best when you don’t cook the greens for a long, long time. that’s because one of the reasons people started using cured and/or smoked pork with greens in the first place is because the meat holds its flavor, no matter how long it’s cooked. smoked poultry can’t hold up the same way so if you want to use smoked turkey then it’s better to cook the greens until they are just tender. or, if you like really well done greens but want to use the smoked turkey necks and legs, then i suggest you cook the meats first until they are nice and done and then take them out of the pan and use the juice to cook the greens and then put the meat back in at the end. it’s a little more work, but what i’m trying to say is that however you like your greens, you can always adapt.

and here’s another adaptation that can work if you cook the greens for a long time . . . don’t be mad when i say two words: frozen greens. now in the past i was a purist and went and got 20 bunches of greens for a big pot and sat and cut all of the hard stems out of the collards and rinsed everything and chopped it. and of course you are welcome to do that anytime. i think the main objection to frozen greens is that if you don’t cook them long enough you can tell the difference in the texture between frozen and fresh greens. plus frozen don’t have quite the same flavor because, after all, they have been frozen. but i wanted to try and make something palatable using frozen greens because they are convenient and always available and, if you have a restaurant supply store near you like Cash N Carry, they are pretty cheap, too.

so, since i was going to be cooking them for a really long time, i hauled out my faithful crockpot and started playing around with recipes for frozen greens.

and i found my inspiration in African cooking. now, if you think that is an unlikely source, then you need to study up on the history of greens. I guess collard greens originated in the eastern Mediterranean region - the Greeks and Romans ate greens. and from there they found their way south and became a staple of African cooking. And Africans brought them to the Americas. first on the slave ships - in North America, collards were one of the vegetables that slaves were allowed to grow for their personal consumption. they also became entrenched in Caribbean cooking during slavery time. and then in the last couple of decades, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Somali immigrants brought their recipes for cooking greens. Their versions are quite tasty and usually don’t involve the use of meat, so i tried to work out how to get a good flavor using just onions and garlic. so get out the crockpot with a really big bowl and get ready to cook some greens.

i like to use equal parts of collards and either mustard or turnip greens. these measurements are for two boxes of frozen greens or about five bunches of fresh.

1 large onion, chopped

1 whole paw of garlic, minced or put thru a garlic press

2 jalapenos, finely chopped

1 2-inch piece of fresh ginger, finely chopped

¼ cup cider or white vinegar

2 teaspoons Johnny’s seasoning salt

1 teaspoon granulated garlic (not garlic salt)

½ teaspoon red pepper flakes

½ teaspoon black pepper

¼ cup water

If you are using frozen greens, then let them sit on the counter for a few hours and they will be easier to get out of the package. If using fresh, and you haven’t ever cooked greens before, you need to cut the thick stems out of the collards and wash the greens really well. i fill the sink with water (some people add some baking soda to the water) and soak the greens. then drain them really well and roughly chop them. all greens cook down a lot and fresh greens cook down a whole lot. if the greens won’t all fit into the pot, then stuff as many as you can in and put the lid on and then when they cook down add some more. see? that’s why i started using the frozen ones.

because i just put the thawed greens into the crockpot with ALL of the other ingredients, put the cover on, turn the temperature to “hi” and walk away for at least five-six hours. well, i do stir the greens a few times, but mostly i let them cook overnight on their own.

now the measurements are approximations and they also are light on the salt. you are gonna have to taste the greens after they have been cooking for an hour or so and then correct the seasoning. now, i like things to be tasty, so since this is a meatless recipe, this is when i start doing crazy things.

add two tablespoons of butter

yeah, butter. if you don’t eat dairy, you can skip this step. if you have ghee (clarified butter), you can use that. better yet, if you have niter kebbeh (Ethiopian spiced butter), use that (and, by the way, sometime i will show you how to make your own niter kebbeh which is a wonderful golden substance that tastes like it was made from the milk of some heavenly cow that ate nothing but spices).

the second addition again depends on whether or not you are vegan. but, whether you use the chicken flavor or a vegetarian option, i’m talking about seasoning powders, pastes and cubes. now i don’t actually use bouillon cubes. i go to the Asian store and buy Asian-style chicken broth powder, like Knorr. it isn’t as salty as american-style broth powder and a lot of the flavor comes from nutritional yeasts. i actually inherited some garlic cubes, which are okay but really salty but can work if you don’t eat any animal products. or you can actually add a tablespoon of nutritional yeast. and if you aren’t vegan and you want to get really adventurous, you can try stuff like shrimp paste (bagoong) or pho broth paste.

the main thing is . . . you don’t need very much. i would add only a teaspoon of chicken broth powder or a single vegetarian bouillon cube or a half-teaspoon of shrimp paste. you just want to add a little more depth of flavor.

then let everything cook until the greens are very, very tender. you shouldn’t have to add any liquid to the pot because the greens themselves give off a lot of juice. 

now, hopefully, you are cooking the greens the day before you want to eat them because if you have time, you can let them cool completely and reheat for serving. like most dishes that are cooked for a long time, they taste a lot better the next day. but make sure you taste them just before serving and tweak the flavors. just make sure there is enough salt (but not too much). people have different tastes so i would let the eaters add more vinegar or hot sauce on their plates. plus some folks like to have all of their foods separate and some like to mix the greens with other things and let the juices swap around on the plate so they can be sopped up at the end. yum.

and if you want to know more about collard greens, visit the collard green museum’s webpage! 

http://www.latibahmuseum.org/greens.htm

(i had some pictures but i lost them all. sorry!)

A Perfect Meal

I've probably eaten at least 50,000 meals so far in my life. Some have been quite memorable, but of all of them there's really only one that stands out as the "perfect" one. And it's the only meal I really remember from my childhood.

One day my father brought home a few small fish. They were maybe 10 inches long and had a very pointy nose -- he called them "needlefish." i know now that they are commonly known as pike mackerel. He cooked the fish under the broiler in our electric stove. He seasoned them with shoyu, which he preferred over Chinese soy sauce (back then the only brand of shoyu available was Kikkoman), and he put the pot of leftover rice from the day before on the table.

My mom didn't like fish so this was a special meal just for my dad and me. I couldn't have been more than six, but I still remember the wonderful salty crispy skin on the fish and the tasty brown meat. We ate, as we always did when it was just the two of us, with our fingers. He would hold out his hand, palm up, with the fingers together, and tell me that the hand was "the natural fork." And when he ate with his fingers it was very neat. Just a small bit of the rice, with a small piece of fish. I would try and copy his movements so that nothing would fall and be wasted. 

Since then I've taught myself how to cook a lot of things. And I've watched many wonderful cooks and listened to them talk about their food. But I've never learned how to grill a fish with shoyu so that it comes out crispy and moist. Maybe I just want to preserve the memory of that day and that one perfect meal with my father.

Oxtails

If you have never had oxtails, then you are missing out. Even the pickier eaters in our family will grub on some oxtails. the meat is lean muscle - if you cook it long and slow it has lots of beefy flavor. and the tailbones are modified vertebrae so the ends of the bones where they would meet on the cow are covered with cartilage. they make a nice sticky gelatinous sauce and are good to gnaw on. the only downside is that oxtails are usually sold with quite a bit of the covering fat still attached, so they can be greasy. but i can show you how to make them tender and how to remove almost all of the grease.

There is a famous Filipino stew of oxtails in a peanut sauce called kare kare, but this down home version is how i make oxtails most of the time.

Take 

• two packages of oxtails (two whole oxtails, cut at the joints)

season them with

• johnny’s seasoning salt
• garlic powder
• paprika
• black pepper

layer the meat in a big crock pot with

• 1 large chopped onion
• 4-5 cloves of garlic, chopped
• 2 jalapenos, chopped
• 1 teaspoon sesame oil*
• 1 tablespoon fish sauce*
• ½ cup shoyu or soy sauce*
• 1 cup water

(okay, i know that the soy sauce, sesame oil and fish sauce aren't exactly “traditional” southern seasonings, but soul food was created by cooks who knew how to make good food from whatever ingredients were available. I would argue that soul food is the original American “fusion” cuisine.)

now, back to the oxtails.  cook on high temp in the crockpot for 6-8 hours, or until meat is almost falling from the bone.  

if you want oxtail stew, you can add for the last hour:

• potatoes, peeled and chopped for stew
• carrots (peeled  baby carrots are fine)

Now, here are two really important things to know about stews or stewed meats, especially those made with red meats. The first is that they ALWAYS taste better the next day. one reason is because letting the dish cool and then reheating it gives time for the flavors to blend and develop. another reason is that the texture of some ingredients is improved by the cooling process (potatoes being the prime example).

but the third and really important reason is that if you chill the dish properly, any fat that has been rendered from the meat will rise to the top and solidify so that it can be removed.

the layer of congealed fat

so, once the oxtails are tender, remove them from the cooking broth, let them cool a little and then refrigerate them overnight. put the cooking liquid into a separate container and let that chill in the fridge, too. the next day, the beef fat will have congealed and you can easily remove it and throw it into the trash (or, if you live somewhere like Seattle, put it in the curbside composting bin).

it comes off in slabs . . . yuck

next, start to warm the cooking liquid after you've removed the fat. once it’s gotten to room temperature, you can blend it to liquify the onions or just leave them alone if you like a more homestyle stew. then, you need to taste the broth. if it’s salty enough, you can leave it as is or thicken it with a little cornstarch. but, if it’s not very salty, then the best option is boiling it down. if you can reduce it by half, you will have a lovely, sticky sauce.  but you have to keep tasting to make sure it’s not over-reduced so that it gets too salty. the alternative is to save the cooking broth and use it to make soup and just serve the oxtails (and the carrots and potatoes if you added them) by themselves.

Here they are, without any embellishment

So why is a Filipina writing about Soul Food?

Traveled across the country to attend the 50th Anniversary March on Washington last Saturday. Met some nice people and connected with old friends. Went to visit someone in Maryland and stopped at a popular soul food restaurant that had been started by a Black family and then sold to the Korean family that now runs it. did a lot of thinking, lot of talking. decided to write about some of my reasons for writing this blog.

let me start by saying that Black folks and Filipinos have an association that goes back a long, long, long time.

First off, the original inhabitants of the Philippines were Black people, and they may have arrived as many as 90,000 years ago. Historically, they were collectively referred to as Negritos, because of their small stature. Genetically, they are related to the aborigines of places like Australia, New Guinea and Micronesia. They suffered terrible discrimination from the successive waves of non-Black immigrants and there are maybe 30,000 today, living mostly in isolated villages. With the compulsive adoration of light skin in the Philippines (no surprise after hundreds of years of Spanish and American occupation), the main reason that the indigenous  societies have survived more or less intact is the reluctance of the non-Black Filipinos to intermarry with them.

Black and Filipino in what is now the United States also goes back a lot farther than you might think. The first Filipino settlement in North America started in the 18th Century. From 1565 to 1815, Spain ran the “Galleon Trade” between its colonies in the Philippines and Mexico. In 1763, a group of Filipino sailors jumped ship in the Americas and made their way to Louisiana. Along with groups of escaped African slaves, the Manila Men (as they came to be called) settled in the bayous, where they could hide from the Spanish. In 1784 a group of enslaved Africans escaped into the marshes. Their leader, Jean Saint Malo, was eventually captured and hanged. The principal settlement of Manila Men, St. Malo, was named for the leader of the rebellion. The Filipino settlers made a living fishing and shrimping and intermarried with local women. Because of the harsh living conditions in their bayou settlements, the families of the Manila Men generally lived in town, and there are records of their children being enrolled in schools in New Orleans.

For my family, Black and Filipino starts the day my dad stepped off the boat in Portland, Oregon in 1926. The United States won the Spanish-American War in 1898, making the Philippines a U.S. colony. And one of the principal resources that the U.S. wanted to exploit was the potential pool of cheap labor. But rather than using violence to bring the Filipinos here, the Americans resorted to trickery. One of the first actions of the U.S. government was to send a ship full of teachers to the islands. They set up schools and created a curriculum (all in English), and taught young Filipinos that America was land of opportunity. All they needed was to get here, and then they would be able to go to college, get their degrees in medicine or law, and then return to their homeland as successful professionals.

My dad and thousands of other young Filipinos believed the lies of their teachers. Their families saved up the price for the ticket and shipped them to America. My father left behind his mother, father, siblings, and a young wife and infant son.

I will always remember his story about arriving in Portland. Along with his shipmates, he was dressed in his Sunday best and full of dreams. But they were met at the boat by a labor contractor. The men were packed into the backs of open trucks and told they were going to go and eat. When they arrived at a small café, they went inside and my father said that when he looked around, all he saw were Black and brown faces. It was at that moment that he knew the future that was in store for him – he got a job in a sawmill and then went on to become a migrant worker and eventually, with other Filipino pioneers, he organized the farmworkers union and then became the business agent for the Alaska cannery workers and a member of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union.

Black and Filipino really started involving me, personally, in the ninth grade. I transferred to a mostly-Black junior high school and joined the Black Student Union. Membership in the BSU was open to any Black student at the school and, as a brown person, pretty much everyone accepted me into the group. My friends may correct me, but I’m fairly sure I was the only non-Black member. By contrast, the established Filipino community organizations were closed to me, in part because my father’s militant unionism had frightened away many in the community, and partly because I was personally not acceptable, being only “half” Filipino.

I grew up in a very segregated city at a time when Black activists, like the Black Panther Party, were challenging racism and calling for Black Power and Black Pride. Because of my mother’s race and my light complexion, I had the opportunity shared by many mixed people – would I continue to seek acceptance by the white world in which my mother had raised me, or would I finally accept that I was a woman of color? It took me a while (some years in fact) to realize where I really belonged, but, in the end, I made what I believe was the only reasonable choice. I think i finally realized that my friends didn’t HAVE a choice. So I gave up any claim to white privilege, and threw in my lot with the one community that had always welcomed me.

Beef Heart My Way

i see that Andrew Zimmern is talking about beef heart. heart is pretty different in the pig and the cow. I like to cook pork hearts like the tongues -- boil first, cool, cut into small bits, and then braise for a little while with vegetables. in the Philippines this is a dish called bopis. it’s a good introduction to organ meats as it doesn’t have the strong, bloody, minerally flavor found in a lot of beef offal. but i have worked out a method of cooking beef heart that produces such a nice finished product, i’ve served it successfully to people who would have never in their lives have volunteered to eat it. I just say it’s “beef” and leave it at that.

Beef heart isn’t as cheap as it used to be (what is?), but when cooked properly, it’s still an economical way to serve lean beef.

and it’s simple! take a whole or half beef heart. season with salt, black and red pepper, garlic powder and paprika. put in a slow cooker with ¼ cup of water and ¼ cup of soy sauce or shoyu. cover and cook on low for a long, long time - at least 8 hours. it should be very, very tender.

Now comes the really important part . . . let the heart cool to room temperature. using your hands and a paring knife, cut and pull away every bit that isn’t heart muscle. that includes the fat, the connective tissue, the valves and the blood vessels. you will have to pull the heart into pieces to get at all of the bits that get discarded. while you’re doing this, separate the muscle fibers into strands -- like shredding roast pork. you can save the extra bits to add to a stockpot or you can give them to the dogs. that leaves you with a pile of tender lean beef. sprinkle it with a little shoyu or fish sauce and eat with rice, or heat it in a skillet with a few peppers and onions and then put into a tortilla or sandwich. yum!