Hi folks! Today is Christmas Day. I started this post two days ago, but company and outings and cooking interrupted me. Probably no one is going to read this post until tomorrow, but if you do get to it today—Merry Christmas! You can think of this as a holiday grab-bag.
First, an idea articulated by my husband, one of those blindingly-obvious statements that never occurs to anyone:
One of the reasons why you had less trouble with your weight as a child then you do now as an adult is that children aren’t in control of what food is available. Adults are.
Obviously there are caveats and exceptions here, and this statement would be less true for today’s children than it was for you when you were a child. (I assume there aren’t any child readers of this blog, but who knows?) Children today have money and access to vending machines, they state food preferences strongly and (perhaps) issue orders to the adult who goes grocery shopping. The fact still remains, though, that children can’t get in the car and drive to the grocery store or Taco Bell. They are at least somewhat limited to what they can persuade the adults in their lives to provide. If there are no potato chips in the pantry at 10:00 PM, that eight-year-old child isn’t going to be eating any chips.
Okay. On to some hummus ideas. I’ve written extensively about this item, and at one point I even ordered some very expensive pre-peeled dry chickpeas ($1/ounce! Highway robbery!). I wasn’t very impressed with the results, I have to say. Recently on the Milk Street TV show they were making hummus, and I came away with several ideas: One, blend the cooked chickpeas for at least three full minutes in your food processor. This long processing time makes a world of difference. Two, use dried chickpeas. Canned ones are never going to give you a very good result. Three, add baking soda to the cooking water and then kind of sift through the cooked chickpeas and get rid of as many skins as you can. The baking soda softens the skins and makes them detach pretty easily. (But I’m hot on the trail of another method for removing the skins, so stay tuned, This one is pretty good, though, for now.) Four, add quite a bit of tahini—probably twice as much as your basic recipe says to do. (So half a cup for a regular-sized recipe instead of the mingy 1/4 cup the standard one calls for. But you don’t need more than that–the recipe I link to from Milk Street calls for 3/4 cup, which is a bit much.) Five, don’t make a huge batch of the stuff unless you’re sure it’s going to get eaten up. The Milk Street recipe called for only eight ounces of dried chickpeas, which seemed like such a small amount to me that I was tempted to double it. (Note that they don’t have you put any garlic in it–so it ain’t perfect even with the adjusted amount of tahini.) But I’m glad I didn’t make more, as that amount of chickpeas ends up making about three cups of hummus. The chickpeas themselves end up swelling to probably twice their volume once soaked and cooked, and the other ingredients add a surprising volume. Hummus doesn’t last forever in the fridge, eventually getting moldy, and you can only eat so much at a time. I’d encourage you to make this item for yourself. I had planned to include a recipe or a link to one, but I took a break while writing this to go onto YouTube and that’s how I ran across the new peeling method. I’m going to guess that the holidays aren’t perhaps the time for making healthy vegetarian /vegan food, so I’ll plan on posting the new new recipe in January when everyone’s trying to get back in line. Keep it in mind!
And now for something fast and festive that you may find to be very helpful to make for the week to come, especially if you’re wanting something fancy, or fancy-seeming, for a buffet or appetizer table. (Just to be clear, I never serve appetizers, and I’m on firm ground with this principle as Christopher Kimball of Milk Street Radio, formerly the guru of America’s Test Kitchen, says the same thing—that there’s no way he’s going to kill himself making a huge dinner and then turn right around and kill himself making fancy appetizers that will fill everyone up before they come to the table so that they will then ignore his lovely dinner. As he says, he doesn’t believe in hors d’oeuvres—it’s a philosophical thing. He wants people to come to the table starving. Yea, Chris!)
Anyway, though, you may for some occasion soon want to serve something a little out of the ordinary, and perhaps you’re thinking of smoked salmon. For this item you have a couple of choices, both of them unsatisfactory as far as I’m concerned: the lox-like version, which is basically raw cured salmon and which therefore has a texture that I don’t particularly like. Then there’s a version that’s more cooked seeming which I think is cold-smoked. There’s a brand available at Costco called Honey-Smoked Salmon that’s actually not bad, and it’s at least a little less expensive than the regular stuff. But it’s still $16-$17 a pound even at Costco, and it’s very strongly flavored, and it comes with a thick layer of skin that you have to pay for but wouldn’t want to eat. So I find it to be a bit irritating.
Here’s what you do instead: Buy a nice piece of regular old salmon at the grocery store. I know, I know. I like that farmed Atlantic salmon just fine, but you can buy whatever you want. Brush your filet lightly with Liquid Smoke, which is a completely natural product made by passing hickory smoke through water. Be careful not to use too much. Then sprinkle coarse salt over the fish, about ½ teaspoon per pound, and refrigerate for at least an hour. You can leave it longer if you want, but I had good results with that shorter time. I’d put it in the baking dish you’re going to use to cook it, and I wouldn’t cover it, or at least don’t put plastic wrap directly on the surface. Then bake it at 3500 for 10-15 minutes per pound. Sorry to be so imprecise, but so much depends on how thick your salmon is and how much it weighs. When your instant-read thermometer reads 1300 inserted into the middle of the thickest part of the fish, it’s done. I like to broil it briefly to brown the top just a little, but you don’t have to do that. And you can cook your fish to just 1250 if you want to, but I don’t like raw-ish fish. But don’t overcook it! The pathetic dried-out salmon I’ve had to eat over the years is pretty, well, pathetic. So there’s a fine line here. The salting helps keep the fish moist, though.
I have a small piece of leftover faked-smoked salmon that I’m going to use up today by flaking it and mixing it with cream cheese as part of a nice lunch. One of my step-sisters-in-law and her husband are coming over at noon as they need to go spend Christmas evening with his 95-year-old father. It’s really nice of them to make the effort to come see us for at least part of the day, so I’m putting on the lunch. Homemade crackers and onion-dill bread are also making an appearance, with good-quality ham and some nice cheeses. My mother-in-law is doing dinner, for which I am providing only the rolls and the salad.
In the midst of all this food and celebration, I am conscious of the true meaning of this day, no matter how commercialized and trivialized it may have become. Take a few minutes to think about it as you go through this busy day!