Anger Burger

Foods haunt me.  In the Pepcid way, yes, but also in the Ghost of Christmas Past way.   Despite the fact that making a recipe will generally cost me less than $5 out of pocket, I tend to avoid making something if I can’t emotionally reckon with it.  Despite being interested.  It’s complicated, let’s move on.

A recipe I’d been avoiding was Ina Garten’s Scalloped Tomatoes.  First of all, it’s not what I’d call “scalloped.”  I think because scalloped potatoes are just a gratin, which in turn is just a casserole with a topping of either bread or cheese, but… this is a stupid discussion.  I just flat don’t think that a pile of tomatoes and bread is “scalloped.”  Fight me on it if you want, but you’ll be the boringest troll ever.

ANYWAY.  The other thing that nagged at me was the simplicity of the recipe.  Ina tends to do this to me: something very basic that she gushes over and I think, why is she acting like that is so special? It’s total Huck Finn business, no question.  I have no doubt Ina could get me to paint her fence.

Oh, and then there’s the fact I can’t eat tomatoes.

Technically, I can eat them just fine.  But something with my Crohn’s disease detects the tomato coming in for a landing and basically blows up the entire airport if you know what I mean.  Sort of unrelated, I’ve been nursing the suspicion that the reason I can’t eat tomatoes is because of the skin.  I know.  After nearly two decades of this disease, you’d think I’d have Nancy Drewed this out by now, but I’ve had more important things to worry about such as how do I not think about donuts? and is that a spider?

It was a major leap, then, to realize that I could kill two birds with one stone: try to eat a lot of tomatoes but with no skins, and make the damn Scalloped Tomatoes already.  It helped that Smitten Kitchen made  it and wouldn’t shut up¹ about how great it was, too.

You should know that I’ve actually soaked this glass pan in acid to remove the brown stains, and they won’t budge.

Still unable to come to terms with the “scalloped” nature of this dish, I renamed it “tomato stuffing”.  My mom and I made a round of the stuffing last week and were, shock, immediately crushed out on it.  Most alarming was the fact that my stepdad, an avowed and card-carrying member of the Meat & Potatoes Society, not only ate a serving, but went back for seconds.  I reported him to the Meat & Potatoes Society and we haven’t seen him since.

For the record, I don’t like the texture that a lot of fresh Parmesan makes when baked on something.  I wish I’d stirred more into the stuffing.

Except!  We couldn’t let it be.  The final texture, he did gently amend, was a little too mushy for him, and really for us as well.  We liked it fine, but agreed that a more accessible version could be made by increasing the bread quantity and leaving the crusts on.  I take this a step further by adding that the advised 5 minutes of pan-frying the bread cubes is a prime example of too-little-too-late.  I recommend either having very stale bread cubes or even oven-toasting them in order to make a more stuffing-like texture.

And the final verdict?  Totally fucking delicious, and so far my intestines are keeping their opinion to themselves.  Do I dare say I can eat tomatoes?  I’m not sure.  It often occurs to me that the lamest part of having Crohn’s disease is the unpredictability — just because I’ve twice survived eating a heap of tomatoes without skins doesn’t mean the third time won’t lay me out.  Only time and my belligerent refusal to abandon tomatoes will tell.

Anger Burger Tomato Stuffing
greatly influenced by Ina Garten and Smitten Kitchen
there’s a lot of room for personalization in this, as you might imagine.  more vegetables, like gently fried leeks, would only improve things.  additional fresh herbs, like oregano and thyme, would take it further into Italian realms, though I can’t say I’d prefer that.  be advised that despite containing a boggling quantity of tomatoes – two and a half pounds! – the recipe still only makes a 9×9 inch casserole dish.  this would make a welcome variation at Thanksgiving, but I’d advise doubling the quantity.  lastly, it dirties a lot of pots and pans, but in the easiest possible way; everything but the final big pot (and casserole dish) just rinses clean with water.

1/4 cup olive oil
4 – 5 cups 1/2-inch cubes of bread, something sturdy and flavorful, with crusts left on.
2 – 2 1/2 lbs. good tomatoes, not too ripe but nice and fragrant
1 – 5 cloves of garlic, to taste (use at least one, but many more if you like garlic)
3 Tbsp. sugar
2 tsp. kosher salt
fresh pepper to taste
1/2 cup finely chopped fresh basil
1 cup freshly grated parmesan

• Peel your tomatoes.  This can be achieved by Googling “how to peel tomatoes.”   Dice the tomatoes to 1/2-inch or smaller pieces and set aside in a small bowl, juice and seed and slime and all.  To the bowl of tomatoes, add: the garlic, diced fine or grated or crushed or otherwise terrorized, and the sugar, salt and pepper.  Don’t stir, just let it sit there.

• If you want your stuffing with slightly dryer consistency, I recommend oven-baking the bread, tossed with the 1/4 of olive oil, at 350° for about 15-20 minutes.   Spread the cubes out on a cookie sheet and move them about during cooking about halfway through to ensure even browning.   Leave the heat on, but remove the bread and set aside.

• Heat a large flat-bottomed skilled over medium heat.  Add the browned bread pieces, then add the tomatoes and stuff.  A few extra glugs of olive oil wouldn’t hurt either.  Heat together until just sizzling and incorporated, maybe five minutes, and then turn off the heat.

• To the pot, add the basil and 3/4 cup of the Parmesan, stirring quickly just to barely combine.  Turn out into a casserole dish and top with 1/4 cup of the Parmesan.  Bake for about 40 minutes, or until the surface and edges are nicely browned and the edges are bubbling like looneytunes.

• Let sit for 10 – 15 minutes before serving.

Some suggested additions:

• Before adding the bread and tomatoes, saute the white part of one cleaned, chopped leek in 2 Tbsp. of butter over medium heat until soft.  Then add bread and tomatoes.  Or the same thing with two sliced shallots.  Or both.

• Before baking, top the stuffing with 1/2 cup of shredded, dry (part-skim) mozzarella OR

• About 5 or 10 minutes before the stuffing is done baking, top with slices/globs of the softest, sexiest fresh cow or buffalo mozzarella or burrata that you can find.

• I hate getting on this wagon, but: bacon.

• Top with fried or poached eggs as a main course.

¹She actually would shut up about it and only wrote maybe a paragraph about how great it was, but in my mind it was a neverending loop that followed me from waking to sleep like a particularly slow zombie.

I was recently pointed toward Thursday Night Smackdown, which I had never read before and thus had my sense of awe renewed.  Not because the blog is that good (it is that good but, I mean — how is this post going so badly so quickly?) but because each time I feel that I’ve fully and diligently mapped the internet, it turns out there is a whole new section of dungeon I failed to explore.

Anyway, I suspect that a lot of my regulars will adore Thursday Night Smackdown as much as I now do, even if she makes a few too many soups for me to be happy¹.

¹ Why the sadness? Because I love soup. I love it, I do. And the Viking Heathen I have chosen to align myself with does not like the soup. Like, berserker rage does not like it.  So that even if I just make some for myself, he starts to panic and smash things before I can assure him that I’ve made an entirely separate dinner for him that consists of only partially frozen deer meat and the livers of his enemies.

It started with a trip to the new Los Angeles Magnolia Bakery.

I read stuff, so I’ve been aware of the Magnolia Bakery for a while.  If you’re not, quickly: they’re in New York and they are widely credited with kicking off the American trend of cupcakeries in the last 5 or 10 years or whatever.  Carrie Bradshaw eats one in an early television episode of Sex and the City, if that gives you any idea of how this all came to pass.  But I’m not here to talk about Ms. Bradshaw and her independence-representing cupcake¹.  I’m here to talk about banana pudding.

So, I kept hearing “Skip the cupcake and get the banana pudding.”  But I’d also heard they gave out samples, so when I got there I asked for one.  And was told “It would be a while,” the reason for which I’m still not clear.  They did, however, have pints available for purchase in the cold case.  Since I was walking home and had errands to do, I skipped it altogether.

Later, online,  I noticed another angry comment (I can’t find the actual one, but here’s a pretty solid paraphrase):

“I liked the banana pudding until I found out it was made from INSTANT PUDDING!!!1!  This makes me so angry!  I can just make it at home!”

To which Mike had the best retort of all: “You can also make cupcakes at home, moron.”  Curious of this instant pudding business, I Googled the recipe and lo!  They are right.  It is a lightly complicated preparation of instant pudding.  And the wrath this fact incurs is both startling and delightful.  So many angry ladies!

But really, the reason you don’t make it at home is the same reason you’d buy a single cupcake from Magnolia: this recipe makes 7 quarts.  Even with my one advised correction, this makes far too much banana pudding for a home cook to consume.  This is party food.

The correction I advise is to reduce the heavy cream from 3 liquid cups to 2.  So basically, reduce the whipped cream volume by one third.  While the appeal of this pudding is that it is more of a “banana cream” than a “banana pudding,” I still felt like the whole thing was a tad bit too whippy.

Everything gets layered, though it didn’t really occur to me until later that the layering is entirely unnecessary.  You can’t see the layers from the exterior of the bowl,  and all you’re trying to do is ensure that every piece of banana and every vanilla wafer is covered.

But layering has a methodical quality that I like anyway.

It’s such an old-fashioned recipe that it begs for an old-fashioned presentation.  I highly recommend the dreaded maraschino cherry.  I mean, it’s a giant keg of whipped cream and Nilla Wafers.  You can’t pretend to have scruples now.

Magnolia Bakery’s Banana Pudding
the original recipe also says to serve between 4 and 8 hours after assembly, to which I offer some more specific notes: after 4 hours, the wafers will still be lightly crunchy in the middles.  if this is what you want, then great.  around 6 hours is where I think it is optimal, but even more than 8 hours resulted in distinct, non-soggy cookie bits.  I have no idea what it does after that, because there wasn’t any left.  lastly, there’s all this emphasis on brand names — Jell-O pudding and Nabisco Nilla Wafers — which you can probably totally disregard.  like, maybe you can tell the difference between Nabisco vanilla wafers and generic ones when they’re plain, but after they’re in a big tub of whipped cream?  i doubt it.

pudding base:
1 (14oz) can sweetened condensed milk
1 1/2 cups cold water (I reduced this to 1 cup for stronger pudding flavor)
1 small (3.4oz) packet instant vanilla pudding

next day:
3 cups heavy cream (I’d use just 2 next time — that’s one pint)
1 (12oz) box vanilla wafers
4 – 6 large ripe bananas

• The night before serving, in a smallish bowl (that can hold 3 cups) mix together the pudding base by adding the instant pudding first to the sweetened condensed milk, and then whisking the water slowly into the resulting sludge.  Cover and refrigerate until the next day.

• Ideally 6 hours before serving, whip the cream into stiff peaks (this is aided greatly by having a very cold bowl and very cold beaters, if you can).  Set aside.

• In a third bowl, dump the pudding mix out and give it plenty of good stirs to get it all loosened up.  Add one large spatula-full of whipped cream to the pudding mix and fold it in until mostly but not entirely incorporated.  Then add about 1/3 of the remaining whipped cream, again folding in until mostly but not entirely incorporated.  Repeat with remaining 2/3 until you have a giant bowl of pudding-tinted whipped cream.

• Cut the bananas into slices and reserve about a cup of Nilla Wafers to crush and use as a topping.

• In yet another bowl, this one capable of holding about 7 quarts or so, begin layering the pudding cream with bananas and Nilla wafers.  Top with crushed wafers, cover, and refridgerate undisturbed for about 6 hours.

• Just before serving, decorate with something kitschy like sliced maraschino cherries or canned mandarin orange slices.  Set out to serve with a giant spoon and stand back so you don’t get splattered when your family rushes up and disembowels the pudding.

¹Okay, maybe I am a little.  As with any disproportionately popular food item, Magnolia’s cupcake buzz seems to consist of 50% die-hard fans and 50% haters.  Or maybe 49% haters with the remaining 1% being people like me who think their product is fine and everything, just too overpriced for everyday cupcaking.  I expected a block-long line at Magnolia two weeks ago when I visited, but I just walked right in, ordered a vanilla cupcake, paid for it and left in under 5 minutes.  I ate it while walking home.  It was what I would solidly classify as a “good, homemade cupcake.”  As in, they are small — the size of standard cupcake liners — and they taste like butter.  There are lots of complaints online about dryness, which I have to bitchily correct: the cake is finely textured and very delicate, which an inexperienced cake eater might mistake as dryness.  The frosting was too sweet for me (and in fact tasted so strongly of powdered sugar I was sort of startled off it for a moment), and the final bill of $2.75 would make me grumble even at a bake sale.  However!  If you want a single cupcake?  They’re great.  They’re fine.  Maybe my low expectations saved them on this one.

This is probably the best birthday cake I’ve ever made, even if I did run out of frosting before I could pipe a decent border around the bottom:

I was a little stressed about the butt-smears around the board, but I got over it.  I also wanted to cover the sides (not the top) with silver sprinkles, but the whole cake was so fucking heavy that we couldn’t even tilt it 5 degrees to the side without danger of catastrophic structural failure.  So I just threw some sprinkles on the top and called it a day.  Grandpa certainly doesn’t give a shit, why should I?

Anyway, my mom and I have dutifully chugged through a lot of yellow cake recipes in an effort to find something as junky and delightful as boxed cake mix.  Long story short: I found my holy grail, and it’s Shirley Corriher’s “Magnificent Moist Golden Cake”.  I hijacked the recipe from Cookie Madness based on the photograph alone.  It looked so unnaturally shaggy and fluffy, and then the recipe itself is so weird (trust me — just read it) that I was entranced.  And it was perfect.  Aside from one small thing: it makes very little actual cake.  Cookie Madness split the batter between two round pans, but you can see from her photo what a short cake it makes.  My cake above is two whole recipes mixed separately and baked separately in two 9×13 cake pans.  It was a little bit of a pain in the ass, but the batter is easy enough to put together and the end result was awesome.

For the record, Joy the Baker’s “Best Chocolate Buttercream” is actually the best (though I leave out the plain milk to keep the texture more spreadable).  For reals.  Don’t skip the Ovaltine (you can’t identify the malt flavor) and follow her instructions.  It’s not the ingredients that makes the buttercream, it’s the motion of the ocean, if you know what I mean and I think that you do.

AND!  I’m going to shut up about this cake soon, but if you have any edible writing to do,  the Wilton Fondant Icing Writer is totally worth the $3 it’ll cost you.   So, so much better than mixing together a tiny quantity of icing and making a little parchment writing tip.  I will truly never endure that garbage again.  It dries hard and comes in bright colors.

I’ll tell you more about this banana pudding later:

The recipe makes something like 7 quarts and we were certain we’d end up throwing away at least half of it.  So of course it was totally obliterated before I even got a serving of it.  True story.  I was told it was delicious, but I have no goddamn firsthand knowledge of this.

My sister’s brilliantly doofy salami/cheese/olive horns.  This salami was really too big, but you use what you’ve got.  You roll the salami, stick one end in an olive and use a piping bag or a snipped ziplock to full the horn with cream cheese or Alouette or Boursin  if you’re rich.

I didn’t catch who made this or how they made it, but it was rad.  It was fresh corn (I could tell because a lot of the kernels were still stuck together) and beans in a mild sauce, but for some reason it was magic.  Maybe it was the pumpkin tureen.

This landscape.  You’re familiar with it, I hope?  I mean, whatever your family’s version is, but basically a vast accumulation of unidentifiable salads and dips.  And a random jar of pickles thrown in, because when has that ever gone badly?

Here my cousin’s daughter demonstrates how to smell a spoon to try and suss out what the hell you’re putting on your plate.   She hasn’t yet learned to just put in on the plate and eat it.

It warms my heart to know that other people have cake disasters, too.  Of course it still tasted good.

No one can accuse us of being a multicultural family, that’s for sure.

This is Dolores, she’s the one that arranged this.  I barely had a chance to talk to her because I was busy eating.  But I think she knows that’s how I express my love.

I’ve got some old things lined up for you since I’m on the road.  First of all, I made this, and I don’t have a recipe for you:

It was one of those fugue state dinners where you start cooking, having only an oblique concept of what you’re making, and then suddenly you’ve made the best fried rice you or anyone in your family has ever had, and a side of baby bok choy and pea shoots so perfectly cooked that you eat the entire pile that you’d just declared was “way too much”.  (Not the above pile. The above was just my first serving.)

Later, my mom ate around the dried fish in her deluxe Japanese peanut snack mix, a sight that cracked me up.  It was like low tide fishpocalypse.

Like you never bought a box of sugar cereal before.

When I was little we weren’t allowed sugar cereal, and we lived with my grandpa, who was allowed.  Wrap your mind around this.  Our boxes of Shredded Compost sitting next to his boxes of Frosted Flakes.  For my 5th birthday I was allowed a sugar cereal of my choosing¹, a memory that remains in my mind as the definition of perfect happiness.  So basically: deny your kids a $2 luxury and then occasionally “splurge” and your poor little waif babies will think you are a god.

I have a not-exactly guilty pleasure of cake-flavored things that aren’t cakes.  So, cake batter icecream?  Yes.  Cake batter jellybeans?  Good in theory, bad in practice².  Which leads me to the obvious mitigating factor that the flavor has to be good, and there are some bad artificially-cake-flavored items out there — mostly when just so mild that the primary flavor is merely vanillin, but also the rare coconut end of the spectrum, which is just weird.

Post’s Cupcake Pebbles are excellent.  A true milky, vanilla, egg-yolky cake-batter flavor, and plenty strong.  Of course, it’s made with like triple-hydrogenated oils, baby seal fat, BPAs and mercury, but shit, dog.  Sometimes a girl needs a giant bowl of cupcake-flavored cereal for dinner.

¹ I chose Smurf-Berry Crunch.
² They taste like coconut.

I’ve had to recently tell myself to stop making recipes for Anger Burger that are just recaps of other prominent bloggers, but then my mom was all “Dude, Smitten Kitchen’s bread and butter pickles,” and I was all — okay, she didn’t call me dude — and I was all “I know, right?!”  So we made them.

First hurdle: I just came from Southern California where there are buckets of free cucumbers just sitting along the sides of the roads¹.  In Washington state the canning cukes still aren’t ripe, which means the farmer’s markets won’t carry any because god forbid a cucumber come west of the mountains and have the carbon footprint of Fiji Water or whatever.

The second hurdle was my old friend Fiddle-Dee: I started tweaking SK’s recipe before I was even halfway through it.  Hers calls for a pound of cucumbers, which, after putting into a sack, seemed like hardly any at all, certainly not enough for my mother, myself and the jar I’d planned on giving to my friends Sean and Junko in thanks for their never-ending hospitality.    So I doubled it.

This recipe isn’t true canning, by the way, so don’t worry about what is MY SECRET SHAME: I’ve never canned anything.  It seems like a tremendous hurdle to me.  For a long time I was afraid of it (botulism!) and then more recently it just seems unnecessary (uh, I have no pantry), and then most recently of all, I realized that it is possible to just can one or two jars of something at a time.  Anyway, blahdeeblah, this is not that time: quick pickles merely require the cooking of a marinating syrup and some time and maybe a nice jar but even that isn’t important.  The pickles wilt down and “pickle” in a horrifying shitstorm of salt for two hours on the counter and if you’re a fool then you’ll taste one and have your head turn inside out.  Trust me.  I’m lucky my mother was a nurse.

Oh yeah, and the other hurdle was that I went to the crazy spice lady in Olympia and asked her for a few spoonfuls of mustard seed and she asked, “What color?”  So I asked, “Which is good for pickles?”  To which she answered “All of them.  Brown is the cheapest.”  So I said, “Brown it is then.”  And then I got home and my mom said, “You were supposed to get yellow.”

Take of that information what you will.

Then they go live in the fridge for at least 24 hours before eating.  And again — you may try tasting them after just a minute or a few minutes or an hour later, and each time you will be freshly heartbroken at how they don’t taste right.  Eventually you will come to know two things: the salt takes about 24 hours to leech back out of the pickles, so quit it with the early tasting (and when SK says they “begin tasting pickled in just a couple of hours,” the emphasis here is on the word begin) and that sugar levels are a very subjective thing.  SK advised cutting the sugar down even more than what she did, so I followed her advice and both my mom and I found the pickles to be not sweet enough.  Wah-waaah.  I think they’re okay but borderline, my mom definitely wanted more sugar.  Then again, she’s on chemo and sometimes thinks the air tastes funny, so maybe we shouldn’t listen to her.

Anger Burger’s Smitten Kitchen’s The Dispatch Kitchen’s Bread and Butter Pickles
i tried to describe bread and butter pickles to Junko (who rightfully was all, uh, WTF is a ‘bread and butter’ pickle?) and all I can say is: they’re a little sweet and a little salty and do not have sweet spices like clove or cinnamon, and instead are savory, oniony and frankly sort of Japanese.  my mom was also sad that we didn’t think to put pimentos or red bell peppers in them, which add another flavor dimension, so my recipe adaptation reflects that.

2 lbs. pickling cucumbers (often called Kirbys)
2 large yellow onions, sliced thin
1/2 cup Diamond Kosher salt specifically (LISTEN TO SMITTEN KITCHEN ABOUT WHY)
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups distilled white vinegar
1/2 tsp. ground turmeric
1 Tbsp. plus 1 tsp. yellow mustard seeds
2 Tbsps. whole coriander seeds
1/2 tsp. celery seed
1 large jar diced pimentos, drained, or 1 fresh red bell pepper peeled and diced small

• In a big bowl, layer the cucumbers, onions and salt.  Toss together with your hands to combine.  Reflect on how rad it is that you have a hangnail that now has salt crammed under it. Cover the surface of the veggies with ice cubes and set aside the whole bowl on a counter for two hours.

• In a big pot, bring the vinegar, sugar and spices to a simmer.  While it is getting there, drain the cukes well but do not rinse clean.  Dump into vinegar pot along with the pimentos or peppers and at high heat bring everything back up to steaming hot.  The vinegar will barely get to a boil after about 5 or 7 minutes, but at soon as everything seems real hot, remove from heat.

• While still warm, decant into jars or other glass container, evenly distributing the vegetables and covering with the pickling juice.  Allow to cool at a little at room temperature (until just warm to the touch) and then refrigerate.

• You can sneak tastes, but don’t judge until at least 24 hours and ideally 48.  Will last a few weeks in the fridge, but don’t experiment; just eat them.

¹ This is not true.