December 2020 – Page 2 – Southern Fusion Cooking

Avocado Plants

We try to never throw any food away. First there are leftovers, then dog treats, and cooked grains go to the chickens. Everything else gets composted.

We have random compost piles throughout our garden, though I did recently complete what I have been calling a “Moocher’s Compost Bin,” because my total outlay for the bin was three deck screws–everything else was mooched. Our reward for chunking all sorts of stuff into our garden was completely unexpected. We now have two nice Avocado plants.

These weren’t planted, but in the gardening lingo, were “volunteers.” We ate more than a few Hass avocados over the summer, and in true frugal fashion, composted the pits, aka seeds. Strangely enough, Mr. Hass, from just outside of Pasadena, CA, began with just three seeds that he planted. One turned out to be the parent of the now famous Hass avocado. They are tasty.

Apparently the Hass does not come true from seed, but people who get free plants can hardly complain. We will grow these in containers, where they are said to reach no more than seven feet tall.

Can you grow tender fruits in containers? Here are our first free falling Key Limes. As soon as they are ripe, they fall off, and go boink boink boink across the floor, usually in the middle of the night. No dead cat bounce here.

My favorite are the Meyer Lemons.

If you want the world’s longest Christmas song, finish “On the Twentieth Day of Christmas my True Love gave to Me, Twenty Meyer Lemons….” I’ll have a drink instead.

Turkey and Vegetable Soup Gumbo

I’m a little late with my Thanksgiving leftover recipe, but any fowl will do for this recipe, or even frozen leftover turkey. It’s a simpler version of a standard gumbo, as it uses already prepared soup as the base for the gumbo.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon Bacon Fat or other Oil

1 tablespoon Flour

1 pint Vegetable Soup (preferably home made, and frozen is fine)

1 cup chopped cooked Turkey or Chicken (maybe Guinea Fowl, anyone? P-trak, p-trak)

Poultry Stock

Extra Frozen Okra

Salt and Pepper

Quick and dirty here. The only thing that requires a good deal of attention is the roux, which should be a dark brown roux, so start with the oil/fat flour combo, and stir constantly. Once that is to the as you like it stage, add the soup and the turkey. Cook until it begins to simmer, and gauge how much stock you want, or how soupy you want your Gumbo to be. The extra okra is optional, but it adds some color to my home made veg soup.

Serve over rice, or if you’re really hungry, red beans and rice. Coastal dwellers regularly add shrimp or oysters to their gumbos. The p-trak sound is the incredibly loud call of the crazed and wild guinea fowl. I want a few, as they are predator proof and require zero food. Alas, they will drive your neighbors bonkers. Maybe I should get a dozen.

Grillades with Mushroom Brown Sauce

If you do the right thing, Karma will treat you right. MJ and I have given away so many eggs that we are getting free food in return. Long live bartering.

Case in point was the cooler full of locally grown beef that one brother-in-law gave us, and the cow was grown by yet another brother-in-law. In the pile of meat were a couple of packs of cube steak, something I had never eaten before, and usually associated with greasy spoon diners. Then I read on the interwebs that good quality cube steak is really round steak that has been pounded flat for tenderizing. This was of the best quality, and I immediately thought: Grillades.

Turning round steak into a Grillade is the classic Southern way of turning inexpensive meat into a thing a beauty, and is sometimes referred to as fried meat a la Creole. I adapted the recipe for Grillades with Gravy from the latest reprint of the Picayune’s Creole Cook Book, and the result was unbelievably good.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon Bacon Fat (Grandmother Lilian’s trick)

1/2 Onion, chopped

1 clove Garlic, diced

1 tablespoon Flour

4 inch squares of pounded Round Steak, seasoned highly with Salt and Pepper

6 large Mushrooms, sliced, and sauteed in Bacon Fat, Lard, Butter, or Oil

Water

The recipe in the cook book uses tomatoes instead of mushrooms, but we won’t have good fresh tomatoes here for a while, and I had bunches of shrooms. Begin by cooking the onion in the bacon fat for about a minute. When they begin to soften, add the garlic. Cook until you can smell the garlic but DO NOT burn it.

Add the flour, and begin the basis for a brown roux, aka a gravy. Stir regularly, as a roux is also known as “Creole Napalm.” When you get to a brown color to your liking, add the Grillades to the top of the roux, along with the mushrooms. Add the water and stir. Mine looked like this.

That’s my favorite heavy cast iron skillet. Close it about 7/8 of the way with an equally heavy cast iron lid. Stir regularly, because even with the stove set at the lowest setting, this sauce will stick and burn, and the dish is ruined. Add more water when the gravy begins to thicken excessively. Simmer a minimum of thirty minutes, though we just cook ours until it is completely tender. This cooked forty or forty five minutes.

Serve over Louisiana, or any other good, rice, and garnish with chopped parsley, unless you enjoy food that is just really brown. That was served on one of Grandmother Lilian’s Tennessee made plates. Leftovers made the best steak and biscuit with gravy, the next morning, in history.

Grillades. It’s what’s for supper.

Recipe for One Pint of Egg Tempera Paint

We just had our first freezing weather today, and therefore it is too cold to paint outside. I will write about it instead, and give the recipe first, before I wander off into the weeds of Nerdlandia.

1/2 Cup Boiled Linseed Oil (I wouldn’t use this for interior paint, but many people do)

1 Egg

1/3 Cup Water

2 Tablespoons Pigment

This should result in exactly one pint of paint, which means this can be used up before the paint begins to smell like oily rotten eggs. I had that happen once during hot weather this summer.

Begin by mixing the oil and egg together. This is a whole egg Tempera, though there are also recipes that use only the white, or more commonly, only the yolk. Add the water very gradually, stirring constantly. Dissolve the pigment of choice with a small amount of the mixture, stir briskly, and once dissolved, add to the paint. Pour the whole thing into a mason jar (if you can find one), slap on a lid, and use asap. Now for the trip to Nerdlandia–tickets, please.

Though tempera paints have been around for at least three millennia, it was classical Greece that popularized the wide use of egg tempera. My information comes from the excellent 1942 book Painting Materials, written by an art conservator and a chemist at Harvard, the capitol of Nerdlandia. This book convinced me that I needed to specify egg as the binder, as there are also glue tenperas and gum temperas.

They note that the first known mention of egg tempera came from the Roman writer Pliny, though they did not specify if it was the elder or the younger. He noted the wide use of this paint in classical Greece, as many of the famous Greek sculptures were originally painted with brilliant bright colors (they also wore real jewelry).

The two real heydays of Tempera painting were during the Italian Renaissance and in Twentieth century US paintings. Everyone knows the two greatest tempera paintings, Leonardo’s The Last Supper and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. The best known of the US tempera revival artists would have to be Andrew Wyeth, of Chadds Ford, PA.

I, however, am painting a wall, which is actually the foundation of my brick oven. This has proven to be a vast improvement to the grey paint that was there before. One museum claims the egg tempera won’t crack or fade, the latter of which I know to be true, as I used iron oxide as my pigment. Now it just needs to warm up some.

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