southernfusionfood

Egg Drop Soup with German Egg Pasta and Oyster Mushrooms

Good Soup in my Favorite Jerry Brown Bowl

Let’s time travel a bit, and go to Mr. Ho’s Chinese Restaurant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, during the 1980’s. My girlfriend Melanie Jane (now wife) and I had only one extravagance–eating at Mr. Ho’s every week. We went so often that the waiters began to recognize us. Here’s one exchange.

Waiter: You two brother sister?

For the record, I had black hair and green eyes, and Melanie Jane is a classic German-American, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Not much resemblance.

Me: I hope not.

Side note: I once wrote for a magazine who had an editor who was something of an expletive. He had a little 3×5 card with one sentence on it, that he would carry around, and he would ask people what was wrong with it. The sentence, that is.

Me: Why do you carry a file card around with you, that has one sentence on it?

Editor: To see if people can tell that it’s missing an antecedent.

Me: In Alabama, we’ve been known to marry our antecedents.

True enough.

Any who, back to Mr. Ho’s. After my “I hope not” answer, the waiter said the following:

Waiter: Hahahahahahaha. All you people look alike to me, anyway.

That joker did not get a tip that day.

Mr. Ho’s is long gone, but I can still make some Chinese-German-Southern light soup for a hot Summer’s night.

Ingredients

Poultry Stock (Chicken, Turkey, or Duck)

Oyster Mushrooms, Rehydrated and Chopped

Oyster Mushroom Water

Fine German Egg Pasta (the brand we use is Riesa)

1/2 Vidalia Onion, chopped and sauteed

One Egg, beaten

Soy Sauce (a few drops)

Salt and Pepper

The stock is the main ingredient. I actually strained the mushroom water through a paper towel this time, a la Marcella Hazan, and all of Italy. The Oyster mushrooms were a freebie from our dried mushroom vendor, after MJ ordered a cartload of Morels for me last Christmas. They are excellent in the soup.

Let the mushrooms simmer while the onion is cooked in olive oil. After those two join each other in holy matrimony, drizzle in the egg while whipping the soup with a fork: hence the name, Egg Drop. Serve with egg rolls if you got them, toast or crackers if you don’t. And try to not marry one of your antecedents.

Pie

Sweet and savory, but mostly savory recipes here.

Brick Oven

Grab some wood, cook some food, learn how to use a brick oven. You can get one pre-fabricated, hire someone to build one, or DIY. I took the last route, so I know whereof I speak.

Chicken

Our favorite chicken recipes, cooked with a Southern accent.

Breakfast

For your cooking pleasure, a smattering of breakfast recipes.

Soft Scrambled Eggs

Seriously, a post about how to scramble eggs? I would have thought the same thing a few years ago, before the great English food writer Elizabeth David caught my eye. Jane Grigson, an equally talented writer, gave me my first account of David, in what has become one of my all time favorite books, published under various titles, but now sold as Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery. There, Grigson discusses several of David’s recipes from her book French Country Cooking. I immediately bought a three books in one collection of her work, published by the appropriately named Biscuit Books. I now own four of her books, each better than the last.

David hated overly complex and pretentious food, and instead focused on the real thing, such as perfectly scrambled eggs. Her method is superb, taken from a French country cook. The secret is to cook the eggs at the lowest temperature possible, which is something of an antithesis to the more common get your stove as hot as a flamethrower approach. Here’s my paraphrase. This is a two person version.

Ingredients

2 Eggs, Beaten

Salt and Pepper

Heat up a skillet coated with olive oil–I like these Lodge carbon steel ones. Turn the stove down to minimum temp, and let the skillet cool off for a bit. Then pour in the seasoned eggs, and do nothing. Wait until the egg begins to set, and s-l-o-w-l-y stir the eggs with a fork. I always prefer wood utensils, so I made my own.

The eggs should cook slowly, so it is much simpler to serve it at the soft, creamy stage that is the goal of using this method. After a couple of tries, cooking this way will become second nature. It doesn’t hurt any to begin with quality pasture raised eggs, either.

Speckled Lima Beans

Lima Beans, known as butterbeans in the South, are one of our most prized fresh summertime vegetables, partly because they are less common than other goodies, like really fresh ripe tomatoes. They are less productive and more labor intensive than many other legumes, even though it is yet another crop native to the Americas.

Imagine our surprise, then, when we were roaming the Festhalle Farmer’s Market yesterday morning, to see market baskets full of butterbeans being sold by one of our favorite farmers. Note: a standard farmer’s market basket is four quarts, or roughly 1/10 of a peck. We swooped in like a chicken on a June bug, only to be told these were a special speckled variety of butterbean. Naturally, that made them more expensive. Nevertheless, we paid up, and bought a basket.

They turned out to not only be a wild range of different psychedelic speckled colors, but also included some funky solid colored beans. They are butterbeans tripping on LSD, and almost too pretty to eat, but eat them we will. Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients

2 cups fresh Butterbeans–any variety. (Frozen will do if fresh are not available)

Water

Seasoning Meat (in order of preference–Tasso, Smoked Ham Hock, Smoked Bacon, Country Ham)

Salt and Pepper

Tasso, in the South, is a Cajun/Creole invention made of heavily spiced strips of pork shoulder, which are then hot smoked, which means smoked and cooked at the same time. It’s easy enough to make yourself. Tasso adds more flavor than other kinds of smoked pork.

The cooking process is simple enough: simmer the beans until they are tender. Removing the seasoning meat when serving is optional. I like my butterbeans to fly solo. These will work great that way, especially considering that they are already on a trip.

Brick Oven Tools–Mop and Fireplace Poker

These are the last two tools in the catalog of devices needed to cook in a brick oven. One is the first tool needed, the other one of the last, but also one of the most important. We’ll begin with my trusty industrial sized mop.

My wife eventually gifted this mop to me after she found it to be too big and bulky to use in our house. I immediately drilled a hole through the handle, tied a piece of accessory cord threaded through the hole into a loop, and hung it on the rafters on the oven. It’s been there ever since.

The mop is the final cleaning tool used before baking either bread or pizza in a brick oven, as the baking is done directly on the brick surface of the oven. The brush takes away the larger bits and pieces, and the mop finishes the job. Usually two passes with the mop is necessary to provide a surface suitable and clean enough for cooking. Some dispensation must be made to provide a way to rinse the mop off between passes-I have a lawn hydrant adjacent to my oven.

This mop occasionally gets set on fire while making pizza in a 900 degree F oven, but the cotton part can be replaced, and has been. I think these are still made in the US, and can be found fairly easily. I also use it for mopping the slate top on my Rustic Cabinet, which is connected to my brick oven. Would also be great swabbing the deck of an eighteenth century frigate.

The first tool anyone starting a fire in a brick oven is going to resort to is a fireplace poker. This one was made by an Amish blacksmith in Ohio. It’s the best I have ever seen, as it can multitask. It’s thick steel and hook end make it perfect for lifting the lids on cast iron Dutch/Camping ovens. Best used with a pair of welding gloves, as it’s only drawback is that it can only reach so far into a brick oven. That’s when the scraper comes in handy.

So gear up and get to cooking. We plan on doing just that again this weekend, unless we get walloped by the tropical storm that is currently lurking on the Gulf Coast. Our current forecast is for two to four inches of rain. Guess that’s why I put a roof over my oven.

Biergarten Tomorrow, July 11, 2019, in Alabama’s Rocket City of Huntsville!

Huntsville, soon to be home to a minor league baseball team named the Rocket City Trash Pandas, has it’s very own Biergarten tomorrow. Best of all, it’s being held at the U. S. Space and Rocket Center there–hence the name “Rocket City.”

Admission is free, so get out your Dirndls and Lederhosen and bring money, because you have to pay for the food and drink. Maybe the Lederhosen is not a great idea at 95 degrees F, but a nice Dirndl is really really nice, any time of the year.

Doors open at 4:30 in the afternoon, and close at 7:30 at night. Prost!

If you miss this one, there will be another July 18, in honor of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The Saturn rocket was a Huntsville product.

Brick Oven Tools–Scraper/Brush Combo

Two essential tools for the efficient use of a Brick Oven are a scraper and a brush. Many people buy them separately, but why? This old US made scraper/brush combo is over fifteen years old, and has years of use left. And I leave it outside hanging on the oven.

Just last weekend I cooked pizza for nine people on the hottest day of the year, with a blazing hot oak/pine fire, and never even broke a sweat. I could do that because of the efficiency of the scraper/brush. Let’s begin with the most useful side–the scraper.

The scraper side serves two important functions, which are scraping, and bulldozing. As a scraper it performs both maintenance and cooking functions. The long handle allows its use as an ash remover, as it reaches all the way to the back of even a large oven. Many modern ovens, like mine, have an ash slot where the remains of yesterday’s fire can be easily scraped away.

Secondly, if you’re making bread or even just baking, the scraper allows one to reposition the fire and/or coals easily, which is a skill that I will address in a later post.

If you’re into pizza or baking, this thing can bulldoze any fire into the back of the oven, which is a necessity when making pizza. Once that is done, it’s time to put the brush to work.

That rather dangerous looking wire brush is really a preliminary clean up tool. It removes most of the ashes from a working fire, as well as small embers and stray pieces of wood. It prepares the surface of the brick oven for the final tool that is needed for the cooking of a pizza–a mop. That will be one of the last two tools I will discuss, but that is a whole another post.

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