Vegetarian Chili with Bulgur

I’m trying to get used to going back to work. I’ve always been working for the past 15 years, but it’s been from home and freelance, so basically I could wake up in the morning, down a cup of coffee, and then head to my guestroom in my pajamas to conduct the day’s business. Now, it’s a little different. For the past month, I’ve been driving to a public relations firm in Bedford Hills, where I work 20 hours a week. That’s 20 less hours to do a variety of things, which have fallen along the wayside. I know I shouldn’t expect a pity party for having to give up my Friday morning manicure or my daily dose of watching at least part of “The View,” but I do miss being able to run down to the kitchen at any time of the day to start preparing dinner, whether it’s to dice a couple of carrots and cucumbers for a salad, marinate chicken breasts, or scrub and quarter some red potatoes.

I was getting into a bad dinner routine, picking up frozen raviolis and store sauce one night, then prepared spinach quiche on my way home from work the following evening. As I was dialing Dom & Vinny’s to order a pizza last week, I slammed down the phone and called an intervention on myself. “I’ve got to get my act together and find a way to keep home cooking in my routine. There’s no way The Inspired Chef is going to start living on Chinese takeout!” I said to myself.

I remembered a story my friend Eric had told me about his mom going back to work when he was in tenth grade (which is, coincidentally, the grade my younger son, Spencer, is in). “Yeah, she got this slow cooker and made all our meals in it,” he said. Putting aside the fact that Eric said that’s why he never wants another one-pot meal in his life, I decided that this was going to be my mission – to find some meals I could cook for my family in the slow cooker.

Still recovering from the recent “steak night” at our club, I made up my mind to go the “no meat” route for my first run. Cutting out ground beef, chicken and turkey meant sacrificing some much needed protein, so I decided to look for a slow cooker vegetarian chili recipe that could still deliver the goods via a variety of beans and vegetables. I also happened upon an additional protein source, which I found online in several recipes for slow cooker vegetarian chili that added bulgur to its list of ingredients.Read more...
Best known for its presence in tabouli salad, bulgur is “what’s left after wheat kernels have been steamed, dried and crushed,” according to the TLC Cooking website. “High in fiber and protein, and low in fat and calories,” this Middle Eastern staple offers “bulk and nutrients to fill you up without adding pounds.” Apparently, a cup of bulgur has twice the fiber of brown rice (remember this part, it will become important to my story later on). I also read that you should store bulgur in a screw-top glass jar in the refrigerator; that way it will keep for months. (Click here to see youtube.com video)

Deciding to adapt the “Slow Cooker Bulgur Chili” recipe I found at sparkrecipes.com, I started searching the house for the ingredients I would need. In the pantry, I found cans of kidney, garbanzo and black beans, plus containers of crushed tomatoes and tomato sauce. Then I headed into the kitchen, straight to my spice cabinet. (Do I admit here that I keep my spices in alphabetical order? That I’m The Obsessive-Compulsive Chef in addition to the The Inspired Chef?) I found the cayenne pepper, chili powder and cumin – in that exact order. Although you could use a packaged chili mix, it’s much less expensive and lower in salt if you make it yourself with these spices. Opening the refrigerator, I discovered a couple onions, a few leftover cloves of garlic, and a package of shredded cheddar cheese, so all I needed to buy were some jalapeno and green peppers.

Now here’s the problem that I frequently discover with slow cooker recipes. You don’t just throw all the ingredients into the slow cooker in 10 seconds and then leave on your merry way to work; no, there’s more to be done. In this case, I had to soak the bulgur in boiling water for half an hour and also sauté the green peppers, jalapeno and onions until tender. I ended up doing this the night before I served the chili.

The next day, I combined all the ingredients in the slow cooker, turned it on low, and left for work. I was starving by the time I got home. As soon as I walked in the door, the enticing smell of the chili wafted out of the kitchen and beckoned me with its tangy tendrils of spice and heat.

I thought the chili was terrific, but I have to admit there were some mixed reactions in my family. Bob liked it but said he preferred meat in his chili, and Spencer saw the beans and wouldn’t touch it. I pawned the leftovers onto my friend Roberta, whose entire family is vegetarian. I felt vindicated when Bob and I came back from eating out the following night and the message machine was beeping. It was Roberta’s husband, Alex. “Laura, I’m eating your chili right now and I have to say, it’s absolutely amazing. You can bring your leftover chili over here anytime you want.”

Of course, my husband, being the jokester he is and having split a bottle of wine with me at dinner, immediately texted Alex on his Blackberry, saying “Glad you enjoyed the chili, but be prepared for a total colon cleansing.” Like I said before, this is the chili to go to if you are looking for lots of taste, lots of protein – and lots of fiber!

VEGETARIAN CHILI WITH BULGUR
Adapted from http://www.sparkrecipes.com/

1 cup bulgur
2 cups boiling water
3/4 cup finely chopped green pepper
1 large onion, chopped
1 jalapeno, finely chopped
2 tsp. olive oil
1 can kidney beans
1 can black beans
1 can garbanzo beans
1 can crushed tomatoes (29 oz.), drained
8 oz. can tomato sauce
1 cup water
2 tbsp. chili powder
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp. ground cumin
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (or to taste)

Garnishes:

Shredded cheddar cheese
Green onion
Sour cream

Directions:

Place bulgur in a bowl and stir in boiling water. Cover and let stand for 30 minutes. Drain and squeeze dry. Sauté green peppers, onions, and jalapeno pepper until tender.

In large slow cooker, combine bulgur, beans, tomatoes, tomato sauce, water, chili powder, garlic, cumin, and cayenne. Stir in sautéed vegetables.

Cook on low for 8 hours in slow cooker.

Yield: 8 servings

The seed for my zucchini bread story sprouted while we were on vacation in Lake Placid last month. I was dozing in and out of sleep on a massage table at our hotel’s spa, seeking relief for my aching limbs after a four-hour trek to the top of Cascade Mountain and back.

I must have been dreaming about food because I woke up and started talking to Mike, the masseuse, about growing herbs and vegetables. I told him that I had pots of basil, rosemary, mint, parsley, and thyme on my deck.

“Plus, I’ve got a couple of cherry tomato plants that are growing like crazy. I’ve harvested dozens of tomatoes already,” I said, proud of my horticultural skills.

As it turned out, Mike’s garden put me to shame. Apparently he was growing peppers, eggplants, cucumbers and carrots in his backyard.

“In fact, I brought in five zucchinis today in the hopes of giving them away. Do you want one?” he asked.
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Is that a little weird to ask a client? Plus, on a practical level I still had six days left of vacation before going home. But on the other hand, there was a refrigerator back in my room.

“Sure,” I said, and then promptly returned to my trance-like state as he finished the massage. Afterward, I gathered my belongings and looked for Mike to give him a tip.

Turning a corner, I saw him, zucchini in hand. “Here it is,” he said.

This was not your average zucchini. Granted, it was dark green. But it was four or five pounds, about ten inches long and five inches in diameter at its widest. “Oh,” I said to myself, “I’m glad my husband’s not around to see this.

I took the zucchini and quickly stuffed it in my purse. When I got back, Bob was lying on the leather couch in the sitting room of our suite, reading the newspaper.

“How was your massage?” he asked, not looking up.

“I had a male masseuse,” I said.

“That’s nice,” Bob said, eyes still glued to the paper.

Feeling like I wanted a little attention, I said, “Uh huh, and I got a ‘happy ending,’ too.”

That’s when he looked up and saw me holding the oversized squash. “Laura, how did you end up with that?”

We had a good laugh and then I stuck the zucchini in the refrigerator of our efficiency kitchen and forgot about it until it was time to head to our second destination, Manchester, VT. I packed the zucchini in my beach bag, sandwiched between several bottles of cold, bottled water so it would remain cool during our trip. Along the way, we stopped at a dairy farm near Manchester and bought a half dozen raw milk Gouda cheeses that I planned on giving to friends as gifts when we returned. I threw them into my beach bag with the zucchini and cold waters.

Our room at the Equinox hotel in Manchester was small but beautifully decorated, overlooking the quaint town below. Bob and I started unpacking our suitcases. I looked around for the honor bar, wanting to store our food in its refrigerator. It wasn’t in the mahogany wardrobe or in the matching chest of drawers. In fact, it didn’t seem to be anyplace. This could be a problem, I thought, imagining four days of smelly cheese and rotting zucchini.

Desperate, I called the front desk and asked the receptionist if there was a mini-fridge available. Wah-lah! One was waiting for us in our room when we returned from dinner.

Well, the zucchini made it safely through our stay in Vermont and our car ride back to New York. Then it sat in my garage refrigerator for another few days until I could think of a reason to use it. The occasion turned out to be a Shiva call for the father of one of Bob’s employees. As an added bonus, I could bring a loaf to book club later in the week. The format, I decided, would be zucchini bread.

My mission was to cram the healthiest ingredients possible into the bread, combining a few recipes I found online. My shopping list included a banana, applesauce, walnuts, golden raisins, and some whole wheat pastry flour (FYI, much finer than regular whole wheat flour, resulting in a lighter, fluffier end product). Not to mention the star of the show, the zucchini, which was still sitting in my refrigerator.

I peeled the skin off the squash and quartered it and cut out the seeds. When I put the pieces into the food processor, I couldn’t believe I ended up with over four cups of grated zucchini, and I only needed two – that was one supersized vegetable!

I peeled the banana and mashed it with a fork. After beating some eggs, I added the other “healthy” ingredients, plus some baking basics – vanilla, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt. I cut the oil in half and substituted applesauce in its stead, which I often do when baking sweets.

The recipe made two loaves of zucchini bread, which baked perfectly and turned a golden brown on top in about 50 minutes. I cut off a corner slice of the bread after it had cooled to see how it turned out. I couldn’t see or taste the zucchini, but the vanilla, cinnamon and raisins proffered a pleasantly sweet taste, the walnut added a little texture, and the banana definitely contributed to the moist interior of the bread.

Now, a normal person would have been happy, but not the Inspired Chef. I still had two more cups of grated zucchini in the refrigerator and couldn’t stand to see it go to waste. The solution? I decided I had to make more zucchini bread, but a slightly more sinful version the second time around. The next day, I found a recipe for chocolate chip zucchini bread on cooks.com. It had the same basic ingredients, but instead of banana, raisins and walnuts, there were semi-sweet chocolate chips. I did my usual healthy substitutions – two parts white flour to one part whole wheat pastry flour, and cut the oil in half by using applesauce – but there was no denying this would be a much richer zucchini bread.

Again, the bread baked to golden perfection, but this time a taste test revealed a denser, much sweeter flavor. But no complaints, especially from Bob, who is a chocolate man at heart. By then it was late and I was tired. I told him that was going to be the only “happy ending” he would get that night.


ZUCCHINI-BANANA-RAISIN BREAD

2 eggs
½ cup applesauce
½ cup vegetable oil
2 tsps. vanilla
1 ½ cups sugar
1 banana, mashed
2 cups white flour
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup walnuts, chopped
1 cup golden raisins

Beat eggs and then add the applesauce, oil, vanilla, sugar, grated zucchini and mashed banana. Mix together and add other ingredients. Pour into two well-greased and floured loaf pans. Bake in a 350-degree oven for 50 to 60 minutes or until toothpick inserted into the center of the loaf comes out clean.


CHOCOLATE CHIP ZUCCHINI BREAD
Cooks.com

3 cups flour (I used two cups white flour and one cup whole wheat pastry flour)
½ cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
3 eggs
2 cups grated zucchini
¾ cup oil (I used ½ applesauce, ½ oil)
3 tsp. vanilla
6 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips

Mix all dry ingredients together. Then mix eggs, oil, applesauce, vanilla and zucchini in a separate large bowl. Add dry ingredients to wet mixture and mix well. Add chocolate chips.

Grease two loaf pans. Bake at 350 degrees for 50 to 60 minutes.

Kale Salad

First of all, thank you to everybody who filled out my blog survey question: “Have you ever bought anything at the store and then served it to guests and said you made it yourself?” According to the results, six respondents said “yes,” 26 said “no,” and one said “I’ll take it to my grave.” While I’m happy to know I am not the only who hasn’t always been completely honest about serving something I’ve “made from scratch,” I’m still not sure if those 26 who answered “no” are cooking saints or big fat liars.

Nevertheless, some funny stories came out. My friend Barbara said that she was at a party where the hostess served a fancy apple turnover with fresh berries and Chantilly cream for dessert. While the hostess took credit for making the dish from scratch, Barbara told me in an email that, “I was helping her later in the kitchen, and, there in the trash, were the Pepperidge Farm frozen apple turnover containers.”

Then, on Facebook, an old high school friend posted that one of her co-workers “served his weekend guests tomatoes they believed he grew in his garden, but he had actually bought them from a friend.” I don’t know – is that similar or worse?

I could do a whole blog on lying about making something from scratch that I bought at the grocery store (come to think of it, I already did: APPLE PIE), but this blog is going in the opposite direction because I recently bought something at a store that I wanted to make myself at home. It was a kale salad that I discovered at Susan Lawrence, the incredibly delicious and somewhat pricey gourmet shop in Chappaqua, NY.

Last week, I was early for my physical therapy appointment in nearby Pleasantville, so I thought I’d drop by Susan Lawrence and pick up some lunch. I spotted the kale salad in the shop’s display case and was immediately drawn to it, enticed by the shredded dark green leaves mixed with currants and pine nuts. “This is definitely for me,” I said to myself, and ordered a small container along with a pasta and vegetable salad, which, by the way, turned out to be totally forgettable.

At first, I was going to wait until after my PT appointment to eat lunch. Starting the engine of my car and blasting the air conditioning, I decided to have a little taste of the kale. As I opened the container lid, I smelled fresh greens perfumed with the sharp scent of vinegar. I stuck in my plastic fork to take one bite, but ended up devouring the entire portion in less than a minute. It was delicious! The kale had been either sautéed or marinated in what I thought was olive oil so that it wasn’t too tough but had just the right crunch. I was also pretty sure I could taste vinegar, Parmesan cheese, and this lovely bit of sweetness imparted by either sugar or honey. Anxious to find out exactly what was in the salad, but too lazy to walk back across the street, I dialed my new favorite number, 1-800-GOOG-411, a free phone directory, and got connected to the store.
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“I’m interested in the kale salad,” I said to the woman who picked up the phone. Summoning my courage, I asked, “What’s in it?” I wasn’t sure if she would divulge what might be a store secret, but right away she told me the obvious: kale, pine nuts, currants, olive oil and Parmesan.

“Is there any vinegar?” I asked. She said no, but I wasn’t convinced. “Do you cook it?” I wanted to know.

“No, it’s raw and just marinated in some olive oil,” was the answer. Thanking her, I hung up the phone and made a mental note to do a little more research back at home.

Later that afternoon, I phoned my friend Lisa, who’s also a cook. “Have you ever had the kale salad at Susan Lawrence?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s great,” she said.

“Have you made it at home?”

She said she’d prepared a similar version that was pretty good, but it wasn’t quite the same as Susan Lawrence’s. When I asked her if her salad had any type of vinegar, she told me she had used lemon juice, which I could also see as giving the kale a little kick. The best tip Lisa gave me was to chop the kale on the pulse setting in a food processor instead of cutting it with a knife, which would have been much more time consuming.

My next step was to go online and do a little research. I decided to go to Google and type in the words “kale salad, currants, pine nuts, and Parmesan cheese.” A number of recipes popped up, but they were all basically the same. Apparently, the key to the “bite” was a mixture of unseasoned rice vinegar and white balsamic vinegar. The next “secret” ingredient, the one that gave the kale salad its sweetness (along with the currants), turned out, as I had guessed, to be honey.


Now, let’s talk about kale, a form of cabbage that has large, ruffled, dark green leaves. It pops up all the time as a “superfood,” which, according to Wikipedia, “is a term sometimes used to describe food with high phytonutrient content that some may believe confers health benefits as a result.” It’s on the top ten superfoods list, and I also found the following on http://www.formerfatguyblog.com/, not exactly the American Heart Association, but it’s funny, right?):

1. Collard, mustard & turnip greens - Nutrient Score: 1000
2. Kale - Nutrient Score: 1000
3. Watercress - Nutrient Score: 1000
4. Bok Choy - Nutrient Score: 824
5. Spinach - Nutrient Score: 739
6. Brussels sprouts - Nutrient Score: 672
7. Swiss chard - Nutrient Score: 670
8. Arugula - Nutrient Score: 559
9. Radish - Nutrient Score: 554
10. Cabbage - Nutrient Score: 481

Checking kale out on Wikipedia.com, I was impressed by its résumé. “Kale is considered to be a highly nutritious vegetable with powerful antioxidant properties and is anti-inflammatory,” according to the website. It also said the vegetable is “very high in beta carotene, vitamin K, vitamin C, lutein, zeaxanthin, and reasonably rich in calcium,” and “contains sulforaphane, a chemical believed to have potent anti-cancer properties, particularly when chopped or minced.”

The timing was perfect to make the kale salad because I had some friends coming over the following night who were extremely health conscious. I was going to grill some wild salmon and corn-on-the-cob, and the kale dish would go perfectly.

The first thing to be done was to marinate the currants in some of the white balsamic vinegar. It’s best to leave the mixture overnight so the vinegar can soak in well. The next day, I pulled out my two big bunches of kale and removed each of the leaves’ large central veins with two quick cuts of my knife (see video). I dropped the leaves into my salad spinner to rinse off the dirt and spun them dry. Then I put them in the basin of my food processor and, following Lisa’s suggestion, pressed the pulse button to create perfectly shredded kale.




The next step was to grab the white balsamic vinegar again and whisk it in a bowl with the rice vinegar, honey, extra-virgin olive oil, and salt. I drained the currants, put them in the bowl, and then added the chopped kale and grated Parmesan cheese (you can also use shavings, but I liked the way the grated cheese mixed in so well with the other ingredients). I also lightly toasted the pine nuts in the toaster oven. (Watch out! Do not turn your back on those little suckers – they’ll go from cream-colored to absolutely burnt black in a matter of seconds.) I added a little salt and pepper, and then got ready for the taste test.

I was glad that I had made the dish early in the day, so the olive oil would have enough time to do its magic and soften the kale, which, when I tasted it right after I made it, was a little bit too chewy. Also, I didn’t think the recipe called for enough oil or honey, by the time I finished altering it, I had tripled the amount of these two. By nightfall the salad ingredients had marvelously intermingled and the kale had wilted to just the right texture.

I know the kale salad was good because not only did I like it, but my friend’s husband had about 10 helpings. I’ve served it several times since and have been repeatedly asked for the recipe, so I think it’s a safe bet that it’s a winner. The great thing is that this kale salad tastes good while also being good for you.

Now the only question is, are you going to make it yourself or run out to the store and buy it (and say you made it)?

Kale Salad with Pinents, Currants and Parmesan
Adapted from Bon Appétit, February 2009
By Dan Barber

Ingredients:

2 tablespons dried currants
7 tablespoons white balsamic vinegar, divided
1 tablespoon unseasoned rice vinegar
1 tablespoon honey (I used 3 Tbs.)
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil (I used 3 Tbs.)
1 teaspoon salt
2 bunches Tuscan kale (about 1 pound), center ribs and stems removed, leaves thinly sliced crosswise (I used a food processor to chop)
2 tablespoons pine nuts, lightly toasted
Parmesan cheese shavings (I used ¼ cup shredded Parmesan)

Preparation:

Place currants in small bowl and add 5 tablespoons white balsamic vinegar. Let soak overnight. Drain currants.

Whisk remaining 2 tablespoons white balsamic vinegar, rice vinegar, honey, oil, and salt in a large bowl. Add kale, currants, and pine nuts; toss to coat. Let marinate 20 minutes at room temperature, tossing occasionally. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Sprinkle cheese shavings over salad and serve. (Note: I think this salad should sit much longer so I put it in the refrigerator for several hours, then take it out about half an hour before serving. In addition, I mixed in the shredded parmesan cheese with the rest of the salad ingredients.)

Watermelon Gazpacho

Photo by Kyra Socolof

I have been cooking and baking like crazy, but oddly enough it’s not been for happy occasions. From barbecued chicken, roasted potatoes and corn salad to brownies and biscotti, food has been sailing out of my kitchen and winding up at the homes of various friends, one whose husband just had open heart surgery, and not one, but two whose father-in-laws passed away. Last week, I finally had a chance to whip up something for a celebration. My friend Roberta was having a Father’s Day dinner cum party for her daughter Natasha’s high school graduation.

I decided to prepare watermelon gazpacho, which I hadn’t made since last summer. The first time I tried it out was after taking a hike with my neighbor Lauren and another friend, Jessica. Walking along the windy, wooded paths in Rockefeller Park, Jessica told us about this amazing watermelon gazpacho that she had tasted while on vacation with her husband and two sons. “I ordered it for an appetizer at dinner and it was so good that I insisted everyone try it. But when I got it back there was hardly anything left,” she lamented. “I really wish I had a good recipe for that gazpacho so I could make it at home.” Then she looked at me with a big smile and said, “Hey, since you’re the Inspired Chef, I was hoping maybe you could find one for me."
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I remember thinking that it was so unusual to have watermelon as a base for gazpacho, a culinary term that usually refers to a chilled tomato-based, raw vegetable soup. In fact, I wasn’t so sure I would even like it with watermelon. I have a rule about fruit and that’s that it should be a stand alone. That means no stewed apricots or prunes with my chicken, no fruit jams or jellies in my cake, and certainly, until now, no fruit in my soup. In fact, only in the past few years have I included berry and apple pies in my repertoire (OK, I can also manage some fruit in my sangria).

Yet Jessica had posed a challenge, one that I felt I had to meet. There were a few hurdles that I had to overcome first, however. To begin with, my husband, Bob, only dislikes three foods in the entire world and they are liver, sole and – you guessed it – watermelon!

“I don’t understand, how could you possibly not like watermelon?” I once asked him. “Did your mom force feed it to you as a child?

“No,” he said

“Did you swallow a seed by mistake?”

“No, I just don’t like it.”

“Don’t worry. You probably won’t event taste the watermelon in this gazpacho.”

Bob shrugged his shoulders, which I took to mean “You’re going to make it anyway, so go ahead.”

The next setback happened when I searched the Internet and discovered a recipe on Epicurious.com for “Watermelon and Cucumber Gazpacho.” On the pro side, in addition to the watermelon, there were a lot of fresh vegetables on the list – cucumber, red bell pepper, yellow bell pepper, jalapeno chili, celery, and red onion – plus mint (which I had growing in a pot on my deck) and limes. The con side was that the veggies all had to be diced into small pieces, the mint needed to be finely chopped, and the limes had to be squeezed, none of it difficult but all very time consuming. I decided to halve the recipe, finally making it for Bob and me at the end of the summer. It turned out great (Bob even conceded so), but I didn’t blog about it at the time because it was too late in the season. You should definitely make this when there are bins of local watermelons for sale in the grocery store.

Roberta was expecting around 30 people at her house, so this time around I had to triple the recipe instead of cutting it in half. You can probably imagine the assorted produce taking over my refrigerator, not to mention the bowling ball-sized watermelon on my counter. Since this was going to be a relatively big task, I decided I would prepare the soup in stages over a three-day period. Coincidentally enough, I was taking another hike with Lauren and told her about my plan. She said to be careful because she had once made tomato-based gazpacho and put it in a glass jar. Driving to visit friends on Long Island, the sun beat down on the gazpacho, and the tomatoes, cucumber and garlic created a mini science experiment gone awry, causing enough expanding gas to break the bottle. “Well, hopefully nothing that exciting will happen here,” I said.

In preparation, I chopped up the vegetables and put them in a Ziploc bag in the fridge (I like to keep the onion and jalapeno in a separate bag so the other vegetables don’t absorb their strong bite). Then I took most of the watermelon and pureed it in the blender. I added in the squeezed lime juice, red wine vinegar and salt, thus making my so-called “broth,” a bright pink liquid bursting with watermelon pulp. Dipping in a spoon for a taste test, I was greeted by a cool sweetness tempered by the acidity of the lime juice and vinegar. I stored the “broth” in plastic containers in the fridge. Finally, I chopped the remaining few cups of watermelon that I hadn’t pureed and packaged that up as well.

The next morning, I pulled the assorted plastic bags and containers out of the refrigerator and poured them into a large pot, stirring well to make sure all the different ingredients were well integrated. The soup smelled so fresh, like it had come straight from the garden. It also looked appealing with its rainbow of colors – pink, red, purple, yellow and green – but would it taste as good as I remembered? I stuck a soup spoon into the pot to sample the goods. I bit into the crunchy veggies, enjoying my “salad in a soup” perfumed by sweet mint. It wasn’t spicy enough though, so I chopped up a little more onion and jalapeno and also decided to puree some more watermelon to increase the liquid to vegetable ratio.

When I arrived at Roberta’s, she poured the soup into a beautiful antique white china punch bowl. It came with about 20 little cups, which were the perfect size for serving the gazpacho. Natasha tried the soup first and said she loved it. It turned out to be a big hit with all the guests.

My oldest son, Sam, almost 20, was the last holdout.

“Just try it for me,” I said.

“Hmm, I’m not quite sure how to approach it,” he said. “Do I use a spoon or a fork? And why is it cold?”

He tentatively put a spoonful into his mouth. “Mmm, it’s good,” he said with a smile on his face. I do admit you have to be a little open-minded to try watermelon gazpacho, but once you do, I guarantee you’ll want more!


WATERMELON AND CUCUMBER GAZPACHO
Bon Appetit, August 2005
By Pat Cora

Ingredients:
1 3-pound seedless watermelon, diced (about 5 cups), divided
1 small cucumber, peeled, seeded, diced (about 1 cup)
1 medium-size red bell pepper, seeded, diced (about 1 cup)
1 medium-size yellow bell pepper, seeded, diced (about 1 cup)
1 small jalapeno chili, seeded, minced
3 pale green inner celery stalks, diced (about ½ cup)
½ small red onion, diced (about 1 cup)
¼ cup finely chopped fresh mint
3 tablespoons fresh lime juice
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
¼ teaspoon salt


Puree 4 cups watermelon in blender until smooth. Transfer puree to large bowl. Add remaining 1 cup diced watermelon and next 10 ingredients; stir to combine. Cover gazpacho and refrigerate until cold.

Carolina Pulled Pork Barbecue

I flew to Durham, NC a few weeks ago to attend my Duke 25th college reunion. Although I had been a little nervous about going to my first reunion in a quarter of a century, I ended up having a blast. Some of my closest friends and about 20 of my sorority sisters were there, and we reminisced about so many things I had tucked away in my memory for decades.

Alpha Delta Pi's, Duke, Class of 1984, 25th Reunion

Like my first date at college ... A friend of my aunt’s had a son who went to Duke and he invited me to go to his off-campus fraternity party. On the way home he asked his buddy to stop the car and then got out. We waited and waited, and after a while I started to wonder what had happened to my date. After half an hour, he returned. Apparently he had fallen down a steep hill while relieving himself. He had leaves in his hair. His pants were torn and his shoes were covered in mud. Needless to say, that was the last time we ever went out.

Another incident my friends reminded me about took place at the end of my sophomore year when we convinced the college quarterback to steal a six-foot-tall plastic pink flamingo from a putt-putt golf course down at Myrtle Beach. Unfortunately, the flamingo was cemented into the ground and my friends and I must have been a little raucous because the police showed up. We all ran away into the nearby bushes but the quarterback got caught by the cops (Thank God he didn’t get into trouble!).
























But all fun and mischief aside, one of the strongest memories that came back to me while at the reunion was that of Carolina Pulled Pork Barbecue. Down south it’s just called barbecue and it’s made with a distinctive vinegar-based sauce that is so lip-smacking flavorful! The reunion caterers served the pulled pork for lunch on the Saturday I was down there. Walking into the 1984 reunion tent with my old friends Cindy and Laura, I detected the unmistakable scent of barbecued pork – that rich and smoky meaty aroma that can only make you picture a whole hog slowly roasting on a spit all night long. To put it lightly, I was salivating. I was so busy the night before catching up with fellow classmates that I had only managed to eat two bites of chicken and then, when I got back to my hotel room, an assortment of about two dozen licorice, cherry and tutti-frutti jelly beans. I awoke the next morning starving, but too lazy to go down for breakfast, therefore having to resort to my vanilla Power Bar and an apple that I pilfered from the hotel gym.

Greedily eyeing the barbecue, I wondered to myself, “Could it ever meet my expectations? Would it be as good as I remembered it being 25 years ago?

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And, most importantly, would I be able to eat it in a lady-like fashion even though I was hungry enough to devour an entire pig at the moment?” The answer was yes on all three accounts. From the first bite, the barbecue delivered the hoped for punch – tender, hand-torn strips of pork packed with a heady taste of meat tinged with the greasy flavor from the marbled fat it was surrounded in, a brightness brought on by the tart acidity from the vinegar, and a rush of heat created by a hearty dose of hot red pepper flakes. Seeing no buns to tuck the barbecue into, I stood by the serving station and ate it slowly and appreciatively with a fork, trying to avoid conversation so I could fully enjoy my meal.

After I had consumed my fill, I deposited my empty plate in the garbage and started looking for my next course – chocolate chip cookies that were piled high on a table on the far side of the tent. It was there that I spotted my sorority sister Katie, who’s now living in Texas. “I forgot how much I love barbeque,” I said to her in between bites of my cookie. Katie, blond and blue-eyed with just as much energy as back in college, was one of my classmates in charge of organizing the reunion, and ever since reconnecting with her, we’ve been chatting on Facebook and I’ve been sending her my cooking blog.

“I’m going to make barbeque when I go back home,” I told her.

“Ooh, with vinegar?” she asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Promise, you’ll send me the recipe?”

“Better yet, I’m going to blog about it,” I answered.

I quickly forgot about barbecue as I finished my cookie and looked around the tent, trying to remember what the men I knew there looked like as boys back in college, that is before they had gained weight and lost their hair. I was also busy sizing myself up with the other women – seeing who was still in shape, who looked like they’d had Restylane and Botox, and who had just let it all go.

I didn’t think about barbecue again until about a week ago. I was putting away some cereal boxes in my pantry when I came across my slow cooker. The lid was covered with dust, emphasizing the fact that it hadn't been used in a long, long time. Inside was a little paper booklet with recipes suggested by the manufacturer. Leafing through the pages, I found the recipe for “Carolina Barbecued Pork.” “OK, it’s time to fire up this old crockpot again,” I said to myself.


















The first thing I had to do was buy some pork butt, which, by the way, is not the pig’s rear end. According to the book, “The Barbecue! Bible 10th Anniversary Edition, by Steven Raichlen, “A true pork shoulder includes both the Boston Butt (the upper part of the leg with the shoulder blade) and the picnic ham (the actual foreleg), a cut of meat that weighs fourteen to eighteen pounds in its entirety and is used chiefly at professional barbecue competitions.” Thank God, his recipe called for “Boston butt alone (five to six pounds), which thanks to its generous marbling gives you superb barbecue.”

The pork butt that I purchased from my local butcher (and which I had to order in advance because he doesn’t usually have pork butt lying around), weighed in at 4.5 pounds and was about the size of half a loaf of bread. As mentioned in Raichlen’s book, the reddish brown pork was striped with white layers of fat, which I knew would generously add to the flavor of the meat.
















Early the next morning, I made the rub for the barbecue, combining brown sugar, paprika, salt and pepper, then massaging the mixture into the outer surface of the meat. I quartered a couple onions and placed them on the bottom of my crockpot, then sat the pork butt right on top. All that remained was to whip up the vinegar sauce and drizzle some of it over the meat. I decided to use Raichlen’s vinegar sauce because the crockpot recipe didn’t look tomato-ey enough. His recipe called for a healthy dose of ketchup, plus lots of brown sugar, which can never be bad.

The rest his ingredients were: vinegar, salt, red pepper flakes, and ground black and white pepper. As an FYI, I cut the amount of hot red pepper flakes that he called for in half, because four teaspoons sounded a little too hot for my taste! And I added some dry mustard and garlic salt.

As it turns out, Raichlen’s recipe has western Carolina roots. After doing a little online research, I discovered that down in North Carolina, they are quite divided on the issue of sauce. On the eastern side, vinegar is kept pure, and no tomatoes are added. However on the west side barbecue sauces are put together with a hint of tomato and sugar. Clearly, that was the direction I was going in.

After covering the meat with some of the vinegar sauce, I put on the top and set the crockpot to low and the timer to 10 hours. Now here’s the hard part – every time I walked into the house during the day, I had to smell the scent of the barbecued pork cooking, beckoning me, taunting me, making my stomach grumble and my head dizzy with desire, and I couldn’t even take one bite!

Around 5 p.m., I poured a little more vinegar sauce over the meat and let it finish cooking. Did I strip off a little piece of pork and taste it? Of course I did! It was so soft and tender from cooking all day long and it had that piquant, meaty, full-flavored taste that just knocks your socks off. I had to control myself from not eating any more, but it wasn’t easy. At this point, I do want to say that I added a few tablespoons of barbecue sauce (any market brand variety will do). It’s really your choice to doctor up as you choose.

I’m just warning you, the next part requires patience. After you put the meat and onions in a strainer to get rid of all the extra liquid and pick out any remaining big clumps of fat, you need to chop the onions and shred the meat. You could cut the pork up into bite-size bits, but I really recommend using your hands to pull it into small pieces (hence the name "pulled pork"). As Raichlen says, “A human touch is needed to achieve the perfect texture.” (Yes, your hands will be orange and greasy, but some warm soap and water will make you as good as new.) The shreds should be about one to two inches long and 1/8 to 1/4 inch wide.



















By this time, my husband, Bob, and younger son, Spencer, were already in the kitchen, almost circling me like hungry wolves. “Stand back,” I said, waving a serving spoon at them in mock-defense. “Dinner will be ready in a minute.” All that was left to do was to spoon the pulled pork on to hamburger buns and top with some onions, which were incredibly soft by now and bursting with flavor from having been cooked so long with the meat. Some people also add coleslaw on top of this, but I put the slaw on the side, along with a big serving of cornbread.

Well, I fed the animals, otherwise known as my family, and they were very happy. I probably could have served 12 other people as well. If you make this, invite company!

Video:




CAROLINA BARBECUED PORK

2 onions, quartered
1 (4-6 pound) boneless pork butt

Rub:
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon paprika
2 teaspoons salt
½ teaspoon ground black pepper

Vinegar Sauce:
2 cups cider vinegar
½ cup plus 2 tablespoons ketchup
¼ cup firmly packed brown sugar, or more to taste
3 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons hot red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon freshly ground white pepper
½ teaspoon dry mustard
½ teaspoon garlic salt

Place quartered onions in crockpot. Combine brown sugar, paprika, salt and pepper; rub over pork butt. Place pork over onions.

Combine vinegar, ketchup, brown sugar, salt, hot red pepper flakes, ground black pepper, ground white pepper, dry mustard and garlic salt; stir to mix well. Drizzle about one third vinegar mixture over pork; cover and refrigerate remaining vinegar mixture.

Cover crockpot and cook low for 10 to 12 hours. Drizzle about one third of the reserved vinegar mixture over the pork during last half hour of cooking (you can also add a little barbecue sauce here, if you like).

Remove meat and onions, drain. Chop or shred meat and chop onions. Serve meat and onions on hamburger buns. Pass remaining vinegar sauce to drizzle over sandwiches.

HOLY MOLE!

Ever since my older son, Sam, came home from my neighbor’s house raving about the chicken mole he’d had for dinner, I’ve been trying to make the dish myself. I should say I’ve been trying to make an edible version of the dish. It’s been close to a year now and I’ve prepared no less than four putrid renditions of mole sauce, ranging from an über-time-consuming one that sent me on a search for Pasilla chilies and Mexican chocolate, to one so simple that all you had to do was add chicken broth to a bottle of supermarket mole poblano sauce.

You’re probably thinking to yourself, “How bad could they really have been?” Well, pardon my French, but we have a saying in my family when something tastes truly awful, and I can still picture Sam taking one bite of the made-from-the-bottle mole and telling me, “Mom, this tastes like ass.” If ass tastes like spoiled milk interlaced with hot sauce and chunks of bitter chocolate, then he was right.

I was finally successful with my last try, a recipe that I found on the Rachael Ray magazine website, believe it or not.

Bob nearly begged me not to make the mole again. “Laura, I don’t understand. Why are you doing this to me?” he asked.

“If, I get the recipe right, you’ll like it,” I promised him.

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“I don’t think I like mole, even at a restaurant,” he said.

“Yes, you do. Remember the time at Guadalajara when you tasted Lauren Fisher’s mole sauce and you said it was so good?”

In case you haven’t figured it out already, not only am I the Inspired Chef but I’m also the Obstinately Determined Chef. Even though I’d had a succession of failures, I wasn’t going to give up because I really wanted to nail this mole sauce. That wasn’t my only reason though. Bob had had some complications from a recent sinus surgery, i.e., major nosebleeds, and we had to cancel our winter vacation to Mexico’s “Mayan Riviera,” just south of Cancun, which we’d planned over a year ago with four other families. I cried the entire day we were supposed to have left, and drank tequila straight from the Patron bottle until I couldn’t see straight.

In my haze, I reminisced about an event that took place back when Bob and I were in college. I was a little sister in his fraternity and they were having a “Let’s Go to Mexico” party. Whereas all the other fraternities had similar bashes where the winning couple would be given two tickets to go away on a vacation to Puerto Vallarta or some Caribbean island, the Sigma Chi version was a little different. In a nutshell, you were supposed to drink so much tequila that you passed out and thought you went to Mexico. If my memory serves me correctly, the “winner” here was the person who fell asleep on the couch and got a Frito Bandito mustache drawn on his upper lip in permanent black marker.

Pulling myself together, I decided that if we couldn’t go to Mexico, I was going to bring Mexico to us. So, that’s where the mole came back into the picture.

Do you know what the history of mole is? According to http://www.mexonline.com/, mole poblano is a “thick rich, chocolate-tinged sauce made famous in the colonial mountain city of Puebla, Mexico.” According to the website, “Some sources say that moles have as many as 100 ingredients, but that’s an exaggeration . . . 30 ingredients are not unheard of, and some mole recipes contain 10 different types of chilies alone. Other ingredients include: peanuts, almonds, fried bread, plantains, lard, sugar, bittersweet chocolate, cinnamon and cloves.”

I had invited our friends, the Peskoes, for dinner. My original plan was to make two different moles, and I figured we could vote on our favorite sauce. That plan came to a halt after I prepared the first recipe, which actually had some of the ingredients I just mentioned. To my horror, it was as terrible as all of its predecessors, tasting heavily of peanut butter and some unidentifiable taste that made me want to be sick. I ended up pouring the entire contents of my Le Creuset iron pot (it was heavy!) down the drain of my kitchen sink.

My heart was heavy too, and I admit I was disappointed. I sat at the kitchen counter and moped as I read over the ingredients for my next mole, the one I had gotten from Rachael Ray. I didn’t have high hopes, as this recipe didn’t actually have any of the ingredients listed on the mexonline.com website, plus it called for Reese’s peanut butter cups. I mean really, how can any decent recipe for mole have peanut butter cups in it? I decided to unwrap a Reese’s cup and eat it while I mulled this over. “Mmmm,” I said out loud. I’d forgotten how good they were, so chocolaty, peanut buttery and sugary sweet! I decided that maybe there was hope for the recipe after all – but not much.

The first thing I did was heat a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil in my pot and sauté some chopped up onions and garlic. Then I added a little allspice and stirred the mixture together. While my other recipe that day had included cinnamon and ground cloves, this one had substituted allspice, which I assumed was a combination of those two and other spices. Later research on the web would prove me wrong. According to Wikipedia, “Allspice is the dried unripe fruit of the Pimenta dioica plant, a tree native to the Greater Antilles, southern Mexico and Central America. The name ‘allspice’ was coined by the English, who thought it combined the flavor of several aromatic spices, such as cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves.”

My next step was to add some canned fire-roasted tomatoes, chicken broth, espresso powder, peanut butter cups, raisins, a pinch of salt and, last but not least, half of a chipotle chile in adobo sauce. The recipe called for a whole chile plus a teaspoon of the adobo sauce, but I highly advise against this unless you are into really fiery food. Plus, you can always add more later if you want. The sauce’s faintly sweet smell, hinting at a hidden spiciness, made me believe that I might be heading in the right direction.

After the mixture simmered for a while, I let it cool down and then pureed it in the blender with a little extra broth. The result was a thick, brownish-red sauce that at least looked like mole. The real test would be to taste it. Tentatively, I stuck my wooden spoon in the blender and brought a small amount of the mole to my lips. The sauce actually tasted good, with touches of chocolate and cinnamon, followed by a delayed reaction in the back of my throat when the heat of the chipotle chile kicked in. If not exactly like the restaurant mole, it was close.

Our friends came over for dinner that night, and I served the mole poblano over some grilled chicken cutlets and brown rice, and accompanied it with a salad. I held my breath when everyone lifted up their forks and took their first bites, but to my relief, they seemed to like the mole. Bob even had a second helping. So while there were no sombreros or suntans for us that week, at least we had a little taste of Mexico.


PEANUT BUTTER CUP CHICKEN MOLE
www.rachelraymag.com
From Every Day with Rachael Ray, October 2008

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 small onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
3/4 cup fire-roasted diced tomatoes
3/4 cup chicken broth
1 chipotle chile in adobo sauce, chopped, plus 1 teaspoon adobo sauce
1 teaspoon espresso powder
3 peanut butter cups, such as Reese’s, chopped
1/4 cup raisins
Salt and pepper
1 pound chicken cutlets

In a small skillet, heat 1 tablespoon oil over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic and cook until the onion is soft and the garlic is just beginning to brown, about 5 minutes. Stir in the allspice and cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Stir in the tomatoes with some of their juice, 1/2 cup chicken broth, the chile and adobo sauce, espresso powder, peanut butter cups, raisins and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Simmer over low heat for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Let cool slightly.

Meanwhile, in a large skillet, heat the remaining 1 tablespoon oil over medium heat. Season the chicken cutlets with salt and pepper, then cook for 3 minutes per side. Remove from the skillet and cover loosely with foil to keep warm.

Using a food processor, puree the cooled sauce with remaining 1/4 cup chicken broth, scraping down the sides if necessary. Spoon the mole sauce over the chicken.

Serves 4

TEXAS SHEET CAKE

I started to ponder what dessert I was going to bring to the Super Bowl party about a week before the big event. “What about lemon squares?” I asked myself. “Maybe I could make a chocolate cheesecake, or get fancy and whip up a tiramisu?”

My plan was to make my dessert of choice a few days ahead of time and therefore be able to enjoy my weekend. But that never happened. Not only did I not bake a dessert, I didn’t even go shopping for ingredients, much less finalize my selection. And I can only offer one reason for my delinquency – I joined Facebook. And this is what took place for three days in a row: I typed in my e-mail address and password to access my Facebook page and was instantly sucked into a fifth dimension, where I talked to friends I hadn’t seen or heard from in 25 years, played three simultaneous games of Scrabble, and electronically passed on the Duke Blue Devils Fan Club wave. Then, after what seemed like five minutes but was actually three hours, I returned to reality, horrified that I’d wasted an entire afternoon. All in all, I had managed to accomplish absolutely nothing – although I did get 42 points for spelling out Q-U-E-N-C-H in Scrabble.

Super Bowl Sunday morning I vowed to get to work on dessert. But of course that was after logging onto Facebook and triumphantly spelling out G-O-O-S-E-D for a triple word score of 38. I also scanned my “wall,” only to find a posting from my husband’s colleague, Jeanne, that said, “Check out Bob at our holiday party.” Opening up the photo, I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or disappointed to discover that it was quite tame. At first I thought about asking Jeanne if she had anything a little more incriminating (I could use some new jewelry), but decided to control myself and just responded with a thank you. Anyway, it seemed Sunday was frittering away, or at least I was frittering away Sunday, so I decided to finally focus on dessert.

“What am I going to make?” I lamented as I walked downstairs from the guest bedroom/office and ran into Bob scrounging for food in the refrigerator I had yet to restock due to my online priorities.

“Can you make that Texas Sheet Cake?” Bob asked with a hopeful look on his face. I thought a saw a little bit of drool on the side of his mouth, but that might have been my imagination.

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“Now that’s an idea,” I said. I had made it for previous Super Bowl parties but in the last few years had given it a break.

I went to my desk, piled high with days of unopened mail, and grabbed my blue plastic accordion file filled with my favorite recipes. I spilled out all the contents from the desserts section across my kitchen table. Hidden among the unkempt and unorganized layers of yellowed newspaper clippings, torn-out magazine pages, and faded faxes and copies was the item I was looking for – two stapled together 3x5 index cards with a recipe for “Texas Sheet Cake” written out in my mother’s loopy, nearly illegible script. The blue ink bled in cloud-like, watercolor splotches across the recipe, a remembrance of times past when I had either dripped milk on the cards or left them on a wet counter, or probably both.

Although my mom had never made the recipe, I had vivid childhood memories of this moist chocolate cake with creamy chocolate frosting. I had often enjoyed it growing up on visits to my Aunt Hope and Uncle Phil’s house, where a brood of five teenagers – four of them boys – plus frequent guests made the large cake, baked in a 11x18-inch jellyroll pan, an attractive choice for my aunt. I don’t know when or why my mom copied down this recipe and mailed it to me, but I think I’ve had it for over 15 years and made it close to a dozen times. Thanks to a note inscribed by my mother in the top right-hand corner of the first index card, one thing I do know is whom to thank for the recipe and that’s Millie Korman, who was once a close friend of my mom’s and Aunt Hope’s before a falling out of sorts resulted in her ouster from their inner circle. While I’ve subsequently seen similar recipes online, none are quite the same as Millie’s.
I decided to go with the Texas Sheet Cake for several reasons. One, Bob asked me to make it and it could serve as payback for neglecting him and the house for a few days of living in an electronic fog. Two, it’s relatively simple to make and takes under 40 minutes start to finish. And three, I had all the ingredients in the house, which was a good thing since I was running short on time, especially if I wanted to squeeze in one more game of Scrabble before leaving for the party.

The first thing you need to do for this recipe is melt butter, water and cocoa in a small pan. I prefer to do this in a double boiler because it allows the ingredients to heat slowly and evenly, thus reducing the risk of burning. I’ve had my same Paul Revere copper-bottomed double boiler since I got married, so 22 years and change. It’s got two fitted saucepans. You put some water in the bottom pan and fill the top one with the ingredients you want to melt via indirect heat. If you don’t have a double boiler, feel free to improvise with two pans separated by a trivet or other heat-resistant spacer.

While the butter and chocolate were melting, I beat the eggs in a small bowl and then whisked in the vanilla, baking soda and sour whole milk, which I made by adding a tablespoon of vinegar to a half cup of milk. In a large bowl, I mixed together the flour, sugar and salt. The next step was to add the first two concoctions to the flour mixture and gently blend together. At this point the deep chocolate color, creamy texture and sweet cocoa smell made me want to stick my finger in the bowl and take a taste, but decided to save myself the salmonella threat and waited for the frosting.

After I poured the batter into the jellyroll pan, I stuck it in the oven and got to work on the frosting. Employing my trusty double boiler again, I brought some butter, cocoa and milk to a boil. In a separate bowl, I poured in a box of confectioner’s sugar and added a little vanilla, then added the cocoa mixture and blended it all together until a velvety chocolate frosting emerged. Now was the time to sample the goods. Since Sam, my older son and counted-on taste tester, was not available (he’s now a freshman in college) and my younger son, Spencer, was in town skateboarding, I offered first dibs to Bob, but he turned it down because he’s on a diet. (Although I must tell you, he was among the flock of guests who had second and even third helpings of the cake that night). Apparently it was up to me to lick the spatula clean and make sure the frosting was OK. And it was. It had the sweet and sugary taste of fudge, but the consistency was just a little softer.

After the timer went off, I opened up the oven and a welcome waft of chocolate perfumed the air. I shook the pan gently and noticed that the cake was jiggling a bit in the center, so I put it back in for another five minutes.

The key with this recipe is slather on the frosting with a knife as soon as the cake comes out of the oven. That way the frosting seeps into the cake and makes it even moister. Plus the heat of the cake makes the frosting easy to spread. All that was left to do was get my blue icing pen out, draw a football and insert XVIII.

With about half an hour to go before the kick-off, the cake was done and I had a few minutes to relax. But that’s not what I did. I ran upstairs to update my profile on Facebook, which read, “Laura is…playing three games of Scrabble and not getting any work done.” What should I write next? Well, I decided to play one more round of Scrabble and think about it.

TEXAS SHEET CAKE
By Millie Korman

Cake
1/2 lb. butter or margarine
1 cup water
4 tbs. cocoa
2 eggs
1/2 cup sour whole milk (add 1/2 tsp. vinegar to 1/2 cup whole milk)
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. baking soda
2 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1/2 tsp. salt

Icing
1/4 lb. butter
4 tbs. cocoa
6 tbs. milk
1 lb. confectioner’s sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped (optional)


1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Grease 11x18-inch jelly-roll pan.

2. Melt butter, water and cocoa in a double boiler.

3. In a small bowl, beat eggs with sour whole milk, vanilla and baking soda.

4. In a large bowl, mix flour, sugar and salt.

5. Add butter mixture and egg mixture, mixing gently.

6. Pour into prepared pan. Bake 20 minutes or until cake tests done. Spread icing over hot cake when it comes out of the oven.

7. To make icing: Melt butter, cocoa and milk in a double boiler. In a separate bowl, combine confectioner’s sugar and vanilla (walnuts are optional). Add butter mixture and blend thoroughly.