Grandmom's Hamburger-Vegetable Soup

This recipe comes from Gordie's grandmother's favorite recipes in a typed cookbook, illustrated by her grandchildren, and is one of two vegetable soups in there. We tend to make this soup in the space between Christmas and New Year's Day. It is so comforting to eat, as well as to cook-- the instructions are dump everything in a pot. I've adjusted the ingredients a tiny bit but not much and included the original recipe complete with dancing vegetables here just in case. We enjoy the barley in it, and we hardly ever eat barley otherwise (having to replace our expired bag of it once a year for this purpose). It is sublime with cheese bread, but makes a great warm meal with any bread or salad on the side. 

Grandmother's Hamburger-Vegetable Soup

1 lb. ground beef

1 C diced carrots

1 C diced celery

1 medium onion, chopped

1 medium potato, cubed

1 can tomato soup

salt to taste

1/2 C barley

1/2 t ground black pepper

8 C water

Brown meat in large pot.

Add remaining ingredients, cook until vegetables are done, and taste for seasoning.

Cheese Bread

This one is high up on my list of childhood comfort food favorites, and I have started to make it in recent years after having nearly forgotten it. It involves store-bought pizza dough, cubes of cheddar that melt, and lots of butter that all come together to make crispy edges and deliciousness.... My classic meal is to have it with kielbasa stew as the two are a perfect fit and I never ate one without the other as a kid. But I also make it alongside black bean soup or Gordie's grandmother's hamburger-vegetable soup, or any soup that could use a little rich cheesy treat on the side to dip into it and scoop up dregs of it with. Mmmm.

Putting together cubes of cheese and balls of dough: a perfect kid job in the kitchen!

Cheese Bread

from my mom

1 lb. store-bought pizza dough, cut into 24 roughly equal small balls of dough

24 cheddar cheese cubes, about 3/4"

1/2 stick of butter (will not use the whole thing)

Wrap ball of dough around each cube of cheese and seal it up, set aside till all are ready.

Melt butter in a saucepan on stove top, then remove from heat.

Roll each ball of dough around in the melted butter right in the saucepan, then place in a loaf pan. (These pictures show more of a hodge-podge assembly, monkey bread style, which is fun. Lately I have squished the dough balls into one layer in the loaf pan, 4 balls by 6, and like the way that comes out.) Let them rise for a while. 

Then bake at 350 for maybe 20 minutes or so. Check the bread and remove from oven when golden. (I like putting the loaf pan into a not preheated oven and then turning the oven on, as it seems to allow the bread some nice last rising time as the oven warms.)

Upend baked bread "loaf" onto a serving plate. Pull sections off the loaf and serve alongside/dip into soup or stew.

Fresh Corn Cream Sauce with Pasta

This is one of our things we like to make with corn in late summer. (Back in the days when we rented a place in Lyme, I used to drive the half mile up the road nearly every day in August to get corn from the farmstand we felt convinced had the best corn. In recent years, not living really close to a farmstand (or anything else) and no longer wanting to have to go to fetch it on the exact day we want it, I have adjusted my standards so that I regularly buy corn several days ahead of using it and just stick it in the fridge. And it is definitely not the same, but it still works.) 

Anyway my mom and I first put together this recipe one of those days right after having bought some fresh corn from the nearby farmstand (our little notes here say 2008!) and after we had recently eaten dinner at a restaurant where my mom had had a pasta with a lobster and corn cream sauce. Whenever she eats something at a restaurant she really likes, she has to come home and try to replicate it, and she often does a pretty good job of it. Anyway, we left out the lobster (one of my two foods that I really dislike) and made this simple pasta focused on the corn, which I love. You'll noticed the recipe notes from ten years ago say we used a stick of butter and 16 ounces of heavy cream. Not sure if I batted an eyelash at those things back then or not. I can't see using that amount of butter now or the cream being necessary, so I cut the butter in half over the summer when we dusted off this old favorite, and I used entirely skim milk instead of cream. It felt plenty rich and was still delicious. But I thought it was fun to have our original notes here just the same. 

A couple of other notes: I bet you could use parsley or basil for the fresh herb and would have a slightly different but equally delicious final product. One thing I love about cooking in the summer is that if I want a little of some fresh herbs I have them growing fresh right out in our garden rather than having to buy an entire bunch from the store. Yet I often forget to pick what I need before I am in the kitchen cooking. This has become one of the ways I enlist Willem's help in the cooking lately [summer 2017], handing him the kitchen scissors and asking him to go fetch a certain amount of something. It's made me realize he's a little fuzzy on which herb is which so it's been a learning experience. He knows what the basil is (we've got a ton of that and it's a precious ingredient in pesto which he loves). And he's fairly involved in the gardening in general, but the herbs overall I guess are just not high on his priority list. The other day I sent him for cilantro, describing where it was in the garden and how many stems to get, and he came back with parsley. The night I made this I sent him out for parsley and after a couple minutes went to peek out the window and saw him contemplating the oregano and lavender so I called out to him and pointed him in the right direction in time. After he came in I stuck it in his face in hopes that his good sense of smell would help him remember next time.

Fresh Corn Cream Sauce with Pasta 

6 - 8 ears fresh corn, or 2 or 3 C frozen corn

1 lb. pasta (penne, rotini, bow ties)

~4 T butter

2 C milk +

salt and pepper

1 - 2 green onions, sliced, or 1/4 of an onion, diced

2 - 3 T fresh parsley, minced

~1/4 C flour 

1/3 C Parmesan, grated 

Cut corn off cobs. (In our notes we wrote to boil the corn, then cut it off. I don't think this is necessary as you end up sauteing it a few minutes anyway, although the one plus to dunking it in the boiling water for a minute first is that it is much easier to slice off the cob if it's been cooked without the kernels flying everywhere.) Cook pasta in the same water after corn if you've cooked the corn. 

In large pan, melt butter. Add onions, and soften a bit over low heat (I covered the pan). Add corn and saute briefly. Add flour, stirring in a little at a time. Slowly add milk, stirring. It will thicken up a bit. 

Add parsley, Parmesan, salt, and pepper at the end. Serve over, or stirred into, pasta.

No-Knead Overnight Bread

A friend recommended this recipe to us to go with roast beef for a holiday party a few years ago. It now feels like roast beef would be incomplete without this perfect, easy bread. We could make it any time but it's become a tradition along with a roast and vegetables for Christmas dinners. It is crackly, crusty, on the outside and tender inside.

No-Knead Bread
from Jim Lahey, via The New York Times

Time: About 1½ hours plus 14 to 20 hours’ rising

3 C all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
¼ t instant yeast
1¼ t salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed

In a large bowl combine flour, yeast, and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam-side-down on towel and dust with more flour, bran, or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

At least a half hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex, or ceramic-- we used our 5-quart round Le Crueset) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

Slice, and enjoy as is or with salted butter alongside dinner.

Yield: One 1½-pound loaf.