There will be no mariachi bands marching through our house on Cinco de Mayo, but there will be tacos, and maybe some good Mexican beer. And I have to confess that I came to the taco party late. When I was growing up our spices were limited to Christmas nutmeg, cinnamon for cinnamon toast, black pepper and baking powder. Garlic was an exotic commodity. Red pepper was on the tables at Italian restaurants. I doubt if my mother was acquainted with cumin. We never had Mexican food. My mother’s idea of adventurous ethnic cooking was preparing corned beef for St. Patrick’s Day. And so my indoctrination came from my peers, as are so many seminal youthful experiences

The first tacos I had were at my friend Sheila’s older sister’s place. Margo was sophisticated and modern. We adored her and the string of characters who wandered through her tiny beach house. She made tacos with regularity, and we mooched often. I learned how to shred the cheese and the lettuce and chop the onions that went on top of the taco meat, which we browned in a frying pan and then covered with a packet of Old El Paso Taco Seasoning Mix and a cup of water. I thought it couldn’t get any better than that.

Sheila and I graduated to platters of nachos and tacos at the Viva Zapata restaurant. (I think we were actually more attracted to the cheap pitchers of sangria, which we drank, sitting outside in dappled shade under leafy trees, enjoying languid summer vacations.) And then we wandered into Mama Vicky’s Old Acapulco Restaurant, with its dodgy sanitation, but exquisitely flaming jalapeños on the lard-infused refried beans. Ah, youth.

True confession: my children were raised on tacos made with Old El Paso Taco Seasoning, but they always had vegetarian or fat-free refried beans. This weekend I am introducing them to the wonders of Mark Bittman’s mix-free beef tacos. (The Pescatarian will have to figure out how to do a fish version for herself.)

Beef Tacos

45 minutes, serves 4

½ cup vegetable oil
12 small 5-inch tortillas (I only ever manage to eat 2, but the Tall One will probably require a few more)
1 pound ground beef (try to get grass fed)
Salt & pepper
1 medium onion, chopped
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 fresh hot chile (like jalapeño) seeded & minced, optional
1 tablespoon ground cumin
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 cup roughly chopped radishes for garnish
2 limes, quartered, for serving

I cook the meat first and then fry up the taco shells, but Mark Bittman does the shells first, and he hold more sway than I do.

Crumble the ground beef into a frying pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper, breaking up the meat as it cooks, until it starts to brown – about 5 or 10 minutes. Add the onion and cook, until it softens and begins to color. 5 or 10 minutes more.

Add the garlic and the chile (be sure to wash your hands thoroughly after handling the chile – I didn’t and rubbed my eye and wept for a good while afterward) and cook about 3 minutes, until they soften. Add the cumin and tomato paste and cook and stir until fragrant. I added a little water, perhaps a throw back from my Old El Paso training, but the mixture just seemed too dry. Experiment for yourself.

Warm the oil in another frying pan over a medium-high heat. Put a tortilla shell in the oil, and let it bubble for about 15 seconds before turning it over, carefully, with tongs. Let that side bubble away for another 15 seconds or so and then fold the shell in half. Turn it back and forth until it is as crisp as you want. Best Beloved likes a softer shell, I like explosively brittle.

Divide the meat into the lovely, crunchy shells and top with cilantro and radishes. Squeeze some lime on top. Good-bye to grated cheese. Good-bye to too much sodium. (There are 370mg of sodium in a 1 ounce packet of Old El Paso. [I still have a packet in the spice cabinet, obviously.] Plus it costs about $1.59, so just imagine how much better this recipe is for you, healthwise and financially.) Open beer, pour beer, drink beer.

Other topping suggestions:
Guacamole, chopped tomatoes, shredded cabbage, chopped scallions, black beans, salsa, shredded lettuce, chopped peppers, sour cream.

When the Tall One and the Pouting Princess were little and still couldn’t read, I used spinach for their tacos instead of lettuce. I don’t think they have forgiven me yet.

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

“On the subject of spinach: divide into little piles. Rearrange again into new piles. After five of six maneuvers, sit back and say you are full.”
-Delia Ephron

A video from Mark Bittman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYpVvO8b_FA

Bittman, Mark. (2012). How to Cook Everything. The Basics: All You Need to Know to Make Great Food, Beef Tacos, 392, 393

Tra la! It’s Spring! It is the time when dreamers long for the long, languid days of summer, with trailing white dresses, tall frosted glasses of lemonade, and a beauteous weed-free garden that is burgeoning with heirloom tomatoes, ruby-like strawberries, enough zucchinis to alienate the entire neighborhood.

I have thumbed through a slick pile of seed catalogues and circled enough items, that if successfully planted, would have me and a few hired hands busy for the entire growing season. I have to remember to reel myself in, and start slowly, because I cannot plant to the horizon line. I need to restrict myself to my humble container garden, which still manages to get choked by weeds by July. Corn has never been elephant eye height in my garden.

Kathy Redman, of Redman Farms, says the first crop they will be bringing to the Chestertown Farmers’ Market (which re-opens officially for the season on Saturday) will be asparagus. That will be in mid-April, depending on the weather, she cautions. May will bring a harvest of cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, kale and collards.

My mother kept flowers and just a few vegetables, on three levels of an eccentric Victorian garden that had stone walls, brick walks, six sets of steps, bird baths, bird feeders and a sun dial that proclaimed “I Count None But the Sunny Hours”. My brother and I loved hurling ourselves off one of the stone walls, into the sunken garden, and we learned early on that we had to push out far enough to avoid landing on some of her treasures.

In the spring we watched my mother’s vision come up through the brown leaves she used as a blanket of mulch through the long Connecticut winters. Gaudy crocuses appeared overnight, alongside the more demure snowdrops, scattered in odd places across the lawn. (Squirrels are no respecters of garden beds or Master Plans.) Later in spring, close to May Day, there would be a congregation of Lilies of the Valley on the west side of the house that seemed to enjoy the warm sunshine and the drip of the garden hose. A clutch of lilac bushes (two purple and one white) grew opposite them at the southeast corner of the sunken garden, by a set of mossy stairs. The lilacs sheltered the Jack in the Pulpits, the wild violets and later in the summer, the Bleeding Hearts. Strewn through all the beds were daffodils, because there can never be enough daffodils. There were delicate miniature jonquils, pale yellow and pink narcissii; others were great honking trumpets of brassy yellow that bobbed flamboyantly in the cool spring winds.

Waving clouds of cheerful yellow forsythia bushes grew along the fence lines. Every New Year’s Day my mother would cut some forsythia branches that she would put in water in an old cut-crystal vase, waiting for the forced blossoms to bring a little cheer to her winter days. Later in the summer the forsythia were hidden by big beds of day lilies.

In a large bed along one side of the driveway she grew great spears of white, purple, pink and yellow iris and as the days warmed, a few tomato plants. Sometimes she planted cherry tomatoes, which were the best things to eat warm and unwashed in the middle of a hot summer’s day, with seeds and juice running down into our bathing suits.

Way in the back of the lower garden, down by the barn, where Mr. Lee (the original resident of the house) had kept brittle little cool frames for cucumbers, we had a couple of rhubarb plants. They thrived, growing as they did just next to the compost pile. We sampled some rhubarb every summer, dipping stalks in sugar, and threading the stringiness through our teeth.

My mother kept a great variety of rare and antique plants that she nursed from clippings or from seed, and she had a great and arcane knowledge of the nuanced subtleties of her little charges. We had the childlike appreciation of their colors and smells. Lilac perfume would waft in through the screened windows, and the earthy loamy smell of fresh damp grass when we landed on our faces in the lower garden, trying to fly off the stone wall. I remember well the smell of the warm, red tomatoes, stolen on those long summer afternoons we spent playing in my mother’s garden.

This year I think I will limit my container garden to a few tomato plants and some basil. I will resist the siren song of the seed catalogues and the notion that this time I might actually water and weed and nudge our half acre into a vast field of asparagus, lettuces, melons and more. I know my limits, and I know what smells will bring back those sunny hours. And maybe I will plant some more flowers.

Be sure to stop downtown and graze through the Farmers’ Market this weekend! Tell Kathy I said, “Hi!”

“Gardens are a form of autobiography.”
~Sydney Eddison

This is just the just the ticket for a cold, dreary night. We had it as a side dish with a spluttering platter of Italian sausage, along with a glass of rough peasant wine and a crusty baguette. And yes, we did have a green salad, too.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away I lived in London for a post-grad year with another Washington College alum. We had been invited to a posh Christmas dinner and were responsible for bringing a dish to share. Our assignment: scalloped potatoes. We were kitchen novices. Our spaghetti sauce sent potential suitors running from our flat – we thought chopped onions were an excellent thickener for the runny tomato sauce. Knowing our limitations, and this being the antediluvian days before the Internet, we set off to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s library in search of a cookbook.

We brought the weighty Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Cookery and Household Management back to our flat. Mrs. Beeton’s book, unlike Nigella Lawson’s or Ina Garten’s friendly and photo-heavy volumes, was complicated and bewildering to us. Illustrations? Few and far between. Breadcrumbs? Bechamel sauce? Ounces instead of cups? And the cooking times were distressingly vague, too. 1 1/2 to 2 hours? That could make the difference between potatoes that were half raw, to a dishful of cinders!

After thumbing through the book we came to realize that Mrs. Beeton didn’t have a handy dandy recipe for Scalloped Potatoes. We were being left to our own devices. Young women who thought onions were the salvation for watery spaghetti sauce have no business trying to invent scalloped potatoes. We didn’t even have a potato peeler! We peeled the potatoes as if they were apples, hacked them into hunks, covered them with chunks of some processed cheese and milk and shoved them all in the oven. Our scalloped potatoes were a lumpy sloshing mess.

We somehow transported the now-cooled baking dish (where did we ever find that?) on our knees on the Tube ride to Chiswick. We warmed them up, which did nothing to improve their movie star good looks. These sad-looking potatoes were inedible. We were not sure of the etiquette for this situation – but the dodgey nature of the potatoes was obvious. The dish was untouched by the discerning Brits who were suspicious of anything American. Particularly loud young American women who perhaps drank a little too much of the Beaujolais Nouveau… Our hearts were in the right place, though, and we helped with the washing up, before retiring to drink port and smoke cigars with the former RAF pilots who were telling the best stories we had ever heard. But I digress.

Full disclosure: We do not own an oval gratin pan. I used a round Pyrex pie dish. We do have a mandoline, which makes lovely uniform slices. And I have yet to slice off the tips of my fingers.

The garlic is a lovely, unexpected flavor with the creamy potatoes. An excellent idea, thanks Merrill. Merrill Stubbs of Food52 is responsible for this recipe. And the layers of grated Gruyere melted in a divine fashion; the cheese was evident in every bite. The RAF chaps would have enjoyed these potatoes.

http://food52.com/recipes/11595-pommes-dauphinoise-potatoes-au-gratin

• 1 1/2 cup milk
• 2 garlic cloves
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
• 1 1/2 pounds Yukon Gold potatoes
• 2 cups grated Gruyere
• Salt and pepper

1. Heat the oven to 425 degrees. Put the milk in a small heavy saucepan and peel and smash one of the garlic cloves. Add it to the pot and then heat the milk gently until it starts to bubble at the edges. Remove from the heat and let steep while you continue with the recipe.
2. Peel the second garlic clove, cut it in half and rub the cut side around the inside of an oval gratin dish about 9 inches long and 2 inches deep. Rub 1 tablespoon of the butter over the inside of the baking dish.
3. Peel the potatoes and cut them into 1/8-inch-thick slices (I use a mandoline to get them nice and even), laying the slices on a kitchen towel to drain. Layer about a third of the potatoes in the bottom of the baking dish, fanning them into concentric, overlapping circles. Season the potatoes with salt and pepper and sprinkle a third of the cheese over them. Repeat with two more layers of potatoes, salt and pepper and cheese, making the top layer as neat and tidy as you can.
4. Remove the garlic clove from the hot milk and pour the milk evenly over the potatoes. Dot the top of the potatoes with the remaining tablespoon of butter and bake the gratin for about 30 minutes, until it’s browned and bubbly. Let the potatoes cool for 5 minutes before serving.

Here’s another version that uses Cheddar cheese and breadcrumbs:
http://southernfood.about.com/od/potatocasserolerecipes/r/bl30119t.htm

http://www.closetcooking.com/2009/02/potato-au-gratin.html

“What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be pretty decent sort of fellow.
-A.A. Milne

Isabella Beeton

I have mentioned that I just read Dearie, a new Julia Child biography. I have also waxed poetical about the film Julie and Julia, which prompted me to think that if Amy Adams could make beef bourguignon, I could make beef bourguignon. Heck, I have trouble spelling bourguignon. Which is probably why my efforts were reduced to plain, simple beef stew.

This is cold and flu season, and we should be prepared for the inevitable. I have tested the fates by not having gotten a flu shot. But precautions are necessary in these trying times. It is always wise to have a few Tupperware containers with emergency (and nurturing) provisions nestled deep in the freezer. And if that big snow storm is coming our way this weekend, I certainly don’t want to be out in the driveway digging out the car so I can run to the grocery store again, unless I run out of Kleenex.

Nope. I want to be sitting in my comfy rump-sprung red velvet armchair, basking in a watery patch of sunlight like a feeble cranky cat, wheezing and sneezing and thumbing through my Kindle. I can re-visit the great Julia as she does battle with the bourguignon while my beef stew is thawing nicely in the Dutch oven on the back of the stove. We even have a box of Saltines for my scratchy throat.

I usually turn to my friends at Food52 for ideas. Their recipe was just a little beyond my skill set – except I liked the alcohol content – one whole bottle of red wine and half a cup of cognac. So very medicinal! It is too bad that so much of it evaporated in the cooking process. Best Beloved came home that night, sniffed the air redolent with wine, and asked if I had raided a vineyard. Perhaps I cooked it too long – the meat was very tender, but I stewed vegetables away. Maybe they absorbed all the wine. Selfish, greedy veggies.

http://food52.com/recipes/2969-beef-bourguignon

Here is Julia Child’s version – with a little film clip from Julie and Julia. But in the end, I think I will stick with my mother’s version of beef stew. http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/recipe/julia-childs-beef-bourguignon-8222804

Beef Stew, from New England

3 pounds beef chuck, cut into 1 1/2-inch cubes
1/3 cup tomato paste
3 tablespoons vinegar
2 – 3 tablespoons flour – please no bleached flour
Salt and pepper
2 medium yellow onions, cubed
6 small red potatoes, cubed
A smattering of carrots, peeled and cut into chunks
3 cups of water
2 cups red wine (more if you [or someone you love] are really feeling flu-y)

1. Preheat oven to 350° F. Dust the beef chunks in flour, and brown them in oil in a Dutch oven. Combine browned beef with tomato paste and vinegar; season with salt and pepper.
2. Add onions, potatoes, carrots, and 3 cups water. And the wine. Bring to a boil. Cover, transfer to oven, and cook until meat is fork-tender, 2 to 2 1/2 hours.

For the folks with the flu:

“Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.”
-P.J. O’Rourke

For the rest of you:

“This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook- try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!”
-Julia Child