Every once in awhile, we all need comfort food. There's no one recipe, or one meal, even for each person. Comfort food is whatever makes you feel secure, protected, comforted. Tonight, I needed some comfort food, and here's what I made.

Creamed Corn

1. Why am I starting with creamed corn? Because of the items on this menu, it takes the longest to make. "WTF?" you ask. "You open a can and heat it. How long can it take?" To which I say "Yuck!". Here's how I make creamed corn. Preheat an oven to 400ºF and get some ears of corn, one per person, plus some more, as fresh off the stalk as you can: grow it, get to a local farmer, whatever it takes, but every minute the corn is off the stalk, it's losing sugar and taste. Gently peel back the leaves on the corn, removing only the toughest outer leaves. Rub off the strings. Pull the leaves back over the kernels, and place each ear in a bowl of salted water. Once all the ears of corn are prepared, wrap each in heavy duty aluminum foil and place in the hot oven for 45 minutes.
2. At the end of 45 minutes, heat a heavy sauce pan (I use porcelain coated cast iron) over low heat, preferably on simmering bricks. For each ear of corn, add 1 pat of butter, a bit of turbinado sugar, a grind of white pepper, and an half-cup of heavy cream to the heating pan. While the mixture is heating, unwrap the corn and return to the oven to brown for 15 minutes. About the sugar: if the corn is from your back yard, you should need very little, if picked that day, perhaps a quarter of a teaspoon, if from some warehouse and a chain supermarket, maybe a whole teaspoon per ear.
3. Once the cream mixture has heated and the corn has browned, remove from the oven, and peel back the leaves. Using the leaves as an handle, which should be cool enough to hold, use a sharp knife and remove the kernels from the cob. Add the kernels to the heated cream. If need be, add cream until the kernels are covered, or better floating in the cream.
4. Increase the temperature and allow the cream to boil for 3 minutes, return the heat to low or the pan to the simmering bricks and keep warm, stirring, until the meal is ready to serve.

Garlic Mashed Potatoes

1. I use yukon gold, and either one small or one-half medium potato per person. Peel and halve the potatoes, add to salted, cold water in a heavy pan. Peel one garlic clove per person, and add to the pan. Heat over high heat until boiling, lower heat to maintain a simmer, check after 10 minutes and keep heating until the potatoes can be easily pierced to their center with a fork. Remove the potatoes and garlic cloves from the boiling water, and allow to drain.
2. Pour out the water, and return the pan to the stove over low heat. Add an half-tablespoon of butter to the pan, with the garlic cloves and a grind per potato of white pepper and another grind of nutmeg. Allow the butter to brown at the edge, and the garlic to lightly brown. Add a tablespoon of heavy cream per person to the butter and bring to a boil. Put the potatoes back into the pan, and mash with a potato masher; alternately, you can pass the potatoes and browned garlic through a coarse-disk food mill into the pan.
3. Whisk it all together, and stir over heat until you're ready to serve

The Beef

I generally like Niman Ranch Ground Round for the meat. You can use any ground beef, or thin steak, pounded or not, or dry-aged New York Strip. For comfort food, the ground, for fancier meals the strip. You can dress up the ground with sautéed onion, Worcester Sauce, mustard powder, egg, whatever. You can rub the steak with a crushed garlic clove. With good quality meat, I don't like anything hiding the flavor. Use anywhere from 4 ounces to half-a-pound per person. Six ounces is a standard restaurant portion. Heat a pan over medium heat, add extra-virgin olive oil. Brown the meat for at least five minutes on a side, until nicely dark brown (lots of esters generated from browning, making for richer flavor). Cook the meat to the desired degree of doneness, rare to well-done.

The Sauce

While the corn is roasting, do the prep work. That includes the potatoes above, but also the prep work for the sauce or gravy. What's the difference? Flour. If you want a gravy, make a roux from butter and flour, a tablespoon of each per cup of liquid, cooking the flour in the butter for three minutes. Whisk the hot liquid into the the roux, until thick. What liquid? Keep reading.

1. Use about an half-inch of a red torpedo onion per person, thinly sliced.
2. Use four to six cremini mushrooms per person. Clean and slice.
3. Remove the meat, when done, from the pan, and allow to rest for 10 minutes.
4. Add oil if the pan is dry.
5. Add the onionslices to the pan, lower the heat, and sauté until translucent, add the mushroom slices and cook until tender.
6. Deglaze the pan with red wine or stock, working loose all the nice browned bits.
7. Add 4 ounces per person of vegetable, mushroom or beef stock
8. Here's the part where you can work the roux if you want a gravy.
9. For a sauce, cook the liquid, stirring often, over high heat until the liquid thickens - 10 to 15 minutes.
10. If the meat has cooled too far, return to the pan for the last five minutes.
11. If added, remove the meat, turn off the heat, and work a pat of butter into the sauce.

The Finish

Plate it up, with the sauce on the plate, or the gravy on the potatoes and beef. Put two to four heaping tablespoons of creamed corn in a small bowl for each serving. Maybe add some crusty bread and a salad, maybe not. Serve with the red wine used to make the sauce. Enjoy.

For her birthday, Mom asked for lasagna and cheesecake, as she's somewhat fanatical about both. I had a meeting in Palo Alto on Friday, so picking up a tiramisu cheesecake from The Cheesecake Factory was a no brainer, as I knew I wouldn't have time to shop and prepare both things.

The Americanized lasagna with which I grew up, and that will make my Mom the happiest is cooked from dried, curly-edged pasta layered with a ricotta and cheese mixture and tomato-meat sauce. I would prefer a more traditional lasagne, as made by Gianugo Rabellino. But, I also want to make a vegetarian lasagne. So, I'm combining the Italian tradition with the Italo-American tradition, and I'll make two lasagne, one meat with a ragù and one vegie with eggplant and portobello mushrooms.

On a recent visit, Gianugo told me that portobello isn't a mushroom's name in Italy, but that there is a portobello orange. Here's the mushroom:

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I'm also using so-called Italian Eggplants, which are smaller, more slender, less bitter and with fewer seeds than the large, globular Eggplants more commonly sold in the USA.

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The cap of the mushroom is about 4-inches (~10 cm) across. I'll make a sauce from these, similar to a ragù, but using the eggplants and mushrooms without any meat.

I'll also be serving some extra sauce on the side, the same as in my post on Abruzzo Polpettine, but with a rack of baby-back pork ribs rather than the veal shank, as my father prefers the ribs.

I'll be using sheets of fresh egg pasta, cut to fit the pans that I'll be using. These sheets don't have curly edges After cutting to fit the pans, blanch in salted, boiling water for two minutes and set aside, laying flat or draped over a drying rack.

In addition to the ragù and eggplant-mushroom-tomato sauce, I need enough balsamella sauce for both lasagne.

The tomatoes are cooking down in the wine with a red onion studded with bay leaf and cloves. I've cleaned, sliced and sautéed the mushrooms with garlic, in olive oil, and simmered in red wine. The eggplant was sliced, salted, set aside to drain (necessary with larger eggplants, and a matter of caution with these, to remove the bitter, soapy oil that eggplants have in their seeds) and sautéed in more olive oil and garlic slices. So, while the tomatoes, are cooking, I made the balsamella, and started blogging

Béchamel or Balsamella

Fill a greater-than-2-quart crockery bowl with hot water and set aside. I started with 2 sticks (16 tablespoons) of unsalted butter. Melt them over low heat in a large, porcelain coated pain. When the butter is melted and just starting to foam, grind in 16 turns of white peppercorns, and slowly whisk in a cup of unbleached, white wheat flour. Allow the flour to cook for at least three minutes, but don't let it brown. While the flower is cooking, heat in the microwave (or start this earlier if in a pan on the stove) 6 cups of whole milk mixed with one cup of heavy cream. When the flour is cooked, slowly whisk in the warm milk & cream. Cook for five more minutes over medium heat, whisking frequently. Grate a quarter-pound of locatelli romano hard, sharp cheese and whisk into the sauce. Salt to taste. Drain and dry the crockery bowl. Transfer the balsamella into the bowl, cover with a square of buttered parchment paper, and allow to cool for three hours.

Ricotta & Cheese

Now to make the cheese mixture. Start with ricotta. By the way, ricotta isn't a cheese, more of the anti-cheese, as it's made from the whey that is left-over when the curds are made into cheese. For my two lasagne, I'll need four pounds of fresh ricotta, with one egg per pound plus one egg per tray of lasagne, making for six eggs total. Mix in grated cheeses: one-half pound of parmigiano-reggiano, one-half pound of pecerino-toscano, and one-quarter pound of locatelli-romano and a hand-full of chopped Italian (flat-leaf) parsley.

Assemble the Lasagne

1. In the bottom of two large roasting or lasagna pans, put a ladle of the appropriate tomato sauce (ragù or vegie) and a tablespoon of olive oil. Make sure the bottom and sides of the pans are coated.
2. Lay a cooked sheet of pasta in the bottom of the pan
3. Imagine the squares each portion of lasagne will be; in each square put a rounded teaspoon each of
   • basil-garlic-pignoli pesto (note that the pesto for the vegie version also has blanched baby spinach leaves),
   • balsamella,
   • ragù or vegie sauce and
   • ricotta mixture
4. top with a pasta sheet, squeeze flat, do it again until the pan is full or you're out of materials
5. top with remaining balsamella

Place the lasagna pans into an oven preheated to 350ºF, and cook for 45 minutes. Check every 15 minutes to makes sure that the balsamella doesn't burn. If it gets very brown, cover with aluminum foil.

Sever with a salad, and the same type of red wine that you used in the sauce. I used Thalia Sangiovese from Viansa.

I've got to get back to cooking. If I have a chance, I'll update with pictures of the finished products.

Update: Finished eating the salad and entrée; here's a picture of the meat lasagne:

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And here's the vegie lasagne.

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I have to go back and get ready for cake, and I already feel like I'm about to explode.

Another Update: Here's Mom blowing out her candles.

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I'm going to go die now. I couldn't even finish my piece of cake.

Enjoy. Happy birthday, Mom.

I've been making this coleslaw for a few years, now, but somehow never blogged it. It's a bit different in that it contains sour cream, walnuts and dried cherries. If I can find them, I use a combination of dried Bing and Rainier cherries.

Start by soaking for 30 minutes, a total of an half-cup of dried cherries in warm sherry, brandy or wine, just enough to cover the cherries.

Quarter & core one small green cabbage and one small red cabbage. Slice the pieces very thinly. If you have a mandolin, this works great to slice the quarters of cabbage. You should wind up with about 2 quarts of cabbage. Put the shredded cabbage into a large bowl.

Peel and shred two medium, sweet carrots and mix with the cabbage. That mandolin will come in handy here, or just use the vegetable peeler, whittling away at the carrots as if you were making toothpicks.

Slowly pour in around a third of a cup of extra-virgin olive oil over the shredded cabbage/carrot mixture.

If you mix it with your hands, you can feel when you have enough oil to just lightly but completely, coat the cabbage. If you don't like to use your hands, just pour in a third of a cup of oil and hope it's the right amount.

Grind sea salt and rainbow pepper corns over the oiled cabbage to taste, and continue to mix. Set aside.

Juice a quarter to the whole of a small, sweet yellow onion (Walla-Walla, Visalia, or Maui). The amount of onion is really a matter of taste. To juice an onion, peel the amount to be juiced, and rub it over a ceramic, hole-less grater, collecting the juice in a mixing bowl.

Whisk together a quarter of a cup of tarragon white vinegar (wine or rice), a cup of sour cream, a teaspoon of freshly toasted caraway seeds - ground fine, a tablespoon of fine (quick-dissolving) white sugar and the onion juice.

Pour the dressing over the oiled, shredded cabbage.

Drain the cherries, and coarsely slice them; add to the dressed cabbage, and mix.

Chill for at least an hour, but overnight or even a day or two is fine.

Toast an half cup of walnut halves, dice and add to dressed cabbage, right before serving.

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And there you have it.

When I arrived home this past Friday night, there was a fire truck in front of my house, and a group of folk in my back yard. A tabby kitten belonging to new neighbors had run up the cypress tree in our back yard. The general consensus was that she would come down when she was hungry, and an opened can of tuna was left as an inducement.

Several times throughout the night, I went out to check on the kitten, who was mewing quite piteously, between naps. I even tried to get her to chase a spot of light from a flashlight, to get her to lower branches. She watched it, but never budged. I heard others come into our yard during the night, trying to induce the kitten down. But she was unmoved.

I later learned that the owner had come by with an arborist who used my ladder to climb into the tree, which only served to drive the kitten higher.

On Saturday morning, the owners, Sunshine and Leor, convinced the firefighters to come back, this time with a 75-foot hook and ladder truck, and another truck. I think all the on-duty firefighters from the Point Montara Coastside Fire Protection District were there, as well as a bunch of neighbors.

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Chip, whose backyard abuts ours, and who is also a firefighter, directed and photographed from on-high.

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The hook and ladder truck couldn't quite reach the tree from the street.

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But the arborist, using a regular ladder from the fire company, managed to lure the kitten into his arms, and brought her down.

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And all's well that ends well.

Even though I've come down with the flu [while I love working at my current customer, and I'm thankful for all the great people with whom I'm working, a flu has vectored through the place like a wildfire] we managed to make our reservation at the Sardine Factory in Monterey, continuing a tradition of many years.

The menu was much the same: abalone bisque or acorn squash soup, arugala & pear salad with blue cheese or autumn greens fancifully presented, Diestel Turkey with stuffing and gravy, a white & sweet potato tort, green beans and baby carrots, and whole cranberry-orange relish, with a choice of pumpkin bread pudding or pumpkin pie or chocolate pecan tart for desert.

The abalone bisque was a bit disappointing this year. Normally it is a light brown in colour, and redolent of abalone and sherry. This year it was white, thick like a bad chowder and the predominant flavour was of raw flour. Methinks the cook didst slip with the thickening.

The ride down was great. The traffic was light and sky was bright, blue and beautiful along CA Route 1. The Pacific was swollen and foamy, and surfers were everywhere. The ride home was equally great. Again light on traffic and timed for the sunset.

If I do cook this weekend, as I often wind up doing, I'll follow my traditional recipes as described last year. With one exception… I want to recreate the Colonial Virginia Peanut and Chestnut soup that I had when Mike and Chris brought us to Mt. Vernon for the Campus Technology 2007 visit & presentation. I've done research, but haven't been able to find the recipe online, only a forum of frustrated folk who also can't find it, not even in the Mt. Vernon cookbook.

Here's what I'm planning. Parboil raw peanuts in the shell for about 10 minutes, then roast them for another 10 in a medium oven. Cut an X in the shells of raw chestnuts and roast in the medium oven for about 20 minutes. Allow the peanuts to cool, and then put the chestnuts in a brown paper bag, just until they're cool enough to handle, and then shell them. Cook a rich vegetable stock that includes the normal onion, parsnip, carrot, celery, bouquet garni and garlic, but also has a diced turnip in it. When the stock has been simmering on the bricks for most of the day, add the peanuts, still in the shell, as well as the shelled and skinned chestnuts into the stock. After about 10 minutes, remove the peanuts and allow to cool, and then shell. Using a stick blender or a food mill, purée the stock, leaving all the vegetables and chestnuts. If too thick, add more stock or hot water to thin. Shave a raw turnip with a mandolin or slice it thinly with your favorite, sharpest knife, and add the cooked, shelled peanuts and slices of turnip to the soup, and cook for another half hour - salt to taste. I'll let you know how it comes out.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving Day.