Retro Recipes and Traditional Fare

What a perfect time to declare it to be New England clam chowder week because the temperature here in Maine has been zero degrees at night and the wind has been a howling! Recipes for chowder are pretty personal  around here. Some old salts would never use rendered bacon fat to sauté their onions in, they'd stop listening to you, roll their eyes and turn up their noses. Salt pork is how the old timers started chowder, period. Quahogs, not likely, either.

I'm telling you from experience you can't please too many people here in Maine with chowder because it's never like their mother's. Perhaps they will taste it, but if you leave the room they all will be chatting about "where did she learn to make chowder, Howard Johnson's"?  But, I'll take a shot at MY way of making it and hope that I don't take too much heat for it.

First off, you need 2 1/2 to 3 pounds of steamer clams, yup, steamers. What's a steamer clam, you ask? It's a soft shell clam that lives in sandy or muddy Atlantic shoreline. If you're lucky enough to have a choice, pick the mud clams. Nothing complicated, the mud washes away after several soakings, but God couldn't get all the grit and sand out even with an army to help. There's alway some crunchy grit left, period! Clean the fresh steamers well and go directly from the sink to a waiting large 6 quart heavy bottomed pot, turn the heat on medium and cover. You caught me, no water! Be brave...

So far I have kept my New Year’s resolution to eat healthy. (Okay, so maybe except for the wine and a little chocolate.) This commitment includes a granola breakfast. (Later in the day, the menu gets very green.)

I have been obsessing about making the perfect granola to support my resolution. I have played with ingredients such as coconut (all formats: oil, sugar, shredded), millet, dried apricots, wheat germ, quinoa, etc. and I intend to continue messing with the recipe just to keep things interesting.

But as of today, I’m eating the one described below. It’s tasty, and makes me feel almost good about the fact that I’m not eating a croissant with jam.

Try it, knowing you can substitute almost everything with something else, if you are feeling granola obsessive. (This may not be the case for you if you, say, have a life.)

Growing up my mother and grandmother fed us picadillo, a dish of ground beef, potatoes, tomatos, onions and spices. It was the perfect meal–delicious and satisfying–and always enjoyed with fresh flour tortillas on the side. It’s a dish I still crave to this day, and like most Latin cuisine it has its regional differences.

As I’ve traveled I’ve noticed that almost everyone has their own version of meat and potatoes, and it’s easy to see why. A traditional Irish corned beef and potatoes, a Kashmiri Rogan Josh served with slowly stewed potatoes, or Brazilian churrasco enjoyed with mounds of Brazilian potato salad- – mix a protein and a starch and happiness is always guaranteed…not to mention a fully belly.

Sometimes in my moments of quasi-food snobbery I chide my friends who refuse to join me for dinner, fearing I’ll pick something that falls outside their culinary comfort zone. I practically have to sign a form promising them no organ meats, no intense heat, no stinky cheese, no bellpeppers and certainly nothing that comes from the “strange” parts of an animal (which always leads me to ask why a rump roast isn’t strange but a tongue is, but whatever!) However, the perfect meal to satisfy my picky meat-and-potatoes kind of friends are, well, meat and potatoes. But only meat and potatoes in their most simple, smoky and stripped down form: steak frites.

Recently I was at a library book sale and as usual I scanned for hidden treasure among the cookbooks. Browsing cookbooks is nothing short of a history lesson. Here's what I found, as men came back from fighting overseas and Americans travelled abroad for pleasure, their hunger for exotic recipes increased and so did the number of international cookbooks.

Cooking on a budget was a popular theme in times of recession like the 1970's. Curiously the cookbooks from the 50's and 60's were dominated by the use of processed foods. Browsing the volumes, I began to wonder, just how did processed food come to such popularity anyway?

Not long after my shopping trip I began reading Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. Not a cookbook at all, but a rich and fascinating history of cooking in America in the post WWII period up until the early 60's. Suddenly it all made sense!