Goldy's Kitchen Cookbook Read online

  Dedication

  To all the marvelously supportive booksellers who have helped bring Goldy to readers

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Goldilocks’ Gourmet Spinach Soup

  1 Appetizers and Soups or How Do I Look? (And Other Stories About Food and Appearance) Holy Moly Guacamole

  Nachos Schulz

  Bacon-Wrapped Artichokes with Dijon Cream Sauce

  Tom’s Layered Mexican Dip

  Mexican Egg Rolls with Spicy Guacamole Dipping Sauce Spicy Guacamole Dipping Sauce

  Chile Con Queso Dip

  Diamond Lovers’ Hot Crab Dip

  Handcuff Croissants

  Prosciutto Bites

  Not-So-Skinny Spinach Dip

  Hoisin Turkey with Roasted Pine Nuts in Lettuce Cups

  Not-So-Secret Cheese Spread

  Low-Fat Chicken Stock

  Models’ Mushroom Soup

  Homemade Cream of Mushroom Soup

  Rainy Season Chicken Soup

  2 Eggs and Cheese or My Agent Is Still a Vegetarian Chile Relleno Torta

  Crustless Jarlsberg Quiche

  Julian’s Cheese Manicotti

  Mexican Pizzas

  Quiche Me Quick

  Tomato-Brie Pie

  Provençal Pizza

  Doll Show Shrimp and Eggs

  Collector’s Camembert Pie

  Savory Florentine Cheesecake

  Huevos Palacios Boulder Chili

  Chuzzlewit Cheese Pie

  Asparagus Quiche

  Julian’s Summer Frittata

  Ferdinanda’s Florentine Quiche

  3 Spuds, Salads, Etc. or My Editor Is Also a Vegetarian Jailbreak Potatoes

  Slumber Party Potatoes

  Penny-Prick Potato Casserole

  Prudent Potatoes au Gratin

  Party Apples

  Goldy’s Marvelous Mayonnaise

  Wild Man’s Rice Salad

  New Potato Salad

  Schulz’s Guacamole Salad

  Dijon Pasta Salad

  Sugar Snap Pea and Strawberry Salad

  Grilled Slapshot Salad

  Exhibition Salad with Meringue-Baked Pecans Meringue-Baked Pecans

  Mediterranean Orzo Salad

  Figgy Salad

  Wild Girls’ Grilled Mushroom Salad

  Chopping Spree Salad Tangy Lime Dressing

  Primavera Pasta Salad Simple Vinaigrette

  Stylish Strawberry Salad

  Heirloom Tomato Salad

  Chilled Curried Chicken Salad

  Goldy’s Caprese Salad

  Love Potion Salad Love Potion Salad Dressing

  4 Meat, Poultry, and Fish or The Heart of the Matter Snowboarders’ Pork Tenderloin

  Party Pork Chops

  Figgy Piggy

  Puerco Cubano

  Chinese Beef Stir-Fry with Vegetables

  Shakespeare’s Steak Pie Upper-Crust Pastry

  Love-Me-Tenderloin Grilled Steaks

  Sweethearts’ Swedish Meatballs in Burgundy Sauce Crème Fraîche

  Ad Guys’ Roast Beef and Gravy

  Anniversary Burgers

  The Whole Enchilada Pie

  Unorthodox Shepherd’s Pie

  Goldy’s Garlic Lamb Chops

  Grilled Chicken à l’Orange

  André’s Coq au Vin

  Trudy’s Mediterranean Chicken

  Chicken Piccata Supreme

  Portobello Mushroom Stuffed with Grilled Chicken, Pesto, and Sun-Dried Tomatoes

  Stir-Fry Chicken with Asparagus

  Chicken Divine

  Enchiladas Suizas

  Sonora Chicken Strudel

  Turkey Curry with Raisin Rice

  Shrimp on Wheels

  Shrimp Risotto with Portobello Mushrooms

  Shuttlecock Shrimp Curry

  Plantation Pilaf with Shrimp

  Chesapeake Crab Cakes with Sauce Gribiche

  Chilean Sea Bass with Garlic, Basil, and Vegetables

  Power Play Potatoes and Fish

  Goalies’ Grilled Tuna

  5 Breads or This Is Not Your Low-Carb Chapter Bread Dough Enhancer for Yeast Breads

  Dad’s Bread

  Galaxy Doughnuts

  Monster Cinnamon Rolls

  What-to-Do-with-All-the-Egg-Yolks Bread

  Julian’s Five-Grain Bread

  Got-a-Hunch Brunch Rolls

  Chicky Bread

  Yolanda’s Cuban Bread

  Almond Poppy Seed Muffins

  Irish Soda Bread

  Piña Colada Muffins

  Banana-Pecan Muffins

  Cinnamon Griddle Scones

  Castle Scones

  Grand Marnier Cranberry Muffins

  Stained-Glass Sweet Bread

  Crunchy Cinnamon Toast

  Goldy’s Guava Coffee Cake

  6 Desserts or This Is Not Your Low-Carb Chapter, Either Honey-I’m-Home Gingersnaps

  Ice-Capped Gingersnaps Icing

  Chocolate-Dipped Biscotti

  Red ’n’ Whites

  Cereal Killer Cookies

  Sweetheart Sandwiches

  Canterbury Jumbles

  Lemon Butter Wafers

  Blondes’ Blondies Creamy Citrus Frosting

  Keepsake Cookies

  Queen of Scots Shortbread

  Chocolate Snowcap Cookies

  Fatally Flaky Cookies Vanilla Buttercream Frosting

  Chocolate Coma Cookies

  Chocolate Comfort Cookies

  Chocoholic Cookies

  Strong-Arm Cookies

  Babsie’s Tarts

  Goldy’s Nuthouse Cookies

  Crunch Time Cookies

  Dungeon Bars

  Lethal Layers

  Bleak House Bars

  Got-a-Hot-Date Bars

  Scout’s Brownies

  Spicy Brownies

  Goldy’s Terrific Toffee

  Labor Day Flourless Chocolate Cake with Berries, Melba Sauce, and White Chocolate Cream Melba Sauce

  White Chocolate Cream

  Happy Endings Plum Cake

  Chocolate Truffle Cheesecake

  Fudge Soufflé

  Big Bucks Bread Puddings with Hard Sauce Hard Sauce

  Damson-in-Distress Plum Tart

  Shoppers’ Chocolate Truffles

  Super Spenders’ Strawberry-Rhubarb Cobbler

  In-Your-Face Strawberry Pie (I)

  In-Your-Face Strawberry Pie (II)

  Double-Shot Chocolate Cake

  Deep-Dish Cherry Pie

  Door-Prize Gingerbread

  Dark Torte Sherry Syrup

  Whipped Cream Topping

  All-American Deep-Dish Apple Pie

  Chocolate-Lovers’ Dipped Fruit

  Totally Unorthodox Coeur à la Crème Hazelnut Crust

  Black-and-White Cake Chocolate Glaze

  Breakfast Bread Pudding with Rum Sauce

  Sugar-Free Vanilla Gelato

  Chocolate Tartufi Diana

  7 Enfin! Low-Carb Recipes or How I Lost Thirty Pounds and Kept It Off Fried Pecans

  Luscious Arugula Salad

  Cauliflower Mash, or How to Get by Without Potatoes

  Garlicky Spinach

  Green Beans Amandine

  Hard-Core Prawn Salad

  Chicken Tarragon

  Tenderloin of Beef

  Berries with Yogurt Cream

  Epilogue

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Diane Mott Davidson

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the f
ollowing people: Jim Davidson; Jeff, Rosa, Ryan, Nick, and Josh Davidson; J. Z. Davidson; Joey Davidson; Sandra Dijkstra, Elise Capron, Andrea Cavallaro, Thao Le, Elisabeth James, and the rest of the superb team at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency; Brian Murray, Michael Morrison, Liate Stehlik, Carolyn Marino, Kaitlyn Kennedy, Tavia Kowalchuk, Joseph Papa, and the entire brilliant team at Morrow; the St. Anne’s-Belfield community in Charlottesville, Virginia, especially Kay Butterfield and Gunda Hiebert, with special remembrance of the passing of our beloved Pamela Malone and Emyl Jenkins; Professor Diana Kleiner of Yale University; Kathy Saideman; Carol Alexander, for testing the recipes and making many valuable suggestions; Jasmine Cresswell; Linda and David Ranz, M.D.; Shirley Carnahan, Ph.D.; Carole Kornreich, M.D.; Julie Kaewert; Dylan Burdick and Tiffany Green; Lyndsay White; Pamela Eaton; J.R. and John Suess; the Reverends Andi Suess Taylor, Jay Rock, David Evans, and John Hall, all of St. Boniface Episcopal Church in Sarasota, Florida; Judith Rock, Nancy Evans, Betsie Danner, Carolyn Walker, and all the parishioners and staff at St. Boniface; Harriët van Elburg and Jason Heckman; the Reverend Nancy Malloy, Bill and Carole Hörger, and all the parishioners at St. Laurence Episcopal Church in Conifer, Colorado; my far-flung family: Adam Mott, Janie Mott Fritz, Lucy Mott Faison, Sally Mott Freeman, and William C. Mott, Jr., plus all their wonderful spouses and dear children, with remembrance again of the passing of our beloved Tom Fritz; John William Schenk and Karen Johnson Kennedy, who taught me how to cater; Marty O’Leary and the staff at Sur La Table in Sarasota, Florida, for numerous helpful suggestions; and thanks forever to Triena Harper and Sergeant Richard Millsapps, now retired from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, Golden, Colorado.

  Introduction

  In the early 1980s, I started to write about a character named Goldy. She would be a caterer, I decided. At that time, I only knew three things about her: She loved to cook; she had a troubled eleven-year-old son; she was a survivor of domestic abuse. Her ex-husband, whom I named the Jerk, was a wealthy doctor who had repeatedly beaten her. But as I wrote more about Goldy, I realized that she had thrown him out. Her grit, hard work, and ability to find support from friends, church, and her mentor at a Denver restaurant enabled her to put her life back together. She did more than survive. She thrived. She took the lemon that life had given her and made not just lemonade but Lemon Chicken, Lemon Bars, Lemon Cookies, and Lemon Meringue Pie.

  By 1987, I had finished writing what became Catering to Nobody. My critique group, to which I often brought cookies, told me I should put some recipes in the book. So I did. In 1988, the wonderful literary agent Sandra Dijkstra took me on. She sold the book to St. Martin’s Press, which published it in 1990. Over the next twenty-plus years, Goldy, her family, and I have continued to grow, and it has been a fabulous journey.

  Like Goldy, I enjoy working in the kitchen. This was not always so. The night before I married my husband, Jim (who is nothing like the Jerk; I say this only because people have repeatedly asked), I broke down.

  “I can’t marry you!” I cried, as we sat in the front seat of our Chevy Nova (which turned out to be a lemon of a different kind).

  Jim asked, “We can’t get married? Why not?”

  “I can’t cook!”

  Jim said, “We’ll be fine.”

  And we were. I learned to have fun cooking. How I decided to write about Goldy is another, parallel story.

  But let’s start in the kitchen. I am the oldest of four children. Our mother disliked—despised would not be too strong a word—the necessity of preparing the family’s evening meal. My guess is that this resentment coincided with a mishap with the pressure cooker.

  I was nine. My mother had mastered making beef, potatoes, and carrots in her cooker, so that was what we ate almost every night. This would usually be accompanied by leaves of iceberg lettuce dabbed with mayonnaise from a jar. Based on our experiences at friends’ houses, my siblings and I knew that some mothers liked to cook and did it well. But if we dared to complain, we would be sent to our rooms without dinner. So we learned to keep our mouths shut, as they say in the South, right quick.

  Occasionally, my mother varied what she served, perhaps out of a sense of duty. She was from New England. On St. Patrick’s Day, she made corned beef and cabbage. Even though we were Protestants, she always served fish sticks on Friday—just in case. We also had the occasional dinner of (canned) Boston baked beans and (canned) New England brown bread. On the weekends, my father worked off stress by making yeast breads, which he kneaded with great vigor. We kids dug into the corned beef and cabbage and pressure-cooked beef, potatoes, and carrots and slathered margarine—all we knew in those days—on Dad’s bread, and things hummed along.

  Then she accidentally blew the lid off the pressure cooker. I remember the kerbang. No one was hurt, thank God. But the kitchen ceiling bore a permanent imprint from the lid. The beef, potatoes, and carrots left stains that never came out. (Before they sold the house, my parents scrubbed the ceiling and painted over the stains.)

  After the pressure cooker incident, my mother threw in the kitchen towel and pretty much handed the job off to me. She didn’t mind shopping, so I would use the ingredients she bought: packages of chicken pieces, pounds of ground beef, those sticks of margarine, plus more heads of iceberg lettuce, boxes of Shake ’n Bake seasoning, Rice-A-Roni, Betty Crocker Noodles Romanoff, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, instant mashed potatoes, instant mushroom gravy, instant salad dressing mix.

  So in fact I had done plenty of “cooking” before Jim and I were due to get married. But I knew it wasn’t real cooking. The mothers of my friends and my siblings’ friends when we were growing up outside Washington, D.C., were great cooks, and they made everything from lasagna to tzimmes with what looked like ease and dedication. When I would plead to have my friends over for a meal, my mother would bake a ham. I made Kraft Macaroni & Cheese to go with it, plus iceberg lettuce mixed with mayonnaise.

  During those early years, I also was fortunate enough to witness a real cook in her element. When my siblings and I were young, our parents would go on vacations without us, which was common among middle-class households in the fifties and sixties. An older woman would stay with us. I’m sure she’s passed away, but still: Let’s call her Mrs. Jones.

  Mrs. Jones made everything from scratch. As long as I was willing to listen sympathetically to her laments about her son, Jeremiah, I could watch. Mrs. Jones would make luscious chicken pot pies. She cut real butter—never margarine—into flour, sprinkled on iced spring water, and rolled out pie crust while telling me how Jeremiah had been acting up. Mrs. Jones made spice cookies, chocolate cookies, and sugar cookies while bemoaning the fact that Jeremiah was in jail. Mrs. Jones’s real specialty was candy. The problem with Jeremiah, she said as she rolled chocolate into luscious globes, was that he had a chemical imbalance. I listened and nodded, all while recognizing that Mrs. Jones, like the mothers of our friends, was the genuine article in the kitchen.

  I had just turned twenty, and Jim had just turned twenty-two, when we were about to get married and I was sobbing and saying that there would not, could not, in fact, be a wedding the next day, because I couldn’t cook. I knew the “Mrs. Jones standard” would be the one by which I would be assessed. Those were the days when women, and only women, were judged—usually harshly—based on their ability to cook. My mother had escaped this judgment, but I knew “the truth,” and that was that we had Instant Everything.

  When our parents had cocktail parties, they served frozen egg rolls that my sisters and I heated up. For their rare dinner parties, my father would place a raw egg beside his place and expertly whisk it into a dressing for Caesar salad, which would be served with ham and baked potatoes. Other times, when they needed to entertain guests for a meal, they took them to a restaurant.

  So before the pressure cooker exploded, I had enjoyed the beef, potatoes, and carrots, the occasional New England dish, the ham, and fish sticks. Then I’d had my adventures with Shake ’n
Bake and other time-and-effort-saving dishes. When I was twelve, though, I quite unexpectedly received a profound lesson in differing regional cuisines.

  That year, I received a scholarship that enabled me to attend a girls’ boarding school, St. Anne’s, in Charlottesville, Virginia. (It is now a coed school called St. Anne’s-Belfield, known by the acronym STAB. When I purchased a pair of sweatpants with STAB embroidered on them, our youngest son thought I’d bought them at a crime writers’ convention.)

  At St. Anne’s, I was blessed to have outstanding teachers, one of whom, Emyl Jenkins, told me I should be a writer, a compliment that I held in my back pocket for eighteen years, while going to college, working at other jobs, and raising a family.

  In the food department, Charlottesville might as well have been a continent away from Washington. At St. Anne’s, we had real Southern cooking: grits and sausage; biscuits and gravy; perfect fried chicken; black-eyed peas and stewed tomatoes. According to my sisters (they were too young to cook, and my brother was only a year old), our mother resignedly took over making the Shake ’n Bake chicken and Rice-A-Roni. One hundred ten miles away, I thought I’d died and gone to Food Heaven.

  Eight years later, when Jim and I were, despite my pre-wedding meltdown, married, we were both full-time scholarship students, this time at Stanford. Jim was a Navy ensign and ensconced in a graduate engineering program. I was finishing my undergraduate degree and had a limited budget to prepare meals. At first, I served Jim Instant Everything. Surprised, he lavished compliments on me.

  While relying on Instant Everything—which was expensive but not time-consuming—I read Peg Bracken’s hilarious, wonderful I Hate to Cook Book. It seemed even I could follow her simple instructions. I learned the Art of the Casserole, which usually involved canned creamed soups mixed with a variety of other ingredients.