Goldy's Kitchen Cookbook Read online

  2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

  1 large onion, chopped

  1 carrot, chopped

  3 to 3½ pounds bone-in, skin-on chicken drumsticks and thighs

  12⅓ cups chicken broth (contents of two 49.5-ounce cans) plus 12⅓ cups spring water (or use 25 cups canned chicken broth)

  1 celery stalk with leaves, cut up

  2 bay leaves

  2 teaspoons dried thyme, or more to taste

  ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or more to taste

  1. On the stove, heat a very large stockpot over medium heat. (If you do not have a very large stockpot, you can divide the ingredients and make the stock in 2 stockpots.) Add the oil and heat until it shimmers. Toss in the onion and carrot, reduce the heat to low, and cover the pot. Cook, stirring frequently, until the onion is translucent. (This can take up to 15 minutes.) Increase the heat to medium-high. Add the chicken, and cook, stirring frequently, until the chicken skin is browned on both sides, about 5 minutes. Pour in the chicken broth and water, add the celery and bay leaves, and bring to a boil. Boil for 5 minutes. As foam accumulates, skim it off and discard.

  2. Reduce the heat to a simmer and stir in the thyme and pepper. Simmer, partially covered, for 2 hours. Add water as necessary to keep the chicken covered with liquid.

  3. Remove the pot from the heat. Remove the chicken and allow it to cool, then pick the meat from the bones and reserve for another use. Strain the stock and discard the vegetables and bay leaves. Cool to room temperature.

  4. Cover and refrigerate overnight, or until the fat has congealed in a single layer. (This can take up to 2 days.) Lift the layer of fat from the stock and discard. Store the stock for 2 or 3 days in the refrigerator or freeze in covered plastic containers for longer storage.

  Makes about 25 cups

  Models’ Mushroom Soup

  —PRIME CUT—

  This is a hearty soup, lusciously thickened with puréed vegetables.

  5 tablespoons unsalted butter, divided

  1 large carrot, chopped

  1 large onion, chopped

  2 celery stalks, chopped

  8 ounces fresh button mushrooms, cleaned, trimmed, and thinly sliced

  4 tablespoons all-purpose flour

  6 cups chicken stock, preferably homemade (here)

  2 tablespoons chopped fresh thyme

  1 tablespoon chopped fresh marjoram

  2 tablespoons heavy (whipping) cream

  6 tablespoons dry white vermouth

  Salt and freshly ground black pepper

  1. In a large skillet, melt 2 tablespoons of the butter over medium-low heat. Add the carrot, onion, and celery and cook, covered, stirring frequently, until the vegetables soften, 15 to 25 minutes. Set aside to cool.

  2. In a small skillet, melt 1 tablespoon of the butter over medium-low heat. Add the mushrooms and cook briefly, until they are cooked through and begin to yield some juice. This takes less than 5 minutes. Set the mushrooms aside.

  3. In a blender, purée the cooked carrot, onion, celery, and any accumulated liquid.

  4. In a large skillet, melt the remaining 2 tablespoons butter over low heat. Stir in the flour and cook this paste, stirring constantly, until the flour bubbles. Slowly whisk in the stock. Increase the heat to medium. Cook and stir until hot and thickened, about 10 minutes. Stir in the thyme, marjoram, cream, mushrooms, vermouth, and puréed vegetables until hot and bubbling, about 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve immediately.

  Makes 6 servings

  Homemade Cream of Mushroom Soup

  —CRUNCH TIME—

  This is one of our family’s favorite soups. It combines the complex flavors of wild and fresh mushrooms. Homemade chicken stock makes it sing, and the cream and sherry make it fancy.

  1 ounce dried wild mushrooms (porcini, cremini, morels, or a mixture)

  2½ cups spring water

  8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, plus an additional 2 tablespoons, if needed

  1 shallot, peeled and finely diced

  8 ounces fresh button mushrooms, cleaned, trimmed, patted dry with paper towels, and finely diced

  7 tablespoons all-purpose flour

  4 cups (1 quart) homemade chicken stock (here)

  2 cups heavy (whipping) cream

  ¼ cup dry sherry

  Sea salt or kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

  1. Place the dried mushrooms in a large heatproof bowl. Bring the water to a boil and pour it over the dried mushrooms. Allow to sit for 30 minutes. Remove the reconstituted mushrooms with a slotted spoon. Remove the stems and discard. Pat the mushrooms dry, finely chop, and set aside. Strain the mushroom soaking liquid through dampened cheesecloth or a sieve lined with a paper coffee filter into a bowl. You should have about 2 cups of mushroom liquid. Set aside.

  2. In a stockpot, melt the 8 tablespoons butter over low heat. Add the shallots and fresh mushrooms and cook, stirring frequently, until soft, about 10 minutes. Increase the heat to medium, sprinkle in the flour, and stir constantly until the mixture bubbles and the flour is cooked, about 3 minutes. (If the mixture is completely dry, add up to 2 extra tablespoons of butter. Stir the mixture until the butter is completely melted, then stir and cook until the flour is cooked.)

  3. Add the chicken stock and reserved mushroom liquid, increase the heat to medium-high, and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens and bubbles. Reduce the heat and add the chopped wild mushrooms, the cream, sherry, and salt and pepper to taste. Cook, stirring frequently, for another 15 minutes, to blend the flavors. Remove from the heat to cool slightly.

  4. Working in batches, purée the soup in a blender. Place the puréed batches into a large heatproof bowl. When the soup is completely puréed, pour it back into the stockpot, taste, and correct the seasoning. Bring the soup back to a simmer and serve.

  6 to 8 servings

  Rainy Season Chicken Soup

  —THE MAIN CORPSE—

  This soup is for those times when you need a good chicken soup for a sick child, neighbor, or friend. The fideo makes it exotic. Don’t worry about adding dry white vermouth, as the alcohol cooks out. Feel free to use regular sour cream, as we now know it’s not the sour cream that makes you fat, it’s the pasta . . . but kids will look askance at you if you give them what is basically a glammed-up chicken noodle soup, with no noodles. So go ahead and put them in.

  2 dried porcini mushrooms

  2 tablespoons butter

  2 leeks, white part only, split, rinsed, and diced

  1 medium carrot, diced

  1 medium onion, diced

  1 large celery stalk, diced

  2 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves

  2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

  2 tablespoons dry white vermouth

  4 cups chicken stock, preferably homemade (here)

  1 cup regular or light sour cream

  1 cup fideo (fine egg noodle strands)

  Salt and freshly ground black pepper

  1. In a small saucepan, bring 1 cup spring water to a boil and drop in the porcini mushrooms. (If you live in a place with bad-tasting tap water, use spring water.) Cook uncovered over medium-high heat for 10 minutes. Drain the mushrooms, pat them dry, and thinly slice. Set aside.

  2. In a large sauté pan, melt the butter over low heat. Add the leeks, carrot, onion, celery, and chicken, stir gently, cover, and cook for 5 minutes. Uncover, stir the vegetables, turn the chicken, and check for doneness. (The chicken should be about half done.) Cover and cook until chicken is just done—not overdone—about another 5 minutes. Remove the chicken from the pan and set aside to cool.

  3. Sprinkle the flour over the melted butter, vegetables, and pan juices and stir to cook the flour over low heat for 2 minutes. Slowly add the white vermouth and 2 cups of the chicken stock. Stir and cook until bubbling and thickened. Add the sour cream very slowly, and allow to cook gently while you cut the chicken into thin, bite-size pieces.r />
  4. In a large skillet, bring the remaining 2 cups stock to a boil. Add the fideo and cook 4 minutes, or until almost done. Do not drain. Slowly add the noodle mixture to the hot vegetables and sour cream mixture. Add the chicken and the mushrooms and bring back to a boil. Serve immediately.

  Makes 4 servings

  Chapter 2

  Eggs and Cheese or My Agent Is Still a Vegetarian

  Highbrow (and even some lowbrow) food writers disparage quiche. But anyone who enjoys lunch at the neighborhood bistro will tell you that the Quiche of the Day has remained a menu staple for over thirty years. People, including real men, like a rich mélange of eggs, cream, cheese, and other ingredients.

  I came by quiches in California, where an older student in one class—she was French and was married to a professor in the French Department—invited some classmates to lunch. As I’d learned from observing Mrs. Jones, I helped out in the kitchen beforehand: gathering dishes, silverware, and glasses, as my friend whisked eggs with cream and poured it over chopped cooked bacon and grated cheese already in a crust. Not long afterward, we all dug into a velvety, cheesy, crunchy concoction our hostess told us was Quiche Lorraine. Forty-plus years later, I still remember it.

  Yes, quiches became overdone, because they were made poorly, contained inferior ingredients, or were forced to sit until they (and we) wept. But with a little attention, that simultaneously feathery and hearty dish is still scrumptious.

  So . . . once I started taking my agent’s admonition to create more vegetarian dishes, I began to work on quiches and other egg and cheese dishes. The ones in this chapter became our family’s, and thus Goldy’s, favorites. I find others delicious, such as Julia Child’s Quiche au Roquefort, but when I tried to develop a blue cheese pizza, our family rebelled. I had to palm off that particular creation on an obliging neighbor.

  Now, the parallel to writing is this: A similar dynamic can take place with character development (which does not mean you are palming off anything on an unsuspecting neighbor). Au contraire, sometimes you create a recipe or character whom you love, but no one else does (see: Blue Cheese Pizza). Say you think the character is charmingly naïve. Your critique group (your writing family) says that person is boring, stupid, or both. Other times, you create a character you think is, well, enthusiastic. The group unanimously says, “Bombast and rudeness don’t work.”

  Okay, lesson learned. But there is something else I learned from paying attention to my friend making the Quiche Lorraine. Observing one’s own emotional reaction to people can help create characters. My example here is General Farquhar, an unplanned character who walked onto the pages of Dying for Chocolate.

  The story of the inspiration for the unplanned character begins with my enjoyment of discovering the etymology of commonly used words. Take glamour. We think of a person as glamorous if she or he is chic, or dresses fashionably. But a glamour originally meant a spell. By those lights, a person who is truly glamorous casts a spell.

  So, if you’re in the writing business, it behooves you to pay attention when a person you encounter seems to cast a spell. Race home, write it all down, see how it works, rewrite it, then rewrite once more. You might have something you can get past your writers’ group.

  How this relates to my recently learned etymology of glamour (and General Farquhar) came about in 1990, when I attended my first mystery convention, Malice Domestic, in Bethesda, Maryland. My parents were staying in Washington and took me out for lunch at the Army-Navy Club.

  We were enjoying a pleasant (read: nonpolitical) conversation when my father, a retired admiral, suddenly said, “Come here, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

  I am sorry to say that I did not reply, “Sure, Dad!” My father and I were not of the same political persuasion. I had met enough of his friends to know that they weren’t likely to be of my political persuasion, either.

  So instead I said, “Please. I don’t want to meet any of your friends.”

  My father lowered his formidable eyebrows and said, “Don’t embarrass me.”

  My mother sighed.

  At that point, I was already embarrassing Jim’s and my adolescent son. Now I was embarrassing my father. It seemed I couldn’t win.

  So I followed my father—you’ll have to imagine the clinking of silver, china, and crystal—to the far side of the dining room, where my father said, “Colonel North, I’d like you to meet my daughter, Diane.”

  I blinked and blinked again as Oliver North very graciously responded to my father’s introduction. He asked me a question or two—he and Jim had been a year apart at the Naval Academy, as it turned out—but all I could say was “Uh, uh, uh.”

  It was hard for me to find my voice, because Oliver North was glamorous in the old-fashioned sense: He cast a spell. I finally answered one of his questions regarding the Academy. (“What company was your husband in?” Oliver North asked. “The thirtieth!” I finally replied.) But I went home thinking, I have to use this. My emotional reaction to this spellbinding man, my theory went, could create a character.

  And thus was General Farquhar born. Goldy takes refuge in the Farquhars’ house when the Jerk begins stalking her. After the Jerk argues with Goldy and begins throwing clay pots at the Farquhars’ house, the general sneaks up silently behind him, grasps him in a stranglehold, and torques his head around to force eye contact. General Farquhar warns the Jerk to keep away from Goldy, and adds, “I’ll show you how the Special Forces can kill people without making any noise. Is that clear?”

  General Farquhar is a real man. And he eats quiche.

  Note on equipment: Some of these recipes call for using a 10-inch pie plate, but these can be hard to find these days. In its place, I now use an Emile Henry 11-inch pie plate, and no, I don’t get any money from Emile Henry. It works perfectly in place of the old 10-inch pie plate.

  Chile Relleno Torta

  —DYING FOR CHOCOLATE—

  I first tasted a recipe similar to this at a Mexican restaurant in Denver. The flavors of chiles rellenos melded with a creamy custard? Heaven! I begged the chef for the recipe. But what she gave me didn’t quite work, maybe because it was for a hundred people, and what became Goldilocks’ Gourmet Spinach Soup had already proven I had issues with food fractions. (A typical dialogue in our kitchen used to go like this: Diane: “Jim, what’s three-fourths of 3½ cups?” Jim: “Diane, you should be able to do that in your head.” We don’t have those kinds of conversations anymore, because even I can figure out how to use a calculator on a smartphone.) Anyway, I was confident I could come up with a dish that approximated the tastes I wanted. Thankfully, the family was willing to try anything Tex-Mex. In this dish, the picante sauce rises to the top of the custard, giving, once the torta is cut into, a scumbled surface—one readers of the Goldy series know can be handily and undetectably laced with poison.

  ½ pound Cheddar cheese, grated

  ½ pound Monterey jack cheese, grated

  5 large eggs

  ⅓ cup all-purpose flour

  1⅔ cups half-and-half

  Contents of one 4-ounce can diced green chiles, drained

  ¼ cup picante sauce

  1. Preheat the oven to 375˚F. Butter a 10- or 11-inch pie plate.

  2. Mix the Cheddar and jack cheeses and spread evenly in the pie plate. In a bowl, beat the eggs, add the flour slowly, and then beat in the half-and-half. If the mixture is lumpy, strain it. Pour the egg mixture over the cheeses in the pie plate. Carefully spoon the chiles over the surface, then spoon the picante sauce over all. Bake for 45 minutes, or until the center is set.

  Makes 8 to 10 servings

  Crustless Jarlsberg Quiche

  —DYING FOR CHOCOLATE—

  This is technically a ramequin, which is also one of the names for an oval-shaped casserole in which you can bake your recipe. The virtue of this dish is that it can be assembled in advance and refrigerated.

  8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, plus more for the pan
/>   ½ cup all-purpose flour

  1½ cups whole milk

  11 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature

  2½ cups (24 ounces) small-curd cottage cheese

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

  1 teaspoon kosher salt

  9 large eggs

  3¼ cups grated Jarlsberg or Gruyère cheese (¾ pound)

  ⅓ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

  1. Preheat the oven to 350˚F. Butter a 9 x 13-inch glass baking dish or a 10-cup capacity gratin pan.

  2. In a large skillet, melt the 8 tablespoons of butter over medium-low heat. Add the flour and stir just until the mixture bubbles. Slowly add the milk, stirring constantly. Stir this cream sauce until it thickens. Add the softened cream cheese and whisk the mixture well, until smooth. Set aside to cool.

  3. In a medium bowl, stir together the cottage cheese, baking powder, mustard, and salt. In a large bowl, beat the eggs well, then beat in the cottage cheese mixture. Slowly beat in the cream sauce, then thoroughly incorporate the Jarlsberg and Parmesan. Stir well to combine. Pour into the prepared baking dish. At this point you can cool the dish, cover with plastic wrap, and place in the refrigerator.