Sunday Supper: Bacon-Fried Chicken Southern Supper

melting bacon fat for Bacon-Fried Chicken

Schatzi: Eli wanted to experiment with a fried chicken recipe involving both bacon in the batter and frying the chicken in bacon fat. Of course, I had to let him. I also let him have his head with the rest of the meal, and he cooked up some kale and mashe potatoes, shallots, and roasted garlic. For dessert, we had the classic banana pudding.

what we ate: Thursday evening

Schatzi: After a long day of schoolwork and geeking out, we had a semi-junk food supper: turkey melt, stuffing, and garlicky broccolini. The turkey melt was just deli turkey meat, Tillamook cheddar, and mustard on sourdough slices, and the stuffing was actually–gasp!–StoveTop. We saw it on an endcap in Fred Meyer, and bought it as an impulse. So we fail at being conscientious omnivores, but hey, everybody remembers eating StoveTop sometime. Eli sauteed the broccolini in a little olive oil with garlic, salt, and pepper. Come to think of it, this would be a great post-Thanksgiving leftover meal.

StoveTop, turkey melt, and broccolini

totally turkey melt

Baked Apples

baked apple with bleu cheese

Mother didn’t like the idea of my going to a strange boarding-house, so Miss Mills kindly made a place for me. You know she lets her rooms without board, but she is going to give me my dinners, and I’m to get my own breakfast and tea, quite independently. I like that way, and it’s very little trouble, my habits are so simple; a bowl of bread and milk night and morning, with baked apples or something of that sort, is all I want, and I can have it when I like.” –Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl

Elisha: I thought these up this morning when Schatzi and I were beyond hungry and trying to figure out what I could possibly make with the little ingredients I had available. I saw Schatz’s bag of apples and thought to myself jokingly that I could make baked apples. Then a second later I realized that was a great idea.

You may leave the blue cheese off, and they will still be delicious, but even someone like Schatzi who has a love/hate relationship with blue cheese thought that it added an amazing creaminess and sophistication to an otherwise homey dish.

Hot Fudge Pudding Cake

Sylvia Lovegren dates the popularity of the pudding cake to the Forties, though that popularity declined in the Sixties when all things old-fashioned were scorned for space age chic. My mother used to make a chocolate pudding cake very similar to this one, differing only slightly in how the ingredients were put together, but my sister has her recipe box, so I used the recipe Lovegren adapted from 1946’s The California Cookbook. Their spongy, cakelike tops floating over thick, gooey sauces make pudding cakes perfect for a cold, wet fall or winter when served right out of the oven. The Oregonian’s FoodDay printed some “upscale” versions last spring, which I cut out to try sometime.Men and children are especially fond of this hot fudge pudding cake.

had to get away: Marionberry Slump (or Marionberry Grunt)

it's slump, it's slump, it's in a pot.

When Europeans settled North America, they brought with them any number of useful and beloved things, particularly culinary habits, and when they couldn’t find quite what they needed, they adapted for their new home. From the pies, tarts, clafoutis, and steamed puddings of Europe came cobblers, crisps, slumps, grunts, buckles, pandowdys, bettys, and pot pies, all variations on a theme improvised with fresh, seasonal fruits and crusts, biscuits, and dumplings. Most of the variations with which we are familiar date to the nineteenth century, when they were family dishes, easily and quickly prepared in the kitchen or over a fire with primitive equipment.

The grunt and the slump are more closely related to the steamed pudding than pie, and involved a stewed fruit filling topped with dumplings and cooked stovetop. The two seem to be mostly interchangeable, though some sources assert that a slump is cooked stovetop, while a grunt is the same thing, but cooked in the oven. It is also said that the slump is named for the sloppy appearance it presents on one’s dish, while the grunt is named for the noises it makes when cooking. They are essentially steamed cobblers, whatever else they might be.