Food For Thought

Nancy Leson and I both love sausages of all kinds.  We keep them on hand for quickie weeknight meals and for some recipes better suited to a weekend cooking project.

We agree that it's better to buy sausage in links than loose. If you need the sausage loose, you can always have the fun of squeezing it out of the casing like meat toothpaste.

This story originally aired Nov. 10, 2018.

It's getting to be soup season, and both Nancy Leson and I have our favorites.  In this week's Food for Thought, Nance and I trade favorites from childhood, our go-to's at restaurants, and the homemade must-haves.

I claim that the number one job of a Thanksgiving roll is to soak up gravy.  "And butter," Nancy Leson added.  

Here are our two favorite roll recipes.  Both have the virtue of being started the night before, giving already harried TG cooks a head start on Turkey Day.  

It was the Big Uh-Oh. An inch of lemon poppy seed sludge was left in the bottom of the KitchenAid mixer bowl when I poured out my cake batter. Could the gap between the bottom of the paddle and the bottom of the bowl be out of adjustment? 

It was easy to find out and all it took was one thin dime.

Julia Collin Davison needed to get a feel for Northwest food resources. And who better to give the host of PBS's popular America's Test Kitchen the tour than our own Nancy Leson.

In this week's installment of Food for Thought, Nancy Leson and I explore the delights of dunking with not a donut or basketball in sight. Instead, we break out the dunkage on cookies, whiskey, sandwiches, saltines and soup.

"The nicest thing happened last Thursday," I told Nancy Leson. It was Broadway Farmers Market day, happening right outside the door of our new Tacoma studios.

And what a nice surprise a market shopper gave to me that morning.

Just back from Philly, Nancy Leson says that easterners are more likely to chat up people they don't know,  especially in restaurants and in supermarkets. "Strangers just come up to you and talk.  Or I come up to strangers and talk. About anything. About what you're ordering, how to make it."

Nance says this happens all the time back east but not so much in Seattle. Does she think this is the much bemoaned Seattle Freeze?

"What was I thinking?"  The question's not just for past relationships. In this week's Food for Thought, Nancy Leson and I share tales of some of the questionable gizmos we've bought over the years.

I'm a guy who appreciates the virtues, however imaginary, of the quick fix.  And what could be more emblematic of the QF than duct tape?  Surely there's something analogous in cooking.  When I asked Nancy Leson what she thought that might be, she posed the question on her Facebook page. 

“It’s so much like the days of yore, when the marketplace was a place for people to meet and greet.”

That’s how food commentator Nancy Leson described Tacoma’s Broadway farmers market, after she’d spent a couple hours there with KNKX’s Dick Stein on a recent Thursday morning. It’s one of four around the city.

This segment originally aired June 21, 2017.  

"My kid finally got a real, paying job," Nancy Leson announced.  Young Nate's now a B.C. barista.  Which led us to reminisce about our first food service jobs.  Nancy's was at the Chalfonte, a venerable Cape May, N.J. hotel. 

My first food service job nearly earned me a deep-fried head.

Covering the food and restaurant scene in and around Seattle is a tall order. Ask me, I know: I did it, in one capacity or another, for more than two decades, much of that time at The Seattle Times, where I kept a desk — and file cabinets filled with restaurant review notes — before retiring from that job in 2014.

I told Nancy Leson about the years of flops I'd had with a certain complicated, hard to follow and very chancy lemon meringue pie recipe. Then one day in the supermarket, I saw a better way on the back of a can of Eagle sweetened condensed milk: a recipe both simple, sensible and foolproof. Now I'll never make LMP any other way.

This week Nancy and I talk about the wealth of good recipes available right on the box, can or bottle.  And by the way...

Nancy Leson says her favorite thirst quencher is (in Philly-ese) "werter." Mine's just plain, unflavored seltzer.  Except on special occasions. Like when I make a pastrami. Then, nothing will do but the officially sanctioned pairing for deli-style pastrami, corned beef or pickled tongue sandwiches.

Nancy Leson's apricot tree, a Puget Gold she's had for 21 years, only puts out fruit about every five years. This was one of those years, and a bumper crop it was.  With all those apricots the only thing to do was make apricot jam. There was just one problem.
 

"Over the years," she says, “the one thing I have failed at is jam-making.”

Not anymore.

If you know gardeners, sooner or later one of them will present you with a zucchini the size of a baby seal. When that happens, don't wonder if there's room in the hall closet. Make zucchini "crab" cakes. I told Nancy Leson about this years ago and she still hasn't made them. But you should.

But first, "lettuce" praise famous gems.

"Hey Nance," I asked. "Do you ever go to the library any more — the regular brick and mortar library?" She sure does. "My Edmonds library has the biggest selection of cookbooks you can imagine." How big? "Bigger than my own personal collection."

I've seen Nancy Leson's collection and can tell you that's a lot of cookbooks.

As I suggested to Nancy,  "Today I thought we'd talk about stuff that's really good for things you never thought to use them for." For instance?

Squeegees.  Sure, they're great for windows and windshields. But you know what else?

I'd never found a good way to make crushed ice at home. Pound the cubes in a dish towel? They fly out and what’s left sticks to the fibers. Put 'em in a Ziploc? It tears. The thrift shop '50s era crank ice grinder was awkward to use, hard to turn and yielded very little product. There had to be a better way.

And there was.

In the dentist's waiting room, searching in vain for the latest Muffler Monthly I struck pay dirt in an old Sunset.  "How to make a two-ingredient all purpose cleaner" with white vinegar and rosemary.

Vinegar and water has been the sole cleaning solution in my kitchen for years but I hadn't thought to add rosemary.  Since we have a rosemary bush the size of a small Christmas tree in the yard I gave the recipe a try. 

While browsing recipes at the station last week, Daniel Gritzer's savory vegetable galette caught my eye. Leeks, mushrooms, asparagus and cheese open-faced in a flaky pie crust. No need to even stop at the store on my way home. I had asparagus and mushrooms still unwithered in the fridge and two thick wintered-over leeks in the garden.   

In a recent New Yorker Annals of Gastronomy article, Lauren Collins disagrees with Fresh Air's Terry Gross on the best way to start a conversation. Gross says it's "Tell me about yourself." Collins thinks the best ice breaker is "What time do you eat dinner?"

When I mentioned this to Nancy Leson, she said "Sounds like a Food for Thought to me."  

Nancy Leson's husband, Mac, has always been the paella maker of the two. But this time around, Nancy wanted to give it a try. Paella is one of those dishes like gumbo or cassoulet that court controversy. There are probably as many paella recipes as there are people who will passionately decry them as inauthentic.  

So since no recipe will ever please everyone the best bet is always to please yourself.  "You know that thing you do when you look at umpteen different recipes and then just do what you want to do?"

And that's just what she did.

I love world travel if I don't have to leave Tacoma to do it.  But after hearing from Nancy Leson about DK Market I'm willing to make an exception and journey all the way to exotic Renton. DK is a cavernous, warehouse-style market on Renton's Lind Avenue offering foodstuffs from a dozen cultures around the world.

I told Nancy Leson that I'm not interested in eating anything that "tastes like chicken" unless it is chicken.  That bird has got to be the most versatile eating there is. 

In this week's episode Nancy and I do a brief rundown, in no particular order, of some of our favorite chicken recipes. Ready? Saddle up, here we go.

"We've been looking at them and lusting after them for at least a decade."  That's Nancy Leson talking about the Big Green Egg outdoor cooker. She and husband Mac had always been put off by the price – some models cost more than $1,000. And that's not including accessories.

But Mac's friend Alan and Craigslist came to the rescue. Together, they found a reasonably priced, used BGE, which Mac brought home just in time to roast an Easter leg of lamb. 

Was it any good?

Like most home pizza bakers I've always lamented the puny 500-degree max on my oven. I've had good enough results using a pre-heated pizza stone, and later even better with my pizza steel, but still I dreamt the impossible 800-degree dream. 

Don't settle for anything less than neon green in a hot dog relish. Dick Stein tells how to make your own in this encore Food for Thought.

The sordid secret eating habits of KNKX staffers revealed in this encore Food for Thought.

"Stein, what do you eat when no one's looking?" Nancy Leson asked. I turned the question back to her and Leson was firm in her preferences. 

"It's gotta be fatty, salty, preferably both," she said.