Goldy's Kitchen Cookbook (6 page)

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.

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.

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

H
ighbrow (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.

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.

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

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.

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.

4.
If you have refrigerated the dish, allow it to come to room temperature before baking. Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, or until puffed and golden brown.

Makes 8 servings

This was another recipe that I thought would be super for my vegetarian agent. I threw myself into making manicotti—every night. After five nights of this, the family rebelled. “No more manicotti,” they cried. So I started bringing it to nighttime church meetings, where everyone always seemed to arrive both irritated and hungry. Julian's Cheese Manicotti, in its final form, soothed tempers and got meetings finished.

Preheat the oven to 350˚F.

For the sauce:

In a large sauté pan, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the onion and gently sauté, stirring frequently, until the onion is translucent, about 5 minutes. Reduce the heat to low and stir in the garlic. Cook slowly until the garlic is also translucent. Add the tomato paste and stir until well combined. Fill each of the tomato paste cans 2 times with spring water and add to the pan. Add the oregano, bay leaf, salt, and pepper and let the sauce simmer while you prepare the manicotti and filling.

For the pasta:

Bring a large pot of spring water to a boil. Add the olive oil and drop in the manicotti. Cook just until al dente, according to package directions. Drain in a colander and run cold water over the manicotti just for a moment, to cool it.

For the filling:

1.
In a large bowl, with an electric mixer, beat the ricotta with the eggs until combined. Add the fontina and mozzarella, ⅓ cup of the Parmesan, and the butter, and beat until combined. Add the salt, pepper, and basil and beat on low speed just until everything is combined.

2.
Butter two 9 x 13-inch glass baking dishes. Gently fill the cooked manicotti with the cheese mixture and arrange in the dishes. Cover the pasta in each dish with the sauce. Sprinkle half of the remaining ⅓ cup Parmesan on top of the sauce in each dish. Bake for 20 minutes, or until the cheese is throughtly melted and the sauce is bubbling.

Makes 7 servings