Donkey Fazoo

By Sarah Stevenson and Shari Livingstone

Donkey Fazoo is about common as well as unusual ingredients beloved by all of us. Our excitement about food is contagious and encourages those that we share stories with to remember their own experiences with food. The history about many of these foods is explained. The love of food, family and friends makes a lovely five course meal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781483599359

Book preview

appetit!

PART I

FAVORITES AND APPETIZERS

Chapter 1

Our Favorites

(Sarah)

I’m Sarah—a proud foodie. But like most food-obsessed people, I can’t help myself—I just like some things better than others. Webster defines the word favorite as a person or thing regarded with special liking. Everyone has them. They can include a doting uncle, a festive time of year, a romantic song. It’s great fun to tell a friend that you love something and have her say she loves it too. There is a universal joy in sharing an opinion, but it reaches new heights when it has to do with food. Favored foods encourage you to conjure up a mental picture, remember an aroma, or relive a happy time. You get to know people better when you find out what foods they like. Before we embark on this wondrous journey of food, here are some insights into both my life and Shari’s.

Sarah’s Favorites

Any freshly picked fruit or veggie still warm from the sun.

Twice-baked potatoes with Gruyère cheese, homegrown chives, and crème fraiche.

Pizza delivered to my door when I don’t feel like getting out of my pajamas.

The scent on my hands when I return from picking herbs in the garden.

Caviar at Christmas with our kids and grandchildren.

Butter. Butter on an English muffin. Butter on corn on the cob. Butter on pasta. Butter on baked potatoes. Butter on every conceivable vegetable. Butter on anything and everything.

A tender Yankee pot roast.

Hand-cranked ice cream made with real vanilla beans.

Authentic French foie gras—so naughty but so delectable.

Eating my sister’s bourbon corn chowder during an unexpected heavy snowstorm.

A cold meatloaf sandwich; a hot meatball wedge.

Cooking anything with my husband.

A bucket of Nantucket mussels, gathered by my family and friends, and steamed with butter and red wine.

A recipe I created that works.

Dinner by candlelight—even though the power is on.

Cookbooks. Rows upon rows of them. (I am a cookbook-a-holic.)

Extra mayo.

Crisp Southern-style chicken fried in lard—another naughty but delicious treat.

A bright bouquet of fresh flowers on the dinner table.

A cup of aromatic Columbian coffee delivered to my bedside as a wakeup call.

Shari’s Favorites

A hankering for a piece of homemade crusty bread, and my brother goes to work immediately to make it happen.

The smell of Thanksgiving turkey roasting in the oven.

A cup of real hot chocolate warming your hands and body after shoveling snow.

Chocolate chip cookies straight from the oven.

Memories of thick slices of my grandmother’s homemade bread hot from the oven slathered with real butter. (Note to my brother: there is no contest between your bread and grandma’s!)

Returning home to Mom’s house for a family meal to which we all contributed a dish or two.

Any glass of Chateauneuf du Pape!

A piece of hot homemade apple pie—à la mode.

A steak done to perfection on the outdoor grill on a beautiful summer evening.

Mashed potatoes, mashed potatoes, mashed potatoes . . . garlic mashed potatoes!

Anyone making a meal for me. Why is it that someone else’s cooking always tastes better than one’s own?

Chocolate in any form.

Deep-fried food.

Fettuccini alfredo with homemade pasta, lots of butter, heavy cream, and real parmesan reggiano.

French toast with sausage and real maple syrup.

A fresh baguette from Madam at any Boulangèrie in France.

Chapter 2

I’ll Just Have the …

(Sarah)

No matter what else I’ve consumed that day, I’m always hungry when I get to a restaurant. Aren’t you? So, the first thing you do is open the menu and want to order every single one of those deliciously appealing appetizers. They should be called teasers, not ’tizers, because they lure you into the menu with a mouth-watering promise of things to come. The problem is, unfortunately, that I often forget that there is more to come and I over-order up front. But it all sounded so good when I sat down!

There are very few rules in the appetizer department. The selection can be Italian or Asian or Mexican. It can be a soup or a salad, it can be hot or cold, crunchy or mooshy—so many choices and only one mouth to eat them all! The theme of this starter course does not necessarily have to match the genre of the restaurant’s cuisine. In fact, these days it is considered chic to cross the lines, meld flavors, and present fusion cuisine.

A friend of mine once confided that her definition of eating appetizers was the same as eating food standing up: no calories. Of course, she meant that it’s easy to fool oneself into believing it’s only the main course that puts on the main pounds. The miniscule size of these appetizer portions also tells you to relax. There’s little substance here; it’s mostly show. It’s just a starter—a taste of things to come. The brie en croute or smoked trout or fresh oysters may seem minimal, but after the shared main course of chateaubriand for two, and by the time my husband and I attempt to follow the waiter’s recitation of a melange of desserts, I can scarcely move! Thankfully, I wore the flowing waistless dress; meanwhile, my husband surreptitiously loosens his belt.

I try to order things from the menu that I wouldn’t ordinarily prepare at home. This makes dining out more of an occasion. Fresh fruit or a good cheese platter, however, are exceptions. They just plain taste good while you’re waiting for the main course.

And speaking of waiting . . .

I really like a restaurant that gives you something to toy with while you’re waiting for the arrival of that first appetizer course. Homemade tortillas and salsa . . . an artichoke to dip in a curried mayonnaise . . . fresh hot bread schlooped into a squeezed roasted garlic bud that has been bathed in warm olive oil . . . even simple bread sticks with herb butter. In French cuisine, these flavorful morsels are called amuses bouche. Literally translated, this means to please or amuse the mouth. Not only do these free pre-starters prevent you from gnawing on your sleeve, but they really give you a satisfied feeling that you’ve gotten more than your money’s worth. For those out on a new date, they also offer an opportunity for bridging that sometimes awkward gap from silence into titillating dinner conversation.

And then there’s the challenging dilemma of wine. Which wine and how and when? And why were there ever rules? Do you care for the wine early, or would you like it with your dinner? my waiter has asked. Is there a right answer? Should I take a hint from his word early and be polite and wait? I think not. An appetizer deserves to be complemented by wine. But does that mean that, if I ordered fish as an appetizer, I must have white wine with it, and then change over or reorder to have the customary red with my beef? Au contraire. As most people who dine out with any regularity know, the days of red wine with beef and white with fish have long faded into the archives of lives and food customs past. Thank goodness.

My stepmother, the very sedate and regal French Countess de Lesseps, was a sculptor and painter. She once created a humorous set of drawings depicting the magnetic combination of food and wine and humor. Red Wine with Beef, as she titled her magnus opus, was a drawing that showed four cows standing on their hind legs and leaning on the corral fence with glasses of red wine in their cloven hooves. It expanded to include White Wine with Fish, which depicted an undersea tavern with fish fins hoisting glasses in a piscatorial toast. Even royalty has a sense of humor that acknowledges the silliness of color-pairing wine with food.

So, drink what you like. Drink it early in the meal with your appetizer, or wait. Drink white wine with red meat and red wine with white meat. There are no rules these days; if food police still exist, their jobs are sadly out of touch with culinary reality. These days, you never need to fear running the risk of being sent to food or wine jail. Everything goes!

Chapter 3

Rude Beginnings

(Sarah)

Liver, brains, head cheese (a terrine of meat from the head, heart, or feet of a calf or pig or sheep), and other various and sundry organs, frog’s legs, fish eggs, snails, and entrails don’t really strike me as the way to begin an unforgettable dinner. And yet, there they are, unavoidably daring you to order—some of the most outrageously priced choices on the appetizer list. The proper term for internal organs is offal , meaning off-fall, or cut-offs from the carcass. (I didn’t say awful , I said offal! ) Another term is variety meats. Being polite and using euphemisms, however, does not change what they really are.

Foie gras in French means fat liver. Foie gras is created at the expense of a specially fattened goose or duck. These pitiable birds are force-fed to enlarge their livers to a shocking degree—enough to make their brief existence horribly uncomfortable. Yet this inhumane practice has existed since 400 BC! You can find the process pictured in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Having said that, I need to admit that there are certain things that make me feel really guilty, and one that tops the list is eating force-fed goose—foie gras (the other is veal, but I’ll save that for another story). If I can just shove my guilt aside for the moment, I must admit that it is undoubtedly one of the most delectable items I have ever eaten. The real stuff—not the paté made from who-knows-what—melts in your mouth with the most pleasant aftertaste I have ever experienced. The French are experts at its preparation (it’s awful if overdone.) A restaurant called RSVP in Cornwall, Connecticut, does one of the best I’ve ever had. It’s no surprise that the chef is French. I plan to respondez s’il vous plait as often as I possibly can.

A very distant cousin of foie gras that doesn’t even come from the same animal is chicken liver. It is not nearly as elegant and is most frequently served as a paté. When I was in graduate school at the University of Southern California, I dated a great guy studying law who belonged to a Jewish fraternity. When we were asked to bring an hors d’oeuvre to a frat party, I chose a chicken liver paté made with—what else?—chopped chicken livers, plus mayonnaise, onions, hard-boiled eggs, sea salt, and fresh ground pepper. It was the unrivaled hit of the party. One of the fraternity brothers commented that only at their Jewish fraternity could there be someone who could make such an impressive Jewish chopped liver. My date told him that I was, in fact, Episcopalian. His fraternity brother smiled broadly and quickly declared a toast that made me an honorary Jew. I was highly flattered, and to this day when I make the recipe, it makes me laugh. The last laugh was on me, however, when I recently discovered that my recipe was actually Hungarian. No matter—I love it when we all can share our ethnic foods!

And now, bring on the brains. For the longest time, I’m now rather embarrassed to say that I thought sweetbreads were brains. Not so! Sweetbreads come in two varieties: thymus glands or pancreas glands. The pancreas ones are called stomach sweetbreads and the thymus are referred to as neck sweetbreads. The term sweetbreads is much easier to order than glands. They can be harvested from veal, beef, lamb, or pork younger than one year old. Veal is considered the best, the most coveted delicacy. The thymus glands are longer and more irregular, while the pancreas glands are larger and more rounded. If they are properly cooked, they’ll be crispy on the outside and succulent inside.

Restaurant ordering of glands needs to be approached with caution. You may not want to cause a stir in the restaurant by asking the waiter from which animal and what part of its body your order came. My stepmother (the above-mentioned French countess), could never pass up sweetbreads when she spotted them on a menu. If she was in a French restaurant, she would speak knowingly—it was almost as though she had a secret sweetbread code—to the chef in French and find out the answers without disturbing the other diners. I’ve never been entirely convinced that the answers merit learning a second language.

Head cheese, or brawn, or souse, is in fact not a cheese. It is a terrine of meat extracted from the head of a cow, sheep or pig, combined with a savory gelatinous broth and chilled in a mold. It may also include the meat from the feet, tongue, and heart. The head is cleaned and simmered until the meat falls from the bones and the liquid becomes a concentrated gelatinous broth. It is usually served as a luncheon meat. To be honest, I have never tried it. And it does make me wonder whether, like deviled eggs or twice baked potatoes, it is served back in its original skull. If it is politely sliced and plated with Italian parsely, I’m still not sure I will put it at the top of my appetizer list. Even the thought of my favorite sweet hot mustard used as an accoutrement doesn’t send me. There are some things that you just can’t accessorize!

We will discuss caviar in the Conversation with a Cod chapter, so I will not repeat myself here. Suffice it to say that these little beads of fish roe (eggs) that gently explode inside your mouth are a huge favorite of mine. Every Christmas, when my whole family is gathered round, we indulge ourselves wildly. Last year we had a taste-test, comparing the caviar from two different California producers. Try that sometime! It’s the ultimate decadence. Both were delicious. I served them with small condiment sides of chopped hard-boiled egg, diced onions, and crème fraiche, on silver-dollar-sized warm homemade blinis. Yum! But sorry—they are still really fish eggs.

I did say that sweetbreads were not really brains. But there’s an exception: sheep brains are, alas, truly sheep brains, and used to be offered as a tasty appetizer. At present we are unable to consume them because of the fear of mad cow disease. Phew! What a relief!

All of this brings us to escargot. Yes, like sweetbreads, the term escargot is a much easier and euphemistic name to swallow than snails. Ugh. One is immediately put in mind of slimy garden snails. Of course, escargot is a French term, yet in Commonwealth countries one still orders them as snails. Don’t ask me how this snail custom pervaded American sensibilities.

Snails can be harvested wild or farmed. There are 116 different species and not all are edible. Because of their diet, their digestive tracks must be cleansed by force-fasting and purging. Snails raised on farms are fed ground cereals, while wild snails munch on soil and rotted leaves. Both go through the one-week fast before they’re eaten. Some are washed every other day, which stimulates them to empty their guts. Salt or salted water removes any impurities before cooking.

The fun part of snails is the elaborate gear recommended for so-called ease of consumption. I was given a complete escargot set as a wedding present way back in the dark ages of snail-eating: tongs that are clamped around the shells to hold them, a petite fork with which to extract the meat, and a special dish that has six rounded depressions in which are held the shells and the extra butter the snails have been cooked in. Snails and shells were often bought separately. This was the ideal wedding gift as it made the new bride and groom work together to resolve a difficult issue. It’s definitely a compatibility test.

Nowadays, the way I fix these little guys is in a lot of garlic butter. Wine sauce is also popular. A must is the crispy fresh bread needed to mop up all the extra butter. Those who are squeamish can simply leave out the snails and just sop up garlic butter!

Raw meat? Okay, let’s get euphemistic again—we’ll call it by its Italian name, carpaccio. Asians, but the way, call it sushi. It can come in a variety of forms—raw beef, veal, or even salmon or tuna that has been pounded or rolled very thin. The name derives from the Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio (1460–1525), who favored red colors reminiscent of raw beef. It is, however, a fairly recent invention, having been popularized in 1950 in Venice by chef Guiseppe Cipriani at Harry’s Bar. I serve it with vinaigrette dressing made from olive oil and lemon juice on a bed of mixed greens. It is ideal as an appetizer because it’s very light and leaves plenty of room for the main