Last night I produced two quickly made concoctions, one to eat and one to drink, and now, this afternoon/evening, one is gone, and the other sits patiently in the fridge for further future consumption.
Ah, meat loaf. Or meatloaf. 2lbs. of ground beef (thawed); two small or medium onions, sauteed but not carmelized (though that might be tasty); almost a cup of oats; 2 eggs; about a teaspoon of salt; and mustard, horseradish, paprika, red pepper sauce, worcestershire sauce, etc. to taste. Mix all by hand and press into a greased loaf pan and provide with a ketchup “glaze” if you wish. Bake at 375F for an hour. Drain the grease and serve.
There are tons of meatloaf recipes out there, and you can’t really go wrong because meatloaf isn’t so much a specific recipe as it is a way to use of old ingredients. Meat, oats for texture, eggs as glue and such, and whatever spices/flavors/left-over veggies you want.
I’m fascinated by pizza, Flammkuchen, and Hungarian langos as a similar response and solution to an issue in bread baking and using up old ingredients. It’s sort of a structuralist position on my part, I guess, these similar (though not necessarily universal) culinary structures across cultures.
I might as well provide a quick aside on the matter. I got interested in the topic when I came to know Flammkuchen in Berlin. Flammkuchen, something vaguely pizza-like, comes from Alsace, for the French-German border region, and it consists of a thin crust topped with creme fraiche (or sour cream) and onion, “bacon” and — now — other toppings. Some do without the onion & or meat approach and go for fruits or similar things. The origin, though, is contained in the name: Flammkuchen = “flame cake.” Imagine it thus: you bake bread not every day (bread takes a lot of effort) but once every week or so, and on top of that you have this stone/brick oven that you have to light and fuel with wood or perhaps charcoal. There is no thermometer. You don’t want to but your dough in the oven and have the oven be too hot (black crunchy chunk of charcoal) or too cool (doughy undercooked mess), so you roll out something thin and put it in to “test” the oven. This is your “flame cake.” But why just waste a piece of dough that way. Your cream starts getting old but this is not an age of plenty — you don’t waste things. You use your sour cream or creme fraiche on the dough and look, left-over from that butchered hog is something really fatty and not very tasty on its own, something rather bacon-like. On top of that you have some spare onions (they store well and are plentiful). *Poof* a basic Flammkuchen. Similarly: pizza and langos, though the latter now is more like an elephant ear scone (deep fat fried and served with butter and perhaps cheese or garlic). Its origins, though, seem to be the same — a way to test the oven before committing the whole loaf.
In any case I did not make pizza or Flammkuchen or langos last night to go with my meatloaf.
I did, however, have .3 to .4 liters of cheap vodka left in a 1.75 liter bottle and nothing to go with it, so, I thought to myself, “Self, let’s make an impromptu and improvised coffee liqueur.”
10 cups of water and 8-10Tbsp. of ground coffee (I forget which), brewed normally in my Mr. Coffee, and then poured into a pot so I could reduce it by a cup or two on the range. I added 1 cup of Karo dark syrup and most of a cup of granulated sugar. I let it cool and added 1.5Tbsp. vanilla extract. Then I mixed it with the vodka and then bottled it. It filled a 1 liter bottle and left a cup or so extra, which, when mixed with milk and cream over ice was very very tasty, and close to a white russian but much weaker. A normal liqueur is usually about 25% alcohol, whereas vodka and similar hard spirits are 40% (with wine 11-13%, let’s say). If you make such a liqueur with grain alcohol (95%) you get something about 30% alcohol, and if you use Bacardi 151, the result is about 25%, so as a liqueur should be. Using regular booze (vodka, rum) gives you something much weaker, but if you’re looking for the syrupy sweet, vanilla-laden coffee flavor, it’s fine. For me it was a way to get rid of cheap vodka. I’ve made something similar but stronger and under more controlled conditions with Everclear (Wisconsin) and Bacardi 151 (Idaho) in the past, based on a recipe from Adam, but we’ve all forgotten how much water to start with.
I had a glass or two of the impromptu coffee liqueur last night, but the rest is in the fridge, “aging.”
This afternoon I made it through a lot of Pink Floyd and now I’m on the Pixies (from the album “Doolittle”); later I’ll get to PJ Harvey. I have about 10 hours of “P” left.
This evening I should grade. Tomorrow it’s back to teaching for me …
