Man With a Pan (8 page)

Chicken Paprika

My kids like this chicken dish because the taste is sweet and inviting. It is colorful to look at, which interests them. I like it because it’s easy to make. This recipe serves two and can easily be doubled, which is what I often do.

2 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves, cut crosswise into ½-inch strips
Salt and pepper
4 teaspoons paprika
1½ tablespoons butter
1 small onion, chopped, about ½ cup
1 large plum tomato, chopped
1 cup chicken broth
¼ cup reduced-fat sour cream

Season the chicken with salt and pepper and 1 teaspoon of the paprika.

Melt 1 tablespoon of the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat.

Add the chicken and sauté until just cooked through, about 3 to 5 minutes.

Transfer the chicken to a plate.

Add the remaining butter to the same skillet.

Add the onion and sauté until it starts to soften, about 3 minutes.

Add the remaining paprika and stir for 10 seconds.

Add the tomato and stir until it softens, about 1 minute.

Add the broth, increase the heat to high, and boil until the sauce thickens enough to coat a spoon thinly, about 5 minutes.

Mix in the chicken and any collected juices.

Reduce the heat to low.

Add the sour cream and stir until just heated through (do not boil).

Season to taste with salt and pepper and serve on a bed of thick egg noodles.

Surefire Broccoli

1 head broccoli, trimmed of the stalk and cut into small pieces
½ cup bread crumbs
1 clove garlic, minced

Take a whole head of broccoli, rinse it well in cold water, and cut off the florets, making sure they’re not too big—kids like small things to eat. Dip the broccoli in some bread crumbs and garlic and stir-fry them over high heat. The bread crumbs make the tips get a little crisp and give them some extra flavor. It’s very tasty. I put it down on the table and it goes in a snap. The kids can’t get enough of it.

STEPHEN KING

On Cooking

Stephen King has written more than forty novels and two hundred short stories. He is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the Canadian Book-sellers Association Libris Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2007 he was inducted as a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America. Among his most recent best sellers are
Full Dark, No Stars
and
Under the Dome.
He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King.

First, my wife’s a better cook than I am. That’s straight up, OK? And she should be. Raised in a Catholic family during the fifties, she was one of eight children, six of them girls. These girls were “kitchen raised,” as the saying used to be, by their mother and grandmother, both fine country cooks. My wife has an excellent command of meats, poultry, vegetables, quick breads, and desserts. She keeps a deep store of recipes in her head. If she has a specialty, it’s what I call “everything-in-the-pot soup,” which usually starts with a chicken carcass and goes on from there. It’s good the first time, and—like the best country cooking, which specializes in plain food often prepared sans directions—even better the second time.

But in the late 1970s, something strange began to happen to my wife (perhaps because she was raised in a mill town in central Maine back in the days when environmental protection meant little more than pouring used engine oil at least five hundred yards from the nearest well): she began to lose her senses of taste and smell. By the turn of the twenty-first century, both were almost gone. Over those years, her interest in both cooking and eating have declined. There was a time when my major contributions in the kitchen were making break-fast for the kids and washing dishes. I do more of the cooking now because, left to her own devices, my wife is apt to eat little but cold cereal or sliced tomatoes with mozzarella and a little olive oil.

Other than baking bread, which used to fulfill me (a thing I rarely do since a Cuisinart bread machine came into our lives), I have never cared much for cooking, and like my mother before me—a good provider and a wonderful person, but not much of a chef—my weapon of choice is the frying pan. Susan Straub, wife of my sometime collaborator Peter Straub, once said, “Give Steve a frypan and a hunk of butter, and he can cook anything.” It’s an exaggeration, but not a huge one. I like to broil whitefish in the oven, and I’ve discovered a wonderful gadget called the George Foreman grill (cleaning it, however, is a pain in the ass), but for the most part I enjoy frying. You can call it sautéing if it makes you feel better—but it’s really just educated frying.

Turning down the heat is always a wonderful idea, I think. Whether I’m frying hamburgers, making breakfast omelets, or doing pancakes for a pickup supper, the best rule is to be gentle. Frying gets a bad name because people get enthusiastic and fry the shit out of stuff. The grease splatters; the smoke billows; the smoke detectors go off. No, no, no. Show a little patience. Engage in culinary foreplay.

If you feel the urge to turn a stove-top burner any higher than a little past med, suppress it. You are better served by getting your stuff out of the fridge—your pork chops, your lamb chops, even your chicken, if you’re frying that—and letting it warm up to something approximating room temperature. I’m not talking leaving it out until it rots and draws flies, but if a steak sits on the counter for twenty minutes or so before cooking, it’s not going to give you the belly gripes unless it was spunky to begin with. If you start frying something fresh out of the fridge, it’s maybe thirty-seven degrees. It’s going to cool off your pan before you even start to cook. Why would you do that?

Be gentle is the rule I try to follow. I can respect the food even if I’m not especially crazy about cooking it (mostly because I can never find the right goddamn pan or pot, and even if I can find the pot, I can’t find the goddamn cover, and where the hell did those olives go—they were right on the bottom shelf in a Tupperware, goddamn it).

Want to make a really good omelet? Heat a tablespoon of butter in your frypan (on a burner that’s turned a little past med). Wait until the butter melts and starts to bubble just a little. Then go on and sauté your mushrooms, onions, green peppers, or whatever. All this time, you’ve got let’s say five eggs all cracked and floating in a bowl. Put in three tablespoons of milk (if your mother told you one tablespoon for every egg, she was wrong, especially when it comes to omelets) and then beat it like crazy. Get some air in that honey. Let it sit for a while, then beat it some more. When that’s done, you can go on and pour it in with your sautéed stuff. Stir it all around a little bit, then let it sit. When the eggs start to get a little bit solid around the edges, lift an edge with your spatch and tip the frypan so the liquid egg runs underneath. Wait until the eggs start to show a few blisterlike bubbles. Add some grated cheese if you want. Then use your spatula to fold over the most solid part of the omelet. If you want to flip it, you’re either an acrobat or an idiot.

All on
MED
heat, plus a little more. The omelet is happy, not even brown on the bottom, let alone charred. A five-egg omelet will serve two hungry people, three “I just want to nibble” people, or ten super-models. And the principle of gentle cooking holds for everything you do on the stove top. If your definition of sautéing is “gentle cooking,” I’m fine with that. You say tomato, I say to-
mah
-to.

I also love the microwave … and if you’re sneering, it’s because you think the only things you can do with the microwave are make popcorn and nuke the living shit out of Stouffer’s frozen dinners. Not true. I don’t do recipes, but before I go cook some lamb chops, let me pass on a great fish dish that’s beautiful in the microwave. Simple to make, and a dream to clean up.

Start with a pound or so of salmon or trout fillets. Squeeze a lemon on them, then add a cap or two of olive oil. Mush it all around with your fingertips. If you like other stuff, like basil, sprinkle some on, by all means, but in both cooking and life my motto is KISS: Keep it simple, stupid. Anyway, wrap your fish up in soaked paper towels—just one thickness, no need to bury the fish alive. You should still be able to see the color through the paper towels. Put the package on a microwave-safe plate and then cook it for six minutes. But—this is the important part—
don’t nuke the shit out of it
! Cook it at 70 percent power. If you don’t know how to use the power function on your microwave (don’t laugh, for years I didn’t), cook it on high for three minutes and no more. If you cook a pound of salmon for much more than three minutes, it will explode in there and you’ll have a mess to clean up.

When you take the fish out of the microwave (use an oven glove, and don’t lean in too close when you open the paper towels or you’re apt to get a steam burn), it’s going to be a perfect flaky pink unless the fillets are very thick. If that’s the case, use a fork to cut off everything that’s done and cook the remainder—very gently—for ninety seconds at 60 percent power. But you probably won’t need to do this. People will rave, and all the mess is in the paper towels. Cleaning up is, as they say, a breeze.

I’ve learned a few other little things over my years as a cook (always shock the pasta in cold water before removing it from the colander, test steaks for doneness with the ball of your thumb while they’re still on the grill, let the griddle rest if you’re planning on cooking more than a dozen pancakes, don’t
ever
set the kitchen on fire), but the only real secret I have to impart is
be gentle
. You can cook stuff people love to eat (always assuming they have a sense of taste) without loving to cook.

“We must be getting close.”

Recipe File

Pretty Good Cake

I found this recipe, by Scottosman, on the Internet at allrecipes.com and adapted it. It’s simple and it works.

1 cup sugar
½ cup butter
3 teaspoons vanilla
¼ cup milk
1 cup white flour (or a little more: check your batter)
2 eggs
1 stick melted chocolate (don’t expect a chocolate cake, you just get a hint of flavor)
1½ teaspoons baking powder

1. Preheat the over to 350°F while you’re getting ready.

2. Grease a 9 × 9-inch pan with lard or Crisco. I use my fingers.

3. Mix the sugar, butter, and chocolate into a nice sweet soup.

4. Beat the eggs, add the vanilla, then add these ingredients to the sweet soup. Start adding the flour and the milk. If you need to add extra flour or milk, do so. Your objective is the kind of batter that made you say “Can I lick the bowl?” when you were a kid.

5. Put in the baking powder last. Keep mixing, but don’t overdo it.

6. Bake it for 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

7. Frosting? You can find lots of recipes for that, both on the Net and in Betty Cooker’s Crockbook, but why not buy a can? It’s just as tasty. Don’t do it until the cake cools.

IN THE TRENCHES

Josh Lomask, a forty-one-year-old firefighter, lives in a rambling Victorian house in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. He cooks most nights of the week for his wife, an administrator at a private school, and their twin eleven-year-old boys and ten-year-old boy. Josh’s house has been under renovation since they moved in more than a decade ago, and all he has at his disposal is a single Broil King burner and an old convection oven.

Cooking is like building a house. It’s a manual process. But unlike a house, which might take months to build, cooking takes one night, and that gives me a great sense of satisfaction. I’ve read stories that the kitchen staff in restaurants is full of excons. There’s definitely something about cooking that appeals to the masculine side of things.

I really started cooking when I joined the fire department. Somebody in the station has to do it. You don’t want to be a bully, but I tend to always be involved. I’ll tell a new guy not to stir the rice, or I’ll keep someone from cutting his finger off while chopping an onion. Some guys have no clue. I guess I was that way when I started out.