I know you can buy a jar of blackening spice blend already made and ready to shake, rub and roll on your protein of choice. I know. And if you want to let the commercialized, agricultural-industrial complex (add evil, if are me) control your spice blend autonomy, deprive you of the chance to make your own cute formation of mounds of spices on a well-worn pie plate, rob you of the aroma of all these individual components as you measure them from their individual containers and mix them together, then fine.

But if you like to play with your food and you like saying “it’s my own blend” or “I threw this together myself” or “it’s an old recipe handed down to me from my catfishin’ folk down on the bayou” (even if your folk are all from Eastern Europe by way of The Bronx), then go ahead and make this and fly in the face of convenience. An added bonus is that you won’t have any sneaky additives in your homemade blend, like BHT or MSG or yeast extract or cellulose to prevent caking, or maltodextrin.  I decided to make this when I saw a recipe for blackened Mahi Mahi sitting atop a rich puddle of grits that I knew I had to make. Here’s a sneak peek of the finished dish:

I’ll post the recipe for this tomorrow. In the meantime, make the spice blend and let it meld together for a day or so. Let the heady smells get you thinking about what each separate spice makes you remember or imagine, (don’t inhale too strongly, or it will make you remember your last head cold!), and what the earth-colored blend makes you hungry for.

Blackening Spice Blend
Adapted from Seven Stars Cookbook, Chef Brian Fairhurst, Harrah’s Las Vegas

INGREDIENTS

2 tablespoons rd pepper flakes
3 tablespoons garlic powder
3 tablespoons onion powder
2 tablespoons chili powder *
3 tablespoons sweet paprika **
1 tablespoon fine sea salt or table salt
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon celery powder
Pinch of cayenne pepper

PROCEDURE

In a medium bowl, combine all the ingredients, mixing well. Store in an airtight container and use within 6 months to ensure potency of flavors.

*   For a smokier flavor use chipotle chili powder, if you can find it.

** If you can’t find chipotle chili powder you can use smoked paprika, but don’t use both, or the smoky flavor may be too dominant.

Dear Kitchenista,

Why does food stick to my expensive stainless steel and enameled cast iron pans?

From the little picture I posted last week of an iphone sending that text about the stainless pans, I got a bunch of emails asking, “so why does everything seem to stick to these pans?” So, to do my part in ending this global PAN demic, (get it? Pan Demic).  I feel I must go ahead and answer that question without further delay.

For a while, when I first got out of culinary school, I did all these demos for a very high-end cookware company, going out to specialty and department stores in the NY Metro Area to cook and talk about these heavy, professional quality pots and pans. One of the most common complaints I heard most about these pans, was that everything seems to stick to them and once crusted upon, they are hard to get clean. The second most popular complaint was that they were too heavy to use so they most often just use their lighter, cheaper, lower quality or non-stick cookware to get the job done. Sad, but true.

If used properly, you can enjoy your heavy stainless steel pans, or heavy enameled cast iron for the excellent, time-honored cooking instruments that they are. They conduct heat better, distribute it more evenly, and hold on to it better while cooking, all of which make controlling the temperature and your results a lot easier. They can be used stovetop and in the oven and on induction burners, too. Stainless steel and enameled cast iron don’t leech chemicals into your food, don’t scratch peel or warp, (unless you have a habit of immersing hot-as-hell pans in ice cold water…and if you are…STOP THAT!), are durable and will last forever unless you toss them from the roof of your house (stop doing that too!) I still have the All-Clad stainless and Le Creuset enameled cast iron pans that I got as wedding gifts 20 years ago and they are all that I use. These indestructible pans are wonderful tools that will last a lifetime, so they are worth learning how to use properly.

A preheated pan and lower flames are the key to stick-free stainless steel and cast iron cooking. That’s really the whole secret. Here’s the short version:

1. Preheat the pan.

2. Don’t crank up the heat too high. Medium/low is good for eggs/butter. Medium high good for sautéing and searing. (Veggies and proteins)

3. Preheat the oil/fat you’ll be using.

4. Then, and only then, add whatever it is you are cooking.

Here is the long version, for cooking eggs, egg batters, pancakes, fritters, crepes, etc:

1. Heat the pan (dry) over medium/low heat for about 2 minutes. Let it get fully warmed through. Really. Let it sit there over the flame and stop worrying. If you feel the heat radiating off the pan when you place your palm a few inches above the center of it, then it’s warm enough. If you feel as thought it’s gotten too hot, take it off the heat and let it cool a bit and then start over with a lower flame.

2. Add the fat to the pan that you are using, (butter, olive oil, veg oil, bacon fat, etc.). Allow the fat to warm fully. Butter will be totally melted and bubbling, but not burning. Oil will begin to shimmer and thin out. If you are using butter, consider adding a touch of veg or olive oil to it to increase the smoke/burning point. Make sure to use enough fat to fully coat the bottom of the pan and up the sides at least an inch. You want a bit more than just a coating…enough fat for the eggs  to “float” on the oil. The oil, when hot, will create a natural barrier between the food and the pan. If the oil/fat is not hot enough, the eggs will “sink” and stick to the pan.

3. Adding eggs: gently pour beaten eggs onto warmed fat (or break whole eggs gently on to the fat for fried eggs) and resist moving them until they harden a bit, 5-6 seconds, and the “barrier” is established. At this point you can turn off the flame/heat under your pan and the residual heat in the pan will finish cooking your eggs without over cooking them, and you can move the eggs in the pan to create “curds” or scrambled eggs, or if doing an omelette, then proceed adding filling, folding over, etc. If cooking fried eggs, wait until the white is set and releases from the pan on it’s own when you shake it, or gently move it with a spatula to flip. You can also cover the pan and let fried eggs sit and steam for a minute of two instead of flipping, to cook the yolk top.

For sautéing veggies, or searing meats:

1. Follow directions above for preheating pan and adding oil/fat.  Over a medium heat, (remember the key is to bring the pan up to temperature gradually, and it will hold the heat, rather than crank up the heat all at once and get the pan too hot), add your food, making sure that there is an even sizzling sound when your food touches the pan. This lets you know that your food is cooking on contact and creating that natural barrier to prevent sticking.  Again, resist the urge to move the food or turn it too soon or you will miss the holy grail of pan cooking: caramelization!  The natural sugars in your food brown on the cooked surface, developing great flavors and when that happens food should lift off of the cooking surface easily.  If the sound your food makes on initial contact with the pan is more of a screaming crackle than a sizzle, your heat is probably too high and sticking may occur.

If you messed up a bit and end up with a dirty pan, or did everything right and still ended up with a bit of crust in your pan, here is my sure-fire advice for getting them clean quickly, but you have to have the will power to delay gratification (eating) and to what I say:

Wash the pan immediately! While it’s hot!

Most manufacturers suggest you allow the pan to cool down before washing, but the people who write these guidelines obviously have help, or have never washed a pan in their lives. I would follow their advice about never plunging a hot pan into cold water, so you don’t warp your pans or create a cloud of steam that will frizz your blow-dry and ruin your evening, but otherwise, trust me. You want to wash it while it’s warm. It will only take a minute if you do it this way, and you’ll enjoy your meal better knowing the pan is done and not forming an immutable layer of residue that will require muscle and profanities to remove.

So, holding the pan with an oven mitt or dry towel, bring it over to the sink and run the hottest possible water you can. Squirt a small amount of dishwashing liquid onto the pan. Using a nylon pad or other gently abrasive sponge (I do use steel wool on my stainless, but not on my enameled cast iron), start to gently scrub off the crusted food layer. I hold the pad with tongs to accomplish this with a really hot pan, to save my hands and nails, something I’ve seen restaurant dishwashers do. You’ll find the crusted food releases fairly easily. If you have stubborn spots, you can do one of the following:

1. Fill the pot/pan with hot water and a little soap and return it to the stove over a low flame. Go eat. When you are done eating, the warmed water in the pan and the soap with have “deglazed” pan sufficiently to allow you to finish scrubbing it clean.

2. Use a slightly abrasive cleaner like “Bartender’s Friend” or Soft Scrub to help finish the job.

I cannot hear a Donna Summer song without doing time travel in my head to a place where my life seemed like a boundless adventure, every opportunity for romance, fame and fortune a distinct possibility. This photo captures a moment in 1975, after I’d just turned 18, and was being nominated for Homecoming Queen, sophmore year at my small New Jersey college. I was an unlikely candidate for such mainstream popularity, having escaped high school by skipping my senior year and passing GO! in a hurry before my parents could change their minds. You don’t skip senior year of high school if you are Homecoming Queen material. You stay and revel in your top-of-the-heap status at school, you take it easy, plan all year for prom. Not me. In high school I was too tall, too introspective, a brooding journal keeper, shy, a bit of an outsider who could occasionally find a way in with humor. I was self-conscious of my immigrant parents in a homogenous town, and made even more so by the dark secrets of emotional and physical abuse that happened behind the closed doors of my home. I was looking for an escape and college provided one.

There, I found my first real boyfriend, lost 20 pounds and blossomed. I was part of a “crowd.” I can still remember in visceral detail the breathless awe I felt the first time I walked into a packed disco with my college friends, the wave of deafening music hitting me in the face, jacking up my pulse until it matched the bass line of the song being played. It was Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby.

My weekends through college I worked as a cocktail waitress, then bartender at a sports bar/disco near Giant Stadium that the players frequented, and it was Summers’ songs, along with others, that had me dancing through the nights, making it more play than work, slinging drinks and pocketing big tips that were more about my short hotpants than the good service.

The driving disco beat was the soundtrack of my life those years. Bear with me as I try to tie all this in with food, which in New Jersey, in the 70’s, when you’re leaving the club at 2 a.m., and you’ve had a few drinks, and haven’t eaten anything all night but goldfish crackers or orange segments off the bar, means you hit a diner. I’d push away the telephone-book-of-a menu that had everything from cheese-laden French fries with gravy (aptly named Disco Fries) to Chicken Cordon Bleu on its pages, and simply order cheesecake with the cherry topping.

In Jersey that comes not so much by the slice but the slab. The thick, graham-cracker-crust end of the wedge would be a good four inches. You couldn’t eat the whole thing, and needed hot coffee to help get its cold creamy decadence down. Donna would be there too, made possible by a few coins, a flip of the pages to find your favorites, and some buttons pushed on the mini jukebox at the diner booth. Something more mellow like MacCarther Park, Dim All The Lights, or On The Radio. Around 3 o’clock you’d all drift out, sober and sleepy and full.

There’s no rewind button for life. Time bullies on, taking our youth and our youthful icons along the way. But the music makes you remember, lets you close your eyes and feel it. And the cheesecake, yeah, the cheesecake lets you taste it.

NJ Diner Cheesecake
aka New York Cheesecake, adapted from Gourmet Magazine, by way of Smitten Kitchen

Crumb crust
15 sheets of graham cracker, ground finely in a food processor (4 3/4 x 2 1/2-inch each) or 8 oz. of finely ground chocolate or vanilla wafer cookies or any of these you can find in a gluten-free variety can be substituted
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt

Cheesecake filling:
5 (8-ounce) packages cream cheese, softened (Philadelphia is my preferred)
1 3/4 cups sugar
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
(or gluten-free flour mix)
1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
1 teaspoon finely grated orange zest
5 large eggs
2 large egg yolks
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Cherry topping
15 ounces sweet or sour cherries, pitted (frozen is fine)
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 cup sugar*
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1/2 cup watet

Make crumb crust:

Stir together crust ingredients and press onto bottom and up the sides, stopping one inch shy of the top rim of a buttered 9 1/2-inch (or 24 cm) springform pan. Place the pan with the formed crust in the freezer to set, for 15 minutes. Make the filling.

Cheesecake filling:

1. Preheat oven to 550 degrees (yes, 550). NOTE: if using a Teflon coated pan, only go as high as 475, which is the manufacturers suggested limit. Your cake may then need more time to brown before you reduce temp. See baking instructions below.)  Beat together cream cheese, sugar, flour and zest with an electric mixer until smooth, using a paddle attachment (with scraper), if you have one, or beaters if you don’t. Add vanilla, then eggs and yolks, one at a time, beating on low speed until each ingredient is incorporated. Scrape bowl down between additions to avoid being left with stripes of unincorporated cream cheese.

2. Take your springform pan out of the freezer and put it in a shallow baking pan or on a rimmed sheet pan to catch any overflow in the baking process. (Better than scraping off burnt goo from the bottom of your oven later.) Pour filling into crust, which will be full just about to the top. Carefully transfer the sheet pan, with the springform pan in it to the oven, positioning it in the center of the rack (which is positioned in the lower middle of the oven). Bake at 55 degrees for 12 minutes or until puffed. Keep an eye on your cake because some ovens will brown the top very quickly. If you notice this happening, turn the oven down as soon as you catch it. Reduce the temperature to 200 degrees and continue baking until cake is mostly firm (center will still be slightly wobbly when pan is gently shaken), about one hour more.

3. Remove the pan(s) from oven. Run a knife around the top edge of the cake to loosen it and cool the cake completely in the springform on a rack, then chill it, loosely covered, at least 6 hours before serving to allow it to set.

Make cherry topping (optional): Place all ingredients together in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil. Once it is boiling, cook it for an additional one to two minutes then remove from heat. Cool completely.

To serve:

Gently remove springform side of pan and transfer cake to a plate. Spread topping (if using) over chilled cheesecake.

Do ahead: Make topping up to 3 days ahead and store in air-tight container in fridge. Cheesecake keeps, covered and chilled, 2 weeks.

In Memory of the Queen of Love, RIP Donna Summer 1948-2012

Dear Kitchenista,

How timely that you have started this Q & A feature! I was just wondering the best low-or-no sugar way for me to preserve the fresh strawberries offered for sale this time of year. I want to keep them available for breakfast year round (I hate buying them from France or California in winter). Thanks, Kitchenista!  — Sharon W.,  Asheville, NC

Dear Sharon,

I myself am a strawberry hoarder, too. And why not? When researchers measure them against other fruits, they weigh in as the forth highest source of antioxidants. They are rich in vitamin C and help reduce inflammation when consumed three or more times a week. They can even help regulate blood sugar, prevent heart disease, and protect us against cancer. Not to mention they are gorgeous, smell amazing and taste good. With chocolate on them. Or in a smoothie. Or on cereal. Or just naked.

I tend to buy strawberries in large quantities, (I have been known to clean out a display), whenever I can get my hands on organic ones, which aren’t available that often. According to the Environmental Working Group’s 2011 report “Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce,” strawberries are high on the list (top 12) foods most frequently found with pesticide residues. Additional research in 2011 has also shown non-organically grown strawberries to contain a high concentration of pesticide residues, including residues from 14 different pesticides.

Of course, I prefer local organic whenever possible during the season, but my priority for strawberries, year-round is to purchase organic. If buying local, from farmer’s markets or roadside stands in your area, ask if pesticides were used. Small farms might not use pesticides on their strawberries, but haven’t jumped through all the hoops to become certified organic, in which case I might be willing to buy them, if I trust the source. It’s important to know if pesticides are in use, especially if you are going to go to a “you pick it” farm with young kids, who can be particularly sensitive to such toxins. You’ll want to know what the exposure to chemicals—on your hands and clothing—will be.

Since you ask about low-or-no-sugar methods for keeping strawberries, I’m going to skip talking about jams, jellies or preserves. The best way to preserve them, sugar-free, and have them fresh, year-round is to freeze them. Remember to start with the freshest strawberries possible. Strawberries start to lose freshness and nutrients quickly and will only last a few days in the fridge, so the sooner you freeze them the better. I use this method because, if you’ve ever tried to just cut up fruit and throw it into a ziplock or container and freeze it, you already know that it freezes into a solid block that requires an ice pick in order to hack off a portion. Follow these steps and they will remain separated and easy to grab a handful of for your use in a smoothie, to top cereal, or to use in any recipe. Prepared and stored in this manner berries (or mostly any fruit…I do this with peeled bananas too ), can last up to a year in the freezer:

1. Gently wash berries and pat them dry or allow them to air dry for an hour or so. Slice off the tops, including the stem and any white area, then cut them in half lengthwise. (You can leave them whole, too, but since I use them primarily for my daughter’s morning smoothies, I cut them in half so they will blend up more easily and not jam up the VitaMix)

2. Line one or more rimmed baking sheets (depending on how many berries you have) with parchment or SilPats (silicone sheet pan liners). Spread berries in a single layer on the sheets (any which way, they don’t have to be lined up uniformly or anything OCD like that), and  place them, uncovered, or loosely covered with plastic wrap in the freezer. Allow them to freeze solid, about 12 hours.

3. Once frozen solid, transfer the berries (they may stick to the parchment a bit, but peel off relatively easy) to a freezer weight plastic zipper bag. Press out as much of the air from the bag as possible before sealing, to minimize freezer burn over time. If you are planning to leave them in the freezer for months, then consider double bagging them.  Place the bagged berries in the freezer, where they will keep for up to one year.

Note: I will warn you that the thawed berries will not be firm and bright like they were when raw and fresh. They tend to thaw out a bit mushier, and slightly darker…but can still be used for anything you would use fresh strawberries for. For smoothies, toss into the blender frozen.

Optional: Brushing the berries with a bit of lemon juice or adding a sprinkle of citric acid before you freeze them will help to preserve their color.

This is an introduction to what I hope will be a regular alternating series of posts (alternating with my regular recipe posts) in which you, the world of the culinary curious, my friends, supporters, students and readers will get to ask me, The Kitchenista, any question pertaining to cooking, the kitchen, culinary technique, kitchen tools, appliances, gadgets, etc. I get a lot of emailed and texted questions from my students—people I’ve done private or group cooking classes, or cooking parties with. Usually they are elbow deep in a recipe or trying to replicate a recipe we’ve done together in a lesson and they dash off a frantic question, no doubt leaving goop on their keyboards or iPhone screens in the process.

My desire for perfection in all things (mostly never achieved) has had me putting off launching this feature because I didn’t have all the bells and whistles in place for it…a separate page on the site, a searching tool that will allow readers to search a particular issue, a cool new logo just for this feature and on and on. Because I was awarded a scholarship to a class at my alma mater, the International Culinary Center (formerly the French Culinary Institute in New York) on Food Blogging with Steve Shaw I am being inspired (forced, coerced, held to the ground, pushed, cajoled) to just go ahead and get this idea out of my head and onto the screen.

Help me launch this by sending your kitchen questions to me or leaving one in the comment section below.