Croquettes and the Kitchen Sink

The other day my husband told me that, since I’ve been under-employed, I have taken over so much of the cooking, he has forgotten how to do it. He was half joking—nobody outside of a food stylist knows how to plate half as well as Mark does—but even I can see that my proclivity for running the kitchen has driven him into a more passive role: I cook; he sits at the computer and herds virtual sheep through increasingly difficult levels of terrain. Now when I call out for his help, he reluctantly abandons his animated flock, but he’s slow to remember where the staples are kept.

            I have been told, by old friends of my parents, that my father, like my husband, was once a gourmet cook. Years of a surprisingly traditional marriage must have erased the knowledge of food preparation from his memory, for, outside of whipping up the occasional batch of pancakes, or, frying up a can of corned beef hash (a sodium-laden delicacy he allowed himself only on those rare occasions when my mother was out of town), he left the cooking to my mom.

At the end of one autumn, very late in their lives together, my mother came up with the ingenious idea of making cooking a communal project. Winters in the country were bleak, she reasoned, and my Dad could no longer do as much outdoor work in the bad weather as he once had. What better way to keep them both occupied than to share meal preparation? My father looked up from The New Yorker when my mother broached this plan. “No,” he said flatly, and returned to reading and petting the dog. That was the end of that.

            This is not to say that he was not helpful in the kitchen, he was, but his duties were postprandial. My parents never owned a dishwasher; that was my father’s job. He was autocratic about it, too, although in a nice way. If a visitor insisted on helping in the kitchen, my father, equally insistent, would ease her (usually a “her”) away from the sink, replacing the soapy sponge she was holding with a towel. “You can help dry,” he would say, not unkindly.

            After he died, my mother told me that the reason he always washed was because he was anguished by the amount of water that everyone else wasted. Rather than publicly reprove them, he would reclaim his position as Master of the Kitchen Sink. He was also most meticulous about sweeping up crumbs and wiping down surfaces. His hands and feet may have been black with the soil ground in by years of perpetual gardening and mucking about, but the floors and counters were clean.

Best Meal of the Week

And yet, I remember a time when my father cooked the most delicious meal of each week. Long after I’d grown up, I asked him if he remembered the tasty croquettes he used to make for us. He was kind of wary and noncommittal at first, and when I asked him for a recipe, he claimed not to have a clue. So, I attempted to piece together its contents from my own early memories.

These sumptuous patties were completely leftover dependent. At the time, my family had company on the weekends, either Saturday or Sunday, and company always meant a big roast—pork, beef, lamb. It’s funny to think about, considering that only a few years later my mother and my brother became lifelong vegetarians. Back then, that big roast would show up, in various guises, for many of the meals throughout the ensuing week. In its final form, it would become part of my father’s croquettes, as would anything else in the fridge that he deemed saveable. The roasted meat, bits of cold potatoes, perhaps a fresh onion, leftover frozen vegetables, the hamburger my brother had refused to eat because it was pink inside, all of these would be pushed into the hopper of an old fashioned meat grinder. My father would turn the crank and long ribbons of chopped up ingredients would be forced through the little holes and into the bowl.

As I remember, he would then add an egg to the ground up matter, work it together, slap it into patties, and fry them in butter. The accoutrements were humble ketchup and toasted bread. My brother and I would not have stood for anything more exotic; but, truth be told, neither would my father.

There was always something so comforting about these little burgers; they were always slightly different, and yet essentially the same, as was my family back when I was a child—Mom, Dad, Big Sister, Little Brother, forever—or so it seemed.

A Not-Quite-Historical Recreation

Nowadays, the contents of my refrigerator are wildly eclectic. To name but a few of the items I regularly use that my parents never heard of back then: fresh cilantro, miso, ground cumin, tofu, fresh ginger, rice wine vinegar, jalapenos, red heirloom carrots, tomatillo sauce. And I do not have an old fashioned meat grinder. I did have one I bought at a church fair for a little while, but its intricate, rusting metal blade inserts started to seem more unsanitary than intriguing, so I got rid of it.

However my fridge is usually full of languishing leftovers, and I do have a food processor. So this morning, when I should have been learning how to drive traffic to my Web site through social networking, I peeked into my refrigerator instead. There was some turkey chili, a dish of rice and beans, some carrots braised in ginger and hoisin, homemade hot pepper sauce, and some brussel sprouts fried with pork sausage. So, in homage to my father’s invention (with some help from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian), I embarked upon an experiment.

Kitchen Sink Croquettes

• 1 cup homemade turkey chili with tomatillo sauce, cilantro, and white beans. Pretty thick, because it’s been in the fridge for four days.
• ½ cup red carrots braised in ginger and hoisin. With a piece of hamburger that got thrown in in the last minute.
• 1 ½ cups red beans and rice. With chili powder and cumin.
• Rest of the jar of pureed hot pepper and vinegar sauce I got kind of tired of (about ¼ cup).
• ½ cup brussel sprouts sautéed with leeks, kielbasa, and a splash of wine vinegar (very Northern European).
• ½ cup commercial medium hot salsa that my brother bought the last time he was here, but he didn’t finish it.
• 1 egg
• ½ cup fresh chopped parsley
• ½ cup rolled oats
• 1 cup of finely ground cornmeal
• 2 teaspoons of chili powder
• Olive oil to keep the patties from sticking

 

1. I washed the parsley, dried it in a cloth napkin because I was too lazy to take out the salad spinner, and chopped it up in the small bowl of the food processor. I reserved the herb, and added the brussel sprout mixture, giving that a rough chop. I quarantined the sprout mélange to the small bowl, because I thought the flavors it was hitting might prove cacophonous in combo with the other ingredients, and I wanted the option of leaving it out.
2. I put the parsley, chili, rice and beans, carrots, pepper sauce, salsa, ¼ cup of the rolled oats, and the egg into the large bowl and turned on the processor. What the hell, I added the sprouts; they had a nice tang. Let it get well mixed together, while still retaining a fair amount of texture.
3. I put the mixture into the refrigerator to thicken up.
4. An hour later, because I always have to fuss with cooking projects, I came back and prodded the mixture, decided it was too soft, and added the additional ¼ cup of oatmeal. Then I left it in the fridge for another hour and a half.
5. I took another break from Web sites and greased a cookie sheet with olive oil. I mixed the cornmeal and the chili powder together in a low, flat bowl. Then I took the croquette mixture out, and formed it into patties—very gingerly, they were kind of soft—and dredged them in the cornmeal/chili mixture. I put them on the cookie tray, and put the tray back into the fridge for another hour.
6. Pre-heated the oven to 375, for about ten minutes. Removed the tray of patties and popped them into the oven. After fifteen minutes I once again interrupted my diligent labors at the computer and came into the kitchen to give the burgers a turn. They were firm and did not stick to the (nonstick) baking dish. Hurrah!
7. Twenty minutes later, I turned them again, then left them in for about fifteen more. At that point, they were browned and starting to dry out.
8. I removed them, and they’re sitting waiting to be reheated. I will let you know how successful they were after Mark comes home from work and we partake.

 

Post Script

Mark got home late, and we had to move the car before he could eat dinner. The croquettes were rather cold and dry by the time we found a place to park, so I re-heated them in the microwave, with some more of that store-bought salsa on top. I served them with a wilted arugula salad (wasn’t supposed to be wilted, but my local supermarket isn’t great about sell-by dates) and cauliflower.

      I thought the croquettes were pretty good, crusty and just a touch zingy, although definitely not the best meal I’d eaten in a week. Mark said that they were just like haggis and suggested that we open some scotch whiskey. “We don’t have any scotch whiskey, it’s too dangerous,” I pointed out, “and have you ever had haggis?”

      “No,” he admitted. “But the rolled oats reminded me of haggis.”

      “Right, I can see that,” I said, “Although this isn’t cooked in a sheep’s stomach and it doesn’t have any offal in it.”

      “More’s the pity,” said Mark.