Why hello there, one and all, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe. I’d like to thank you all for accommodating our slight delay, a statement I mostly made because I thought “Maybe this time I’ll spell accommodating right on the first try”, which I did, and will now clutch that meager strand of success amid the tempest of the last few days. I’m your Struggling Strandee, Jon O’Guin, and today, because I’m jammed for time, I made a simple sauce. And then, because I’m neurotically emotionally incapable of the thought of disappointing people, I made two more, so we’ve got THREE recipes today, and, genius that I am, I didn’t start writing this until 12:40 in the morning, so I bet Tuesday Jon is going to have a lot of fun researching to do to try and wrestle this post into something cohesive. (Editor’s note: Man, did Last Monday Jon underestimate how bad things were going to be,) If you want to avoid all that noise and suffering, click this link, and maybe you’ll go to the recipe. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

 

 A Brief Lament

Just to update you all on WHY we’re so late that : during a Mother’s Day visit, my brother Stephen’s dog Opal jumped a gate, hurtling herself down a flight of stairs, in order to chase down and savage one of our chickens. Specifically, the ever-resilient Blue. A three-hour Vet appointment followed, where the vet told us, simply put, that Blue had a less than 50-50 chance of surviving the injury: while she only had one notable puncture wound from the attack, said bite had damaged her spine. I’ll spare you the worst possible outcomes, but the prognosis was not good. After a lot of tears, reflection, and knowing Blue’s fighting spirit, I voted (and was not overruled) that we would give her the chance: a lot of the worst potential outcomes would be observable within a couple days, meaning that, if she took an obvious turn for the worse, we could hopefully put her down before she suffered too much.

This meant that we then had to include Blue into a quarantine unit inside the house, and adopt another thrice-daily medical regimen to give her the best odds of overcoming the injury. A choice that was NOT appreciated by Kado

“Bearded one, why? Why is the demon indoors? Why must I suffer?”

And one not fully appreciated by ME, since, as I noted during Blue’s last stint in quarantine, moving her into the house immediately turns me into a stuffed-up lethargic mess due to the drop in air quality. So I was emotionally wrung out, physically unwell, and stretched for time. Which is why Monday, I decided to make some very SIMPLE recipes, to give myself some breathing room. But of course, other conflicts came up, that needed me to resolve them, and then Wednesday night, my computer decided to restart itself, and deleted the 900 word section on our first sauce. That…really took the wind out of my sails, and slammed my schedule into a Blues Brothers’ style pile-up, that I could not shift for the rest of the week. So here we are now. The cat is still mad (ED: She’s actually extra mad right now, because Nate scheduled for her to get a dental cleaning in the morning, so we had to stop feeding her 12 hours beforehand…which we are now 4 hours into. She is not happy that I am not feeding her),  I’m…actually struggling less to breathe, because on Saturday, I forced myself to drive to the nearest Costco and buy an air purifier, so that’s been a nice upturn, and we’re coming in a week behind schedule…but A: I brought three recipes to make amends, and B (knock on wood) Blue’s held a consistent weight all week, and she hasn’t shown signs of an infection, so the immediate risks seem to have been overcome.  So enough of my suffering, let’s get saucing!

 

Throwing a Ranch in the Plans

So, I’ll cover the recipes in reverse order that I made them, because I MADE them hardest to easiest, while we can write about them the other way, since for most of my audience, they’ll go in order of familiarity. So first up is the RANCH DRESSING. IF you don’t know what ranch dressing is, then let me say “Hello non-American reader!” Because ranch dressing is literally the most popular salad dressing in the USA, so it’s not something people from there won’t recognize, while I also know that most Ranch flavored items in foreign countries get different names: in Europe, Cool Ranch Doritos are “Cool American”, while in the UK, they’re “Cool Original”.

Who told you my Dutch gang-name?

If you’re a surprisingly un-familiar US resident, or citing random Doritos flavors didn’t help you, Ranch dressing is a creamy dressing with a variety of herbs. Most commonly, the recipe consists of buttermilk, sour cream, and mayonnaise flavored with parsley, chives, garlic, dill, salt and pepper. What’s most interesting to me about the dish is how surprisingly new it is, despite its ubiquity. Like I said, it is EVERYWHERE in America, to the point that only certain types of restaurant can get away with not having some as a potential dip/sauce option. Given that, you’d think it to be a recipe that’s endured for 100-200 years…but it’s actually around 70 years old. My grandfather is older than ranch dressing.

The story is a little fuzzy on some of the details, but here’s what we know: Kenneth “Steve” Henson, a White Nebraskan (some people have confused a poorly lit photo of him in his older years as being of a Black man) moved to Alaska with his wife to work a job as either a plumber or construction worker for remote Alaskan homes. The company used a sort of dispatch system, with a central hub with multiple ‘teams’ that would go to work jobs, and Steve often ended up as the cook. Looking for a way to make the vegetables more palatable to the rough-and-tumble teams, he whipped together a mixture of dried herbs and preserved dairy, which met with universal approval. After three years, Steve’s contract ended (or he chose to retire), and he and his wife moved to Santa Barbara, California where they bought Sweetwater Ranch, rechristening it a name now familiar across the nation: Hidden Valley Ranch.

Yeah, turns out there IS a Hidden Valley.

At the ranch, Steve created a steakhouse (this was the 50’s, when the literal majority of television programs in the US were cowboy-based, and so ranches were a popular getaway location), and sold jars of “The Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing” as souvenirs. They were so popular that Steve started selling the ranch at other locations, and made a dry-seasoning packet, so it could be shipped more easily. Within a decade, the ranch had closed…in order to make more room for the constant demand for salad dressing. The company industrialized, buying a factory and moving production out of their home, and within 7 years, they were bought up for $8 million ($51 million in today’s dollars) by Clorox, who were eventually bought out themselves because basically 6 companies own everything in your house.

So, in honor of the recipe being devised for dried herbs and longer-lasting dairy, I first assembled a spice blend of dill, parsley, chives, and garlic powder.

A Spice blend, or lawn trimmings?

To this, you dump in some mayonnaise, sour cream, and buttermilk, and add salt and pepper to taste. Whisk together, and you’ve got ranch.

Yup. That’s Ranch.

It’s better if you let it meld a little, so scrape it into a jar, pop it in the fridge, and it’ll keep. Meanwhile, let’s work on a sweet little surprise that packs a bit of a punch.

 

You Must Take the ‘Ard Way

This recipe wasn’t even going to be in this post: originally, I had just intended to make the first and third ones, and call it a day. But then I realized that my third one is kind of ketchup-like, and if I’m making Ketchup and ranch, I can’t in good conscience leave out mustard. It was further motivated by an unplanned trip taken last Saturday: after several hours of home maintenance to get things ready for the visit on Sunday, my family had to haul a load of cardboard to the recycling center. And since this was the first time in years we were all free to deliver the recycling at a normal time, I brought up that I at least had not had lunch, and that a mere 2 or so miles from recycling center was a winery that we’d never visited. What better way to celebrate getting the house ready for Mother’s Day than a wine tasting? Somewhat unexpectedly, my family agreed, and though we discovered the recycling center was closed for the day, we still went to the winery, where the wines were great, but the REAL star of the show was this little sucker.

#NotAnAd. But, you know, if Dan the Sausage man wants to send me free mustard, I’m down. We straight up ordered like, 2 boxes of stuff from him after this and one of his sasuages.

We got a little picnic basket of sausage, cheese, crackers, and condiments, and It turns out Nathan, mother, and myself are all fans of sweet-hot mustard, and the kind made by “Dan the Sausageman” is very appealing to all of us, reminding mother of ‘Bunco mustard’. Unfortunately, we ate the entire small jar provided, but I was reminded of the appropriateness of mustard as another condiment for the season.

Mustard…look, where ranch is impressive because it’s fairly new, Mustard is the opposite: the condiment mustum ardens (“Spiced Must”) was created in the Roman era, adopted by French monks in the Dijon region, and it’s been on tables ever since. I do NOT have time to unpack millennia of mustard. It’s spicy, it’s related to cabbage, it’s old. So let’s just dive into this one.

Sweet hot mustard recipes are all fairly consistent: mustard, vinegar, sweetener, maybe a touch of salt/spices…and then there’s a divide. It comes down to consistency: for thicker, smoother mustard, a lot of recipes add eggs, which they beat into the recipe over gentle heat, which allows them to cook out the raw eggs without having the egg set. Others just skip the step, so if you want vegan sweet-hot, that’s totally possible. I went with an egg-based recipe, just because it looks closer to the style I prefer. But first, you gotta mix brown sugar and apple cider vinegar together, and then add the…mustard…and honey…Oops. I misread this. You mix the sugar and MUSTARD together, then add the vinegar and honey.

“Yeah, this looks right” - A Dummy

Well, literally the worst case scenario here is that my mustard turns out gritty, so that’s not a huge problem. Once whisked together, you wanna strain it just to be sure that there’s no little sugar or mustard nuggets. Then you pour in some eggs, whisk to combine, and then you’re gonna simmer-steam it. What does that mean? It’s not a real term, so you’re forgiven for not knowing. It’s really just “double boiling” with simmering water instead of boiling. If you’ve forgotten (or don’t know), Double boiling is a cooking technique where you simmer/boil water in a pot/saucepan, and the food you’re cooking is in a heat-conductive bowl being heated by the steam. It’s a very gentle way to heat foods, used a LOT in like, chocolate cooking, or delicate egg work such as this.

Anywho, once you’re on the heat, you’re going to want an instant-read thermometer, because you want to take the mixture to 160 degrees, stirring somewhere between constantly and often. I didn’t trust my stove, so I went with “constantly”, so the process took like, 10 minutes. The 160 is just to ensure that you can kill off any bacteria, and help set up the eggs. I also hit my mix with a dash of garlic powder, which..may not have been the best choice, we’ll talk about it later. For now,  pour into a jar, let cool, and pop into the fridge.

This could be a candle without a wick.

So, we’ve got Ranch, we’ve got mustard. What do we need last? Standard American impulse says ‘ketchup’, but I went with something a little more offbeat. While somehow being basically the same thing.

 

Chut Up And Dance

So, tomato chutney. What is it? Well, the brief answer to that is “a sweet-and-savory sauce, based on a style of sauce from India we already covered.” The long answer is “Read the post linked in the previous sentence”. I got interested in the idea of making tomato chutney when I read the latest Cook’s Country, where today’s recipe comes from. I thought it would be an interesting way to explore a kind of opaque topic that’s been buzzing around food circles listen to: how ketchup’s complexity is under-rated.  Most people in the US eat a LOT of ketchup. It’s considered by many the de factor condiment of American foods. Which is interesting, because real, good ketchup (and even normal everyday ketchup), is remarkably complex. Like, think about it: it’s sweet, tomato-y, and tangy. It’s vinegar, sugar, tomatoes, and spices. We put it on fatty meats and salty potatoes for a REASON. Honestly, the way I normally recommend people come to this understanding is to try more specialized ketchups: curry ketchups and spicy ketchups both served as my “oh, yeah, I guess this IS like, a real sauce with its own flavors” entry point. And I thought to myself, looking at the recipe for Five Spice Tomato Chutney: “I wonder if this could do something similar…”

“Is this what you think ketchup is made of?”

The recipe is very simple, once you get your hands on all the ingredients shown above. You just chop some stuff up, toss it and some other stuff in a pan, and cook it all down. Specifically, you gotta mince some garlic, and a jalapeño, grate some ginger, and chop some tomatoes. Toss it in a skillet with some fish sauce, brown sugar, cider vinegar, and five-spice.

So we’ve got salty, sweet, tangy, and…five spice. Which we’ve covered before, is the Chinese spice mix of cinnamon, anise, and warming spices. So it’s a little licorice-y, a little cinnamon-roll-y, and a little spicy. Get everything in the pan, mix it up, and cook it down for 10-15 minutes. It’s supposed to cook down, get more syrup-consistency, and a little darker. Then, mash the tomatoes with a potato masher off heat, until it’s all mashed into mostly the same texture. Then pop it back on the heat, and cook it down further, until you get to a ‘clean pass’, which is what I call it when you pass a spatula through the mixture, and the line you leave stays clean: liquid doesn’t flow back in to fill the gap.

“once you push them out, they don’t come back” is fine for cooking, less fine for, you know, resettlement.

Once there, pour into a jar, let cool uncapped for about an hour, and then you can serve, or pop a lid on it and pop it in the fridge.

Give everything a couple hours, and then you can throw together a little snack plate like I did.

I hate the shadow in the bottom corner.

How’d everything turn out? All good, but not mind-blowing. The ranch, I think was a strong result. It takes like ranch. It maybe needed a little more salt and pepper, but it straight up tasted like ranches I’ve had in restaurants and bars all over the place. The Sweet-hot mustard took a frustrating turn: Just before it hit 160, I added garlic powder, and while I think it rounded out the flavors, in so doing, it also felt like it dragged down the high hot point of the mustard: the sweet-hot mustard was fine, but it was clearly now a little more sweet than hot. (Maybe I need like, a tablespoon less brown sugar). The chutney…was VERY interesting, because I think it really hits those same kind of “ketchup” notes in a different angle/texture. It’s vinegar-y, sweet, and tomato-y. I think you might want to let it warm up a bit to get the more complex flavors, but honestly, if all you want is like “here’s a thing LIKE the thing you like” to help people explore new foods, I think it’s a great contender for that.

THURSDAY: I DON’T KNOW, MAN. THE CAT HAS BEEN MEOWING AT ME FOR 40 MINUTES NOW. MAYBE WE’LL TRY SOME BLIND TASTE-TESTS OF THESE AGAINST OTHER VERSIONS, OR I’LL FIND SOMETHING TO GET INVESTED IN.

 

Recipes

Homemade Buttermilk Ranch

Ingredients

1 ¼ cup mayonnaise

½ cup sour cream

⅓ cup buttermilk

½ teaspoon garlic powder

½ teaspoon dried dill weed

1 teaspoon dried parsley

1 teaspoon dried chives or ¼ teaspoon onion powder

salt & black pepper to taste

 

Preparation

1. In a medium-sized bowl, combine all ingredients, and whisk together. Pour into a 16 ounce jar, let chill for 1-2 hours, and use as desired.

 

Sweet-Hot Mustard

Ingredients

3/4 cup (packed) light brown sugar

1 4-ounce tin Colman's mustard powder

1 cup good-quality apple cider vinegar

1/4 cup honey

1/8 tsp garlic powder (optional)

3 large eggs, beaten to blend

 

Preparation

1. Whisk brown sugar and mustard powder in a large bowl to combine. Add vinegar and honey; whisk well. Strain through a fine-mesh sieve into a large metal bowl. Add eggs and whisk until blended.

2. Set bowl with mustard mixture over a large saucepan of gently simmering water (do not allow bottom of bowl to touch water; eggs may scramble). Cook, whisking and scraping bottom of bowl frequently, until mustard is thick and an instantread thermometer registers 160°F, about 5 minutes. Add garlic powder at about the 150 mark, if using.

 

Five-Spice Tomato Chutney

Ingredients

1 pound plum tomatoes, cored and cut into ½-inch pieces (Or 16 ounces grape and cherry tomatoes, if there are NO PLUM TOMATOES AT THE STORE, just cut into pieces)

½ cup plus 2 tablespoons packed dark brown sugar

6 tablespoons cider vinegar

2 tablespoons fish sauce

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 large jalapeño chile, stemmed and minced

2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger

¾ teaspoon five-spice powder

 

Preparation

1. Combine all ingredients in 12-inch nonstick skillet. Bring to boil over medium-high heat. Cook, stirring often, until mixture is syrupy and slightly darkened in color, 10 to 15 minutes.

2. Off heat, mash tomato mixture with potato masher to even consistency. Return to simmer over medium heat and cook until rubber spatula leaves distinct trail when dragged across bottom of skillet, 1 to 3 minutes. (Note: Chutney will continue to thicken as it cools, so don't over-reduce.)

3. Transfer chutney to jar and let cool completely before serving, about 1 hour. (Cooled chutney can be refrigerated for up to 1 month.)