Courage in the Kitchen

Want a really easy way to impress guests with your skill in the kitchen? Serve them homemade noodles in beef, chicken or turkey soup. Jerri has been wowing me with her noodle-making ability for nearly five decades. Once she taught me how to make them, I was less awed by her skill but still impressed by how good they taste.

That’s because noodles are simple to make. They have only five ingredients, which may explain why people have been making noodles for over 4,000 years. As she was teaching me how to make them, she kept saying, “You can’t screw them up. If they’re too sticky, just sprinkle on more flour.” And she was right.

My mother made her noodles with just four ingredients– eggs, water, salt and all-purpose flour that we used to buy in 25-pound bags. My sister Patsy told me that when Mom taught one of her granddaughters to make noodles, she showed her how to measure the water with an eggshell. I don’t remember ever watching Mom make noodles, but she probably did it early in the day when I was at school. I sure ate a lot of them, however.

Jerri makes her noodles with semolina flour and uses milk rather than water for the liquid. Semolina is the high-gluten durum flour used by commercial pasta makers in Italy, and it makes delicious noodles. You can find it in the specialty foods section of many supermarkets today or at food co-ops. It has a slightly sandy texture that feels odd when you start to knead the dough, but it soon becomes smooth and elastic.

Jerri’s recipe makes about six cups of cooked noodles. Since you dry them before cooking, you can cook just the amount you need and store the rest. If you dry them completely you can put them in a plastic bag and keep them in a cabinet. We usually store them in the freezer. They seem a little tougher when we cook them after freezing, but we think that they are still good.

Here’s how to make a batch of noodles in no time at all:

INGREDIENTS:

2 cups semolina flour
1 tsp. salt
2 large eggs
1/4 cup milk
All-purpose flour for kneading

PROCEDURE:

Stir the salt into the flour in a mixing bowl. Beat the eggs until lemon colored, mix in the milk and stir the liquid into the flour and salt. Add a tiny bit more milk if necessary. Turn the dough out onto a bread board generously sprinkled with all-purpose flour and knead until the dough is smooth and elastic, three or four minutes. The semolina will feel grainy as you start to knead the dough, but it will soon become smooth. Sprinkle more flour on the board if the dough is sticky.

Shape the dough into a ball and let it rest for five minutes or so. Cut the ball in half. Pat a half into a flat round, turning it on the floured board so both sides are well floured. Roll the dough very thin. We aim for noodles that are between 1/16 and 1/8 inch thick.

Using a pizza roller cutter, slice the dough into strips between 1/4 and 1/2 inch wide. Lay the strips on dish towels to dry for at least a couple of hours before cooking. Repeat for the second half. To make three cups of cooked noodles, bring three to four quarts of water to a boil, add two teaspoons of salt and half the dried noodles. Boil for 9 to 12 minutes.

If the noodles are very thin, test one for doneness after eight minutes, longer for thicker ones. Like all pasta, noodles should be cooked al dente, which means there should be a slight firmness when you bite through the noodle.

NOTES: If you are making the noodles for soup, just add the dried noodles to the soup and cook them until they have reached the al dente stage before serving. Taste and add a bit more salt if necessary. Homemade noodles are wonderful with goulash or pörkelt too.

My father was seventeen years old when the stock market crashed in October of 1929. He told me that Grandpa Rang lost all the money he had saved from twenty years of farming except for the last couple of milk checks that he had deposited in a bank that survived the collapse. With cows and chickens and a big garden, the family had enough to eat, but clothes, hardware and other “store-bought” things were precious.

Women and girls mended clothing, darned socks, and turned flour sacks into dish towels, pillow cases, dresses and curtains–often embroidered with flowers or geometric patterns. Men and boys made tools, repaired equipment and salvaged anything they could. My father and mother passed on those frugal ways to their offspring.

For instance, the second carpentry job I learned was how to straighten nails. The first was how to bend them, but that was self-taught. Today I still find myself reusing nails and saving wood scraps.

Before I left home for college, Mom taught me how to sew on buttons and stitch up a seam, and she gave me a patching kit with some needles and spools of thread. This spring I actually sewed on a button when I was spending a few days by myself at the cabin. It is still on my fishing pants, which seem to be getting smaller.

People didn’t waste food either. Leftovers were saved and either warmed up and served again or used as ingredients in another dish. Here is an example. We called it “dough potatoes.” It’s not fancy–just leftover potatoes and onions fried in a thin batter of eggs, flour and milk–but made with a baked potato and served with ketchup, it is a good example of northern European comfort food.

Dad sometimes made this simple dish when Mom was not home to cook dinner. My sister Barb thinks that he learned the recipe from his mother, so it might have originated in Germany. If so, I may have eaten it at Grandma and Grandpa’s the year I lunched with them when we had lost our good cook at Blair School.

Anyway, here is how to make Dough Potatoes

INGREDIENTS:

1 leftover baked potato (1 to 1 1/2 cups when sliced)
1/4 cup onion
3 T flour
2/3 cup milk
4 large eggs
1 scant tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
3 T butter, vegetable oil or bacon grease

PROCEDURE:

Peel the potato, cut it lengthwise into quarters and slice 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick. Chop the onion medium fine. Heat the oil in a skillet and fry the potato and onion until they begin to brown.

While the vegetables are frying, beat the eggs until lemon yellow. Add the milk, flour, salt and pepper and mix well until you have a thin batter. Pour the batter over the potatoes and onions and stir continuously until the batter begins to set. Reduce the heat to very low, cover the pan and cook until done, about 3 minutes.

Dough potatoes are rather bland, so make sure that ketchup, salt and pepper are on the table.

NOTES: You can use leftover boiled potatoes, but baked potatoes give a better flavor, at least to our tastes. Once the eggs are nearly done, you can use a spatula to turn them over so the bottom does not get too brown.