Tzatziki and Pita

From Ina Garten

Ingredients:
4 cups plain yogurt, whole milk or low-fat
2 hothouse cucumbers, unpeeled and seeded
2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons champagne vinegar or white wine vinegar
1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice (2 lemons)
2 tablespoons good olive oil
1 tablespoon minced garlic (2 cloves)
1 tablespoon minced fresh dill
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

Directions:
Place the yogurt in a cheesecloth-lined sieve and set it over a bowl. Grate the cucumber and toss it with 2 tablespoons salt; place it in another sieve and set it over another bowl. Place both bowls in the refrigerator for 3 to 4 hours so the yogurt and cucumber can drain.

Transfer the thickened yogurt to a large bowl. Squeeze as much liquid from the cucumbers as you can, and add the cucumbers to the yogurt. Mix in the sour cream, vinegar, lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, dill, 1 teaspoon salt and pepper. You can serve it immediately, but I prefer to allow the tzatziki to sit in the refrigerator for a few hours for the flavors to blend.

Personal Note: Made this for the Sunday afternoon board game party at Mosh and Jolly's. I cheated because I was super short on time though--I just used high quality true Greek yogurt and hoped it'd be dense/thick and flavorful enough without so much time straining. It probably is worth the extra time, and one day I'll try to do it properly all the way through and compare results. But people enjoyed it, even the food snobs at the gathering. So! ...Ina never steers me wrong.

Rochester-Style Hot Sauce

Hot Sauce

From The Democrat and Chronicle/Times-Union's Food/Living Section column "Ask-It Basket." Sorry, don't know the date; it isn't on the old clipping we've kept.

1 large onion, chopped
2-3 stalks of celery, chopped fine
1/4 tsp. garlic salt or powder
1 lb. ground beef
1 tbsp. salt
1 tsp. pepper
2 tbsp. chili powder
2 tsp. cayenne pepper
2 dashes of Tabasco sauce
1 tbsp. paprika
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. ground cloves
1 tsp. ground thyme
1 tsp. marjoram
1 qt. water

Brown beef. Saute onions and celery in small amount of butter or margarine. Add garlic and browned ground beef. Put all ingredients in kettle and simmer for two hours or until desired thickness.

Personal Note: This is my hometown's local specialty, the hot sauce that tops all of the small lakeside greasy-food establishments' Rochester-trademarked burgers and hot dogs and defines them as local chow (in Rochester, the burger is not defined by massive amounts of soft and thick ground beef; the patty is relatively small and more charred, and you heap hot sauce, cheese, caramelized ONIONS, extra hot sauce, relish, ketchup, and whatever the hell else over it and put it on a special bun and voila, local burger). It also goes on the infamous garbage plate (why the hell hasn't this caught on elsewhere? There's surely a market for it in trucker-friendly Memphis as well as Primanti-Brothers-and-greasy-diner-loving Pittsburgh). As I mentioned to Ryan over the summer, the secret is the cloves--my parents and my aunt and uncle tried for years to figure out how to replicate the sauce and then it leaked on this column somehow and they quickly realized the missing X component was cloves. However, don't use too many; a little goes a long way (I made the batch I brought to Joe's party too strong clove-wise and it suffered as a result). It's spicy and savory, and cinnamon-y. Mm, it's good and always makes me think of Bill Gray's and Vic n' Irv's, and Don's Original and Mark's Texas Hots and Nick Tahou's and Gitsi's and Sea Breeze and Tom's off the highway and the summer and mm.

Mayonnaise

Mayonnaise

Recipe courtesy Alton Brown (2003 Television Food Network)
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Yield: 9 fluid ounces

1 egg yolk*
1/2 teaspoon fine salt
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
2 pinches sugar
2 teaspoons fresh squeezed lemon juice
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
1 cup oil, safflower or corn

In a glass bowl, whisk together egg yolk and dry ingredients. Combine lemon juice and vinegar in a separate bowl then thoroughly whisk half into the yolk mixture. Start whisking briskly, then start adding the oil a few drops at a time until the liquid seems to thicken and lighten a bit (which means you've got an emulsion on your hands). Once you reach that point you can relax your arm a little (but just a little) and increase the oil flow to a constant (albeit thin) stream. Once half the oil is in add the rest of the lemon juice mixture.

Continue whisking until all of the oil is incorporated. Leave at room temperature for 1 to 2 hours then refrigerate for up to 1 week.

Raw egg warning: The American Egg Board states: "There have been warnings against consuming raw or lightly cooked eggs on the grounds that the egg may be contaminated with Salmonella, a bacteria responsible for a type of food poisoning...Healthy people need to remember that there is a very small risk and treat eggs and other raw animal foods accordingly. Use only properly refrigerated, clean, sound-shelled, fresh, grade AA or A eggs. Avoid mixing yolks and whites with the shell."

Personal Note: Once you have real homemade mayonnaise you will never go back. Once you get the hang of it, it's incredibly easy, and it makes a HUGE difference. I refused to use the stuff on anything when I still thought store bought was all there was; I found it really gross. But seriously. This mayonnaise makes anything a zillion times better. And you don't use much because it's already got a lot of flavor; a little goes a long way.