Rich Cooks

Bastardized Rum Drinks, Part 2: Emergency Mai Tais

2011-11-14T09:17:00.001-05:00

I have an Indian cookbook called 660 Curries. It's pretty good as a comprehensive survey of Indian cooking, but the first step in every recipe should really be: "First, quit your job." I understand that this is the nature of Indian food, but I'm much more comfortable with Madhur Jaffrey's At Home with Madhur Jaffrey, which I just picked up and intend to put through its paces very soon. It's got nice-looking recipes using a human number of ingredients and only a few recipes refers to some spice mix you will have made 72 hours earlier.

My energy level and mood at the table is probably the most important thing about a dish I make. If I'm ragged from effort by the time I sit down to eat, I just won't have a good time. It took me a couple decades of entertaining to understand this.

Still, I am tempted by the prospect that an extra infusion of effort will uncover a new vista of flavor. When it works and a new technique uncovers something transcendent, it's a peak experience for me. It can stay with me for years. So every now and then, I see a recipe which, however assily complex, slips through my filters.

This mai tai recipe from the New York Times is the most recent. What, like I'm going to let big-time corporate agribusiness tell me what my orgeat syrup should taste like? Me? No way. I went ahead and made the homemade orgeat syrup before seeing the first comment:

So, the critical ingredient is perfect Orgeat syrup--specifically 1/2 ounce thereof. And to make that you start with a little over a pound of almonds... Oh, well, at least I don't need to start with planting an almond tree.

Doh. The commenter was right. I'd been sucked in again. Well, the one half of the orgeat syrup made a nice gift for a Giant Toad. I ended up throwing out almost all of my half a few months later.

Fast forward to August 25th of this year. Hurricane Irene had just driven us northward from the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where we'd been vacationing. A much-anticipated vacation had just been busted out in the middle of a perfect week. We drove back on Thursday all day, arrived home ragged and worn out, ready to brace for the hurricane, which was conveniently following us home from vacation.

Maybe only certain people know this, but hurricanes usually have awesome weather at their periphery. All the sucky weather is in close to the eye. We had one more day of sunshine before Irene descended on New York City and we decided to make the most of it.

We took our rental car out to Jacob Riis beach. I brought along refreshments in the form of Emergency Mai Tais. Provided you have the requisite cooler to transport it, the entire thing can be ready to go in 5 minutes. And if you're not picky about your OJ (i.e., you don't mind concentrated, considering all the other flavors in there), you could conceivably make this entirely from pantry and freezer ingredients, so you can technically have the makings on hand at all times.

1 can (46 fl. oz) pineapple juice, any brand.
2 quarts orange juice, frozen concentrated is fine.
1 bottle overproof rum (Lemon Hart Demerara 151 is preferred)
1/4 cup grenadine syrup (next to the bloody mary mix)
1 tbsp almond extract (yes, from the baking aisle)

Mix all ingredients with some ice in a dangerous-looking 2 gallon cooler. Ours is orange, but this red one from Amazon sends a sufficient signal to beware.

The Lemon Hart rum is really essential here.... but not for the taste. It's more the label design, which fits with the sort of 1970's supermarket groove we've got going here. This is the kind of rum that says "There's such a thing as fresh asparagus?". Seriously, though, it's very tasty, but you could substitute a bottle of almost any 151+ or two bottles of 80 proof if it comes to that. In an emergency, you have to be flexible.

Bastardized Rum Drinks - Part 1 - The Papazerac

2011-09-09T16:50:00.000-04:00

I'm all for the classics, but I'm also completely in favor of bastardizing the hell out of them to suit your needs. This year, I've enjoyed and destroyed several classic rum drinks, and had fun doing it. Here's the first:

I love the classic papa doble or Hemingway daiquiri.

Papa Doble

2 oz white rum
juice of 1 lime
generous portion of grapefruit juice
slight dash of Luxardo Maraschino

Shake and serve on the rocks.

When I went to Hilton Head with my in-laws this year, we spent a lot of effort punishing my father-in-law for the mistake of saying we could put anything we wanted on his open tab at Pool Bar Jim's on the beach. They do fantastic frozen drinks, but they're not classicists by any stretch. These are drinks for the Jamba Juice crowd (albeit much, much better than anything you'd get there).

Jim's recipe for a papa doble includes the cardinal sin against the purist version: substituting maraschino cherry juice for Luxardo Maraschino liqueur. Yes, maraschino cherry juice comes from almond extract, whereas Luxardo is actually made from cherries. But food scientist Harold McGee will tell you that cherries actually have a strong almond component to their flavor in the form of benzaldehyde, so what's the big deal? It's a frozen daiquiri. You've got all that ice stunning your tongue into submission. You can't taste the rum. You think you can tell the difference? And you actually care? You're on the friggin' beach and someone else is paying for the drinks! Shut up!

Now, though, just to make things easier, whenever I'm at a beach bar with frozen drinks--which is surprisingly often--I just ask for a grapefruit daiquiri and that does the trick. It's amazingly refreshing.

I discovered that the smokiness of a solid single-malt Scotch whisky makes a wonderful backstop to the flavors of a papa doble. So I came up with the Papazerac, a papa doble made with the same process as the iconic Sazerac cocktail of New Orleans, with a Laphroaig rinse.

Laphroaig is a powerfully flavored whisky, and not everyone likes it, but its power makes it come through the rum, sourness, and sugar in this drink wonderfully.

Papazerac

Fill an old-fashioned glass with ice and let chill while you make the rest of the drink.
In a mixing glass, muddle one lime with sugar to taste.
Add two tablespoons fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice, a dash of Luxardo maraschino liquer, and 2-3 oz white rum.
Top the mixing glass with ice and shake vigorously.
Discard the ice from the old-fashioned glass, pour a generous dash of Laphroaig into the glass, swirl, and discard.
Strain the mixing glass into the old-fashioned glass, garnish with a grapefruit peel twist, and serve.

Drink twenty to thirty of these and you will have gotten through your bottle of Laphroaig pleasurably without actually drinking any. As with the absinthe in a Sazerac, do not actually drink the rinse out of the glass. Control your urges and just throw it out. If you feel bad about that, just use less. If you drink it, you'll wreck your ability to taste its subtle underpinnings in the drink, which is the whole point.

If you can't bear to waste whisky, put it in a shot glass and re-add it to your drink as necessary to preserve the smoky flavor.

Next: Emergency Mai Tais

One Great Pan vs. One Great Knife

2011-03-30T13:43:00.003-04:00

I've got a pretty well-stocked kitchen, but often get questions from folks who want to know where to spend money when they're expanding beyond the basics. Of course, the two most basic pieces of kitchen equipment are the knife and the cooking vessel. (Well, before that, the heat source, of course, but you're less likely to have much choice in that matter.) So, if you're going to spend-up on only one, which should it be? And what should you get. Well, it starts with three levels of equipment: OK, good, and great.

The OK Level

This is the province of the Ikea starter kitchen set, and the place where most people end up. It's fine for those who think more about what they're going to eat tonight than what they're going to cook tonight. Or for those who don't really think about food at all. If you're one of those, you're probably not reading this.

The Good Level

It seems like the first level of kitchen equipment hovers around $60-70. I noticed back when I got out of college that I was quickly going into debt, and most of the purchases that were sending me there were in the $60 range. Anything in the high $70 range sort of gets rounded up to $100, and it's easy to see where an extra $100 might mean making your rent that month or not. But what's sixty bucks?

In my 20's, I accumulated a lot of cookware and other stuff in the $60 range. Here's the thing about it: It looks like the Great level of cookware, and performs at the OK level. It's almost always a waste of money. As long as what you're cooking with is not actually flimsy or poorly made, you're fine sticking at the OK level.

The Great Level

Okay, so you're going to shoot the moon. You've committed to spending $200 or more on a piece of kitchen equipment. What do you do?

Knives

Japanese. All the way.

German drop-forged knives are the standard in American kitchens, but they're usually too chunky to comfortably chop vegetables, which is the most frequent task they'll be used for. The standard chef's knives are ridiculously large and heavy for the skill level of the people who typically use them. They're also usually sold as part of an expensive set, which appears to come with a bunch of extra knives that might be useful, but really just costs money for something you'll rarely if ever use.

Misono 440 Molybdenum Santoku

Go to Korin Japanese in lower Manhattan or korin.com. Japanese knives are really amazing. They're sharpened on a bevel, so that one side of the knife cuts straight, and the other side pushes the food away from the cutting edge. Much more stability and safety. The Misono santoku is my favorite all-round knife in my kitchen. Light, nimble, but substantial enough to work with. Holds an edge forever, but is relatively easy to sharpen.

I'm also a huge fan of virgin carbon steel, too. I have two knives, a gyotou and a petty. One from a stall outside the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, the other from Korin. You have to be a bit careful with carbon steel, because it's brittle (no frozen food) and not stain- or rust-resistant. But, man, does it take an edge. It looks ugly, but gets sharper and stays sharper than anything else. The only downside is the marital strife it causes when my wife uses one to cut a lemon, then leaves it rusting in the lemon juice. Aaargh! (But, of course, she goes for my carbon steel knives every time because they're light and sharp and a pleasure to use.)

One of the most obvious disadvantages is that the knives need to be sharpened a specific way. Luckily, if you don't want to invest in a water stone and developing your sharpening technique, there are plenty of specialized sharpeners at reasonable prices.

What to use while you're saving up

If you're not going to go Japanese, go Victorinox. You'll spend $67, with shipping on these three knives, and they should be enough for most kitchens. Victorinox knives are priced at the OK level and they perform at the Good level.

Knife care: Invest in a block or magnetic strip to hold your knives. If you're going to put them in the dishwasher, expect to sharpen them (a pain) a lot more often. Keep them sharp to minimize accidents. Take a knife skills class; it'll save you time in the kitchen... and maybe an injury or two.

Cookware

Copper. Sorry. That's just how it is. Preferably Cuprinox. This Mauviel saucier is my favorite.

This is it. This is the desert island pan. I use mine every day. Oatmeal, sausage, marinara, steak, stew, stir-fry, braised short rib, frittatas, stuck pot rice. It just never gets put away. It stays on the stove.

I easily have a dozen other pricey pots and pans (many handed down from my Mom), and you can keep all of 'em. I almost never use them. I wish future-Rich had been around the first time I bought a piece of expensive cookware and told me to get the Mauviel saucier instead. That Le Crueset bouillabaise pot was great for my 20's, when my most frequent big cooking project was a gumbo or a big chili for a party. Now, I want something light and responsive, which copper is. I find the shape so easy to work with for many different uses. These sauciers are getting hard to find, which is a shame.

Side note: I seriously wouldn't ever have gotten this pan if it hadn't been for a mistake. I was testing out different wedding registries in 2008, and put this on my registry. My very generous and kind uncle John was searching for my registry online the same day. I put the saucier on thinking "I wish," never really intending to put it on the registry because what kind of filthy yuppie spends $300 on a single pan. Uncle John snapped it up and it arrived later in the week. Back then, it was way more gift than I'd ever have thought to ask for. Since then, I've given Mauviel copper for wedding gifts more than once.

Having owned this pan for three years, watching the Le Creuset and the All-Clad gathering dust, I'm kicking myself for not having bought one sooner. There's just nothing in my kitchen that performs anything like this pan... unless it's the oval copper roasting pan my old boss got me as a wedding gift.

It took me a long time to become a copper convert, but here I am.

What to use while you're saving up

I don't have any, but Lodge enameled cast iron is very reasonably priced and pretty much has to perform well. If you can hack the care regimen, their regular cast iron is the best deal in cookware. I had a bit of a discovery with my Fagor pressure cooker. I use the pressure cooker about monthly, usually for brown rice or chickpeas. But I use the pot that came along with it all the time. The 8 quart one is a great pasta pot and would make a very good stew pot.

So, which one?

Get a Cuprinox pan and Victorinox knives, then start saving for the Misono santoku.

I had a sous vide cooker all along

2010-09-29T22:59:00.001-04:00

So I'd often wondered whether my little Sunpentown countertop induction cooktop could double as a sous vide cooker. After asking for it as a wedding present (and then buying it for myself when nobody thought it substantial/romantic enough), I've never really found a great use for it except as an extra warming plate when in a pinch, or a way to boil rice or pasta in the summer while keeping the house cool.

I did some experiments with just water and my digital thermometer. (Not to turn this into an endorsement-fest, but I love, lurve, this thermometer. It's exact, durable, and easy to use.)

The first experiment, I set it on "cook" and set it for medium-low, which the cooker said was155 degrees F. Well, I don't know what that means in Taiwanese, but it doesn't mean "make the water 155 degrees." It means, "boil the water, but not as quickly as on medium." Realizing that I had to go rely only on my observations, not the assertions of the cooker, I redesigned.

The second experiment, I put 8 quarts of water at 155 F on the cooker on its low warm setting. "Warm" doesn't appear to mean anything other than, "cycle on and off at regular intervals". Well, lo and behold, the water slowly came down to 144 F and stayed there. Or looked to stay there. I had to go to work... Yes, I was doing this in the morning before work... What? Oh, like you've never done a little science in the morning just to get the day going.

Tonight, I took hot water from the tap, filled up the pot, put it on low-warm and left it, taking the temp every 20 minutes. It came up to 141.5 and stuck there, which is not enough for a "perfect egg", so I put it on medium-warm and it jumped to 155 for a couple of minutes before I brought it down quickly with a glass of water. I found that by half-covering the top, I could get it to come up to 144.5, which is perfect for eggs.

Here's the result, with chopped thick-cut bacon, on a toasted baguette.

Here's what happened when I broke the yolk.

This was... well, this was just stupidly delicious and amazingly easy. Here's the delicata squash soup with fried sage leaves I made while the "main" course was cooking.

Being limited to 141 or 144 degrees is not ideal, but given that I have the equipment around anyway and it's easy, why not, right? With those temps, I can make eggs, beef, pork, and chicken. I'm thinking of pointing a fan at the open top of the pot to see if I can get it down in the right range to do fish.

UPDATE:
I never did this again. I've since been using my Nissan Thermos Vacuum Flask Cooker for all sous vide cooking.

What do you get the chef who has everything?

2010-05-18T17:07:00.000-04:00

I think we all know the answer to that:

An egg cuber.

Why Wondra? Why Velveeta?

2010-05-14T17:54:00.000-04:00

There's plenty of precedent for using processed ingredients in haute cuisine. Jean-Georges used Hellman's mayo and canned condensed milk (and little else), to make a sauce for shrimp in one of his restaurants. David Bouley admitted to using Heinz ketchup.

I got Wondra from Jacques Pepin. He uses it primarily for dredging. I use it for quick thickening sometimes. It's a great tool to have in your toolbox, but sometimes it's also the right ingredient. Wondra allows you to make a nice thin crust on a piece of meat. It protects the meat, doesn't burn easily, and doesn't clump.

I used Velveeta in my latest recipe because that's what I used when I originally made the dish. The recipe came from a caterer I know, who will remain nameless. When she originally instructed me on the dish, she said, "I hope you don't mind using Velveeta." I didn't.

This sauce isn't very cheesy. The Velveeta just sits in the background and, with the thickening of Wondra, props up the sauce. The principle attraction of Velveeta is that it can be incorporated at any time and it's stable for a long time, which is great for catering. But if it's great for catering, it's also good for a dinner party where you want to actually spend time with your guests and not fuss over the food, but still make something good. That's what my coworker asked for, and I hope I delivered.

What I'd really like to do is make this dish in to a type of cheater's risotto. Parboil the vialone nano rice, and incorporate it into half the sauce, while the thighs finish in the oven with the other half. Maybe throw in a few saffron threads, too, to make it more like risotto alla milanesa. In that case, the Velveeta would nerf the making of the dish in another way. Often, making risotto, you have to hit that perfect spot where the rice is soft and the sauce is creamy. With this, the sauce is already creamy. You just cook it until the rice is just right.

Actually, this is what I'm having for dinner tonight. I'm off to make it.

p.s., if you ask my friend the caterer for the recipe for her chicken dish, you get something that calls for fresh-grated sharp cheddar cheese.

Chicken Thighs with Vermouth and Cheese

2010-05-06T14:34:00.002-04:00

A coworker just asked me what I'd do with some chicken thighs and not much time. I came up with this. What I love about chicken thighs is that you can't overcook them. What I dislike is the longer you cook them, the more of their flavor leaches out into the sauce, and the more the thighs become stringy. I also don't like the texture you get when you apply high heat directly to the chicken flesh. It reminds me of plastic. In this recipe, the Wondra flour acts like a very light breading, forming a crust that keeps the meat plump, but dissolves back into the sauce. During the initial saute, it also lets some of the juices go through and stick to the pan, so you have something to deglase, and helps thicken the sauce more than the Velveeta (I know) alone.

1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp olive oil
2 lbs boneless skinless chicken thighs
Wondra flour
Salt & pepper

1/2 c dry white vermouth
1/2 c low-sodium chicken broth

1 tsp herbes de Provence OR 1/2 tsp dried thyme leaves (not ground thyme)

1/4 lb Velveeta cheese (I know.) cut into 1/2" cubes

Preheat oven to 325.

Heat the olive oil and butter in your heaviest pan.

Dry the chicken thighs very well with paper towels and lay out in a single layer. From a height, season with salt and pepper, and dust gently with Wondra flour. (Doing this from several feet above the chicken gets you an even, thin coverage you can't get with dredging.)

Saute the thighs in the oil and butter, in batches, if necessary, so that they do not crowd each other, and a crust is formed on the chicken. Set the chicken aside on a platter to rest. Deglase the pan with vermouth, scraping up all the brown bits, which should dissolve and thicken the vermouth as it reduces. When the sauce is smooth, thin with chicken broth, add the herbs, and add the cheese. Stir until the cheese melts.

Return chicken and any accumulated juices to the pan, stirring and coating all sides with the sauce. Cover and place in the oven for 25-30 minutes to cook through.

Serve with rice.

Serves 4.5 people.

I'm pretty sure I need this.

2009-11-27T13:50:00.002-05:00

"...said Charlie Kleinman, chef of Wexler’s, a new restaurant doing creative takes on Southern food, like Barbecue Scotch Eggs (soft-poached eggs coated in short-rib burnt ends, deep fried, and served with sweet pea gastrique and hot sauce)."

From this article in the Times.

Weighing in on the subject of the article itself, the difference here is between "produce" and "culture". In SF, it seems the raw materials outshine the food culture, but as anywhere, there's always more going on than the press sees, or than the blogs cover. It's just what gets your attention.

Cold-brew Coffee

2009-11-24T07:06:00.003-05:00

Cold-brew Coffee

It's often called "Toddy," which is a trademarked term. The trademark belongs to Todd Simpson, who experienced cold-brew coffee while traveling in Latin America in the 1960's and devised, patented, and popularized in America his system for cold-brew coffee.

Here's what I know about cold-brew coffee from some fifteen years of experience with it.

1.) It's caffeinated.

The amount of caffeine in any coffee extraction has primarily to do with how long the water is in contact with the beans. Thus the relatively low caffeine content of espresso (relative to flavor). Cold-brew coffee stays in contact with the beans for a long time, albeit at lower temperatures, and thus has quite a kick.

2.) It's cheap.

The higher the brewing temperature, the better beans you need. At lower temperatures, lower quality beans, which might yield sour hot coffee, only release their coffee-ish flavors, not the sour, acidic notes. My cold-brew recipe calls for Chock Fulla Nuts in the brick form ($5 for two weeks' worth of iced lattes). It's not improved by using pricier coffee.

3.) It lasts.

Kept in a stainless steel bottle in my fridge, cold-brew coffee will remain drinkable for a month, even if it's sitting on some lees (see below). That's just my estimate, of course. I'd try to get through a batch in a couple of weeks for best flavor.

4.) It works mainly for iced coffee drinks.

Some people like to mix cold-brew coffee with hot water for low-acid hot coffee, but I've just never found it that satisfying, and even with boiling hot water and room temperature cold-brew, it usually wants some time in the microwave to get hot enough. And even then, it's just not as good as drip coffee. If you can't tolerate the acid in drip coffee or espresso, it's a decent substitute, but where it really shines is over ice.

5.) It's messy to make.

This is why Mr. Simpson deserves his trademark. He didn't solve the problem of making cold-brew coffee. That's relatively easy. He solved the problem of making it relatively painlessly. Since it lasts and is cheap, cold-brew coffee is best done in large batches. Those large batches leave you handling a pile of swollen coffee grounds and a large quantity of liquid. The problem for me, though, is that I don't want to have yet another single-use piece of equipment in my New York kitchen.

For my recipe, you will need:

A "pound" of cheap coffee. It's usually 14 oz or so. Most grocery store brands are rated for percolators, which means the grind is large enough to get mostly trapped in a sieve.
A large sieve
A whisk
Two large non-reactive containers (glass, plastic, stainless bowl or pot)
A non-reactive bottle for storage (and a funnel, depending on the size of the bottle's mouth)
Paper towels

Remember: Since we're making coffee in volume here, with cheap materials, we're not looking to minimize waste or maximize the amount of coffee. We're looking to get through a messy process with as little bother as possible. You will throw away some viable cold-brew coffee with this method. If you're looking to maximize your coffee, go out and buy a Toddy Cold Brew System.

Dump the coffee grounds in a non-reactive container. Pour in cold water, whisking as you go, just until the mixture is combined and stirs freely. I'm never sure how much water I use, but I end up filling a 40 oz. stainless bottle at the end of the process. If I don't fill the bottle, I top it up with cold water to make sure I have a consistent strength of cold-brew coffee.
Cover and leave in refrigerator overnight.
Place your other non-reactive container in the sink, with the large sieve over it.
The grounds will have settled overnight. Whisk the grounds-water mixture to get it moving, then, as quickly as possible, dump the whole thing into the sieve. It will catch 95% of the grounds.
Hold the sieve above the level of the liquid to let it drain for a bit. Just hold it until the stream coming out of it slows down or you get bored. Do not shake or agitate it. Remember, we're trying to minimize mess, not get every drop of coffee. The grounds go in the trash or, better yet, on your compost pile.
What you're left with is great cold-brew coffee with two problems: bitter foam on top and a layer of sludge on the bottom.
To remove the top layer of bitter foam (and usually gross little floating grounds), lay a paper towel over the surface of the liquid. When you gather the paper towel into a ball (don't squeeze) and discard it, you'll be discarding some coffee, but again don't worry. Do this two or three times. The paper here is performing the same function your paper coffee filter performs in drip coffee. (By the way, if you're using one of those gold mesh abominations for drip coffee, throw it out. Paper filters make drip coffee better.)
Let the coffee sit for a while in the fridge while you make breakfast (10-60 minutes). If you can't make breakfast without coffee, ladle a little off the top and preview your work. You're almost there!
Decant the coffee into the storage bottle (using a funnel if necessary). As you pour, you'll see a layer of sludge that has settled out. It's better to leave as much of this behind as possible. Remember, you're spending five bucks on two weeks worth of coffee here. It's okay to let a little go down the drain for quality's sake. The best thing is to watch the coffee going down the funnel. As soon as it darkens, stop decanting and throw out the rest.
Store in the fridge for up to two weeks.

Depending on how fastidious you were in the decanting step, you might end up with a layer of sludge (or lees) sitting harmlessly at the bottom of the bottle. Don't shake the bottle when you pour the coffee. The lees will remain on the bottom until you're ready to clean the bottle. When you do, they'll rinse out easily.

Yield? It's really up to you and how strong you like your coffee drinks. I use it for iced coffee and lattes. For iced coffee or latte, I mix equal parts cold-brew coffee and water or milk, respectively, over ice. I sweeten with simple syrup or chocolate syrup for iced mochas.

Side note/reminiscence: The coffee house I worked in in Cleveland ages ago used cold-brew coffee to make their very popular mochas. The recipe was simple: one part cold-brew coffee, two parts half-and-half, and a good dash of chocolate syrup. We made it by the five-gallon bucket and sold it in 16 oz cups, hot or cold. I figure those drinks ran about 500 calories and 35 grams of fat. (A Big Mac runs about 540 calories and 29 grams of fat.) Put that alongside a butter-soaked scone or a coconut-laden "morning glory" muffin, and you've got quite a treat. We used to get quite a chuckle watching the customers come in for their 1200 calorie "healthy" breakfasts.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/detoxz/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

A Shout-out

2009-05-14T06:46:00.001-04:00

They printed my review of Tasty Hand-Pulled Noodles in the Chowhound weekly digest! This place really is great. I'm going there this afternoon.

Canned Bacon

2009-04-25T09:45:00.000-04:00

Wow. Canned Bacon.

Curry Leaves

2009-04-21T09:25:00.003-04:00

My friend Meredith asked me to write briefly about curry leaves. I'll try to expand on the Wikipedia entry a bit.

First, if you're in New York and you want to know about curry leaves first-hand, go to Chola. Curry leaves are used in the cookery of my birthplace of Durban, South Africa, but they were an import there, probably brought by the earliest of the indentured servants that came as laborers from the south of the subcontinent.

The iconic curry leaf dish at Chola is the Chettinad chicken. It's chunks of chicken, with hot chillies, curry leaves, and a highly spiced tomato sauce. Absolutely breathtaking, and not too spicy for normal folks to enjoy.

From the various recipes I've cobbled together, curry leaves seem to have an affinity for tomato and spice. I've never tried them in any sort of fusion capacity, but I'd very much like to experiment a bit.

The taste is, to me, tarry and toasty, both in good ways. It's very much a warm flavor.

Enough blathering. Here's the facts:

In New York, you can get fresh curry leaves at Dual, and at Little India. I find Little India to be a much better place to shop for actual Indian specialties than the more famous Kalustyan's on the next block. Kalustyan's is crowded and expensive, with diffident service. Little India and Dual are both friendly and helpful places with reasonable prices. If you absolutely need to buy Korean black garlic and Welsh smoked salt in the same store, go to Kalustyan's. If you are interested in cooking, though, I recommend either of these others.
The wikipedia entry for curry leaves says you can freeze them. I have frozen them, but have never actually ended up using them, because I make a stop at one of these stores often enough that it's never come up.
To use them, heat vegetable oil in a heavy pot with a lid. Meanwhile, rinse the sprig of leaves and shake dry. When the oil is very hot, strip the sprig into it quickly and put the lid on. The curry leaves will sputter and can burn you. When the sputtering starts to subside, go on with your recipe. This is where you can bloom some curry powder, throw in some onions, garlic, ginger, etc. The leaves will suffuse the dish with a lovely and somewhat indescribable flavor.
Most recently, I used curry leaves and hot red chillies in a variation on the Chettinad recipe. I used whole frozen okra and tofu. It was heavenly. You could use just the okra and serve over rice for an awesome vegan curry.
I was told by the manager at Chola that southern Indian cooking was characterized by the use of curry leaves and coconut. I wasn't clear if he meant them to be used together.
I am sort of dying to know if they go well with seafood, particularly shrimp. I made a Madhur Jaffrey recipe the other night, shrimp with crushed black mustard seeds, that I think might work really well with curry leaves instead of mustard.

Let me know if you know anything more about this lovely seasoning.

Photo credit: ImageBang! on Flickr

Why was I not apprised of this?

2009-02-06T15:23:00.001-05:00

http://aveceric.com/category/gettoasted

Long Time, No Post

2009-02-03T10:29:00.005-05:00

Ooof, so I just need to throw a post out here to mention what I've been into recently.

1.) Toaster-oven cookery. Enoteca, on the Lower East Side, put together an entire restaurant without an oven, just a toaster-oven. I've taken inspiration for the Fog Creek offices. Today, I made oeufs en cocotte, using buttered ramekins and a bain marie in a toaster-oven-size loaf pan. I've also been rockin' the Nestle Break-n-Bake Toll House Cookies. I've found the pans offered by Kitchen Supply on Amazon pretty good!

2.) Less animal protein. Bittman's recent crusade to get people to eat less animals was, at first, a bit annoying, but I'm actually down with it now. There are many scientifically proven reasons to eat less animal protein, rather than focusing on animal fat. For one, the amount of animal protein in your diet can actually undermine your ability to build bone. See Harold McGee's On Food & Cooking (p. 15) for an interesting perspective here:

... the intake of animal protein, the metabolism of whose sulfur-containing amino acids acidifies our urine, ... pulls neutralizing calcium salts from bone.

It's funny, the drive to eat less animal fat that swept through our society without having much of any negative impact on the meat industry. You can eliminate a lot of animal fat while actually encouraging the killing and consumption of animals. I'm experiencing something of a sea-change here. I am not going vegetarian, but when I look at a diet that minimizes animal fat, I see something less healthy and far less flavorful than one that minimizes animal protein.

3.) Soup weather. I've made my tomato-less gumbo twice recently and am very happy with the recipe. I'll lay it out soon. Last night, leftover broccoli from work lunch, boiled with water and milk, pureed with some Wondra flour.

4.) Embracing the feedback loop. Stop patronizing businesses that don't have a strong feedback loop. For restaurants, this basically means that they have a source of incoming business that is not based on good food and service at reasonable prices. This eliminates: celebrity chefs, storied reputations, places popular with those on expense account, room service, chains and restaurants owned by chain-owning groups. The last is because of my shoddy experience at the Strip House. The first because of my shoddy experience at Felidia. I just think in these cases, the people with the ability to improve things are not going to be able to "hear" you, whether you're complaining vocally or just staying away, because they've got too many other customers to worry about, including those who are there for something other than the food.

The Strip House: What's with this place?

2008-12-10T05:52:00.002-05:00

Last night was the second time I've been to the Strip House south of Union Square and I just don't get it.

Let me just get this out of the way: The creamed spinach was incredible and the sommelier was friendly and helpful.

The food had some misfires, but what caused me to wake up at 5am this morning was the way we were treated by the staff.

The oysters ($18 for a half-dozen) were flaccid, small, and tasteless. The $112 rib-eye for two was raw in the middle. It was also carved tableside, so the waiter could clearly see that he was serving us raw, not medium-rare, steak.

But, again, if the food was the only thing, I wouldn't feel compelled to write this. (I'd just not go back.)

When I checked in, the hostess was clearly displeased that one of our party was going to be fifteen minutes late. If we had just stalled instead of telling them we knew we were going to be late, maybe none of the rest of it would've happened. We waited on a couch in the lounge area.

The hostess approached and asked us if we'd "like to have our cocktails at a table while we wait[ed]." I agreed, even though I didn't see the point. Once we sat down at the table in the bar, menus, wine list, and bread arrived. They were trying to shift us to the lounge area instead of the dining room. I did not appreciate the underhanded way the hostess did this. When I made it clear that our reservations were for the dining room and we weren't going to be strong-armed into the bar, she led us to the worst table in the place, right at the mouth of the dining room, swarmed by wait staff and food runners. When we left later, there were still better tables sitting empty. This was dishonest manipulation, and, when I called them on it, pure vindictiveness.

I should've gotten the check for our two Manhattans right then and eaten elsewhere. Instead, I got poorly executed food, an enormous bill, and my foot stepped on three times.

Me & JP

2008-11-18T08:03:00.002-05:00

I went a few weeks back to see Jacques Pépin speak and sign his new book, More Fast Food My Way, at the the Astor Center. It was really great. He had so many memorable things to say:

The art of cooking is the art of adjustment, and sometimes, the art of recovery. My mom's the expert here. I've seen her recover so many dishes that I would've given up on. People got fed, they enjoyed it, and they were never the wiser.
Never apologize and never explain. A motto he passed on from Julia Child. At most tables where you're setting down food, you know the most about how the dish should be. This goes double if it's a dish of your own creation. If you keep your self-criticisms to yourself, everyone has a better meal. If there's a fellow chef at table and you tell an out-and-out lie, a simple wink will suffice to keep them quiet. They'll expect the same discretion from you when they screw something up, though. (Again, my mom comes to mind... though she has never told a white lie to make her guests more comfortable, right, Mom? [wink])

I can't overstate how much of an influence this man has been on the way I cook. I think I'm not alone in saying that he elucidated a way of cooking at home that I had always though of, but hadn't trusted myself enough to do. He's a great force against pretentiousness in the food world and a national treasure.

I'm famous

2008-09-16T10:06:00.001-04:00

Chris wrote about me.... well, my neighborhood.

The Fish Sauce Postulate

2008-09-13T16:35:00.003-04:00

The Fish Sauce Postulate:

If a cook is adventurous, the contents of his fridge and pantry will always be crowded with arcane, unused ingredients unless he has,

a.) a good recipe that uses each ingredient, and

b.) a means for reminding himself to cook that recipe regularly.

Call it, "a use for everything and everything in use."

I've recently embarked upon a quest to have a clear use for everything I have in my kitchen. So far, it's yielding good results. I try a lot of different recipes and am always experimenting, so there's a constant influx of interesting ingredients. The fresh ones that don't get used get chucked pretty quickly, but the long-lived ingredients just end up taking up space. For instance, I picked up some tamarind paste at Dual Quality Products to try out this recipe. The results where not awesome, but I am totally down with cooking eggplant in the microwave and have done so to good effect since, just not south Indian eggplant. But I still have that tamarind paste in the fridge. And unless I get a recipe that uses tamarind paste, it's going to be there until it goes off (a year from now!) and gets thrown out.

So the pantry list is now more of a whole-house food inventory. I've added all of these recipes to Bubbalup, my organizational tool (forthcoming soon, I promise), and it's working just brilliantly. I keep black sesame seeds on hand, and every now and then zakkokumai cha zuke will bubble up on my list, ensuring that the sesame seeds have a chance of some day not being in my pantry.

It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Of course, I may be totally insane.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

2008-09-11T21:49:00.002-04:00

This is ten pounds of tomatoes. The wine bottle is there for scale. This is what came in the farm share this week. Most of these monsters are over a pound in weight. Looks like I've got more chicken curry in my future. If you've got some good ideas for burning through tomatoes, let me know.

Chettinad Chicken/Durban Curry Hybrid

2008-09-08T11:19:00.007-04:00

I've developed a one-pot Chettinad Chicken recipe that's informed by a more Western style of cooking.

My starting points were here and here.

A lot of Indian recipes involve toasting spices and/or frying onions in oil or ghee at the end. This gets stirred into the stewed portion of the dish and served immediately. It's very similar to the Latin cooking method of soffrito, in which a mixture of onions, peppers, garlic and spices gets fried in oil at the end of a cooking process and added into, for instance, boiled black beans.

There are two problems with this for how I cook:

1.) It creates another dirty pan.

2.) I burn things way too easily when I do this.

Toasting spices in hot oil and frying onions are fairly delicate operations and putting them at the end of the cooking process, when I'm concerned about getting to the table on time, boiling rice, etc, is just not feasible for me. I need a bit more of a French-style layering approach, where the more labor-intensive portion is at the beginning, and I think I can do this without losing too much.

Or maybe I just haven't had it explained to me why frying spices at the end is better than doing it at the beginning and having the flavors fully incorporated into the final dish. We cook with leftovers in mind, and curry is almost always better the next day anyway, so I don't see a great deal of potential hazard in re-ordering the traditional recipes a bit.

One-pot Chettinad Chicken (or Tofu)

2 lbs fresh tomatoes

1 tsp cumin seed

1 tsp whole black peppercorns

1 tbsp coriander seed

1 tbsp poppy seed

1 tbsp fennel seed

2 green cardamom pods

3 cloves

1/2 a cinnamon stick (or 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon)

3 dried red chilis (available at Indian markets)

1 tsp salt

1 cup plain yogurt

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 tbsp minced ginger

Juice of 1 large lime

2 1/2 lbs chicken thighs, chopped into chunks OR packages firm tofu, chopped into chunks

3 tbsp vegetable oil or ghee

1 large or 2 medium onions, sliced thinly

2 sprigs fresh curry leaves (available at many Indian markets)

6 pods dried red chilis

Fresh cilantro

Core tomatoes and score the bottom of each with an X. Put in a large bowl and cover with boiling water for one minute. Run cold water into the bowl until tomatoes are cool enough to handle. Strip off skins, half tomatoes across the equator, and squeeze out seeds. Chop tomatoes coarsely and set aside.

In a dry skillet combine the cumin, coriander, peppercorns, poppy seed, fennel seed, cardamom, cloves and cinnamon. Toast over medium heat until fragrant. The cumin seeds will darken first. When they do so, take off heat and allow to cool. Grind to a fine powder with a clean, spice-dedicated coffee grinder.

Combine spice mix in a non-reactive bowl with Aleppo pepper, yogurt, garlic, ginger, salt, lime juice, and chicken. Marinate in the refrigerator for at least two hours, covered.

Heat vegetable oil or ghee in a heavy, non-reactive pot off-heat. Strip curry leaves into the oil, stir. Be careful, it will sputter. When the sputtering subsides, add 6 pods dried red chilis, stir until they darken, about 30 seconds. Then add onions. Cook until translucent.

Add yogurt-spice-chicken/tofu mixture and tomatoes. Bring to boil and simmer uncovered 30 minutes to reduce sauce. If liquid is still thin, you can thicken with a corn starch slurry (2 parts cold water, 1 part corn starch) or by sprinkling on and stirring in Wondra flour.

Serve over basmati rice, garnished with fresh cilantro. It's spicy, so you can try cooling it down with yogurt. (We added Mrs. Ball's chutney from South Africa, which went very well.)

Serves 6-8.

Planet Tomato

2008-09-06T16:31:00.003-04:00

So, the very helpful counterman/cashier at my favorite Indian spice store, Dual Quality Products, will give you a quick verbal recipe for almost anything you buy in the store. When I asked for his input on using shahi jeera, also known as black cumin (not to be confused with kalonji, or black onion seed), he gave me a quick recipe. When he mentioned tomato, I asked if I could use canned. "You can," he replied, "but fresh is better." At the time I wondered what planet he was from, where you could shell out good money for delicious tomatoes only to turn around and skin and cook them.

Well, the name of the planet is late summer, and we've just crash-landed there. Our farm share gave us nearly five pounds of beautiful tomatoes and four pints of delicious cherry tomatoes this week, and I'm sure another batch is coming next week. Frankly, we're going to have to cook some of them.

Chettinad chicken. I've been obsessed with doing this recipe since I figured out that it's a pretty close match to (and possibly the original source of) my beloved hometown curry (Durban, South Africa). It has all the same spices, the tomatoes, the curry leaves that Durban curry has, but relies on your own spice mix rather than a Durban masala, and fresh tomatoes rather than tomato paste. I discovered the dish at Chola, the stunningly good Indian place near us on the Upper East Side, and have been wanting to do it ever since.

I took the recipe from about.com and sort of simplified it for the way I cook, making it a one-pot meal. I'll post the recipe later. Here's pic of these world-class tomatoes, skinned and seeded, and headed for glory. The green is provided by curry leaves.

Welcome to Planet Tomato.

Omnivores 100

2008-08-29T15:53:00.005-04:00

From Very Good Taste.

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

Venison
Nettle tea
Huevos rancheros
Steak tartare
Crocodile (I'm assuming alligator is close enough.)
Black pudding
Cheese fondue
Carp
Borscht
Baba ghanoush
Calamari
Pho
PB&J sandwich
Aloo gobi
Hot dog from a street cart
Epoisses
Black truffle
Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
Steamed pork buns
Pistachio ice cream
Heirloom tomatoes
Fresh wild berries
Foie gras
Rice and beans
Brawn, or head cheese
Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
Dulce de leche
Oysters
Baklava
Bagna cauda
Wasabi peas
Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
Salted lassi
Sauerkraut
Root beer float
Cognac with a fat cigar
Clotted cream tea
Vodka jelly/Jell-O
Gumbo
Oxtail
Curried goat
Whole insects
Phaal
Goat’s milk
Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
Fugu
Chicken tikka masala
Eel
Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
Sea urchin
Prickly pear
Umeboshi
Abalone
Paneer
McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
Spaetzle
Dirty gin martini
Beer above 8% ABV
Poutine
Carob chips
S’mores
Sweetbreads
Kaolin (as kaopectat
Currywurst
Durian
Frogs’ legs
Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
Haggis
Fried plantain
Chitterlings, or andouillette (M gagged all the way through my Paris andouillette phase.)
Gazpacho
Caviar and blini
Louche absinthe
Gjetost, or brunost
Roadkill
Baijiu
Hostess Fruit Pie
Snail
Lapsang souchong
Bellini
Tom yum
Eggs Benedict
Pocky
Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
Kobe beef (Kobe sliders don't count.)
Hare
Goulash
Flowers
Horse
Criollo chocolate
Spam
Soft shell crab
Rose harissa
Catfish
Mole poblano
Bagel and lox
Lobster Thermidor
Polenta
Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
Snake

85 for me. The list is a little UK-centric, with all the various Indian dishes, but an interesting meme. I put in italics the ones I'd like to try.

Here's another bunch from my own eating and travels. I tried to think of things that are out of the ordinary (wild boar) and not particular dishes (pappardelle alla cinghiale). Part of the problem here is the "thousand things" problem, which my dad pointed out about the book 1000 Places to See Before You Die. A lot of entries in that book are specific experiences, like you have to go to Montreal in the summer to see the festivals. Well, whatever. I've been to Montreal and not seen a festival, but dammit I'm crossing it off the list. I could well put "Steak and Kidney Pie in a London Pub" on this list, but then the item is place-dependent, whereas the dish is not. I've had my share of steak & kidney pies in London, let me tell you that you could easily outclass most of them with a can-do attitude and a sympathetic butcher. So, think it'd be good to blow this out to a thousand things. Let me know if you've eaten anything interesting/good that's not here.

Marmite
Testicles
Lights
Steak & Kidney Pie
Fresh Anchovies
Tuscan Bread Dishes (Pappa di Pomodoro/Ribollita/Panzanella)
Wild Boar
Ossobuco
Pigeon/Squab
Lamb's Tongues
Elephant Garlic
Passatelle
Purslane
Rendang
Xiaolongbao
Lamian
Dim Sum
Bottarga
Pot-au-feu
Milk-fed Veal
Suckling Pig
Durban Curry
Guanabana
Szechuan Hot Pot
Pad Thai
Bucatini all'Amatriciana
Homemade Sushi
Cock-a-leekie
New Mexico Green Chile
Full Moroccan Cous Cous
Italian[sic] Wedding Soup
Meatloaf
Chazuke
Chicken Hearts
Full Asado
Cod Tongues
Boerewors
Hominy/Posole/Samp
Real Maple Syrup
Pickled Tomatoes
Tamales
Jeppson’s Malört
Underberg
Duck Tongues
Cheese Souffle
Chicharrones
Razor Clams
Yerba Mate
Moussaka
Halva
Boiled Peanuts
Nopales
Tripe
Quail (served at our wedding)
Casu Marzu
Pheasant
Clambake on the Beach
Poi
Dark 'n' Stormy
Cincinatti Chili
Corned Beef & Cabbage
Irish Stew
Biltong
Duck Fat Potatoes
Biltong
éclade de Moules
Dolmas
Olive Ascolane
Mozzarella in Carrozza
Fried Cheese
Grandma Pie
Meatball Burrito
Meatball Parm Sub with Broccoli Rabe
Tsukune (Giant Chicken Meatball)
Yakitori
Caprese Salad
Limoncello
Milk-boiled Veal
Buta no Kakuni
Hakata-style Ramen
Tokyo Shoyu Ramen
California-Style Burrito
Enchiladas Suizas
Fiori di Zucca
Spaghetti alla Chitarra
Gnocchi of Spinach & Ricotta
Carciofi alla giudia
Puttanesca
Panforte
Risi e Bisi
Paella Valenciana
Paella Basque
Vitello Tonnato
Brandade
Oeufs Mollets
Fegato alla Veneziana
Bresaola, Rucola, Parmigiano, Limone
Pasta alla Quattro Formaggi
Cassata Siciliana
Creme Brulee
Croque-em-Bouche
Natto
Balut
Hundred Year Eggs
Yuba
Surimi
Caesar Salad
Bloody Mary
Bloody Caesar
Lasagne? In Brodo? alla Bolognese?
Spaghetti alla Bolognese
Tiramisu
Cassoulet
Cioppino
Bouillabaisse
Quiche Lorraine
Raclette
Hummus
Aceto Balsamico (with strawberries, melon, prosciutto)
Pesto Genovese
Porchetta
Saltimbocca
Spaghetti Alla Carbonara
Roast Leg of Lamb with Mint Sauce
Bubble & Squeak
Cornish Pasties
Toro Sashimi
Ama Ebi
Cuban Sandwich

Economical Summer

2008-07-08T22:42:00.004-04:00

So M and I are back from an expensive wedding and honeymoon and looking forward to a summer of simple abundance. We've signed up for a weekly farm share for the summer, so a bunch of produce invades our home every week. Also, I'm back at work, where we luckily have free lunches, but there's always a lot left over. So, I've been fighting food waste for the last week, especially tonight. M went to the gym and I decided to exercise some culinary muscles instead.

So... Let me just say first that this all would have gone to waste had I not taken it home. There's another lunch arriving at the office tomorrow, so this was all taken with the full blessing of work.

First off, there were some leftover hard-cooked eggs from lunch. I diced those and topped them with some leftover marinara sauce from the cheese sticks my friends ordered when they came over on Sunday, then topped that with leftover Swiss cheese from lunch. A few minutes in the oven, then a few under the broiler, and you've got egg & tomato gratin. (This is from Jacques Pepin's Fast Food My Way, by the way.... always a great resource.)

I love cauliflower. I think it's so satisfying and delicious. Today's lunch included a huge pan of roasted cauliflower that I just knew was going in the bin. I took it home and combined it with water, black pepper, salt, nutmeg, and a touch of leftover cream cheese from last weekend's bagels. I put it all in my pressure cooker (always good for keeping the apartment cool on a hot night) and heated it up on my new counter-top Sunpentown induction cooktop (pictured above, and another good strategy for keeping the place cool without sacrificing the menu). The result: creamy cauliflower puree. Can be eaten cold. I thinned it for a healthy soup.

Next, on to the leftover beef short rib from yesterday's lunch. The farm share last week included a couple heads of Napa cabbage. It took me a bit of puzzling, but in the end I decided on cold beef borscht. A great summer dish... if you can find beets. I whipped some up with a can of beets from the supermarket, but got no real color or flavor out of them. Still, all the fat came out of the short rib on the initial braise (before it was served for lunch today) so I got tender beef that can be served cold in a soup.

I broke all this stuff down into smaller portions to make sure it had a chance to cool before going in the fridge, but the old girl is working overtime tonight to get all this stuff cooled.

All told I maybe spent $3 tonight on food that will last us for at least 8 meals. Still have some Swiss chard and some English cucumbers from the farm share. Don't know what I'm going to do with those.

OH! Also, I rediscovered my affection for cold-brewed coffee. It's a nice, low-acid way to make cold coffee drinks for the summer. The other nice thing is that cold brew, like dark roasting, it hides the flaws of crappy coffee. Thus, I used a $4 "pound" (actually 13 oz.) to make enough "Toddy(TM)" to make M and I a good dozen iced coffees in the morning. It's not as tasty as Illy in the macchinetta, over ice with half-n-half, but it's dead easy in the mornings... which is when I need things to be easy.

So we've got a fridge full of awesome food and drink for under ten bucks. I'd say that's pretty good.

Simple Summer Lunch

2008-06-29T14:42:00.002-04:00

It's so nice to be back from honeymoon and to be able to cook for us again! Not that the food wasn't great in Canada. I'll be blogging about my experiences at O Noir and Au Pied De Cochon in Montreal later, plus maybe some other foodie stuff. Here's a photo, though, of M digging in (while I'm still shooting the picture!) to today's lunch. A rotisserie chicken out the fridge, some sliced tomatoes and some PEI potatoes I did in the pressure cooker in 10 minutes yesterday.

The sauces are a storebought honey mustard dressing (meh), sriracha mayo (yum) and olive oil with Welsh smoked salt and fresh cracked Telicherry black pepper.

I chose to serve it on a cutting board and we just ate with our hands, supplementing at the end with a couple of oily lox slices to eat with the remaining potatoes (not pictured... and no dipping sauce necessary for those).

Would've been awesome with some Rosé wine like the Baux de Provence Mas de Gourgonnier 2007 we served at our rehearsal dinner and took on honeymoon with us. (Shown below with a sea snail trying to horn in on our supply.)

We bought a case of it for the rehearsal dinner, but unfortunately (or fortunately for us) the stigma attached to pink wine is still in full force and there were several leftover bottles. We were the beneficiaries, though, as we got to take those bottles all over Canada, cracking one whenever we felt summery.

Would've been great for this lunch, but we haven't found a local source yet, so we just had iced tea.

I'm Bourdain, Dammit!

2008-03-18T07:46:00.003-04:00

I generally find Anthony Bourdain to be irritatingly self-centered and self-consciously "extreme." But his reaction to an insult by Alan Richman is pretty priceless:
“It was like being mauled by Gumby. Afterwards, you’re not sure it even happened.”

[via The Gurgling Cod]

Marmite Soup

2008-02-26T10:38:00.003-05:00

It had to happen sooner or later. Butter and Marmite go so well together. The base for them is usually toast, but in this case, pumpkin puree makes a nice, mellow base for those flavors. Too easy and absolutely delicious!

3 tbsp butter
1 15 oz can pure pumpkin (Libby's)
1 tsp Marmite
Salt
Stale baguette
Sour cream

Heat a heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat. Add butter and cook until the solids are decently brown and foam has subsided. Add the pumpkin a spoon at a time to the butter. This will stop the butter burning, and will also caramelize the pumpkin a little bit, developing more flavor. As the pumpkin dries out and begins to stick to the pan and brown a little bit, add about a quart of water. You want a pretty thin soup for what comes at the end.

Bring the soup to a simmer and stir in Marmite, stirring well so that it is completely incorporated. Add salt to taste.

Put pieces of stale baguette into a deep bowl. (I used a baguette that was nearly a month old!) Pour soup over the bread, and garnish with a little sour cream and some fresh ground black pepper. Careful, the bread will soak up the soup really quickly and very well. Even if you think the soup is really thin, you're likely to end up with a fairly thick concoction at the end.

Serves 4. Do me a favor and serve this to people who hate Marmite. (M's got a bowl of it in her future.)

It's time

2008-02-12T15:42:00.001-05:00

I may already have waited too long. But the winds of history are blowing and it's clear to me that the time has come to put my dream into practice. So, next party:

Hot Dodka: the hot-dog-infused vodka.

Stay tuned. Stay scared.

Rich

Rich Doesn't Cook (And That's Okay)

2008-02-07T08:20:00.000-05:00

So my brother had his 40th birthday weekend in New York last week. We celebrated very well, including a couple of great meals at DB Bistro Moderne and Frank. Also included was a champagne reception at our apartment. I wanted good food, but I didn't want to cook, as the weekend was going to be hectic enough. So I went to the cheese shop, fishmonger, wine store, and spent, spent, spent my way to a great appetizer spread.

Provençal olives (black and green), locally made sopressata, serrano ham, gorgonzola with dried figs, jumbo shrimp with cocktail sauce. A pretty normal-looking spread, but the ingredients were the best available, and that made all the difference. The only things I really cooked were a loaf of Lahey bread the day before, and the shrimp. I also did an appetizer I adapted from Jacques Pépin. Boiled red potato slices, topped with a dijon-caper sour cream, and then with salmon caviar. It was a great way to start the evening. A bunch of Perrier-Jouet didn't hurt either.

Honeymoon

2008-01-23T10:13:00.000-05:00

M and I spent the weekend planning our honeymoon. We're going to Canada. Highlights include Montreal, with a visit to the cult hit restaurant Au Pied De Cochon, and Newfoundland, with $5 lobsters.

Also, a recent episode of "America's Test Kitchen" cottoned me on to a tip about getting eggs to room temperature in short order (for my favorite spaghetti carbonara). Chris Kimball says to take eggs right out of the fridge and cover them in hot tap water. They'll come up to room temp in a few minutes. Sounds like this would fit in well as a first step in the recipe.

Previous Recipe - Stock Cube + Marmite

2008-01-14T15:56:00.000-05:00

Oh, duh. A friend's comment made me remember that for the broccoli soup, instead of adding a stock cube, I stirred in a teaspoon of Marmite. I know, I know, most people find this stuff awful, but it really does add a lot of umami and not a lot of salt. Like fish sauce or anchovies, which you also might not love, you totally can't taste it, but it lifts the entire dish. I'll take a natural solution to the problem any day.

Veggie Cart + Stock Cube = Cheap Soup

2008-01-14T14:43:00.000-05:00

A recent favorite trick, which I guess will only work for NYC residents, is to go by the local fruit & veg cart, where you can get a limited selection of produce for dead cheap. Three cups water. One Knorr stock cube. One clove garlic. A bunch of whatever vegetable is cheap that day.

Boil for 15 minutes and then run the hand blender through it. Yes, the stock cube has a little MSG in it, but the soup is healthy and tasty.

If we have leftover cream cheese, I usually throw a couple of tablespoons in, which results in a soup that's a little creamy without being a cream soup.

(No pictures on this one, as I'm afraid they all look like green or orange goo, but they're delicious.)

In the past week, we've done these:

asparagus
broccoli
red bell pepper & carrot & celery

Yearly Inspiration

2008-01-10T11:03:00.000-05:00

So my birthday's coming up, and I'm asking you, dear reader, for a present. My email address is right there, just to the right of this post. Shoot me a quick email and let me know that you read regularly, if you do. It'll help keep me motivated to keep putting stuff up in 2008.

You can also help with suggesting topics or things you'd like to see. One of my resolutions is to start adding pictures to the blog.

If you're truly lurking and are too shy to email me directly, just comment anonymously on this post so I know you're there.

A few words about spaghetti carbonara

2008-01-03T11:37:00.001-05:00

So, I think I made the best carbonara I've ever made last night. So simple, so fast, so awesome, four ingredients. I've really settled on the fact, though, that the most essential step is to leave the eggs out to get to room temperature before cooking. I used 250 grams of spaghetti, 2 extra-large eggs, a mound of fresh grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, and a heavy dose of diced pancetta. The pancetta I used was very lean, so I didn't have to pour off any of the fat after frying it up. I simply fried it until it was crispy and left it in the pan. I boiled the spaghetti and when they were just al dente, I took them direct from the water into the warm pancetta pan, swirling them around so that the water on the noodles effectively deglased the pan. The noodles also soaked up those traces of fat that had rendered off the pancetta. I had beaten two room temperature eggs with a generous dose of Parm. I stirred this into the noodles, then realized that I'd forgotten to warm the pasta bowls. I simply dipped a cup of pasta water into each bowl and let it sit for a minute. By that time, the spaghetti had firmed up. I dumped out the water, portioned out the spaghetti into the two bowls and served. Topped with more cheese and a generous amount of fresh ground pepper.

Damn.

M's brother gave me for Xmas a bottle of white truffle oil and a bottle of lavender vinegar from a place called Oil & Vinegar in Chicago. They had suggested dressing a salad with a combination of the two. I'm usually a bit leery of white truffle oil, as I find it can be a bit overwhelming, and the combination sounded weird, but, again, damn. This was seriously one of the best salads I ever made. Ever. And I didn't really make it. It was just spinach, grated carrot, oil, vinegar and salt. Really incredible. If you're in Chicago, stop by and pick me up some more of this stuff.

Italian Wedding Soup

2007-12-13T15:37:00.000-05:00

Made a huge batch of food over the weekend. I started by poaching a whole chicken, with the intent of using the poaching liquid and the stripped carcass as the soup base. Then I made about 300 tiny meatballs, boiling them in salted water to cook. Total pain in the butt. I also made a big (10 egg) escarole frittata in the usual way (boil escarole, drain and squeeze all liquid, then puree with eggs). I cooked and cubed it.

I froze half the meatballs and mixed the rest with the frittata. By this time, the chicken was ready. I stripped the meat, reserving for another use (eating) and threw all the bones back into the poaching liquid. I boiled and strained this.

For a weeknight meal, 3tbsp of acini di pepe soup pasta. Throw it in a couple cups of the broth, with a handful of each meatballs and frittata cubes, boil 8 minutes and serve topped with parmigiano, fresh ground black pepper and a hit of olive oil.

Unreal.

Thanksgiving

2007-11-05T15:09:00.001-05:00

In figuring out whether I want to attempt a turducken for Thanksgiving, I stumbled up the idea of hotchken, a chicken stuffed with hot dogs. This might be the perfect dish to have with my invention, hotdodka, the hot-dog-infused vodka.

Boned Whole Chicken Stuffed with Spinach & Mushroom

2007-10-29T14:55:00.001-04:00

So I've been Tivo'ing "The Complete Pepin", Jacques Pepin's series from the mid-80's detailing classic cooking techniques. His demonstration of deboning a whole chicken was so impressive and easy-looking that I decided to try it out myself. A good weapon to have in the old arsenal.
Here are the results of maybe a twenty minutes of work with only a paring knife and a remote control. Took him maybe three minutes to do the whole thing. Next time, I think I'll be able to get a whole chicken boned, stuffed and tied in about ten minutes. Really not bad for an impressive dish. Also, this was delicious... absolutely delicious.

Molecular Gastronomy

2007-10-17T10:35:00.000-04:00

Apparently, I did not get the memo that the term "molecular gastronomy" has been disavowed by some of the people most closely associated with it. They want to be thought of as pioneering chefs and food writers, not part of some fad. When the final tally is made, I'm pretty sure they're going to be thought of as both pioneering and faddish. I am glad, though, that this detachment allows Herve This to go on with his important work, which is much closer to Cooks Illustrated than to WD-50 or El Bulli. Using science to break through long-held prejudices is a noble profession, as is using new techniques and ingredients to make a meal more interesting. They're just not very close to each other.

I was disappointed that these luminaries, in dissing the term "molecular gastronomy" also felt the need to diss its coiner, Herve This, and to obliquely look down their noses at his work, by not referring to him by name and complimenting him on taking down some long-held fallacies.

Evidently, He Does Not

2007-10-03T14:58:00.000-04:00

I've found it very difficult to cook recently with a surfeit of social obligations. Going out for soup dumplings with my brother and his kids tonight, tho.

dangerous food

2007-09-19T17:17:00.000-04:00

I love this picture. Really just so creative. It can take a while to load.

Banana-flavored Sake

2007-09-19T11:21:00.000-04:00

So it just occurred to me that sake has been around in Japan longer than bananas. Sometimes when you get a strong-smelling sake, it has the scent of bananas. This is due to the presence of isoamyl acetate. If you turn your perspective around, though, imagine the first Japanese sake drinker to eat a banana. It would be like discovering a whisky-fruit!

Meatloaf

2007-09-17T09:34:00.000-04:00

Made my first ever real American meatloaf (that I can recall) over the weekend. Used a recipe out of Saveur Cooks Authentic American. It turned out really well. Soft and flavorful. I used a recipe variant that includes mushrooms and sherry, which was a very nice touch. The meatloaf was supple and meaty, not hard at all. I subbed in a pound of ground turkey for one of the three pounds of ground beef.

Funny, I find Saveur magazine to be really precious and their recipes are usually so irritating, with ridiculous specialty ingredients. I'm not really one to talk, being that I tout Aleppo chili and curry leaves for my recipes, but I'm not publishing an widely circulated magazine. But these Saveur Cooks Authentic cookbooks have yielded two good recipes so far. One for tarte tatin and the other for meatloaf. They are, at least, well-tested.

Fruit

2007-09-11T14:22:00.000-04:00

I have two peaches on my desk that I picked up from a fruit dish here in the office. They were kinda hard when I picked them up, but I figured they'd ripen on my desk. Instead, they're going bad. Fruit that rots before it ripens. That's where we've gotten ourselves.

Scrambled Eggs

2007-09-04T12:01:00.000-04:00

So, I've gone over almost exclusively to doing my scrambled eggs French-style. That is, with very small curds, still very moist. I do it by using a non-nonstick pan, either my copper saucepan or a cast iron pan, and a whisk. I put the eggs with a little butter over medium-low heat and just keep whisking them until they congeal. I take them off heat well before they start to look cooked. Otherwise, they'll overcook. The texture ends up creamy and satisfying. It also feels like because of this, there's more egg there. Three eggs done this way will satisfy M and I very well. Also, they don't need cheese or other fillings for richness. The slightly underdone quality makes them very custardy. Needless to say, you need to use only very fresh eggs if you intend to undercook them or use them raw, as in a mayonnaise. I get mine from my butcher. They are straight from the farm. The expiration date is often six weeks out. This allows me to make spaghetti alla carbonara correctly as well.

The eggs in carbonara end up just-cooked as well, from the heat of the just-boiled pasta and the pan. The big trick I've found with this dish, though, is that the eggs absolutely must be at room temperature before being added to the pasta and fried pancetta. If they're cold, they just cool down the pasta and don't cook, which means you have to heat them with the pasta, which results in an uneven heat coming from the bottom of the pan, leaving you with scrambled egg pasta rather than that rich custard that makes this dish worth eating. If you have the eggs at room temp (or fudge it by putting them in the microwave for 10 seconds per egg), then the pasta gets them to just the right point without cooling down too much and without any extra heat.

Spaghetti alla Carbonara

100 g. spaghetti per person.
1 very fresh, room temperature egg per person + 1 more "for the pot"
1 slice pancetta, chopped, per person
Parmigiano Reggiano

While the spaghetti is boiling, fry off the pancetta in a cast iron pan, pouring off most of the excess fat that collects. Meanwhile, beat the eggs and then beat in a generous amount of grated Parmigiano. When the spaghetti is ready, use tongs to transfer it to the cast iron skillet, then pour the eggs over and stir until the eggs start to congeal, without forming curds. Transfer into heated bowls (a ladle of pasta water in each near the end of cooking will do this), top with more Parmigiano and lots of black pepper and serve.

Serves 2-10. (Make this at your own risk, of course. Undercooked eggs, like undercooked meat or undercooked organically grown baby spinach, present inherent food safety risks.)

Science!

2007-08-27T16:47:00.000-04:00

Martin Lersch, whose blog I will be devouring over the coming weeks, left a comment which makes me realize I didn't adequately represent my feelings about the previous Crispy Booze post. It wasn't meant to be a shot at molecular gastronomy, really. I just like the idea of hard-won scientific knowledge ending up at the same place as folk wisdom. It doesn't mean nothing was gained. Knowledge can be expanded upon. We can look back from the stepping stone of the latest knowledge and see the path back to the bank we came from, and sometimes can begin to pick out the nearer stones that will take us to the far bank. Folk wisdom is usually just one stone in a murky stream. It might keep you out of the current, but it won't take you anywhere new.

Crispy Booze

2007-08-27T12:30:00.000-04:00

So back in March, Harold McGee posted on his blog an explanation of how Heston Blumenthal at the Fat Duck had developed a science-y way of creating a near-perfect crust on deep-fried fish, one that protected the fish from being overcooked, but would not steam off the fish once the cooking was done and the thing had to sit on a plate for a while.

The big triumph is that they were able to dumb down or reverse engineer or whatever this recipe into something that the home cook would be able to benefit from. Their breakthrough: vodka. As I understand it, the alcohol's lower boiling point means that the crust crisps up faster with a shot of alcohol than with water. This allows the crust a head-start on the rest of the packag, which means that it can get some structural integrity before the fish overcooks, and will maintain that integrity by both better-
resisting the steam that comes off the cooked fish, and making sure that the fish doesn't give off too much steam. That's all really impressive, but in both articles, they fail to mention a pretty strong precedent for the use of hard alcohol to achieve better texture in deep-frying: The Brazilian pastel, basically a deep-fried empanada or raviolone, has long called for a shot of cachaça in with the water for the dough. It is considered essential to giving it a crispy, resistant texture.

All that molecular gastronomy to reverse-engineer something that already existed.

Restocking

2007-08-21T23:11:00.000-04:00

So I've posted a live link to my pantry list on the right hand side of this page. I've reformatted it to be grouped less by the type of stuff I want to have on hand, and more by where I expect to find the things on the list. So, I can go through my spice rack and make sure I've got everything on the spices and seasonings list. The things that are in boldface are things that I don't currently have on the shelves. M and I stepped off a plane from London a week ago tomorrow and we've really yet to do a big supermarket shop. Part of this is dread at going across the street to D'Agostino's and being overcharged for nearly everything. I have been shopping, of course, but it's been at the fruit cart, the butcher shop, the cheese store, the fishmonger.

Speaking of all that, my friend Josh, who runs shortshrifted.com gave me a welcome home present that really made me glad to be back. It was the Zagat New York Gourmet Shopping Guide. It listed Ideal Cheese Shop, Simchick Meats, and Pisacane Seafood (but not my fruit cart guy) and gave them all rankings over 25. (For those who don't know, that's really, really good.) It gave me a new appreciation for just what we have here on First Ave. Really, it's rare to find a concentration of good food stores like this anywhere, but having all three within a block makes me really count myself as lucky.

I was a bit shattered at what I thought was the bad news of Simchik's having closed while we were away for the summer. I surmised this based on a "Store For Rent" sign in their front window, seen from across the street. I went by for a closer look and found that they had just moved down the street to swankier digs. Phew!

Anyway, restocking. We've been running a pretty lean operation since we got back. Not willing to eat out (much) and not willing to do a big shop at D'a-gross-tino's (ah, le mot juste) has pretty much left my buying bits and pieces as we need them. A big help for the two days M was away was baking up a loaf of Lahey bread. I'm pretty well convinced that I will build any number of meals around this chewy, crusty bread based on the meager contents of the fridge rather than subject myself to a big shop. And I think that's a pretty good thing. One sticking point is the fact that I haven't gotten the energy together to go buy some real butter. All I have is some months-old stuff that I clarified on our return to make it taste less stale (which it does). I know that sounds gross, but this was Ronnybrook butter from a local dairy. Very fresh. Okay, 80 days might be pushing the boundaries, but it's fine. Really. Anyway, this culinary equivalent of dry-farming has yielded some triumphs:

open-faced cream-cheese, tomato, and white-peach chicken delice sandwich.
bread bowl (more of a bread canoe, actually) filled with chicken livers sauteed in clarified butter with herbes de Provence, deglased with sherry and lemon juice.
griddle-toasted, garlic-rubbed crostone with Sardinian extra-virgin olive oil and Marmite.
Stilton and apricot jam sandwich

Okay, okay, so it's all pretty much sandwiches, and I've been remiss in my vegetable consumption, but it all sounds pretty good, and I have been pretty resourceful.

Anyway, take a look at the pantry list, if you like, and let me know your thoughts or possible additions. I'd love to know what other people can't do without.

White Peach Chicken Delice

2007-08-19T13:28:00.000-04:00

Question: What do you do with sub-par white peaches? I got three for a buck from the fruit cart across the street. They were half hard, half mushy, basically not worth a damn. I'm not going to cry over a dollar. A couple days ago, the guy sold me the best mango I'd ever had. Ever. And that was a buck, so I figured he had some leeway.

The peaches were not good hand-fruit, but did have that perfumed white peach flavor to them, even if they didn't have the texture or the sugar to make them shine. I'd made a delice sauce (1 cup bechamel, 2 tbsp ketchup, 1 tsp cider vinegar, pinch curry powder) to put over some leftover poached red snapper from the house rewarming party, so decided to just use the leftovers of the sauce as a venue for the peaches. I cut away everything that wasn't firm, peeled, pitted and chopped the three fruits. Then I threw them in, with a teaspoon of apricot jam, a good shot of fresh-ground white pepper, and a dash more cider vinegar to punch up the flavor. The taste was rich and round and yet perfumed. Fruity chicken dishes are not really in vogue right now, but I figured it would be the perfect accompaniment to some poached chicken breast.

I'm amazed at how overlooked poached chicken breast is. It's always grilled or sauteed, both methods which dry it out terribly. Since it's basically just lean protein that's going to be the vehicle for other flavors, I just don't understand why people feel the need to subject this delicate meat to such harsh temperatures. I used Jacques Pepin's technique. Boil water, salt, and aromatics for about five minutes, then throw in the chicken breast, return to boil, take off heat, cover and leave for 15 minutes. In this case, the cupboard was a bit bare, so I just used white peppercorns and bay leaves.

I sliced the chicken, topped with sauce, and there ya go! The peaches had softened and given the sauce a wonderful flavor and texture. I good lunch for almost no effort.

It's good to be back in my own kitchen. It's also kinda fun to restock the fridge slowly, one meal at a time.

White Peach Delice Sauce

2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp flour
1 cup milk (warmed in microwave)
2 tbsp ketchup
1 tbsp apple cider vinegar (or any vinegar, balsamic included)
1 tsp apricot jam
1/2 tsp curry powder
2-3 white peaches (under-ripe is okay), peeled, pitted and diced
salt and white pepper to taste

1.) Melt butter in a skillet until foam subsides, then add flour and stir until lightly browned.

2.) Whisk in warm milk and bring to simmer. Add all other ingredients and simmer for 5 minutes.

Serve warm over poached chicken breast, or chilled over chilled poached chicken breast.

Mock Bunny Chow

2007-08-19T12:14:00.000-04:00

M and I had a house re-warming party on Friday. A few friends attended (short notice) and I made Durban curry for bunny chows. M went and got a bunch of fresh-baked rolls, and I made this in the morning. Tragically, we were both too shattered at the end of the night to clean up fully, and the leftovers spent the night on the stove, so we didn't get to enjoy the second-day curry. We did bring back some stuff from South Africa, but I refused to lug Durban curry powder around with me, stinking up the luggage. So this was an experiment to see if I could duplicate the style of Durban curry without using actual Durban curry. Aleppo chili to the rescue! I'd been thinking about this for a while, that one could mix the very flavorful, but not very spicy aleppo chili with regular curry powder and get the intense chili flavor of Durban curry. It is possible to order Durban curry mix from several places in the Victoria Spice Market in Durban. They'll ship anywhere in the world, but one worries about safety. A lot of the deep red color associated with Durban curry comes from tartrazine-based red dye, which is not good for you.

This is all based off our friend Gertie Sumner's lamb stew recipe, which is sort of Durban curry without the curry and is simply awesome. The only ingredients I used that are specifically South African (as in imported by me) are the beef-flavour powder--which is actually vegetarian--and the tomato paste, which in SA comes in plastic packets rather than cans, which makes just too much sense.

I think this recipe could maybe stand the addition of a good shot of paprika for a bit more color, but the taste as it stands is awesome, so I'm not going to mess with it. This is by far the best curry I've ever made.

Durban Curry

2 lbs lamb stew meat (I used coarse-ground lamb with good effect)
2 tsp oil (I used olive)
3 medium onions, finely chopped
2 tablespoons good (mild) curry powder
As much Aleppo chili as you can take (I think I used a full quarter-cup!)
3 medium-large potatoes, peeled and diced into 1/2" cubes
1/2 can tomato paste
2 medium fresh tomatoes, diced or about a can of diced tomatoes
1 tsp Inamann's beef powder, or your own stock cube/stock/flavor powder combination
2 bay leaves
1 stick cinnamon
1 star anise
2 black cardamom pods (not traditional, but used on a whim and loved the musky flavor)
1-2 tablespoons apricot jam

1.) In a large, heavy, non-reactive pot, brown the lamb in batches, keeping it spaced out in the bottom of the pot so it doesn't boil. Set the lamb to the side, add oil to pan, then the onions and fry until they become translucent and start to break down. (This is very important, as having chunks of onion in the final product ruins the texture.)

2.) Add the curry powder and Aleppo to the frying onions and stir until fragrant (about a minute). Re-add the lamb and all other ingredients, along with water to cover. Bring to simmer and simmer one hour. Halfway through simmering, taste for salt and heat. Add salt and more Aleppo to taste.

Serve in hollowed-out bread rolls.

Serves 12.

The South Africa Food Post

2007-08-06T09:04:00.000-04:00

So, what do I have to say about South African food after seven weeks in the country? Two words: biltong and naartjies. Like other wine-producing countries, the South Africans have a lot of good raw materials to work with here, but I must say that they don't really seem to have capitalized on them in the same way that the Californians, French, Italians, or Australians have. The quality of the ingredients is good. The steaks are good, and the produce is stunning, but the expertise is just not there yet, at least in the restaurants. Granted, we haven't been eating at national-park-run restaurants and some hotel or lodge restaurants where we were a captive audience. Maybe we'd have a different experience in the halls of haute cuisine. We did have a very good meal at Haiku, a swanky, pan-Asian place in downtown Cape Town, but Chinatown dim sum would have won out any day, and at half the price. We just haven't found that sweet spot where good ingredients shine through without pretension. But maybe I'm being harsh. I'll report back after a couple days in wine country.

We have enjoyed the biltong, though. It's basically just beef jerky, sometimes seasoned with coriander seed, but it's far superior to what we get in the States. Plus it's relatively cheap and available everywhere. Quality varies a bit; it's easy to get a batch that's too soft or too dry. But in general, biltong is widely available and of very high quality. My favorite was in Namibia, where for $7 (US), I got nearly a half-pound stick of biltong, plus the pocket knife to carve it up with. In addition, the pocket knife had some surprises: a.) it was a switchblade(!) and b.) it included a tiny LED flashlight. Random, but cool. It's not a dangerous weapon at about 2 inches long, but it was very fun to freak M out by flicking out the knife in the car to slice off a hunk of dried beef.

Naartjies are just tangerines, but they're sweet and plentiful here. With biltong, they make fantastic travel food. The biltong is often preservative-free, so the pair can keep you going quite a while, and they're infinitely more wholesome than a Slim Jim and a candy bar.

Other things:

Burgers with fried eggs on them. Why was this innovation not adopted in the US? Too long have we labored under a regime that has left our burgers un-egged.

Nougat. This stuff is all over and really good. Not like the stuff in a Three Musketeers bar that's supposed to be nougat. This stuff is pillowy, nutty, honeyed and delicious. I must figure out how to make it.

Woolworths. It's a different brand down here. Not only is it a clothing store, it's sort of like Trader Joe's is to the States. They have only one or two brands of everything, and usually favor their house brand, which is often locally and responsibly produced. We like everything we've gotten there... particularly the nougat...
Bread pudding and custard. Yum.
Savory pies. Steak & curry, steak & kidney, Thai chicken. Delish.

I've figured out a great Durban-style curry recipe with lamb shank. I guess I'll post that next.

Not Defunct

2007-07-18T08:54:00.000-04:00

For those I haven't notified, the blog is not defunct, but on hiatus while M and I explore South Africa and Namibia. Notes (not extensive) from that adventure are being logged at homesic.blogspot.com. Look for this to resume in late August.

Variability

2007-05-03T00:02:00.000-04:00

Here, Malcolm Gladwell, whose most recent book, Blink, I didn't much care for, gives a talk in the TEDTalks series on the lessons of one food scientist who discovered a long time ago that, in short, one size doesn't fit all.

Watch the video here.

I think it goes a bit beyond this. I think that we're just starting to scratch the surface of what he calls "discovering variability". I think, in fact, that what we're coming back to is what I've come to call "analog warmth". It's what audiophile talk about when they embrace the "warm" sound of an analog amplifier that uses vacuum tubes over a digital one that breaks everything down into ones and zeros, either/or.

Digital makes scalable, but the either/or of the whole thing robs digital of the warm feeling of life on the most basic level. Somewhere between the chaos of randomness and the order of binary code, there's life.

I've been thinking of this concept for a while and would like to start fleshing it out, maybe not even in the food realm, but it seems a good place to start. More later.

Gin Snobs

2007-05-02T10:54:00.000-04:00

The New York Times just ran a story which denigrates vodka and celebrates gin. Piffle. They're just mad that they've been overpaying for Grey Goose like the rest of us for years. (Most of those ratings you see that put Smirnoff at the bottom and Grey Goose at the top are sighted, not blind tastings. With blind tastings, vodkas get ranked pretty randomly. It's all marketing... witness the spelling of the first word in "Grey Goose".)

I've found this to be true:
You can't trust a woman who drinks gin after sunset.
This may sound sexist, but the fact is you can't trust a man who drinks gin, period...

Unless it's a Ramos Gin Fizz... or the occasional Salty Dog... and I've always enjoyed a cold G&T on a hot afternoon. The Negroni's not a bad drink, though I'd rather have just the Campari with soda. Oh hell, I guess I'd rather cop to untrustworthiness than ruin the symmetry of the aphorism.

Maltagliati al Forno ai Funghi Porcini Secchi

2007-04-30T15:06:00.000-04:00

Not only have the Italians given us pasta fresca, they've also given us a way to maintain our dignity (or at least some authenticity) when we screw it up. I made fresh pappardelle for M and her friend the other night. Since I was making fresh pasta, I went ahead and made extra to freeze against some late and hungry arrival home. Saturday evening was that late and hungry arrival, when we came home from a night in the Berkshires scoping out wedding venues.

I remembered the pappardelle in the freezer, and as is usual, started constructing a dinner menu in my head based on what I suspected was in the fridge and pantry. What I hadn't counted on, though was my idiocy in storing the pasta. I knew that it was the usual thing, after cutting up the pasta, to flour it before freezing, but I was eager to sit down with our guest on the night that I made it, so I just tossed it in a bag and the bag in the freezer. It was a big lump of wide noodles. I tried to peel them off one by one, but they just came apart. So I changed my approach. I had already been soaking some dried porcini mushrooms for the sauce, so I just took that broth, strained it through two layers of cheesecloth, threw in a porcini-flavored stock cube, and some cream and boiled it up, then thickened with Wondra flour, readding the rinsed chopped porcinis at the end with a generous grinding of black pepper.

In the meantime, I broke and picked apart the frozen fresh noodles into whatever shapes I could. As long as they were a single layer, they were fine. I boiled them up in salted water, then put them into a Pyrex baking dish that, in retrospect, I should've greased. I threw in the porcini bechamel I'd made and stirred it up, topping with a generous amount of finely grated Parmigiano Reggiano. Baked at 400 for 15 minutes or so and we were done.

Maltagliati al Forno ai Funghi Porcini Secchi. It made for awesome leftovers. M called it "noodle kugel but with mushrooms and not sweet"... Hmph.

Anyway, maltagliati means, basically "badly cut" in Italian. The term should usually be reserved for remnants, say from making panzerotti or some other round stuffed pasta, that are cut into soups, but repurposing the term for badly frozen pappardelle sits well with me.

In other news, tapioca pudding has proven to be beyond my culinary capabilities. I tried two recipes with Brazilian pearl tapioca from Kalyustan, the spice shop in Manhattan, and just can't get it to thicken right. Forget it. I'm going back to rice pudding.

Nothing in the house

2007-04-27T12:05:00.000-04:00

M and I have been running pretty close to empty as far as pantry and fridge goes. We're overdue for a big shop, but I've been putting it off. Still, if there's good chicken broth in the house (frozen, from that chicken a couple weeks ago), it's easy to make something good. M picked up a rotisserie chicken night before last, which fed us fine, and I made baby pea soup. That's just the Bird's Eye frozen baby peas boiled for 5 minutes in chicken broth, with salt, pepper and butter, pureed.

For cold chicken, though, my favorite thing recently is just dipping it in Halen Mon Smoked Sea Salt. (Image at left borrowed from bearcreekfinefoods.com.) It adds a little crunch, a little smoke, a spike of salt. Poached chicken is pretty much the simplest way to cook meat. This is the simplest way to season it (outside regular salt). Yet it makes for a very satisfying meal. Last night, when M came home late, I made her some chicken breast, sauteed in schmaltz to alleviate the dryness, with this on the side, plus some griddle-toasted leftover biscuits and leftover pea soup. Pretty good for coming home at 10pm myself.

$1.15

2007-04-17T09:53:00.000-04:00

Man, chicken livers. Who knew? Last night, both M and I got home late after our respective workouts (racquetball for me, swimming for her... at different branches of the Y, no less). I swung by the awful grocery store as the butcher had long since closed. Overpriced and overprocessed meats were the order, of course. Then I spied them: Chicken livers! About half a pound for about a buck. Delicious, nutritious.

I took some of the schmaltz I'd rendered from the chicken we poached last Monday (waste not, want not) and fried up some onions in the melted fat. I trimmed the chicken livers, cut them into about thirds, just following the lines of the lobes, and fried them until the outsides were brown, but the insides were still pink and soft. Really delicious. M remarked that she'd never even consider cooking chicken livers for dinner. I'm sure I'll consider it more frequently now.

As a side: Brussels sprouts, steamed. I cut them in half and toasted some almonds in a little brown butter (in the unrinsed chicken liver pan... why not) then tossed the sprouts with that.

For a starch: a preview of our upcoming South Africa trip. Samp and beans, otherwise known as umngqusho. This dish is impressive for the string of consonants in its name, but it's really just white hominy and white beans boiled with chicken stock.

Umngqusho (Xhosa-style)

1 15oz can white navy beans, drained and rinsed
1 15oz can white or yellow hominy, drained and rinsed
1 cup reduced chicken stock,
OR half packet onion soup mix and 1 cup water,
OR half a large-size Knorr/Star stock cube (any flavor except fish) and 1 cup water.
Salt and pepper to taste.

Place all ingredients in a medium saucepan and boil 20 minutes or until thickened. Season and serve.

Serves 4-6 as a side dish. May be doubled. Keeps well.

It couldn't get any easier than this. Some people in South Africa stir some animal or vegetable fat into this dish to give it a little more richness and to make it satisfying when it's a main course. This didn't need any fat really, as the flavors of the hominy and the beans just fit together. It's quickly become one of M's most favorite side dishes.

Potato from another planet

2007-04-16T12:05:00.000-04:00

The unearthly purple color here is really the kicker. I think it comes through in the photo. This was from a Prince Edward Island tater that fell out of the bag and rolled behind the shelving. It really wants to live!... and develop intelligence... and eventually spawn a race of intelligent, human-eating potatoes.

I put a stop to that.

Finally, a name I can live with

2007-04-16T11:55:00.000-04:00

So I've relocated and renamed my blog, hopefully for the last time (for a while). It's now richcooks.blogspot.com as you know since you're here. I've also created a Google Groups mailing list if you want to sign up to get new post notifications delivered directly to your inbox. Not that I think it's sooooo important that my little musings get to you immediately, lest they lose their inherent rich-ness, but because I know it's a hassle to keep checking someone's site if they post irregularly, and some people don't use feed readers, despite the awesomeness of Google Reader.

Eating over the weekend: Japanese curry; spicy chorizo and butter bean soup; ate at Jublilee, a French place around the corner (literally) and it was good, not awesome, but cassoulet and a cold Brouilly hit the spot, plus there was awesome lobster for M.

OH, and some spring cleaning unearthed a mutant potato that had dropped behind the Metro shelves we use as a prep area. Posting pics in the next post (hopefully using another Google product, Picasa).

And then there's this

2007-04-15T09:38:00.000-04:00

Ladies and gentlemen, the meat cupcake.

The best of all possible worlds

2007-04-11T13:39:00.000-04:00

Haven't posted in a while, so I'll just go with this.

And this.

It's so great that they have the freedom to do this in Europe, not like here where bacon research is hampered by the powerful turkey bacon lobby.

That Fruit Salad with Custard

2007-03-26T15:13:00.000-04:00

OK, I have to write another quick post about that fruit salad. We stopped by the fruit cart on 57th and 1st on our way back from a walk. I had seen some cheap asparagus and dead cheap ugli fruit on our way out, and wanted to stop back in. The asparagus was cheap and rightly so. It was just on the verge, and the stalks were very thin. Still, they taste like asparagus, so that's why you use them for soup. I bought six ugli fruit for $4, but they turned out to be a little bitter and not very sweet. Still, maybe I can resurrect them with a bath in some honey. I think M might be permanently put off.

It was then that we decided that fruit salad would make a nice dessert. We got a red papaya and a couple of melons and some huge black grapes. One of the uglis made it into the bowl, but mostly this was about melon, papaya, and grapes. They were all incredibly good. This guy has a good eye for fruit. They were also relatively cheap, and not supporting the highway robbery of D'agostino's is an added benefit.

I pulled a recipe for creme anglaise out of my Cooking A to Z (still lamentably out of print). I had already beaten a couple of whole eggs, so I couldn't follow the recipe as it was written, but it worked out anyway.

Creme Anglaise

2 cups half-n-half
1 vanilla bean, preferably Bourbon vanilla, split
2 eggs, plus two egg yolks
3 tbsp sugar

Put the vanilla bean in the half-n-half and put it over low heat. Don't worry about a skin forming, as you'll be straining this anyway, but make sure it doesn't burn. Meanwhile, put a pot of water on to boil, and get out two metal bowls, one big, one small.

Put some ice, coarse salt, and water in the large bowl. In the small bowl, whisk the eggs and sugar together until they're lemon-yellow. Take the split vanilla bean out of the heated half-n-half and scrape out the black paste of tiny seeds inside, returning the paste to the pot and throwing away the husk. Put the small bowl with eggs over the boiling water, and pour in the heated cream. Whisk briskly until thickened (enough to coat the back of a dessert spoon you dip into it.

makes 3 cups

I absolutely adore fruit and custard. I grew up on Birds Custard and canned peaches. This is fancier, but still the same concept. Cream and vanilla make chopped fruit special. Thank you also, to Chocolate & Vanilla for turning me on to Vanille de Mayotte. Good vanilla is as important as good chocolate. (Good vanilla is often in good chocolate, too.)

I gotta start taking pictures of this stuff!

Dinner party on Saturday

2007-03-26T11:31:00.000-04:00

Had five people over for a short notice dinner party on Saturday. The menu:

Cheese board (gorgonzola dolce, etivaz, torelle)
Cream of asparagus soup
Sliced tomatoes with fleur de sel and olive oil
Salad with vinaigrette
Bucatini with porcini cream sauce
Polpettone (Italian meatloaf) stuffed with prosciutto & scamorza (smoked mozz)
Roasted locally smoked mozzarella with truffle sauce (for the vegetarians)
Fruit salad with creme anglaise

Really a very simple meal, despite the many courses. I wish I'd picked up a bunch of parsley or something to garnish, as most things were one color.

Bronze Age Pasta

2007-03-23T13:12:00.000-04:00

I cooked bucatini all'amatriciana: cured pig cheek (guanciale), onion, tomato sauce, Aleppo chilli and grated pecorino romano. I got special pasta at this place, Buonitalia, in Chelsea Market. It's made in the "traditional" way, though it's weird that there's such a thing as a traditional way of producing an industrial product, which pastasciutta is. This involves extrusion through traditional bronze dies. Modern dies are Teflon-coated, which makes the pasta easier to produce, but makes its surface very smooth. Because of that, sauce doesn't adhere to it as well. Running your thumbnail down the length of these noodles, they have a roughness that's appealing. The surface of the shorter pasta looks whitish, rather than the light yellow of normal pasta. You can literally see the nooks and crannies that the sauce is going to seep into. I wonder if it makes better pasta water as well. One would assume that some of those microscopic peaks dissolve out into the cooking water, moreso than with a smooth surface.

I don't know if I can tell the difference, but I'm going over to buy another type of pasta to try again tomorrow night. Maybe organetti.

Back from Denver

2007-03-18T20:13:00.000-04:00

I've just returned from a week of relaxing and skiing with family and fiancee in sunny Colorado. It was gorgeous. Of course, there was a real culinary aspect to it... though calling it culinary is giving it maybe a bit too much. The priorities were:

First, My Brother's Bar (the oldest bar in Denver, and not actually my brother's) for good conversation with friends and a damn good burger and onion rings, served in greasy wax paper. When M heard the bar's pedigree (oldest in town, best burgers many years in a row), she despaired of having a good night, but this place is never a bad choice. Tin ceilings, old wood, no pretention, no television, only classical music. Just awesome.

Second, though it never materialized was Jack 'n' Grill to introduce M to real green chile. We didn't end up getting there, as it's a bit out of the way, but my mom made up some posole and chicken soup with green chile out of a can. It was very satisfying, and now I realize that when you're within 8 hours drive of Hatch, New Mexico, you can be picky about your green. Living in New York, I just need to make sure I have the stuff on hand. In previous years, I've ordered 10 pounds of frozen whole fire-roasted chiles straight from New Mexico, but it just never worked. I could never make a good chile out of it. This time, I brought back a big-ass 27-ounce can of Hatch chile and I'll at least have decent green chile a few times a year. Green chile stirs up strong feelings like macaroni & cheese, so if I have to take it on the chin from the purists again, so be it. I'll just be over here enjoying my food.

The other two highlights were dinner at Domo, the awesome Japanese restaurant in Denver, and dinner at the top of a mountain at the Alpenglow Stube. More tomorrow.

Un-eating

2007-03-06T11:35:00.000-05:00

Got caught by a wicked stomach virus early yesterday morning. It has allowed me to renew my culinary interest in bananas and unseasoned white rice.

Durban Curry

2007-02-23T11:54:00.000-05:00

My mother has had an article on Durban Curry published by fiery-foods.com. It's a great article. Check it out.

Tirade

2007-02-17T14:24:00.000-05:00

I gave myself thirty-five minutes on Saturday to bash out a tirade. I got about five hundred words into it and was stuck more firmly in a morass of competing arguments than I've ever been. Funnily enough, the question of the best food to eat is a little bit complex. So, I'm taking it as a sign that my second shot at a tirade has also resulted in exhaustion. Michael Pollan's "Unhappy Meals" (registration required, but it's still free, thank god) article in the NYT Magazine summed most of it up for me, though his mistrust of science has been rightly panned.

Here's a few thoughts that've been kicking around my head:

Your kitchen (cuisine) is a cottage industry and an expression of you and your culture. There are corporations and industrial chains out there which are competing with your cottage industry. There's a historical analogy here. American home cooking : American agribusiness :: Indian saris : British textile mills.
There's a lot of putting up or shutting up that needs to go on to undo the Walmarting of American food. If you want to live in a neighborhood with a butcher shop, you must buy your meat at that butcher shop whenever possible. If you want the option of going to farmer's markets, you need to go to farmer's markets as much as you can. If you want good food rather than fast food, demand good food. This will cost you more money. Consider it a "character tax". Decide how important eating well is to you and use your money and time accordingly. (The Italian analog here, which came to me several times while living there, is that if you want to be able to get anything you want on Sunday, be prepared to work seven days a week.)

Of course, when the food industry can produce such wonders as Guinness Marmite, it really saps my ire.

The Wondra of It All

2007-02-15T08:14:00.000-05:00

Anonymous said...

Seriously, how can the some guy who prepares rabbit from scratch use Wondra to make macaroni and cheese?

A Disappointed Reader

So, I've ruffled a feather by recommending Wondra flour as a method for equaling the convenience of Annie's or Kraft mac 'n' cheese while using whole and wholesome ingredients. I wasn't clear, Disappointed Reader, whether the quibble was with Wondra itself or using it for mac 'n' cheese.

If the problem is with Wondra flour, it's not processed with chemical additives. It's just pre-cooked. It's a shortcut, for sure, and not as good as real white sauce or bechamel, but it's no different than using instant oatmeal or cream of wheat. And not that this is the stamp of total legitimacy, but Jacques Pepin uses it liberally in his excellent series, "Fast Food My Way." And if it's good enough for him, it's good enough for me. (He also uses cream of wheat to thicken a soup, which I think is just cool.) If the quibble is with using shortcuts or non-authentic ingredients, I think I made clear in my post about Texas Crispers that I'm not above using processed food as part of a meal if it's convenient and helps to round out, complete, or speed up a wholesome, tasty meal made with whole foods.

If the problem was specifically using it for mac 'n' cheese, I do understand the pain I've caused. Mac 'n' cheese arouses strong feelings. Let me just be clear here that I was not putting "Wondra-mac" forward as my canonical mac 'n' cheese recipe, but as another option, easier for the cooking-challenged than making a white sauce. I'll do a real Macaroni and Cheese recipe someday when I have the time.

If we shadows have offended... and so on.

Just for the record, though, I did make mac 'n' cheese with Wondra last night and it was great. I prepared a Valentine's Day dinner for M. The main dish was Engagement Lamb, breaded using Wondra flour. The side dishes were creamed leeks and spinach, thickened with Wondra flour, and Vermont sage-flavored cheddar mac 'n' cheese, made with.... you guessed it!

Everything was good. I used bread crumbs from my home-baked, no-knead Lahey bread to bread the lamb, and I gotta say it was just a little disappointing. The breading just wasn't as good. I'm going to stick to the original recipe of ground rusks, semolina and butter.

The mac 'n' cheese was great. I made it with Barilla rotini, milk, butter, Wondra, salt & pepper, Dijon mustard, and a good amount of finely shredded sage-flavored cheddar from the Grafton Village Cheese Company in Vermont. I wouldn't have made it this way--indeed, I wouldn't have considered mac 'n' cheese at all--except for the recent post about Annie's, and the need to test out what I'd already put forward. The pasta soaked up all the sauce. It looked pretty much bare, but had a cheddary, sage-spiked richness to it. Was it Macaroni and Cheese? No, not really. If an Italian friend was visiting the country and wanted a representation of American macaroni and cheese, I'd definitely make a real cheese sauce. But, was it a good side dish? Absolutely.

I want to thank you, Disappointed Reader, for keeping me honest. In fact, getting this comment this morning has really made me look at my attitudes toward food and cooking and how I've communicated them. Maybe I haven't been clear enough as to what I'm about. I thought I could get away with just putting up the best and easiest of what I make and eat. There's a lot of stuff I make that doesn't make the blog. I guess I thought I could get away with not putting up a jeremiad, but I guess I was wrong.

Next: Tirade.

Three posts today?

2007-02-14T16:47:00.000-05:00

Yes, truly this is a great day. Here's the long promised scan of my picture in the New York Times.

OCF > WTF?

2007-02-14T16:31:00.000-05:00

So I mentioned to M while we were taking a walk in the woods that I wanted to start reading the Oxford Companion to Food again. She said, "What letter did you leave off at?" I said, "B..." Which sounds bad, but I finished the letter B this morning and realized that I was more than an eighth of the way through the book (120 out of 867 pages), even though I was only two letters through the alphabet.

I wonder why this is. Why this front-loading? Is it some sort of encyclopedist's fatigue, where you start off all diligent but by the time you get to N, you begin to leave out entries and summarize? Who really cares about "nougat" anyway?

Or is it maybe that if two words are synonyms with equal claim to being a topic heading, the one closer to A is the one that gets the heading?

Either way, it's good to have "bummalow" behind me and I'm looking hopefully toward "zuppa inglese."

Kill da wabbit! Kill da wabbit!

2007-02-13T14:10:00.000-05:00

OK, so I guess I should weigh in on the latest thing to run through the food blogging world: Anastacia Marx de Salcedo's indictment on Salon of Annie's Homegrown. Surprise, surprise! Turns out the friendly alternative to Kraft's blue box is actually less about what goes into it than it is about how its buyers want to identify themselves: healthy, skeptical of big business, organic, classy. So, basically: rich, liberal, white, upper-middle class.

OK, I had the skeleton of a jeremiad all typed up, but it's all just so exhausting to rail against things.

The one thing I'll say is that there's an awesome convenience food out there called Wondra flour. The Salon article ends with a recipe for white sauce. Wondra flour is processed with malted barley flour to not clump and to dissolve instantly in hot or cold liquid. How it's able to do this without a slew of toxic additives is beyond me, but it's true. The ingredients are flour, barley flour, and vitamins like riboflavin and such. They've even put a recipe for One Step White Sauce on the back. Here it is:

1 cup cold milk
2 tablespoon Gold Medal Wondra Flour
2 tablespoon margarine or butter
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper

Directions:

Heat all ingredients to boiling over medium heat, stirring constantly.
Boil and stir 1 minute.

1 cup sauce.

Cheese sauce:
Add 1/4 teaspoon dry mustard and stir 1/2 cup shredded Chedder or American cheese into hot sauce until melted.

So, I think this is a good candidate for the easiest homemade crappy mac 'n' cheese known to man. I dunno, though, that dry mustard in the recipe seems kinda fancy. Might have to axe that. I'll give it a shot and let y'all know.

Ochazuke Redux

2007-02-12T10:52:00.000-05:00

So M and I spent a weekend at The Four Seasons Inn in West Dover, Vermont. Fireplace and jacuzzi in the room, very relaxing, very nice, and a very good breakfast. It's run by a lovely English expat couple, Ann and Barry, and their family.

I spent good part of our relaxing weekend delving into The Folk Art of Japanese Country Cooking by Gaku Homma. It's a quirky book. My friend Brian left it on my desk for a week to peruse at my leisure. Of course, I didn't get to it and so he took it back. If I'd taken even a cursory look through the book and at the back cover, I would've quickly seen that this book was written by the founder of Denver's Nippon Kan, the Japanese cultural center, aikido school, and restaurant all rolled into one. I've eaten at Domo (the restaurant) several times! It's the first place I had yuba, the tofu skin that's so much better than tofu. Anyway, the book sat on my desk until Brian had to take it back.

Then, to get it through my head that this was something I'd enjoy, Brian finally bought me a used copy. I read half of it this weekend, and it's a strange mix of reminiscence, folk wisdom (read: superstition), warnings against folk wisdom (read: common sense), impossibly simple recipes, impossibly complex recipes. Sort of like this blog.

The book brought me back to one of my culinary obsessions: ochazuke. Not, mind you, because ochazuke is treated, or even mentioned in the book, but because it was a primer on Japanese country culinary terms. Country people need to preserve food naturally, so pickles (zuke) come up a lot. For instance, umezuke are pickled plums. Wouldn't that make ochazuke some sort of pickled tea? This recipe for ochazuke, which I oddly found on Nigella Lawson's web site, sorts out that confusion, and makes it clear that pickles are an essential part of the dish, which they were when I had it in Japan, but have never been here in the US. Though I've always ordered pickles to go along with it.

The above-linked recipe sort of cuts to the core of what I want ochazuke to be in my world. I like the image of "pawing through the fridge" and making do with what's on hand. That's what we did last night. This recipe makes a great choice for something substantial after a long trip because it's made entirely from the pantry, but is somehow wholesome and fresh-tasting, maybe through some sort of Japanese halo effect.

We arrived home at 8pm and were eating by about 8:30. I pressure-cooked some brown rice, which gives it a nice, substantial texture, and used genmai-cha, the japanese green tea with brown rice in it (and in this case, popped sorghum seeds). There's something bitter and unsatisfying about the tea I've been using, though. I think maybe Chinese green tea might be a better option, as it's less grassy. That might be sacrilege to purists, but I've started to realize that the thing I'm chasing here is not the perfect ochazuke, but the perfect ochazuke-style meal for my and my fiancee. I feel fine putting whatever I want in it. I served along with it:

arare maki nori (seaweed-wrapped rice crackers)
wasabi
bonito flakes
shredded nori

And that's where the traditional ended.

Rather than salt or a flavor packet with tons of MSG, I ground up a fish-flavored stock cube in a mortar and pestle with a little Wondra flour to loosen it to granules. Still salt, still MSG, but a little more on my terms than just tearing open a packet.
We tore open and flaked some smoked salmon given to us by some friends from the Pacific Northwest. It was awesome. We used a tiny bit and it went a long way toward providing flavor.
I put in some wasabi green peas, mostly because the wasabi powder I got from Sunrise Mart kind of sucks. I love the crunch of the wasabi green peas and they have enough of a hit of wasabi to satisfy me.

Honestly, I liked this version a lot more than any other I've made before, and it was easier and more fun for M and I to assemble our own little dishes, and more satisfying with the brown rice than with white. Bonito flakes add a sly smokiness, but honestly I could skip them altogether, as they end up papery in the broth without adding as much flavor.

We ate some kosher pickles from Gus' Pickles on the Lower East Side right before we had dinner. We should've just chopped them and had them as garnish. A bit of sliced omelet would also have worked very well.

I also would like to try this with some barley in the mix with the brown rice. Really, now we're getting far away from ochazuke in its pure form, but as long as it keeps getting better and we keep liking it, I'm up for that.

That smoked salmon's still in the fridge, so we might take another swing at this tonight. And more on Gaku Homma's odd treatise later.

Delice Sauce

2007-02-06T12:01:00.000-05:00

My mom has come through with her recipe for delice sauce.

"Delice Sauce is 1 cup of bechamel sauce with about 2 tbsp ketchup, 1 tsp vinegar and a pinch of curry powder."

Thanks, mom!

Despite the above looking a lot like the way I rattle off my recipes, it's not how my mom usually rolls. This is her just dashing something off in an email, probably from Italy, definitely from memory. When she really wants to talk about food, though, she's a real pro. My mom's cookbook, linked below, is a collection of some of the most thoroughly tested recipes I've ever encountered. She managed to weather the low-fat "revolution" without ever sacrificing her dedication to taste. The hundred recipes in this book were culled from over four hundred favorites, each whittled down to reasonable amounts of fat without sacrificing flavor, and they're all fantastic. You can follow them to the letter and they will return great results every time. It's a great testament to my mother that she can have this kind of precision and marshal the kinds of resources necessary for real recipe testing, but when necessary can just rattle off a list to help out in a pinch.

Oh, and after all that work, she donated the entire book to charity.

Sotsuji Karaoke

2007-02-05T13:33:00.000-05:00

OK, WARNING. Another non-food post about karaoke. I risk alienating my readership of ten, but whatever. I have something to say and it's important:

I note that the Wikipedia entry for karaoke has a pre-existing meaning for "kamikase karaoke".

A popular game using karaoke is to randomly type in a number and call up a song, which participants take a turn to try to sing as much as they can. In some machines, this game is pre-programmed and may be limited to a genre so that they cannot call up an obscure national anthem that none of them can sing. This game has come to be called "Kamikaze Karaoke" in some parts of the United States and Canada.

I've done this before. Last time, I got "Here I Go Again" by Whitesnake and, I think, held my own. Really, though, the metaphor doesn't extend. Still, it was a fair bet that someone was going to come up with a meaning for this phrase.

The other variant I've heard is sometimes called "dare-oke." In this variant, no one selects their own song. They rather select songs for each other, and sing to the best of their ability the song selected for them by their so-called friends. This is kind of "omakase karaoke". I refer to the practice in sushi restaurants of putting yourself in the chef's hands. But the word "omakase" comes from the Japanese for "entrust" or "protect," and with "dare-oke," you are definitely putting yourself in the hands of people who are not going to protect your honor. They will likely do anything they can to humiliate you.

Anyway, I never liked the self-destructive aspect of calling it "kamikaze" or the violent "blitzkrieg" or any of those martial idioms we've come up with before. I've been looking up words like "refreshing" or "plunge" or "quick" to try to come closer to what we're doing here. Any Japanese speakers who would like to help name this thing we've started doing are invited to help.

In Praise of Poaching

2007-02-05T10:33:00.000-05:00

No, not that kind of poaching, the kind where you cook something in gently simmering water or stock. In an episode of "Fast Food My Way," while describing his recipe for pollo tonnato, which is based on chicken breasts poached in a court bouillon (a light vegetable stock), Jacques Pepin tosses off a bit of kitchen wisdom: that you can also poach a whole chicken in court bouillon the way he does the chicken breasts. Add the whole chicken, simmer ten minutes, switch off and leave to poach forty-five minutes. It's something I always wanted to try, so on Friday I just went ahead and did it.

A big pot filled with boiling water out of the electric kettle.
A couple teaspoons salt.
A couple carrots, chopped up.
An onion, coarsely chopped.
The top of a head of celery, leaves included.
Three bay leaves.
Some white peppercorns.

Brought this to a rolling boil for about five minutes and added....

A whole chicken. I used a Murray's minimally processed bird, about 5 lbs. I took the giblets out, but didn't do anything else, didn't even wash it, as it was going into boiling water anyway.

The coolness of the bird killed the boil. I brought it back to a gentle simmer and left it for 10 minutes, partially covered. I then shut the heat off, covered fully, and put the timer on for 45 minutes and walked away. When I came back, the breast meat registered 170F on the thermometer. I did this out of curiosity, not necessity. I could've futzed for another fifteen minutes and it would've been fine.

I pulled the bird out, and then let it cool on a platter. That's it.

I've turned this into several different dishes. After about 15 minutes, I went at it with a paring knife, separating the legs from the body, and slicing and pulling the breast meat off. All the skin went back into the pot. As the bird cooled, I stripped all the meat off that I could and returned the bones to the pot. I simmered the bones, skin and poaching liquid together for about a half hour, then left it to cool. I've been using this delicious stock for a few dishes as well.

Here's some great things about poaching:

energy-efficient. If you're looking for lower power bills, it's maybe better to turn off a few lights, but water conducts heat much more efficiently than air. The amount of gas you'd use roasting a chicken to done in one hour would be at least triple what you'd use to poach. Even better, you can use your electric kettle to boil the water, making this recipe...
cool. There's not a lot of extra heat flying around your kitchen, so this is a summer recipe. Boiling down the poaching liquid to stock makes it a good winter recipe as well.
forgiving. Fish is less forgiving, but there's a lot of wiggle-room in this recipe. The predictability of using water's boiling point as a heat source and thermostat means there's less variability in the heat being put into the food, which also makes poaching...
precise. The boiling point of water varies with altitude and salinity, and a simmer is anywhere from about 185 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, but these variances are minute compared to the variables introduced in roasting, braising, and sauteeing by the nature of the heat you're applying, the weight and material of the cooking vessel, etc. Poaching in a cheap aluminum pot is the same as poaching in anything else. Heck, you could do this recipe in a rice cooker if you wanted. The water's always about the same temperature, and the water's really the only thing touching the food.

Next: What I did with all this good food.

Kamikaze Karaoke

2007-02-01T11:58:00.000-05:00

Couldn't find my mom's cookbook to get the shrimp delice recipe. I'll try again tonight after Kamikaze Karaoke.

I came up with this idea after leaving a karaoke night relatively early. We were doing karaoke with my friend Rob's dad and we got out of there at 11pm, went somewhere else and had a sedate drink. In bed by midnight. No problem. Also, I noticed at the karaoke place that before 8pm Sunday through Thursday, private rooms were only $4 per person per hour, as opposed to $8 after 8pm. A light bulb went on. We could use the price jump as a stopping point and get out of there in a reasonable amount of time. So, no interminable procession of 80's songs, no huge bills, no hangovers. Here's the rules:

Leave work at 6pm sharp.
One hour only. From the moment we enter the room, it's a hard stop at 60 minutes.
Two drink maximum.
Everyone must sing.

There's sort of a three-to-five-person maximum with this sort of thing. Sixty minutes means fewer than a dozen songs, probably, so with more people, the total cost increases and the songs per person decrease. Three people pay $12 for 12 songs. Four pay $16 for 12 songs. And so on. If more people want to go, there's always the possibility of getting two rooms and changing up the mix at 30 minutes.

Karaoke Duet on 35th St has small private rooms, and they offer the deal, so that's where the magic happens. The amount of resolve needed to put down the mike at 60 minutes is gargantuan. Strength, fail me not.

Something Different

2007-01-31T11:04:00.000-05:00

Reader DagoodS has issued me my first challenge. His wife has asked for "something different" for appetizers to be served at their Super Bowl party. That presents me with a problem, because I don't really gravitate toward different things. Almost everything I cook is normal (if not same-old, same-old) to someone out there. I gravitate toward the classics done right, but without too much fuss. There's room to do this even with football party food. Like, for instance, hot wing sauce should be made with Franks Red Hot and margarine, not butter, because that's how you make hot wing sauce. Making it with butter changes it. That said, if you only have butter in the fridge, use that. It's not worth going out to the store just for that one difference. So I'll try to remain true to that ideal.

DagoodS specifically asked for something other than weenies in crescent rolls. So I offer you Sausage Puff Pastry Rolls... OK, all kidding aside, when I need to please some folks at a party, and throwing some cheese and salami on a board is not an option, I go straight to my mom. And this is probably my mom's best party pleaser.

1 package Pepperidge Farms puff pastry, thawed
1 lb Jimmy Dean sage sausage (Gimme Lean for veggies... Hey! I just got that!)

Preheat oven to 350 F
I can't remember if the puff pastry comes in one sheet or two. In any case, I know that it comes folded into thirds. Unfold the puff pastry and cut it along the seams so you have three long, thin rectangles.
Form the sausage into a long snake, about as thick in diameter as a magic or dry erase marker. Lay this along the length of the pastry.
Roll the far edge of the pastry over the sausage toward you and press the two edges together. Then, roll the whole snake back and forth a few times to round it, leaving it seam-side down.
Slice into 3/4" rounds. You can freeze these for months to have ready at any time. If you choose to freeze at this point, you might want to turn off your oven.
Bake rounds in a single layer on a baking sheet. They will give off some fat, so a rimmed sheet and some baking parchment might be advisable.
I don't know how long to bake them for. Will get the timing from my mom's book tonight and edit this post.

OK, my Super Bowliest recipe would probably be Seven Layer Dip. I know, also, that it's not different, but it's demanded by my best friend every year for his Independence Day barbecue, so I figure it demands a place here. Again, small differences, corners not cut, make it "different". First, using interesting variations like green chile refrieds, or roasted garlic sour cream. Second, thinning the beans with the salsa. Third, grate your own cheese. Fourth, seven is too many layers. Six is just fine (see below for seventh layer).

1 can refried beans (I really like Annie's with Green Chile)
1 small tub sour cream. (I found a roasted garlic sour cream that's perfect in this recipe.)
1 jar salsa (got a fire-roasted one this year that made all the difference. Fresh Direct carries it, for all the NYers out there.)
1/2 lb block of cheese. (pre-grated has the shreds coated with nasty stuff to keep them from sticking together)
1 bunch green onions
1 can sliced black olives, or whole black olives that you slice. They must be black and canned and not fancy.

Combine a half cup of the salsa with the beans and mix until well-combined, layer on the bottom of the dish.
Stir sour cream in a bowl and spread on top of the beans.
Layer on salsa.
Grate cheese on large holes of a box grater. (Small holes will make it stick together and fall off the chip.) Sprinkle over.
Finely slice all of the white part and about half the green part of the green onions. Sprinkle over.
Top with black olives.

On the Fourth, I usually say the seventh layer is patriotism. I think we all know what the seventh layer is in this case... FOOTBALL! Seriously, though, I've put some thought into this and can't reasonably come up with a seventh layer that's reasonable. Guacamole or avocados go brown over the course of the party, driving people away from the second half of the dip, even though it's still tasty. Diced tomatoes are out because they're made redundant by the salsa, as are any forms of hot sauce, jalapenos or more green chile. Meat's out because chips and dip are a vegetarian's last resort at a party. Plus, if you have a better idea for the seventh layer, let me know, Commie.

You also might want to check out Union Square Cafe Bar Nuts. I saw this recipe in Saveur ages ago. They're awesome. I think there's a misprint in this recipe, though. It's supposed to be for 2 lbs of nuts.

Shrimp is also key party food.

I will look up tonight and post tomorrow my mom's recipe for Shrimp with Delice Sauce, a light curry sauce that makes a great and easy appetizer.

I will also get my friend's recipe for Bacon-Wrapped Shrimp, if she'll part with it. It's fairly involved, including apple butter and other ingredients, but they're by far the best.

More tomorrow!

Pappardelle al sugo di coniglio

2007-01-29T11:17:00.000-05:00

Well, the second time out with the pasta maker attachment was a success. It sort of all came together.

M offered to cook me eggs on Saturday morning. Nice of her, but there was the problem of no eggs in the house. So, I was dispatched to get some eggs and some cheese while M made coffee and sauteed the mushrooms and peppers. I had wanted to go to the butcher up the road to get the farm fresh eggs I love, but D'Agostinos is right across the street, so I went there instead.... and walked out within three minutes. Anything above factory farmed was over $5.00 for the dozen. Some dozens were north of $6.00! Totally disgusting and shameful. Especially when the butcher down the street carries those big, beautiful, hand-gathered eggs for $3.50 a dozen.

When I walked in, Mr. Simchick was trimming what looked like a cut-up rabbit. I said, "What is that, a rabbit?" He said, "Yes, would you like one." I didn't see how I could refuse. I'm only one man. What can I do? I also took a dozen eggs, and they'd just finished baking a spiral cut ham. It was steaming on the countertop. I told them a few slices and went next door for cheese, already plotting the Sunday dinner in my head.

I got some gruyere at Ideal Cheese, and a small tub of oil-cured olives. I normally don't like their bitter, pasty texture, but knew that they'd plump up and become sweet when braised in tomato with that rabbit.

Breakfast was great in its own right. I ended up cooking the scrambled eggs, adding some of that spiral-cut ham, and following the technique I've been using recently of stirring vigorously rather than allowing large curds to form. I had added some water to the eggs, which I probably won't do again, because they did give off a bit of water on the plate. I left them quite moist, something we've not really been worrying about, given the freshness of the eggs. M loved them. As I was watching, she sort of disappeared into the eating experience. It's a fascinating transformation. When I really hit the mark, she eats in a completely different way. Not any faster or slower, but more intently.

I kept back some of the ham for use with the rabbit. Here's how I did it:

Pappardelle: 2 x-large eggs to 1 cup flour. This is a learning experience. The normal recipe is 5 eggs to 3 cups flour (a pound), or 2 large eggs to 1 cup flour. I ended up having to put more flour into the mix. I'm also having trouble getting down the mixing technique. But it's pretty forgiving. I put in more flour until it came free of the board, then kneaded it for a good ten minutes, adding flour whenever it stuck. Then, wrapped in plastic and left to rest for a half hour at room temp. Fed the sheets through the rollers, folding in thirds and rotating a quarter turn. I've seen other recipes that stress folding in thirds and re-rolling each time you put the rollers down to the next notch. I don't know that this is exactly necessary. It might result in a bit more toothsome noodle, but delicate is okay as well.

1 rabbit, cut up and trimmed
1 tbsp. neutral oil (like vegetable or light olive)
2 medium yellow onions, diced
2 cloves garlic (I would've preferred more, but that's all I had)
1 14 oz. can diced tomatoes + 1 cup water (I used whole San Marzanos and a potato masher, but the flavors in this dish are strong enough that that wasn't strictly necessary. I also should've used a big can rather than small.)
1 cup oil-cured black olives
2 bay leaves
1 tbsp mirto, an herb from Corsica, reminiscent of herbes de provence, which can be substituted.
1 Star brodo stock cube
salt and black pepper

I seasoned and floured the rabbit pieces (cut up for me) and browned them in two batches in oil in the bottom of the pressure cooker, which was not really necessary, as I had all day to do the sauce, but I hadn't used it in a while. I set the rabbit aside and I sweated the onions in the remaining oil, adding the garlic once they'd softened. Then, the remaining ingredients went in. I re-added the rabbit and brought it to a boil, then pressure-cooked for 20 minutes. The "sugo," or juice, was a little watery, so I left it open and sprinkled a little Wondra flour in there to give it some body to the sauce. I also let it simmer uncovered for a while. I find this a lot with pressure cooker food. If you give it a little time to readjust back to natural atmospheric conditions after depressurizing, it will often "relax" and become identical to the long-braised dishes that the pressure cooker is meant to approximate.

I hand-cut the pappardelle with a pizza wheel, boiled it for barely a couple minutes. I took it right out of the water into warmed bowls and ladled over the sugo, which was saucy, but not thick, leaving the meat in the pot. A few little shreds of meat came along with the sauce, but that's not really the point. The point is to use the pasta to soak up the flavor that's come out of the meat, then eat the meat as a secondo. I did this. M got stuck on the pasta, which she loved.

We ate it with grated Parmigiano. Italians say that pasta dishes based on game and fish should not be cheesed. I think everything tastes better with a little Parm, especially when there're tomatoes involved. It counters their acidity and makes the whole thing just... better. And this isn't really game.

Looking forward to a couple more great meals out of this one recipe.

2007-01-08T10:04:00.000-05:00

I made a catch-all gumbo over the weekend, using chorizo in place of andouille, dried okra from the spice store in the place of fresh, and the stock I'd made for lasagne in brodo the other night. All the substitutions worked out fine. The big lesson was to warm the stock before adding to the roux-vegetable mix. It resulted in a silkier, thicker gumbo, with less skimming (and thus more fat) and actually a good thickness to it. Cold stock apparently shocks the roux into separating. I'll check my McGee book tonight for the science on this.

Ochazuke

2007-01-05T13:41:00.000-05:00

Had dinner at Sake Bar Hagi near Times Square last night. It was good food, a little greasy, but satisfying and a good base for the bottle of Towari buckwheat shochu we shared. It wasn't exactly a standout, but the ochazuke (tea-rice) we had was about as close as I've gotten so far to what I had in Tokyo.

I've learned from Maki of justhungry.com that the little round crispy things on top of the ochazuke I had in Tokyo were arare, tiny rice crackers. She has a good overall description of the dish in that post. As far as the cultural place of ochazuke, a couple of Japanese people have likened it to mac-n-cheese. It's warm, comforting, unpretentious. I suppose what I had in Tokyo was the equivalent of a truffled mac-n-cheese. Same unpretentious dish made fancy for a high-paying clientèle. Coming soon, a home attempt of this lovely little dish, just as soon as I get to a Japanese market.

ps. I chickened out on the chorizo-flavored Lahey bread mentioned in my last post. Rather, I'm currently doing the rise on a second attempt of the plain bread. It's just too risky to leave meat out overnight, however cured and spiced it is. Maybe I can figure out a way to stuff the Lahey bread with minced chorizo, though, for the last rise.

How to score a fiancee with a nice rack

2007-01-02T12:42:00.000-05:00

I think it's telling that the only tears of joy that were shed on the night we got engaged (New Year's Eve) were by M, and they were not over the beauty of the vintage ring I'd bought her, but over the rack of lamb I made her, long before the ring made an appearance. This bodes well for our future. I intend to make her many, many more meals... I can't necessarily say the same about buying her diamonds. (Sorry, love.)

This was my second try at duplicating the smoked paprika rack of lamb we had at Daniel on M's thirtieth birthday, and I think I did it. I wanted to bread the lamb, but I didn't want to give up a seared flavor, so here's what I did:

Smoked Paprika Rack of Lamb

Rack of lamb, two bones per person, trimmed of excess fat.
Bread crumbs from one fete biscottate per person (or substitute 2 tbsp plain bread crumbs)
1/4 tsp smoked paprika per person
1 tsp butter per person, melted

flour seasoned with salt
1 egg, beaten.
Salt and pepper

1.) Heat a cast iron griddle or skillet on the stove. Cut the rack of lamb (fresh from the fridge) into portions of two bones each, and season generously with salt and pepper.
2.) When the pan is very hot, sear each side of the lamb shank just until brown (no more than 30 seconds), then remove to a plate to cool. Doing this with the lamb straight from the fridge will make sure they just sear, rather than cooking.
3.) Combine crumbs, paprika, and butter, in that order, and toss until well-combined.
4.) Holding by the bones, dredge the lamb in flour, then egg, then the paprika bread crumbs. Set on a roasting pan, bones arced down and leave out to come up to room temperature.
5.) Preheat oven to 375. Serve appetizers. (We had Prince Edward Island mussels with garlic, white wine, and olive oil.)
6.) Place lamb in oven, roast at 375 until internal temp reads 135 F, about 12-15 minutes.
7.) Before serving, slice in half between the two bones, arranging on the plate so that one crusted and one carved side is up.

I served it with simple steamed asparagus and butter, with a nice Rioja on the side. M cried. A better compliment I couldn't imagine. Well, agreeing to marry me later that night was probably a little better.

Pasta Fresca!

2006-12-29T14:40:00.000-05:00

I ordered a couple dozen pears from Harry & David to be delivered to M's folks place on Cape Cod for Christmas. They arrived too early, so I called and complained. They promised another batch to arrive closer to Christmas. No charge. Now, I never thought fifty pears was what I wanted for Xmas, but it's what I got. Or at least what the whole family got. They were awesome. So awesome, in fact, that I regret not saving one, the reasons for which become apparent below.

M got me a pasta roller attachment for her Kitchenaid mixer. They're traditionally sold with two noodle cutters, one narrow, one wide, but I told her not to bother with these. If I'm going to the trouble of making pasta fresca, it's gonna be a something stuffed, and if it's not stuffed, I prefer hand-cut tagliatelli and papparedelle to uniform noodles. So why clutter the kitchen. I went through a couple of cookbooks and my recollections of various meals in and out of Italy and came up with a must-try list.

pappardelle con tartufata - With the Italian truffle spread, butter and cheese. If this were made just with truffles, many would say to omit the cheese. I say go make your own pasta to leave the cheese off. Jacques Pepin tells a great story where he and his wife ask for cheese on a fish pasta dish in a restaurant. The waiter corrects them, saying it's not done, but they insist. He informs the chef who storms out asking who dares sully his creation with inappropriate cheese. The chef takes one look at Pepin, gulps, says it's no problem and retreats to the kitchen. I like the taste of truffles and cheese. And besides, tartufata is mostly mushrooms.
"pepperdelle" con olio, pomodoro, e pecorino - Ever since I made the bagel pappa di pomodoro, I've thought the combination of pecorino, black pepper, and tomato was a lovely balance, particularly with a silky or oily texture to back it up. I've found a recipe for black pepper pasta. Once I get a little experience under the old belt, I'm going to attempt this, probably with big sheets of hard, salty pecorino shaved over the top.
fagottini con pere e formaggio - little bundles stuffed with ricotta and a chunk of ripe pear, served with a cooked radicchio cream sauce. These were the original dish (with a slightly humorous name in English, though "fagot" in English means bundle) that made me fall in love with Osteria del Ponte. I imagine the difficulty here is in keeping the bundles closed when you boil them.
ravioli di zucca - Years ago, I had squash ravioli at Barolo, a restaurant in Denver. Three big, floppy, irregular trapezoids of pasta, stuffed with a very thin layer of sweet, spicy squash--it barely accounted for half of the entire thickness of the ravioli, and melded perfectly with the browned sage butter it was served in. I had this long before I ever got acquainted with real Italian cooking and I could sense even then that this was something true. This is the one bow to familiar dishes I'll probably make with fresh pasta. Because when you cook the familiar, your dish falls into a continuum between the best and the worst your guests have ever had. Hopefully, you can be on the top end of the scale. You'll rarely be the best, so why even compete in the "spinach-ricotta ravioli" division? Why not do something new?
maltagliati - The name means 'badly cut'. This is, I guess, what you cook up for the kids with the leftovers from making the mezzelune for the guests. Basically, it's irregularly cut noodles. Bits and pieces. Pastasciutta (dry pasta) is the essence of industrial food: mass-produced, totally uniform. (Too bad other industrialized food hasn't maintained the same purity.) I think was I was latching onto with those irregular ravioli was the fact that they'd obviously been created by a human, not a machine. Don't get me wrong. I love dry pasta for its infinite combinations, but the same impulse that made me shy away from the uniform noodle cutter attachments makes maltagliati attractive.
lasagne in brodo - I had this in Lubriano, cooked by my friend Vivian. It's truly an amazing recipe, somewhere between soup and layered pasta, with meatballs and sliced hard-boiled egg! Labor-intensive, for sure, but impressive. Could even make it more special with the addition of a peeled soft-boiled egg on top too enrich the broth.
casoncelli alla bergamasca - These are gyoza-shaped, stuffed with braised beef or veal, raisins, and crushed amaretto cookies, sauced with sage butter and pancetta. Had these at Osteria del Ponte in Italy, but didn't know the ingredients. If I'd known them, I probably would've enjoyed the dish more. As it was, I didn't really like it as much as the others.

This is sort of getting at the heart of stuffed pasta's appeal. It's what Michael Pollan in the Omnivore's Dilemma calls "good to think." The book is incredible, by the way, and highly recommended. He uses "good to think" as the pair of "good to eat" mostly to indicate that you feel good about the provenance of the food you are eating (e.g., that the cow was humanely slaughtered, or that the vegetables weren't trucked in from California). Stuffed pasta is often "good to think" as well. Usually, it's not much to look at, and the fillings are almost necessarily a fine paste of various indistinguishable ingredients, none of which can be too strongly flavored for fear of overwhelming everything else, including the pasta and whatever sauce it comes with. But at the same time, there's so little of the stuffing that you really can't put any great number of things in there or they're all going to disappear. So you almost have to bank on the diner's knowledge of what's in the pasta to heighten their enjoyment, because it's unlikely that they'll be able to pick out more than a couple ingredients, and if they do, it probably won't be a pleasant sensation.

I've found a few other stuffed pasta terms, but they seem to fall into a few groups (limiting myself here to those that are stuffed and boiled):

crimped - Ravioli, lunette, and ravioloni. These are two separate sheets filled and sealed together. Suited to industrial production.
folded - Mezzelune, casoncelli, and quadrucci. This is a single piece folded over and sealed.
origami - tortellini, agnolotti, and tortelloni. In the tortelli family, the piece is square, and it folds over to a triangle, two points of which are folded together. This makes sense as there would not be any maltagliati left over with cutting square sheets.
bundled - Fagottini and perline. These are pieces with a dollop of filling around which the pasta is gathered. I'm still unclear on how these don't end up coming undone in the water. There might be considerable trial and error here.

That last point also brings up the fact that the best and easiest probable use for pasta fresca is in lasagne. Multi-layered lasagne with a light topping is a real treat, with no boiling needed, no chance of explosion, and a heavy satisfaction factor.

Phew! I never suspected when I sat down to list some of my pasta fresca ambitions that this would turn into a meditation on what it is, but I suppose I should always be prepared for that. If anyone has any ideas about other stuffed or fresh pasta I should try, let me know.

Moved My Blog

2006-12-19T14:33:00.000-05:00

I moved my blog to blogspot. I just think it's a little unnecessary to have a fully hosted web site when all I ever do is talk about dinner last night.

Protein and Greens

2006-12-19T07:22:00.000-05:00

I've been eating a hunk of protein and leafy greens for lunch at work almost every day and have yet to tire of it. So I brought that knowledge home this weekend

Sunday dinner comprised a couple of old favorites: hanger steak and broccoli rabe. I've workshopped both of these dishes a few times and figured out some good tricks. My butcher sells marinated hanger steaks, but the first time we got them, we were rewarded with meat that tasted only of marinade. Hanger is a bargain-ish cut, but you still want to be able to taste your meat.

I marinated the steak for under an hour in a combination of toasted sesame oil, soy sauce, mirin, a dash of sriracha, and a clove of crushed garlic. Somehow, when you put this combination with a steak, it just tastes good, not markedly Asian, so there was no problem doing the greens Italian style. I cooked the steak on medium heat on a cast iron griddle. The marinade crusts up pretty good. I don't know whether this is a problem or a benefit, but it definitely means you can only do one batch of steaks before scrubbing out the pan. So this is sort of a two-person recipe.

The big discovery on the greens was something I cottoned onto cooking dinner at Dashton's house. Broccoli rabe is a labor-intensive green. I'm glad to start seeing it all over, as it's tasty and good for you, but it's a lot of work because of the tough threads on the outside of the stalk. Some restaurants cut corners by chopping the stalk crosswise so the threads are not as noticeable, but you still can feel them in your mouth, and it's not pleasant. The other approach is to peel the greens from the bottom of the stalk up. This is labor-intensive, though, because you end up tearing some of the leaves off, and leaving some of the thready side stalks on. The compromise is to chop the leaves and head off the stalk, leaving the main stalk and maybe a few side stalks. These you can strip off, then peeling the main stalk is a breeze. Also, separating the leaves and stalks makes the main dish a bit of a different beast. It's somewhat like braised swiss chard, where there's a leafy component and a tender, sweet stalk component. The peeled stalks are light green and stand out, encouraging you to eat them singly, and you're rewarded for this amply.

I did mine simply, boiled for about 5 minutes in abundant salted water. While they boiled, I fried up some thinly sliced garlic in good olive oil, and added a healthy dash of pepper flakes. Experience has taught me to avoid lemon juice or pepper, which are good with other greens. Broccoli rabe has an inherent zing that both of these kickers, so good with beet greens or escarole, distract from. So, just five ingredients: greens, oil, garlic, salt, red pepper flakes (and water). M pronounced them the best greens yet.

One 18 oz. hanger and a bunch of greens. Not bad for a Sunday night. I splurged on a Hess Estate Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon for such a simple but flavorful meal, and wasn't disappointed.

Texas Crispers

2006-12-09T10:02:00.000-05:00

So Texas Crispers are probably my favorite processed food. They're steak fries made by Ore-Ida, coated in a crispy, spicy... well, coating. I dunno, as far as a high effort-reward ratio for cooking something from scratch at home, I think the homemade french fry rivals homebaked bread. It's not that both of these can't be sublime when made at home, but that they both benefit from scale. Having a professional fryolator or a steam-injected oven allows you to perfect these simple, textural treats. My views on homebaked bread, though, might be changing.

This is especially important with breakfast food. It's very rare for me to have leftover potatoes on Sunday morning, and I've just found that throwing a dozen Texas Crispers on a cookie sheet for the 14 minutes it takes me to whip up some chorizo and eggs is a far more pleasurable way to start a weekend morning than peeling potatoes.

Of course, since moving to Manhattan, I've largely given up what I call "American breakfast" in favor of "New York breakfast". The bagel place directly downstairs is just awesome. The standard with me and M is a pumpernickel, a sesame, and a little tub of cream cheese. I find that if we let them do the cream cheese, it's overwhelming and not very healthy. Sometimes I'll throw on a quarter pound of their unbelievable, buttery lox, but at $36 a pound, that's an occasional treat.

We also use Tal Bagels as a resource when we entertain. Fresh baked bagel wedges, cream cheese and smoked salmon are a very good way to start a meal. I'll often wait there until a batch comes right out of the oven (which is right there, visible from the counter) and take that home. There are few more sublime pleasures than a bagel hot enough to melt the cream cheese.

Bagel places, as well, are a good example of how scaling helps certain foods. Can you think of anything else that applies here? The high-throughput environment of a popular bagel place (or a sushi place, for that matter) contributes to its quality. So success begets more success. It's an interesting thing.

I suppose Texas Crispers and processed foods don't really fall into this same category, since those are all about shelf (or freezer) life and bakeries and sushi places are all about freshness.

Pantry

2006-10-28T09:13:00.000-04:00

Turns out a pantry is not, in fact, where you go to buy pants.

Time sure does fly. Over the past couple of months, my food obsession has only grown, gone beyond words. I guess I left the blog behind because it wasn't giving me what I needed, which is what? Feedback? Support? I dunno. If you're reading this, drop me an email or a comment (if you don't have my email) so I know there's someone out there.

Anyway, back to cooking. I've been learning a lot from Jacques Pepin recently. His "Fast Food My Way" series is incredible. It's profoundly changing the way I'm cooking at home. Less Italian influence (though Ital is still the go-to for easy and simple home cooking), more creativity, less pretention, less fuss.

He keeps hammering on cooking from the pantry. It inspired me to sit down and make a personal pantry list. A list of everything I keep in the house on a regular basis, that I count on being in the cupboard when I come home wanting to make a meal. This is my personal list, not a suggestion for others. I can't imagine there's another person on the planet who relies on Marmite, smoked paprika, and frozen guanabana pulp, though maybe.

Chola

2006-08-04T11:29:00.000-04:00

My friend from Florence came to visit last night. She's been in town for a few weeks, but we've not managed to get together. I had thought that it might be a good opportunity to try another izakaya but then thought better of it. M came home and suggested we got to Chola, an Indian place nearby with a high Zagat rating and a low pricetag.

We had:

Chicken Chutneywala - mango-coconut curry sauce with pieces of chicken. Yum.
Staff Goat Curry - goat on the bone, spicy brown curry sauce. Not the best thing at the table, but still good.
Five-grain daal - spicy, but very, very good. I'm pretty sure they savoried-up the dish with a dose of Marmite, which I've seen in Indian food stores like Dowell Quality Products.
Mutton Biryani - This was tasty, but not the standout.

The service was very nice. I'm going to try out the daal with Marmite thing some time soon. I see there's a Marmite Cookbook on Amazon.

Aburiya Kinnosuke

2006-08-03T11:59:00.000-04:00

Aburiya Kinnosuke

Went to this restaurant (whose name I can never remember) with friends on Tuesday night. It was awesome. First off, they seated us at a table separated from the dining room by paper screens, so it had the feeling of a private dining room. I started out with a shochu on the rocks, but after seeing the grapefruit shochu cocktails that arrived for everyone else, I switched over quickly. They basically bring you a glass with shochu, soda, and ice in it, and a squeezer with half a pink grapefruit. You squeeze your own juice and pour it into your glass. Really great.

I just rattled off a bunch of stuff that sounded good from the menu, making sure to get the giant chicken meatball for which the place is renowned. The service was amazing. Every dish they brought, they separated up into four bowls and served it to us. Normally you have to pay big bucks for service like this. First was soft tofu in basket, served with sea salt, chives and ground ginger. It was very smooth and custardy. Really delicious.

Then came ochazuke, the tea-rice dish I loved from Tokyo. I haven't been able to find it here like I had it in Tokyo, served with Japanese pickles and raw marinated fish. They only do it garnished with a little fish, cod roe, or in this case, umeboshi plum, a very sour fruit that's not actually a plum. This also came with shredded nori and wasabi and chopped cilantro. The broth was very satisfying, even if it didn't quite match with the heat of the night.

A big and rather pedestrian sashimi dish came next. Not much to say here. The fish was decent, but it was at room temperature, which diminishes its appeal.

Now came the robata grill. In Japanese, robata means "by the fireside," and it's an apt description. Rather than yakitori, which skewers everything and grills it over charcoal, robata uses the radiant heat of the fire to grill. I do not envy those robatistas their jobs during this heatwave, but we did eat very well for their suffering.

We had grilled sticky yam (yamaimo), which arrived with sheets of nori for wrapping. The waiter instructed us to wrap the slices in nori and dip them in soy sauce. It was crunch and a bit textural. Not overwhelmingly great, but a neat experience. Considering the price ($6 for 8 slices of yam each about the size of two stacked poker chips), it was not something I'd walk across town for by itself, but it made a neat accompaniment to the rest. Ditto the grilled asparagus, thick spears chopped into 3" pieces and served with the first butter I've ever seen in a Japanese restaurant. Still, it was only two stalks at $3 per.

The standout was the pork cheek. A grilled piece of meat, sliced into salty, fatty morsels, served with a lemon for squeezing and an accompanying relish whose ingredients and taste I can't place right now.

The giant chicken meatball, our raison d'venir, was more impressive than the picture from the Flickr New York Cuisine Pool that had brought us here in the first place led me to believe. The paddle in the picture looks smaller and thinner than it actually is. The waiter sliced it off the paddle and carved it into six pieces for us. The meatball is big, teriyaki-sweet, and with the dip into the coddled egg, rich. If you go, make sure you order the teriyaki, not the plain meatball.

The bill with a few rounds of drinks, tax and tip came to about $50 a person for one of the best dining experiences I've had in a while. (Actually, not true, I've been blessed with an amazing streak of dining luck recently, but it was damn good.) I love good food, and I love not having to pay big bucks for it even more. I will definitely return, but there are some other izakaya in the neighborhood I have to check out first. I'm going to Ariyoshi with my Florentine friend tonight.

2006-08-01T10:08:00.000-04:00

We had the pappa al pomodoro again last night, cold, with olive oil and crumbled pecorino fresco. It was so freaking good. So here's the real recipe. I can't vouch for what it's like made with bagels from other places than Tal. It's a lot like gazpacho, but richer and rounder.

Pappa di Beighel al Pomodoro con Pecorino Fresco
Serves 6

1 large can San Marzano whole plum tomatoes
1 plain bagel, cut half, then each half into 12 wedges.
1 tbsp olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
14 ice cubes (1 tray)
Salt and black pepper to taste

extra virgin olive oil
pecorino fresco (maybe could substitute crumbled goat cheese)
fresh basil or parsley

Place a seive over a bowl and empty can of tomatoes into it. One by one, remove tomatoes from seive, removing any remaining skin, then halving them in your hand with a dinner knife, squeezing them gently into the seive to remove most seeds and juice. Place on cutting board. Once you've halved all the tomatoes, chop them coarsely and re-add them to the strained tomatoe puree/juice in the bowl. Discard seeds and skins.
Heat olive oil in heavy-bottomed, nonreactive pan. Add garlic and saute until golden brown.
Add tomato mixture and bagel pieces.
Add 1-2 cups water or stock. Stir until the bagel pieces have soaked up all the liquid. Only add as much water as you need to make sure the bagels get well-softened.
Bring to simmer, cover and cook 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. This will be where the crumb separates from the crust of the bagels. The crumb should dissolve and make the soup silky, whereas the crust should form small, chewy, dumpling-like chunks.
Remove from heat, add one tray of ice cubes and stir until melted.
Adjust seasoning and chill well.
Serve drizzled with a lot of good olive oil, crumbled cheese, chiffonaded basil.

Long Time No Blog

2006-07-31T13:48:00.000-04:00

OK,

So I've been remiss in blogging recently. I have two momentous things to get to eventually: our trip to Paris and our dinner at Jean-Georges. But really, that's all about someone else's food, and this blog is supposed to be about my food. I could go into transports of joy about the multiple slabs of foie gras with Sauternes on the side that I gobbled down in Paris. I could go on and on about the creamy sherry-spiked orange sauce they poured over the turbot at Jean-Georges, but you can get the same experience by going to Paris or JG yourself. I suppose this disqualifies me temporarily as a travel writer, but I was always about the food anyway.

When my folks were here, I made lemon-garlic chicken thighs to go along with the stuck-pot rice I served. They were simple and tasty and most importantly, I learned a lesson about how to cook these little beauties. I started with 2 lbs of boneless, skinnless thighs, cut them into pieces and marinated them for an hour in the juice of 1 lemon, 2 crushed cloves garlic, and lots of salt and pepper. In the fridge, the pieces gave up a little liquid but I could tell it was working.

Then, that much chicken wouldn't fit into the pan, so I just cooked half to bring to the table with the rapidly cooling rice. I dutifilly heated up some oil in the pan and didn't crowd the chicken, making sure to shake off the excess liquid so when I put it in the pan it would caramelize and come out brown and savory. Well, I came away with some pretty good chicken pieces that went well with the rice for a basic meal. For the rest of the chicken, though, I was tired of taking pains and, realizing that you can't really overcook chicken thighs if you're using wet heat, I just threw the rest of the thighs into the pan, set it on low to simmer and went back to the living room to talk to my folks.

Now, I had just read in the Oxford Companion to Food about a southeast Asian dish made with coconut milk. I'll go back and find out the name. Anyway, he says that this dish is pretty singular because it starts out as a boiled dish and ends up as a fried dish. As the water in the boiling coconut milk evaporates away, it eventually breaks and yields oil which becomes the cooking medium for the rest of the preparation time. This dish ended up being somewhat like that. The chicken thighs, as they cooked, gave up most of their liquid and fat. The liquid then reduced and caramelized, and was cooked back onto the outside of the chicken pieces, giving a very flavorful glaze to each piece. Very nice.

I made this dish again for M this past weekend, but looking for something to spice it up, stumbled on smoked paprika. I threw a couple teaspoons in and stirred it around, then thought maybe some mustard would perk things up. I got on the Interweb and found this recipe which seemed to confirm my suspicions. I followed the same procedure as I had with the chicken thighs previously. This time, I used a nonstick pan, just threw the whole mess in there, let it reduce, and at some point there was a magical transformation where I went from a pink-orange soupy dish to deep-brown, fragrant, tender chicken pieces. I served it with cherry tomatoes that I burned in a cast iron pan, and with unstuck pot rice (fully-cooked basmati with yogurt, curry powder, and lime juice). The rice wasn't any good until I threw some cherry preserves in there, but that might have been because I neglected to add oil, which would've kept the rice grains separate.

Anyway, it was darn good and easy to make.

Yesterday morning I made pappa al pomodoro, the Tuscan bread-tomato soup, using a can of San Marzanos, a couple cloves of garlic, and a day-old garlic bagel from Tal Bagels downstairs. Some homemade chicken stock added a good base of flavor. It ended up a bit chunkier in the bread department than I'd have liked, but I had a bowl and put it in the fridge. Then, last night, I had some cold, with olive oil and shavings of fresh pecorino. It was unbelievable. The soup had gone smooth and the unpleasant chunks of crust had turned into little chewy dumplings. The unctuousness of the smooth soup was accentuated by the fruity Umbrian olive oil we brought back from Orvieto, and cut by the sharpness of the pecorino. Funny, because I was a little disappointed after buying the pecorino that I still hadn't found anything as wonderful as we usually have in Umbria. It was sharper and more crumbly, but was a perfect accompaniment to the soup and olive oil. Yum.

I also make a downmarket crab tower for dinner. I used half an avocado for each bowl, half a can of crabmeat (the junk stuff, not the beautiful lump meat), some fresh-steamed sweet corn, finely diced red onion, and some cubed mango. Lots of pepper and a little salt on each layer, plus some good squeezings of lemon juice along the way and a big hit of olive oil at the end. I garnished with five grape tomato halves and a wedge of lime for color. It was a beautiful dish and perfect for a hot summer night. I got all of this stuff except the onion and the crab from the
fruit guy on the sidewalk across First Avenue.

All told, a great and successful weekend of cooking, and I didn't have to go down to the Union Square farmer's market to do it. In fact, with the exception of the olive oil and the spices, I bought everything within a block of my apartment. I love New York!

2006-07-07T10:29:00.000-04:00

I bought and butchered an entire leg of lamb last night, in advance of tonight's dinner party for M's friend's birthday. The leg of lamb was $29 at Fairway Market on the West side, a little more than half what FreshDirect wanted for a boneless leg of lamb. I wasn't super-clear on what I was doing, but it all seems to have worked out. I took the top portion for a tied, boneless roast, the major muscle on the inside (?) got set aside for an eventual lamb curry, and the rest of it, silverskin and all, got chopped up and thrown in the Cuisinart for stuffed grape leaves.

It was my first time butchering a leg of lamb and I found it relatively easy. I tried using my Japanese knife first, but found that the tip just wasn't sharp enough, and the blade was too wide, making it not very nimble. Being that I don't have a boning knife, I just used my Henckel parer and got some pretty good results. The removed bone looked appropriately creepy. I wish I'd taken photos. And there wasn't much waste. All told, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Made some hummus this morning for tonight's dinner, too. It seems to me that hummus is probably the most abused appetizer/side dish of all time. How many freakin' poetry readings have been accompanied by some limp veggies and gummy, grainy pureed chickpeas with a little tahini? Hummus is cheap and easy, which means it takes special attention and good ingredients to make it anything more than workaday. Chickpeas are cheap, yes, but you're not going to go broke laying on thick with the tahini, so when I made it this morning, I treated it as more of an olive oil delivery system, with the chickpeas and tahini serving basically as an emulsifier for the oily goodness. I made it with a lot of Umbrian olive oil brought back from Orvieto, a lot of tahini, and a good hit of cayenne. It's pretty strong-tasting, with two lemons and two cloves of garlic to one can of chickpeas. I left the food processor running, adding water and drizzling in olive oil until I got more of a light, whipped consistency than the normal paste. This makes it a lot more satisfying in my book.

More to come...

Dinner in Trastevere

2006-06-12T04:22:00.000-04:00

We went across the Tiber for dinner, to a packed little restaurant in a narrow street in Trastevere, the equivalent of the East Village, I suppose. Good people-watching. I coined the term "asstuary" for when a girl's pants are hanging so low in the back that you can see the entire top of her thong, to the point where it disappears between her cheeks. There was a very good example across the way, which gave us much to talk about.

The food was good. Started with suppli', the fried rice balls. Then I had risotto with shrimp and M had spaghetti alle vongole veraci (with clams). Both very good. Finished off with a big, saucy plate of veal osso buco. Delicious. M had tiramisu for dessert. I had Amaro Ramazzotti, which is very much like Jaegermeister

First day in Rome

2006-06-11T15:15:00.000-04:00

After a slow start, we headed out to the Pincio gardens in the north of the city, there, we rented bikes, with the intent of riding them across the park, locking them at the Museo Borghese, and taking in some art. Well, we bagged that early and just rode those bikes all over the city, across the Tiber to the Vatican, back to Piazza Navona, and back. Took about two hours.

Before that, we went to lunch at a place called Il Brillo Parlante (means Jiminy Cricket). M had a pizza with prosciutto, and I had mezzi bucatini con cacio e pepe e fiori di zucca. That's half bucatini (not thick straws, but thin) with cheese and black pepper, tossed and cooked with orange squash blossoms. Cheesy and delicious. Off to dinner in Trastevere!

Domesticity

2006-05-23T11:14:00.000-04:00

I guess it's been a while since my last post. April and May were a blur of activity. I've moved in with M, which means cooking for another person, which is a pleasure. It's also interesting to find out her likes and dislikes and fine tune my food to find a happy medium between us. The greatest difficulty thus far is getting her to open up about what she thinks about the food. I think she thinks it's complaining, rather than valuable feedback. Just one of the many adjustments we've both had to make.

Some food notes from the last few months, in no particular order:

We went and stayed with M's sister in Kentucky to go see the Kentucky Derby qualifiers at Keeneland. One of the activities for the weekend was tailgating. The stand-out was the cold fried chicken. They bought it the night before and put it in the fridge while it was still warm. It was unbelievably good the next day. The big lesson here is that you should always buy exactly as much chicken as you need, no more, because if there are leftovers, the remorse of having chilled a devastatingly good piece of fried chicken for no good reason sticks with you for a while.
In Lexington, I tried David Chang's recipe for roast brussels sprouts with kimchi and bacon, but without the kimchi. It was a dud, mostly because the sprouts were big and sort of grainy. I'm still trying to figure out how to treat those big sprouts you get at the market. Long, slow cooking to reduce them to buttery sweetness is one thing I haven't tried yet. Must consult M about her feelings on this.
The Nathan's hot dogs are better at Shea Stadium than Yankee Stadium... but I might just have gotten lucky and gotten a well-heated dog off the hot rollers, where usually they come steamed out of the box the vendor carries. Oh, and they have better mustard at Shea.
The tiny kitchen in our new apartment has spilled out into the entryway. Lots of shelving with lots of cookware.
We have a dishwasher now.
I made curried cauliflower, with coconut milk, mustard seeds, frozen tamarind pulp and onions. It was pretty good. Not sure if I like the souring effect of the tamarind. I think next time just a basic curry.
Last night, I made beef short rib biryani, to be eaten today. Simple recipe but calls for long cooking. Will update on how it went.
We went to the Strip House, a steakhouse near Union Square, with some coworkers of mine. Awesome duck fat potatoes and creamed spinach. I was lukewarm on the steak. We took home some of M's rack of lamb and some of the creamed spinach (with white truffle oil). I made a bechamel and stirred in the spinach, tossed this with orecchiette. I sliced the lamb thin and reheated it. I layered the lamb over the pasta and then deglased the pan to make a broth, which I poured over the whole thing. It was really great. I tried to recreate this with my own, lighter version of creamed spinach, with cannelini added, given the affinity between spinach, lamb and white beans, but it had to sit overnight due to a miscommunication, so ended up mushy. I'd like to try this recipe again, maybe with a braised lamb neck, stripped and shredded, and cannelini over creamed spinach, served over noodles. Maybe penne would be a better option.
We now live upstairs from Tal Bagels, voted the best bagels in the city in 2005 (Citysearch). I've been going down regularly in the mornings to pick up a pumpernickel and a sesame bagel. They're usually hot out of the oven, with the crust anywhere between still-cripsy and slightly chewy. An unbelievable pleasure. I hated pumpernickel before, but guess I just hadn't had a good one. Their lox are incredibly expensive at $36 a pound, but are oily and soft and just don't stand up to the stuff from the supermarket. So for now that's a Sunday treat. It's supplanted smoothies and eggs as the breakfast of choice... and for good reason.
2 lbs of green beans is a LOT of green beans.
I made risotto primavera with green beans (see above), asparagus, shredded carrot, and some leftover homemade basil. There wasn't enough parm to grate into it, but pregrated pecorino romano did just fine. The rice was mushy, though, so I guess I'm out of practice with the pressure cooker...
I suppose using the pressure cooker on those curried beef short ribs would make it a week night dish. Must remember to try that.
We're using FreshDirect now. I like their butchery, even if it's expensive. The veggies are passable, not really the quality I was expecting. They carry kefir, which simplifies the guanabana smoothie to three ingredients.
It's lychee season!

2006-04-07T14:26:00.000-04:00

I've just learned that durian, the nasty-smelling, spiky fruit of southeast Asia, is bad for another reason. It's a killer! During ripening season, the fruit, which is hard and spiny and can weigh up to 5 lbs or more, can fall from the hundred foot high trees to the forest floor, killing anyone unfortunate enough to be walking under. And if the fruit doesn't get you, the tigers attracted by the fruit's pungent smell will probably finish the job. If this all sounds familiar, that's because it is pretty much exactly the premise of a Monty Python sketch.

Live & Learn

2006-03-26T13:20:00.000-05:00

Since M's on a shoot in New Jersey this past week or so, I've had occasion to do a lot more cooking. She's been coming home late and getting out early, so I've made sure to cook healthy but comforting dinners for her when I could. Last weekend, I made borscht, sort of accidentally. I made roasted beets as a side dish for a ground beef & cabbage stew with potatoes, then decided to chop and throw in the beets at the last minute. It was very good and rich, though I'd have liked to maybe have some potato starch to thicken up the broth a little at the end.

Yesterday, I went to Mario's, the Italian butcher in my neighborhood, and got the ingredients for bucatini all'amatriciana, which is a favorite for M. Pancetta, a couple cans of San Marzano tomatoes, some ground pecorino romano, and, actually, perciatelli, which is smaller in diameter than bucatini (since we'd had a little trouble last time eating the bucatini without spilling sauce all over us). I also got a couple of fresh-made sausages, some rusks and some prosciutto. As usual, it was ridiculously cheap, around $20 for the same stuff I would've paid at least $50 for at Citarella or Dean & Deluca.

I had to get some onions and some cheese for Italian Breakfast, and some broccoli rabe to have as a side dish, so I stopped by the regular supermarket. There, I decided to change things up, and do orecchiette with sausage and broccoli rabe instead. Like Amatriciana, it takes to having pecorino romano sprinkled over rather than parmigiano, so the fact that I'd forgotten to get parmigiano at Mario's wasn't a problem. What was a problem, however, was that I'd underestimated the importance of having the right pasta for the dish I was making. I couldn't find orecchiette, so I didn't get any more pasta at all, remembering that I'd randomly found good orecchiette pugliese at the bodega across the street (which rarely has anything good at all).

I couldn't find the orecchiette, so I just decided to go with the perciatelli, broken in half. Not a terrible mistake, but I did have it demonstrated to me when I cooked the dish just how important having the right pasta is. Had I to do it over again without orecchiette, I would've gone with penne rigate instead, as it has the ridges to pick up and hold the juice which comprises the sauce. The most important thing for this recipe is peeling the broccoli rabe well.

Orecchiette with Sausage, Broccoli Rabe and Roasted Garlic

Serves 4 as a main dish, 6 as a primo

1 head garlic
olive oil
salt

1-2 bunches broccoli rabe (depending on how much you like it)
1 lb Italian pork sausage, removed from its casing (you can use sweet or hot)
pinch red pepper flakes (if using sweet sausage)
1 lb orecchiette

plenty of good extra virgin olive oil
lots of fresh ground black pepper
pecorino romano

Preheat the oven to 400F. Put a large pot of lightly salted water on high heat.
Cut the top half-inch off the head of garlic so you can see the tops of the cloves. Drizzle with a little olive oil, sprinkle with some salt, wrap well in foil and roast for 40 minutes.
While the garlic roasts, trim the broccoli rabe, peeling the stems from the bottom up to the flower. Cut the stalks into 1" pieces. Boil for 4-5 minutes, then drain and plunge into cold water to stop the cooking. Put another fresh pot of water on for the pasta.
In a large skillet, saute the sausage, breaking it up into small pieces with the back of a wooden spoon. Drain the sausage on paper towels. Wipe out the skillet and add a couple tablespoons olive oil.
When the water boils, start cooking the pasta.
When the garlic is done, unwrap and, holding in a dishtowel, squeeze the garlic into the skillet, followed by a pinch of red pepper flakes, the sausage, and the broccoli rabe. Add a little of the pasta cooking water.
Toss the pasta with the sauce, a good amount of olive oil, pepper, and pecorino romano. Serve immediately

Vegetable Dinner

2006-03-13T10:17:00.000-05:00

Dinner was less successful than lunch. I went to the store and got some supplies. We ended up with udon noodles in portobello mushroom soup with grilled chicken breasts, which was fine, but as M pointed out, the noodle soup weather is waning now.

I also made a side dish of chickpeas, brussels sprouts, beet greens, onions, and chorizo (yes, again). It was good but needs improvement.

Made roasted beets, too. Roasted in foil for 2 hours at 350° with a little olive oil and salt. Maybe next time I'll save the foil and just roast them in cast iron. Or maybe even beets en pappillote. The recipe called for simply washing them and leaving the stems on. The peels just slide right off the beets with the outer layer of flesh. Even if they're too hot to handle, you can do this under cold running water and be fine, plus they'll retain enough of their heat, even under the water, to serve immediately. I would have liked a little chopped flat-leaf parsley and maybe some lemon, but they were great just all by themselves. Looking forward to fresh spring veggies!

A basic lunch

2006-03-12T15:58:00.000-05:00

M is down for the whole weekend, so we're enjoying a lazy Sunday this afternoon. Smoothie breakfast (guanabana flavor), reading, hanging out. I had the idea this morning of making a parfait with the white guanabana smoothie and the muesli in layers. Yum!

For lunch, I had a bag of potatoes that needed to be cooked, so I scrubbed and boiled them, figuring they'd be a good raw material for whatever I made later today or later on this week. Well, they actually became the main course for lunch. We had a warm potato salad, vaguely reminiscent of a cobb salad, actually.

I started with two bowls and in each crumbled some unbelievably good Valdeon blue cheese (wrapped in oak leaves). Then a dash of red wine vinegar, black pepper, and a shot of olive oil, mixed them together into a chunky paste.
I chopped up and smashed a medium boiled potato for each bowl, tossing it with the dressing.
While this was going, I fried a diced Goya chorizo and a diced onion in a little more olive oil. I crushed in a clove of garlic and then threw in about a cup of shelled edamame.
When the chorizo was browned, the onions soft, the garlic just browning, and the soy peas cooked, I split the mixture between the two bowls, then topped with a quartered hard-boiled egg, and a few more crumbles of cheese.
I finished with pepper, a drizzle of good oil, and a sprinkle of red wine vinegar.

The colors were actually the nicest part, with they yellow of the yolk, the red of the chorizo, the green of the soy peas, with the white of the egg whites and potatoes, plus a shot of color from the blue cheese. Really tasty, too, especially warm.

(Editors note: on reflection, maybe some frozen baby peas would've been better than edamame in this.)

Jack's Luxury Oyster Bar

2006-03-03T13:43:00.000-05:00

Just realized I made reference to Jack's Luxury Oyster Bar and haven't logged here what we had there. I'll see if I can reconstruct it in my head and get it down on paper[sic].

M and I waited until the night after Valentine's Day to go out to dinner, which made it much easier to get a table at Jack's. It was a great meal. As I just observed about Hearth, it's pretty easy to blow $75 on a tasting menu in this town, but at Jack's, you get a lot for that.

Here's the rundown:

The amuse bouche was a mini lobster panini (pronounced by our Latino waiter meanie puh-neenie, which I suppose was correct, but has since become a running joke). It was buttery and rich, about the size of a matchbox.
Next came caramelized scallops with pistachio butter and baby artichokes. This was M's favorite, and really a standout for me. The brown crust on the sea scallops was delicious.
A raw bar selection: two oysters, a raw clam, a cooked shrimp, and a piece of toast with egg and parrotfish caviar.
Potato leek soup with white truffle oil, poured over 3 kumamoto oysters. Really fantastic, if a little salty. The oysters had some sort of sauce on them before the soup was poured over, but it escapes me. This was a great dish and a great combination.
Lobster Newburgh. Creamy, a little spicy from the paprika. Very rich and luxurious.
Sauteed monkfish over shallot puree, surrounded by a white port porcini broth.
Mint tea sorbet
Chocolate sampler for dessert: chocolate-mint cup (a shot glass filled with mint-flavored rich liquid chocolate), mini dark chocolate box with caramel mousse and fleur de sel (salty and chocolate), and a white chocolate tart.

It was all pretty darn good and worth the price of admission. We shared a bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc over the meal, and a glass of champagne over dessert. A really fine meal.

Hearth

2006-03-03T12:29:00.000-05:00

Had dinner at Hearth on 12th St. and 1st Ave. last night with some friends from Japan and some coworkers. We had the tasting menu. A really nice meal, though for the $75, I'd rather go back to Jack's Luxury Oyster Bar for their tasting menu. I chose the wines... then found out later that one of my Japanese friends was a wine buff and probably could've outselected me with one hand tied behind his back. The wine list was challenging. There weren't any slam dunks and there were lots of bottles over $300, which is just dumb. Anyway, here's what we had:

Lobster, blood orange, truffles and mâche. Wine: Josmeyer Le Dragon Alsatian Riesling. This was good, but I still don't get the trend for pairing seafood with strong citrus, like I had at Sushi Samba. It overwhelms the flavor of the fish/shellfish.
Striped bass with lentils, fennel and red wine reduction. Wine: Trousseau (can't remember the vineyard, but it was light like a pinot noir, but with more tannin than I would've liked for the food. A very nice merlot like Duckhorn would actually have been better because it would've been softer.) This was very tasty and earthy. A nice blend of flavors.
Rack of lamb with lamb osso buco and rappini. Wine: Mr. Riggs Shiraz Voignier, Adelaide, Oz. The wine was strong and stood up to the lamb. Again, not an ideal choice, but a good learning experience. The rack was tasty but fatty. Didn't mention the provenance of the lamb, so probably not Icelandic or New Zealand. The shank (osso buco) was fantastic. Salty, savory, greasy, comforting. The rappini was great, too. The best part of this course was the look on my Japanese friend's face when at my prompting he sucked the marrow out of the bone and got a mouthful of, well, fat. Expensive fat, but fat nonetheless.
Two desserts: passion fruit panna cotta with huckleberry compote and almond cookie. Very nice. Coconut souffle with ganache poured into it. Very rich. My dining companions didn't finish theirs. I finished mine.

Overall a very good meal, but again, if I was looking to blow $250 on dinner, I'd go back to Jack's in a heartbeat, and Hearth only if Jack's was booked.

Brown butter?

2006-02-24T10:15:00.000-05:00

Question from a friend: What's "brown butter sauce" all about? (Too
lazy to go into the next room and consult the Joy of Cooking).

Brown butter is also called beurre noisette or buerre noir, depending
on how distracted I get from the cooking process. It's basically
browned or burned butter, respectively, sometimes with a dash of lemon
juice to emulsify it. I was just thinking it's a good way to give some
extra flavor to the crabmeat. In effect, you're adding clarified
butter, which we all know has a big affinity for lobster and crab,
plus some nutty flavor, which should complement the roux in the
bisque. Just put a couple tablespoons of butter in a heavy skillet and
heat over medium-low heat until the foam has disappeared and the
solids start to take on a brown color, then throw in the crabmeat or
shrimp and squeeze a teaspoon or so of lemon juice over the top. Stir
vigorously until the crab is heated through or the shrimp is mostly
cooked, then put on the bisque.

The Joy of Cooking will make you think this is the wrong way to do it.
The cooking-industrial establishment will tell you that this is a very
slapdash way to make a beurre noisette. The cooking-industrial
establishment should get a full-time job. They should also stop
trying to sell us things we don't need. Ladies and gentlemen, the $20
replacement for the beer can: the vertical chicken beer roaster. Do not buy this product.