$1.15

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.

That Fruit Salad with Custard

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!

Delice Sauce

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.

Pappardelle al sugo di coniglio

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.

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

1. 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.
2. Heat olive oil in heavy-bottomed, nonreactive pan. Add garlic and saute until golden brown.
3. Add tomato mixture and bagel pieces.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Remove from heat, add one tray of ice cubes and stir until melted.
7. Adjust seasoning and chill well.
8. Serve drizzled with a lot of good olive oil, crumbled cheese, chiffonaded basil.

Gumbo!

So I finally made gumbo again. M and I went up to Maine for President's Day weekend. We stayed with her friend up there and had a very good (if chilly) time. I won't go into the details of the whole thing, but I cooked the gumbo in a shallow pan, then rather than simmering it, I put it in the oven to braise for like 3 hours. Here's the basic recipe:

Basic Sausage n Chicken Gumbo
serves 8, apparently

1 cup flour
1 cup vegetable oil

3 medium onions, chopped coarsely
2 red bell peppers, chopped coarsely
4 ribs celery, with leaves, chopped coarsely
4 cloves garlic, minced or put through press

3/4 lb. okra, cut into 1/2" rounds

1 box Swanson's chicken broth

1 Hillshire farms kielbasa or smoked sausage (light would've been better in retrospect), cut diagonally into 1/4" slices
6 boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut into 1" chunks

2 bay leaves
crushed red pepper
dried thyme

• In a 3 qt pan, make a darkish roux with the flour and oil. I stayed lighter than I have before and had good results. I cooked the roux to slightly darker than natural peanut butter.
• Heat a heavy skillet or griddle alongside the pot.
• Add peppers, onions, celery to the roux and stir, cooking, until soft (10 minutes?). This stops the roux cooking, makes it look pasty and clumpy, but it's nothing to worry about. Add garlic halfway through.
  
• Add okra and broth the the pot, stirring until roux is worked in. Thin with water if necessary.
  
• Fry the sausage slices on the griddle/skillet until they have at least some char on both sides. Add to the gumbo as they brown.
• Fry the chicken chunks as above.
• Deglase the skillet with water and add the juices to the gumbo.
• Simmer or braise 1 hour and serve over rice.

Braising for a long time made everything fall apart. The texture was good from the okra, but lacked variety or body. I still like medium-grain sushi rice, like Nishiki for the gumbo, cooked until sticky, and a big scoop in the middle of the bowl, with the gumbo served over and around it (topped with parsley), but a kitchen mishap had us using a mish-mash of Basmati and Nishiki for the rice. It also caused a burn on their formica countertop (oops) and clogged up their drains with half-cooked rice.

The big surprise here was that with salad and dessert, this recipe comfortably fed 8 hungry people. More lessons about portion size, I guess. I hope we get invited back to stay, though I despair of my chances to get invited to cook again after destroying their kitchen and their plumbing. Maybe a curry or a chowder will change their minds.

Spaghetti Collins

Digging through an old Saveur, I picked up a recipe for Spaghetti Collins. Collins was my maternal grandma's maiden name, so it caught my eye. It's basically

2 cloves garlic,
6 bunches scallions sauteed in olive oil,
deglased with white wine, which is then reduced,
enriched with veal stock and
mounted with a half-stick of butter.

This is tossed with a pound of cooked spaghetti.

Apparently the provenance is New Orleans, which explains its richness.

I'd like to try it, though.

Last night, I semi-replicated the dish Dan S. made for us in Italy. He had the benefit of Italian zucchini and fresh made fusilli. I used the Braun cordless kettle I am currently in love with. The automatic kettle is as good as those instant 190 degree water thingies people put on their sink. Actually, since those dispensers only hold about 3 cups of water at a time, I'd prefer the kettle, which holds 7 cups. It boils very quickly and shuts off automatically. I bought it for tea and manual drip coffee, but use it for cooking nearly every time I turn on the stove. It works especially well for pasta on a weeknight.

I fill up the kettle and set it to boil. Into the large pasta pot, I put about an inch of water and a tablespoon of salt, then set it over high heat. Then I go about making or heating the sauce. When the kettle boils, I open the top flap so it can be dumped out quickly. (Otherwise, I have to hold the upturned kettle over a steaming pot for too long.) Dump the water in the pot and it's usually at a rolling boil immediately. Set the timer (for 1-2 min short of recommended cooking time), throw in the pasta, and bingo bango, al dente perfection. For long noodles which need to be submerged more, or for pasta for more than two people, two batches of boiling water are sometimes necessary, but it's still much faster than boiling it on the stove (and wastes a lot less energy since the water is heated directly).

Orecchiette con zucchini
1/2 lb. orecchiete pasta
2 zucchini, grated on large holes of box grater
1 clove garlic, run through garlic press
2 tbsp butter
1 tbsp olive oil
salt & pepper
Parmigiano Reggiano

1.) Place water on to boil (or use kettle method above).
2.) In a medium saucepan, saute the garlic in oil over medium heat, browning very slightly. Add zucchini, season generously with salt and pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened. (The salt should help the zuchs release a lot of their moisture.)
3.) Cook pasta according to package directions, reserving a half cup of the pasta water. Drain pasta. Do not rinse or shake. Add pasta to zucchini, add the butter and some of the pasta water according to taste, and stir until well combined. Top with Parm and serve immediately.

Serves 2

Another of my recent favorite tricks is warming up the pasta bowls with the pasta water. If my mom were watching, I'd use a ladle to put some of the boiling water into each bowl to heat it up a little and make sure the ceramic doesn't cool down the pasta too much, but when it's just me or me and my girlfriend, near the end of the pasta cooking time, I'll just dip the bowl into the pasta water and scoop out some water. This is also nice because it sets aside pasta water for combining with the finished product in the saucepan, whatever sauce you're using.

So I never got around to the meatball soup because there were already meatballs from Ikea in the freezer. Instead, I made my pressure cooker risotto, which is a godsend on weeknights. Since it's basically a porridge, I like to add some protein and maybe a vegetable on the side, just to feel like I'm not eating gruel (albeit tasty gruel). I get the Star porcini mushroom stock cubes from my local Italian grocery, which is easy to do if you live in Brooklyn. If you can't get Italian, you can use any of the cubes found in the soup section, as long as they're the big 1" x 1" ones rather than the tiny little Wylers ones. If you're sensitive to MSG, don't cook this recipe, or use chicken broth in place of water and omit the cubes. I've added all the time-saving tips I usually incorporate for a weeknight. The equipment necessary for this to be really fast is: a pressure cooker, and a Braun electric kettle. If you feel like a pressure cooker might be a boondoggle, that's understandable, but living in New York I don't have much storage space to waste on unnecessary equipment, and I use it all the time (ok, usually for this recipe, but I do still use it). More on the automatic kettle in another post.

The key here is that the pressure cooker doesn't cook the rice all the way through, but just shortens the cooking time. You still need some of the traditional open stirring and reducing that's part of making regular risotto.

PRESSURE COOKER RISOTTO
1 tbsp. olive oil
1 small yellow onion
1 cup risotto rice (arborio or carnaroli)
1 Star stock cube
Fresh ground pepper (white pepper preferred)
Parmigiano Reggiano

Add-ins: usually a protein and a veg. Edamame do well as both!

1.) Heat pressure cooker without lid on medium to medium-high heat. Add olive oil. While pot is heating, chop onion.
2.) Fill kettle just short of 3 cup mark with cold water and start.
3.) Add onion to pot and cook over medium heat until translucent, without browning. When halfway thorough, add rice and stock cube.
4.) Stir rice with oil and onion, breaking up stock cube with back of spoon. Cook the rice in oil until fully coated and cube is mostly broken up.
5.) Add boiling water to pot carefully. There will be lots of steam.
6.) Place lid on pressure cooker and lock. It should come up to pressure almost immediately because the water inside is already boiling.
7.) Cook at pressure for 7 minutes. While that's happening, I usually prep my add-ins. This is usually a bit of protein, like some cooked chicken breast, edamame, or frozen meatballs. Sometimes I add some vegetables like shredded zucchini or carrots. I'll use the microwave or a quick saute on the side
8.) Run pressure cooker under cold water until pressure releases, then remove lid and return to stove. Continue to cook on medium-high heat, stirring constantly, for about 5 minutes until a little more of the liquid has evaporated, but rice is still toothsome. Season with pepper. Stir in add-ins.
9.) Top with freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano and serve immediately.

Makes 2 servings.

Sourdough Stuffing

Thanksgiving!
This is adapted from a recipe that appeared in Saveur November 2000

SOURDOUGH STUFFING
serves 12

2 sticks butter
3 medium yellow onions, peeled and diced
1 head celery, trimmed and diced
1 bunch chopped flat-leaf parsley (stems reserved for soup or stock)
1 cup chopped fresh sage leaves
Salt and pepper to taste
1 fresh 1 lb. loaf sourdough bread, broken into pieces and processed in a Cuisinart to breadcrumbs.
1/2 cup vegetable stock (or chicken if you don't have vegetarians around the table, but keep in mind that they live for stuffing.)


1.) Preheat oven to 350. Melt butter in large, heavy pot or skillet over medium-low heat.
2.) Add onions and cook over low heat, stirring occasionally until soft, about 15 minutes.
3.) Add celery, sage, parsley, salt & pepper. Cook 5 minutes longer.
4.) Turn out onion-celery-butter mixture into large mixing bowl. Add bread crumbs and toss until well-coated
5.) Pour stock over stuffing a little at a time, tossing to avoid sogginess.
6.) Use to stuff bird or bake in a hot, buttered baking dish at 350 for 30 minutes or until golden-brown on top.