Nature freak-out!

On our left, a Tomato Frog. No, really, that’s what it’s called. Found in Madagascar and at exhibits like the Bronx Zoo’s one of the same name, this critter is most likely a female because of its rich shade of red.

On our right, a watermelon radish. That’s right, radish. So crisp and delicious and much milder than what you are probably used to in a radish.

One’s good for eating. The other one, not so much. Ain’t evolution grand?

Road Trip!

Any takers in the New York City Metropolitan area who want to be up at 8 am on February 2nd to see what the critter on the right has to say about our meteorological future?

I’m free after 5 on Monday and don’t have to be at work till 4:20 on Tuesday. And as a friend could testify, I make the saddest mixed tapes for road trips ever.

Home – Groundhog Day.

after a big meal

the last thing I want is a rich dessert. I’ll eat it, oh yes, I will. But then I sit back, mildly disgusted with myself and my unending appetites.

I still enjoy a bite of something sweet to close the meal. This is a dessert that is complex in flavor and has a touch of sweetness that will not fill you with regrets. And it’s pretty, too!

Poached Pear in Red Wine with Mascarpone Cheese

5 firm bosc pears, peeled, bottoms trimmed so they sit upright

1 bottle red wine. I used a cheap-o Chianti and it was dandy

3/4 cup sugar

2 star anise

2 tbs. cardamom seeds or 8 crushed cardamom pods

2 two-inch strips orange zest

1 vanilla bean, bean split and seeds scraped out

mascarpone cheese

• Place pears stem side up in a pot where they can all fit snugly in one layer. Pour bottle of wine over, add sugar and spices. Bring to simmer and cover, cooking until pears are tender. Peek from time to time to make sure the pears are submerged. You can weigh them down with parchment paper if you’d like, or just rotate them occasionally to make sure that they are all having some quality time with the wine mixture. Poaching times vary according to ripeness of fruit from 30 minutes to an hour. Check them starting at 30 minutes every ten minutes or so.
• Remove pears from wine (don’t use stems to pick up) and set aside in a bowl. Pour half of the wine mixture over the pears, then return the remaining to the stove. Cook until wine reduces to a thick syrup. If not serving the pears soon, cover them and refrigerate. Pour syrup into a small container, cover and refrigerate as well.
• To serve: some serve these warm, but I find room temperature or slightly cold to be delicious. Place one pear in bowl, stem side up, drizzle with a fair amount of syrup and a spoon of mascarpone cheese.

an inauguration (and high time, indeed)

There is a hallway in my apartment. The kitchen is at one end and the dining room is at the other. This leap from one-room living to living in rooms has now been officially commemorated with my first supper for friends. While I recognized the change  between the two spaces, the difference of leaving my guests while finishing up different parts of the meal in a separate room didn’t become a reality until I was too far away to follow the conversation and just heard brief snippets of motorcycle talk and laughter. To those who don’t know my old home, let’s just say that wasn’t a problem: the stove was three feet from the table and everything made was watched over by me and all of my guests.

In slight anticipation of this hallway separation, I prepared a braise, something that can more or less be left alone once safely in the oven. The weather was once again an inspiration for the meal – any item that is cooked for a long period of time, that literally warms the air and fills the house with rich smells being welcome when the windows are shut tight against the cold. Osso buco is a dish that is popular as much for the bone that the meat is cooked on as the meat itself. The bone marrow enriches the sauce and serves as a bit of meaty butter at table.

I went for a traditional Italian preparation, braising the shanks with aromatic vegetables and tomato then topping with gremolata before serving. The heat of the dish opened the gremolata’s scent, adding a bright note to the rich sauce. Where before I plated food when people came for dinner, this meal was served family style to christen the dining table in an unfussy manner. Homemade bread, cauliflower risotto, a couple of green beans:  a proper meal in my home with friends. And high time, indeed.

Osso Buco with gremolata

Osso Buco:

4 to 5 veal shanks, roughly 4 lbs. secured with kitchen twine

salt and pepper

flour, for dredging

4 tbs. olive oil

2 tbs. butter

3/4 cup white wine

1 medium onion, minced

3 carrots, chopped fine

3 celery stalks, chopped fine

2 cloves garlic, minced

4 cups light stock (I used vegetable)

1 cup dry white wine

2 cups canned tomatoes in their juice, chopped

5 thyme sprigs

Gremolata:

1 tbs. minced lemon zest

1 tbs. minced orange zest

2 tbs. chopped flat leaf parsley

2 cloves minced garlic

• Preheat the oven to 350°. Pat the veal shanks dry with a paper towel. Season with salt and pepper, then dredge through flour, shaking off excess flour. Heat 2 tbs. of olive oil and all of the butter in a large oven proof pot, then brown the shanks well, roughly 10 minutes. Transfer the shanks to a plate.
• Heat the remaining 2 tbs. of oil, then add the onion, carrots, celery and garlic, cooking over low heat (give them a stir every now and again) until softened, around 8 minutes. Add the remaining osso buco ingredients (not the gremolata) to the pot and bring to a boil, stirring to get any brown bits from the veal up from the bottom of the pot. Arrange the veal shanks in one layer in dish, cover and place in the middle of the oven. Allow veal to cook for 2 1/2 hours, until very tender.
• To serve, remove veal shanks from pot, cut off strings, and set in a warm place while you reduce the sauce. Strain the vegetables out of the liquids and return the liquids to the pot, cooking until reduced by half.
• Stir the ingredients from the gremolata together just before serving. Plate the osso buco, pour a small amount of sauce over, then sprinkle with gremolata. Serve with extra sauce and gremolata on the side and some instrument to get the bone marrow out. I found a chopstick worked just fine.

Birthdays – Django Reinhardt

When I was a child, I would sit on the curb in front of my house waiting for the gypsies to take me away. I didn’t have anything too specific in mind: a horse drawn wagon with covered top that would serve as our home, clothing affixed with tiny cymbals that would fill my steps with jingle jangles, a life on the road. There weren’t too many horse drawn gypsy caravan homes frequenting the streets of central New Jersey in the early 70’s, so I settled for a gypsy Halloween costume year after year after year.

I didn’t come upon Django Reinhardt’s music until many years later, but if I was guaranteed that this was the soundtrack to the gypsy life, I’d be sitting on the curb to this day.

Today would have been his 100th birthday.

for those in the Williamsburg area tomorrow night

A good cause to drink for!

in acknowledgement of the weather/in acknowledgement of the date

The weather screamed out for split pea soup in the last two weeks, with the wind and then the cold and then the wet and then the snow. It is one of the first things I tried to cook and it is something that is immanently forgiving. To a point.

I learned how to cook through trial and error. A lot of trials and a lot of errors. Split pea soup is not meant to retain the shape of the soup ladle after being plopped in the bowl. Food poisoning teaches an unforgettable lesson: if the egg smells funny, don’t eat it! Humiliation works as a motivating factor when porkchops are called a ‘disaster’ and the ruse under which I had been brought along on a carpenter job in Cape Cod (to cook for the builders) was exposed for the sham it was. I collected a lot of wood that weekend to earn my keep. And while it may have been painful for some of those around me’s stomachs (my friend who I shared the bad egg dish with had the sense to peel her egg off and thus avoided a day and a half of food poisoning in a foreign land), it was how I learned. I just kept cooking.

As the cooking continued, so grew the cookbook collection. Cookbooks provided so much more to me than recipes: they held stories from the years in which they were created and offered  insights into individual’s and/or culture’s ways of life. I poured through them, drooling over the glossy photos and wondering at the flavor combinations. The collection spilled over from their assigned shelves near my kitchen table into several shelves on my main bookshelf. Though not organized in any formal way (bad librarian!) I would have been hard pressed to put a distinct line between travel log and cookbook with Patience Grey’s Honey from a Weed or anthropology and cookbook with Clementine Paddleford’s How America Eats.

When I moved from my apartment this fall, my cookbooks were saved (huzzah!), but only because they were tucked away in a storage space (boo). This constriction brought me to a realization: as my cookbook collection and my abilities as a cook have grown over the years, I stopped experimenting as I did those years ago when I cracked a bad egg on top of a vegetable tart before throwing it under the broiler. Not that a dish that ended in my French roommate threatening an Irish doctor with bodily harm unless he saw me immediately is necessarily the best source of inspiration, but it works for me. That sense of inspiration, play and level of fearlessness were missing in my cooking. I consulted cookbooks for everything: dishes I’ve made repeatedly, dishes I’ve heard of, dishes that should be self-explanatory just from tasting them. The cookbooks had turned from a source of inspiration into a crutch.

This may be a result of the much abused cliche  ‘the more you learn, the less you know.’ Having the good fortune of being introduced to more and more amazing food and chefs through my years in the restaurant industry, I became aware of my own lacks as a cook in a way I was unaware of when I first started off and thought everything could be done. This is part of the challenge of growing older, no? Gaining wisdom without losing the sense of possibility in the face of your knowledge.

And so, as I face down a new year and a new decade, I want to fill my cooking and, why not, all of my life with a sense of play and experimentation and yes, fearlessness inspired by and not inhibited by knowledge. A resolution? I suppose so!

Happy New Year to one and all!

to glaze or not to glaze

If that is the hardest question I have to face, then it’s a good day.

I never was a fan of glazes on cakes in the past. In spite of every other post on this blog being something sweet, I don’t like my sweets overly sweet. And a glaze on a cake seemed to me to be the same as making a sandwich using german chocolate cake as the bread and ice cream and pudding as the middle – overkill.

And then I baked this cake. The cake lacked the tang that I wanted from the lemon/buttermilk combo and was heading to the trashbin when I remembered the much maligned glaze option. The glaze saved the cake from the gallows.

Lemon-Buttermilk Bundt Cake

for the cake:

3 cups all purpose flour

1 tbs baking powder

1 tsp salt

1 1/2 cups sugar

3/4 cups unsalted butter (1 1/2 sticks), room temperature

3 large eggs, room temperature

3 tbs lemon zest

2 tbs lemon juice

3/4 cup buttermilk

for the glaze:

3/4 cup confectioner’s sugar

5 tbs. freshly squeezed lemon juice

3 tbs. grated lemon zest

• Preheat oven to 350°. Butter and flour a 10″ Bundt pan. Whisk flour, salt and baking powder together in a medium bowl. Using an electric mixer, beat the sugar and butter together until light and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, waiting for each egg to be fully incorporated before adding the next. Beat in lemon zest and juice. Alternating between dry and wet, beat in flour mixture in 3 additions and buttermilk in 2. Pour batter into prepared pan and bake for one hour or until a tester inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean.
• Cool cake in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes, then invert cake onto the rack and cool completely.
• Make glaze: whisk confectioner’s sugar, lemon juice and lemon zest in a bowl until well blended.
• Place the cake, still on the rack, onto a large plate or baking tray. Use a toothpick or a fork to prick the cake all over with small holes. Pour or spoon half of the glaze over the cake. Let the glaze set, for roughly one hour, then pour the remaining glaze over the cake (if your glaze has solidified in the mean time, you can warm it quickly till it reaches liquid consistency). Let the final coat of glaze set before slicing and serving.

I love you, Porgy

It’s funny how certain people have flavor profiles. You just know that by cooking this kind of food with this kind of sauce, they are going to be as happy as can be. One of my friends is happiest with a plain green salad and a pasta with red sauce in front of her. Another friend doesn’t think it’s a meal unless she has a piece of protein on the plate, preferably beef. A guy I know can easily be bribed with a bowl of hand pulled noodles. And more people than I can count would be happy if everything came with bacon. One of my friends likes to ask the “if you were on a desert island” variety of questions, one being the following: “If you could only eat three kinds of cuisine for the rest of your life, what would they be?”

Please don’t make me answer that question.

Different cravings come up that I can’t shake. Sometimes they are purely physical, a need for a big pile of kale to feed the leafy green gods that be. Other times they are emotional cravings to bring back a memory or to relive a specific meal. I woke up last week with a combination of the two; the need for a simple piece of fish with some ginger, not a specific meal I’ve had, but which brought to mind a friend through its ingredients.

Whole steamed porgy with ginger garlic sauce

1 1lb fish, gutted and scaled

fresh ginger (a knob a little smaller than a thumb, 1/2 cut into medallions, 1/2 minced)

5 cloves garlic, 3 sliced, 2 minced

1 tbs. grapeseed, vegetable, or sesame oil

2 tbs. soy sauce

• It feels silly even calling this a recipe. Rinse and pat dry the fish. Cut two or three scores on each side of the fish. Season with salt and pepper. Stuff the cavity of the fish with the ginger cut into coins and with the sliced garlic, reserving the rest of the garlic and ginger for the final sauce.
• Bring a pot with two inches deep of water to boil. When the water comes to a boil, place the fish in the pot above the water. I propped my fish up on two inverted small loaf pans with success. An inverted bowl would probably do the trick as well. Cover with lid and lower the heat to medium (you don’t want your water at a high boil).
• Check the fish in about 12 minutes. If the flesh flakes off the fish easily, it’s done. If it sticks, give it another minute or two.
• Remove fish from pot and set aside on a plate. In a separate pan, heat a small splash of neutral oil like grapeseed or sesame oil if you want a stronger flavor. Add the remaining garlic and ginger and stir for one minute until it gives off its aroma (don’t let them brown). Add soy sauce and heat for 30 seconds. Pour over fish.

This is just the base recipe. Add scallions or cilantro or a hot chili if you’d like. I had it with some plain steamed cabbage and carrots because that was what was in the house. It would have been just as satisfying without.

cooking for one

There are nights when a large bowl of popcorn serves as dinner. Other nights, it’s the single vegetable meal, an entire plate of broccoli with lemon, garlic and chili flakes serving as appetizer, protein + 2 and dessert. I eat fairly simply when eating alone. There’s no need for multiple courses and I serve myself plates that I would never set before a friend.

But every once in a while I cook for myself as if I’m a guest in my own home.

We had the bunny and now into the ducky.

Duck is unlike any other bird that I have tasted. It is rich and fatty and has a mineral quality that the tofus of the meat world (a.k.a. chickens) can’t hold a candle to. It’s not something that I think to eat frequently, but after cooking this meal, it might happen more often.

Duck is traditionally served with some sort of fruit sauce, the sweetness and the acidity of the fruit cutting through the richness of the meat. This gave me an excellent chance to bust out one of my many canned items, so I made a sauce from the sour cherry/red current sauce I had made during the summer when the bounty of cherries fell into my lap. At the end of the day though I enjoyed the piece I ate off of the cutting board better – plain, unadorned and allowing the flavor to come through in all of its rich glory. Maybe the sauce is for when I’m cooking for more than one.

Crispy Skinned Duck Breast with Sour Cherry Poivre Sauce

1 duck breast

salt and pepper

1 shallot, minced

1/4 cup sour cherry and red currant sauce (if you don’t happen to live in my home, which honestly, I’d be a little freaked out if it turned out you did, you can substitute fruit of your choice using fresh fruit and a little wine to make up the liquid part)

• Heat a heavy pan over a high flame. While the pan is heating, pat the breast dry and season with salt and a little pepper. When the pan is hot, set the breast fatty side down in the pan. You might want to have your window open, because the duck will give off a fair amount of smoke due to the fat content.
• Lower the heat to medium and cook the breast for twenty minutes. If you are cooking more than one breast or if your duck is extremely fatty, you might need to remove some of the fat from the pan. After the 20 minutes is up, turn the breast to the skin side and sear for 3-4 minutes longer. Remove from the heat (and pan) and set aside to rest for a few minutes.
• Use the duck fat left in the pan to sautee the minced shallots until they become translucent, 1-2 minutes, adding a little olive oil if there isn’t enough fat. Add fruit and liquid to the pan along with a fair amount of freshly ground pepper and salt to taste. Simmer these together for 2-3 minutes. I added a splash of cognac at this point and a small pat of butter to give the sauce a bit more body.
• Slice duck breast across the grain and pour sauce over. Eat. Feel like the queen (or king) of your castle (or hovel).

I had brussel sprout leaves sauteed in some of the duck fat and a turnip puree with my duck. Sweet potato puree would have been lovely or some roasted squash or tried but true mashed potatoes. You are cooking for yourself, one of the joys of which is only having to satisfy your own taste buds.

A is for Dining Alone

….and so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself. This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.

•Bibliography: M.F.K. Fisher, An Alphabet for Gourmets. New York: Viking Press, 1949.