a classic

When it was happening, I didn’t think much of it. I was at a party at my Aunt Celia and Uncle Maurice’s house and happy to be there. Parties at my different aunt’s and uncle’s houses were always good (except for the trying to get my parents to leave part), but in different ways. They both involved good-byes followed by an hour or two of singing, followed by more good-byes and then more song. One had piles of comic books and big comfortable chairs to read them in and a hill up the street to roll down into traffic on a Big Wheel™; the other had a huge back yard and crazy realistic looking marzipan fruit that looked way better than they tasted and bowls of really, really good gummy bears on every side table. As you can tell, I was a very profound child with complex needs.

Anyway, I was walking through the kitchen, sent to get a glass of ice or maybe searching for some soda or a box of crackers for the cheese and I remember my uncle taking a large wood bowl out of a cabinet and setting it on the counter. He peeled a garlic clove and then smashed it against the inside of the bowl, circling the perimeter multiple times with the clove. One of those throw-away moments that doesn’t register at the time but you return to again in later years.

My uncle was an epicure.

When I discovered the Thin Man movies I had a brief moment of recognition of my aunt and uncle in these characters and in that recognition realized that it was part of why I moved to New York City: the good life, the bon vivants, the quick wits and the people who owned specific bowls for their salads that they seasoned with smashed garlic cloves. That world seemed much more the place for me than the shopping malls and the endless driving of the suburbs that I desperately wanted to escape. As you can tell, I was a very profound 17 year old with complex needs.

My uncle gave me my first taste of a Sidecar – a bad one, as he was quick to point out – with too much Cointreau tipping the balance from the perfect medium between sweet and tart to a treacly sweetness.

I have since spent many nights with sidecars in my hand, all with interesting outcomes. Tonight I made one for my Uncle Maurice, in thanks for the world he introduced me to.

Sidecar

fresh squeezed lemon juice

Armagnac (traditional is Cognac, but this is what I use)

Couintreau (or orange liqueur of your choice)

• Using the three ingredients in equal proportions, but perhaps leaving a splash less of the orange liqueur out of the equation, shake strenuously with ice in a cocktail shaker then pour into a cocktail glass with a sugared rim. Lemon rind garnish is optional.

Mascara

Coming at the end of a large family, I sometimes found items passed down to me that I wasn’t in a position to refuse. Like my older brother’s winter coat. Or my sister’s dresses. But there was one thing that I inherited that was the gift that kept giving. My sister’s rabbit, Mascara*.

Mascara was a second generation rabbit in my family, the offspring of one night of freedom of her mother, Sniffles*, from her rabbit hutch. Mascara and Sniffles were outdoor bunnies, living in hutches built by my dad divided into an indoor area and an outdoor mesh-floored area where we hoped they’d poop, operative word being hoped. A chicken-wired bunny run gave them a space to hop about without the same repercussions as Sniffles’ previous foray into the wilds of New Jersey. At some point, my older siblings figured out (and I still don’t understand how this combination was stumbled upon) that Mascara viewed my Eeyore stuffed animal doll as her arch enemy.

Have you ever heard a rabbit scream?

If not, count that among the things to be thankful for. If so, my condolences.

It is horrific. Loud beyond any proportion to the size creature making it, high pitched and nightmare inducing. That would be Mascara’s reaction to my Eeyore doll every time one  of my siblings would steal him from me to throw into the rabbit run with her. This banshee, this hater of Eeyore who didn’t like anyone picking her up, who shrieked like she had just sat down on a bed of hot coals covered in broken glass became my unwanted pet when my sister went off to college. Willie, an albino rabbit who somehow dropped into the bunny menagerie came to me from a brother three years later. These rabbits thrived on neglect. After my initial attempts to give them affection were unceremoniously rebuffed (Mascara clawed me), I saw them as a slightly smelly daily chore: dump food in one bowl, water in the other. I did not develop a love of rabbits until later years.

Rabbit in Mustard Sauce

a 2 1⁄2 – 3 lb rabbit, cleaned, cut into 6 or 8 parts

2 tbs. olive oil or a combination of oil and salt pork

2 tbs. butter

2 shallots, minced

1 medium onion, minced

2 cups dry white wine

1 cups stock (I used vegetable)

1/4 cup dijon mustard

a couple of twigs of fresh thyme

• Pat the bunny pieces dry then season with salt and pepper. Heat the oil up in a good, heavy pot that is large enough to fit all of the rabbit pieces in one layer. When the oil is hot, add the rabbit, being sure not to overcrowd the pan. It is important for the rabbit to have space during the browning period so you will have to do this in 2 or more batches.
• Brown the rabbit pieces on all sides and remove the pieces to a large bowl as they are browned. Don’t rush this process because the browning adds a nice flavor to the braise and also keeps the final dish from being a sea of yellow and beige. Set the bowl with the browned rabbit pieces to the side.
• Lower the heat under the pot you browned the rabbit in, then add the butter. Add onions and shallots, stirring until softened. Add the wine and boil until reduced by half. Return the rabbit to the pot, add stock and thyme and lower the heat. Cover the pot and simmer for 40 minutes.
• Once again, remove rabbit to a clean bowl. Reduce the remaining liquid in half, then stir in mustard. Return the rabbit to the sauce, turning to coat, and simmer until heated through. Eat the bunny.

*inherited with the critters were their names. At age 8 I would have probably named every rabbit Mr. Bun Bun. Actually, I think I still would.

where was I?

Oh yes, ice cream.

Some people in New York (and I’m sure in other places, but I can only speak of here) see it as a point of pride that they have never used their kitchen for much else other than making coffee, storing beer or eating cereal. For me it isn’t living somewhere unless I can cook and have people over to eat that food. Which I wasn’t able to do for the last two months or so (for reasons that I may or may not go into at greater length down the line). And so I moved: ditched the security (read: stranglehold) of a rent-stabilized apartment in the East Village with a 15 year old lease, dumped the belongings that held me there (except the kitchen equipment – that made the move) and moved into a new space which may or may not work out, time will tell. But one of the first things that greet you when entering this new apartment is something that looks a little like this:

How’s that for a greeting? I’m still exploring the joys of using this beast for cooking and I have yet to break the oven in – that will happen in the next few days – but wow, I feel bad for those people who would look at this beautiful piece of equipment and think “storage space for phone books.”

Within the first few days of moving in I cooked myself dinner for the first time in over two months. That goes a long way in making me feel grounded. I sat at a table instead of the middle of my bed, with a real plate and silverware instead of a takeout container and cheap chopsticks, eating food that I picked, brought home and cooked. I hope I never take that for granted again. It was a simple meal: roasted mackerel with an end of the summer tomato, caper and lemon sauce and some braised dandelion greens. It tasted good. As the cold weather makes its intermittent presence known other meal possibilities crop up: soups and stews, anything braised, and perhaps this will be the year when I bite the bullet and make cassoulet from beginning to end (oh duck confit, will you be my bete noire?).

It’s good to be here, for however long it is. It’s open roads ahead with a little ice cream to fuel the ride:

Cardamom Pistachio Ice Cream

1 1/2 cups whole milk

1 1/2 cups heavy cream

1 vanilla bean, seeds scraped from the pod and all of the bean reserved

10 crushed green cardamom pods

5 egg yolks

1 cup sugar

1/3 cup pistachios, removed from shells and roughly chopped

• Place the milk, heavy cream, all parts of the vanilla bean and the cardamom into a medium pot and bring to a simmer. While the mixture heats, combine the sugar and egg yolks in a medium bowl.
• When the pot comes to a simmer, add a small amount of the hot liquid to the egg yolk mixture, stirring all the time to keep the yolks from cooking and continuing to add more hot liquid until the two are incorporated (this will take a cup and a half or so of the hot liquid).
• Add the warmed egg yolk mixture to the pot and heat the mixture until it reaches 170° on an instant read thermometer or until the custard coats the back of a spoon. Remove from heat.
• When the mixture has cooled, refrigerate for eight hours/overnight and process according to the ice cream makers instructions. Add the pistachios 5 minutes before the ice cream is finished.

Birthdays – Leonard Cohen

Happy 75th to the poet, the novelist, the singer, the songwriter, the Buddhist monk.

Birthdays – Eduardo Galeano

There were books that I gave credit of being mind-altering while in college:  Herman Hesse’s Demian, Milan Kundera’s  The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Henry Miller’s The Tropic of Cancer – the usual suspects. But there were less notorious books that I read during the same years that truly served that function: Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, Eduardo Galeano’s three part series Memory of Fire. These books taught me perspective in a way that no piece of fiction had done before. Galeano’s precision of language struck me as very few poets had. This was the history that I had not been taught in grammar school or high school and they made me hungry for more. I became enamored of primary sources and eager for the paper trail of research. Galeano gave voice in those books, as in his others, to those who were otherwise silenced.

1984 Washington

We Are All Hostages

Nicaragua and other insolent countries still act as if unaware that history has been ordered not to budge, under pain of total destruction of the world.

“We will not tolerate….” warns President Reagan.

Above the clouds hover the nuclear bombers. Farther up, the military satellites. Beneath the earth and beneath the sea, the missiles. The Earth still rotates because the great powers permit it to do so. A plutonium bomb the size of an orange would suffice to explode the entire planet, and a good-size discharge of radiation could turn it into a desert populated by cockroaches.

President Reagan says Saint Luke (14:31) advises increasing military funding to confront the Communist hordes. The economy is militarized; weapons shoot money to buy weapons to shoot money. They manufacture arms, hamburgers, and fear. There is no better business than the sale of fear. The president announces, jubilantly, the militarization of the stars.

1984: São Paulo

Twenty Years After the  Reconquest of Brazil

The last president of the military dictatorship, General Figueiredo, leaves the government to civilians.

When they ask him what he would do if he were a worker earning the minimum wage, General Figueiredo replies: “I would put a bullet through my head.”

Brazil suffers a famished prosperity. Among countries selling food to the world, it stands in fourth place, among countries suffering hunger in the world, sixth place. Now Brazil exports arms and automobiles as well as coffee, and produces more steel than France; but Brazilians are shorter and weigh less than they did twenty years ago.

Millions of homeless children wander the streets of cities like São Paulo, hunting for food. Buildings are turning into fortresses, doormen into armed guards. Every citizen is either an assailant or assailed.

Today is his 69th birthday.

Bibliography: Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire: III. Century of the Wind. NY: Pantheon Books, 1988. pp. 272-273.

Why fight it?

For reasons that I won’t go into now (and perhaps will never go into in this forum), my home has, as of late, been less than hospitable. Unwelcoming of cooking or eating, loafing or reading, and at the end of the day, of sleeping. Ice cream, something that only requires roughly 5 minutes of stove time plus 20 or so unattended minutes of machine agitation is about as much as I can hack in these hostile territories. And while I hesitate to push yet another tale of ice cream and sweets on you who are so kind as to check in, it’s what I’m doing. Move along to another blog if your cavities are acting up.

Coffee Ice Cream with Cocoa Nibs

(adapted from David Lebovitz’s A Perfect Scoop)

1 1/2 cup whole milk

1 1/2 cup heavy cream

5 egg yolks

3/4 cup sugar

1 vanilla bean

1 1/2 cup whole coffee beans

1/3 cup cocoa nibs

• Split the vanilla bean in half, scrape the seeds from the pod and place the seeds and pod in a small pot. Pour all of the whole milk, 1/2 cup heavy cream, and the coffee beans into the pot and bring to a simmer. Do not allow to boil.
• Mix the sugar and the egg yolks in a small bowl until the mixture is a pale yellow color.
• Pour a small quantity of the milk mixture over the yolks and sugar, stirring all of the time so the yolks don’t cook. Add more of the dairy, continuing stirring, until you have warmed all of the eggs. Scrape the mixture back into the pot and cook until it reaches roughly °170 degrees on an instant read thermometer or until the custard coats the back of a spoon.
• Pour the custard over the remaining one cup of heavy cream. Stir until the mixture cools down, cover and refrigerate for at least 8 hours.
• Before making the ice cream, strain the custard (including the coffee beans) through a fine meshed strainer, then proceed according to your ice cream maker’s directions. Add the cocoa nibs to the mix 5 minutes before the ice cream is finished. Freeze for at least 3 hours before serving.

I’ve made buttermilk/strawberry ice cream, gingersnap ice cream, lemon verbena ice cream, apricot/chamomile ice cream and more in the last couple of weeks. If anyone wants the recipes to most (I sort of winged it with some), I will happily send them along.

Happy September, everyone!

Huzzah!

I swear I’ll write a substantive post soon, but in the mean time, some good book news related to our recent birthday girl.

a good read

is the cover story of this week’s Time magazine.

Birthdays – Julia Child

The release of “Julie/Julia” has caused an impromptu celebration of Julia Child’s life among those who had the good fortune to meet/work/know her.  The one common denominator of these stories is the sheer joy with which Julia approached food, cooking and life. She willingly shared her enthusiasm and knowledge with anyone who expressed an interest.

Her kitchen is now a permanent part of the Smithsonian. You can take an online tour of it here.

Today would have been her 97th birthday. We should all eat something delicious in her honor!

High: 90° Real Feel®: 99°

If I had a registered Real Feel index, I would put it at around slow motion under water molasses movement today. But I guess 99° works for some.

I know there is fruit out there waiting to be canned, but on days like this, when it’s a debate if I should or shouldn’t turn the one burner on for the three minutes necessary to make my stove top espresso in the morning or walk the two blocks (two whole blocks? Oh, the humanity!) to have someone else make my coffee (sloth won out over stickiness – coffee was made at home this morning), putting 12 quarts of water to boil is not an option.

Does this count as a recipe? You’ve probably heard of the combination before, though I remember the first time I had it, maybe four years ago, dining at the bar of Blue Hill. It struck me then, as it does today, as a perfect plate for the weather. Cool, refreshing, complimentary salty and sweet notes, and bright with the addition of feta adding some substance for those who need protein in every bite.

Watermelon, Tomato, Feta and Mint Salad

This would be an item where the title pretty much covers the recipe. You can adjust this to how much you want to make, using the same amount of watermelon to tomato. I’ve seen it presented in large hunks, but think it looks more attractive (and is more fun for diners who don’t know what they are eating) to make the watermelon and tomato into roughly the same size bites so you are never sure what you have on your fork. I use a small quantity of feta to add a salty note, not wanting too much of it to load down the salad, thus ruining its refreshing quality. Mint is also a matter of personal taste, add a little and if you want more, throw some more in! I do add a pinch of salt (in spite of the feta) and a drizzle of olive oil just before serving.

With a dish like this, where there are so few ingredients, it is very important to make sure that all of your ingredients are as delicious as they can be. Both watermelon and tomatoes are in season on the east coast right now, so if you are lucky enough to live near a farmer’s market, swing by and pick some up. And if you, like me, like to feel like a giant while eating your food, you can pick up one of the watermelons that fit in the palm of your hand: