anapestic

Beaten

2009-05-22T06:30:00.000-07:00

There's a fairly substantial culinary mythology surrounding beaten biscuits. I'm sure that academic culinary historians know the true story, but it's pretty clear that most of what you read on the Internet is third-hand information written by people who've never actually eaten, let alone made, a beaten biscuit. And, really, there's nothing wrong with that because, these days anyway, the beaten biscuit is either entirely or almost entirely a mythical creature. Some of the information I've seen suggests that they're still common, or at least available, in Kentucky and Maryland, but I grew up in Maryland, and no one has ever served me a beaten biscuit. They may be a creature of the deeper south, but when I was a child, my family often traveled as far south as Georgia and Alabama to visit relatives, and I never saw any beaten biscuits there, either. (On the other hand, when I was in college, I knew a young woman from Kentucky who mentioned in passing that, as a child, she had been served beaten biscuits by an elderly woman. At the time, I didn't know enough about them to follow up with an appropriate level of curiosity and/or skepticism, but I believe we have at least one credible account of beaten biscuits having survived into the 1970s.)

Not that any of that is surprising. My best sense, from what I've read, is that the beaten biscuit is a creature arising from the ready availability of free (i.e., slave) labor and the not-yet-createdness of commercial baking powder.

My first encounter with the notion of beaten biscuits came from reading the original version of Joy of Cooking, where the process is described by the Rombauers, who, I can't help but believe, likely never actually followed the recipe. They describe it as something that requires both labor and time, but they also have the breezy you-can-do-it-ness of those DIY hosts who tell you that you can lay your own hardwood flooring. I have laid my own hardwood flooring, and I am here to tell you: you can't do it. YOU CAN'T DO IT. Leave it to the professionals.

Anyway, somewhere in my store of never-used cookbooks, I have a variation on a Junior League cookbook produced by some woman's group or other in Kentucky, and it includes a food processor version of beaten biscuits. But I can't find that cookbook. I received it as a gift many years ago from my then-sister-in-law, and while it was somewhat entertaining, it didn't seem very useful, aside from the beaten biscuit recipe, which, I may just have mentioned, I can no longer find. But the ideas that a) beaten biscuits are something worth trying, at least once, and b) they can be accomplished with the help of a machine (in fact, they were, apparently, often made with something called a "biscuit brake," and Joy of Cooking says you can also prepare the dough by passing it ten times through the coarsest blade of your meat grinder) have stuck in my head lo these many years.

I'm also planning to serve salmon mousse at an upcoming church fundraiser, and I had originally thought to serve it on relatively thin, relatively small baking powder biscuits. I was going to add dill to the dough, then slice the biscuits in half and make a mini sandwich of the salmon mousse plus a very thin slice of English cucumber. But then I thought, "Hey! Why not try beaten biscuits?" So the other night I decided to try a test batch. I halved and slightly modified the JoC recipe. I made a fairly stiff dough in the food processor. Then I folded it over and whacked it a couple of times, just to be able to say I'd beaten it, then I put it in the KitchenAid with the paddle attachment for five minutes, then I rolled it out a couple of times, then I wondered whether the whole notion of breaking down the gluten even makes any sense, then I pulled the dough into pieces and ran it through the food processor for a minute until it came back together, then I did that exact same thing four more times, then I rolled it out as thin as I could, then I cut it into small rounds, then I pricked the rounds with a fork, and then I baked it.

And I have to say that the results were pleasing. But I also have to say that they tasted a lot like a slightly puffier version of a water cracker and that baking powder biscuits, which are immensely less work, are a lot better. I will say that the reported keeping qualities of beaten biscuits are true. A baking powder biscuit needs to be eaten very soon after baking or there's not much point. A full twenty-four hours later, the beaten biscuits still tasted the same. But, then, so do water crackers.

Of course, it's possible that I just didn't execute them properly. For one thing, I rolled them a lot thinner than is usual, but I was going for something to serve salmon mousse on. Perhaps, given enough time and 500 whacks with an axe handle, I would have gotten something revelatory rather than just tasty, but I don't think so. I think that, like many myths, beaten biscuits improve by being dreamed about rather than by being realized.

Anyway, here's the recipe.

Beatenish Biscuits

2 c. all-purpose flour
1/2 t. salt
1/4 t. baking powder
1 t. dried dill
1 T. vegetable shortening, frozen
1 T. butter
1/4 c. cold milk
ice water

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Combine the flour, salt, baking powder, and dill in the food processor and whirl briefly to combine. Add the shortening and butter and pulse until the mixture resembles a coarse meal (you know, like you're making biscuits). With the motor running, add the milk. Then slowly add the water until the dough forms into a ball. Knead it briefly, fold it up a few times, roll it out, beat it, tear it to bits, put it back in the food processor, and abuse it in whatever way seems like a good idea at the time. Eventually, the dough should be nice and smooth or whatever, so roll it out, cut out the biscuits, put them on a baking sheet, prick them well with a fork, and bake them for about thirty-five minutes, or until they're barely browned.

Remove the biscuits from the oven, let them cool, pour yourself a glass of wine, sit down, and rest your arms. Eat a biscuit, then put the remaining cooled biscuits in a tin, as evidence. Tell everyone you know that you made beaten biscuits, and then lose the recipe. Experience profound gratitude for the advent of commercial baking powder.

Cold

2009-05-18T17:56:00.000-07:00

I realize that I haven't posted in forever, but I try to think that I haven't lost all my readers: I've instead gained a great deal of privacy. This could come in handy. In just under two weeks, there's a fundraiser for the music program at church, and I'm doing substantially all of the food preparation. (People offered to help, but asking people to make specific things would require a level of organization that I just don't have. A few people will show up on the afternoon of the fundraiser to help assemble things, and a bunch of other people will carry trays around.) So I can put my recipes here, for my own reference, and when attendees ask me for any of my recipes, I can say, "Oh, I just found it online. I can't remember exactly where." And this will have elements of truth (while being, in substance, a complete lie, which makes it even better) since each recipe is stored in its own post, and I certainly don't memorize the URLs for individual posts. I will, of course, be happy to give any of my recipes to anyone who makes a suitable donation to the music fund. Yeah, I know, but it's for a good cause.

Anyway, the hoped-for scale of the evening combined with my personal desire to serve a large variety of nibbles, means that I need to prepare things that can be fully or nearly completed either well in advance (and preferably frozen) or with relatively little effort. (It also means that at some point I have to become organized, because I'm also singing, and frazzled is really not a good mood in which to perform "La Vie en Rose." Mme. Piaf certainly had more than her share of troubles, but she appears to have been at one of her high points when she wrote the lyrics, and, in any case, one doubts that she was ever frazzled.) This chilled tomato soup meets both criteria. It can certainly be prepared several (probably many, but why push it?) days in advance and left in the refrigerator, and it's a snap. That's because its main ingredient is a bottle of V8. Sue me.

My doctor has recently encouraged me to limit my sodium intake, so I used a bottle of low sodium V8 for the test batch, which is now in my refrigerator, and which I am working my way through eight or so ounces at a time. And it's good, but it needs salt, so I'll probably use regular V8 when I prepare the final batch. Or perhaps I'll use one bottle of each, since I'll probably need a double batch. Also, the amount of horseradish in the recipe is the amount I think would likely be good. I thought I had horseradish in the refrigerator, but when I got home, the bottle was very nearly empty, so I only got a little less than a teaspoon, and the soup definitely needs more. You can adjust to taste, of course.

Also, dill isn't the only way to go here. If I find some nice basil next week, I might finish the soup with that. Cilantro would also be good. The dried dill works pretty well, but fresh would probably be a better idea. I used nonfat Greek style yogurt because there's already going to be a lot of very heavy food at the fundraiser, so I thought something light would be a wise choice. But either whole milk yogurt or sour cream would also be yummy.

I haven't worked the recipe out yet, but I'm going to serve small amounts of the soup in tiny cups and make some sort of cheddar cheese straws/wafers as a companion piece. That way it'll be sort of like communion. (The addition of the onions and, especially, the yogurt make the color not quite right, but the room will be dark, probably.) I may not make the communion inspiration explicit to the guests: most Unitarian Universalists are as fond of sacrilege as I am, but there are some who wouldn't appreciate me telling them to take a body-of-Christ-cheddar-cheese wafer and follow it with a blood-of-Christ shot of tomato soup. Chacun a son gout, I reckon.

Chilled Tomato Soup

2 T. butter
1 c. chopped sweet onion
1 T. flour
A 64-ounce bottle of V-8
Freshly ground black pepper
1 T. prepared horseradish
1 c. Greek style yogurt (nonfat or whole milk, as you prefer)
1 T. dried dill

Melt the butter in the bottom of a large saucepan. Add the onion, cover, and cook until very lightly browned. Add the flour, stir well, and cook for another three to five minutes.

Add 2 cups of the V-8 and the ground pepper (to taste). Bring to a boil, then simmer for three or four minutes. Turn off the heat. Let the mixture cool to a temperature that your blender can handle (or use an immersion blender if your mother didn't break yours). Add the horseradish, blend until smooth, then return to the pot. Add the remainder of the V-8, whisk in the yogurt until smooth, and stir in the dill. Adjust the seasoning. Chill thoroughly.

Since cold soups typically require more seasoning than soups to be served hot, it's a good idea to put a teacup or small soup bowl in the freezer when you start cooking. Then when you've added the cool and cold ingredients, you can put a small amount of the soup in the cold teacup, put the whole thing back in the freezer, and taste it five minutes later to get an idea of how it's going to taste when it's served.

Not Unlike

2008-12-15T10:07:00.000-08:00

I have, for many years now, resisted the allure of dark fruitcakes. It is true that I have often, particularly at this time of year, leaped to the defense of fruitcakes whenever some misguided and underinformed soul has issued a blanket condemnation of fruitcakes as doorstops. And I've made black cake, which some would say is the cake that all dark fruitcakes hope to become in their next lives. But I haven't made the traditional dense and rich dark fruitcake of the sort that my mother makes. And I love it, truly I do. Even though my mother includes those horrible red and green cherries in her dark fruitcake, she also includes the best pecans, and she cloaks everything in a really good, spicy dark cake. What she ends up with is notably humongous, and it lasts, wrapped in cloth, soaked in spirits, and then wrapped again in aluminum foil, in a closet for much of the following year, disappearing a slice at a time.

I am very happy with my light fruitcake. I have always been very happy with it, and, now that I've perfected it, I'm happier still. But I still wanted a dark fruitcake that I could slice up and pass around to all the fruitcake haters out there whenever one of them mentions either doorstops or bricks. And then a few days ago, I was going through the pantry, trying to make some space so that V. wouldn't have another storage-related meltdown, and as I was going through the dried fruit section, I realized that I hadn't done anything with the big bag of prunes that I'd bought recently from Costco. And that got me thinking about my awesome prune cake and how I'd wanted to try it again with a few modifications, and that got me thinking that the prune cake was not entirely unlike a black cake, though with fewer fruits and a much shorter maceration period. And I would be remiss here if I didn't mention that my original prune cake was based on a prune cake by redfox, to whom I cannot link because her blog has now gone underground, most likely because she did something to piss off Big Prune.

Anyway, I made this cake twice to try to get it just the way I wanted it. It was very good the first time, but I decided that I wanted more prunes, more chocolate, more nuts, and more spices. I also further lowered the baking temperature, to make sure that I didn't get any burning. Unfortunately, I used up all of my black walnuts (they'd been in my freezer for almost two years, but they were still delicious) in the first batch. The recipe would almost certainly be even better with black walnuts, but they're expensive and hard to find, and it's very good with good old English walnuts. If you have black walnuts lying around though (and you don't want to just send them all to me, even though I swear I'll give them a good home), you could use half as many of those.

I'll admit that part of the reason for increasing some of the ingredients was to get the recipe to the right size for three smaller (8.5x4.5) loaf pans. The first time I made it, I prepared three pans, but when two were filled, I only had enough batter left to make the two small crescent-moon-shaped cakes you see in one of the pictures.

This is a very dense, rich cake, and perhaps it's not for everyone, just because it's so dense and rich and flavorful (though not overly sweet). Of course, some people have a terrible aversion to prunes, but you can get around that by failing to mention the prunes. I think it's an awesome cake, but it takes a bite or two before you can properly appreciate all the delicious subtleties. I have a few of these wrapped in cloth and soaking in port, and if I remember, I'll report back on how they age.

It occurs to me that the addition of some dried cherries to the fruit mixture would be a good thing, but I forgot to add any. Next time, perhaps.

The Prune Is Not Unlike a Cake Fruitcake

24 oz. prunes
4 oz. candied orange peel
1 oz. candied ginger
1 cup port
2 cups walnuts
8 oz. (2 cups) all purpose flour
1 t. baking powder
1/2 t. salt
1/4 cup cocoa powder
2 t. ground ginger
2 t. ground cinnamon
1/2 nutmeg, grated
8 oz. (1 cup) sugar
8 oz. (2 sticks) butter, at room temperature
2 t. vanilla extract
4 large eggs, at room temperature
6 oz. bittersweet chocolate

Cut each prune in six or eight pieces. Finely chop the candied ginger. Put the prunes, candied ginger, and candied orange peel in a container and add the port. Close the container and macerate overnight. Invert occasionally to make sure all the fruit has a chance to soak up the port.

At some point before you begin the final batter preparation, toast the walnuts at 300 degrees for ten to fifteen minutes, being careful not to burn them.

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Prepare your pans.

Combine the flour, baking powder, salt, and spices in a bowl. Mix well and reserve. Finely chop the chocolate and reserve.

In the bowl of your stand mixer, cream the butter thoroughly. (See my most recent post for a discussion about butter creaming, etc.) Slowly add the sugar, and continue mixing until well creamed and fluffy. Scrape down the bowl, if necessary. Add the eggs one at a time with the mixer running. Stop to scrape down the bowl, as necessary. Add the vanilla.

With the mixer on low, slowly add the dry ingredients. When well incorporated, add the nuts and continue mixing. Add the macerated fruit, then add the chocolate. Scrape down the bowl, make sure the batter is well mixed, and fill the loaf pans. Smooth the top, then put in the oven.

Bake for about an hour at 300, or until the top springs back when lightly pressed. Let cool in the pans for at least half an hour, then remove from the pans and let cool completely. If desired, soak some cotton fabric in additional port, then use it to wrap the cooled fruitcakes. Put in a large plastic bag and close tightly.

Perfect Fruitcake

2008-12-09T19:32:00.000-08:00

I have been a bad holiday baker this year. I did make some lebkuchen for the church bazaar, but I haven't made more since, despite L.'s insistence that they were the best ever. There's still time, I suppose, but usually by now I'd have made a lot more. And, truly, this seems like the year to dial back the commercialism and to crank the baking up a notch.

But I reckon there's still plenty of time, and a couple of days ago I set out to try a new fruitcake recipe. For years, my standard fruitcake recipe has been the Fruitcake Cockaigne from Joy of Cooking. It's a very good recipe, and it produces a very good white fruitcake. Even people who don't like fruitcake like it. But this past weekend, I had to make something for the bake sale for my daughter's ballet company's Nutcracker performances, so I decided to make the pound cake from Joy of Cooking, (I followed the recipe exactly, except that I omitted the mace and added a teaspoon each of lemon and almond extracts, and I measured the flour and sugar by weight -- a pound of each, naturally -- rather than by volume. Oh, and use the option where you add the eggs whole, not the option where you separated the whites and then beat them and fold them in: who the hell wants a fluffy pound cake?) and it was truly wonderful. And I remembered (and then verified) that JoC described Fruitcake Cockaigne as "not unlike a pound cake." And I suppose that's true, after a fashion, but if you look at the proportions, the butter and egg content are far short of what's in a pound cake. I wasn't sure that a pound cake with nuts and fruit mixed in was quite what I wanted, but I thought that something even less unlike a pound cake would probably be very good, so I doubled the butter and added an egg so that instead of the classic 1:1:1:1 proportions of butter, flour, sugar, and egg in a true pound cake, I was closer to 0.75:1:1:0.75. Very rich, indeed, for a fruit cake.

I had thought that because the pound cake recipe makes two 9x5 loaf pans, a similar recipe with the addition of four cups of fruits and nuts would require a third pan, but, as it happens, the recipe perfectly filled the two loaf pans.

There are several items that are more important than usual when you're making a pound cake or a not-unlike-a-pound-cake fruitcake:

1. It is not in the nature of this cake to release from the pan easily, so pan preparation is important. I melt shortening in the microwave and apply it to my (metal) loaf pans with a brush. I cut a piece of waxed paper to fit the bottom of the pan, put it in the pan, then brush the whole pan (including the waxed paper) again. Then I flour the pan.

2. You should start out with your butter and your eggs as close to room temperature as possible. I usually do this by leaving the butter out for a couple of hours, but there is also a "soften" setting on my microwave that will work if I forget. You can't let the butter melt, but it shouldn't be cold, either. When I'm starting to do my mise en place, I put my eggs in a bowl and cover them with hot water from the tap. By the time I'm ready to add them, they're usually near room temperature.

3. This is a recipe that you should not rush. But the butter in your mixer and let it cream while you're preparing the pans. Add the sugar gradually, and then let it cream with the butter for five minutes or even longer. Do not worry about overbeating at this point. You will also be baking the cake for a long time at a relatively low temperature.

4. Light fruitcakes sometimes have a problem where the fruits at the edge of the cake burn. Soaking the fruits overnight in rum takes care of this and also gives great flavor.

As it happens, I was a little bit late getting my pans in the oven, so that even after I'd gone out to pick up A. and L. from L.'s ballet and then brought them home for a while, when it was time to take them over to their mother's house, only one of the cakes was done. (I found one nonstick pan and one stick pan, and the nonstick pan, being darker, finishes the cake five to ten minutes earlier.) The other was close, so I turned off the oven, opened the oven door for a few seconds, closed it again, and left. I was letting A. drive so that she could practice for her driver's exam, and she had to unload a bunch of stuff from the car (she flew back home Saturday from a semester in Guadalajara), so it was about forty-five minutes before I was home again. The top of the cake looked slightly odd and flat, but I pulled it out of the oven then and depanned it a few minutes later (both cakes released perfectly). When the cakes were cool, I decided to wrap the other one in cloth and let it soak in more rum for a week or two, but I figured I might as well cut into the other one to make sure it was properly baked.

Words cannot do that cake justice. So, so good. I'm still going to let the other one soak in the rum for a couple of weeks because, heck, it can't hurt, right? Also, fruitcakes are easier to slice thinly after they've absorbed some booze. But this is a cake that you can serve as soon as it's cool, and it will be awesome. Not unlike a pound cake. But better.

Perfect Fruitcake

2 cups mixed dried fruit (suggestion: 1/4 c. candied ginger; 1/2 c. dried blueberries; 1/2 c. dried cranberries; 1/4 c. candied orange peel)
1/2 cup dark rum
2 cups pecans
3/4 lb. butter, at room temperature
1 lb. granulated sugar
6 large eggs, at room temperature
2 t. vanilla extract
1 lb. all purpose flour
1 t. baking powder
1/2 t. salt
1/2 t. mace
1/2 t. nutmeg
1/2 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. cardamom

The day before you're going to bake the fruitcake, combine the dried fruits and the rum. Cover and leave to macerate.

Sometime before you're going to bake the fruitcake, toast the pecans for about 12 minutes at 300 degrees. Be careful not to burn them.

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Prepare your pans. Combine the flour, baking powder, salt, and spices. Mix well and reserve.

In your mixer, cream the butter thoroughly. Gradually add the sugar to the butter, and let them continue to mix for several minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly after each addition. Scrape the bowl down if necessary. Beat in the vanilla extract.

At low speed, gradually add the dry ingredients. When thoroughly combined, scrape the bowl down again, if necessary. At low speed, add the pecans. Add the fruit and rum mixture and fold in until well blended.

Divide the batter between the prepared pans. Bake for about 85 to 95 minutes, or until the cake springs back slightly when pressed.

Remove from oven and let cool in the pans for half an hour. Remove from pans and let rest on cooling rack until thoroughly cooled.

You can slice and serve the cake as soon as it's cool. You can wrap it in plastic and slice it a bit at a time. So far, my cake's two days old, and it tastes the same as on the day it was baked. You can also wrap it in cloth, apply your spirit of choice, and then wrap it airtight for as long as you think wise. Add more spirits occasionally.

Omms

2008-11-17T08:00:00.000-08:00

[Picture here. Eventually. I promise. No, really.]

Last weekend was the somethingth annual church bazaar. I'm really not much of a joiner, but if someone thinks to ask me to do something, I'll usually do it because a) I want to help out, and b) it's just easier to accept than to say no. This policy has its drawbacks, of course: I once spent three years as church treasurer, and, in retrospect, saying no would probably have been less work. But all anyone asked me to do this year was to make something edible, so I decided to try out a few things for the bake sale. I didn't remember to take pictures of any of them, though, so I'll probably only post the other recipes if I make them again, which means that you'll likely be seeing yet another lebkuchen post. I had thought that the lebkuchen I made last year couldn't be beat, but I think this year's were even better. The recipe really wasn't all that different, though. I made some minor adjustments in the spice mixture, but mostly I just used significantly less flour than in the past and made the lebkuchen as drop cookies. This requires a very special technique where you run your hand under cold water and then use it to flatten the cookies, and you may not want to try that without an advanced degree from a culinary institute or, in the alternative, some experience playing with children and Play-Do, but, well, I digress.

I really wanted to make some meringues this year. I'd tried, a month or two ago, several batches of meringues with a chocolate and orange flavoring, and the results were tasty, but they were also flat and chewy where I wanted them to be crispy and puffy. I had hypothesized that the problem was either that I was using too little sugar or the wrong kind of sugar. So this time I used more sugar, and I used regular granulated sugar. And the meringues came out just right, but I also used a little bit of cream of tartar this time, and that's more likely why they came out just right. Anyway, the meringues were very tasty, and they weren't oppressively sweet, so maybe I'll just stick with this recipe.

"Omms" is, obviously, an abbreviation of "orange mocha meringues." I joked, when I was working the bake sale table on Saturday, that the cookies are so named because they inspire meditation. I'm not sure this is at all true as they are more likely to induce excitement than calm, but it's a good name, right? You can go further, if you like, by abbreviating "orange mocha meringues, mmm" into "ommmmms," but then people might thing you were being silly, even if the cookies are very tasty, which they are.

Orange Mocha Meringues

4 egg whites
1/4 t. cream of tartar
1 cup + 1/4 cup sugar
The finely grated zest of one orange
4 T. cocoa powder
1 T. instant coffee
2 ounces dark chocolate, finely chopped
2 T. finely chopped candied orange peel

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment, or use Silpats.

You will want your egg whites to be as close to room temperature as possible, but you don't want them to sit out for long periods of time. I generally separate my egg whites, put them in a bowl, and put the bowl over a saucepan of water that is as hot as the tap will make it. Then I let them sit while I assemble the rest of my ingredients. They probably don't make it to room temperature before I start beating them, but it's better than nothing.

Combine the 1/4 cup sugar, the cocoa powder, the orange zest, and the instant coffee in your coffee or spice grinder and grind until fine. You are doing this mostly to grind the instant coffee up. If you have access to instant espresso powder and your orange zest is already very finely grated, then you can just combine the ingredients and reserve them. Putting them through the grinder also turns your sugar into instant dissolving sugar, which is nice but probably not essential.

Put the egg whites into the bowl of your mixer and turn the mixer on low. Add the cream of tartar and beat until the eggs are foamy, then increase the speed to high. When the egg whites look like they're reaching the soft peaks stage, gradually beat in the 1 cup of sugar, and continue beating the egg whites to the stiff peaks stage. You can, by the way, do all of this by hand, which is a good idea if (and only if) you hope to compete on Top Chef some day.

Turn the mixer off and verify that you've got stiff peaks. Then turn the mixer on low and add the cocoa/sugar/coffee/orange zest mixture. Mix very briefly. You want to get the mixture mostly incorporated into the egg whites, but you don't want to overbeat them. Fold the chopped chocolate and candied orange peel into the meringue mixture. This will also finish mixing in the cocoa mixture.

Using two teaspoons, drop heaping teaspoonsful of the meringue onto the prepared baking sheets. You can put them relatively close together, but leave a little room since they will likely spread a tiny bit during baking. I can get about thirty-five of them on a half-sheet pan, but since I can't get them all on one pan, I typically get about thirty on one pan and fifteen on the second. Whatever works for you. Similarly, you can make them larger or smaller if you like.

Put the trays in the oven and bake at 300 degrees for forty-five minutes. Turn off the oven. Ideally, you'll leave the meringues in until they cool, which will take several hours. If you need to bake something else afterwards, leave them in for as long as you can, then take them out and let them finish cooling. As soon as they're cool, peel them off the parchment/Silpat and store them in an airtight container. I used large ziplock bags and then transferred them to some printed cello bags that I got at the dollar store (25 for a buck: what a deal!)

I made two batches of the meringues, and I only added the finely chopped candied orange peel to the second batch. The first batch was very nice, but I found the orange flavor a bit too subtle for my tastes. I still wanted to sell both batches, though, so when I packaged them for sale, I filled each bag with half pre-peel and half post-peel meringues. Otherwise, I figured I'd have complicated labeling and marketing issues, possibly leading to fisticuffs when some members learned they didn't have candied orange peel while others did, and, well, fighting in church should probably be discouraged, in spite of its obvious entertainment value. Besides, the meringues might get crushed, and that would be a bad thing.

Dirty Almonds

2008-10-19T12:12:00.001-07:00

Yesterday evening, we were heading into DC to have dinner and see a movie with some friends. One of them was driving down with us, so I invited him to stop by early and have a martini. I have already put down for posterity my thoughts about martinis, so I will do my best not to bore you with yet another diatribe about people who try to pass off vodka-based drinks as martinis. Nor will I rail yet again against the attachment of the -tini suffix to places where it clearly ought not to be.

Instead, I'll just say that when you're going to be serving someone a martini, it is a considerate and usually appreciated gesture to serve him or her an accompanying nibble. A dish of nice olives will suffice, and if I'd had no time to do anything, I'd certainly have opened a jar of Kalamatas from Trader Joe's and called it a day. But I wanted to do a little bit more than that, and I hadn't really planned ahead far enough to make marinated olives, and I had (as I always have) a large bag of almonds from Costco in the pantry, so I figured I'd make some spiced nuts.

The easiest (and possibly the best) spiced nuts are Laurie Colwin's Rosemary Walnuts. But I wasn't sure my walnuts were quite up to snuff. One of the best characteristics of the almond is its relative slowness to turn rancid. When your walnuts or your hazelnuts might have started to take on an off flavor, your almonds will still be just right. That's one of the main reasons (along with their relative inexpensiveness) that I use almonds instead of hazelnuts when I make lebkuchen. Anyway, I also wanted to do something a little more involved than the Rosemary Walnuts, so I spiced up my almonds.

I've made several recent attempts at spiced almonds, and the results had all been pleasant, but none of them had been exactly what I wanted. Even with this attempt, I had to make adjustments as I was going along, mostly to fill out the flavor profile, but what I ended up with seemed just right to me, even if it wasn't necessarily what I was going for when I set out.

Dirty Almonds

1 T. butter
1 dash Liquid Smoke
3 cups raw almonds
1 t. salt
1/2 t. cumin
1/2 t. ground dried chipotle
1/2 t. smoked sweet paprika
1 T. sugar
1/4 cup dry red wine
Black pepper, to taste

In a nonstick skillet, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the Liquid Smoke and stir. Add the almonds and toss well to coat.

Mix together the salt, cumin, chipotle, and paprika. Continue to cook the almonds, tossing frequently, for three or four minutes. Sprinkle on the sugar, toss well again, and continue to cook and toss for another two minutes.

Pour the wine over the almonds. It should begin to evaporate immediately. Continue cooking and tossing until the wine has completely evaporated. Grind some pepper over the almonds, and toss again. Taste and add additional salt if necessary.

Transfer the almonds to a lined baking sheet (I use a Silpat) and put the almonds in a slow (250 - 275 Fahrenheit) oven for about ten minutes, or until dry. Let cool.

A few notes: while I generally favor kosher salt in cooking, in this case, you don't want a salt that's too coarse. You could whirl your kosher salt in your spice grinder of course. I happen to have a small collection of fancy salts that I almost never use, so I used some pink salt that I bought about eighteen months ago when I was in Manhattan and drunk. It was a ridiculous amount to pay for a container of salt, but it was probably cheaper than having another drink, and now it's sort of a souvenir. In the same vein, I have a small amount of very coarse pink salt that I picked up last year in Florence, and which I may never get around to using. But I think it's cooler than, say, a snowglobe. I also picked up a fake Rolex while I was in Florence when I happened to be sober.

I was going for a smoky flavor here, obviously, but there are other flavor profiles that would probably work equally well, so I encourage you to play around with spice combinations. The sugar caramelizes and works as a glue to make the spices adhere to the almonds. It also adds something to the flavor, but there isn't enough sugar to make the whole thing sweet. I tossed the wine in because there was a part of my palate that felt like it was being ignored, and I reasoned, correctly, that wine would give that spot some attention. It also seemed to help with the caramelization.

I'm not sure the oven period is really necessary, but it seemed like a good idea after adding the liquid to the recipe. If you put these in a bowl or container right out of the oven, they'll stick together a bit, but when they're cool, they'll break apart again easily and then they'll stay separate.

These made an awfully good accompaniment to the martinis yesterday, but I think they might be even better today. I also think they'll make a good addition to Christmas baskets. It's mid-October, so it's really getting to be time to start on my Christmas baking.

Orange Blossoms

2008-10-05T17:58:00.000-07:00

It's fall here in the anapestic kitchens (and, one presumes, elsewhere), and that means that it's time to candy orange peel. As I've mentioned, ad nauseum, in my infrequent recent posts, I'm trying to watch what I eat, so I haven't had much of a chance to try to make something inspired lately. And candying orange peel might not seem like the ideal place for inspiration: I make it myself only because what I find in the supermarket is highly overpriced and, more to the point, of dreadful quality compared to what I make myself (or what you can find in the supermarket if you happen to live in Germany, but I happen to not, more's the pity, though I'm not sure that I have an especially Teutonic temperament). Still, the thought of spending two days (off and on, mind you: when you candy orange peel, there's a lot that goes on that takes much time and little attention) making the same old, albeit excellent, candied orange rind didn't, ahem, appeal, so I wondered what I could do differently. And, really, it didn't take me long to think that what I probably wanted to do was to candy the orange peel in a cardamom-flavored red wine heavy syrup. It just seemed like a good idea. And [spoiler alert!] it was. The result was not only divine, and something that L. now asks to eat whenever she's over, but something I really couldn't get anywhere else, even in other countries. I mean, as far as I know. I suppose it's perfectly possible that there's an entire cardamom-wine-flavored candied orange peel industry in Peru or some place, but if there is, they aren't exactly beating down my e-mail inbox to sell it to me at a reasonable price.

Anyway, because candying orange peel is a production to begin with and because I was trying something special, I also decided that I wanted to go for a special shape. I had (note past tense) a small, six-petal-flower-shaped cutter with a diameter of just under an inch that I thought would make ideal candies. So after stepping out to Costco and buying a box containing three dozen navel oranges, and after carefully removing the peels from each orange in only three pieces (long, shallow cuts with a sharp paring knife makes this feasible), I began to stamp little flowers out of my 108 orange peel segments. Sadly, the flower cutter was not all that much thicker on the non-cutting side than on the cutting side, so the process was somewhat painful for the palm of my hand. So I covered the cutter with a folded up dish towel and applied more force. That worked for a while, but the cutter, alas, soon began to deform, so that my flowers were slowly morphing into amoebae. Eventually, I switched over to the smallest of my crenelated circle cutters, which is both sturdier and much more comfortable to use. The results are not quite as pretty, but they are pretty enough, and I had, fortunately, already cut a large number of flowers.

Traditionally, my main use of candied orange peel has been not as candy but as an essential ingredient in my annual mega-batches of lebkuchen. When you've gone to the trouble to cut out small pieces of flower- or near-flower-shaped peel, you don't want to turn around and grind it up. On the other hand, when you've cut out pieces of peel, you have all the negative spaces leftover, and it's an easy matter to quickly chop these up and process them to get the candied orange peel ordinaire that is so essential to my holiday cooking. Right now, I have two fairly large tubs of regular-shaped candy, and a huge container of irregular candied peel. And it's all good.

I'm going to give the recipe for the candy with prepared peel as the starting point, but I'll also tell you how to prepare the peel. After you've peeled the oranges and cut the peel, by whatever means necessary, into the shapes you want, you put them in a pot that's big enough to hold them easily (and with three dozen oranges, that's a realllly big pot: my eight-quart stockpot wasn't big enough), you cover them with cold water, you bring the water to a boil, you turn the heat off, you let the peels soak in the water for a few minutes, and then you drain the peels in a colander. Then you repeat the entire process until you have boiled the peels up to five times. I did five full boils this time, and the peel is delicious (and probably ideal for L.'s palate), but I wonder whether it wouldn't be even better with a tiny bit more bite. I let one of my boils (the third, if memory serves) go on rather longer than I'd planned. I might go with three or four boils next time, but it's hard to say, and the flavor is certainly still excellent after the fifth boil. What I'm trying to say here is that if you only did one or two boils, your orange peel would be very bitter, but beyond that, the procedure is very forgiving. I mean, I know that almost no one besides me ever actually bothers to candy orange peel, but I wish more people would. This recipe is really awesome, and if you make it, you'll be able to serve something that just isn't otherwise available. The red wine gives it a very dramatic color, and the red wine and cardamom both give it a wonderful flavor.

Orange Blossoms
Eight cups prepared orange peel
2 cups dry red wine
1/2 cup water
5 cups granulated sugar
20 pods cardamom
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 t. ground cardamom

Open the cardamom pods to get at the kernels inside. Discard the papery covering.
In a large, heavy saucepan, combine the red wine, the water, and the 5 cups of granulated sugar. Cover tightly, and place over medium heat. Bring the syrup to a boil, stirring if necessary to dissolve the sugar. Add the cardamom kernels and let boil, uncovered, for five minutes.

Add the prepared orange peel, stir well, and return to a low boil. Cook uncovered for approximately one hour, until the peel is translucent. You should not run out of syrup, and you do not need to cook the peel until the syrup is all absorbed. You can use the extra syrup (at full strength or diluted with a simple water-and-sugar syrup) for another batch.

Drain the peel and put it on a rack over a half-sheet pan. Set your oven to its lowest setting (170 degrees on my oven), and put the rack, pan, and peel in the oven. Leave it there overnight. If your oven doesn't go as low as 170 degrees, then turn the oven off and on occasionally so that you don't burn the peel.

Combine the last cup of sugar and the ground cardamom. Remove the peel from the oven when nearly dry and let cool. Toss the peel in the sugar and cardamom, return to the rack, and return the rack to the low oven until the peel is dry but still soft. Let cool to room temperature, and store in zipper-topped bags or sealed containers.

I still have a little bit of last autumn's peel left, and it's still tasty. Some of it's gotten hard, but some of it's still soft. If it gets hard, you can still use it in cooking, but if you're making candy, you're going to want to keep it well sealed so that it doesn't dry out. At the same time, you have to make sure that it's dry enough so that it doesn't get moldy if you store it for long periods. The best solution is to eat it or gift it before the end of the year, but with a very little bit of practice, it's easy to have your peel end up in the zone where it keeps well without getting too hard.

Some of your orange blossoms will have pieces of cardamom sticking to them from the candying syrup. This is very much a feature rather than a bug: the cardamom mellows and becomes even tastier during the long cooking.

I took the syrup that I had left over from making the orange blossoms and added additional sugar and water (2 to 1) to candy the rest of my orange peel. When I'm making peel for lebkuchen and other cooking uses, I go ahead and dry it more than I do for the orange blossoms. I usually make enough to last the whole year, and the flavor isn't hurt by extra drying. When it's time to use it, I soak it in a little rum or pour a small amount of boiling water over it so that it's easier to work with.

Figged

2008-09-23T18:01:00.001-07:00

Here, readers, we have a classic example of why you should be careful what you wish for. V. and I have been together for almost five years, and we've been living together for almost four. When I first moved in, there was a fig leaf tree in the backyard. Since I am a person who normally eschews all manner of fig leaves, I found it, while somewhat pretty, mainly a nuisance in that it bore no fruit and needed to be navigated around when cutting the grass. Then, about two years ago, it bore a handful of figs. And last year, we got, oh, I don't know, maybe as much as a pint of ripe (and delicious) figs from the tree.

And then there was the Great Fig Flood of 2008. I suppose it just took a while for the fig tree to find its way in the world, but it has certainly done that. On one occasion this summer, I had to call a friend, who'd told me in the past how much he loves fresh figs, to come over and please, please, please relieve me of some of these accursed (but delicious) figs. He came and picked about a gallon, but the next day, I was able to harvest almost as many more. A neighbor saw me picking them and asked what they were, and when I explained that they were figs, he said, "Oh, is that an Italian thing?" V., you see, is Italian. I replied that I believed that figs were somewhat universal, but then he replied that he was Norwegian, and I recalled that figs really do best in zones 7 through 10, so I allowed that figs were likely not a Scandinavian phenomenon. In any case, I prevailed upon him to take two handfuls of the figs, and, thus emboldened, I went to the next door neighbors, where I unloaded a quart or so. I also told them that they could feel free to help themselves to more figs from the tree, and they liked the figs so much that they eventually did so.

I eventually bought a food dehydrator and dried a substantial number of figs. They shrink quite drastically under drying, but they retain a good flavor, and I expect to stew some of them in a bit of red wine and honey to make a delicious yogurt topping. Before I got the dehydrator, though, I looked around for other methods, and I came upon recipes for candied figs.

I'm going to admit right up front that I don't, apparently, care much for candied figs. They are, you see, very sweet. Hence the name. I had some trouble eating them, and I thought that perhaps I had done something wrong, but when I offered the jar of candied figs (which, by the way, are gorgeous) to V. upon his return from a recent trip to Bogota, he tasted them and exclaimed that they were very good indeed, going so far as to hope that they would last long enough to be included in a Christmas basket for his mother. He also allowed that they are, indeed, very sweet, but apparently that's to be expected.

This is a lengthy and somewhat inexact recipe and procedure. It is not, however, difficult, though it requires some patience. It is similar, in some respects to making any sort of fruits confits, though it's not nearly so difficult as that. But it does require at least a week to complete because it takes a fair amount of time to replace most of the water with sugar. The recipe I adapted to make my recipe notes that you can use the same process on either plum tomatoes or apricots. I'm sure that glaceed apricots prepared this way would be splendid, but if you try it with plum tomatoes, please don't say that you got the idea from me. I had plum tomatoes from the garden, and I just made some sauce. Also, it's probably best if your figs aren't extremely ripe for this recipe, but some of mine were, and they survived pretty well.

Candied Figs

About sixty medium-ripe to ripe figs
2 T. baking soda
Sugar
Water
More sugar

Rinse the figs well. Then add the baking soda to about a gallon of water and soak the figs in the mixture for about ten minutes. Drain thoroughly and let dry.

In a heavy saucepan, mix together sugar and water in a ratio of about three cups of sugar to 2.5 cups water. You should have enough to cover the figs. Cover and heat until the sugar is dissolved. Bring to a boil, then let cool. Add the figs and return the syrup to a boil. Simmer, uncovered, for twenty minutes. Cover and let sit overnight.

Once or twice a day, return the figs and syrup to a boil and simmer for twenty minutes. Cover and let sit at room temperature after each cooking. Repeat this process until almost all of the syrup has been absorbed. This will likely take a week or so.

Place a rack over a half-sheet pan. Remove the figs from the saucepan and place them on the rack. Let drain.

Preheat your oven to its lowest setting (170 degrees on my oven). Place the figs in the oven and heat until they are nearly dry. You can do this an hour at a time and stop in between if need be.

When the figs are as dry as you think they're going to get, add some granulated sugar to a large bowl. Add the figs a few at a time, roll them in the sugar, and remove them to a plate. Store the figs in a jar. If they begin to throw off a lot of syrup/moisture, dry them again in a low oven.

I got a fairly significant feeling of accomplishment from making the candied figs, and even when I thought that they weren't any good, I was happy to consider keeping them in a jar on the table to sit around and look pretty. Naturally, I'm happier that someone thinks they make good eating, though.

I reckon I can give some of them away at Christmas, but if anyone has any other uses for candied figs, I'd be happy to hear about them. Or for dried figs, for that matter. Everyone I've talked to about fig trees has lead me to believe that I'm likely to have at least as many figs every year from here on in.

I still haven't figured out what to do with the fig leaves, though.

Red Winey Pears

2008-09-07T16:15:00.001-07:00

I'm laboring under the weight of abundance, readers, and for once, I'm not talking about my waistline. The tomato plants, which we put in very late this year, are finally sending forth lots of fruit, though not more than I can use relatively easily, thanks to a) an unusual amount of restraint when we planted, and b) losing some of the plants to hungry deer earlier in the season. If the tomatoes are manageable, however, the figs are anything but. There's been a fig bush in the back yard for, well, I don't really know how long. V. planted it some years back, so it was here before me, but it never really produced figs until a couple of years ago when it produced a small crop. Then last year, a slightly larger crop, and this year it's the flood. V. picked all the ripe and near-ripe fruit before the remnants of Hanna came through. Then he left this morning for a two-week consulting trip to Bogota, and when I got home this afternoon, I collected about two quarts of ripe and overripe figs. And, truly, they're yummy, but there's only so many figs that I can eat. I started to candy some today, and I'll let you know how that comes out. So many of them were so ripe that I'm likely to end up with sweetened fig paste, but we'll see.

None of which has anything to do with the pears. As I've mentioned before, my folks have a summer place up in Somerset County in Southwestern Pennsylvania. They're getting to the point where they want to stay in Florida year 'round, so they've asked me whether I want to buy the house in PA. And I do, but I wanted V. to see it before I made a final decision. I figured that if he hated it, I wouldn't go up there much. Fortunately, it was a beautiful late August weekend when we visited, so it looks like it'll be a go. Which also has nothing to do with the pears, except that while we were up there, I got a call from my first cousin once removed, who has a house next door to my parents' house, asking me whether I'd like some of the pears she'd picked from her tree.

There is, of course, only one response to "Would you like some of my pears?" So I wound up with a small bag of lovely green pears of an unknown (to me, anyway; I suppose she knows) variety. I ate some of them out of hand, and I sliced others to eat with my Greek-style yogurt (which, by the way, I have perfected), but that still left me with more pears than I was going to be able to use up easily, so I decided to think of some way of preserving them.

I'll confess up front that the preparation I used was intended more to create a potable liquid than to keep the pears, but I reckon it'll do both. If things work out according to plan, I'll end up with something sweet and strong that can be drunk in very small amounts, plus some pears that will be lovely over ice cream. I had originally thought of simply slicing the pears, adding a little sugar, and pouring Vodka over them, but I thought I might want some other flavors. That, in turn, led me to think of the fabulous recipe for Poires au vin rouge from the equally fabulous Cuisine of the Sun by Mireille Johnston. That recipe for poached pears never fails to draw raves. I decided that I didn't really want to poach the pears all the way, but I didn't want them fully raw either, and I did want a similar flavor profile. What I came up with was the idea to pour the hot syrup over the sliced pears, let them come to room temperature, and then store them with more red wine and some stronger spirits.

I figured that I must have an appropriate jar somewhere and that it would likely have been taken to the basement by V. on one of the many occasions when he feels that I've brought too much junk into the house. So I went down to the basement and, sure enough, there was a nice clamp-top glass jar from Ikea. I don't know exactly how big it is. It seems to be more than 1.5 liters and less than 2, but, well, it was just chance that made everything fit in it as well as it did.

If you're more particular than I, you may want to try a different method of preserving your pairs. I didn't cook mine in a boiling water bath or anything because I wanted them to retain as much of their essential pearness as possible. I generally figure that alcohol kills most things. I'll let you know how they turn out when I try them in a few weeks. I suppose that if I were more responsible, I'd wait until then to post the recipe, but then we'd have another situation like we had with that kimchi I made a few weeks ago, which didn't taste all that bad but gave me a mild case of intestinal distress and made me think that perhaps I should be exploring sauerkraut instead. It's just that kimchi seemed like such a good idea because it's so low in calories and high in flavor. When you're on a diet, that's the ideal food, right? If I come up with enough really successful new ways of preserving vegetables, I should be able to starve to death without ever actually being hungry!

Anyway, the pears are not so much diet food, but if I don't eat them for a few months, they will be, right?

Red Winey Pears

Eight small pears
One lemon
1 cup sugar
1 cup + 1.5 cups red wine
2 whole star anise
2 whole green cardamom pods
1 cup vodka

Remove the zest from the lemon in strips. Juice the lemon.

Wash and dry the pears. Cut them in quarters and remove the cores. Toss them with the lemon juice in a heatproof bowl.

In a saucepan, combine the sugar with a cup of the red wine. Bruise and add the anise and cardamom. Add half of the lemon zest. Cover and bring to a boil. Pour the syrup over the pears, cover, and let come to room temperature.

Wash your jar thoroughly. Add the vodka and the other half of the lemon zest to it. Add the pears and syrup. Top with the remaining red wine. Close the jar and let sit for an extended period of time.

It's probably best if you store this in a dark place. On the other hand, it's so pretty that it may be hard to put away. If no one offers you eight small pears, you could use six larger ones. Or any number of pears of any size, provided that you make adjustments.

M'm! M'm! Good!

2008-08-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

Cooking while dieting presents many special challenges, but it also presents some opportunities. Since most of my cooking is limited to large batches of meals like low-fat, high-protein turkey chili, large batches of Greek-style yogurt, or highly flavored fresh pickles, when I cook something else, I really don't mind putting a lot of time into it. It may be possible to make onion soup without a large time investment (does Trader Joe's sell caramelized onions?), but I doubt it. Anyway, while the start-to-finish time is quite high, the effort is relatively modest, and much of the cooking requires only intermittent attention. It's a great thing to make on a weekend afternoon of chores and/or reading.

This soup succeeds or fails on properly (i.e., slowly) caramelizing the onions. Obviously, you can't burn them. If you undercook them, the soup will be good, but it won't have that wonderful flavor that you get from a good bowl of French onion soup. I was on vacation with the kids a couple of weeks ago, and we ate out one evening after a movie, and I encouraged L. to select French Onion as her soup choice. She turned up her nose at it, so I took it and had something of a spiritual soup. It might have been all that melted cheese and bread after so much fat and starch restriction, but I think it was just well-made soup. Because, while the cheese and bread were delicious, it was really the broth that made the soup, and it was the onions that made the broth.

Anyway, I set out to make a more diet-friendly version, and I think I succeeded very well indeed. The recipe below is as far as I can take the diet-friendly concept. The entire pot has, by my estimation, about 720 calories. I can easily get eight lunch servings from it, but as a dinner starter, you might want to divide it six ways instead. In any case, while I think the recipe below is yummy, you can abandon some or all of the diet features and perhaps take it even further. A second tablespoon of both butter and flour would not be amiss here. And using regular beef broth (from a box) instead of the fat-free, low sodium variety, does taste a little better, if all that sodium doesn't frighten you. I think, though, that the real change you might want to make is just to switch out the porcini and put in a larger quantity of shiitakes, which would add not very many calories at all. Also, if you double the amount of barley, you will have something much more like a stew than a soup, and it will be extremely good. I am tempted to add yet more barley sometime and call it a barley risotto, but right now I'm more interested in soup.

Even without these additions, though, you have something very hearty and warming. It would be even better, perhaps, in winter, but if you work and eat lunch in an air-conditioned office, like I do, it's very good now. It freezes and reheats perfectly, too.

You will have to forgive me for relying on boxed beef broth. I am sure that if you made beef stock from scratch, it would be even better, but I find the store-bought version relatively tasty, if sometimes overly salted. Also, I have a tough time laying my hands on the bones I'd need to make a good beef stock.

If you're not on a diet (or if you are but want to splurge), the perfect and obvious accompaniment would be slices of baguette topped with some Gruyere cheese, well toasted and then run under the broiler.

Onion Soup with Barley

1 very large (8-10 ounce) onion
1 T. butter
1 T. flour
1/2 cup dry red wine
2 quarts low-sodium beef broth
1/2 cup barley
1/4 ounce dried porcini mushrooms
Salt
Pepper

Remove the root and outer skin of the onion. Quarter, then slice very fine.

Heat about a cup of the broth until it's steaming, then pour it over the dried mushrooms and let sit.

In a heavy pot, melt the butter. Add the onions, stir well to coat, cover, and cook over very low heat until the onions are thoroughly wilted, about ten minutes.

Remove the cover and cook very slowly until the onions caramelize. This will take somewhere between a very long time and an even longer time.

When the onions have browned nicely, add the flour and stir well. Cook over low heat for two or three minutes. Add the red wine and stir thoroughly, making sure all the bits are scraped off the bottom of the pan and incorporated into the liquid. Add the remaining stock, increase the heat to medium, and bring to a boil.

Add the barley, reduce the heat to a simmer, and cover.

Squeeze the mushrooms dry, chop them finely, and add them to the soup along with the broth they soaked in, leaving behind any grit.

Cook until the barley is tender, from forty minutes to an hour. Season as necessary with salt and pepper.

Semi-Greek Yogurt

2008-08-18T22:48:00.000-07:00

There's no compelling reason for any sane person to attempt to make his own Greek-style yogurt, of course. Fage yogurt, which is delicious, has been available around here for at least a couple of years, and these days, I can walk into the local supermarket and pick up other brands, as well. But, well, there's a backstory here, so I'll just get into it.

I've been dieting, and because I find normal (aka sensible) dieting to be a nuisance, I decided to go with something a little more extreme so that I could get it over with. A friend of mine recommended a program that he was on. It involved two protein shakes and one regular meal each day, except that for two days out of the week, you skipped the two protein shakes and the regular meal, but you continued to take the elixirs and the supplements, which you were also taking on the days when you ate normally. I am utterly hamstrung here by my strong personal aversion to scare quotes, but you should read the last two words of the preceding sentence as if there were scare quotes around them, because there was nothing normal about that diet. Still, I decided to try it for a month, so I went to some place on the Internet and registered, and they took $377 out of my bank account and sent me a box with four canisters of protein powder, three bottles of pills and tablets, and three bottles of elixir, all of which was chock full of bee pollen and aloe extract and eye of newt and the blood of extraterrestrials.

Anyway, I followed this plan for a month, and I did, indeed, lose a significant amount of weight, but while $377 a month is not going to break me, it just seemed like an awful lot of money for what I was getting. I looked at the labels and figured that I could get very similar (or at least fully adequate) nutrition from a combination of yogurt, cottage cheese, and multivitamins. And you can buy a lot of cottage cheese for $377 a month. And, you know, it may sound like heresy, but when you're used to getting your breakfast from the McDonald's drive-through, a breakfast made of yogurt and/or cottage cheese blended with some frozen fruit is really very convenient and fairly tasty.

But it's significantly tastier if you go with just the yogurt. (I like cottage cheese a good deal, but I like it better either plain or as part of a savory filling.) The problem is that in order to get the same amount of protein that I was getting from the protein powder, I'd have to use a lot of regular yogurt. Regular non-fat yogurt has about ten grams of protein per hundred calories, so to get thirty grams of protein (what I wanted for breakfast), I'm at 300 calories before even adding the fruit.

Greek-style yogurt, though, has a very different nutritional profile. A 100-calorie serving of Chobani non-fat yogurt (my favorite: it's delicious and has five different kinds of active cultures) has 18 grams of protein. Exactly how this is possible, I have no idea. I know that Greek yogurt is made with milk that's been somewhat concentrated and that it's strained after it's made, but I really can't figure out why that makes such a difference. When I strain yogurt, it seems to me that most of what comes out of it is water and whey, and, since whey is protein, it would seem that most of the caloric loss would be from protein. On the other hand, strained yogurt is decidedly less tangy than unstrained yogurt, so perhaps much of what's lost is actually the lactic acid that the lactose turned into when the lactobacilli did their thing. Anyway, I've Googled and Googled until my little fingers were about to fall off, but I couldn't find a good explanation for why the 100 calories' worth of nonfat milk that had ten grams of protein and that became 100 calories' worth of nonfat yogurt with the same ten grams of protein becomes something that -- when you add enough extra to get back to 100 calories -- becomes something with 18 grams of protein. Maybe they do it with mirrors.

Anyway. No, really, I mean it this time: anyway. Anyway, I could just go and buy the Greek-style yogurt and use that, because when you're not spending $377 to make someone else rich to send you some protein powder and ground eye of newt, you can buy a lot even of Greek-style yogurt, which typically runs between $1.25 and $1.50 for a little 6 ounce container that provides 100 calories and eighteen grams of protein. But that pretty quickly becomes a lot of containers and a lot of money, even when you can easily afford it. So I though, heck, why not make my own?

As it happens, I was on vacation last week. The kids and I were staying in the remote part of Southwestern Pennsylvania where my folks have their summer home. I figured (correctly) that I couldn't get Greek-style yogurt there. I suppose I could use any sort of active-culture yogurt as a starter, but why not use my favorite brand with its five different active microbes? So I packed a couple of six-ounce containers of nonfat Chobani in my cooler and took it with me. I was able to find the other supplies there.

The other supplies in this case were skim milk, nonfat milk powder, some discarded food containers, a cooler, a thermometer, and a fine mesh paint strainer bag (which I acquired from Lowes, in the paint department). I figured that in lieu of trying to concentrate the milk through evaporation, I'd add some nonfat milk powder. I washed everything very thoroughly, then I poured a gallon of skim milk into a stockpot, heated it up until it was near the simmer (the thermometer I found only went up to 125 degrees Fahrenheit), stirred in a cup of nonfat milk powder, put the lid on the pot, and put the pot in a sink full of cold water until the temperature fell to 110 degrees. Then I whisked in about a third of the container of the Chobani (because I wanted to eat the rest). Then I poured the mixture into the emptied and cleaned ice cream tub and put the covered tub inside the cooler. I added 115-degree water to the cooler until it was near but not to the top of the ice cream tub, sealed the cooler, and let the whole thing sit for twelve hours.

In the morning, I had yogurt. It was a little bit thin, still, but it was still very warm, so that was to be expected. And it tasted suitably sour, though, in retrospect, I probably should have let it get sourer. I stuck the covered container in the refrigerator for the day, and then when I got home from an outing with the kids, I put the big mesh bag in a colander, poured the yogurt into the mesh bag, set the colander back over the ice cream tub, covered the top with plastic wrap, and put the whole contraption back in the refrigerator to drain overnight.

And the next morning, I had over a half-gallon of something that was a whole lot like Greek yogurt. It's the nature of Greek yogurt to be less tangy than regular yogurt, but mine was less tangy still, and while some people might prefer that result, I would have liked a bit more acidity (the texture is exactly right). Still, it was a great topper to my turkey-lentil chili, and it went marvelously with fresh fruit. And, well, wow do I have a lot of yogurt. A half-gallon didn't seem like all that much at the time, but it sure seems like a lot more now that I'm working my way through it. It does do a great job in a protein shake, in part because the flavor's very mild, and it's still very good with the fresh fruit. And it was a significant cost savings, and, truly, a lot of fun to make.

Next time, I'll likely go with more nonfat dried milk and a longer incubation period, but otherwise, the process worked pretty well and wasn't at all difficult. I think that -- even after I'm off the diet -- a cup-and-a-half or two cups of the yogurt blended with some good frozen fruit and perhaps a few ice cubes will continue to make a good weekday breakfast.

By the way, if you're like me and you can't resist buying the big bag of limes at Costco and so come home and zest and squeeze all of the ones you're not going to use immediately and put the juice in ice cube trays and then put the frozen lime juice cubes in ziplock bags so that your significant other can't say that you're always wasting food, you can take one cube of lime juice, let it melt, mix it with two tablespoons of sugar (I use Whey Low, as usual), and then stir in about two cups of plain, nonfat Greek-style yogurt. The result is divine. (If you don't agree, try adding another tablespoon of sugar. I won't tell anyone. I like it best with just two tablespoons, though.)

A Different Oatmeal Cookie

2008-08-09T21:05:00.000-07:00

Not so long ago, my daughter A., who is home for the summer after a highly successful Freshman year told me that she believed she had an adrenal gland disorder and planned to begin a diet that cut out, among other things, processed sugars and starches other than whole grains. This seemed like a reasonable choice, and since I'm dieting, I'm not eating much in the way of sugar and processed grains anyway. So there were already plenty of lentil-based and other legume-based meals being prepared. There wasn't so much in the way of sweets, though.

When you want something sweet but don't want processed sugar, dates are generally going to be your best friends. They're naturally so sweet that eating a date is much like eating candy, except with more fiber. And they're pretty easy to work into recipes. Baked goods without white flour are more problematic. L., my younger daughter, recently made her first unassisted batch of chocolate chip cookies and used whole wheat flour by accident, and the cookies were just fine, albeit different, but I wanted to try something different. So I went with ground oats.

I thought my initial attempt was quite good, and so did my partner, V. Upon first taste, A. said, "Well, they're pretty good for health food," but a few minutes later, she announced that they were growing on her. I think perhaps that her first sample came from the first tray I baked. They certainly appeared done and were a reasonable shade of brown on the bottom, but the next tray, which were darker, were much better, even though they came from the same batch of dough. Americans generally tend to underbake their doughs (and overbake their batters: hence all those dry cakes), which is one reason why so much of our bread and pastry is not what it should be. You should never underbake your cookies, but you should especially not underbake these cookies. They don't have any chocolate chips or molasses or anything similar to fall back on, but they really are yummy when fully baked.

Fully baked, of course, is something that varies significantly by oven and by pan. I always bake my cookies on heavy, silpat-lined half-sheet pans, and I think that's why so many of my cookies stay in the oven for so long. These cookies don't have a whole lot of fat in them, and they don't have any flour to give a firmer texture, so you'll probably want to bake them on lined pans in any case, but if you're using a thin, flexible, unrimmed cookie sheet, then they'd probably bake faster for you. In my case, it takes twenty-one minutes to get a properly baked cookie with this recipe.

The lack of flour is also probably why they don't spread or puff very much. I ended up with fairly small cookies, even though I used soup spoons to form them. On the plus side, my recipe calculator tells me that each cookie has only about fifty-five calories. They are decidedly in the not-too-sweet corner of sweet baked goods, but you will know that you're eating a cookie.

Oatmeal Date Cookies

2 c. whole pitted dates
1 c. boiling water
1 orange
3 c. rolled oats
1 c. roasted, unsalted sunflower seeds
1 t. baking powder
1/4 t. salt
6 T. butter, softened
2 eggs
1 t. vanilla extract

Put the dates in a heatproof bowl, pour the boiling water over them, cover and let sit for a half hour or more. Zest the orange, then squeeze it and reserve the juice.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Combine the orange zest, rolled oats, and sunflower seeds in the bowl of a food processor and process until finely ground. Add the salt and baking powder and mix well.

Put the dates, water, and reserved orange juice in a blender and blend. The mixture will be very thick.

In the bowl of your mixer, cream the butter until light. Add the blended dates, and mix well. Add the eggs and vanilla, and mix again. Add the dry ingredients, and mix.

Drop rounded soupspoonfuls of dough onto prepared cookie sheets. Bake for twenty-one minutes, or until well browned on the bottoms. Remove from oven, let cool briefly, then remove cookies to racks to cool thoroughly.

Makes sixty.

You could, obviously, make a number of adjustments to this recipe. You could add some spices and/or raisins and/or coconut and/or you name it. You could use a different nut: I would likely have used cashews if I'd had any unsalted cashews available.

I like them just as I made them, though, so I'll probably stick with the recipe, as will A., who has already demanded it so that she can make the cookies when she returns to school. That will happen far too soon.

Sichuan Cucumbers

2008-07-06T15:29:00.001-07:00

It would appear that I have not posted for some time. Life and all that, you know.

I hadn't, as it happens, been cooking all that much recently, but V. is working abroad for most of the summer, so I have more opportunity to cook without worrying that the kitchen is too messy, and there is no dinner on the table unless I put it there.

I've also been trying (yet again) to reduce, so these days I've been making a lot of light but flavorful dishes that are easy to pack with my lunch or easy to make quickly for dinner and that also perk up what might otherwise be a somewhat meager meal.

I have always loved Sichuan pickles. I order them whenever they're available at dim sum, and I've occasionally made them in the past, with varying degrees of success. As they can be very low indeed in calories and fat, they seemed like the perfect thing to try this past weekend, so I looked up a recipe (in the Gourmet cookbook) and adapted it rather heavily to meet my needs.

I like to make my food last (while I'm eating it, that is, rather than for weeks on end in the refrigerator), and I don't mind recipes that are somewhat labor intensive, so the first change I made in this recipe was to pickle ribbons rather than wedges of cucumbers. It is probably folly to attempt pickling cucumber ribbons unless you have a good slicer of some sort (or you want lots of practice with your knife), but there is no reason at all why this same recipe wouldn't work with cucumber wedges, which is what one typically gets when one orders Sichuan pickled cucumbers at a Chinese restaurant. I like the ribbons because I can curl them on my fork as if I were a child eating spaghetti, so I eat them more slowly. Which is, I think, a good thing because they're very highly flavored.

The longer they sit in the refrigerator before you eat them, the more highly flavored they'll be, and the taste that will grow the most over time is the heat from the crushed red peppers.

You should, of course, feel free to adjust amounts and seasonings as you see fit. I think the next time I make them, for example, I might put in an extra tablespoon of rice vinegar. But then again I might not. I just ate a small dish of the pickles (they are prettier served in small dishes), and I thought the first ribbon might have been a bit underseasoned, but by the time I got to the last one, I was thinking that they were just about right.

Sichuan Cucumbers

2 English cucumbers
1.5 T. kosher salt
2 cloves garlic
A one-inch section of ginger
1 t. crushed red pepper flakes
2 T. dark sesame oil
2 T. seasoned rice vinegar
2 T. sugar

Take a thin slice off the bottom of each cucumber, so that it will stand without rolling. Cut the cucumbers in half crosswise, then cut each half in half lengthwise so that you end up with four quarters.

Exercising great caution, slice each quarter into thin ribbons on your slicer. You may find it easier if you occasionally give the cucumber a quarter-turn so that you're slicing along a different surface.

When you have all eight quarters sliced, toss the cucumber ribbons with the salt in a colander. Sit the colander in a bowl to drain for twenty minutes.

While the cucumbers are draining, prepare the seasoning. Put your slicer on its thinnest setting and slice the garlic cloves and the ginger. Add the crushed red pepper and reserve.

In a separate bowl (or a small skillet) heat the sesame oil for thirty seconds in the microwave (or over the stove until very fragrant). Add the ginger, garlic, and red pepper flakes and let sit (off the heat if you used the stove).

When the salted cucumber ribbons have been sitting for twenty minutes, rinse them and drain them thoroughly. I use a salad spinner to do this, but you can certainly drain them in a colander. Keep in mind that the cucumbers are still somewhat salty, no matter how thoroughly you have rinsed and drained them, and they will continue to give off water as they sit. This is not a problem, but if they sit for too long while you're getting everything else ready, you may find that they need a bit more salt when you're ready to eat them.

Keep in mind that the cucumbers are still somewhat salty, no matter how thoroughly you have rinsed and drained them, and they will continue to give off water as they sit. This is not a problem, but if they sit for too long while you're getting everything else ready, you may find that they need a bit more salt when you're ready to eat them.

Put the oil mixture in a bowl large enough to hold the cucumber ribbons. Whisk the rice vinegar and then the sugar into the oil mixture until well combined. Then add the cucumber ribbons and toss until they are thoroughly coated.

Pack the seasoned cucumber ribbons into a container that can be inverted and that is not too much larger than the cucumbers. Refrigerate for at least four hours, the mixture upside down occasionally.

The ribbons do seem to shrink rather dramatically during the whole process, and when you're packing your ribbons into their container, you may feel like you've done much work for little reward, but a very small serving of these pickles goes a long way. You can serve them with any number of things (I'm thinking, for example, that they'd make a great addition to my Thanksgiving relish tray), but I prefer them most as a snack. A smaller amount in a small bowl packs a lot of flavor when I'm not especially hungry but I very much want something to eat.

Semi-potent Potables

2008-01-08T19:41:00.000-08:00

I'm aware, as I often am, that this entry would have been more timely had it appeared earlier. Hot alcoholic drinks are especially well suited for entertaining at any party meant to celebrate one of the holidays associated with the winter solstice. But a) better late than never, and b) there's still a lot of cold weather to come, though not, perhaps, here, where "unseasonably warm" does not even begin to cover it. Still, it's likely that there will be plenty more cold weather between now and spring.

In general, I prefer to make heated alcoholic drinks on the weaker side than, say, eggnog, which I believe should continue to be made the way it was routinely made in the fifties. That is to say in a period when people routinely smoke and drove under the influence without worrying too much about the consequences. I don't much care for smoking, and I believe in designated drivers and/or waiting a sufficient amount of time after drinking and/or calling a cab and/or passing out sleeping bags, but given what passes for eggnog these days, your goal should probably be for your guests to exclaim "Whoa! That's lethal" right after they've exclaimed, "Gee! That's tasty." (I require all of my guests to use "Gee" as their first interjection when they visit. Penalties for non-compliance have sometimes been very harsh.)

But with heated drinks, I generally start with a good deal less alcohol. Admittedly, this is partly because some of the alcohol cooks out and because when I'm serving, say, the mulled wine, I like to toss a healthy shot of dark rum in the bottom of the mug before ladling on the hot wine to make the drink more, um, volatile. But it's also because if I have leftovers, I can drink a significant quantity without having to worry about inebriation.

This has been a special concern this year because I have often found myself in the situation of needing something both tasty and friendly to the voice. Winter is hard on the throat and lungs, and on Christmas Eve this year, I had to sing in a madrigal choir at the afternoon service and in the regular choir at the evening service. There were also (relatively short) solos for each service, and my vocal mechanism (I have no idea what else to call it) was, not to put too fine a point on it, pissed off.

It is my firm belief that honey, lemon juice, red wine, and heat are all good for the voice. This belief is important to me, so if I'm mistaken, I would very much appreciate not finding out: go mess with somebody else's religion. I will say that the belief comports with my experience, and on this Christmas Eve, I was sitting in the choir with a thermos of my mulled cider and wine, and taking a drink of it when my voice was feeling unhappy made me feel a great deal better. And because the effect was immediate and because it isn't that strong, I'm pretty sure it wasn't the alcohol that helped. There may be a placebo effect going on, but, again, ignorance is bliss, and I intend to follow mine.

Mulled Wine and Cider

A half gallon of apple cider, preferably unfiltered
A three-liter box (or four 750 ml bottles) of red wine
One lemon
One orange
2 cinnamon sticks
2 slices crystallized ginger
2 star anise
1 nutmeg
5 green cardamom pods
1 t. whole allspice
1 cup honey
Granulated sugar, optional

Remove and reserve the zest from the lemon and orange. Squeeze the citrus and reserve the juice. Break the cinnamon sticks in half, bruise the anise and cardamom pods, and cut the nutmeg in half. In a large pot, combine the wine, the cider, the citrus zests, the citrus juices, and the spices. Over a low flame, bring to near the simmer, then cover and let heat, without boiling for an hour or more.

Stir in the honey. Taste and add granulated sugar or more honey if necessary. Serve hot.

You can, if you like, put all the spices, etc. in cheesecloth, but I don't see the point. It's easy enough to keep them out of the ladle, and if someone gets a cardamom pod in his or her mug of mulled, then where's the harm? You can also, of course, ratchet up the alcohol (dark rum is an especially nice addition), but, again, it's not necessary, and if you leave this the way it is, people can drink quite a lot of it with no fear of impairment. Which is good because the recipe makes quite a lot.

It should go without saying that you can alter the blend of spices to your liking, but if it doesn't, I've said it, so it needn't.

Between our Christmas Eve guests (my Christmas Eve schedule: 9am - noon, go to work; noon - 2:45, drive home, start Christmas Eve dinner; 2:45 - 4:30, drive to church, sing, drive home; 4:30 - 5:45, finish and serve dinner, leave guests at table; 5:45 - 8:30, drive to church, sing, drive home; 8:30 - 12:30, hang out with guests, clean up, drink much wine; 12:30 - 2:30, wrap presents) and the next couple of days, the mulled wine/cider was gone before the girls and I went to Florida to see my parents and my sister and her family. It takes a while to make more, so when my voice or throat or sinuses are feeling unhappy and in need of some TLC, I need a quicker alternative. This one is as restorative as it is easy.

Weak Wine Punch

The juice of half a lemon
4 oz. red wine
2 T. honey
a sprig of fresh rosemary
2 cups boiling water

In a very large (24 ounce) coffee/soup mug, combine the lemon juice, red wine, and honey. Stir well. Add the sprig of rosemary. Fill to near the top with boiling water.

I almost always have the ingredients for this concoction (that's V.'s term for everything I make, pretty much) on hand, though I sometimes have to step outside for the fresh rosemary. If you don't have fresh rosemary, by the way, just leave it out. The drink is perfectly delicious without it. In fact, you don't really taste the rosemary, but when you add the boiling water, the essential oils are released, and a little cloud of rosemary-scented vapor hovers over the top of your mug. Rosemary is invigorating, and there is something extremely healthful and comforting about the way it floats into your sinuses as you sip the punch.

I should note that I really don't measure the ingredients for this. I cut a lemon in half, then I cut one half into two quarters, then I squeeze the quarters into the mug, then I add a healthy squeeze of honey from my big Costco honey container, then I add a good splash of red wine from the box, then I stir, then I toss in the rosemary, then I add the water from the kettle. I did measure the wine one time, just so I could say how much I used, and I found that the four ounces I measured was probably about twice as much as I'd used the first time. And it's good either way, but I think it's a little better with the extra wine. I can't bring myself to measure the honey, but I think the 2 tablespoons is a good approximation. If, you know, it's not sweet enough, just squeeze a little more in. If you add a little too much, well, this is a pretty weak drink, so you'd have to add a lot too much for it to be a big problem, I think.

In any case, if your amounts are anywhere close to the amounts here (and probably even if they aren't), this is going to be an awfully good drink. It may not have any proven medical benefits, but it's very salutary to your mood. It is just the ticket for a tough day. Or, indeed, for a day that might turn unexpectedly tough. And what day is immune from that affliction? Better not to take chances: drink your punch.

Perfect Storm Lebkuchen

2007-12-09T23:59:00.000-08:00

First, readers, an apology. The last time I posted a lebkuchen recipe, there were omissions. I'm not sure the omissions would have rendered the lebkuchen inedible or even unpleasant, but they would have created something far short of the ideal. Rest assured that I am fully and suitably abashed.

Anyway, I baked up a batch of lebkuchen ~~the other night~~ two weeks ago, and they were the best I've ever made. You'll have to trust me that, prior clerical errors notwithstanding, the best lebkuchen I've ever made is an exceedingly high bar. I was beyond pleased.

I am not so humble as to take no credit for this achievement. There is, clearly, a certain amount of skill involved in the creation of lebkuchen-to-die-for. But there is also a not insignificant amount of chance. The luck factor begins with the candied orange peel. I candy orange peel every year, and I do my best to follow the same procedure, but the results are, shall we say, highly variable. The main problem is that when you candy orange peel and you get to the end of the process, you're treading a fine line between too dry and too moist. If you make the peel too dry, it's like a rock. You can still use it in baking, and it keeps for a good long time, but you can't just eat it. If you make the peel too moist, you run the risk of mold. Candying orange peel is not the sort of thing you do on a whim. Well, okay, I do it on a whim, but there are consequences. It's the sort of process that takes the better part of a day, and while for most of that time you don't have to do anything or even monitor all that carefully, there's still a lot of labor involved. Spending all that time and then coming back a few weeks later to find something green in your bag of orange is disappointing. You will understand that I am using understatement in that last sentence.

Anyway, the orange peel worked this year. It's really just right, and if there's a problem with it, it's that the peel is so tasty -- without being cloyingly sweet -- that it's difficult not to eat it as candy. Fortunately, I made a couple of quarts, so there's plenty for lebkuchen and other recipes with some left over for the occasional nibble.

In addition to having first-rate peel (I have tried, but I cannot bring myself to use the candied peel that comes from the supermarket. I have used it before and gotten very tasty lebkuchen, but lebkuchen are special to me, and they deserve the best I can give them.) to work with, I remembered to check all my stocks before starting this year, and I acquired the spices that I had been missing before.

Still, I almost didn't get the lebkuchen done because I had a devil of a time finding molasses. I will spare you my molasses jeremiad. I'm sure you can figure out for yourself the implications for Western civilization if we continue to be the sort of society where people can't find molasses because the supermarket decided it needed to stock six additional varieties of canned soup instead. I get that people use canned soup more often than they use molasses, but, well, if I go any farther down that road, I'll have to go back and remove that sentence about sparing you my molasses jeremiad.

Anyway. I gathered my spices and everything else. I used large quantities of almonds and candied orange peel, and I made the dough ~~last weekend~~ a couple weeks ago. Then I rolled, cut, and baked it ~~Monday night~~ last week. The recipe made 169 2.5" round cookies. I note the number so that I can say that it is either one more than fourteen dozen, or it's a bakers dozen of bakers dozens. In my case, it was seven sheets of 24 with a bit of dough left over.

Anyway, I did my best to take careful notes and include all the ingredients this time because I want to make them the same way next year.

Lebkuchen

1 cup molasses
1 cup honey
1.5 cups light brown sugar, packed
1 lemon
1 t. baking soda
3 cinnamon sticks
1 T. whole cloves
2 whole nutmegs
2 whole star anise
2 t. whole allspice
1 t. cardamom seed
1/4 c. cocoa powder
2 eggs
2 ounces crystallized ginger
3 cups whole almonds
2 cups candied orange peel
5.5 cups flour

Combine the molasses and honey in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Remove from the heat and let cool to room temperature.

Zest and juice the lemon and reserve both.

Combine the spices in your spice grinder and grind them. Reserve.

Put the almonds, orange peel and ginger in the food processor and process until very finely chopped. Reserve.

Transfer the honey mixture to the bowl of your mixer. Add the brown sugar and mix until well combined. [Edited to say: add the eggs and mix well.] Add the lemon zest and juice, the spice mixture, the baking soda and the cocoa and mix well.

Add the nuts and fruits and mix well again.

Gradually add the flour to the mixture. You will have to do this part carefully to avoid having flour fly all over the place.

Scrape the dough out of the mixer bowl and onto a sheet of plastic wrap. Wrap well and refrigerate for at least four hours or up to a week.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees

Remove the dough from the refrigerator. Working with a hunk of it at a time, roll the dough about a quarter inch thick and cut into rounds. Bake on lined sheets at 375 for about thirteen minutes. Remove from oven and glaze immediately. Let cool for a few minutes on the sheets, then transfer to a rack to cool completely.

If your mixer is not large or if you don't like lebkuchen as much as I do, you can halve the recipe. The recipe I used as a point of departure is half as big as mine.

The dough does tend to be sticky, so don't be shy about using flour during the rolling.

In the past, I have used a boiled sugar glaze. This time, I made a glaze out of one cup of confectioners sugar mixed with a quarter cup of Grand Marnier. The glaze is not as pretty as the boiled sugar glaze, but it tastes better.

If you like, you can also coat the lebkuchen with a layer of melted chocolate before serving.

Happy Accidents

2007-11-25T08:48:00.001-08:00

When A. came home for Thanksgiving, she brought a recipe that she wanted to make for a friend. It was a chocolate chip meringue recipe, and the meringues were fine, I suppose, but they were awfully sweet, even after I -- hoping to counteract some of the sugar -- added some cocoa powder. I checked recipes on the web, and they were mostly very similar, though they did have a somewhat more reasonable baking method, which I adopted. The recipe A. brought asked me to preheat the oven to 375, turn it off when I put the meringues in, and then leave the meringues in the oven for thirteen hours. As this would have meant the meringues would be done after A.'s departure, I switched to 250 for an hour, followed by two hours in the oven, which also meant I could use the oven for other things.

In the past, I have often not understood the problem many people have with foods that are very sweet. It's true that I'd long ago abandoned the sea-of-corn-syrup form of pecan pie for the much less sweet pecan pie from Beat This, but while guests who have that pie for the first time marvel at how good and how much less sweet it is, it's still a very sweet dessert. A nine-inch pie will easily give you twelve servings. But I have long adored many very sweet foods, from caramel to fruit punch.

But tastes, including my own, change. These days I am more about the dry martini than the mai tai, and I will always pass up the milk chocolate for the dark. Within reason, of course. I still find that a bar of 72% chocolate can be eaten only in nibbles, over time.

So I wanted a much less sweet meringue, and when I was home alone yesterday, I set out to make one. I used more egg whites and less sugar. I used cocoa powder and bittersweet chocolate, plus some orange zest. And I used Whey Low (google it if you don't know) in place of sugar. In my first try, I decided to beat the egg whites to about soft peaks and then beat in the sugar and cocoa combined, and I ended up with something which seemed like it might make a decent icing. So I tossed that and tried again, and this time the finished texture seemed just write, and I had about forty nice little clouds of meringue when I put them in the oven.

When I (finally: I'd baked them for an hour, then turned the oven off and gone out to a movie and dinner with some friends and then invited them back for pecan pie) took them out of the oven, I had flat disks. I was disappointed, but then I peeled one off the Silpat and tasted it, and I thought, "Not bad." Additional tasting and the opinions of my guests (and I must have realized they were pretty good, or I wouldn't have offered them around) ramped "not bad" up to "delicious."

I would still like to know which of the possible factors (whey low instead of sugar, not enough whey low/sugar, the presence of the orange zest, or something else) deflated my meringues, but given that I'm not willing to change any of the known possible culprits and given how good they are, I'll probably just stick with this recipe in the future. These meringues (or whatever you'd call them) have a taste that's both delicious and sophisticated. They're a perfect small cookie to serve with coffee or tea. Or probably to garnish a chocolate mousse, though in that case you might want to shape them differently.

OC Meringues

3 egg whites, at room temperature
1/4 t. salt
1/2 cup sugar
3 T. cocoa powder
1 t. vanilla extract
3 oz. bittersweet chocolate, chopped fine
Zest of one orange, finely grated

Preheat oven to 250 degrees. Line a baking sheet with foil, or use a Silpat

Beat the eggs on low speed until they're frothy. Add the salt and beat to soft peaks.

While beating, gradually add the sugar and beat to stiff peaks. Beat in the cocoa powder and then the vanilla extract.

Fold in the chocolate and the orange zest.

Drop by teaspoons onto the prepared baking sheet.

Bake at 250 degrees for an hour. Turn the oven off and let the meringues sit for two more hours.

Other recipes will tell you to use mini chocolate chips. You could do that, I suppose, but it's much better to use good chocolate (I used Trader Joe's Pound Plus bittersweet for this. I didn't use the 72% chocolate, which I think would have been too much.) and to chop it yourself. It's good to have some of the chocolate still in small chunks while some of it has been reduced almost to a powder.

I mixed my orange zest in with the chocolate, but I would be happier, I think, with another method. I had to fold longer than I'd have liked to get all the zest incorporated. I think that next time I might put the zest and a tablespoon of sugar in a spice grinder and then fold the mixture in at the end. It seemed to me that all of the folding didn't deflate the meringue, at least when it went on the cookie sheets, but I could tell that the last ones I put on the sheet were softer than the first ones because I'd had to scrape the batter off the sides of the bowl a couple of times to get the last couple of cookies formed. But they all baked up the same.

I formed mine with two teaspoons. I got a heaping teaspoon of meringue in one spoon then pushed it off with the other. You can make them larger or smaller if you like, but if you get about three or three-and-a-half dozen meringues from this recipe, I think that's the ideal size.

As soon as these are out of the oven, you need to put them in a ziplock bag or a container that seals tightly. Otherwise, they will suck moisture out of the air and become sticky.

A Little Something for the Cook

2007-11-22T21:34:00.001-08:00

I guess it's been a while since I posted. I don't have a good reason for that. V. and I went to Italy in the middle of October, and it was a trip filled with so much good food and wine that I could easily have made many posts about the spinach gnocchi with gorgonzola sauce or the really fabulous pizzas I had in Florence and Rome (we also went to Venice, where the food is slightly less impressive, but the gelatto is cheaper). Or at the very least, I might have posted about the melanzane marinate that I had in an extremely charming family-run restaurant a couple of blocks from the Tibur. I did my best to recreate it when I got home, and I got something very good, albeit somewhat different from the inspiration antipasto.

But I didn't, obviously, write about any of that. Still, it's hard to let Thanksgiving pass without posting.

Thanksgiving this year, as it has been for the last couple, was just the girls and I having dinner together. A. has been away at college, and this was the first time I've seen her since the beginning of September. V. had warned me that when she came back the first time, I would find her changed, but she's the same wonderful person that she always has been. Also hungry. She is not especially enamored of the dining hall food at her school, and she was very much looking forward to having me cook for her. And I have.

Where my daughters are concerned, there is really no point in making the large number of dishes that I would normally prepare. The girls want turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, and pie. A. will also eat green beans. This year, I confited them (reusing the fat from the first time I tried the process), and A. thought they were remarkably good. I had to agree. L. was particularly enamored of the garlic mashed potatoes, and they both liked the turkey, the gravy, and the pies. I was happy with the way everything turned out.

Since I only had eight things to make altogether (turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, green beans, pumpkin pie, and pecan pie) and since the pies and the cranberry sauce were made (and the turkey brined) the night before, the cooking process for Thanksgiving itself was relatively leisurely. At some point, I was putting the turkey neck and the giblets into a saucepan to make a stock for the gravy, and it seemed to me that I ought to have a nice way to use the liver. I had a large pot of water that I was heating up to boil the potatoes in later, so I used that to make a hard-boiled egg, and I made a turkey liver spread that was entirely delicious. It, along with a glass of wine, is just the sort of thing to keep you humming along while you're spending a day in the kitchen.

Turkey Liver Spread

The liver from one turkey
Salt
Pepper
1 T. butter
2 T. port
1 hard boiled egg
A 1/2" thick slice of bread
Heavy cream

Melt the butter in a skillet over low heat. Season the liver with salt and pepper. Turn the heat up to medium and cook the liver for two to three minutes on each side. Add the port, ignite, and cook until the flames die down. Let cool slightly, then put the liver and liquid into the bowl of your food processor. Add the egg and process until smooth. Add the bread and process again. With the processor running, add cream until the consistency is as you like it. Add salt to taste. Serve with toast.

The spread is especially terrific when eaten right away, but you'll likely have too much to eat right away unless you have considerable help. Cover the rest tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate. It's still very good when it's thoroughly chilled.

The girls, of course, have no interest in anything made from liver. More for me.

PBTs

2007-09-23T12:12:00.000-07:00

It's time to send off another batch of cookies to my daughter A. You know, the one who went off to college and never calls or writes unless she needs something? Yeah, that one. Just last week, I saw her online and we chatted for a couple of minutes, and then I went to amazon and ordered her two hundred ear plugs. It was just easier that way.

Anyway, I'd originally planned to make some sort of peanut butter and chocolate cookie. Perhaps a traditional peanut butter cookie with an indent, filled with a very thick ganache. But when I was researching various peanut butter cookie recipes, I decided to modify one that said it was traditional by adding some cocoa powder to the dough. I have found that the addition of cocoa powder adds a great deal to many different cookies, most notably lebkuchen. I also used less flour than originally called for, and I used all butter instead of shortening. And I ditched the brown sugar. Anyway, once I tried my recipe, I decided that the resulting cookies were exactly right, and that the addition of further chocolate -- even chunked good dark chocolate or a very rich ganache -- would be counterproductive.

I have nothing against the traditional, crumbly peanut butter cookies, that are formed with a fork. It's just that my cookies are better. A lot better. Really superlative. And they're still good nearly a week later, so I know that the batch I just made and will mail tomorrow will be fine for days after A. receives them. And, really, between her and her fellow students, they're unlikely to last more than a few hours, anyway.

The shape of these cookies is due to the thumbprint method of forming them. I had originally expected the dough to hold its shape slightly more, and I was trying to make indentations that could be filled with melted chocolate. Instead, I get something that has a very slight concavity, sort of like one side of a red blood cell. The cookies are moderately crisp instead of chewy.

I can get six or seven rows of four of these cookies onto a half-sheet pan. I find that it's easier to form them into balls if the dough's been refrigerated overnight, but there's certainly nothing to stop you from scooping the dough immediately onto the cookie sheets. The thumbprint is probably unnecessary, but I very much like both the shape and the cookie, so I'm sticking with that method. If you don't refrigerate the dough, it's likely that you'll need a minute or so less of cooking time. With dough that's been resting overnight in the refrigerator, I get perfect cookies after twelve minutes at 375. Because the dough starts out brown, it's not all that easy to tell from sight when they're done. If you touch the top of a cookie while it's still in the oven, it will seem soft but not wet when it's done.

Peanut Butter Thumbprints

1 c. butter, at room temperature
1 c. smooth peanut butter
2 c. granulated sugar
1 t. vanilla extract
2 eggs
Pinch of salt
2 c. flour
1/4 c. cocoa powder
1 t. baking soda

Cream the butter, peanut butter and sugar together. Add the vanilla, eggs, and salt, and mix until well combined. Combine the remaining three ingredients then mix them into the other ingredients until the dough is smooth and uniform.

Measure the dough out with a small cookie scoop (or a teaspoon). Roll each bit of ball into a dough and place on a lined cookie sheet. Using the tip of your thumb, make an indent in each ball of dough.

Bake at 375 degrees for twelve minutes. Remove from oven, let cool on the pan for five minutes, then remove to a rack to cool completely.

Makes approximately ten dozen.

The Way We Lunch Now

2007-09-21T11:57:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, somebody pointed me in the direction of an online article or forum that championed the practice of cooking dried beans without any presoaking. I didn't actually read the article or forum: I just stored the description of the method in the back of my brain somewhere and figured it might come in handy one day.

A couple of weeks ago, V. had just left for a two-week trip, and I was pushing a cart through the supermarket, and when I got to the dried beans section, I saw a bag of dried hominy. And I thought, "Well, why not?" as I picked up the hominy and a bag of black beans to go with it. Often there's no very good answer to "well, why not," but in this case, the answer would have been, "Because you'll be eating that for weeks." Still, two weeks later, I haven't gotten tired of the combination of hominy and black beans. It does take up a lot of room in the refrigerator, though, so I'm not likely to make it again until V. goes out of town again. Alas. I suppose you could cut the quantity by half or more, but if I did that, then I'd have half a bag of dried hominy sitting around, and V. would hate that at least as much as he hates having a big container in the frig. As it happens, just before he got back from his trip, I took the big container out of the frig, repackaged most of the beans and hominy into individual serving containers and discarded the rest. There was some waste, to be sure, but I still got about fifteen lunches out of the concoction, and, well, it was dirt cheap to make. Even after you add in the salsa and shredded cheese that I serve with the beans and hominy, you're looking at something less than fifty cents a serving.

It takes about 2.5 hours for the beans to cook to the point of tenderness but not mushiness. The hominy was done at the same time, fortunately. The beans are done when they have just started to release their starch, so that the cooking liquid resembles gravy. There is a certain industrial sludge look to the beans and hominy, but the addition of salsa and cheese makes them considerably more attractive, but they are still not going to win any beauty contests. You could, of course, shop up vegetables and add them during the cooking, but using the salsa is easier, and I like it better that way.

I use my big, cast iron dutch oven for this dish, but anything that goes from the stovetop to the oven (and is really big) will work.

Black Beans and Hominy

1/4 pound bacon
1 large onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 t. celery seed
2 t. smoked paprika
1 T. ground cumin
1 pound dried black beans
1 pound dried hominy
2 t. salt, plus additional to taste
14 cups water

Preheat the oven to 275 degrees.

Cut the bacon into pieces about an inch long. Put them in the bottom of a large, heavy pan over medium heat and cook until the fat is rendered and the pieces are crisp. Add the onion, stir, cover, and cook for about five minutes. Add the garlic and spices, stir, and cook for another two minutes.

Add the beans, hominy, salt, and water. Stir well, and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Cover the pot and move to the oven. Cook until the beans are tender, about 2.5 hours.

Serve with whatever strikes your fancy.

The WOBOCs Go to College

2007-09-12T13:58:00.000-07:00

You see that sad-looking, tiny bag of cookies? That's all that's left of a thirteen-dozen batch. Almost all of the rest got shipped off to Vermont as part of the first care package for A., who is now a freshman at Marlboro College in Marlboro, Vermont, a small town about ten miles west of Brattleboro. AKA the middle of nowhere. It's out there. Really, really out there. But the post office goes there, apparently. Or at least I got an e-mail from A. saying that she had received the care package and that she and her roommates had enjoyed the cookies. I was a bit disturbed by the past tense in her e-mail. I'd taken the cookies to the post office on Saturday, and the guy at the counter had said that the cookies should arrive by Tuesday, and the e-mail came on Tuesday, and there had been twelve dozen cookies in the package. Surely three young women hadn't eaten all of them so quickly. I'd ask, but I probably don't want to know.

It took two cars and numerous people to get A. to Marlboro a couple of weeks ago. I have to say that I was dreading the trip. Ever since I drove A. a long way to visit a college back in March, I'd had to face the reality that she'd be leaving. I'd talked to a number of parents who said how excited they were at the prospect of their kids going off to college, and, frankly, I just didn't get it. It's true that these same parents have their kids every day, and I only have (I mean had) A. seven nights out of every two weeks. And it's true that the other parents said they fought with their kids all the time, and A. and I really never fought. And it's true that the other parents spent a lot of time nagging their kids about doing their homework, etc., and A. has always been responsible in the extreme with getting their work done.

I guess what I'm saying here is that I have a great kid (two great kids, but I don't reckon L., who is eleven, will be leaving imminently), and I knew I was going to miss her horribly.

And I do, of course. But I'm also immensely proud of her, and I'm glad that she's going to the school that she most wanted to attend. And it's good to have someone to send cookies to.

These WOBOCs are a variation on the original WOBOCs, which I first made earlier this year. The original WOBOCs had m&ms, and I still believe that if I could still find mini m&ms, they'd be the best choice, but I couldn't, so I used the chocolate- and candy-coated sunflower seeds that come from Trader Joe's. They're not as colorful as m&ms, but they're still colorful and tasty. I also added some peanut butter and craisins this time around.

The cookies are very good, but I think next time I'll cut the sugar a bit. These cookies have a lot of additions, and all the additions have sugar in them. The overall effect was a bit too sweet for me, but they do seem to be a big hit with the youthful palate.

The other major change from the original recipe was that I went for smaller cookies. Instead of the large cookie scoop, I used teaspoons and the classic drop cookie technique. Consequently, the recipe makes a lot more cookies (the extra ingredient or two helps, but it's mainly the smaller cookie size). I got about thirteen dozen smaller cookies, as opposed to fifty-six really big cookies the first time around. Cooking time is also shorter, naturally.

Peanut Butter WOBOCs

1/2 lb. butter, at room temperature
1/2 c. peanut butter
1 c. granulated sugar
1/2 c. honey
3 eggs
1 t. vanilla extract
1.5 c. all purpose flour
1 t. baking soda
1 t. ground cinnamon
1/4 t. salt
3.5 c. rolled oats
1 c. unsalted roasted cashews
1.5 c. toasted coconut
1 c. miniature semisweet chocolate chips
1 c. butterscotch chips
1 c. craisins
1 c. chocolate covered sunflower seeds

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cream together the butter and peanut butter. Add the sugar and cream some more. Same again with the honey. Add the eggs and vanilla and mix until well incorporated. Add the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt, and mix again.

Add the remaining ingredients, one at a time, mixing after each addition until the ingredients are well incorporated.

Drop by teaspoonfuls onto prepared cookie sheets. Bake for thirteen minutes, or until nicely browned.

Allow cookies to rest on the cookie sheets for about five minutes, then remove to racks to cool fully.

As with the original WOBOCs, you can make a lot of substitutions for the final few ingredients, and still have something terrific. It may be possible to add another cup or two of goodies, but I think I'm getting pretty close to the limit of how much stuff can be in there without overwhelming the cookie dough. Not that pushing the limits wouldn't be fun.

Naturally, there will have to be more care packages, and naturally, I won't be able to send the same cookie twice in the same semester. I'd certainly appreciate any suggestions for cookies that ship and keep well. I'm certain A. will be similarly appreciative.

Salade de Concombres Tante Marie

2007-08-28T08:07:00.000-07:00

My Aunt Mary (the youngest sister of my late grandmother, so really my great aunt) would be very amused to find her recipe -- or herself -- with a French title. She is an extremely good natured and unpretentious person of nearly ninety years. She and my great uncle (who is ninety or ninety-one) have lived on the same farm for over fifty years. They don't actively farm the land any more, but they are still very active. When I was a child, we would frequently go and visit them on the farm, where we always had a terrific time and a lot of good food.

She brought this cucumber salad to the most recent family reunion, and it was quickly devoured. It is very much the sort of recipe that I would expect from my Mennonite relatives: fresh vegetables and a lot of sugar. (The Mennonite diet in general, one might say, is not especially health conscious, but my aunt is almost ninety, and you're not, so there.) A number of my relatives would likely have added sour cream as well, which might have been tasty but would still have been an abomination. Abominably good. Anyway, I've actually used half the sugar her recipe calls for, and that's still a whole lotta sugar. I was doing the recipe from memory, and I was pretty sure it called for a cup of vinegar and two cups of sugar, but I couldn't be absolutely sure that it didn't call for a cup of sugar and two cups of vinegar. So I used one cup of each and left a message for my mother. Mom didn't get back to me until after the party I was serving it at, but when I tasted it with the 1:1 ratio, it was a)very good and b)clearly less sweet than the version Aunt Mary served. Brutal honesty requires me to say that hers is even better, but you'll enjoy mine more because you'll have less guilt. No, really.

I have one of those little Japanese slicers that's plastic with an incredibly sharp ceramic blade. It makes slices in four different widths, none of which is very big. For the cucumber salad, I use the next-to-largest size to slice the cucumbers and the smallest size to slice the onions.

I worried that perhaps I should salt and drain the cukes for a period before proceeding with the recipe, but I didn't, and the result was splendid. Once you have everything sliced, it's an almost embarrassingly simple recipe. I suppose you can always tell your guests that you harvested the celery seed by hand. One by one. Sort of like the beerenauslese of celery seeds. Somebody might believe you. Trochenbeerenauslese would be overkill, however.

In essence, this recipe is a rudimentary form of fresh sweet-and-sour pickles. It's very good after four hours in the fridge, and it's even better a day or two later. If you don't have at least two hours for it to marinate before you're going to serve it, don't bother.

The amount of cucumbers called for in this recipe is just the amount that comes in the pack of long, unwaxed cucumbers that you can get at Costco. It's a large recipe, so take it to a potluck, or enjoy the fact that it'll keep for a good long while in the refrigerator.

Salade de Concombres Tante Marie

Three English cucumbers, thinly sliced (about 7 cups)
1 cup thinly sliced onion
4 t. salt
1 cup cider vinegar
1 cup granulated sugar
2 t. celery seed

Toss the sliced cucumbers and onions with the salt. Add the vinegar and sugar and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Add the celery seed. Cover and refrigerate for at least two hours and preferably overnight.

Cast Iron Peach Cobbler

2007-08-20T06:41:00.000-07:00

I spent this past week in the mountains of Southwestern Pennsylvania, in the tiny, tiny village of Springs, just a mile north of the Maryland border in Somerset County. It is a heavily Amish area, so that driving down the highway often involves waiting behind a buggy until you reach a spot where the road straightens sufficiently to let you pass. It's gorgeous up there, and it's a great place to decompress for a week and either think about nothing or try not to dread the fact that in two short weeks you'll be driving your oldest child off to college. You know, as the case may be.

Anyway, I was up there with the girls and my parents, who live there during the summer. Time being a thing that moves in only one direction, my parents are not as young as they were, and this fact becomes more noticeable with each passing year. And with each year it becomes less and less clear that they'll continue to make the trek northward for the summer. I will not be overly surprised if next year they decide not to leave Florida, though I continue to hope that they'll defer that decision for a few more years.

We spent a fair amount of time sitting around the table, all playing cards. I tried not to overburden my mother with cooking, so we most often ate breakfast out (if you're in that area of the country, breakfast is really the meal you want to eat out; you can find a good breakfast almost anywhere there; the other meals, not so much), then I took the girls off to do something during the day, and we'd come home for dinner. On Friday, my mother made breakfast because we were planning to go out to an all-you-can-eat (always a mistake) fish fry (always a mistake in the mountains). But later in the day, they were feeling too unwell to go out, so I volunteered to make dinner.

Part of making dinner involved reheating corn on the cob that had been cooked days earlier yet was (miraculously!) still delicious. And another part involved slicing some cucumbers and dicing some tomatoes and mixing them with mayonnaise and garlic powder and salt and pepper and vinegar to make a messy but delicious salad. And yet another part of dinner involved defrosting some large boneless, skinless chicken breasts, slicing them into thinner pieces, salting and peppering them, and browning them in a bit of olive oil. Then I finished off the dish by (I am not making this up) deglazing the pan with balsamic vinegar, adding a can of cream of mushroom soup, adding a half-can's worth of milk and another half-can's worth of water, and then stirring in a couple of cups of leftover mashed potatoes. When it was all bubbling nicely, I put the chicken breasts back in to finish cooking through. I am officially prohibited from endorsing any recipe that involves a can of cream of mushroom (or any other, really) soup, but the result was undeniably delicious. And, you know, sometimes you've got to work with what's available.

Also available were some peaches that were destined to go bad if I didn't use them up. My father had bought several pounds before we arrived, and we'd done our best to get through them, but they were only good peaches, not the sort of peaches that one dreams about. Mom had been planning to make a pie, but she wasn't going to get around to it (she'd made other pie during the week; her crusts are so good that I weep with envy). On Friday morning, Dad took me to the wholesale produce auction that happens twice a week about a mile from their house. Some of the white peaches there looked like the sort of thing one dreams about, but I would have had to buy four pecks, which seemed, well, optimistic.

Anyway, I'd been staring longingly at my mother's three cast-iron skillets (I've written about my cast iron envy before) all week, and I thought that a peach cobbler was just the thing to combine my desires to cook with a skillet seasoned over decades and to use the ripe peaches. This particular cobbler is a bit of a cross with a tarte tatin. As it happens, the bottom was sufficiently caramelized and the filling sufficiently solid that I could have unmolded the whole thing and made upside down peach cobbler, but that seemed needlessly showy.

The amount of milk added to the dough here is really very much your preference. You could add less and roll the dough out like rolled biscuits, or you could add more and just pour it like batter. I opted for something that was just a bit too wet to roll out, and I spooned blobs of it over the simmering peaches, figuring (correctly) that the heat from the pan and the oven would even it out. The dough layer may have been a tad thicker than I would have liked, but it was light and tasty, so I didn't mind. If I'd had more peaches, I would likely have used the same amount of dough to cover a cobbler made in a ten-inch skillet.

You want to serve this cobbler with vanilla ice cream. Served thusly, it will comfort anyone who can be comforted.

Peach Cobbler

Four or five ripe medium peaches
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/8 t. ground cloves
2 t. tapioca
Pinch salt

1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup rolled oats
2 T. granulated sugar
Pinch salt
4 T. butter, melted
Milk, approximately 1/2 cup

2 T. butter
2 T. brown sugar

Preheat oven to 400 degrees

Peel and slice the peaches. Put them in a bowl with the 1/4 c. sugar, the cloves, the tapioca, and the pinch of salt. Mix and let sit while you prepare the dough.

In a separate bowl combine the flour, oats, 2 T. sugar, and another pinch of salt. Mix well. Pour on the melted butter and mix again. Stir in milk until you have something that is the consistency of drop biscuits.

In an eight-inch cast iron skillet, melt the butter, tilting the pan to coat the sides. Add the butter, and stir to distribute evenly across the bottom of the pan. Cook over medium heat until the sugar begins to caramelize. Pour in the peaches and let cook for a minute or two. Spoon the batter over the peaches, then transfer to the oven.

Bake until well browned, about twenty-five to thirty minutes.

Oatmeal Spice Cookies

2007-08-11T21:55:00.001-07:00

If there's anything a man loves to hear on a Saturday night, it must be, "I signed you up to bring cookies to the bake sale tomorrow." Especially when the words are coming from his ex-wife, but let's just not go there, okay?

L. is appearing as a fairy (and probably other things: she has three different costumes) in the local civic ballet company's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream tomorrow, and one of the responsibilities of a ballet parent is to contribute to the bake sale. Many parents do this by purchasing rather than actually baking the baked goods, but the only time I ever did that was when I only had two hours of notice. Then I went to the supermarket and bought some chewy oatmeal cookies and some pre-packaged German chocolate cake frosting and made sandwiches. The kids loved them, but I felt unclean, somehow. After all, I like to bake, and I like to bake for bake sales. I'm not so thrilled with the requirement that the cookies have to be individually wrapped, but what are you going to do?

Anyway, I wanted to make something gingery. I adore the gingersnaps recipe in Joy of Cooking (I double the spices, though), but while they're delicious and the texture is just right for, say, shipping cross country, I thought something a bit larger and more delicate would be better for the bake sale. So I decided to cross the gingersnaps recipe with an oatmeal cookie recipe. Well, actually, I took an oatmeal cookie recipe and made some modifications and additions. Another time, I'd like to try starting with the gingersnap recipe and adding oatmeal, but I needed the cookies to be good on the first try, and the oatmeal cookie recipe was clearly the safer starting point. Mostly I just added spices and molasses and adjusted the other ingredients accordingly.

The cookies are very good. I wimped out a bit on the ginger, and I wish I hadn't. Usually when I make spice cookies, I take a no-prisoners sort of approach and end up with something very gingery. I was timid here, and why some people may like the result better, I'd like a bit more of a bite. Still, they're delicious. (Also, I forgot the vanilla extract, but don't tell anyone, okay?)

If you were making these for the cookie jar instead of a bake sale, you would just go with a smaller cookie scoop (or drop by teaspoons) and a shorter baking time. And, obviously, you'd get a larger number. Using the larger cookie scoop, you get about four dozen.

Ginger Oatmeal Cookies

1 cup butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup molasses
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 t. vanilla extract
1/2 t. salt
1.5 cups all purpose flour
1 t. baking soda
1 T. ground ginger
1 t. ground cinnamon
1/2 t. ground cloves
3.5 cups rolled oats
1 cup currants

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Measure out the dry ingredients (starting with the salt and going all the way through the cloves) and mix them together.

In the bowl of your mixer, cream the butter until fluffy. With the mixer running, add the molasses and the sugar, and mix until well incorporated. With the mixer still running, add the eggs -- one at a time -- and the vanilla extract. Turn the mixer off and scrape the bowl with a rubber spatula to make sure everything's well incorporated. Add the dry ingredients and mix on slow until thoroughly mixed in. Do the same thing with the oats and then the currants.

Using a large cookie scoop, put mounds of the dough on a cookie sheet lined with a Silpat or parchment paper. The cookies will spread out quite a bit, so if you're using a half-sheet pan, you won't want to put more than a dozen mounds of dough on a sheet.

Bake at 350 degrees until done (the tops will no longer feel wet when you touch them lightly), which takes seventeen minutes in my oven.

Let sit for a few minutes on top of the oven, then remove the cookies to racks to cool thoroughly.

These cookies end up thin and crispy rather than thick and chewy. Perhaps another time I will add more rolled oats to keep them thicker if, say, I want to sandwich two of them with some lemon curd or raspberry buttercream. But they're awfully nice as they are.

Soup for Many

2007-07-30T10:41:00.000-07:00

This past weekend found me and the kids traveling to a family reunion in southwestern Pennsylvania. The reunion is for the descendants of my great grandfather. He had eleven children, of whom only the youngest is still living. She's pushing ninety, but she seems to be pretty spry for her age and she made corncob jelly to sell at this year's family auction.

Anyway, the families of each of my great grandfather's children (or at least the ones who made it to adulthood and had kids) take it in turn to organize the reunion, and this year was the year for my grandfather's family. In the past, my parents have taken a more active role, but this year, some of my cousins took the lead. My mother was responsible for one meal, and she asked my sister and I to take charge of reheating what she'd made and adding some more food. There is really no great skill involved in reheating sloppy joes or opening bags of chips or smiling while members of the extended family prepare their cole slaw or cucumber salad or whatever. By the way, if your sloppy joes are a bit on the runny side, the easiest way to handle the situation is to open up your bun and dump the beef mixture on both halves. If you then top it with cole slaw, you will understand the true meaning of "guilty pleasure." You probably won't want to do this too often, however.

Anyway, in addition to reheating Saturday lunch, I was asked to make my leek-potato soup for Friday dinner. I had made it the last time my family was in charge of the food, and people still remembered it and wanted it again. I think I did a better job this time, probably because I brought my immersion blender with me. Alas, I also appear to have left my immersion blender behind in the huge kitchen at the camp where we had the reunion. My parents said that they'd try to reclaim it, but in any case, stick blenders are not terribly expensive.

My leek-potato soup is really just the Joy of Cooking's vichyssoise. I don't call it vichyssoise because I tend to think of vichyssoise as a cold soup, and I like it much better when it's hot. (Fortunately, the mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania were nice and cool this weekend, especially after the rain, but for most people and purposes, you are better off making this soup in the winter.) Also, a lot of people omit the final consonant sound when they say "vichyssoise," and that puts me in a bad mood. Joy of Cooking has something amusing to say about this mispronunciation, but I can't quote it verbatim, so I won't try. I also can't reproduce its recipe exactly because I haven't looked at it in years. I knew that I had to make a whole lot of soup, so I picked up what I thought I'd need at the supermarket and took it with me to the camp, and the soup came out splendidly. If you don't want to make 2.5 or 3 gallons, you might want to check out Joy of Cooking for a reduced recipe.

I did want to make rather a large batch. It wasn't the only sort of soup we had Friday, and I was expecting leftovers, but it all got eaten. L., who is not known for her love of non-ramen soups, absolutely raved about the leek-potato soup. She told me that I should be making it at home, frequently.

Leek-Potato Soup

3 bunches leeks
1 very large white onion
12 ounces butter
6 large baking potatoes
4 quarts chicken broth
1 quart heavy cream

Wash the leeks well. Trim off the roots and remove the thick green leaves at the top. You don't need to remove the light green part nearer the base unless you want to. Cut halfway through the leeks, leaving the very base intact and wash again to make sure you have no sand in your leeks. Slice the leeks crosswise, about a quarter inch thick. Peel and dice the onion.

In the bottom of a very large, heavy pot, melt the butter. Add the leeks and onions, stir well, cover, and cook on low heat for about fifteen minutes, or until everything is nice and soft. You don't want anything to brown, however.

Peel your potatoes and slice them finely. Then when the alliums are nice and soft, add the potatoes and the chicken broth and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer, cover again, and let cook until the potatoes are very tender. This should only take about twenty minutes, but you can cook them for a while longer without hurting anything. You're just going to blend the whole mess, anyway.

Put your immersion blender in the pot and blend the whole mess until it's as smooth as possible. Stir in the cream, taste, and add salt if necessary. Serve hot.

I think the soup is pretty much perfect if you leave it right there, but if you feel like it needs some white pepper, have at it. Also, you can snip some chives over the top if you have an aversion to white foods. If, however, you see that everyone else going through the dinner line is taking a normal soup bowl full of the soup and enjoying it the way it's meant to be enjoyed, please refrain from grabbing a serving bowl, filling it up with the soup, and then adding a large handful of grated cheddar cheese to it. One of my cousins actually did that. Right in front of me. I can only suppose that it was payback for something I did to him when we were both ten.

Yet Another Reason I Deserve Apricot Trees

2007-07-15T13:45:00.001-07:00

Eight days after picking the underripe apricots, most of them were still underripe. (On the plus side, none of them rotted.) Perhaps I should have kept them in a warmer place. Because of the vagaries of V.'s air conditioning, in order for the upstairs to be habitable, the main floor needs to be on the cool side. Regardless, a week in a brown paper bag should have done the trick and didn't. Since Mother Nature was not forthcoming with a transformation, it fell to me.

The most difficult part of making apricot preserves is selecting a recipe. I'm sure there's a fabulous recipe in Mes Confitures, but it has still not chosen to re-appear. I had great success with the cherry jam recipe/method from the SureJell package, but I didn't like the recipe they had for apricot jam. It had about as high a proportion of sugar as the tart cherry recipe had, but apricots are, obviously a great deal sweeter than tart cherries. Plus, I thought it would be fun to try something without added pectin.

Unsurprisingly, the more I make preserves, the easier and more enjoyable I find it. I no longer fear the process, really. I think that using Christine Ferber's oven sterilization method has been the key for me. I really don't like having to fish empty jars out of boiling water. Instead, I wash the jars, lids, and rings in very hot soapy water, rinse them thoroughly, put them in the oven, set the oven to 250, and after half an hour or so, turn it to 225 until I'm ready to use the jars.

One problem I do have is that a lot of recipes for preserves aren't terribly forthcoming about how much they make. Consequently, I usually end up with significantly more jars than I need. For example, today's recipe ended up making seven cups, which I put in four jars (three pints and one half-pint; I rather despise the term "half-pint" because it's really a cup, but the people who make jams and jellies seem to think that "half-pint" is preferable, so whatever), but I had ten jars (four pints and six of those jars that are half as big as a pint and hold a cup) ready to go. Oh well. I wish I could have filled all the jars, but that would have been rather an expensive amount of apricots. Hence the title of this post. If I had a couple of apricot trees, I could put up enough preserves for myself and all my friends and family over a couple of weekends in July. Truly, the universe is an unfair place.

Anyway, my travels around the net found this post and recipe, which I doubled and adapted slightly for my own purposes. I liked the idea of the small amount of sugar. The writer says that it's "just a bit less sweet" than commercial apricot preserves. Maybe where she is, but preserves in the U.S. are much, much sweeter than her recipe. In fact, I slightly increased the amount of sugar, and I think I still used less than half of the amount of sugar the SureJell recipe calls for.

The results are outstanding. It has none of the cloying sweetness that is so typical of commercial and most homemade preserves. In fact, the taste reminds me of something like marmalade. Of course, I was tasting the couple of ounces that were left over when I'd finished filling my jars, so the taste may be slightly tamer after the hot water processing and some time on the shelf, but I have to believe they'll still be fantastic. I do think that you could add a bit more sugar and they would still be very, very good; in fact, if I can get more apricots next year, I may up the sugar by a small amount. But maybe not. Hey, I have a year to decide, right?

This is not a recipe that you want to rush. You should count on spending at least two (and perhaps three) hours in the kitchen from the time that you start washing your apricots until the time that you pull the finished preserves from the boiling water bath and set them aside to await the ping of the finishing seal. It's a very good thing to do when you have other chores in or near the kitchen to attend to. During the time the apricots were cooking, I'd set my timer to three minutes, turn it on, do some other things, and come back to stir the pot when the timer went off. I got a lot of other stuff done that way. While the preserves are cooking, you want them to be at a very low boil. The cooking phase itself will probably take at least an hour. Your patience will be rewarded. Try to enjoy the aroma during that time. Try to be in a frame of mind where you are enjoying the process rather than hurrying toward the result. If all else fails, grab a good book and a glass of wine. Or send an e-mail to a friend. You can get quite a lot accomplished in three minutes.

I'm not sure how much they add to the unique and superlative flavor of the preserves, but I did put in the kernels of some of the apricots. I'd say about eight, but I'm not quite sure because they were in pieces. Breaking open the apricot pit is not an exercise for the timid. The original recipe recommends wrapping them in cloth before hitting them with a hammer. I kind of forgot the cloth part, so I had pits and parts of pits ricocheting around the kitchen. The original recipe also recommends wrapping the pits in cheesecloth and then removing them. I fished out one or two of the pits, but mostly I just left them in chunks in the preserves. Apricot kernels do contain cyanide but in very small quantities. You would not want to eat a handful of raw kernels, but half a kernel in a jar of jam shouldn't hurt anybody, and they're pretty easy to work around when you open the jar, I reckon. I didn't bother to go down to the basement and root through my toolbox, but if you have a c-clamp handy, I suspect that using it on the pit will enable you to extract the kernels in one piece and without the dangers of pit shrapnel.

Anyway, the recipe:

Apricot Preserves

About 4.5 lbs ripe (and/or semi-ripe) apricots
1/2 cup water
3 cups granulated sugar
4 T. fresh lemon juice

Wash and drain the apricots. Pull them in half with your fingers and remove the pits. Cut apricots into chunks (eight chunks per apricot) until you have about eight cups of chunks. Cut the remainder of the apricots in wedges or slices (eight wedges per apricot). Break open about eight of the seeds and reserve the kernels.

Prepare your jars.

In a large, heavy stockpot, Combine the water and sugar. Stir as well as you can. A heat-resistant silicon spatula will be very useful hear and throughout the process. Put the sugar and water over medium-low heat and cover. Heat, stirring if necessary, until the mixture is clear and comes to a boil. Do your best to avoid crystallization on the sides of the pot, but don't fret over a little bit: when the apricots go in, it'll be easy to pull any crystallized sugar off the side and into the preserves.

Add the apricot chunks to the boiling syrup. Return to a simmer/slow boil and cook, uncovered, until the chunks are mostly disintegrated. Stir thoroughly every few minutes during the cooking to avoid scorching. This phase of cooking will likely take at least half an hour.

Bring a large pot of water to the boil on the stove. Keep at a simmer. You will use this for processing later.

Add the apricot wedges/slices to the pot and continue cooking with regular, thorough stirring, until the wedges are largely dissolved but some pieces remain, another half hour or so. The mixture should be very thick at this point. Stir in the lemon juice and simmer for another five minutes.

Ladle the preserves into the prepared jars, put the lids on, and screw the rings down. Process in the boiling water bath for fifteen minutes. Remove from the water and set aside to cool and to complete the seals.

I don't have any real reason for putting this picture here. I made the last two cherry pies about a week ago. I gave one of them away to a friend, and we kept the other one. The filling was terrific, but the crust was tough. Good flavor, but really tough. Clearly I overhandled it, even though I thought I'd taken precautions. The little crust flowers on top weren't tough, and my friend said that the crust of the pie I'd given him wasn't tough, so who knows? I'll be more careful next time. Clearly, I haven't been making enough pie, and that's a situation I really shouldn't allow to continue.

Alas, Alack

2007-07-11T09:13:00.000-07:00

I have probably gone on (at great length: always a safe bet around here) before about my desire to pick ripe apricots from the tree. Preferably in my own back yard, but, really, I'm not that particular, I just want the beautiful apricots. So it was with no inconsiderable glee that I opened last week's email from my favorite orchard (to whom I am currently not linking in a fit of pique) saying that the apricots would be ready for picking. They were to be ready this past Saturday, and the email warned that a) there would not be many, b) they would likely not last until Sunday, and c) I should call before venturing out.

The orchard in question (where I also pick my tart cherries and various other fruits) opens at 9 am, and I'd originally made plans to get there right at 9. Camping out the night before seemed not altogether extreme, but of dubious legality. In any case, I overslept slightly, and after making the call to hear their recorded message (which promised "a few" apricots), I left home, arriving at the orchard before 9:30.

Too late, readers, too late! There were still a very few perfectly ripe apricots available, particularly if I stretched on my tippy toes, but most of the apricots were beautiful on one side but green on the shady side. Oh, the humanity.

I was already in something of a state before I arrived to find such slim pickings. I had in mind taking some beautiful apricots and making the fruits confits from Mireille Johnston's The Cuisine of the Sun. I had planned to take my beautiful apricots, make a slice in them, extract the seeds, and slip in a beautiful Marcona almond (which are now available at Costco) before embarking on the long, painstaking process that results in fruits that are too pretty to eat. But not, one supposes, too pretty to give away. And I was going to do it right. I was, in fact, all set to order a hydrometer one evening last week when I thought that I had better check the book to make sure I was ordering an instrument that measured the right range of specific gravities.

I could not find the book.

Now, in between all the cursing and fuming, I realized that I'd had trouble finding the book before, but I reasoned that I simply must not have looked hard enough. I looked hard. I had nothing. I decided to bite the bullet and buy a second copy. After all, I reasoned, The Cuisine of the Sun is one of the best cookbooks I own, and not owning it is not an option. If I bought a second and found the first, then I'd have two copies to someday bequeath to my daughters. And, after all, I do own two (okay, three) copies of Joy of Cooking, so it's not like I have a philosophical objection to the redundancy of essential texts.

I figured that I would pick up a copy at Borders on Friday night, when I was meeting friends to see a movie. I went directly from work, I arrived early, I walked into Borders, and I picked up a copy. Except I didn't because BORDERS DIDN'T HAVE A COPY OF THE CUISINE OF THE SUN. They didn't have a copy in general cooking, they didn't have a copy in Mediterranean cooking, and they didn't have a copy in French cooking. I assumed this was some sort of horrible mistake or that perhaps there'd just been an unexpected run, but when I went to the terminal that tracks their books, they helpfully told me that I could order the book and have it in eight days or so.

I'm just going to say it: a world where The Cuisine of the Sun is not considered an essential cookbook is a world that needs to be fixed. Borders would have had no trouble providing me with the entire oeuvres of any number of people who have shows on the Food Network, but they don't stock The Cuisine of the Sun as a matter of course.

I was apoplectic. Not only was I angry at this grave injustice (I am not really exaggerating here), but suddenly I was faced with having a large quantity of perfect apricots the next morning and not knowing how to turn them into fruits confits. After a few moments of sheer panic, I decided upon a course of action, and I felt a bit better. When I got home, I would e-mail lindy and ask her to summarize for me the first few days' worth of the fruits confits process. This would give me time to procure a replacement copy of the cookbook. I was worried that lindy might be away or not get the email soon enough, but I reasoned that I could stall the apricots for a day or so. I was sure, given the urgency of the situation, that she would help me out. And that she would know, at any given moment, exactly where to lay her hands on her own copy of The Cuisine of the Sun. Thank God somebody's responsible.

Fortunately, it didn't come to that. As it happens, Amazon (perhaps because I'm a prime member, but perhaps not) has a searchable version of The Cuisine of the Sun on its site, and I was able to look at the .pdf of the book itself and determine what I needed to do. And which sugar hydrometer to order. As it happens, I had to order two to cover the entire range of specific gravities that the recipe calls for, but I figured that surely at some point in time, I would be in a situation where being able to boast that I had two hydrometers would result in either sex or chocolate.

Anyway, all of that sturm und drang was pretty much rendered unnecessary by the state of the apricots.

I still picked some, of course. I mean, I'm standing there in an orchard with a bag in my hand and a bunch of half-ripe apricots, and I'm going to just put the bag down and walk away? I'm only human, people. Now I have about eight pounds of mostly ripe apricots in a brown paper bag next to the kitchen. They don't appear to be in any hurry to ripen, and tossing an overripe banana in the bag didn't seem to do much. At this point, I'm figuring that fruits confits aren't worth the effort if I can't get outrageously perfect fruit, but I'm sure that I'll still get some delicious preserves out of the bargain. I'm looking forward to cracking open a few of the seeds and simmering the kernels with the preserves to give an almond flavor. (You only use a few of the kernels because they contain small amounts of cyanide, and if you eat too many of them, you'll poison yourself. A few won't hurt, though.) It's really not much solace in the face of having to live in such a flawed world, but I reckon it'll just have to do.

Crisp

2007-07-02T19:26:00.001-07:00

Some ingredients really do cry out for the simplest possible treatments. Last week's tart cherries, for example. After I'd made the (very simple) cherry jam, I made two very simple cherry pies. I'm not going to post the recipe because I just used the recipe from the tapioca box. The only adjustments I made is that where the recipe calls for 1.5 cups of sugar, I used one cup. And I did put the tapioca and the sugar (as is usually the case with baked goods, I used whey low in place of ordinary granulated sugar) in the food processor and whirl them together for a bit to make sure the tapioca pieces were as small as possible. But, still, it's basically the tapioca box recipe. And so, so, so very good. I do think using the lesser amount of sugar allows me to appreciate the tartness of the cherries. Others thought the pie a bit too tart, but there is an easy remedy for that: vanilla ice cream. Some people have gone so far as to suggest that I make the pie less sweet so that I'll have an excuse to put vanilla ice cream with the pie. Such accusations, I'm sure you'll agree, are so scurrilous that they merit no response.

I still have some cherries left. Actually, I have more cherries. This past weekend, I put the girls in the car, and we went back to Larriland Farms and picked another four or so pounds of cherries. It only took about twenty minutes, but at that point, the girls felt that they'd had enough picking, so they opted to stay in the car and read while I picked some black raspberries. I picked for about half an hour, which I figured was the limit of their patience. Besides, later in the summer, I'll go off for a couple of hours of wild blackberry picking, and that'll be the real haul.

The cultivated black raspberries, however, are undeniably easier to pick, and they're tasty, if a bit bland when compared to the wild blackberries. I wasn't up to straining them for jam, so I decided to make a simple fruit crisp. And it really is a very simple recipe. You can have the finished product in about an hour from when you start, assuming that your oven preheats fairly rapidly.

Black Raspberry Crisp

For the filling:
6 cups black raspberries
1/3 c. sugar
3 T. quick cooking tapioca
Grated zest of one lemon
Juice of one-half lemon

For the topping:
1 cup old fashioned rolled oats
1/3 c. sugar
1/4 t. cinnamon
4 T. butter, softened

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9" square baking dish.

Combine the filling ingredients in a bowl. Stir well and let sit while you make the topping.

Mix together the oats, sugar, and cinnamon. Add the softened butter and mix together until well combined.

Turn the filling into the prepared baking dish. Sprinkle the topping evenly over the filling. Bake at 350 degrees for about fifty minutes, or until the filling makes large bubbles and the topping is nicely browned.

It is very important to cook the crisp for long enough. If the topping isn't browned properly, it won't be nearly as nice, and if the filling doesn't cook for long enough, it'll be a bit on the runny side. Mind you, it'll still taste delicious, but not as delicious.

I would imagine that there are many people for whom the recipe as written has too much lemon juice and too little sugar. I much prefer it as written, but feel free to make your own adjustments. Also feel free to change the sugar in the topping from white sugar to brown sugar, something I wish that I'd done, though I am in no way unhappy with the result that I got.

As with the cherry pie, the black raspberry crisp cries out for vanilla ice cream. I add a scoop of Edy's Vanilla Bean Light No Sugar Added. (It's made with Splenda.) If you eat the ice cream plain, you can certainly tell the difference between it and regular vanilla ice cream, but if you're eating it with either a piece of cherry pie or a bowl of fruit crisp that you've reheated, I'm not sure the difference is apparent. In any case, it's very good when it's melting into the rest of the dessert.

I'm looking forward to more trips to the pick your own this summer. The proprietors have promised a few (a very few, nonconsecutive) days of apricot picking this year. I'm supposed to get an email letting me know what those days will be. Since last year when I candied my own tart cherries, I've been praying for a local orchard to offer pick-your-own apricots so that I could at least try to make my own glacéed apricots. Maybe this will be the year.

Cherry Jam

2007-06-27T09:25:00.000-07:00

The tart cherry season began (and possibly ended) this past weekend, and on Sunday morning at 10 am, I was taking the beautiful half-hour drive to my favorite place to pick them.

I ended up with 9.5 pounds, which, technically, is just short of the amount needed to get the lower price. But the very nice young woman at the stand gave me the lower rate anyway, so my large bucket of cherries cost me less than twenty bucks. It took a little less than an hour to pick them and about the same amount of time to remove the pits with my super-deluxe cherry stoner. Even though I use it once -- or at most twice -- a year, I love it. Any tool that allows me to buy five times as much fruit as I ought is a good tool.

When I stone cherries, I fill a four-cup glass measure level with the top (probably just under five cups), then transfer the cherries to a ziplock bag and start again. Each bag is enough for a generous pie. Or, as it happens, a batch of cherry jam.

I searched with some diligence, but I could not lay my hands on my copy of Mes Confitures, so I searched the Net for a cherry jam recipe and found one that I modified very slightly. It basically takes the SureJell recipe and adds a soupcon of almond extract. The SureJell instructions are very stern about following their proportions exactly. Else, they say, the jam will not set. Yeah, whatever. I raised the fruit and lowered the sugar very slightly, and my jam set perfectly. Not too thin, not too thick.

I did use Christine Ferber's method of preparing the jars: wash thoroughly in hot soapy water, then set in a 250-degree oven until ready to fill. I treated my canning funnel the same way, but I put my ladle in the pot of boiling water that I was going to use for the hot water bath.

Cherry Jam

4.5 cups tart cherry pulp
1 package SureJell
1/4 t. almond extract
1/2 t. butter
4 2/3 cups granulated sugar

Follow the jam instructions inside the SureJell box. When the jars are full, process in a boiling water bath for fifteen minutes.

I prepared my 4.5 cups of cherry pulp by putting one of my bags of pitted cherries in the blender and turning it on for a bit. There is a good chance that that many pitted cherries will still have a pit or two, and you will know whether that's the case by the noise the blender makes. Not to worry, the cherries will be nicely cut up long before the blender can begin to chop the pits. Just take out any that escaped the first run through the cherry stoner. I only had one in my bag.

My batch of jam filled six half-pint jars almost exactly. The SureJell instructions tell you to fill the jars to within 1/8" of the top, and the jam in the sixth jar got to about 3/4" from the top. It still sealed, but I decided, largely for selfish reasons, to store that one in the refrigerator instead. Last night when I got home, I spread some cream cheese on a graham cracker and then topped it with a spoonful of the jam (I may have done this more than once). Heaven. A really lively flavor. We'll see how well it holds up over time.

Making jam is an undertaking that frightens many otherwise wonderful cooks, and I have to say that the blackberry jam I made last year was a bit tough on my nerves. The tart cherry jam, however, was an absolute breeze. The SureJell instructions are written so that a thermometer is not necessary, and the small bit of butter means that you end up having to skim only a very small amount of foam off at the end. You will want to lick all of the tools that you used to cook the jam. Make sure that you wait until they cool somewhat, then have at it.

Strawberry Fool

2007-05-29T19:34:00.000-07:00

The origins of today's dish are a bit murky. Many years ago, I was watching a cooking show, probably on PBS, where a chef/restaurateur came on and showed some of the dishes that she served at her restaurant. I remember that she had some sort of pork cutlet dish because I enjoyed watching her pound the piece of pork with a tenderizing hammer and reforming the cutlet by folding the pounded bits back onto themselves.

I have no idea who this woman was, but she gave the impression of being the sort of person from whom you'd learn much if you were lucky enough to work in her kitchen. I do remember the dessert she made. She took raspberries mixed with some sugar, bread, and butter, and made it into a dessert by layering buttered bread with the raspberries. Then when the pan she was making it in was piled high, she wrapped it tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerated it.

Today's recipe also owes something to Alton Brown's layered strawberry recipe. His uses potato bread and smaller tin cans, but the idea is very similar. I believe that only his bottom layer has butter, in an attempt to slow seepage.

Seepage is, indeed, a difficult problem with this sort of dessert, especially if you're going to use a springform pan. I took a larger springform pan and lined it with plastic wrap and then put the smaller springform pan inside it, but I still ended up with strawberry juice all over the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. It would be wiser to put the whole thing in a non-springform pan, of course. Also, one might try putting a layer of butter around the seal in the springform pan. I think you just have to live with some seepage.

Mess or not, this was a wonderful dessert. It is, of course, hard to go wrong with good fresh strawberries, but I think this is one of the best ways I've seen to showcase them. It was a huge hit when I served it at brunch on Sunday. Everyone wanted to know what it was called, and then I was at a loss because I'd thought a great deal more about developing the recipe than developing the name. I have no idea what it should be called. I'm not really even sure what a fool is, culinarily. You could certainly call this a Charlotte, I suppose. For that matter, call it anything you like.

[Update: commenters have noted that this dish is properly called a summer pudding, and they are correct.]

The orange butter was my own idea, and I think it works extremely well here. You will probably have more than you need, but you can spread the leftover orange butter on the bread crusts and leftover bread, and you'll be very happy to eat those, as well.

I used Pepperidge Farm white bread for this recipe. Look for the package that says "bread with substance." It was just right. I used all of the crusts and other scraps to make a strata, which I also served at brunch. You need to start both the fool and the strata the night before since they both require time to soak up juices.

Strawberry Fool

2 quarts fresh strawberries
2/3 c. granulated sugar
2.3 c. red wine
Grated zest of one orange
1/4 c. granulated sugar
4 ounces butter at room temperature
White bread

Remove the hulls from the strawberries and slice thickly. Put the strawberries in a bowl, add the 2.3 c. sugar, and stir well. Add the wine, stir again, cover, and refrigerate.

Butter a 9-inch springform pan.

Put the orange zest and the 1/4 c. of sugar in a food processor and process until the orange zest and sugar are very fine. Add the butter and process until creamy and well mixed.

Trim the crusts from the white bread and reserve them for another use. Spread a light layer of the orange butter on one side of the bread. Fit the pieces of bread around the perimeter of the springform pan, with the buttered pieces facing inward. You may have to cut the last piece to fit.

Spread more trimmed pieces of bread with the orange butter and fit them into the bottom of the pan with the buttered sides facing up. This will be a lot like putting a puzzle together, so try to enjoy it. When you have a complete layer on the bottom, add a layer of strawberries, with their juices. The strawberries should come not quite halfway up the springform pan.

Add a second layer of buttered bread slices on top of the strawberries. Then add another layer of strawberries and juice and top with a final layer of buttered bread, with the butter facing down.

Cover the springform pan as tightly as possible with plastic wrap, then put a pie plate and a five-pound weight on top of it. Put the springform pan in something that will catch the juices that will inevitably seep out, and refrigerate the whole deal overnight.

Remove the weight, pie plate, and plastic wrap, and invert the fool onto a platter. Release the sides of the springform pan and carefully remove it from the fool.

Slice the fool into pieces and serve with lightly sweetened whipped cream.

Hopefully, you will be better at controlling seepage than I was, and your bread will be uniformly purple (it's the wine). Mine was in no way dry, however.

I am dying to try the same preparation with fresh blackberries when they're ripe later this summer. It would obviously also be very good with raspberries, and you can probably even you frozen raspberries. I'm not sure you'd need the wine in that case, though.

What's for Lunch

2007-05-28T18:02:00.000-07:00

(Oh, it's been a while since I posted, hasn't it? Oops. But I've been cooking, and I should be posting more henceforth. )

Lindy has asked what we eat for lunch and what we use to carry it with us. Taking the last first, I have to confess that I have always found it hard to remain faithful to just one container. I will use whatever I happen to find in the supermarket or the dollar store when I'm running low on containers, which seems to be all the time. I also make heavy use of clear-topped supermarket yogurt containers, and it was with some annoyance that I learned just a week or two that the Giant brand no longer bothers with the clear plastic tops. They were never especially leakproof, but for something very thick or frozen solid, they were terrific, if a smidge on the small side. One cup is an ideal serving size, but a one-cup serving reheats most happily in a ten- or twelve-ounce container.

The little blue-topped Rubbermaid container in the picture above is certainly one of my favorite containers, and it's just the right size for a serving of most of what I take for lunch. I've had that particular one for a few years. Rubbermaid changes its styles every so often, and the red-lidded containers that they're now sending to the markets are really not as nice. They are harder to close and don't have the oversized lip section which makes my blues so easy to open. On the other hand, the reds do seal as tightly and reliably as the blues, so they're still fine for taking for lunch.

These days I'm still trying to watch my weight somewhat, and I've been taking pretty much the same lunch for the last month, and I'm not even close to tired of it yet. I take about a cup of my better tomato soup, a container of light yogurt, and a cup of my unnamed lentil-barley concoction. A single recipe of this dish will make about two weeks' worth of lunches. It keeps extremely well, and it's yummy. It's also very versatile. You can take the basic bones of this recipe and alter it many ways to suit yourself. And it's dead easy to make. You can use frozen onions and frozen peppers with no loss of deliciousness. If you really don't want to deal with a knife at all, you could swap out the minced garlic for some garlic powder and the diced turkey ham for some crumbled bacon. You can use bouillon cubes instead of the boxed chicken stock. It's a very forgiving recipe, and it reheats splendidly in the microwave. You can see from the picture below that while yogurt containers may be only second best for taking lunch to work, they're ideal for use in mise en place.

Unnamed Lentil-Barley Concoction

2 T. olive oil
1 c. diced turkey ham
1 c. diced onions
1 c. frozen peppers
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 t. ground cumin
1 t. smoked paprika
1/2 t. celery seed
Freshly ground black pepper
2 c. lentils
1 c. barley
1 quart chicken broth or stock
2 c. water

In a heavy saucepan, heat the olive oil over low heat. Add the turkey ham and cook for a minute. Add the onions and peppers, stir well, cover, and cook until softened, about five minutes. Add the garlic, stir, and cook for another minute. Add the spices, stir again, and cook for another minute or two. Add the lentils and barley and stir well. Add the chicken broth or stock, stir, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cover. Check the pot occasionally, and add water when needed. You will probably need most of the extra two cups of water.

Simmer until tender, about forty to fifty minutes. Correct seasoning. Serve immediately, or cool and then refrigerate.

You will probably want to alter the seasoning blend to suit yourself. I will often add some chopped pickled jalapenos, cayenne pepper, and chopped cilantro for a spicier version. You can certainly add some diced tomatoes. I don't only because I generally eat it with tomato soup.

In addition to being tasty, low in fat, and very filling, this recipe is very high in fiber. And it's extremely inexpensive to make. The per serving cost is well short of fifty cents, especially if you use bouillon cubes, as I often do.

Better Tomato Soup

2007-05-07T09:15:00.000-07:00

Let me be very clear. When I say "better" tomato soup, I am comparing the tomato soup I'm about to discuss with my previous attempts at tomato soup. I am not comparing my tomato soup to the recipe that I appropriated and changed. You can find that recipe here. I originally came across it here. I had been having my own tomato soup struggles, and I emailed the author, who very kindly pointed me to the recipe, which, he says, he modified from a recipe by Pierre Franey. M. Franey may in turn have modified someone else's recipe, since that, after all, is how most recipes evolve, but I can't really say.

I have no doubt that M. Portifex' recipe results in a splendid soup, and I would gladly use it as an excuse to buy myself a Chinois were it not clear that doing so would result in a domestic dispute. As it is, I am living on borrowed time while V. is out of the country. When he returns and finds that I haven't come up with a suitable location in the cupboard for my cast iron Dutch oven, well, it's best that I don't think too much about how that sentence really ends. Even without a Chinois in my overburdened cupboards, I would likely follow M. Portifex' basic process (with my inferior strainer) if I were going to serve this soup at a dinner party.

But this soup is going to be for my lunches (many of them, as it happens), and given that I don't mind tiny bits of peel, I didn't need a strainer at all. Other modifications included the use of canned, rather than fresh, tomatoes (I can't find decent fresh plum tomatoes at this time of year), the substitution of bouillon cubes for canned bouillon (because I forgot to buy boxed chicken stop when I was at Costco), the omission of a bay leaf and the Calvados(I just forgot and I don't have any, respectively), and the addition of some corn (because when I went to taste it, my first thought was that it needed some corn).

Horrid, horrid compromise that this soup is, however, it's also very good. In fact, I may have found the lunchbox soup that I want. The recipe is so simple that I'm tempted not to try to improve it. (I probably will remember the bay leaf next time, though.) It does not meet my stated goal of being as good cold as it is hot, but I reckon one can't have everything, and there is very little of the year during which I don't appreciate hot soup.

Again, this is a soup that takes a significant amount of time but requires only minimal effort and supervision.

Tomato Soup

2 large Vidalia onions
2 T. olive oil
2 large Granny Smith apples
1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes
1 quart water
4 chicken bouillon cubes
1/2 t. dried thyme
2 cups frozen corn

Remove the ends and outermost peel of the onions. Chop them coarsely.

Put a large, heavy stockpot on the stove, over a low flame. Add the olive oil. Add the onions, stir well, and cover the pot. The onions will need to cook for about twenty minutes, or until they are nice and soft but not browned.

While the onions are softening, rinse, quarter, and core the apples. Do not remove the peel.

Add the apples, tomatoes, water, bouillon cubes and thyme to the onions. Stir well, bring to a simmer, cover, and simmer for about two hours. Add the corn and simmer for another fifteen or twenty minutes.

There are a couple of ways to finish the soup. If you want the corn to stay whole, then you can puree the soup -- before you add the corn -- with an immersion blender. It does a fine job on the onions and apples, especially after all that cooking time.

If you want a fully pureed soup, the immersion blender alone will not suffice since it will leave large bits of the corn kernels in pieces of just the right size to get stuck in your teeth. A regular blender, however, will do a fine job. I used both types of blender: the immersion blender before the addition of the corn, and the countertop blender at the end of cooking.

Because of all that pureed vegetable matter and the relatively small amount of water, this recipe gives a very thick soup. If you want it thinner, add more water and bouillon, which will also increase your yield.

I used cheap yellow frozen corn, and that works fine for flavor. It seems to me that using white corn might give a slightly better color, but I think that I am picking nits with that suggestion.

You should, of course, taste carefully and adjust the seasoning as necessary, but my batch came out perfectly seasoned without any further tinkering.

As always, feel free to futz with the recipe as you see fit. I'm sure it would be delicious with the addition of some ground chile and cumin. Or with some nice cornmeal-and-cheddar dumplings on top. Some celery seed added at the beginning of the simmer would also probably be a good thing.

The Best Green Beans Ever

2007-05-01T17:51:00.001-07:00

For years (and years) I have sworn by green beans made the way that I learned from Julia Child. You know the drill: bring a large pot of salted water to a boil, drop in your green beans, boil until just tender, shock in cold water, and later finish by sauteeing either in butter or olive oil with some salt and pepper. And perhaps a pureed clove of garlic.

Green beans prepared in this manner are splendid, and I could easily make my dinner from a large plateful of them. They're also convenient: you can do everything except the finishing a couple of hours before you serve dinner, and they'll still be bright green and yummy when you finish them in time to accompany your main course.

But I was aware, of course, that there were other ways to prepare green beans. In fact, it suddenly occurs to me that I've been over all this ground in my last post on green beans, and that I should probably go back and delete or rewrite the first two paragraphs of this post, because surely in my last green bean post, I wrote about Ms. Child. And surely I wrote about my childhood green bean experiences.

But fear not, readers, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy ~~that shall be to all people. For unto you this day is born in the city of David~~. Or at least, I'm about to cover some new ground.

When I was in NYC a couple of weeks ago, I stopped in at Kitchen Arts and Letters and bought, among other things, Michael Ruhlman's Charcuterie. I'd been meaning to buy it for a long time: I have been interested in charcuterie for many years, and the book comes highly recommended by Lindy. So I bought it. Right now, in fact, it's in a bag in the bottom of the shoulder bag that I lugged to NYC, but before I packed it, I flipped quickly through the pages and salivated. I didn't read anything in great detail, but my eyes landed on the section about confits. I felt myself getting sucked into the sections on goose and duck, so I quickly moved on and noticed a brief mention of vegetables. I believe there was something about confited (I will not look up the word, I will not look up the word, I will not look up the word; oh all right! Yes, "confited" is acceptable.) onions. I also thought of a story I'd heard on NPR about butter-poached scallops, which seemed to use something of the same approach.

And I had an idea. It seemed like a good idea, so I filed it away for another day.

Late last year, around Christmas, (thanks, in part, to this post, again by Lindy), I acquired a pre-seasoned Lodge cast iron dutch oven. It is a thing of beauty, and if I still haven't gotten around to using it to bake bread, I'm sure that I will eventually. In any case, it gives me a feeling of immense comfort knowing that I have something so solid ~~hidden away in a box where V. won't find it and pitch a fit that I've bought yet another large pot~~ in the cupboard.

Now that V. is off for three weeks in Ethiopia, I have the opportunity to do a lot more cooking. I wanted to make something special, something different, something that would make a good use of my nifty (and very heavy) new pot. So I took my idea with me to Costco, where I acquired one of their two-pound packages of thin, snipped haricots verts, a bag of garlic, and large amounts of extra virgin olive oil and unsalted butter.

Then I came home, and I made the best green beans ever.

I'll admit that I created this recipe in part to do something a little bit ridiculous and over the top, but I always thought that the final result would be pretty good. I didn't know that it would be so good that I'd actually feel like repeating the preparation: after all, the other versions of green beans are also very good, and this one takes a lot of time. But I'm going to make these green beans again and again. For one thing, the work involved is really not that onerous. They take a long time to make, but you don't really have to do anything -- except check the pot now and again to make sure they're not too hot, and if you have a probe thermometer with a temperature-sensitive alarm, you're home free on that count -- while they're cooking. Besides, if you make this dish, you'll have used two pounds of fat that will almost all be left over at the end of the cooking. That fat probably isn't good for much other than confiting more vegetables, but it would be a shame to throw it away when you can keep it in a quart tub in the back of the refrigerator and make more of these green beans whenever you feel like it.

And what's more, beans prepared in this manner will last for a good while in the refrigerator, just waiting for you to warm them up and eat them. And you could make a larger batch just as easily, and I feel sure that the same preparation will work with common (i.e., larger) supermarket green beans. Most importantly: they're awesome.

Confit d'haricots verts à l'ail

2 pounds green beans, trimmed, rinsed, and dried
1 pound unsalted butter
2 cups olive oil
2 heads garlic
Salt (see note below)
Pepper

In the bottom of a very heavy pot, melt half of the butter over low heat.

Separate the garlic into cloves. Peel the cloves but leave them whole.

Add the grean beans and the garlic cloves to the pot. Put the rest of the butter on top of the vegetables, then put the lid on the pot and let the butter melt. Then add the olive oil. It should cover or nearly cover the vegetables.

Put the lid back on the pot and heat until the temperature is about 200 degrees. At this point, the water from the beans and the butter will start to bubble out. Remove the lid and let the water evaporate. Try to maintain the temperature at about the same level. If browned butter solids rise to the surface, skim them off and lower the heat slightly.

Cover the pot and continue to cook at about the same temperature. Cook for a total of three hours. Turn the heat off. Fish out the garlic cloves with a pair of tongs (some of them will break up: don't worry) and reserve them separately. Drain the beans and refrigerate the beans and the fat separately.

When you're ready to eat some green beans, Put a non-stick skillet over moderate heat. Add as many green beans as you want to the skillet. (No matter how thoroughly you drain them, you won't need to add any additional fat to cook them in. Neither will they taste greasy.) Mash one of the softened cloves of garlic and add it to the green beans. Toss until heated through, and season generously with salt and pepper. Devour.

(Note below.) When I started the green beans cooking, I hadn't added any salt with the butter and the olive oil. About an hour in, I added about two teaspoons of coarse salt. As far as I can tell, none of the salt ended up in the beans or the garlic, so I'm not sure it really helps anything to add it during the cooking time: you will still have to salt them when you saute them.

You will have a lot more garlic than you need for this amount of beans. The extra garlic (with a bit of the oil and butter that it was cooked in) can be mashed to make a terrific spread for bread. Unless you forget to add salt to it, in which case it will make a very bland spread for bread.

You can, of course, confit the green beans and the garlic separately and add some confited garlic to the confited beans when you're sauteing the beans. You could do a lot more garlic that way. In fact, you could do the whole bag of garlic and keep it in the refrigerator to make your bread delicious for weeks or months to come. Again: don't be shy with the salt. Both the green beans and the garlic have sat in a bath of fat for several hours and have developed absolutely wonderful flavors, but without salt, they'll be a lot like vegetables boiled in unsalted water.

Anapestic Does Manhattan

2007-04-23T13:02:00.000-07:00

The end of tax season (hooray!) seems a natural time for a short vacation. Or a long vacation, or perhaps a change of career, but a short vacation is a good place to start. And what's a better destination for a short vacation than New York City? It's relatively close, so it's easy to get to, and staying for more than a few days is prohibitively expensive, so it's easy to come home from. And while I know that NYC largely has a reputation for a place people go to relax and get away from it all, there's actually a surprising amount of stuff going on there.

Anyway, Wednesday morning, after taking the kids to their respective schools, I came home, and V. and I put our bags in the car and drove off to New Jersey. Because I realize that most of my readers are American, and because Americans are justifiably celebrated for their geographical ignorance, I will take a moment here to observe that New Jersey is not, in fact, a part of New York. Our usual method of traveling to NYC, however, is to drive as far as Metro Park in New Jersey, and then take a NJ Transit train into the city. A round trip ticket from Metro Park to Penn Station runs about $15, and you can park at Metro Park for $5 for every twenty-four hours, so it's a relatively cheap way to get to Gotham.

We arrived later than usual: around 3pm, which happens to be check in time at our hotel (the New Yorker, at 34th and 8th, a very short walk from Penn Station), so rather than check our bags, we left them in our room and set out for Chelsea and Greenwich Village. I'm going to acknowledge right here that I don't have a very good feel for NYC neighborhoods. V., who went to high school in NYC, however, usually knows where we are, so I just ask him. Still, I get easily confused, so if I happen to say that something was in the West Village, and it is really on the Upper East Side, just remember: God is watching us from a distance.

When we go to New York, we generally have a skeleton of a schedule. It's good to have some things planned, especially if there are things that you don't want to miss, but it's good to leave yourself ample time to wander around without a firm agenda. If, like me, you find yourself mostly confined to the purgatory of the suburbs, you will never be bored in New York, even if you think that you have nothing to do. Anyway, for this two-night trip, we had tickets to see Company on Wednesday night, tickets to see Turandot on Thursday night, and passes to the Metropolitan Museum on Wednesday. The passes to the Metropolitan include admission to the Cloisters, and that was also on the agenda for Wednesday.

We were walking down one of the avenues on our way (probably) from Chelsea to the Village, and I spotted a Balducci's. Whenever I'm on vacation, it's very difficult for me to pass a grocery store without going in. I was going to skip the Balducci's, because there's one just a couple of miles from where I work, but V. noted that it was inside an old bank building, which struck me as highly appropriate, so I decided to check it out. Perhaps not surprisingly, the NYC Balducci's is a lot like the Balducci's in Bethesda, only smaller. It might also be marginally pricier, but probably not, given that a (large) house in Bethesda is probably not much more expensive than a (small) condo in the Village. Anyway, it was a very pleasant grocery store, and I bought a house brand chocolate bar and a jar of pink salt.

I must admit that I have not exactly embraced the notion of expensive salts. I have a box of Maldon that I never use, and I have some La Baleine that I use slightly less frequently than the Maldon, and I have some sea salt from Costco that came in its own grinder jar. I use that last one when I dress my salads at the table, but by and large, it's Morton's kosher salt for me. I'll have to check the salt selection at the Bethesda Balducci's, but I was unprepared for the variety I saw in the Village Balducci's. I went with the pink salt because it was of a finer grain and thus heavier than the other salts, so that instead of paying about ten bucks for five ounces, I paid about ten bucks for nine ounces. It's a souvenir, right?

Anyway. We wandered around the Village for a while longer, and then we saw and stopped in at the Blind Tiger Ale House for a pint. I had something called Smuttynose Winter Ale. According to their web site, "Smuttynose Winter Ale is a full-bodied, amber beer brewed with a special Trappist ale yeast. Stylistically reminiscent of a Belgian Abbey Double, it features fruity aromas and flavor, balanced by soft Crystal hops." I don't know what a Belgian Abbey Double is, but the rest of the description seems pretty accurate to me. The bar was small, but it had twenty-eight beers on tap, and I chose the SWA for the name. When I asked the bartender what it was like, she offered me a small taste, and I liked it. I also ordered something called "Your Mama's Deviled Eggs," which were pretty good, but I regret to inform you that your mama does not do as good a job with deviled eggs as my mama does. And given that my own deviled eggs are superior to either your mama's or my mama's, these deviled eggs were not exactly a culinary revelation. Still, they were pretty good. After all, when was the last time you had a bad deviled egg?

While we were sitting in the bar, V. pointed out to me a restaurant across the corner. It was called Risotteria and billed itself as a "risotto bar," from which we inferred that it served a lot of risotto. When we were done with our pints, we went over to look at the menu and decided to have dinner there. In addition to a great selection of risotti and other foods, the Risotteria has a wine of the month, which it offers for $15 a bottle. I'm sure this is a very good idea, and the wine itself (something called a Rosso) was quite nice, but I am not much of a drinker, and after having a pint and half a bottle or whine, I was about as drunk as I ever get. Fortunately, I wasn't driving.

Which reminds me: who are these people who are driving in Manhattan? I'll give you a pass if your a cabbie or a truck driver making a delivery, but what about those big black cars who try to cut you off when you're crossing the road and you have a signal? Occasionally, I'll see the driver of one of these cars yelling something and looking very unpleased at the traffic situation, and I'll say, "Dude. You're driving in Manhattan. Duh."

Anyway, in addition to my half of the bottle of wine, I had the calimari, roasted red pepper, and black olive risotto, and it was great. Perfectly cooked and extremely flavorful. I took a picture (It turns out that I have relatively few qualms about snapping pictures of my meals when I'm drunk. When I'm sober, I have more qualms, but I do it anyway), but the flash went off, and it was horribly overexposed. V. had the Wednesday special (parma ham, arugula, and truffle oil) risotto, and he loved his, too. The breadsticks, which were of the chewy variety, were also great.

We meandered out of Risotteria and on down Bleecker Street. I saw a place called Murray's that looked interesting, so I stumbled in. Lotsa cheese. Lotsa expensive cheese. They offered me a sample of some smoked goat cheese. It was yummy, but I was somewhat distracted by my inebriation, so I wandered around the store until I found some pink salt. V. had teased me because the first pink salt I bought was from Bolivia, which, he tells me, is landlocked. The pink salt in Murray's was from the Himalayas. I figured I had to have it, so I bought it, along with a French salt caramel, which I ate too quickly, but which I think was pretty good.

Newly fortified with pink salt but still plenty inebriated, we went in search of dessert. We crossed the street and took a table at Pasticceria Bruno (which I am not linking because a bakery really does not need a fancy flash site that plays Sinatra). I almost always order a cannoli for dessert when I'm in NYC (I almost never eat it anywhere else), and I ordered one there. V. ordered a Neapolitan, and we both had coffee. Yummy cannoli, yummy coffee.

I was impressed with all of the pastries in Bruno's display cases, but above all else, I was drawn to the marzipan, especially the marzipan formed into the shape of a bulb of fennel. I mean, I'm pretty sure that it's fennel. You'll have to judge for yourself because when I asked the young man behind the counter to confirm that it was fennel, he said that he wasn't really sure. Then I asked him whether the figs were figs, and he said that he wasn't sure about that either. It probably would have been nicer not to ask about any of the other fruits, but I did anyway, mostly because he was very cute, and since I only flirt when I'm drunk, it seemed like a shame to waste any opportunity. Anyway, I got six pieces of marzipan, which came to about a pound. They were horribly expensive, but since I was taking them home to the kids, I felt like I could spend more than I otherwise would have. And perhaps they'll inspire me to make some of my own.

We headed back uptown to the hotel and then up to the theatre, passing the building you see here on the way. It reminds me of some of the competition cakes that you see on the Food Network. I am, generally, a fan of whimsical architecture, but I can't help imagining the resident of that very top corner office: he has to climb a long ladder to get to it, and he has to sit hunched over at his desk, but, admittedly, the view must be terrific.

Speaking of terrific, I'd never seen Company before. (V. had played the soundtrack for me on the drive up, so that I'd have some idea.) The whole production was just great. It was directed by some guy (I am not looking it up, I am not looking it up, I am not looking it up. Oh, all right: John Doyle) who had directed the revival of Sweeney Todd that V. caught last year. As in Sweeney Todd, the actors were also the orchestra. I didn't really see how this was going to work, but it worked very well indeed. Apparently, it is not that hard to find actors who are also able instrumentalists. Go figure.

The next morning, we were up at a somewhat reasonable hour to head up to the Upper East Side (I have no idea what the proper capitalization here is. I would try to find out, but there's a chance that I would step into the middle of a grammatical dogfight, and I hate doing that when I don't have a strong opinion to smack people around with.) ostensibly for brunch and a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but mostly because this person said that if you were only going to be in NYC for two hours, the place you really ought to go is Kitchen Arts and Letters.

There are a few things that I already knew that I had driven home with greater force on this trip, and I hope that I remember these lessons:

1) There is no point in my bringing V. with me to a culinary book store. After about ten minutes, he'll be all "we can stay as long as you like," but he'll be looking bored, and I'll feel like I need to hurry up and buy things and move along. Otherwise, he'll act like nothing's wrong, but then when I'm buying my books and the owner remarks that I certainly have eclectic tastes, I'll say that I would have liked to buy more but that I was on a budget, which will cause V. to remark that I could just buy the other books I wanted online to save money, and I will just want to die right there on the spot. This will lead to me biting my lip and looking apologetically at the owner who will give me a look that appears to say, "Don't worry. I reckon you've suffered enough."

2) If I try to go to a museum with V., I will surely want to kill him. It took him almost two hours to get through five rooms in the "Venice and the Muslim World" exhibit. The man cannot pass any piece of curatorial text without reading it. I found the VatMW exhibit fascinating for about twenty minutes. I am just not a very visually oriented person, and I don't find standing in one place for very long comfortable. I suppose that I could walk laps around the exhibits, but I fear that other viewers might be annoyed. I really should have sent him along to read about Venice and stayed at the bookstore.

3) Kitchen Arts and Letters is not something you can really absorb in a single visit. I was overwhelmed by the choices. The staff were very knowledgeable and very helpful, and that certainly helped, but I really need to get back there. By myself.

4) Either V. is going deaf, or he has learned that so little of what I say is to the point that he just ignores me. I swear to Julia Child that I told him no fewer than four times that Kitchen Arts and Letters did not open until 10 am, and he still acted surprised when we got there at 9:45 and they weren't open.

Fortunately, Sarabeth's was open, and we didn't have to wait for a table. V. had eaten there on his last trip to the city, and had suggested it when I said that I wanted to visit a bookstore in the area. I ordered a spinach and goat cheese omelet and a bran muffin. Very good indeed. The muffin came with butter and some of Sarabeth's own peach-apricot preserves. You can buy a jar of preserves at the restaurant, but you can also walk next door to the small grocery store (which does not, alas, carry pink salt) and buy the same preserves for slightly less. I didn't buy any at either place, though, because it didn't seem wise to schlep them around the city.

Anyway. After the late breakfast at Sarabeth's (It seems wise, when in NYC, to adopt a two-meals-a-day strategy, particularly if you're likely to be up late. If you have a late, but large, breakfast, and an early dinner, you don't wait as long for tables, and you get more done. Also, you can snack more.) and the too-short visit to Kitchen Arts and Letters, we strolled down the avenue (Fifth) past other museums and to the Metropolitan, where, as I mentioned earlier, I came face to face with the hard fact that I am just not a museum type of guy.

From the Metropolitan, we walked over one and up two blocks to the bus stop for the M4. (The stop just happens to be in front of the Jonathan Adler store, which is a very good place for window shopping. Or, I suppose, for actual shopping, if you happen to be wealthy. Which I am not.) I'm not sure that I'd ever taken a bus in NYC before my trip from the UES to the Cloisters. It was a pleasant enough experience, and it does take you right to the entrance to the Cloisters, but what the museum web site doesn't mention is that the trip takes almost an hour. You do get to see a lot of Manhattan on that ride, and that's a good thing, though in my case I just saw a lot of places where I wanted to get off and look around, and I couldn't. Oh well.

I'm certainly glad I made the trip. If there's one place where a museum kind of guy and a non-museum kind of guy can co-exist happily, it's at the Cloisters. I did look at some of the art, especially the very large unicorn tapestries, but mostly I let V. stay inside and read compulsively while I sat out in the courtyards and gardens. It had been quite cold when we arrived in NYC, but when we were at the Cloisters, the weather was perfect. Sunny and clear, but still cool.

After a nice spell of sitting in the sunshine, I found V., and we made a quick tour through the Cloisters' treasury and then walked to the subway station and headed back to the hotel to change for dinner and the opera. By the way, when I say change for the opera, I don't mean anything fancier than clean cotton slacks and non-athletic shoes. Most men will wear at least a suit to the opera, but then most of the men at the opera are at least twenty years older than me.

When we were at Kitchen Arts and Letters, V. had picked up the 2007 Zagat guide, and he'd found a restaurant that offered a prix fixe, three-course, pre-theater dinner for $24 per person, including a bottle of wine (for two diners). The restaurant was just far enough from the hotel that I could legitimately refuse to walk the whole way, so we hopped on the subway (Even though there is a subway stop at the corner the hotel is on, V. almost always wants to walk. I am sure that he tries to pick a restaurant that is just within the range that I'm willing to walk. I would go along with this plan more readily if I didn't know that step two of the plan would be walking from the restaurant to Lincoln Center, so that I'd end up having walked thirty-five blocks.) and then walked down to Basilica.

The prix fixe menu at Basilica is not ambitious, but it's very well executed, and I was very hungry, so I didn't even go for the least un-ambitious option. I ordered a mozarella caprese and some chicken parmesan. They started us off with some very nice olives and some just-right crusty bread as soon as we sat down, so that I was no longer ravenous by the time the starter arrived, and I was able to enjoy the food properly. Given the price of dinner, I had not expected much from the wine, but it was a 2003 Cabernet made at one of the Sebastiani vineyards, and it was the soul of quaffability. The tomatoes accompanying the mozarella were not as ripe as they should have been, but otherwise, dinner was great. The chicken parm was delicious and ample, and it was served on an equally ample portion of penne that had been cooked to the sort of al dente that you want to take home with you so that if someone asks you what al dente should be, you can hand them a piece and say, "it should be this." I chose the cannoli for dessert. It was good, as was the coffee.

We had gotten to Basilica fairly early (the pre-theater dinner is available only if you're seated before 6:00), and the service had been very prompt indeed. We ended up getting to Lincoln Center at just after 7:00, and the curtain at the Met wasn't until 8:00, so I sat outside while V. went off in search of a restroom. I used this time to ponder some very important matters. To wit:

1. People in NYC wear a lot of black. People going to the opera in NYC wear even more black. They should get over that.

2. "New York" is an iamb, but the most common nicknames for New York are or contain trochees. "Gotham" is a trochee, and "The Big Apple" ends with a trochee. The trochaic sobriquets are mainly a problem because there aren't really many good rhymes for "York." So -- and I cannot stress firmly enough that this is a purely hypothetical supposition -- if you happened to be sitting on a slab of granite in Lincoln Center and you happened to be mentally composing alternative lyrics to "I'd Like to Visit the Moon," and you happened to get to the line where Kermit would be singing "So while I might visit for an afternoon," then you'd be pretty much stuck, because you'd be coming up with lines like "so while I might visit and chow down on pork" or "so while I might visit if armed with a fork" or even "so while I might visit on my way back from an impromptu trip to County Cork" and you would be disgusted with yourself when you realized that the very best couplet you could come up with was "I may be provincial and even a dork/But I don't want to live in New York."

3. What does a guy have to do to find a fake Rolex in this town, anyway?

And speaking of anyway. The Zeffirelli Turandot was a magnificent spectacle. Hei-Kyung Hong (as Liu) was terrific; the other leads: not so much. Still, it was a lot of fun to watch.

On Friday morning, we went down to Washington Square to have breakfast at a cafe that V. wanted to try. As it happened, this place wasn't open for breakfast, so we wandered around Washington Square for a bit and then headed over to what may or may not have been part of the West Village until we came across the Sullivan Diner. It's on Sullivan Street. One supposes that the name and the location are not entirely coincidental. It was nearly 10 am, and I was, once again, ravenous, so it was a good thing that there were not many people there and that the service was very prompt. Good coffee, good food, good service, and reasonable prices: who could ask for anything more?

I ordered the Eggs Florentine: essentially, Eggs Benedict with a layer of cooked spinach between the egg and the English muffin. They were accompanied by spicy hash browns. I was a happy, happy man.

After breakfast, we decided to head back uptown so that I could pick up some souvenirs for the kids. It's pretty easy to get souvenirs for the kids in NYC: L. loves pashminas, and A. always wants a keychain. I got several of each: altogether, they cost about the same as the pound of marzipan that I'd gotten from Pasticceria Bruno.

After I was done with my shopping, we still had enough time to walk through Central Park for a bit before we had to head back to the hotel and check out. It was a beautiful day, and I wished that I had a few more hours to enjoy the park and the city, but I think that I enjoy New York more because my visits there are usually too short. In any case, after walking around and seeing a number of cute dogs and watching some kids doing double dutch, we did hop back on the subway, finish packing, check out, and lug our somewhat heavier bags over to Penn Station to catch the NJT train back to Metro Park.

All in all, it was a great trip, but there was one big question that I never did learn the answer to: what the hell is up with the apostrophe on this sign? I am pretty sure that this is an actual news stand and not a stand run by some guy named "New." And, yes, I checked: that is an actual apostrophe there, not just a smudge. The New Yorker is undergoing some renovations at the moment, and I hope that, when they're done, they will no longer promote improper apostrophization. God knows there's enough of it out there without their assistance.

Tomato Soup

2007-04-17T13:27:00.000-07:00

There really wasn't any reason for me to cook last night. Dinner had already been made (not by me) and eaten, and I had the next day's lunch all ready in the refrigerator. And V. and I are off on a short vacation Wednesday morning, so I didn't need anything for the rest of the week. But I felt like cooking something, and I had the time to do so.

I haven't really had anything resembling free time for the last two months, but busy season was pretty much wrapped up late last Friday afternoon. When I got up Saturday and didn't have anything that absolutely had to be done, I was somewhat overwhelmed by the prospect, so I went back to sleep, and then I got up and took a long walk, and then I did nothing at all for most of the day until it was time to pick up the kids. I may have watched some TV, and I may have read something (I know that nobody keeps such close track on what I say here, but on the off chance that somebody does, whatever I was reading was not Villette. I finally finished Villette sometime late in March or early in April. It was almost -- or just over -- three months of hard work, but I persevered.), and I'm pretty sure that I wandered aimlessly around Costco for a bit, but mostly I got in touch with my inner vegetable. (My inner vegetable, in case you're wondering, is a fava bean.)

Anyway. I felt like cooking last night, but I wanted to cook something slow and lazy, rather than something quick and technical. Tomato soup seemed like the ticket. This is a very easy recipe, and it requires very little attention, but it does take some time. It is perfect for a weekday evening when you have a couple of hours and are doing other low-intensity tasks such as laundry (Laundry is a low-intensity task for me because of my strict no-ironing policy. I am highly tolerant of wrinkles. I attempt to remove my shirts from the dryer and hang them up while they are still slightly damp so that fewer wrinkles will have a chance to form, but once they're there, I just live with them.) and reading a highly amusing book that doesn't mind if you have to set it down from time to time. I am sure that you have just such a book in mind already, but if you don't, you might try this one. I picked it up on a whim in Border's over the weekend, and I can assure you that if you put it down to go and stir your soup, it will be just as funny when you get back. Plus, I read it in just over a day, which, I think, means that it's at least 90 times better than Villette.

Anyway, the soup. I had started off with the intention of making a soup that fell squarely within the Weight Watchers Core parameters, but, alas, I didn't quite get there. (If you are, by chance, on Core, then one serving of this soup [a fifth of the pot] will cost you one extra point. If you're not on Core, then a serving will cost you four points.) When I tasted the soup, it was much too tangy, even for me, and I had to add some half-and-half to tame it a bit. The final result is probably somewhat too tangy for most people (I like it this way, though, and I am, after all, the one who's eating it), but you can make it less tangy in a variety of ways. You could, for example, double the butter and onions and cook them for an extra hour, to let them caramelize. Or you could add more half-and-half or swap out the half-and-half for heavy cream. You could use sweeter tomatoes, assuming you can find some. Or you could just add half as many tomatoes to begin with. I like the tomatoeyness of this soup as it is, though. There are other, less honorable ways to make the soup less tangy, but I won't mention them as I don't approve of them, and you probably know what they are, anyway.

Tomato-Onion Soup with Dill

1 T. butter
2.5 c. sliced onions
1/2 t. kosher salt
1/2 t. celery seed
2 T. flour
1 quart chicken stock or broth
28 oz. tomato puree
1 bay leaf
1/4 c. chopped dillweed
1/3 c. half and half
1/2 c. cornmeal
1/2 t. baking powder
2 T. finely chopped dillweed
1/2 t. kosher salt
1/2 ounce romano cheese, grated fine
fresh black pepper
1 T. olive oil
1 egg

In a heavy saucepan, melt the butter over low heat. Add the onions, stir well, cover, and cook over low heat for half an hour, stirring once or twice. Add the salt and celery seed, stir, re-cover, and cook for another half hour. Turn the heat to medium, sprinkle on the flour, and cook, stirring constantly, for two to three minutes. Gradually add the chicken stock, stirring all the while. Stir in the tomato puree, bay leaf, and 1/4 cup of dill. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook, stirring occasionally for half an hour. Remove the bay leaf, puree the soup with an immersion blender, and correct seasoning. Let the soup simmer while you make the dumplings.

In a bowl, combine the cornmeal, baking powder, finely chopped dill, salt, grated cheese, and black pepper. Mix well with a fork, then add the olive oil and stir well again. Form a well in the middle of the mixture, and break the egg into the center. Mix the egg well with the fork, then stir in the cornmeal mixture. When you've got it all mixed up, you should have a mass that coheres reasonably well and that can be handled but is still slightly sticky. Knead this mass slightly, either on a marble, or between your hands, and then roll it out into a cylinder about 3/4 inch thick. Cut into about fifteen pieces, and roll each piece into a small ball.

Drop the dumplings into the simmering soup, cover, and cook for five minutes.

Because there is no wheat flour in these dumplings, they are somewhat crumbly and fall apart easily if you mess with them too much. No matter: they taste good whole or in pieces.

There are a lot of other ways you could go with this soup. You could use basil instead of dill, for example. You could use cheddar instead of romano. You could add some chopped black olives to the dumplings. You could skip the dumplings entirely and instead toss in pieces of a grilled cheese sandwich that you'd cut up. In any case, it's a very comforting thing to consume when the weather's unseasonably cold, as it has been this week.

News from the Front

2007-03-22T20:40:00.000-07:00

Greetings, readers. Is it April 18th yet? I ask that question every day at work, and the answers I get have, so far, been decidedly unsatisfactory.

Those of you who ~~have heard me whinge about this before~~ read my blog regularly will know that because I am ear-deep in the muck (an appropriately appetizing metaphor for a cooking blog, yes?) that is tax season, I am doing little cooking and less writing about cooking. But I thought I'd say hello and report a few things:

1. I am the proud winner of Lindy's pointless contest. This significant honor (at least as important, surely, as the Nobel Prize, though slightly less remunerative; you can't buy me with your big bucks, Stockholm!) proves that I am the most pointless person ever! Frankly, I don't think there was ever any doubt, but it is certainly gratifying to have the recognition of one's, well, we can't really say peers, since I am peerlessly pointless, but it is nice to have the recognition of good people. There are those who have suggested that "pointless" was meant as a modifier of "contest" in such a way that one would say, "oh, this contest is pointless," rather than "oh, this is a contest of pointlessness." Sour grapes, readers. Those people knew they couldn't match me in pointlessness, so they denigrated the whole contest. In any case, the contest could not really have been pointless since that would mean that it was without point, and it cannot have been without point since I am now the proud possessor of Gillie Basan's Modern Moroccan. I have, thus far, only been able to browse through the book, but I will assuredly be cooking something from it at my earliest convenience. Or perhaps sooner than that, since my earliest convenience is weeks away. In any case, the existence of a prize makes any contest decidedly pointed, and this contest just keeps on giving: I can certainly use having won the book as an excuse to buy myself a tagine. Or perhaps a set of 4 6 8 10 for my next dinner party.

2. The cooking that I've been doing has been mainly batch cooking of things to take for lunch. Most recently, I adopted my fabulous (really, it is) turkey burger recipe into a turkey meatloaf. I did this by more than doubling the amount of chick peas. I also cooked my own chick peas, which meant that they were very nice, but I only had enough time to cook them one night, and then I had to wait a couple nights more before I had time to make the meatloaf. Unfortunately, I really did not adequately season the meatloaf, so that while the level of salt was about right, it was bland. Fortunately, I'd used a meat thermometer, so it was cooked perfectly and not dry, despite having very little fat in it. I heated some up at work today, and then I addressed the blandness issue by taking some leftover packets of mustard and sweet sauce (from the Chinese food that made me sick last weekend) and mixing them together to get a fairly strong sauce for the meatloaf. Tasty and very brightly colored. It probably does not do to dwell too much on just how they achieve that fluorescent orange and yellow that mix together to look like the sun, but I was momentarily comforted to read "No MSG" on both sauce packets. But then I realized that I would not have assumed that they had MSG in the first place, and I wondered whether that means that I must now assume that anything that doesn't have "No MSG" on the label might contain MSG. Just today, I have consumed the following foods, which, apparently, might have contained MSG: an egg McMuffin; two containers of nonfat yogurt; a triple venti nonfat latte; a venti skim, no-whip mocha; two slices of garbanzo turkey meatloaf; four Poptarts (hey, it's busy season); an obscene amount of Diet Coke; and a small package of trail mix. My body might well be 10 - 20% MSG by now. I feel pretty good, though, considering.

3. In other labeling news, a week ago, I was at Costco, and I bought a two-pound, refrigerated container of mango slices. They were delicious, and I was very happy with them until I looked more closely at the label (which, I only now realize was silent on the subject of MSG!). It assured me that my mango slices were "Alpine fresh." DO I EVEN HAVE TO EXPLAIN WHY THAT IS SO, SO WRONG?

Anyway. That's the news for now. I'll be back with some recipes soon. Soonish. Relatively soonish. I hope that all of you (or at least all of you who are due refunds) have filed your taxes. Uncharacteristically, I filed mine before the end of January, and I received a substantial refund weeks ago. I was tempted to spend it on truffles, but I set most of it aside for tuition (A.'s tuition, not mine; she starts college in the fall) instead.

A Bowl of Red

2007-03-17T19:56:00.000-07:00

You know what? Tax season sucks, and so does the weather.

I'd been working so many hours that I was starting to feel like I was becoming nothing but a tax machine, so about a week ago, when V. returned from Paris, we were having dinner out in Bethesda, and I said, "I'm sick of not seeing anyone. I'm going to invite a bunch of guys to dinner next week, and I'll just do something easy, and we'll all eat and drink lots." So I did. Last Sunday, I made a big pot of chili and froze it. Then Tuesday night I set some pinto beans soaking. Wednesday night, I stopped at Trader Joe's and got some desserts from the freezer case, and then when I got home, I cooked the beans and refrigerated them. Thursday night, I stopped at the supermarket and the beer and wine store on the way home and did the rest of the shopping and then when I got home, I made the cole slaw.

And then yesterday afternoon, it started to sleet and snow, and I noticed that the roads were pretty slushy on my way home, and then I got five calls within about ten minutes from guys saying they were afraid to venture out. When I got home, I had another couple of emails saying the same thing.

But, hey, you can't control the weather, right? And, after a fashion, I'd mostly accomplished what I'd set out to do. I'd thrown together a large dinner without driving myself crazy. I'd convinced myself that I didn't need to make everything myself (though, obviously, I wished that I could have) and that simple is fine. And, if not for the ~~utter wimpiness of my friends~~ winter storm, I'd have had a house full of friends.

As it happens, one of my friends lives down the street, so I called and told him that everyone else was cancelling but that I hoped he'd still come, and he did. And another friend, who works way over in Virginia, was coming directly from work, so he didn't get the message I'd left saying that other people were cancelling so that he could stay home if he felt like it but if he didn't get the message, there'd still be food. So there were still four of us, and we still had a terrific time.

We still drank a lot, too. Or at least we did by my standards. I had a small glass of wine while I was reheating and cooking, then I had a strong martini when I made one for my friends, and then I had two beers with dinner. And then I had a small glass of port and a smaller glass of vin de noix with dessert. For me, that's incredible lushiness. My buddy A. had three or perhaps four martinis as well as wine and port and vin de noix and it seemed to affect him not at all, so it's possible that I'm just a lightweight. In this one context.

Anyway. I may have written before about my long and unsavory history with chili. For the longest time, it's just been something I didn't do well, but last night's chili was great. I decided to go Texas style and to make the beans separately, so the chili is pretty much beef, beef, and more beef with a bit of tomato and some spices. It was a bit soupy on reheating, but I had biscuits to sop up the liquid, so it was all good. The chili is not especially spicy, so have hot sauce to serve with it for all those guys who think that the ability to withstand pain is an essential element of masculinity.

Chili

1/2 c. olive oil
1 very large onion, diced
5 lbs. stew beef, cut in 1/2" dice
1 small can tomato sauce
3 T. ground cumin
3 T. ground ancho chile
1 T. sweet smoked paprika
1 t. ground cayenne pepper
1 t. garlic powder
Ground black pepper
1 can beef broth
Salt

Put a heavy stockpot on medium heat and add the oil. Add the onions, stir well, cover and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions have browned. This is one of the rare instances where you are neither required to soften the onions without browning them nor caramelize them slowly over several hours. Just let them brown. It should only take five to ten minutes.

Add the beef and cook, stirring, until the outside of the beef is no longer red. In a perfect world, you would brown the outside of the meat well, but unless you want to take all day and use a lot more oil, you're just not going to be able to do that. It won't matter in the long run.

Open the can of tomato sauce and pour it over the beef. Then run some water in the can, swirl it around, and pour that in the beef so that you're not missing any tomato sauce. Add the spices and stir well. Add the can of beef broth. If the beef is not fully covered in liquid, add some more water (or beef broth) to cover. Stir well again.

Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cover. Cook for at least two hours, stirring occasionally. Taste and add a little less salt than you think you need. Uncover, and simmer to desired degree of thickness. Correct seasoning.

Serve with whatever fixings you like. I usually have sour cream, grated cheddar, and sliced scallions. And the beans, of course.

I like chili with beans, but some people don't. If you make the chili and the beans separately, everyone should be happy. Especially if you've given them a martini first.

These beans are flavorful without being overly assertive. The spices are very similar to what's in the chili, but they're toned down somewhat.

Beans

1 lb. dried pinto beans
1 t. celery seed
1/8 t. ground cayenne pepper
1/4 t. garlic powder
1 t. smoked paprika
1 t. ground ancho chile
2 t. ground cumin
Ground black pepper, to taste
1.5 t. salt
2 T. tomato paste
1 t. dijon mustard
1 t. red wine vinegar

Put the pinto beans in a deep bowl and fill the bowl with water. Remove any beans that float to the top, and pour off the water. Fill the bowl with fresh water, and leave overnight to soak.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Drain and rinse the beans. Put them in a pot that can go on the stove and in the oven. Add the celery seed, cayenne, garlic powder, paprika, ancho, cumin, and black pepper. Add water to cover the beans (about a quart). Cover the pot and bring to a simmer over a medium flame. Then move to the oven.

After 90 minutes, remove from the oven and check. They should be fully cooked but not mushy. Add hot water to cover the beans again (about 1.5 cups). Stir in the salt and tomato paste. Return to the oven for another fifteen minutes, uncovered. Stir in the mustard and vinegar. Taste and add more salt if necessary.

I would have liked to have made cornsticks last night, but I wanted something simpler, especially when I was expecting ten or eleven people. So I came up with a cornstick biscuit. They were pretty good. I overhandled the dough a bit, and if I hadn't done that and if I'd added a little more buttermilk, they'd have been even better. Live and learn.

Cornstick Biscuits

1.5 cups all purpose flour
1 cup stoneground yellow cornmeal
1/2 t. kosher salt
1 T. baking powder
1 t. ground ancho chili powder
6 T. cold butter, cut into 24 pieces (2x2x6)
1/2 c. grated cheddar cheese
4 dashes hot sauce
Buttermilk

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Mix the dry ingredients together. Cut in the butter. Add the cheese and hot sauce and mix well. Mix in enough buttermilk to make a dough that is soft but that can still be handled. Knead very quickly, then roll out on a floured board or marble. roll the dough out about half an inch thick. Cut into one-inch by three-inch rectangles, and place on an ungreased baking sheet.

Bake for twelve to fourteen minutes, or until nicely browned.

For the sake of completeness, let me pass along the coleslaw recipe.

Coleslaw

1. Surf over to google.
2. Put "lindystoast" and "coleslaw" in the search box. Click go or whatever.
3. Click on the link to Lindy's site. Follow her directions.

You would be well advised to follow her recipe precisely. I did not, of course, but only because I didn't have any cider vinegar, and I didn't feel like mincing another onion, so I just grated some instead. Also, by now you should understand that I really can't follow a recipe exactly. I don't feel the least bit bad about that, either. Lindy is exactly the same way, and I'm sure that she wouldn't follow any of my recipes exactly. In fact, I have it on good authority that her panagretto recipe began life as my deviled eggs recipe, her protestations about Jamie Oliver notwithstanding. Obviously, she made a few changes. (For those of you who are rolling your eyes and saying, "Yeah, and was that before or after she turned you into a newt?" let me say, "after," and yes: "I got better.")

A Mousse for the Misbegotten

2007-03-13T06:23:00.000-07:00

One would think that if one had spent $30 to have five delicious cherimoyas shipped to one, then one would manage to eat those cherimoyas while they were still at peak level of ripeness, especially given that one's cherimoyas do not all reach said stage of ripeness at the same time. As is so often the case, however, one would be mistaken, and one might come home to find the last two, smallest cherimoyas sitting on one's countertop, alone and forlorn, as if to say, "really, we didn't expect any better from you; we know the other cherimoyas were bigger, and if we had hoped to be eaten when we were at our best, it was only because we were stupid, bad cherimoyas who didn't know our place," and one would then be tempted to throw the cherimoyas directly into the trash, just to teach them a lesson, but one would remember that the cherimoyas had not been expensive and that they probably still had a delicious flavor to offer, so one would -- without exactly apologizing to the cherimoyas since one never wants to encourage drama royalty of any sort -- come up with a way to use the overripe fruit.

It may not shock you to find that I found myself in just such a position about three days ago, or that I let the situation go for another two days until I had a few free moments last night. An overripe cherimoya is not an attractive thing; neither is it easy to deal with, and two overripe cherimoyas are about half as easy to deal with. The flesh will have begun to turn brown, but the seeds will be no easier to remove. The picture you see here is the seeds that I removed from the pulp of the last two cherimoyas, and it really doesn't do justice to either their number or their tenacity. To separate the seeds from the flesh, I cut the cherimoyas in half, scooped the flesh into a bowl with a spoon, mashed the flesh with a potato masher, and then fished through with my fingers to remove the seeds. I am not in any way squeamish about such kitchen activities, and the fruit was at room temperature, so it wasn't unpleasant in the way mixing a meatloaf can be with the frozen fingers and all, but plucking seeds out of a bowl of cherimoya flesh is probably not how I'd choose to spend five minutes, if I were looking for a good time.

The mousse itself, on the other hand, is phenomenal, and ridiculously easy to make, once you've removed the seeds and provided that you have good heavy cream. You could do the same thing with overripe mangos or peaches or apricots, I suppose, but the flavor of the cherimoyas is special, so while you'd have something good, you'd have something very different. When you first cut into overripe cherimoyas, they won't look very appetizing. Fortunately, the finished mousse will be a very pale pink and looks just fine.

Obviously, this preparation is loaded with both fat and calories. Also, it is in the nature of both whipped cream and overripe fruit to be ephemeral, so you have, at most, half a day to eat this, before it separates. If you want something that lasts longer, you'll have to stabilize it with gelatin and/or egg whites. You could do that by separating a few eggs, cooking the egg yolks with the lime juice and sugar to make a custard, beating the egg whites separately, then mixing the custard with the mashed cherimoyas, and folding in the egg whites and whipped cream, separately. I suppose that if you wanted to use gelatin, you could soften it in the lime juice and then fold that into the whipped cream after you'd folded in the cherimoya flesh. I have never had great success using gelatin with whipped cream, but that may be because I haven't ever really tried. I'm pretty sure that you can find directions for various types of stabilized whipped cream in Rose Levy Beranbaum's Cake Bible, though.

Or you can just eat the stuff right after it's made.

Cherimoya Mousse

2 overripe, smallish cherimoyas
The juice of 2 limes
4 T. turbinado sugar
1 c. heavy cream

Remove the seeds from the cherimoyas. Discard the peels. Put the flesh in a bowl with the lime juice and the sugar. Mash well, until the sugar is dissolved. Taste a bit and add more sugar or lime juice, if necessary. The cherimoya flesh will not and should not reach the consistency of a smooth puree. You want some little bits left.

In a very cold bowl with a very cold whisk attachment, beat the heavy cream until it is very stiff. Fold the cherimoya mixture into it. Eat at once, or refrigerate and eat soon.

Custard Cups

2007-03-12T07:53:00.000-07:00

I realize that this recipe will seem like the worst kind of diet cooking (something that is even more replete with hypocrisy if you take into account the fact that I have been failing miserably to stay on my diet; I'm still packing good lunches and fresh fruit for the office, but I'm really stressed out, and when I get home, I have a tendency to eat everything in sight, resulting in exchanges like the following, which occurred last night:

anapestic: are you looking for the cookies?
V.: yes, why?
a: because you want something to eat, I presume, but you would no better than I
V.: ...
a.: ...
V.: I mean, as you undoubtedly know already, why are you asking?
a.: because they're not there; I meant to replace them, but I wanted to wait until the night before you got home because otherwise I would have had to replace them again
V.: [rolls eyes]
a.: I saw that!), but it's actually quite tasty. It (unlike the double chocolate Milanos, and the Chessmen) also conforms to the Weight Watchers core requirements. These custard cups are really just crustless quiches. I have generally not been a huge fan of the crustless quiche, but my undying affection for pie crusts is something that, temporarily at least, has to be kept under control.

You will note that the custard mixture here is significantly eggier than is usual for a quiche. The reason for this egginess has nothing to do with the crustlessness. It has everything to do with the fact that I am packing these in my lunchbox all this week and that I am forced to rely on a microwave to reheat them. It has long been obvious to me (as it would be to any sensible person) that if my bosses want me to work ungodly hours (and they do), then the only just and reasonable thing to do is to provide me with a fully equipped kitchen and an assistant so that at, say, eleven o'clock in the morning, I could call down to the kitchen and tell the assistant what I need by way of mise en place so that I could come down at one o'clock in the afternoon and prepare my lunch. Sadly, what I get is a refrigerator, a microwave, and an ice machine. When I'm at home, I reheat the custard cups in the toaster oven, where they reheat very well. I have tested them in the home microwave, and they're still tasty, but microwave reheating is clearly a compromise. I think that foods that need to be reheated that way should probably be sturdier to start with, so the custard cups have a relatively small amount of custard, and that custard is decidedly eggy.

You really do need nonstick muffin pans to make these. I take the additional step of spraying my nonstick muffin pans with Pam, which may or may not help, but I'm not taking any chances. This recipe made fifteen custard cups, and only one of them left a tiny bit behind when I turned the muffin pans over onto the rack and shook them to release the cups.

Custard Cups

1 T. olive oil
1 large portobello mushroom, diced
10 ounces fresh spinach
2 red bell peppers, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup red wine
8 ounces cooked turkey, diced
2 cups cooked barley
salt
pepper
3 eggs
3/4 c. milk
1 t. mustard

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Heat the oil in a nonstick skillet over medium heat. Add the mushrooms, stir well to coat with the oil, then cover and cook until they release most of their liquid. Pile the spinach on top of the mushrooms, cover, and cook until the spinach is well wilted and much reduced. Add the peppers, cover again, and cook until the peppers are soft. Stir in the garlic, cover, and cook for another two minutes or so. Add the red wine, stir well, and cook, uncovered, until the wine has almost entirely evaporated. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Transfer the mixture to a bowl and let cool slightly. Mix in the turkey and barley.

Coat one or two muffin tins with cooking spray. Fill the muffin tins level with the top with the vegetable/turkey mixture. Don't pack them too tightly.

In a large measuring cup, whisk together the eggs and mustard. Add the milk and whisk well to combine. Slowly pour the custard mixture into the muffin tins so that it comes to about a quarter-inch below the top of the solids. Transfer to the oven and bake until done, about thirty to thirty-five minutes.

Cool in the pans for ten minutes, then reverse onto a rack and cool completely. Wrap two-by-two in ziplock bags for lunches, then march them into the refrigerator, pretending that you're Noah. Imagine a world where Noah forgot to save a pair of croissants, and be glad that you don't live in such a world, no matter how much easier it might be to stick to your diet if Noah had been a bit less meticulous. Don't blame Noah for your inability to pass up pastry. You can blame him for not forgetting to save the Cheese Whiz, even though you don't eat Cheese Whiz. Who buys that stuff, anyway?

As with any quiche or quiche-like dish, the cooking time will vary greatly depending on the temperature of your solids. If you have to interrupt your preparation to run off and pick up your teen-aged daughter who swore up and down that her meeting was going until four but then called and said it was going to be done at three and could you come pick her up so that you have to refrigerate your solids, then you'll either have to reheat the solids before making the custard cups or live with a longer cooking time, which is really no big deal, provided, of course, that the same daughter doesn't need to be taken somewhere else. It is good to know and/or remember, however, that while the microwave and the quiche may be natural enemies in the wild, using the microwave to warm your ingredients before baking can greatly shorten your cooking time, if that's something you need to do.

Everything in this dish needs to be flavorful, so don't forget to season as you cook. Also, you will want to have cooked your barley in a flavorful liquid. If you add turmeric as well as other spices, you'll be rewarded with a nice color as well. Obviously, there are many other things that you could add to this dish: some softened or caramelized onions, some leftover roasted cauliflower, and any one of dozens of cheeses leap to mind.

Cherimoyas

2007-03-05T18:38:00.000-08:00

I have no time to write these days. But I do have cherimoyas. I first heard about cherimoyas from redfox. They are the perfect food when you have no time because the only sensible way to eat them is to cut them in half, poke out as many of the seeds as you can, and scoop up the flesh with a spoon. They are somewhat messy this way, but that is as it should be. I am sure that there are other wonderful things that you can do with cherimoyas. I suspect that with a small amount of lime juice, water, and sugar, they would make a swell sorbet, but I have neither the time nor the inclination.

I am saving the seeds because I find them attractive. I am sure that they do not grow in my climate. So far as I know, cherimoyas are available only via mail order. If you go to google and enter "cherimoya" as your search term, the first hit should be the site that I ordered them from. If you go there and send them an e-mail, they claim that they will alert you when the season begins, but my own experience suggests otherwise. Fortunately, however, the season is now well underway. I believe it lasts for at least another two months. I had to wait a while between when I ordered mine and when I got them. I'm not sure whether that was a question of availability or simply that they didn't want to ship during a period of sub-freezing temperatures. Shortly after I submitted the order, the weather got very cold, and I was worried about coming home to find cherimoyasicles, but whether by design or by happy accident, my fruit arrived in great condition.

Cherimoyas are an extravagance, for sure. $30 gets you a four-pound box, and the price includes shipping. My box had five healthy sized cherimoyas, three of which I have since eaten. They ripen at slightly different times. Given the cost, you would not want to eat one when it was not at its very best.

I am not sure about the wisdom of spending $30 for five cherimoyas. On the one hand, I could get a lot of pineapples and mangoes for the same amount. On the other hand, if enough people buy cherimoyas, more orchardists will grow them, and perhaps they will become more plentiful. Of course, it is entirely possible that one can already find them at every supermarket in ~~the land flowing with milk and honey~~ California, but given that I already have an overabundance of reasons to envy Californians, I will not seek another.

The high price and the exoticness of cherimoyas make them a terrific gift. This is true of good, fresh fruit generally, of course, and $30 is probably no more than one would expect to spend for a modest gift from most of the mail order fruit houses. And, certainly, if you've never tried them (as I had not), $30 is a lot less than you'd expect to spend for a significant amount of morels or, especially, truffles. For that matter, it's less than many people spend for a good bottle of wine, so my sticker shock is probably unreasonable. In any case, I expect that I'll order another box next year, if not before.

Garbanzo Turkey Burgers

2007-02-28T19:17:00.000-08:00

Now that the month of many birthdays is, mercifully, behind us, I'm endeavoring to return to my diet. Getting back to the straight and narrow is often more difficult than starting along that path, but I think I'm doing okay. It's a little easier right now because for large stretches of time, I'm too busy to eat. Also, V. has trotted off to Paris for a week for a vacation. I would like to say "a well-deserved vacation," but it might stick in my throat just now. Certainly, he worked enough years to earn his retired status, but, really, if one feels like taking a vacation, one can just as easily choose from the hundreds of places that one's partner has no desire to visit rather than to choose, say, one's partner's very favorite city in the whole world.

Not that I'm bitter.

Anyway, V.'s absence does have the very slight silver lining of allowing me to make my own dinner, which, in turn, makes dieting easier. Having very little time, however, I have to come up with things that can be prepared quickly. I stopped at the supermarket tonight to pick up bananas and found that ground turkey was on sale. So I also picked up a can of chick peas, and some cilantro, and I threw together these thoroughly delicious turkey burgers. Were I not on record elsewhere on the Internet as saying I never make the same thing twice, then I would certainly be planning to make them again (with the second package of turkey and the second can of chick peas that I also bought tonight). Alas, I cannot, and instead I shall spend a moment thinking about what V. might possibly bring me back from Paris that would make up for having abandoned me for a week to visit my favorite city. I hope he doesn't have any trouble bringing Jérémie Elkaïm through customs.

Anyway, when I put the first round of these burgers in the pan, I realized that I hadn't added any mustard. I thought that this would turn out to be a mistake, but I believe that this particular ground turkey dish is better without the deliciousness of dijon.

I cannot speak for everyone, but ground turkey is not something that I want to eat medium rare (the way I want a beef burger). If you make this mixture into eight patties that are no more than an inch thick (they should be about four inches in diameter) and use medium heat, five minutes on a side should leave them fully cooked without drying them out. They will also be very nicely browned.

Garbanzo Turkey Burgers

Chick peas, one 15-ounce can
Ground turkey, one 20-ounce package, 93% lean
1 t. smoked sweet paprika
1 t. kosher salt
1/4 t. garlic powder
1/4 t. cayenne pepper
Black pepper, to taste
One egg
1 T. sesame oil
Cilantro, minced, to taste

Drain and rinse the chick peas. Put them in a bowl and mash them. Add the other ingredients. Mix well.

Form into eight patties. Fry over medium heat for five minutes on each side.

I really did measure almost everything this time. I never measure black pepper, and I almost never measure cilantro. I'm not sure if I've just become more accustomed to the taste over time, but it seems to me that the cilantro that was available when fresh cilantro was first readily available was stronger than the cilantro that's generally available now. Though I will say that the bunch I bought today did have a very nice aroma. A quarter cup is probably about right, but you're unlikely to use so much that you harm the burgers.

Another Birthday, Another Cake (with a Side of Pork)

2007-02-26T20:16:00.000-08:00

As soon as I saw Le Fondant au Chocolat de Tante Amélie on Chocolate and Zucchini, I knew that I would have to make it for L.'s birthday. L. had not been terribly specific about what sort of birthday cake she wanted, except to say that she didn't want a cheesecake because A. had had a cheesecake for her birthday. She mentioned either an ice cream cake or a cake made with Oreos, and I countered by saying that I could make a chocolate cake and serve it with cookies & cream ice cream. That suggestion satisfied everyone.

The cake that Clothilde passed along is not quite flourless, but it's close. The gold standard of flourless chocolate cakes is the Chocolate Oblivion Truffle Torte from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Cake Bible, but the Fondant Amélie looked like it would be almost as good and significantly less trouble. I love taking some trouble with a cake, but I knew there was no way that I'd have time to pull off the COTT. It is something of a production, and it's a little hard on even my nerves, and I'm really not easily rattled in the kitchen.

Just how difficult it is to make me upset when I'm cooking was amply illustrated Friday night when I got home very late and still had to make the FA. I was very, very tired, and my judgment was obviously not what it should have been. I followed the instructions fairly precisely, and everything was fine until I went to turn the cake out of its pan.

I had decided to use a ten-inch cake pan in the hopes of producing a slightly more dramatic cake. I had forgotten, however, that I don't have an unlimited supply of plates that will hold a cake that big, and when I finally located the one I wanted, it was an inch or two wider than was entirely necessary. When I inverted the plate onto the cake pan and then inverted the cake pan (righting the plate) and the cake slid out, it was not centered on the plate.

I am, I assure you, more than experienced enough in baking (I have used a bain marie on countless occasions) to understand that a cake made with little flour is very tender even after it has fully cooled, let alone when it is still quite warm and has just come out of the pan. Again, I must plead exhaustion. In any case, rather than enjoying the asymmetry of the cake on the plate or sticking the cake in the refrigerator and centering it the next day, I put the cake pan back over the cake, turned it back over, shook it, centered the pan on the plate, reversed it again, and removed the cake pan.

I had succeeded in folding the center of the cake so that it now looked something like a football with a big ridge in the center. So I tried the entire process again, and this time the cake ripped into a few pieces.

I will confess, reader, that at this point, I was sufficiently distressed to utter a mild sigh. And then I said, "I guess I'm making another cake tomorrow." Then I got out a spoon and ate a few bites (fabulous), scraped the rest into a bowl, covered the bowl with plastic wrap, and put the whole thing in the refrigerator. (There is nothing quite like opening your refrigerator and realizing that you have about three cups of the thing that fudge only dreams it could be, waiting for you to nibble on it.)

In part, I was undisturbed because I had suspected from the time I scraped the batter into the prepared pan and stuck it in the bain marie that the finished product would not really be a suitable birthday cake for L. The principal problem is size. It is, of course, in the nature of a French cake not to be tall, but the Fondant Am&elie is positively Napoleonic. This complex was only enhanced by my choice of a ten-inch plate. The finished product could not have been more than 3/4 of an inch thick, and while I do not subscribe to the typical American notion that a birthday cake needs to be five or six inches tall, I did want a cake rather than a thin tart.

I also felt, having tasted the cake (fabulous! Vive Bonaparte!) that it was perhaps a bit rich for L.'s tastes, even though I planned to serve it with ice cream. So I decided to use a smaller pan and to increase by half most of the ingredients, with a larger increase in the amount of flour, to provide slightly more structure. The final result? Fabulous. Probably not quite as fabulous as the first, but still terrific, and more appropriate to the intended audience, though it was still so rich that I had to cut very small pieces.

In future, I am likely to use Clothilde's proportions, perhaps with the addition of a tablespoon of liqueur. But I will almost certainly bake it in buttered ramekins and serve individual portions in the ramekins. Perhaps with the addition of some crème chantilly.

The method is really the same as Clothilde's except that because I was adding liqueur, I had to put it in sometime. So I whisked it in at the end of the five-minute chocolate-cooling period (i.e., before whisking in the eggs and flour). Otherwise, follow her instructions, but be sure to use a nine-inch pan and the following ingredients:

9 ounces water
9 ounces sugar
9 ounces bittersweet chocolate
8 ounces butter
2 T. Grand Marnier*
3 eggs
5 ounces all purpose flour

The cake will take about fifty minutes in the bain marie to achieve a dense but moist and fully cooked texture on the sides and a gooey center. The center of the finished cake was somewhat gooier than is traditional with, say, a reine de saba, but I prefer mine that way. You can cook it a bit longer, if you like, but if you leave it in the oven until the center is perfectly dry, the outside will be overcooked, and, really, who doesn't like gooey chocolate?

Because I started the second cake at 4 pm on Saturday and L.'s birthday dinner was for 7 pm, I used a springform pan (I wrapped it in heavy aluminum foil so water wouldn't get in) and, after letting it cool for half an hour, I covered the cake with foil and refrigerated it. Then shortly before serving it, I made and poured on some apricot glaze. I put it back in the refrigerator for a few minutes then applied the icing from a plastic tube. Oh, the humanity.

*What I really wanted here was Chambord, but I somehow couldn't find the Chambord. The most likely explanation is that I've run out of it, but it seems unfathomable to me that I could inhabit a house without Chambord. The liqueur is fully optional; its presence is very subtle here, and many wouldn't miss it. Frangelico would also be nice here.

It's hard for me to believe that I've not previously posted a recipe for smothered pork chops, but apparently I haven't. It's really one of my favorite main courses. I love pork chops, and when you've made this recipe, you end up with about two quarts of gravy, which cannot help being a good thing. For L.'s birthday, I went with a less ambitious menu than I had for A.'s birthday, but I'm sure that no one felt cheated. (To the best of my knowledge, no guest has ever left my home hungry.) Smothered pork chops, mashed potatoes, and broccoli. I knew that L.'s kid-attended birthday party would have ended only two or three hours before we'd be eating, and aside from V. and I, everyone else at the table would have been at the party.

One really ought not rush the preparation of smothered pork chops. In fact, the preparation ought to occur over two days. I did not have this luxury, and as a result, the dinner pork chops, while flavorful, were just slightly tough. The leftover pork chops (I got a package of twelve at Costco) that I chopped up and reheated with the leftover gravy and poured over the potato pancakes that I made from the leftover mashed potatoes, however, were out of this world. So if you're going to make this dish for a dinner party (and you should because it's wonderful and no one expects it at a dinner party), you really should plan on browning the chops and cooking them for a couple of hours on one day, then refrigerating the chops overnight, then finishing the sauce the second day, and then slowly reheating the chops in the sauce. Alternatively, you could start in the morning, use a slow cooker, and cook the chops the whole day. Then you could just pull out the chops, discard the bones, chop the meat (think of pot roast you can eat with a spoon), finish the sauce, and return the meat to the sauce. It's a very informal presentation, but this is the sort of dish that you can only serve to your best friends, anyway. No one else really deserves it.

Smothered Pork Chops

1 T. Olive oil, plus additional for browning the chops
2 medium onions, chopped
1 celery heart, chopped
5 cloves garlic, whole
2 c. chopped carrots or baby carrots
1 14-ounce can of whole or diced tomatoes
1 t. dried thyme
2 cups red wine
2 cans beef broth
12 one-inch thick pork chops
Salt
Pepper
2 T. butter
2 T. flour

Put a stockpot on a medium low flame and add a tablespoon of olive oil. Add the onions, stir, cover, and cook for five minutes on low heat. Don't let the onions brown.

Add the celery, garlic, and carrots, stir, cover, and cook for one minute. Add the tomatoes and thyme, 1.5 cups of the red wine, and the 2 cans of beef broth. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer.

Put a large skillet over medium heat. Spray with a small amount of olive oil. Season the pork chops with salt and pepper. Brown the pork chops for five minutes on each side (you will have to do this in three or four batches, depending on the size of your skillet) and then put them in the simmering liquid. When the chops have all been browned, deglaze the pan with the remaining red wine and pour the deglazing liquid and any brown bits into the stock pot on top of the pork chops. Cover the pot.

Simmer the pork chops, covered, for approximately two hours, or until the chops appear to be losing their attachment to the bones. Remove the chops from the liquid and let cool. Use your immersion blender to puree the sauce. Remove from heat and let cool. Refrigerate the chops and the sauce, separately.

A half hour or so before you intend to serve the pork chops, return the sauce to a large pan and bring to a boil. Knead together the butter and flour (you are making a beurre manié) until they are well combined, then drop the mixture, in several pieces, into the boiling stock. Whisk well, then simmer for a few minutes. Return the chops to the sauce. Cook at a low simmer for about fifteen minutes. Serve the chops coated with the sauce, and pass more sauce on the side. You'll have lots.

Use more or less beurre manié as necessary. Because of the large amount of vegetable matter in this sauce, you could probably get by without any thickener, but a small amount does improve the sauce significantly.

Because A. objects strenuously to the inclusion of mushrooms, I didn't put any in this time. The sauce was thoroughly delicious without them, but there is no arguing that it would be thoroughly deliciouser with the addition of either cultivated or wild mushrooms. Given the long cooking time and the puree, dried mushrooms (some shiitakes, perhaps) would work splendidly.

I will not give my recipe for mashed potatoes here. Everyone has his or her own favorite way of making mashed potatoes, and while I'm quite certain that mine are better than yours (or, really, anybody's), I recognize that you might not agree. I will say that I bake rather than boil the potatoes that I subsequently mash. I will also acknowledge that I use garlic, but that I do so subtly. And that I use entirely unhealthy amounts of both butter and heavy cream.

WOBOCs

2007-02-22T20:06:00.000-08:00

Today, readers, we begin with a bit of pedantry. You may well think, "How does that differ from any other day?" but I beg you to remember that while I am frequently pedantic, I am even more frequently circumlocutory so that while I am often caught picking nits, it usually takes me a while to start.

Anyway. The title of today's post and today's cookie is an acronym. It is also an abbreviation, because all acronyms are abbreviations. The inverse, however, is not true. Sadly, there are people (horrible, horrible, bad, awful, naughty, evil, wicked people) in this world who use the terms as though they were interchangeable. Which, I must again aver, they are not. For an abbreviation to be an acronym, it must be pronounceable as a word. I might go so far as to say that it must be pronounceable with relative ease, but I would be on less than solid ground there, so I won't.

By way of example, if one abbreviates the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as NASA, one has an acronym (as well as an abbreviation), because people generally will say "nassa" rather than "en ay ess ay." Contrariwise, if one abbreviates the Concorde supersonic transport as SST, one has an abbreviation (but not an acronym) because people will generally say "ess ess tee" rather then "sisst." I apologize for the inelegance of my transliteration, but it sort of proves my point. I also apologize for the probability that "transliteration" is the wrong word here, but I'm very tired.

Anyway.

Educating the blogosphere about all matters culinary is a tireless and thankless task, so it is perhaps not entirely surprising that I have as yet failed to eliminate all ignorance about certain culinary terms. (I am no longer on about acronyms. I am on about something else now. That last "anyway" was a sort of abrupt transition.) You probably already know, for example, that when one appends florentine to the name of a savory dish, one means that the dish is cooked with spinach. As it happens, sagwala has the same meaning, spinach being a food that is far too good to be claimed by only one culinary tradition.

There are many such terms, especially in the lexicon of haute cuisine, and some of them are quite well known. Others, sadly, remain obscure, including today's term: Whore of Babylon. In classic contemporary cooking, a dish is described as "whore of Babylon" if it appears to be out of control or to have too much going on.

Whore of Babylon is, as you may know, a Biblical term. It appears in the Revelations where the whore (as she is affectionately known to her friends) is described as

the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.

Um. Yeah. Well, perhaps you see why if one is making a whore of Babylon dish for one's child to take to her fifth grade class so that the class might celebrate her eleventh birthday, one might wish to abbreviate whore of Babylon to "WOB" in order to avoid unpleasant questions and explanations. (As a side note, I was raised in the Southern Baptist church until I was eighteen or so, and I don't believe I ever heard any minister quote any verse that contained the word "fornication." Proving, yet again, that there is always something to be grateful for.)

As it happens, though, WOB (in case you're wondering, I believe that the French equivalent is grand guignol) foods generally (and these cookies in particular) are ideally suited for children, who appreciate delicious excess and colorful foods more than their adult counterparts do. Or at least the kids are more willing to admit it. Accordingly, my whore of Babylon oatmeal cookies (WOBOCs) have just about everything that I could think of to put in them, and they're terrific. If I were totally unrestrained, I might also have thrown in a half cup or so of peanut butter, but one learns early in these parts not to send to school any food that has ever been accused of consorting with peanuts. The only thing that I would really have liked to have done differently is to have used miniature m&ms instead of regular, plain m&ms. Alas, no minis were available, though it appears that they are now making some sort of mega m&m. (I do not approve. I also don't approve of peanut m&ms. I approve of mini m&ms only in recipes or when mixed into ice cream. Peanut butter m&ms are an abomination. I object on principle to almond m&ms, but you would be well advised not to come between me and a bowl of them.)

What the WOBOCs don't have is raisins. Don't blame me. When L. called me last evening to see why I wasn't home yet (during busy season, V. picks up the girls, and I make a huge effort to leave the office at 7 pm on the nights they're over; I have to sneak out of the office to accomplish this, and sometimes I get caught) and to ask what we'd be baking for her to take to school, and I told her that we'd be making some special oatmeal cookies, she said, "Without raisins, right?" and I said, "Yes, sweetie, I've already made my shopping list, and there are no raisins on it." I do believe, however, that a cup of craisins would be a felicitous addition here. Just don't try to serve them to L.

These cookies tend to retain more of their dome shape and spread out less than usual oatmeal cookies do. I added the water in the recipe to help them spread out a bit more, but it only made a small difference, and the shape they end up with is really fine. If you form them in a different shape or use a smaller cookie scoop, you will need to adjust the baking time. I used a large (1.75", I believe) cookie scoop, and I got 56 cookies. The thickness does mean that they're excellent with a cold glass of milk (or something similar). And pretty deadly without it. You have been warned.

WOBOCs

1/2 lb. butter, at room temperature
1/2 c. granulated sugar
1 c. light brown sugar
3 eggs
1 t. vanilla extract
1/4 c. water
1.5 c. all purpose flour
1 t. baking soda
1 t. ground cinnamon
1/4 t. salt
3.5 c. rolled oats
1 c. unsalted roasted cashews
1.5 c. toasted coconut
1 c. miniature semisweet chocolate chips
1 c. butterscotch chips
1 c. m&ms

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cream the butter in the bowl of your mixer. Add the sugars and cream again. Add, mixing well after each addition, the eggs, vanilla, water, flour, baking powder, cinnamon, and rolled oats. Either mix or fold in the remaining ingredients until they are well distributed throughout the dough.

Using a large cookie scoop, place mounds of the cookie dough on lined baking sheets. They will spread some but not too much: on a half-sheet pan, you should be able to fit five rows of four cookies each.

Bake at 350 degrees for 18 minutes, or until done. Cool on the pans for about ten minutes, then remove to a rack to cool completely.

Feed to children or eat them yourself when you are sure that no one is looking.

Update: I asked L. how the WOBOCs (she wanted to call them Everything Cookies, but I insisted) had gone over at school, and she said that the kids were initially a bit put off by the list of ingredients (which, of course, you have to send along witht he cookies in case someone is allergic to something), so she told them to smell the cookies, and then demand increased sharply, and, after having eaten the WOBOCs, many of the kids wanted the recipe. L. told them that they couldn't have it because it's a family recipe. Smart kid.

We ate the last of the WOBOCs today, four days after they were baked. They were even better today: the coconut was asserting itself a bit more. I can't wait to make them at Christmas, with red and green m&ms.

Ends and Odds

2007-02-21T14:30:00.000-08:00

Tax season being what it is, these days I'm mostly about either cooking things that are quick and easy (Last night when I stumbled home at 9:00, I got out a pot, put in six cups of water, a bag of red lentils, and a packet of onion soup mix, and brought it to a simmer; forty minutes later, I added some canned beef broth, a cup of salsa, and some salt and pepper: lunch for the week. It's very good, too.) or thinking about things that I desperately want to make but can't.

At the head of that last class would be sunflower seed tuiles. Long~~suffering~~-time readers of this blog may remember that nearly a year ago, I ate at a restaurant in Baltimore and experienced a revelation that I attempted to recreate (with mixed results) here and here. As much as I loved the little cookies/flatbreads that started the meal at Pazo, I had nonetheless let the quest for them slip from my consciousness.

But then, out of nowhere, I received an email from a mysterious stranger. (If I ever write a novel, I really must begin it "Out of nowhere, anapestic received an e-mail from a mysterious stranger." This fact alone would explain why no one will ever offer me a book deal.) Actually, I'm not sure that the stranger is in any way mysterious. He did, after all, sign his name to his email, but he and I don't know each other, so I like to think that he's a sort of culinary Lone Ranger, coming to the aid of cooks in distress everywhere. Hi ho, Colander, away!

Anyway, this very kind person who may or may not be mysterious and who may or may not ride a horse named after kitchen equipment (And who may or may not have a sidekick: he didn't say. I hate to look a gift horse, so to speak, in the mouth, but who sends an email without even mentioning whether he has a sidekick? Those of you who have corresponded with me will confirm that all of my emails contain the text "I'm anapestic: I approve this email, and I have no sidekick. Alas.") recently ate at Pazo and came away determined to discover the same recipe that I had been (and then wasn't) determined to find. So he went to Pazo's web site, and there it was. In defense of my normally superior search skills, I must say that I also checked Pazo's web site last May, so I think that they have posted the recipe since then, probably just to make me look bad. In any case, the recipe's there, and it's pretty much nothing like what I made last year. I intend to try it at my earliest opportunity. Which will likely be May. (Alas.)

Keep firmly in mind that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, reader, when I tell you that a few days ago, I felt like I absolutely, positively had to bake a cake. I will, of course, be baking another cake this weekend for L.'s 11th birthday. And I will probably be baking brownies or something like that this evening, so that L. can take some baked goods to school to celebrate her birthday, but I had a particular cake in mind.

Come with me, if you will, to the dark reaches of the past: last week. I was trying to assemble something quick for dinner, and V. handed me half an avocado. (This is not some sort of bizarre ritual that we have for demonstrating affection. He had just used the other half in a salad.) I decided that the best thing to do with this avocado was to eat it with a bit of relatively nice balsamic vinegar. And I had, in the pantry, a one-liter bottle of the most expensive balsamic vinegar that Costco sells.

I am aware that many people believe that balsamic vinegar has become far too prevalent in the U.S. these days. These people feel, perhaps with much justification, that what used to be an expensive and rare and wonderful thing is now copied, poorly, in large factories in Modena. These people fear that balsamic vinegar is becoming the new ketchup. I have no dog in this fight. I am happy to agree that cheap balsamic vinegar is really not all that, though I would say the same thing about cheap vinegar generally. (I do think that even with cheap balsamic, you can make a pretty good vinaigrette, if you work hard enough.) And frankly, I have no idea how good or authentic the pricier Costco balsamic is. One presumes that at about $10 a liter, it has not been sitting in anyone's grandmother's attic for twenty-five years. But I really don't care if they take distilled white vinegar and add peat moss and high fructose corn syrup and slap a fancy label on it because it tastes really great. I poured about a tablespoon of it into the hole left by the avocado's pit, sprinkled on a little sea salt, and happily ate the avocado with a spoon.

Right after "mmmmm," my first thought was, "you know, I bet this would be good in a cake." Sure, it's tangy, but it's also fruity and delicious and complex.

I figured that the way to go would be to slightly modify one of my other excellent prune cake recipes. Regular readers may well be tired of seeing me write about prune cake, but I apparently can't say frequently enough just how good this sort of prune cake really is.

And the balsamic vinegar prune cake was no exception. So, so good. Tragically, I had been to the supermarket over the weekend and had not found any cocoa powder, so I was unable to add the two tablespoons of cocoa powder that I wanted to add to the batter (I did add a significant amount of semisweet chocolate, but I like to have both ingredients in the cake). I will add the cocoa powder in the future, and I suspect that the cake will be even better, but even without it, the cake is addictively delicious. It is a cake where chocolate is a strong presence without taking over and turning it into a chocolate cake. It is also a terrible strain on my diet, but I try to console myself with the fact that it's been in the kitchen for over two days, and I've eaten only half of it. That's more self-control than I can usually expect of myself. Especially because the cake is so very good. But it's also the sort of cake that ages well, and I'm curious as to how good it will taste in two more days.

The balsamic vinegar is a noticeable, but subtle, presence. (Try not to panic while the cake's baking: at that point, the vinegar will be much more obvious.) One of the last tastes that you get from a bite of this cake is a clear but subdued tang that only intensifies the deliciousness. I usually don't care whether anyone tries any of my recipes, but I hope that some of you give this one a go. If you do, let me know. Make sure that you use a decent balsamic vinegar. Trader Joe's has sort of mid-level balsamics at a reasonable price.

I'm sorry for not taking a picture. The cake doesn't really look like anything special. You could, of course, pour a thin layer of dark chocolate ganache over it, and then it would be very festive indeed.

Another Prune Cake

10 ounces prunes, chopped fine
1/3 cup balsamic vinegar

1 cup all purpose flour
3/4 c. granulated sugar
1/2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. ground ginger
1/2 t. ground cinnamon
pinch salt
8 T. butter, at room temperature
3 eggs
1 t. vanilla extract
4 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped fine

Put the prunes and balsamic vinegar in a nonreactive bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let sit overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour a 9" springform pan or deep cake pan. Line the bottom with a circle of parchment paper.

Combine the flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, and spices in the bowl of your mixer. With the whisk attachment, mix together for two minutes.

With the mixer running, whisk in the softened butter, one tablespoon at a time. With the mixer still running, whisk in the eggs -- one at a time -- and the vanilla extract.

Turn off the mixer, and scrape the sides with a rubber spatula. Fold in the semisweet chocolate and the prunes and vinegar.

Turn the batter into the prepared pan. Bake at 350 for about 45 minutes, or until done.

Cool in the pan for ten minutes or so, then turn out onto a rack and cool completely.

This recipe makes a pretty thick batter. This turns out to be a good thing because it makes it easier to spread the batter in the pan so that the batter is thicker near the edge than it is at the center. That, in turn, means that when the cake rises in the oven, it will be more nearly level. In addition to looking better, it will also bake more evenly that way so that the edges will not be overdone when the center is still gooey. Because of the ingredients, this is a very moist cake, even when it's fully cooked, and it should stay moist for several days, as long as you remember to wrap it after it's cooled.

Portobellos

2007-02-16T06:09:00.000-08:00

I got home late the other night (quelle surprise), and V. had, sensibly, already eaten dinner. I wanted something quick and not too heavy, the diet having taken serious (but not fatal) injuries over the past week. I had two portobello mushrooms left in the refrigerator, and I had some cheese and bread crumbs left from the weekend. There is almost always an open bottle of red wine in the house.

How moist or dry one likes one's large mushroom caps is a matter of personal taste. I should probably have cooked mine a bit longer because I like them a bit dryer than they were. I have reflected that preference in the recipe. What I ended up eating was decidedly juicy, though delicious. Juiciness, to my palate, is fine when the mushrooms are still hot.

The portobellos came from Costco, where a 20-ounce package typically contains four portobello caps. If you look carefully, though, you can usually find a package with six caps. I prefer a slightly smaller portobello when I'm serving it whole, but this recipe would work with any size mushroom. You could easily make it with a dozen or so large white mushrooms, but I do like the portobellos better, and I can pretty much always get them for a very reasonable price at Costco.

The cheddar I used was a sharp Vermont cheddar, and it was very assertive, which is how I like my cheddars. You could certainly make the mushrooms with a milder cheese, such as whatever you use for your onion soup, and that would also be tasty. You could also do a lot more with the braising liquid. And you could pour it off when it was mostly evaporated and make a sauce, especially if you're not getting home at 9 pm and feeling the need to eat RIGHT NOW. I put my mushrooms under the broiler before the liquid was gone and then drizzled the liquid -- straight from the pan -- over the finished product as a nod to saucemakers everywhere, but I don't really think any sauce is necessary.

Braised Portobellos

2 Portobello mushroom caps, whole
Olive oil
1/3 cup red wine
1/3 cup beef broth
Black pepper
1 ounce grated cheddar
2 T. bread crumbs

Put a non-stick saute pan over medium heat. Spray the pan and both sides of the mushrooms lightly with the olive oil. Saute gill-side down for three minutes, covered. Turn over and saute, uncovered, for another three minutes.

Pour in the red wine and beef broth, cover, and cook for about five minutes. Remove cover, and let cook until liquid has evaporated.

Put the cooked mushroom caps in an ovenproof dish, with the gill side up. Sprinkle half of the grated cheddar on each mushroom, then top with the bread crumbs. Broil for 3 - 5 minutes, or until the cheese is bubbly and the crumbs are brown.

I didn't post anything on Valentine's Day, and I have to confess that I find it a silly holiday. V. and I are on the same wavelength here, as in most areas. Originally, the girls were to have been over, as they are every Wednesday night, but due to the recent snow and the protracted school closings, I left them at their mother's house and had them Thursday night instead. This left me free to work late(r). I rightly assumed that V. would eat on his own and would not have made any provision for V-Day. As I was leaving the office, though, it struck me that the day would make a good excuse to serve a festive dessert, so I stopped at Trader Joe's and a wine store on the way home and picked up a pint of lemon sorbet and a bottle of prosecco, respectively. Then when I got home, I got out a couple of large martini glasses, put a scoop of the sorbet in each, and topped them off with the prosecco. We kept going until half of the sorbet and all of the prosecco were gone, leaving me mildly and pleasantly inebriated. V-Day is a notoriously bad day for eating out, and I have no intention of supporting the greeting card, florist, or chocolate industries on February 14th, but the sorbet cocktail (which you can eat with a spoon or sip or eat with a spoon and sip) was a good way to celebrate.

It would also be a good way to celebrate Groundhog Day, Arbor Day, and National Manatee Awareness Day, though in some of those cases, obviously, you'd want to go with a different flavor of sorbet to be more seasonally appropriate.

Salsa Verde

2007-02-14T19:45:00.000-08:00

I'm doing some clean up with this post. I made this recipe about two months ago for our holiday party, and I wrote it down then, but I forgot to post it, partly because I didn't have a picture. (I still don't have a picture, but oh well.) It was, I think, a major improvement over my first attempt at salsa verde, and it was a big hit among the spice lovers at the party.

As with almost everything that I cook (as opposed to the things I bake), the recipe is more of a suggestion than a directive. I was fairly accurate in the description, but mixing up the amount of each vegetable isn't going to kill the sauce. Nor is adding more oil, though I liked this just fine with the tiny amount of oil that I used here. The roasting is very important, obviously.

I mostly dipped cold shrimp into this salsa, and it was very good with them, but it's also good with crudités or corn chips. Or lots of other things. It was very, very green.

Salsa Verde

12 ounces tomatillos
One medium onion
2 cloves garlic
2 jalapenos
Olive oil
One avocado
Cilantro
2 limes
Salt

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Prepare the vegetables: halve the tomatillos; peel and quarter the onion; peel and halve the garlic; halve the jalapenos and remove the seeds. Toss all the vegetables with a teaspoon of olive oil and put them in a small baking dish. (Or put them in the baking dish and spray them with olive oil.)

Cover the pan with foil and bake for twenty minutes. Remove the foil and bake for an additional 25 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and let the vegetables cool.

Put the vegetables and any collected juices in the blender. Add a handful of cilantro and the juice of the limes and blend until smooth. Add the flesh of the avocado and blend again, until smooth. Add salt to taste.

The End of an Era

2007-02-11T21:14:00.000-08:00

Reader, I hope you're sitting down.¹

I have been struggling. And I don't mean struggling with work (it's always a struggle at this time of year, and I'm resigned to that) or struggling with family (everyone's doing pretty well) or struggling with blogging ² or even (for the most part and this weekend aside) struggling with my diet. No, I have been locked in a month-long battle of wills with this woman.

While I was on vacation in January, I happened to spend a bit of time chatting with a nice young man who also happened to be on vacation. He was carrying a copy of Bleak House, and I happened to mention that it was very likely my second favorite Dickens novel, and from there the conversation meandered off on a path through much of Victorian literature that came to an end when our boat arrived at the reef. In the course of that conversation, he innocently (or so I thought!) mentioned that a friend of his from the Internet had suggested that he read Villette as a companion piece to Bleak House.

I have not read a great deal of Charlotte Bronte. In fact, it is likely that my exposure to this particular Bronte Sister³ had been limited to two readings of Jane Eyre. But I had relatively fond, if vague, memories of that novel, and I figured that if another Currer Bell novel was normally considered illuminative of Bleak House, then I would be well advised to read it.

And it is certainly true that Villette is a bleak affair. I will be the first to admit that I am likely writing out of turn, insofar as I have completed only two of the novel's three volumes. And Mr. Bell/Ms. Bronte is not entirely to blame for the slowness of my progress: the novel has many words, and I have little time. I typically pick it up after I am in bed for the evening and read only until I am exhausted (generally about a page and a half later) by either fatigue or, more likely, the prose. But if one reads two-thirds of a way through the novel and has yet to discern more than a ghost of a plot, then one ought rightly be able to assume that no strong plot is forthcoming. Similarly, if one finds the language overwrought in the first chapter and then again in the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second, twenty-third, twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth, and twenty-seventh chapters, it is perhaps not unreasonable to assume that there is a significant probability of additional overwrought language to come. And while it is certainly true that one has a slightly better understanding of the narrator's character at the end of the second volume than one had before beginning the first, it is equally true -- alas -- that the narrator is not significanly more likable than a character about whom one has never read.

Careful readers may well note a certain, shall we say, hypocrisy in my writing that someone else's language is overwrought. (Pot, kettle, black?) Well, yes. And, frankly, I am occasionally almost envious of Ms. Bronte's linguistic excess. More to the point, I believe that I understand its source. I think it is safe to say that Charlotte Bronte lived a life that was not marred by excessive joy. And if Villette is wildly successful in anything, it is in ruthlessly creating a visceral understanding of just how difficult it must have been to be an intelligent woman of limited means in Victorian England. There is inescapable oppression on every page, and part of the problem, I'll admit, with reading the book is that it's just such a downer. Clearly, Charlotte Bronte must have been a woman of a passionate nature with no means, in her everyday life, of expressing that passion. What was left to her must have been a passion for language. A passion for words. It is all enough to make me feel very, very sorry for her, but it is still very depressing. And a very tough read.

But I will finish, eventually. I am generally not one to continue in an abusive reading relationship. If I find that a book has no merit, then I have no trouble casting it aside and seeking a restraining order. But Villette is not a meritless book: it is just hard. And Victorian fiction is often (but by no means always) hard. Persevering in the face of this difficulty has often rewarded me with great enjoyment and sometimes not (I'm looking at you, William Makepeace Thackeray), but I have always gotten some value. If nothing else, then every other bit of Victorian fiction one reads adds to the context which allows one to experience Middlemarch, the single most valuable book ever written.

I suggest that the most difficult lesson that many of us have to learn is to not take ourselves too seriously and to focus on what is truly imporant in our lives⁴. And I submit that the easiest way to learn this lesson is to consider poor Mr. Casaubon. Whenever I find myself becoming too ponderous (say, by means of a wild example, thinking about just what's wrong with contemporary society and by what means it might be fixed; but, of course, you might well suppose that ponderous is not much of a leap for me) or getting involved in an earnest discussion about something not involving my personal welfare or the welfare of a family member or close friend, I try to take a step back and say to myself, "Oh yes. Keep on this line and perhaps you'll have The Key to All Mythologies in another hour or so." And then I laugh at myself and think that perhaps my time might be better spent enjoying the company of my daughters in the last few months before A. heads off to college. I owe my very sanity to George Eliot.⁵

Speaking of A., I attribute my rather more loquacious than usual mood⁶ in part to the fact that just yesterday we celebrated her eighteenth birthday. There is no point here in trying to describe just how proud of her I am or just what a wonderful person she is: there are not words. But I will relate that within the last month she has been accepted to her second and first choice colleges (Antioch and Marlboro), and that she's very happy about that and about most things.

As it happens, my parents had to be up in the area (they now reside in Florida and summer in Southwestern Pennsylvania) for medical visits and were staying with some cousins of my father, so in addition to the usual suspects, the annual birthday dinner included my parents and two more of my relatives, none of whom had met V. I find that the best way to deal with stress and abject horror is to cook like a madman, so despite having to work on Saturday and not being able to be home until about 4:45, I had planned to serve a large dinner for ten at 7:00. This turned out to be a wise decision as it forced me to plan ahead and to spend about two hours in that Zen state one reaches when one is cooking all out.

As it happens (and as expected, really), everyone was very cordial and seemed to have a very good time. More to the point: the food was, without exception, totally kick ass⁷. I had very much wanted to make Bakerina's spiced beef for this very special occasion. The annual family dinner, however, always includes the ex-wife, and the ex-wife has decided that neither she nor, really, anyone else should consume beef because American protections against bovine spongiform encephalopathy are horribly inadequate. Clearly, this view is not one to which I subscribe, but I really did not want to witness, let alone cause, the scene that was sure to occur if beef appeared on the table, so I went with something else. (The ex also doesn't eat eggplant or zucchini or any other form of squash. I'm just saying⁸.)

Although I reluctantly decided to reserve the spiced beef for another occasion, I did make a pair of dishes from two of my favorite food bloggers, the mother-daughter team⁹ of Lindy and Redfox. (FYI, the links are to the particular recipes.) Apparently, the fennel gratin comes originally from Elizabeth David; I believe that the broccoli with pine nuts is redfox' own invention. Not surprisingly, both dishes were knockouts. The fennel garnered more praise, probably because it is not something that my family normally eats (I don't believe I was ever served it as a child). I actually thought the broccoli was slightly better, but that was just because I did a better job making it. If you make the fennel (and you really should), remember, as I did not, that the only chance you get to salt the inner reaches of the fennel is during the boiling, so be sure to add enough salt to your water. But if you don't, it will still be awesome.

But back to the protein. I have been wanting for some time to make a pork shoulder roast. I was listening to The Splendid Table a while back and heard Lynne Rossetto Kasper suggest to a chef that he make a slow roasted pork shoulder seasoned with basil and garlic. Then, a bit later, I read over on Serious Eats a totally different pork shoulder treatment, and it watered the seed that had already been planted. I looked in a couple of stores, and I didn't see any pork shoulders, but when I was at Costco, I found some giant (> 10 pounds) pork loin roasts, so I decided to give them the same treatment.

Just to be nice, I'm pretending that I measured stuff. Measuring is really irrelevant here, but I'm pretty sure these measurements would work out. In practice, you dump the basil in a food processor, process , add the garlic, process some more, drizzle in olive oil -- while processing -- until the mixture is somewhat liquid, and add some salt and pepper.

Roast Pork Loin

A pork loin roast
Large bunch of basil
3 cloves garlic
1/2 cup olive oil
2 t. kosher salt
1/2 t. freshly ground black pepper

Wash your pork loin and pat it dry. Put it on a large cutting board or a sheet pan. With a sharp paring knife, cut slits (about one inch wide and almost all the way through) about every two inches on one side of the roast. Cut similar slits on the other side of the roast, also about every two inches, so that they fall between the slits on the first side of the roast (in other words, if you connected the centers of the slits, you'd have a zigzag).

Using the food processor as directed above, combine the other ingredients into a thin paste. Spoon or otherwise insert the mixture into the slits. Rub some or all of the remaining paste all over the roast. At this point, you can wrap the roast well and refrigerate it for a day or two. Or you can proceed directly; the basil is not the sort of marinade that will or needs to get all the way through the meat.

Roast at 325 degrees, to an internal temperature of 160 degrees. Let sit for 25-30 minutes before slicing.

It should take about an hour and a half to an hour and forty-five minutes for your roast to be done, but ovens vary. If it's done early and has to sit a few minutes longer, it won't hurt anything. It retains its heat pretty well while it's sitting.

I knew going in that A.'s birthday meal was going to be the sort of feast that's incompatible with a diet, so I decided to give myself the day off entirely. It's hard for me to think of a food that is more nutritionally indefensible than macaroni and cheese made the way I make it. My recipe is based on James Beard's recipe from Beard on Pasta, but I have made some significant changes, hopefully for the better. Mr. Beard instructs you to use a very sharp cheddar and not to skimp on the hot sauce (which serves only to bring out the flavor of the cheddar), and he is correct. His recipe (which I doubled as well as changed) says that it serves 4 to 6. I believe that he means as a main course. As a side dish, what I made would easily serve twenty. This was a problem on in that there are now leftovers in the frig, and this mac and cheese is so good that to resist its call is practically impossible, given that I can't easily have myself bound to a ship's mast. This is a very white mac and cheese, and you can change that by using an orange cheese, but I used a very fine aged Vermont cheddar, and that was a very good choice. You can add more color generally by adding all sorts of things to the basic recipe, but I like it fine the way it is. Besides, there was plenty of other color on the plate.

Macaroni and Cheese

4 ounces butter
3 large shallots, minced
1/2 cup all purpose flour
4 cups milk
1/4 cup dry white wine
1 T. Dijon mustard
1 t. hot sauce
1/2 c. heavy cream
1.75 pounds sharp cheddar, grated

1 lb. elbow macaroni

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a large baking dish. Put a pot of water to boil on the stove. Call your mother.

In a large, heavy saucepan, melt the butter over medium-low heat. Add the shallots, cover, and cook over low heat until well softened but not browned, about five minutes.

Meanwhile, either in another saucepan or in the microwave, scald the milk or at least make it hot.

Whisk the flour into the butter-and-shallot mixture and continue whisking over medium heat for three minutes. Gradually whisk in the hot milk.

At some point here, you want to start cooking your macaroni. The idea is for the macaroni to be done at the same time as the sauce, but if you are off by a few minutes, it is no big deal. When the macaroni is cooked, drain it. If the sauce isn't done yet, pour it into a big bowl, add a tablespoon of butter, and stir well to melt the butter and coat the macaroni.

Continue whisking over medium heat until the sauce comes to a boil. Whisk in the wine, mustard, hot sauce, and cream. Return to a boil. At this point you will probably want to switch to a spoon.

Reserve about a quarter pound of the grated cheddar. Stir the rest of the cheddar into the sauce, and stir until the cheese is melted and the sauce is smooth. Taste the sauce and add something if you feel like it's a good idea.

Combine the cooked macaroni and the sauce in a large bowl. Stir thoroughly. Turn into the buttered baking dish. Sprinkle the reserved cheese on top.

Bake at 350 for about thirty minutes.

I like to cook my m&c until there are some brown spots on the top, but not until it's brown and crusty all over. But cook yours for as long as you like. If you're looking for a nice crusty top, you can also sprinkle on bread crumbs after you've sprinkled on the cheese. I kind of wished I'd done that, but mostly just because I had bread crumbs left over from the fennel.

A. requested that her birthday cake be a cheesecake, so I made one. This is not my recipe. It is very slightly adapted from Lori, who used to make cheesecakes professionally and who also has some other cheesecake recipes on her site. She says that it's the best cheesecake ever, and I certainly can't think of a counterexample. It's also very simple to make. I don't really entirely agree with her philosophy on cheesecake crusts, so my recipe makes a slightly thinner crust than hers does. Also, in the future, I think I'd put this cheesecake in a slightly smaller pan: I'd like mine to be just a shade taller.

But, really, Lori's cheesecake recipe is amazing. Because of the topping I used, I decided to skip the lemon juice and use amaretto instead, and when I was eating my piece, it occurred to me that a small touch of acid would really have been a very nice thing. So next time, I might go with two teaspoons of lemon or lime juice. But the cheesecake I ended up with was nothing short of amazing, and the almond flavor is also very nice.

Cheesecake

1.5 cups graham cracker crumbs
6 T. butter, melted
2 T. sugar

1 lb. cream cheese, preferably at room temperature
A 14-ounce can of sweetened condensed milk
3 eggs
1 T. amaretto
Cherry sauce (entirely optional, but yummy; recipe elsewhere on page¹⁰)

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

Combine the first three ingredients and pour the resulting mixture into a nine-inch springform pan. Press the crumbs about halfway up the edge and evenly across the bottom. Bake at 300 for ten minutes. Remove and cool.

In the bowl of your stand mixer, beat the cream cheese until fluffy. Slowly beat in the condensed milk. Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat to combine. Turn off the mixer, lift the paddle, and run a spatula around the inside of the bowl to make sure that everything is getting well mixed together. Then mix in the amaretto, again making sure that the entire mixture is uniform.

Pour the batter into the cooled (or semi-cooled) shell and bake at 300 degrees for about 55 minutes, or until the edges are set but the center is still slightly wobbly. If you start to see cracks around the edges, remove the cake from the oven immediately.

Let cool in the pan for an hour, then wrap the pan well and refrigerate for at least four hours, but preferably overnight.

Remove from the pan, top with cherry (or other) sauce if desired, and serve.

Cherry Sauce

A jar of sour cherries in light syrup
2 T. sugar
2 t. cornstarch suspended in 2 T. water
1 T. amaretto

Drain the syrup into a saucepan. Bring the syrup to a boil and whisk in the sugar. Whisk in as much of the cornstarch/water mixture as you feel you need. Return to the boil and whisk for a minute. Remove from heat and whisk in the amaretto. Reunite the mixture with the cherries. Cover and refrigerate.

I had originally intended to make my syrup thick enough so that I could decorate the edges of the cheesecake using the syrup in a squeeze bottle. If you're going to do that, you'll obviously need to put a few tablespoons of the syrup in a squeeze bottle and refrigerate that separately. As it happened, my syrup ended up not being that thick, so when I tried to decorate with it, it all eventually ran together. But the thinner syrup probably made a better cherry sauce, and no one (even me) really missed the extra decoration.

In fact, I had originally planned a more elaborate decoration in the middle of the cheesecake, but I overbaked the cake by a few minutes, and I got a fairly substantial crack in the middle, so I dumped some of the refrigerated cherries and syrup in the middle of the cake to cover the crack. Slightly overbaking the cake did nothing at all to harm the texture, or at least the texture was already so wonderful that I couldn't really imagine it being even better if I'd baked it slightly less.

Make sure that you taste the syrup before adding the additional sugar the recipe calls for. I was surprised to need it since the cherries had been packed in light syrup, and it is usually the nature of light syrup to be at least sweet enough. In this case, however, the cherries had passed on a good deal of sour to the syrup, and I needed the additional sugar to get a sauce that was delicious without being too sweet.

It is truly not easy to accept that your little girl is not a child any more. A. is a young woman of uncommon maturity, so it is something I have been learning to accept for some time, but an eighteenth birthday pretty much destroys any deniability that I had left. I'm not sure that cooking, or serving, a terrific meal makes the transition any easier for me, but it might, and I am sure that A. deserves at least the best food I can make. And, really, eating very well is always a lot better than eating something mediocre.

¹Not for any particular reason. I just think it's silly to read an Internet post while standing. Especially seeing how I do have a tendency to go on a bit. Oh, and if you're reading the footnotes before the rest of the main text: don't worry; there will be recipes. Eventually.

²I kinda just threw that in as a way to make fun of people who struggle with blogging. I've actually read people writing about how they're struggling with their blogs. Surely "struggling" is the wrong word in that context. Isn't Jacob said to have struggled -- all night, yet -- with an angel and gotten a nasty hip injury in the process? Can you imagine Jacob finally prevailing in that fight only to become despondent because he wasn't sure exactly what he'd say about it on his blog?

³Readers who believe that I have erroneously capitalized "Sisters" will be displaying their unfortunate, though completely understandable, ignorance of musical history. The Bronte Sisters were, in fact, one of the earliest examples of the girl group phenomenon. They specialized in close harmonies and unusual time signatures and were wildly popular on the Haworth Parlor Circuit in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Sadly, the Misses Bronte had near-constant artistic differences, and the group broke up in 1843, reportedly because Charlotte refused ever to let Emily sing lead (most knowledgable scholars believe that events from the career of the Bronte Sisters provided the inspiration for Dreamgirls). Rumors of a reunion were rampant, but probably overstated, and Ann's death in 1848 effectively killed (as it were) such prospects.

⁴I beg you to take my word that this is, in fact, one lesson rather than two. I firmly believe that the two halves of this lesson are inextricably linked, but a discussion of why I believe that contention is beyond the scope of this post.

⁵There are, in fact, other ways to learn this lesson. By way of example, one can learn to let the nature of the universe worry about itself and instead focus on what's really important by going through a vicious divorce and custody battle. But if you are ever offered the choice of spending a great deal of time in the company of attorneys or reading Middlemarch, I respectfully suggest that you choose the latter.

⁶I fear, however, that the real answer to "Why are you going on about this on a cooking blog?" is mostly "Because I can." I'd be more sorry about that if I weren't also giving you three recipes.

⁷I know what you're thinking, and, no, I did not steal the term "totally kick ass" from George Eliot.

⁸Again, I know what you're thinking, and (issues of sexual orientation aside) while it is unthinkable that I should spend thirteen years with someone so culinarily incompatible, yes: reader, I married her.

⁹To the best of my knowledge, the two have never joined forces in a professional wrestling context, but I aver that if such a thing were to happen, it would be unwise to bet against them.

¹⁰Née "follows"

Black Bean Patties

2007-02-04T18:45:00.000-08:00

There's not much originality left around these parts, readers. I'm into the six-days-a-week part of busy season (that's as opposed to the six-long-days-a-week part that starts in another week or two), and simplicity is the name of the day. Simplicity, and shamelessly stealing recipes. I was reading redfox the other day, and she had linked to several very good ideas, most of which seemed pretty simple. Delicious though her oatmeal upma sounds, I decided that the black bean cakes would scratch the particular itch that I have at the moment.

The original recipe (which you can see here) is not at all difficult, but I figured it could be simpler still. I agree with redfox that quinoa might be the grain of choice for this recipe, but I had no quinoa on hand, and there was plenty of barley in the pantry, so I made up a batch of barley one evening this week, plopped it in the refrigerator, and used some of it today to make the black bean patties.

As must be obvious to regular readers, I am not a vegan. Nor am I a vegetarian of any sort, though I have great respect for the vegetarians and, of course, for vegetables. Because I wanted my patties to hold together well, I took redfox' advice and added an egg.

Trust me when I say that patty integrity is really not worth worrying about. I believe that an egg is a happy addition, but if you really want a patty that will stay together, you need two eggs, twice as much cornflake, and a slightly longer cooking time than is ideal. The patties you make with the extra ingredients and cooking time will still be delicious, but they will not be as good as the mush that you get if you stick to a single egg, one cup of cornflakes, and enough time to cook the mush and brown the egg, but not enough to give a dark crust. On the other hand, I was cooking with only the tiniest sprays of olive oil on my nonstick pan, and you might easily get better patties by using more oil for frying. You might also get firmer patties by using either couscous or quinoa (or something else) in place of the barley, but I very much like the taste of the barley. Also, the way I cook barley (bring a quart of water and three bouillon cubes to a boil, add 1/2 tsp. each of turmeric and smoked paprika, add 1 cup of barley, and simmer for about forty minutes, or until tender) makes it yellow, so you get a nice visual contrast with the black beans.

In any case, the black bean patties are terrific, highly satisfying, and very easy indeed. For those who care, it's qualifies as a Core recipe on Weight Watchers, provided that you don't eat more than two thirds of it in one day. And you won't. This recipe would easily serve six as a starter or four as a main course.

Black Bean Patties

1 can black beans, rinsed and drained
1 cup cooked barley
1 cup salsa
2 cups cornflakes
1 T. olive oil
Salt and black pepper to taste
2 eggs

Combine the first five ingredients in a bowl and have at them with a potato masher until the black beans and the cornflakes are well mashed. Taste for seasoning and add pepper and salt (if you need any). Add the eggs and combine well.

Put a nonstick skillet over medium heat. Using a large spoon, place dollops of the mixture in the pan and smooth out into disc shapes. Cook for about 2.5 minutes on the first side, then flip and cook for another two minutes or so on the other side.

It is key here to use a salsa that you really like, but of course why would you have a salsa that you didn't like in your refrigerator? I am very fond of the refrigerated salsa that Costco carries. It's medium hot and flavorful. It's reasonably thick but not in the way that bottled salsa are thick. It's equally delicious as an ingredient and on chips.

Speaking of chips, I've started making my own, sort of. I find most baked chips nearly inedible, and while fried tortilla chips are almost unspeakably delicious, they're very high in both fat and calories, and if I eat a couple, I'll eat a whole bag. And not a little bag, either: the giant economy sized bag. Especially if the chips are flavored with lime. Time comes to a standstill when I'm eating those things.

But you can bake your own chips and get something that's pretty good. Just don't think of it as a substitute for fried tortilla chips because it's not. Think of it more as a kind of corn cracker that you use to shovel salsa into your mouth. It's nearly impossible to eat more salsa than is good for you.

Baked Corn Chips

6 (or however many) corn tortillas
Olive oil
The juice of half a lime
Kosher salt
One or more of:
Ancho chile powder
Cayenne pepper
Garlic powder
Black pepper, ground

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Using an oil sprayer, lightly spray both sides of the tortillas with the olive oil. Brush both sides of each tortilla quickly with lime juice. Stack the tortillas and cut them into six or eight wedges. Put the wedges on baking sheets.

Mix together the salt and whichever of the spices you want to use. Sprinkle the salt mixture over the tortillas.

Bake for about twenty minutes. Serve warm.

You need to watch the chips pretty carefully towards the end of the baking. There is a window of only a couple of minutes when they're just right: crisp and lightly browned but not overdone. If you pull them out before that, they'll be hard but not really crisp, and if you wait longer, the texture will also be not right, and the lime flavor will lose something. If you're using two pans, the pan on the bottom rack will likely be done as much as five minutes before the pan on the top rack, at least in my oven. When I started making these, I would flip the chips over halfway through the cooking. That was a tedious process. Fortunately, I forgot to make the flip one time, and the chips were just as good unflipped.

They are not, however, just as good cold. I suppose you could reheat them, but you're really better off just making as many as will be eaten in one sitting. It's a very easy recipe, so you don't gain much by making a larger batch.

Corn tortillas vary somewhat in composition. The tortillas that I use are the ones that have no fat and a lot of fiber, just because I like the flavor of those best. They are more corny, somehow. If you don't have an olive oil sprayer, then I think you could make a small amount of lime vinaigrette and brush that onto the tortillas. If you did that, you could just add the spices directly to the vinaigrette. That may, in fact, be a superior method, and I should really try it next time.

Both of these recipes are highly susceptible to innovation. The black bean patties are so simple that I'm not tempted to fuss with them much, but if I happened to have some tapenade sitting around, I would certainly use a couple of tablespoons of that and leave out some or all of the olive oil. The salsa is meant to substitute for a number of other flavors, and it does that admirably, but if you like more of a particular flavor, say cilantro, then by all means add it.

Similarly, add whatever you like to the chips. They would probably be terrific with a bit of cumin into the mix. But they are also nice with just salt and pepper.

Red pepper mole

2007-01-30T22:43:00.000-08:00

I have bad news. You know that story that you always hear about why mole is called mole? The one about the toreador who was in the middle of a bullfight when the object of his affection, upon receiving the handkerchief that she had dropped onto the horns of a raging bull and that had been retrieved with equally breathtaking amounts of danger and elan, passed him a piece of chicken that was smothered in a rich, clay-colored sauce redolent of peppers, spices, tomatoes, and chocolate, causing the toreador to stop in his tracks, and say "mmmmmmmm" until the shrieking of the crowd brought home to him the fact that the horns of the still-raging-and-now- even-more-pissed-off-than-usual bull were mere inches from his tight, shiny pants, whereupon the toreador moved rapidly (but in a carefree manner, and without ceasing the audible appreciation of his food) to the side just enough to elude the bull and fling up his cape, thereby eliciting an enthusiastic "olé!" from the crowd? That story?

Apparently apocryphal.

As you cannot help but have surmised, discovering the somewhat questionable veracity of the generally accepted etymology of mole left me devastated. The only means worth considering for restoring my bruised spirits was to make a nice mole of my own. "Mole" means, I believe, nothing more or less than sauce, so it doesn't really mean a lot to say that you want to make a mole, but when most people say "mole" (without "guaca") they mean something slightly more specific. Recipes for this type of sauce abound, and my very favorite is in a cookbook that I own but can't always find. It was written by one of the two women who wrote the Silver Palate cookbooks, and it was published not long after they feuded about something or other and went their separate ways. It has many, many ingredients and is proportionately delicious, though for obvious reasons, it's not as good if you can't make it because you can't find the book.

But no matter. I knew the types of ingredients that were in my favorite mole recipe, and I figured that if I had peppers and onions and tomatoes and nuts and fruit and spices and chocolate, I'd probably come up with something tasty. The main innovation I wanted to test had to do with the initial cookbook. In the no-longer-a-Silver-Palate-chef's book, a small amount of oil was used to successively fry a great many ingredients. I reasoned that I could more easily chop all the ingredients, toss them in a bowl with some olive oil, and then roast them all together in the oven.

And this method turns out to work just fine. I'm not sure that my specific ingredients were really ideal (I think that using both a banana and the prunes was not necessarily inspired, though either of them alone would have been just fine), but when I was done adjusting the seasoning, I had a mole that I liked, and when I went a few steps farther by making a batch of my turkey meatballs and then cooking them slowly in the mole, I had something that I would happily eat for lunch every day this week (as, indeed, I am doing). I will probably make some minor adjustments before I make another batch, but since this batch gave me ten cups of sauce and since two cups of mole are plenty to sauce six lunch-sized servings of meatballs, it may be a while before I get around to making more.

Red Pepper Mole

4 sweet red peppers, roughly chopped
1 large white onion, roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic, halved
1 ounce pine nuts
1 ounce almonds
10-12 prunes, halved
1 banana, sliced
2 T. olive oil
1 t. salt
1.5 cups tomato puree
1 quart chicken broth
1/2 t. cayenne pepper
3 t. ground ancho chile
2 t. smoked sweet paprika
1 ounce unsweetened chocolate, chopped
3 corn tortillas, torn
Salt and pepper, to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Combine the first seven ingredients in a bowl. Add the olive oil and salt and toss well to coat. Transfer to a large baking dish and bake for approximately forty minutes.

Transfer the roasted vegetables to a large pot, and add the tomato puree, chicken broth, and spices. Puree with a stick blender. Simmer for about half an hour, and add the chocolate and tortillas. Simmer for another fifteen minutes and use the stick blender again. Correct seasoning.

How thick you want your mole will depend on both your personal taste and on what you'll be serving it with. I ended up with something pretty thick, but I'm eating the mole and meatballs without anything else, so thicker is better. You could easily put the whole thing over some spaghetti to give an amusing reinterpretation of spaghetti with meatballs, and then you'd probably want a thinner sauce. Just add more broth.

You can use the mole to sauce a lot of different things, but when I first made it and tasted it, it really seemed to lack something that would best be provided by meat, and it was much better after the meatballs than before, so if I were going to use it on something else, I would likely swap out some of the chicken broth for beef broth.

Spoonbread

2007-01-23T19:43:00.000-08:00

I suspect that many of you will be entirely unfamiliar with spoonbread. In fact, until I made some for myself this past weekend, I had only ever had spoonbread made by three people: my mother, my mother's mother, and my mother's sister. I believe that spoonbread is relatively common in southern cooking, but it is clearly not nearly so well known as its famous cousin cornbread or even its slightly less famous cousin, the cornstick.

I will have to acknowledge that this obscurity may not be entirely undeserved. I must further acknowledge that when my mother put spoonbread on the table, my father was pretty much the only person who was delighted by its appearance. To me it always tasted wet, somehow. Exactly why this should be so I cannot explain to you: I haven't had spoonbread made by anyone in perhaps twenty-five years, and while I considered calling my mother to ask her how she made/makes her spoonbread, I decided not to. In part because she probably doesn't use a recipe, but also in part because I was afraid that she might make it for me again the next time I visit her and my father. I suspect that Mom's spoonbread is something that my adult palate would find pleasing, but I'd just as soon not take the chance.

My initial batch of spoonbread didn't really start out with that destination in mind. I just wanted something warm, filling, cornbread based, and within my dietary parameters. Since cornmeal, eggs, and skim milk are all unlimited foods, I figured that I could mix those up with water, some spices, a small amount of oil, and perhaps some cut corn, and get something that would make a decent breakfast. I was really thinking of something more like a corn-based equivalent of porridge. But when I was done, it occurred to me that I'd basically recreated (a leaner version of) spoonbread.

My first batch was made entirely on the stovetop, and it was much better than I thought it had any right to be, given the very small amount of fat. My mother always baked her spoonbread, and that's how I did my second batch. You can make it either way. If you do it entirely on the stove, then you will have a much more solid texture. Bake it, and you get something like a soft baked custard in texture. I'd happily eat a lot of either version. In fact, I have.

My mother's spoonbread (like my grandmother's and my aunt's) was very plain fare. I believe she used white corn meal, water, milk, butter, salt, eggs, and probably nothing else. As is my general practice, when I cut down on the fat in a recipe, I compensate with additional flavors, so the flavor of my spoonbread is nothing at all like Mom's.

Although I am aware that there are many, many options for people who want to spice up their food, I have lately been restricting my spicy palette to ground black pepper and a troika of reds: ground ancho chiles, ground cayenne pepper, and smoked sweet paprika. I find that by using these three spices in varying proportions, I can almost always get something that's just what I want when I want something spicy. (I am not, however, advocating that you do the same. Just last weekend, I heard a brief interview with Rick Bayless where he talked about a large food market in Mexico City and about how one of the stalls had thirty-seven different varieties of dried chiles. It made my mouth water. V., in fact, will be going to Mexico City for a week right after tax season. He's attending a conference there, and I could go with him if I wanted, but I am not sure that I'd feel safe there, and he'd be in meetings most of the day. Of course, that would give me most of the day to count varieties of chile peppers in the markets, but I think that I will instead opt for something less adventurous and more secure. Alas.) I used all three of them in the spoonbread.

I am not kidding you when I say that the tiny amount of oil in this recipe seemed fine to me and that I did not at all miss the fat. At the same time, if you wanted to ramp up the recipe with a couple of tablespoons of butter or bacon fat, then no one would blame you. Neither would blame attach to the addition of some nice, sharp cheddar, though, again, I didn't miss it.

Spoonbread

2 cups water
1/8 t. cayenne pepper
1/4 t. garlic powder
1/2 t. ancho chile powder
1 t. smoked paprika
2 t. salt
Black pepper to taste
1 cup cornmeal
2 t. olive oil
1 cup cold liquid*
2 eggs
1-2 cups corn

Grease an 8x8 baking pan

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a decent sized saucepan, bring the water to a boil. When it is nearly there, add the seasonings and stir. Slowly whisk in the cornmeal, to avoid lumps. Whisk in the olive oil and whisk over heat for another two minutes. The mixture will be very thick. Remove from heat and whisk in the cold liquid. Whisk in the eggs until well incorporated. Fold in the corn kernels.

Turn the mixture into the greased baking pan and bake until brown and crackly on top, about 35 minutes. The spoonbread will still quiver when it's done.

Serve straight up, or with hot sauce or salsa.

*Most spoonbread recipes call for cold milk. I have used cold water and cold (fat-free) buttermilk, and they both work just fine.

If you want to do the whole deal on top of the stove, just return to the heat when you've whisked in the eggs and return to the flame until well cooked, then fold in the corn. This method will save you about thirty minutes. I used semi-defrosted frozen corn, and there was plenty of heat to finish defrosting and cooking the corn. I prefer the recipe with the larger amount of corn, but it is fine with the smaller amount.

This is not the sort of dish that improves with age. You want to consume it soon after it's made.

Popcorn

2007-01-17T23:30:00.000-08:00

Those of you who watch Top Chef will know exactly where the idea for a spicy popcorn came from: i.e., from the dish that Sam created to represent wrath in the seven deadly sins challenge. There is even a recipe for that dish on the Bravo website, but the recipe treats the popcorn as a mere garnish. Worse, it just tells you to pop some corn in some canola oil and entirely neglects the seasoning that Sam put on it and that made the judges rave.

Popcorn is the ideal snack food if you're dieting. In fact, on the Weight Watchers Core plan, 94% fat free microwave popcorn is one of the permitted, unlimited snack foods. And I will confess that there have been times at work (these times will, alas, become more frequent as busy season waxes full) where I have resorted to that option. While it is certainly possible to see (especially if you squint) microwave popcorn as a necessary evil, however, you run into a brick wall if you try to justify it on any grounds other than dire necessity. And perhaps on the grounds that if you go to the supermarket, you will be absolutely inundated with options for creating a series of controlled explosions inside your microwave, but you might have difficulty finding any good popcorn that you can prepare on top of the stove. If you look carefully, however, you can probably find a jar of Orville Reddenbacher, and while I'm sure there are better popcorns (and if you have a favorite, I'd be ever so grateful if you leave a comment or send me an email to let me know what it is and where I can procure some), OR has consistently popped well for me over the years.

I am not one to pass judgment on anyone's culinary practices or kitchen equipment (note that I wrote that last phrase with a straight face: just how long I can keep that up remains an open question), but I do not think that the food appliance industry served us well by creating the hot air popper. When I was a youngster (my mother's family would say "young'un"), my mother popped corn using her pressure cooker. She covered it with the lid from another saucepan, making it, in effect, the heaviest saucepan she owned. Mom would melt some shortening in the bottom of the pot, pour in some store-brand popcorn from a plastic bag, cover the pot, and cook it, shaking frequently, until as much of it as she thought was going to pop had popped. Then she'd pour it out into a bowl and add salt and, sometimes, butter.

When I was a little older, dedicated popcorn poppers were common. These were essentially hot plates with a cooking surface (often nonstick) and a cover, and they did the same thing as my mother did with her pressure cooker, but at a controlled temperature and without the shaking. They may have been among the most pointless (though essentially harmless) appliances ever created, and if anyone was sorry to see them go, it was only because they were chased out by the hot air poppers, which were equally pointless -- but not quite so harmless.

It really does not require a great deal of fat to make good popcorn, but popcorn prepared without any fat at all is doomed to an eternity of flavorlessness (there was, in fact, a Greek myth illustrating this exact lesson, but it was ruthlessly suppressed by Big Popcorn shortly after the end of the Napoleonic wars) no matter how hard you work to compensate (if you go to a Weight Watchers meeting, you will hear people talk about using cooking spray on their air-popped popcorn; when this happens, smile, nod, and escape at your earliest opportunity). The problem with fat-free popcorn popping is that in the absence of fat, salt will not cling to the popped corn. (There are also textural problems with air-popped popcorn, but the lack of flavor will suffice here.) I have not used a hot air popper in many years, but if memory serves, the popper had a place to put butter so that the hot air would melt the butter, and the butter would fall down onto the little chute leading from the popping chamber to the bowl. The theory was that the popped corn would hit the chute and the butter and that the final product would then be saved. It didn't work. You could, of course, rescue your popcorn by pouring melted butter over the finished product and tossing it well to coat: enough butter and salt will rescue almost anything. (Really, try it some time with a bowl of chopped haggis and see if the haggis isn't much improved. Not that there was any direction for the haggis to go but up. I shouldn't say that: I've never had haggis, and the lead singer from Franz Ferdinand claims that it's entirely edible [Scotland: come for the tartan, stay for the haggis!], and I'm sure it can't be much worse than, say, chitterlings. And if you decide to rescue a bowl of chitterlings by pouring butter and salt over them, I don't want to hear about it, ok?) But if you are so desperate to be chewing something that you're willing to eat air-popped popcorn, I suggest sugarless gum. The only time I have ever found a hot air popper truly useful was when I was in college, and we wanted to fill a friend's room up with popcorn. Word to the wise: to do so takes a long time and a lot of popcorn. If you can't convince one of the freshmen to carry out the prank for you, then filling the room to a depth of three inches or so completely makes the statement you wanted to make: any more is just punishing yourself. Indeed, if you're going to put large quantities of popped corn in a friend's room, you want to avoid something popped in fat so as to avoid attracting vermin. (Vermin and haggis in one paragraph! Is it even possible for this blog to get any better?)

Anyway, if you want to pop corn, then what you really need is some decent popping corn, some good fat, some seasonings, and a heavy saucepan with a lid that fits well. It is an amazingly simple process. You put your fat in the bottom of the pan, you place the pan over medium-high heat, you add three kernels of popcorn, and you plop the lid on. When the first two kernels have popped, you wait an additional ten seconds, or until the third kernel pops, whichever is sooner. Then you pour in the rest of your corn, shake well to coat it with oil, and put it back on the heat. Continue shaking occasionally until the corn begins to pop, and then shake more frequently. If you can crack the lid on the corn while it's popping without letting any fly out of the pot, then you'll release some steam and the popped corn will be crispier.

The time it takes for individual kernels of corn to pop should be normally distributed around a mean. In other words, the popping will start slowly, then pick up, and finally taper off. A corn that pops well is one that, in addition to having few dud kernels, has a relatively small standard deviation in the popping time so that almost all of the kernels will have popped before the corn begins to burn.

In any case, when the popping begins to taper off, wait until you have two or three seconds with no pops at all, and then take the pan off the heat and let it sit covered for another fifteen seconds or so. Remove the lid and pour the popped corn into a large bowl. Give the corn a few seconds to allow steam to escape, then add your seasonings, and toss well to coat.

And then eat it. The proper way to eat popcorn is with a soup spoon, though very few people are aware of this fact. Manners experts generally won't even tell you about the soup spoon rule because it's an embarrassment to their profession. Contemporary proper manners continue to be governed by provisions of the Treaty of Languedoc, which was ratified in 1827. At the time, few people of property consumed popcorn, but many people consumed asparagus. Asparagus (prior to the Great Vegetable Shift of the 1850s) was an even more delectable vegetable then than it is now. The proper way to eat it was with a knife and fork, but it prompted such gluttony (and delight) that the noblemen of the day were very much desirous of eating it with their fingers. In order to make a compromise possible, the Manualists had to give something up so that the Utensilists could save face. Accordingly, they offered up popcorn, which they didn't like very much anyway, the moving picture still being nearly a century off. Bottom line: asparagus with the fingers, popcorn with a soup spoon.

As you might imagine, however, the whole business is something of a sore sport for the Languedocians, a people renowned mainly for their shyness about acknowledging their national origins. So while it is now technically impolite to eat popcorn with your hands, it's really the only way to go. You never know when you might be in the presence of a son (or daughter) of Languedoc, and, believe me, you don't ever want to piss a Languedocian off.

What you use to season your popcorn is entirely up to you, of course. When I visited France as a senior in high school, the French sprinkled granulated sugar on the corn after it was popped. Salt and butter have been traditional in the U.S., of course. When I was in college, it was a special treat to catch a movie at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square in part because they still put real butter on popcorn that they had just popped themselves. I am told by a reliable source that they still do that. But nowadays, it's fairly common to see popcorn flavored with grated Parmesan, and of course, there are those giant cans of popcorn that have three different flavors, and God only knows what flavors those have. I don't think anyone ever actually eats that popcorn. You take it to work and leave it in the break room, and, after a decent interval has passed, someone dumps the popcorn down the gargage disposal and takes the giant pail home for another use.

Anyway. Pouring butter on my popcorn, alas, is not consistent with my diet, and in any case, I wanted to make something similar to what I assume Sam made. So I created my own popcorn seasoning.

Popcorn Seasoning

3 T. kosher salt
2 t. ground ancho chile
2 t. smoked sweet paprika
2 t. cocoa powder
1 t. ground cumin
1 t. ground cayenne pepper

Combine the salt and ground chile in your spice grinder, and grind until fine. Put in a jar, add the other ingredients, and shake well.

Excepting the anchos, the other spices generally come very finely ground. The kosher salt is coarse, of course (Willllburrrrrrrr!), and you really want very fine salt for your popcorn, so if you grind the salt and the anchos together, you solve all your problems.

When I make popcorn, I use one tablespoon of olive oil for 1/3 cup of corn. This amount is nicely handled by my Calphalon 3.5-quart Windsor saucepan. It is certainly legitimate to use more oil for reasons of flavor, but the corn pops perfectly well with the single tablespoon. A lot of people will tell you to use canola oil to pop corn, and I'm sure it gets the job done, but if I'm only using a tablespoon of fat, I want to use a fat with real flavor. In searching around the net to see what other people had done with popcorn, I found someone who popped his corn in bacon fat. I must track this person down and see whether he needs a disciple.

One teaspoon of my seasoning adequately flavors what 1/3 cup of unpopped popcorn expands into. When you pour the popped corn into your bowl, let it rest for a moment to give off steam, then sprinkle the seasoning over the top of the popcorn and toss it as well as you can. You will not get a perfectly even coating, and that's just fine. When you taste the popcorn, think twice before adding additional seasoning. It will seem bland at first, but the flavors build, and by the time you reach the bottom of the bowl, your mouth will be tingling.

[I apologize for the lack of a picture. I made two batches of popcorn to make sure that I had the mix of seasonings that I wanted, and while I tried to stop eating for long enough to fetch a camera, I failed. I'll try to make amends later.]

Meatballs

2007-01-15T18:00:00.000-08:00

Consider the meatball. Like its much larger cousin, the meatloaf, it appears in many different forms in many different cultures. Also, like the meatloaf, its quality is highly variable, so it must sometimes be approached with trepidation. Fortunately, the meatball is usually small, so it represents a much smaller investment than does a slice of meatloaf. If you don't like your meatloaf, there isn't a lot that you can do about it, short of faking a case of appendicitis or summoning the family pets. Sadly, not all families keep pets near the dining table (leaving one to wonder whether perhaps they don't care more about their pets than they do about their guests, though the supposed reasons of health and manners provide a convenient and incontrovertible cover), and you can really only fake appendicitis once. Like other things that you can only do once, it is obviously difficult to know exactly when you're facing the optimal time for using the appendicitis excuse. Obviously, you don't want to run into an even worse piece of meatloaf (and pets who are either nonexistent or have learned better than to be present when meatloaf is served) a couple of months after you've pretended to have your appendix out. Contrariwise, too many people have reached the ends of their days cursing the fact that they needn't have choked down that piece of meatloaf back in 1956. Given the state of hospital food, one might suppose that terminal patients who had not hitherto used the appendicitis excuse might not lack for opportunities to use it in their personal end times, but faking appendicitis in the hospital fails on two counts: the nurses will likely be able to tell that you're faking it, and there's always the chance that they might decide to open you up just in case.

Anyway. I have made a good many meatballs in my time. I have rarely used a recipe, and they have always been pretty good, so I don't know what other people do to soil the meatball's reputation, though I suspect that it has something to do with the addition of excessive fillers, a misstep which has also doomed many a meatloaf.

In the past, I've often used a mixture of ground beef and ground pork (or ground beef and sausage) to make meatballs, but I'm rather tediously on this diet, so I wanted to find the perfect meatball to meet my current dietary restraints.

And, frankly, I'm still looking, because the meatballs I made this past weekend are a shade on the bland side. I'm still posting the recipe, however, because the meatballs were still good: tasty and not at all dry. Also, I think that it will be pretty easy to make them significantly better the next time around by the addition of extra seasonings. Mostly more salt, but probably also some cooked onion and an increased amount of both mustard and smoked paprika. Also perhaps some chopped spinach and some herbs. And maybe some grated ginger. (Perhaps you begin to see why in my kitchen the food precedes the recipe, rather than vice versa.) Still, it's good to have a baseline, though it might take me two weeks to get through this batch to have an opportunity to make another. Fortunately, they are still very good after freezing.

I will freely admit that in making this recipe, I used rolled oats rather than bread crumbs entirely because, on the core plan, the former is unrestricted and the latter isn't, but I think the rolled oats perform the same function here and do it well. I also really don't feel like I'm missing much by using ground turkey instead of a fattier ground meat, though I may certainly be deluding myself and/or my tastes may have adjusted to a lengthy period of fat restriction. If you want to use the high test ingredients, then have at it.

Turkey Meatballs

2 packages (about 20 ounces each) ground 93/7 turkey
1 cup rolled oats
2 t. smoked paprika
1/2 t. garlic powder
1.5 t. kosher salt
Ground black pepper
1 T. Dijon mustard
1/4 c. capers, drained
A 10-ounce jar of pitted kalamata olives, drained
2 eggs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Put the ground turkey in a large bowl.

Put the rolled oats in the bowl of your food processor, and process until ground. Add the smoked paprika, garlic powder, salt, and pepper (to taste), and process again. Add the capers and process until finely chopped. Add the olives and process until finely chopped. Add the mustard and eggs and process until well combined.

Pour the whole mess into the bowl with the ground turkey and mix thoroughly.

Using a one-ounce scoop, take a level scoopful of the mixture and roll it into a ball. Place on a half-sheet pan. Continue until all of the mixture has been used.

Bake 40 minutes, or until done.

I believe this will make almost exactly sixty meatballs if you use a one-ounce scoop and make level (rather than rounded or heaping) scoopfuls of your mixture. I can get 54 of these on a half-sheet pan (six rows by nine columns), which leaves enough left over to make something that looks like a hamburger patty. If you aren't using part of your oven for something else, you can crowd your pans left and make it all in two pans. You may thereby reap some additional benefits by not crowding your pan as much as I did, which might allow your meatballs to brown more uniformly. Or you can be smart and use the excess to make test meatballs and adjust your seasoning.

Or you can just start with more salt. The 1.5 teaspoons in the recipe here is what I actually used, rather than what I should have used. You especially want to get the seasoning right on the first try if you're mixing this by hand because your hands will get cold to the point of numbness very quickly, and unless you're wearing gloves, you probably won't be able to mix the meatballs all the way on one try without stopping to warm your mixing hand. Of course, you could halve the entire recipe and save yourself a world of pain, but I wanted to have a lot of meatballs, and I do.

I like these meatballs just as they are, but if you feel that an unadorned meatball is naked and exposed, then go ahead and sauce them. I think if you took a can of beef broth and an equal amount of red wine and cooked them until they were reduced slightly and then whisked in some Dijon mustard and thickened the whole deal with a bit of beurre manié, then you'd probably have something very good, but I haven't actually tried it. Yet.

How I Spent My Winter Vacation

2007-01-10T17:20:00.000-08:00

Lest any of you should worry, let me say right up front that while I was on vacation in South Florida, I did eat well, but I did not eat any of the fauna (or flora) pictured in this post. I believe they are all protected, at least within the Everglades National Park. More to the point, they probably wouldn't have tasted very good, and there were no barbecue pits.

If you have never been fortunate enough to visit the Everglades, I recommend it very highly, provided that you understand up front that it is a place of varied but quiet pleasures. If you want something flashy, then by all means go somewhere else. (I hear, for example, that the Grand Canyon is both large and impressive. I can also recommend, without reservation, the Florida Keys, though I will say that I found Key West itself somewhat overrated and was glad that we'd been forced to take accommodations up nearer Key Largo.)

While you will not find tall mountains or loud waterfalls or geysers that go off at more or less regular intervals in the Everglades, you will find a number of distinct habitats, all of which are fun to explore, provided that you go during the dry season. (We did not run into any mosquitoes, but one hears that they are very annoying in the summer and fall.) The dry season turned out to be a moderate misnomer in our case, as there was a very impressive rainfall on our second day in the park. We were out walking through one of the prairie areas when it hit, and we kept going for another ten minutes before we determined that it wasn't likely to blow over within the next hour, so we spent another half hour walking back to where the car was parked.

Walking in the rain when the temperature is in the low eighties is really very pleasant, but stopping the walk and getting back in the car is really not very pleasant. I did stop back at a restaurant and wring a couple of quarts of water out of my t-shirt, but I was still soaked when I got back in the car.

But our spirits, at least, were not dampened, and when we came back the next day, we were rewarded with a significantly lusher prairie than we'd been walking through the day before. The wildflowers and tree snail you see pictured here are all things that I saw on our last hike (the Everglades, like all of South Florida that I saw, is very flat, making it an ideal hiking spot for those of us with intermittently dodgy knees) through the middle of the park. I saw a great many other wildflowers, but I didn't do such a good job photographing them. I reckon that means I'll have to go back. Quelle dommage.

A vacation is really no time to mind a diet, but while I did indulge in a couple of slices of key lime pie (which, frankly, I see no reason to attempt myself if it means relying on bottled juice), I found it very easy to be moderately moderate with my food intake. In part, this is because you can walk for miles and miles in the Everglades without coming upon a single TCBY or McDonald's drive through. But also, what's abundant in South Florida (i.e., good seafood and fresh fruit) is mostly stuff that isn't bad for you.

When I visit almost any other state or country, I love going to the supermarkets. You might expect that supermarkets throughout the U.S. would be relatively uniform, but I find great differences. Since I live in Maryland, the biggest difference tends to be that supermarkets in more enlightened (I should say more culinarily enlightened, because Florida has just elected a fairly moronic closet case as its governor, but let's not go there) states carry a fine selection of wine and beer.

But even leaving aside the easy availability of alcoholic beverages, I found the various incarnations of Publix (would that be Publices?) to be somewhat superior to my neighborhood Giant. (There were, however, certain disturbing similarities; for example, even in Key Largo, the store brand key lime yogurt is green. What's up with that?) I was so pleased with the quality and selection at one of Publix that I was tempted to weep. Ok, I wasn't really tempted to weep, but I thought about being tempted to weep. And maybe that was just because of the huge wine selection, but still.

Anyway. We flew down on New Year's Day. We had to be up at [an hour so early that I dare not mention it] to catch our 7:30 flight at National, and by the time we'd landed, retrieved our luggage, gotten the rental car, and found our way to where we were staying, it was nearly 2 pm, and I was so hungry that I was starting to intimate to V. that if he didn't pull into a restaurant very soon, I was going to have to rip off his arm and eat it. I'm pretty sure that he knows I wouldn't do that if I didn't have a way to make a decent sauce, but he still found a restaurant. I mention the incident mainly because a day later we returned to the same restaurant for dinner, and I was served a thoroughly delicious grilled fillet of snapper with a Caribbean salsa.

Fruit salsas are really nothing new. Neither are they really anything other than a spicy fruit salad, but I hadn't had one on fish before, and I determined to find or create a recipe when I returned home. So I did.

There is, alas, no getting around the fact that this recipe is very much to taste. I started out with what I thought would be a good combination, but it languished on the palate until I added more lime juice, more salt, and about an eighth of a teaspoon of cayenne pepper. In my experience, the amount and quality of heat provided by jalapeno peppers is remarkably inconsistent, so you just have to taste what you have when you've mixed everything together and let it sit for a while and then make adjustments.

I was making two dishes at the same time with the limes and jalapenos, so I squeezed the juice out of five limes and put it in a pitcher along with two seeded and roughly chopped jalapenos and then took my stick blender to it. I used about three tablespoons of the resulting mixture on the salsa, and I used the rest to marinate some frozen cooked shrimp that I'd briefly submerged in boiling water and then drained. The original idea was to combine the shrimp and the salsa into a salad, but the smallest shrimp I found at the supermarket still had the tails on them, so my plan didn't really work out. I'll probably try again later with some salad shrimp from Costco.

Anyway, after the initial application of lime and jalapeno and about an hour of room temperature marination, I added the juice of my last lime, the salt, and the cayenne pepper, and the salsa perked up considerably. If you don't like spicy food, there's really no point in making this recipe. Just eat the mango and the pineapple by themselves. If you like mildly spicy food, then drain off the liquid before serving, since most of the heat seems to collect in the juices.
I'll be tiresome for a moment and mention that this recipe is entirely devoid of fat and qualifies as a Weight Watchers core food. I'm not sure that it's really dietetic, if only because I want to eat lots of it. Time was when the spiciness of it would restrict the amount that I'd eat, but time isn't any more.

Mango-Pineapple Salsa

The flesh of 2 mangoes, diced
2 cups diced fresh pineapple
1 red bell pepper, diced
1/4 c. diced red onion
3/4 t. salt
Lime juice
Very finely diced jalapeno
Cayenne pepper
Black pepper
2 T. (packed) finely chopped cilantro

Combine all ingredients. Let sit at room temperature for half an hour, taste, and correct seasoning.

It should be relatively obvious just how malleable this recipe is. Add whatever you like (watermelon, cantaloupe, peaches, olives, garlic, tomatoes, avocados [especially avocados], basil), and serve it with whatever you like (I'm thinking with dark rum, in a tall glass, but pay no attention to me). It's at its very best when it's just been made, but I put several cups away in the frig to take for lunch, and two days after I made it, it's still decidedly yummy.

Bitter Lemon Tart

2006-12-31T21:22:00.000-08:00

V. and I are heading off for a short vacation very early tomorrow morning. Our flight departs at 7:30, which means we have to be at National Airport at 5:30, which means waking up and leaving home at hours too indecent to be mentioned. The upshot of all this is that we'll celebrate the new year by snoring.

Because we won't be awake when 2007 arrives, we decided to have a New Year's Eve brunch for those of our friends who are not out of town and who did not have previous commitments. As it happens, brunch on New Year's Eve (when it falls on a weekend) is not a time when people generally have previous commitments, so despite our having planned this little get together about three days ago, most of the people who were in town were able to show up.

I decided to rein myself in somewhat on the food preparation, so there was only about twice as much food as we needed, and that's much better than I usually do. I doubled a lot of recipes and made two versions, so I ended up with two quiches: one with bacon, jarlsberg, and caramelized onions; the other with caramelized onions and all the leftover cheese (chevre and brie) from our recent party. I made a generous batch of pâte brisée (15 ounces all purpose flour, twelve tablespoons butter, 1/4 tsp salt, 2 egg yolks, 1/2 tablespoon red wine vinegar, and about 3/4 cup of ice water) which allowed me to have large circles of thick crust so that I could fold the edges under and keep the rim of the pastry standing upright even through a blind baking (fifteen minutes with foil; another five minutes without: all at 350). I made the custard from seven whole eggs, three cups of half-and-half, two teaspoons of dijon mustard, half a teaspoon of salt, a grating of nutmeg, and some freshly ground black pepper. I baked the quiches at 375, and they took about forty-five minutes to get nicely browned. Delicious.

I also made a double batch of my favorite (from Beat This) blueberry muffin recipe and used half of it with frozen blueberries and the other half with a combination of frozen sweet cherries and toasted slivered almonds. Also delicious.

I had originally intended to be very good about my diet today, so I also made two salads which were more or less on my plan. And the salads (one green bean salad dressed with a bit of walnut oil and an equal amount of white balsamic vinegar with some garlic, ginger, and salt and pepper; one salad of halved grape tomatoes, cubed feta cheese, halved black olives, fresh red pepper strips, baby spinach, and a lot of chiffonaded basil -- all dressed with a standard vinaigrette) were also delicious, but I also made a punchbowl full of exceptionally good mimosas, and after a couple of those, I couldn't resist trying all of the stuff that I'd made extra rich because I'd only been going to give it to my guests. Ah well.

For dessert, I had the last of my Christmas cookies, and this stunning bitter lemon tart. And "stunning" really is the word, because the taste is both a bit of a shock and unexpectedly wonderful. At least to my palate. Because of the bitterness, I felt it necessary to warn my guests, but about three-quarters of them raved about it. The other quarter, I think, were put off by the bitterness, but they were polite enough to say nothing. Take your own taste and the tastes of your guests into account if you're considering making it.

I didn't really set out to make a bitter lemon tart. But I had a small package of Meyer lemons. I saw them last week in the supermarket, and since I'd never seen any around here before, I picked them right up, without a real plan. I decided on the lemon tart when it became clear we were having a bit of a crowd for brunch. I have often heard it said that one can use the entire Meyer lemon without fear of excess bitterness. One would, of course, never include the white part of the peel of an ordinary lemon (except, of course, if one is making candied lemon peel, which requires Herculean effort to tame the bitterness) because of bitterness, but I chopped up most of my Meyers (they came in a pack of four, ranging in size from not very big to decidedly small), added some sugar, and left them to macerate overnight in the refrigerator with no fear of bitterness.

But then I tasted them the next morning. I also tasted fear, but I was determined not to be bested. I tossed my finely diced (sort of: I had chopped some of them fine, but others I had cut into wedges and then put through my handy dandy Japanese, ceramic-blade slicer, and I ended up with a variety of shapes of small pieces) lemons into the food processor, added more sugar until I got a bitter taste that I liked, and then added the rest of the ingredients.

I'd made the tart base the night before. And I think that even if you start out by grinding your Meyer lemons in the food processor with sugar, you probably want to let them sit with the sugar overnight, so you may as well make your crust the night before, too.

I had wanted a nut crust for the base, and after some thought, I decided to make something very like a macaroon batter and spread it along the base of a springform pan and bake it until brown. A word to the wise: if you attempt this, make sure that the batter completely covers the bottom of the pan and runs all the way to the sides of the pan so that there are no gaps for the lemon filling to run down into. I didn't lose any of my filling to the oven floor, but some of it did seep down and make the crust a bit soggy. But still very, very good.

You will not want to chop all of your lemons, however. Take the smallest of your lemons, cut it in half crosswise, and make several very thin slices. These slices will end up being a decoration, and they are very pretty indeed. If you are very skilled with a knife, then go ahead and do this by hand. (But keep it to yourself, okay? The rest of us don't need to be made to feel inferior.) I have very recently sharpened my knives, so the lemon chopping was relatively easy. Still, I made the slices with the 2 mm setting on my handy dandy Japanese ceramic-bladed slicer. My handy dandy slicer has two settings that are thinner than 2 mm, but I very rarely find anything that slices well much thinner than 2 mm. Perhaps I am not buying enough truffles. You will candy your lemon slices in a sugar syrup and leave them to dry on a rack overnight. You will be extremely taken with just how pretty they look sitting there. It will seem almost a shame to have to eat them, but you will go ahead and put them on the top of the tart and, eventually, eat them because I said so.

The macaroon batter recipe will make more than enough to make your tart crust. You want a substantial but not thick layer of the macaroon for the crust. I think about a quarter-inch is right, but a little more or less will not hurt anything. The leftover macaroon batter will make excellent macaroons. Just use a largeish cookie scoop to put mounds of the batter on a lined cookie sheet and bake along with the tart crust. The macaroons will take an extra ten minutes or so. They are yummy. Crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside, delicious throughout.

Cashew Date Macaroons

1 cup toasted sweetened coconut
6 dates, halved
1 cup roasted, unsalted cashew pieces
1/4 t. salt
2 egg whites
2 T. sugar

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

Put the date halves and coconut in the bowl of your food processor. Process until the dates are chopped into small bits. Add the cashews and salt and process until the cashews are ground but not oily.

Put the egg whites in the bowl of your stand mixer, with the whisk attachment fitted. Whisk on low until they are foamy, and then increase speed to high and whisk until you have soft peaks. Gradually add in the sugar and whisk until you have stiff peaks. Fold in the cashew mixer.

Spread about a quarter-inch layer of the mixture in the bottom of a nine-inch, non-stick springform pan. With a large (two-inch) cookie scoop (or two tablespoons), form the remaining batter into mounds on a lined cookie sheet. Bake until medium-brown on the outside: about twenty-five minutes for the crust and thirty-five minutes for the cookies.

Bitter Lemon Tart

A macaroon crust in a nine-inch springform pan
4 Meyer lemons
Sugar
3 eggs
4 T. butter, melted
1/2 t. almond extract

1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup water

The night before, take your smallest lemon and make eight to ten very thin crosswise slices from the middle of it. Reserve the slices.

Cut the rest of the smallest lemon and the remaining lemons into rough dice. Scrape all of the lemon pieces and juice into a large measuring cup and determine how much you have. Add an equal volume of sugar and stir well. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Meanwhile, in small saucier, combine the sugar and water. Put a lid on it and bring it to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and slide the lemon slices into the syrup. Put the lid back on it and simmer for half an hour. Turn off the heat and let sit until cool. Remove the lemons to a rack and let dry overnight.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Put the lemons and sugar in the bowl of your food processor. Process until very finely ground. Add the eggs, the melted butter, and the almond extract, and process again until very well mixed.

Pour the batter into the macaroon-lined springform pan and top with the candied slices. Bake until set, approximately thirty-five minutes.

Let cool. Serve at room temperature right away, or refrigerate and serve cold. It's good either way.

You will want to run a dull knife around the edge of the springform pan before you open it so as not to tear the tart apart.

You will also want to cut small slices of this tart because it's very potent. I cut mine into sixteen pieces, and they were just about the right size.

V. and I will be spending the week in Florida, first in the Everglades and then in the keys. We had planned to stay in Key West, but the hotel we'd booked was closed down because of carbon monoxide poisoning, so now we will be staying just south of Key Largo, which suits me just fine. While I will doubtless be enjoying and comparing various key lime pies, I won't be posting, so let me take this opportunity to wish each and every one of you a happy new year and the best of all possible years in 2007.

I'll Bring Prunes for Christmas

2006-12-24T22:23:00.000-08:00

You are not, reader, to infer from the title that I am among those who become cross, ungrateful, spiteful, mean, or depressed when I come into contact with any aspect of any of the various holidays that celebrate the winter solstice. I have probably said before that I really do believe that this is the most wonderful time of the year, and we all know that I have no fear of repeating myself.

It is my fervent hope that each of you is enjoying the season as much as I am. I may, in fact, be a bit frazzled at this point, but it's a very happy sort of frazzled. I spent most of today with my daughters, then V., his mother, and I went over to his son's and daughter-in-law's house for dinner. Dinner, due to some sort of mistake with timing the turkey, was not actually on the table before I had to leave to head for church, but I had brought some grapes in the car to help clear my voice, so I was not hungry, and in any case, I do not like to eat much before I sing. Having started the season this year some weeks back by joining my favorite soprano in my favorite Bach duet (the slower of the two Soprano-Bass duets from Wachet Auf, the Advent cantata), I closed out the season by joining her in a beautiful arrangement of Pietro Yon's Gesu Bambino, and we sang both pieces magnificently. I also sang with the choir tonight, and that went very well, also. Then I stayed for about half an hour of the post-service reception where I accepted many compliments and enjoyed spiced cider and two of the best cupcakes ever. My own.

If you want to read the whole sordid story behind how I originally came by this most excellent of cake recipes, then you can go here. I can't be bothered to retell it in this post. We are all asked to bring refreshments to share after the service, and while I have plenty of Christmas cookies and would be happy to make more, I had been wanting to have a go at turning the prune cake into cupcakes. Originally, I had intended to make full-sized cupcakes for V.'s and my holiday party last weekend, but while I had managed to pull back a bit after having made far too much food last year, I was still doing a lot of other cooking, and I already had plenty of desserts without making the cupcakes.

It was not without some trepidation that I spooned my cupcake batter into the mini-cupcake liners. I was worried that since I'd been using tired old ground ginger when I first made the cake that the new, flavorful ginger would be too much of a presence. And I was worried that the relatively large chunks of prunes that work well in a full cake would not work in a mini-cupcake (or whatever the hell those things are called). I was worried that I was using too much chocolate and that I wouldn't get the baking time just right. I was worried that making them a full day before they were to be served would cause them to lose something.

I need not have worried. The batter, as before, comes together so that it is both more than the sum of its parts and not apparently composed of its parts. The ginger, no doubt, is important, but it is not really separately identifiable. Neither is the cinnamon. Nor the orange zest. But I'm convinced that they all belong there. The chocolate and the prunes are identifiable, but they are also subtly transformed. I got pretty lucky with the baking time on the initial trial, and they were just as good tonight as they were last night. I will note, however, that if you make this recipe, you owe it to yourself to eat one or two of them while they're still warm. Instant happiness.

The recipe here is not changed much from the last time I made it. A few more prunes. Less cocoa powder, more chocolate, and the chocolate is in smaller pieces. Grated orange zest instead of candied orange peel. Because I had originally intended to make the cupcakes a week ago, the prunes sat around in the sherry for a week. I don't think, however, that there is a significant improvement over what you get from soaking them overnight.

If you want larger cupcakes, cook for longer. I'm not sure for exactly how long but until the cupcakes seem not quite cooked when you press on them. They must not dry out. For the mini-cupcakes twelve minutes without opening the oven was just right.

Excellent Prune Cupcakes

12 ounces prunes
1/2 cup sherry
1 cup flour
1/2 t. baking soda
1 t. ground cinnamon
1 t. ground ginger
1 T. cocoa powder
pinch salt
1/2 cup sugar
4 ounces (1 stick) butter, at room temperature
grated zest of one orange
2 eggs
1 t. vanilla extract
4 ounces miniature chocolate chips

Chop each prune into six or eight pieces. Put in a bowl, add the sherry, stir, and let sit, preferably overnight (or longer).

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line mini-muffin pans with mini-cupcake liners. (The recipe will make just under four dozen.)

Put the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, cocoa powder, salt, and sugar in the bowl of your stand mixer. With the whisk attachment, mix for three minutes. Add the butter a tablespoon at a time, whisking until fully incorporated. Add, mixing until each is incorporated before proceeding to the next, the orange zest, the eggs, and the vanilla extract. Stir in the chocolate chips and the prunes and sherry by hand.

Put a slightly rounded soup spoon full of batter in each cup. Bake for twelve minutes. Remove from oven and let cool slightly, then remove to a rack to cool completely.