Sara Bir

No Valve, No Oats

November 15, 2010

I melted the valve of my pressure cooker. That's the deforemed valve on the left in the adjacent photo. Like an idiot, I put the lid on top of an electric burner that was still hot, and seconds later the acrid smell of burning plastic filled our kitchen. I’m lucky that only the valve melted, because that part is removable; for a second there, I thought I’d have to buy an entire lid, and that would not be cheap. Without my pressure cooker, I’d be stranded in my kitchen. Take my microwave, take my Cuisinart, but don’t take my pressure cooker!

We have a somewhat sordid pre-history, this pressure cooker and I. I didn’t pay for it. It was procured through means that, while not stealing, are technically not very ethical, so I will say no more about it.

Except that it was totally worth venturing into moral gray area to obtain. Thanks to that scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I once assumed pressure cookers were given to explosions. And thanks to being a chef, I didn’t want anything to do with a cooking vessel that didn’t allow peeking; chefs like to get their hands on things and take tastes. How can you tell if food is done when it’s locked under this impenetrable lid?

But I worked at a store that sold pressure cookers, and I never felt comfortable talking to customers about them.

Then lo and behold, I received in the mail a DVD from the Veggie Queen called Pressure Cooking: A Fresh Look. That’s how it all started. Usually I’m happy to learn from reading books and articles, but with pressure cookers it’s optimal to see one in action. Even if you are a voracious carnivore, the Veggie Queen’s DVD offers a wealth of information. It eradicated my pressure cooker fear. Plus it turns out that, unlike Holly Golightly’s 1960s pressure cooker, the pressure cookers of today are very safe and will not explode rice and chocolate sauce all over George Peppard.

You see lots of recipes for self-contained pressure cooker meals, but I use mine almost exclusively to cook beans, grains, and vegetables, which I then use in other dishes. Stuff like steel-cut oats, polenta, beets, whole artichokes, kale. When you come home from work and want brown rice on the table for dinner in 20 minutes, the pressure cooker is your hero. Sometimes I don’t even clasp on the pressure cooking lid and just use the pot part as a small stockpot. It’s not as pretty as my beloved 5-quart Le Creuset Dutch oven in Flame, but it’s more versatile.

The Veggie Queen, like me, prefers Fagor pressure cookers. They’re made in Spain and are rock solid. Swiss-made Kuhn Rikon pressure cookers are foxier and more expensive. They’re like a Mercedes-Benz to Fagor’s Toyota. A pragmatic Toyota driver myself, I am mighty fond of my Fagor Duo 6-quart model.

So fond, in fact, that I continued using my Fagor after stupidly destroying the release valve. Since I’d melted shut the hole that steam escaped from, I had to let the pressure come down naturally before opening the cooker. Didn’t seem like a big deal.

Until I made a batch of my favorite cold-weather staple, steel-cut oats. (2 cups steel-cut oats to 6 cups water with a pinch of salt on high pressure setting for 16 minutes. You’re welcome.) I didn’t turn the burner down enough after the cooker came to pressure, and thus the pressure kept building up, with no means of release.

That’s why the valve blew off the top, followed by a geyser of viscous oat spooge that squirted on the ceiling, the walls, the refrigerator, the floor…it was that Breakfast at Tiffany’s scene, almost. It took me half an hour to clean up.

That night, I ordered a replacement valve from Fagor. At $18 plus shipping, it’s worth every penny. Even a deformed pressure cooker is moderately safe to cook with, but that does not mean it will be fast or clean.

Pressure Cooker Applesauce

Makes enough to be worth the effort

• About 2 pounds of your favorite apples, peeled, cored, and cut into large chunks
• ½ cup water

Put the apples and water in the pressure cooker. Clamp on the lid and set the pressure to level 2, the highest (I have never, ever used level 1. Why bother?)

Once the cooker comes to pressure, cook for 6 minutes. Remove the cooker from heat and let the pressure release naturally. Open the lid and spoon off and reserve any extra liquid. Mash with a potato masher or puree or do whatever you like to do to make your apples applesauce. Add some of the reserved cooking liquid if your applesauce isn’t saucy enough.

[Comments]

Spelt Is Not Farro, or Always Cite Your Sources

November 08, 2010

Were one to create a graph of my blogging frequency, the sudden plummet in posts would coincide with my infant daughter’s discovery of standing, as well as my new job schedule, which isn’t so much a schedule as a mess of ever-shifting on-call hours and trainings. To maintain a sense of balance, I have prioritized and severely pared down my activities. In other words, I love you, but not as much as I love my baby and husband.

So I’ve spent more hours working in public libraries than at the stove as of late, but I’m still learning about cooking. Like don’t assume everything you read is correct. Even if it’s in your favorite cookbook, or on the label of a bulk foods bin at the fancy-pants grocery store. Good cooks and good reference librarians are serial doubters.

Lesson 1: Books Can Be Wrong

This summer, I developed recipes for a story about cooking with nearly obscene amounts of parsley. One of the recipes was a riff on tabbouleh, but instead of bulgur wheat, I used farro, an ancient form of wheat which, in current times, chefs and hippies cook most often in its hulled from. Farro is also called emmer wheat.

One of my favorite cookbooks, Nancy Silverton’s Breads from La Brea Bakery, says that farro is also the same as spelt. It says this on page 110, the recipe for mushroom bread: “I added farro, also known as spelt, to the dough; it’s the grain that fed the Romans as they conquered their empire.”

So I figured farro was the same thing as spelt because Nancy told me so, and I have loved her and counted on her. But over the years I’ve gotten better about fact-checking before I file my articles. I started fact-checking things I was 95% sure were true, because sometimes they are not. And, as it turns out, farro is not spelt and spelt is not farro. I'm hardly the first person to find out the hard way.

I’m not sure when this fallacy first began circulating (let’s not blame Nancy, okay?), but I do know that farro and spelt grains look mighty similar. Because…

Lesson 2: Bulk Food Bins Can Be Wrong

I already had farro grains at home when I began developing the parlsey recipes, but I wanted to get some more for backup, so I went to the fancy-pants grocery store and scooped half a pound from their bulk bins.

But the farro salad testing went very well, and I didn’t have to tap into my reserves. Months later, I decided to use them up making farrotto, a risotto made with farro instead of rice; you can use the risotto technique with many different grains besides short-grain white rice, as it turns out.

So I thawed some precious homemade chicken stock and shredded a raw beet and chopped up some ruby chard and was happily on my way. An hour later, the farro was steadfastly toothy and my chicken stock as long gone, greedily absorbed by the thirsty grains.

Did I mention my daughter is standing now? I don’t have time to indefinitely stir a simmering pan of cooking grains. I dumped the whole works into my trusty pressure cooker and, 30 minutes later, had a very chewy but fully cooked mess of grains to serve my husband.   

Because those were not farro grains. They were spelt grains. You can cook spelt until the cows come home and it will still be tough as all hell. The resulting mock farrotto was like beautifully flavored horse food.

Obviously the grains I’d purchased at the tawny market were spelt, not farro. This also happened to me once in my younger days; I bought what was labeled “pearled barley” when it was merely “hulled barley” (pearled barley is polished, has less of the resilient bran, and cooks in an hour or so) and spent hours cooking and cooking grains that would never, ever be tender.

At my library reference trainings, we’re taught to steer our patrons toward trusted sources, because if you just stand there Googling everything you’ll have to sift through all kinds of crap. Library people are very thorough by nature, and the thought of giving a patron dicey information keeps us awake at night.

But sometimes even trusted sources—yes, you, Nancy Silverton!—can be wrong. So, ultimately, what should you be taking away from this?

Lesson 3: It pays to have a pressure cooker.

[Comments]

Gremo Lotta

September 20, 2010

This is what the aftermath of gremolata salmon looks like. Flecks of parsley and a few crumbs. It’s too good to survive long enough to be photographed.

While dreaming up recipes for this FOODday story about cooking with tons of parsley, I completely forgot one of my favorite parsley preparations: gremolata. It’s one part lemon zest, one part garlic, three parts parsley, and 100% awesome.

Gremolata isn’t the sort of thing you eat with a spoon; it’s a handy hit of concentrated flavor and the traditional garnish for osso bucco (all the better to temper the fatty-rich marrow pocket in that veal shank). But it can grace anything from poultry to pizza to seafood to pasta to risotto.

I like to lavish a salmon fillet with obscene amounts of gremolata before grilling it. Here’s how.

Buy a pound of salmon fillet. This amount should serve three or four people, or two gluttons.

Usually I pull out the pin bones with needle-nosed pliers, but I suppose a kind fishmonger might do that for you. And unless I’m feeling particularly showy, I don’t remove the skin from the salmon, either. Leave the piece of fillet whole, or cut it into two to four portions; it will cook faster that way.

With either a Microplane or a good, sharp knife, create two teaspoons of minced or finely grated lemon zest (I prefer the knife, because you get more of lemon hit than you do with the whispy fluff of a Microplane). Mix that with two teaspoons of minced garlic and two tablespoons of minced fresh parsley (flat or curly, your pick). And that’s it, your gremolata.

Smear the salmon portions with a few teaspoons of olive oil, then season very generously with salt and pepper. Then press the gremolata on the top and sides of the salmon. Don’t skimp. This is not the time to be namby-pamby with flavor. You want this thing to be tiled like a gremolata mosaic.

Now go light the grill. Get it nice and hot. Turn one side down to medium and keep the other side on high. Put the salmon on some heavy-duty foil (or, better yet, a soaked cedar grilling plank) and put the foil-salmon contraption on the medium heat side. Close the lid and grill until the flesh of the fish flakes apart when you prod it with your finger. This might take five to ten minutes, depending on your grill and how done you like your salmon. You’re a grownup, you’ll figure it out.

That’s it. Gremolata salmon. The skin will probably just separate itself from the cooked salmon flesh by sticking to the foil; just leave the skin on the foil. Squeeze the zested lemon over the salmon. Eat. Save the leftover salmon. I flaked mine onto a pizza crust (olive oil, a scattering of peas, feta cheese, then finish with salt and pepper and fresh parsley or dill). That pizza was even better than the actual gremolata salmon itself. But you can always make pasta with it, too. 

[Comments]

Curly Top

September 13, 2010

Curly parsley gets no love. I never buy it when I have the option of getting flat-leaf (a.k.a. Italian) parsley. I think it has to do with an integral dislike of lazy garnishes, and a gratuitous sprig of curly parsley is the epitome of a lazy garnish. Also, its mass-to-volume ratio and squiggly foliage is oh-so-vaguely pubic.

When I began developing parsley recipes for an upcoming story in the Oregonian’s FOODday, however, I started to reconsider curly parsley. I’d always assumed its flavor was just a straight chlorophyll green, bracing but bitter. So I tasted flat-leaf and curly parsley side-by-side and was surprised; it was the curly parsley that had the more delicate flavor.

With parsley on my mind, I began scrutinizing the herb’s role in various dishes. And I noticed that it was curly, not flat, parsley in the tabouleh I had at the Buckley House restaurant in Marietta, Ohio during my recent visit home to see family. The Buckley House’s chef, Emad Al-Masri, is from Kuwait, and the food was some of the best I’ve ever had while dining out in Marietta (what a delight to see sumac and turnips pickled in beet juice on my plate!) So I figure if he’s using curly parsley in his tabouleh, he has a very good reason.

I tasted another bunch later on, and this time I got that same near-harsh flavor that had always put me off. Perhaps like all produce items, the flavor of curly parsley just depends on the freshness and quality of what you get your hands on.

In any case, despite its passé connotations (pleated, acid-washed jeans to flat-leaf’s boot-cut), give curly parsley a spin and see what happens. It’s a good reminder to always re-evaluate our assumptions about what tastes good and what does not.

[Comments]

Reflections on a Gimpy Garden

September 13, 2010

I’ve come to regard our garden as an ongoing experiment; this is our first year in this house, with this yard, with this baby Frances. And so the limited time of a new parent and the limited gardening knowledge of a lax urbanite has given way to a throw-it-in-the-ground-see-if-it-grows approach, and though it does not yield any landscaping that a lush gardening magazines would touch with a ten-foot pole, it has produced some food, some fun, and a welcome reality check.

A few weeks ago, Time had a pretty stupid article about organics, and organic produce is nutritionally any better than conventional produce. (I’ll link to it, but really, don’t waste your time.) If your read past the misleading pull-quotes and headlines, the article says that organic food isn’t always better, but that conventional produce is sort of bad for the land and stuff, and that there’s no blanket answer to the issue. Wow! How enlightening. It really gets my dander up how the mainstream media always panders to our desire for fast, empty answers to very complex questions.

My own diatribe aside, one statement in the article got me thinking quite a bit. They quoted this dude Manny Howard, who wrote a book about the year he spent trying to convert his Brooklyn backyard into a micro-farm bountiful enough to sustain his family (spoiler: it wasn’t): "Green markets can be a kind of food pornography," says Manny Howard, author of My Empire of Dirt, about his experiences with backyard farming. "You buy a big bushel of beet greens without a wormhole in it, and that's just not what farm food looks like."

This misshapen cucumber in the top photo was my garden’s afterthought. Of the entire packet of seeds I planted, only one sad little cucumber seedling showed its face. I kept watering it, just to see what would happen, and lo and behold: it produced one gimpy, bulbous fruit. Watching its progress (or lack thereof) over the summer months was very delightful, because I never knew if the cucumber plant was going to suddenly give up the ghost.

Other items we planted were not so fickle. Radishes, summer squash, parsley, Russian kale, butter lettuce, Swiss and rainbow chard, and sugar pumpkins have been very plentiful, if not photogenic in their growth. A stranger gave me a flat of strawberry plants, which I put in because hey, they were free! And I found out that strawberry plants are more or less garden pets, things you grown for fun, for the little morning ruby snacks they give you.

That’s my parsley in the bottom photo. There’s some lamb’s ear growing there, too, which I neglected to pull out because of its flocked, soft leaves. The photo is not lovely, because my garden, in photogenic terms, is not. But the parsley grows, and I use it…and as for the wormholes, once it’s in the final dish, no one is the wiser.

That’s what a garden is. True organic food, and sweat, and whatever luck and labor partner up to give you.

[Comments]

Foxy Kale-y

August 31, 2010

In our garden right now grows kale. Lots of it. In terms of volume, it puts summer squash to shame. It puts procreating rabbits to shame. And harvest and eat it we do. I'll never be one to throw her hands up in the air in, say, November and holler "Damn this kale! That's all that you have to offer us right now, Nature?" Gimme your kale. All of it. All generous four seasons of kale.

Sausagetarian is happy to introduce its first guest writer, Kelly Alba, the only lady on earth who loves kale more than I do. This is a summer way to love kale; imagine a CSA box and an upper-floor apartment in Brooklyn or Queens, where the sticky-steamy city heat rises. Yes. This is the seamy/steamy side of kale. Thank you for sharing, Kelly. 

***

WARNING: THIS RECIPE IS NSFW.
The food-sex connection has never really captured my imagination - things that are generally regarded as arousing in a typically "female" way (scented candles, bubble baths, vibrators, the word "sensual") have never captured my imagination. But if ever there were a game-changer, then for me, that game-changer is kale. Specifically, this particular preparation of kale.
If you are like me, you love kale. And if you are like me, then you feel like you know how you love your kale. This love may include boundaries - not many, but definite boundaries. "There are just some things, like minimum hours of sleep per night, or sexual preference, where I just know what I can and cannot handle, and one thing I cannot handle is uncooked kale," is how I, for example, might once have explained those boundaries. Fool that I am!
Consider the following analogy: your partner of several years (a partner whom you love, and with whom you have a great relationship, don't get me wrong) suddenly springs a brand-new surprise on you, in bed, and you LOVE it. Somehow, this partner has intuitively sensed a fetish of yours, before you were even aware of it yourself, and has introduced you to it. "Where the hell did you learn that?!" you ask your partner, who mercilessly, relentlessly, just continues whatever it is he or she is doing, until finally you too are driven to speechless wonder.

SUPER SEXY SURPRISE SUMMER SALAD
(starring, of course, kale)
version 1 (for célibataires)
Remove clothing. (The whole point of living alone, or at least having the apartment to yourself, is not having to wear clothes, right? Besides, it's far too hot to be wearing clothes right now.)
Rinse and stem kale.
Pour salt into palm of hand. Rub between your hands to coat both palms.
Massage kale. Massage it.
Add more salt to hands as needed. Massage all kale.
Allow kale to relax. Give it as much time as you can muster. Overnight would probably be magical. If you're feeling over-excited, at least make sure it has softened and reduced to your liking. 5 or 10 minutes. You can give it 5 or 10 minutes, right? Just go browse through your cookbooks or watch some porn or something. (If you are me, then browsing through cookbooks is your porn anyway.) Better yet, browse through your fridge and cupboards. What looks like it would taste good with the kale right now? Oil and vinegar are recommended, plus as few or as many as you like of the following: finely chopped onion, apples, whole grain mustard, pecans, little tomatoes, dried cranberries, roast beets, goat cheese. (If Canadians turn you on: bacon marmalade, maple syrup.) These are all just suggestions. Go with your instincts.
When kale is ready, mix it with whatever you decided looked good. You're doing all this with your hands, right? Now eat it with your hands. Maybe you also want to wash your hands before you masturbate afterwards. Geez.

version 2 (for sharing)
I hope you read the NSFW warning at the start of this. Heads up: at the very least, you should not be preparing or eating this recipe with anyone in whose presence you would feel ashamed to make involuntary sounds of pleasure. At best, you are making this right after you've had sex. If you try to make it before sex, it may take you all day to get around to the actual salad: it's all so damn arousing you might just keep jumping each other. That's fine if it's the weekend and you've got all day, or if you're both prepared to play hooky from work, but hunger makes some folks cranky, and that's not always so foxy.
One of you can wash and stem the kale. The other can select some decent music, or browse the cupboards and suggest things to add to the kale, or take photographs of the adorable behind of the person washing and stemming the kale (you remembered to remove your clothing, right?), or help wash and stem.
You can both do the part where you pour salt into your wet palms, rub your palms together, and massage the kale with your salty hands. Probably you will do this in one big bowl. Probably your hands will touch.
I think you can figure out the rest from here.

[Comments]

Get Your Summer Squash On

August 27, 2010

It’s bad form to complain about a productive garden. There’s a backwards tradition in America of regarding summer squash bounties as the vegetable kin of fruitcakes—burdensome, undesirable. Neighbors offer zucchinis the size of baseball bats to other neighbors, possibly neighbors they do not care for.

Eschew this whole issue of overgrown, mealy summer squash by harvesting them in a timely fashion. Or, if a squashy growth spurt sneaks past you, use the outer parts of the flesh but scoop out and discard the mealy, spongy inner flesh. There are ways. Zucchini bread is the obvious one, yes, but stopping there is, quite frankly, dull.

1. Grated in quick bread, both sweet (with cocoa powder and a pinch of cinnamon and cayenne) and savory (with chopped basil, scallions, and sun-dried tomatoes).
2. Grated, topping pizza sans tomato sauce (one egg, beaten with about half a cup of sour cream, mix with one quart grated zucchini and a cup of very good grated cheddar cheese. Fold some fresh thyme in there, too. Season generously with salt and pepper and smear all the way up to the edges, in a thinnish layer. Bake. That’s it. See photo A.)
3. Crudely chunked up and cooked to death with a little minced garlic and a decent plop of butter (about two pounds of patty-pan squash or zucchini cut in 1/2- to 1/3-inch slices, a few cloves of minced garlic, two to three tablespoons of butter, all cooked over medium-low heat in a cast iron skillet for about an hour. Put a lid over it during the first half of cooking. When it’s done, it’s very mushy and rather ugly and your texture-fussy husband won’t have anything to do with it. But you will. Oh, yes. See photo B.)
4. In the case of patty pan squash, gutted and stuffed with couscous, feta cheese, herbs, and topped with parmesan cheese before an hour or so in a 350-degree oven.
5. Cubed and paired with squash blossoms and goat cheese in a frittata.
6. Grated and cooked with rolled oats when I realized we were out of dog food. A big hit with Scooter.
7. Shared with my library co-workers. They are the opposite of most co-workers in that they just pick and nibble at break room treats, but they pounced on the offering of intact, raw summer squash.
8. Featured in an all-zucchini dinner party.
9. Food bank!

[Comments]

(Southern) Tomato Pie

August 23, 2010

If you are from the south, tomato pie is just tomato pie, not Southern Tomato Pie. My mother makes a different tomato pie, because our family is from Ohio, and so we need the qualifier when it comes to the pie’s southern manifestation.

Southern Tomato Pie is impressive for its array of saturated fat, present in mayonnaise, sour cream, cheddar cheese, and bacon, not to mention the butter and shortening in the crust. It’s a savory pie, yes, but almost like a gloppy, soggy eggless quiche. I’ve tried and tried to remedy this: blind-baking the crust and sealing it with egg white; patting the raw tomato slices on paper towels or dredging them in flour; reducing the amount of sour cream and mayonnaise. And to no avail.

But I’ve realized that Southern Tomato Pie is, by its very nature, a gloppy mess, and were it not, it would be another pie entirely. (E.g. my mother’s pie, which is really just a scrumptious tomato tart with fontina and parmesan cheeses and fresh basil. It is much easier on the arteries.)  And I like this gloppy tomato pie, which springs from the Edisto Island vacations of my childhood; we’d bring down a crate of big, fat red tomatoes down from Ohio to our South Carolina friends, and they’d flip out over them, and the lovely Carol Vaughn would make this pie with a storebought crust, for that is how we made all pies back then. Carol’s son Jason once made a version with a layer of crabmeat, an extravagance only suitable for those with bowlsful of laboriously picked blue crab flesh. So you can see that the apex of Southern Tomato Pie, featuring a union of Ohio tomatoes and blue crab of the Carolina Low Country, can only logically exist in the most unique intersection of circumstances. It is the Brigadoon of the pie world.

This is how to make it, without crab.

Carol Vaughn’s Tomato Pie

Makes about eight servings

This recipe is transcribed from a fax of my mother’s loping, often illegible cursive, in which she ascribes it to Carol Vaughn, but I suspect she included some of her own alterations, as I am about to do. So, really, this is at least a third-generation echo of whatever Carol Vaughn’s tomato pie recipe was. Like I know hers had a cup each of sour cream and mayonnaise, and the recipe below does not. Paula Deen’s tomato pie recipe does not call for bacon, which, considering Paula Deen’s predilection for the gratuitous inclusion of fatty foods, is incredible. I myself like the bacon. I make tomato pie maybe once every 1.5 years, and so topping it with bacon is entirely in line.  

• 1 9-inch prebaked pie crust
• 2-3 large tomatoes, preferably red and sweet, the kind you’d eat raw slices of
• 1/2 cup mayonnaise
• ½ cup sour cream
• 2-3 green onions, sliced
• ¾ cup grated cheddar cheese (the orange kind, not the white kind)
• 2-3 slices of bacon, cooked crisp, drained on paper towels, and crumbled
• Salt and black pepper

Heat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Slice the tomatoes in half through what, if the were globes, would be their equators. With your fingers, scoop out and discard as much seedy goop as possible. Then cut the un-gooped tomatoes into slices about ½ inch thick. Season the tomato slices with salt and pepper and set aside.

Whisk the mayonnaise and sour cream together in a medium bowl; season to taste with salt and pepper, and maybe a few drops of hot pepper sauce.

Put a layer of tomatoes in the pie dish and top with half of the mayonnaise mixture, then with half of the scallions and half of the cheese. Repeat with remaining ingredients, so that on the top layer you have mayonnaise dotted with green onions and cheddar cheese. Sprinkle the bacon over it all. Bake the pie until you see bubbling juices around the sides, about an hour. Cool very well before serving, lest you cut into a pieful of formless slop.

Serve warm or at room temperature or, if it’s quite hot, chilled.

[Comments]

Nancy Nance and Peach Cobbler

August 12, 2010

Are you from Georgia? It's not just a cliche--your peaches are the best. I enjoyed some while in Ohio, where they can easily be procured. It makes sense that here, on the West Coast, we don’t get Georgia peaches. I buy in-season California peaches at the grocery store if they are acceptable, but they’re always just this side of ripe. I seem to have better luck with nectarines.

Too bad, because I re-discovered my favorite peach preparation while on the Ohio vacation/family visit that I apparently will never shut up about: peach cobbler. Cobblers come in biscuity and cakey styles. I prefer biscuit-style for berry cobblers, but this cakey one from our family friend’s family friend Nancy Nance is made for peaches, the Georgia ones with their unctuous flesh. It envelops them, getting crusty at the edges, cakey on top, and gooey and dumpling-y in the middle. It’s also easy as hell. We used to make it on our annual family vacations to Edisto Island, South Carolina, for that is where our paths crossed that of Nancy Nance.

Cobblers like this exist in many iterations, all with the same concept: melt butter in a dish, dump a very basic lean batter on top, and then scatter fruit over the batter. The end. When you use great fruit—peaches especially—you don’t need much else in the way of fanciness, other than a scoop of vanilla ice cream. But I was using eh-eh plums when I made this at home in Oregon, so I added some almond extract and a handful of blueberries. You could make it with cherries, or plums, or nectaries, or whatever; I’d recommend stone fruit, just ‘cause.

Edisto Island Peach Cobbler

Serves 6-8

This is best made the day you serve it. So, if you are anticipating guests, bake it before they arrive for dinner; that way it’s still warm once you dig in for dessert, and the vanilla ice cream you serve it with will melt just a bit and create its own crème anglaise. However, I also like to have leftover cobbler in the morning, sans ice cream, for breakfast.

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Plop a stick of butter in a baking dish, larger than 9 x 9 inches but ideally smaller than 9 x 13 (square or rectangle is better than round, as you get crunchy brown corners, four of them.) Stick the dish in the oven, watching carefully, until the butter is mostly melted—it’ll finish melting as you complete the next steps.

Meanwhile, get a medium bowl and mix together 1 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, 2 teaspoons baking powder, and ¼ teaspoon salt. Measure 1 cup milk and splash in about a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Stir the milk into the flour mixture until you have a lumpy batter, like pancake batter. Pour this into the baking dish with the melted butter and swirl everything around a bit so that the butter and the batter mingle but don’t fully unite.

On top of this, scatter about 8 cups of peeled and sliced peaches (or cherries, or apricots, or nectarines—any stone fruit. You could also use berries, but I myself prefer a more biscuity topping for berry cobblers). Bake 45-60 minutes, until the fruit is bubbling vigorously and the cobbler is cakey and nicely browned around the edges. Cool 30 minutes, until it won’t burn your mouth, and serve with scoops of vanilla ice cream, or enjoy leftovers for breakfast. 

[Comments]

Sweet Corn Dos and Don’ts

August 06, 2010

Fresh sweet corn is the ne plus ultra of summer produce. Tomatoes may bruise and squish more easily, but it is the deceptively delicate sweet corn that demands special treatment.

I’ve been living on the West Coast for ten years now, and I have yet to witness an ear of sweet corn sold or prepared properly. People out here just don’t get it, and if you are a West Coastie and you do get it, please call me and we’ll talk corn. Because I don’t eat the corn out here. Period. It’s just not up to snuff.

How to Get Sweet Corn

·         DO make an entire meal of sweet corn. Even my meat-loving father understands that sweet corn is the centerpiece of dinner, and anything else is just auxiliary.

·         DO buy sweet corn the day you plan to prepare and serve it. If there’s an emergency and you cannot cook corn, maybe you can get away with cooking it the next day, but your guests will be able to tell.

·         DO buy sweet corn from people you trust: farmers. Podunk farms stands are ideal, for it is from such vendors that you can feel confident that the corn was harvested that day. Ask them!

·         DON’T buy sweet corn that was not harvested that day. Corn is a living thing, and every minute it spends separated from the stalk it grew upon, its precious sugars convert to starches; tender, juicy corn becomes more akin to cow feed the longer it spends in transit to you. And so, NEVER buy sweet corn from the grocery store. God knows how long that poor excuse for sweet corn has spent languishing on some truck.

·         DON’T remove the husk from the corn until you prepare it. The husk makes a protective shield around the corn, and once you remove it, the conversion of sugars to starches accelerates.

That’s my mom in the photo, purchasing sweet corn from Witten Farm Market by the Cone & Shake in Marietta, Ohio. I guess they have a few other stands around Washingto County in the summertime. The corn from Witten’s was good, but my dad thinks that Wagner’s out in Lowell is better and more freshly harvested. I agree, but we happened to be closer to Witten’s that day.

• DO, if you are my dad, drive at least half an hour out of your way to get the best corn.

This post is not particularly timely, seeing as I’m putting it up at the tail end of sweet corn time, but I am already mourning the loss of corn from my diet. During a 10-day trip to Ohio, we ate sweet corn four times. It could have been ten times! Is there a more perfect food? It’s a vegetable and starch in one handy package, with tons of fiber to boot. Those tiny rows of plump kernels, each bursting with sweet juices and pure corn flavor, so very satisfying to crunch into. Some work across the cob as they munch (“typewriter keys,” my mom calls it), some work in spiral fashion. I go willy-nilly, perhaps because I get overexcited.

Good corn needs no butter. No salt, no pepper, no nothin’. I eat my corn unadorned. In fact, in a meal of sweet corn (3 ears), ripe tomato slices, and green beans, the only thing I’d even consider salting would be the green beans. I like those stewed a bit, not toothy like in some crummy hotel banquet facility. Anyhoo.

As a young teenager, what we now call a tween, I had braces, and my orthodontist advised me not to eat corn on the cob. And of course I did, and probably knocked a few brackets off my incisors in the process.

• DO have toothpicks handy for post-corn dental hygiene.

Back then my tender palate was not deadened by years of hot sauce overuse and exposure to salt-happy professional kitchens, and so of course I ate my sweet corn unseasoned. Now, after years of abuse, my taste buds still grasp the heresy of seasoning corn. Fancy dressing? Never! Seasoned salt? Pshaw! Butter? For pussies!

Mom used to make corn inside, on the stove in a big black spatterware Dutch oven thing. We know better now. This is how my dad makes corn.

• DO prepare sweet corn in this manner.

Buy your corn from your friendly, trustworthy local farm family. Count on 3 ears per person; you can always cut the kernels off of leftover ears and freeze them for later, during those 10.75 dreary, sweet-corn-less months of the year.

Take the corn home. Go outside and have a big bucket nearby. Strip the very outer husks off of the corn, but keep most of the inner on there. Then pull out as much of the silk, or tassel, as you can. Then soak the corn in water for at least half an hour (that’s what the bucket is for).

Light the grill. Medium-ish heat is good. You probably have a big mess of corn, you you’ll need the entire grill, in which case the heat should be higher. Arrange the corncorbs in their husks on the grill and close the lid. Every now and then, pop over the the grill to turn the cobs. After half an hour or so, take a peek in one of the ears and do a little poking (be careful of steam!) If you feel like the corn is ready, remove it from the grill; if not, keep on going. If you are my dad, there’s probably something unrelated to corn that you need to argue with my mom about, so do this now.

My dad wears big leather work gloves for the next step: remove the husks from the cooked ears of corn (your compost pile will be so happy!) The corn will be very hot, and the leather gloves allow maximum protection with maximum mobility. Put the ears of corn in some kind of covered container. Call the family to the table (a picnic table, or perhaps you are lucky enough to have a screened-in porch with a patio dining set) and make sure you provided salt, pepper, butter, and whatever else for those who choose to pollute their corn as they eat it. Also have an empty plate or platter on the table where people can set the stripped ears of corn as they finish (once again, yay for the compost!) It is very important to continue offering your guests ears of corn, just as a good server or bartender notices a drink a few sips away from emptying and asks if you’d like another. Don’t let anyone leave the table until they have consumed at least two ears of corn. Probably there’s a peach or berry pie or cobbler for dessert, but you can always tell yourself that your third ear of corn is dessert.

This method of corn cookery is optimal, for it a) keeps the kitchen from getting too hot, b) utilizes the corn husk as a nature-made disposable steaming device, c) facilitates some light caramelization on select corn kernels, but not enough to overpower the pure character of the corn itself, and d) involves a grill, so my dad takes care of it all from start to finish. I don’t think dad was involved in sweet corn preparation prior to our family adopting this grill/steam method, but I could be wrong.

• DO indulge your father when it comes to sweet corn.

[Comments]

The Devil's Pudding

August 03, 2010

Our latest Oregonian tasting panel, in which we delve into the nuances of commercial mayonnaise, comes out today. And, despite my initial ambivalence about the subject, I am quite pleased with how it turned out, and the realizations I had about mayonnaise and its role in recipes, and in personal preferences.

I think of homemade mayonnaise as very sensual and magical, almost mysterious. But commercial mayonnaise is unfoodlike and blobby, a big spoonful of heart disease. No wonder some people don’t like it, or hate it, or despise it, as illustrated once by Nick Grizzle (in a column not available online, sorry), whose phrase “the devil’s pudding” was so prefect I had to borrow it for the mayo tasting lede.

I was slightly dreading the day of our mayonnaise tasting in the FOODday test kitchen, recalling unhappy tummies after our chocolate tasting, or the balsamic vinegar tasting, or the olive oil tasting. But the mayonnaise contained within the glass and plastic jars surprised me. It was…oddly pleasant, overall. Most of the mayonnaises were at least fair, and a few were finger-licking yummy. Best Foods (Hellman’s, for you Midwest/East Coasters) and Kraft won hands-down. They taste like mayo the way Heinz tastes like ketchup.

During the period of my assembling the mayo article, I was reading “Eat Me: the Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin.” And in the book, I ran across some mayonnaise wisdom. Shopsin, who runs the legendary (and legendarily prickly) Shopsin’s General Store in New York, writes in that he started out making food by selling mayonnaise with “other shit”—eggs, chicken, tuna. His versions of these salads is just that, mayonnaise and the appropriate protein (in the case of egg salad, he even skips the salt.) And he makes each one with his hands, massaging eyeballed globs of mayo into the eggs or tuna or chicken until the texture and richness is correct. Not too much mayo, but just enough.

And I love his egg salad technique: he takes hard-boiled eggs and crumbles the whites alone (no egg slicer for him!) before crumbling the yolks and mixing the yolks alone with the mayo to make an internal compound mayonnaise of sorts. “It tastes better if it gets its creamy texture not by adding more mayo,” he writes, “which is why it’s important to separate the yolks and white when you make it.”

This made me think of the absurdity of egg salad: eggs dressed with more eggs, or an emulsion of eggs and fat. In summation: eggs, fat, eggs. Eggs in a cold emulsion of eggs. Its unabashed egginess is brilliant, a chilled version of eggs Benedict (eggs in a hot emulsion of eggs).

I used to hate mayonnaise, any kind; I grew up in a Miracle Whip family. But now I think of mayonnaise as an enriching treat, something whose presence is vital yet should be budgeted. A thin veneer of mayonnaise on a sandwich makes a little raincoat of sorts for the bread, keeping the sandwich from getting soggy. And it adds tang and a little somepin’ somepin’. So let us hail the miracle of cold emulsions and the convenience of food technology and give commercial mayonnaise its due. Use it sparingly but not with stinginess for optimal happiness.

[Comments]

We Heart Ohio Tomatoes

August 02, 2010

Ohio is not famous for tomatoes in the foodsnob/aficionado community, at least not that I am aware of. You don’t read heartfelt odes to Ohio tomatoes in Saveur or in the essays of M.F.K. Fisher, or see them on the menu in some Wagnerian experience of a dish at Alinea, or read about annual Summer Tomato Festivals in rural communities, because I don't think such festivals exist. This lack of attention from the non-Ohio world makes Ohio tomatoes the country’s biggest secret amazing food.

Ohio is not keeping these tomatoes secret on purpose, mind you. I didn’t even care about them myself until I moved out of the state; as a girl, I recall our South Carolina friends who we vacationed with every year raving about the tomatoes we brought down to the beach house we shared. “Oh, Ohio tomatoes!” they’d sigh, and it baffled my youthful mind that people who lived within spitting distance of a wonderful beach could crave anything from my humble home state.

And the tomatoes will vary in different regions of the state, so I should clarify that these big, pulsing fists of tomatoey lusciousness ideally hail from the acidic soil of the Mid-Ohio Valley, in the southeast corner of the state, down by the Ohio River. And nothing against heirloom tomatoes, but the nee-plus Ohio tomato is just a run-of-the-mill beefsteak, red and round and shiny, or maybe a bit knobby and misshapen. They grow in backyard gardens and in fields of tiny family farms in towns all along the river, baked under the summer sun and bathed in thick humidity.

Any homegrown tomato is a treat, but the tomatoes I’ve grown in my Oregon yards are just not the same thing. Maybe you grew up with Ohio tomatoes of your own, except they are not of Ohio but some other lost idyll. That’s fine. I’m not in Ohio right now, but I was not long ago, and I can still smell the tomato leaves in the July heat and taste the acidic sweetness of their almost buttery flesh. You can’t make the recipe below, not the way I’d like you to make it, but you can still read about it.

Mid-Ohio Valley Summer No-Cook Tomato Sauce

Serves 4-6

Get one 12-ounce package of Rossi Pasta Capelli d'Angelo. This can be purchased at their gift shop on Front Street, or at any one of a handful of grocery stores. I used to work at Rossi Pasta making gift baskets, and I got a lot of free pasta, and of course that is the best way to get it. That was years ago, and though it would have been cooler to actually make the pasta instead of shrink-wrapping gift baskets, it was still a pretty cool job. Me and this guy Jeremy Reed, who I went to high school with and used to have a huge crush on, we’d assemble and shrink-wrap the gift baskets of pasta and sauce, and our directions were to gob them up with scads of ribbon and bows. Like imagine the level of decoration where you’d say, “okay, enough,” and then keep on going, and you’ve nailed a Rossi Pasta Gift Basket. Jeremy Reed and I would spend hours listening to music and curling ribbon and making jokes and coming up with nicknames for pasta flavors, like ItSpit or SpinBasGar. It was great. We cooked pasta for lunch every day, but nothing like this pasta I just got very sidetracked in telling you how to make.

Next, procure about one and a half to two pounds of quite ripe, very red homegrown tomatoes—beefsteak or the likes, and luscious enough to eat a plain slice of as if it were cake. Maybe you grew them yourself, maybe your best friend’s parents left a bag of them on your back porch like the tomato fairy. They could have been purchased at a farm stand, or from a vendor at the Marietta Farmer’s Market, but if this is the case, it has to be from a small operator, someone who has a huge garden at home and sells their bumper crop for a little extra cash.

These tomatoes should be at the stage of ripeness that’s just before squishy. At least half an hour and up to two hours before planning to eat, chop them up (on a cutting board with a groove if you don’t want to make a swampy red mess of tomato juice). Put these chunks in a large bowl, along with a pinch of red pepper flakes, a large clove of garlic that’s been mashed to a paste, and a generous amount of kosher salt. If you have fresh oregano around, mince up about a teaspoon of that and add it. If not, no big deal. Let this all sit at room temperature; the salt will work on the tomatoes and make a soupy, saucy mess.

Boil the pasta according to the directions on the Rossi Pasta package. And drain the pasta, and although I normally would reserve some of the pasta cooking water, we’re not going to do that now, because we want the pasta to absorb the very liquid part of our splendid tomato sauce so that every bite offers an explosion of summery tomato flavor.

Return the pasta to the pot you cooked it in. Add the tomato sauce, along with a few tablespoons of very good olive oil and a big fat handful of thinly sliced fresh basil. You need lots of basil, which will collapse in the heat of the dish and wind up not looking like nearly as much as you began with. Taste this and add salt or whatever to make it taste right.

Divide the pasta between big bowls and top with freshly grated parmesan cheese. Feta or soft goat cheese would also be acceptable, but I like the parm. Then dig in. That’s it. This recipe absolutely will not work in parts of the country with crummy tomatoes, or in September, or if you use the wrong shape or type of pasta; the network of angel hair pasta strands lock in the sauce like a sponge so that you don't miss a speck of flavor. This also will not be as good if you consume it in a location other than my parent’s screened-in back porch, where an unseen chorus of cicadas drone in the background, to a mesmerizingly creepy, jungle-y effect. But if you get all of the variables right, your dinner will be like a big plate of adult candy. No salad, no bread. Just the pasta, maybe a glass of white wine. Amen.     

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FloFab and the Inspector

July 14, 2010

In 2006, I decided to move from the San Francisco Bay Area to New York to fulfill my lifelong dream of joining the editorial staff of a national cooking magazine. My husband, a lifelong Californian who hates change, reluctantly agreed. With no concrete job prospects for either of us, we set off. It sounded like a good plan.

Shortly after exiting onto the Jackie Robinson Parkway on our way to our soon-to-be apartment in Queens, we got our moving truck stuck under an overpass (as Mapquest-using rubes, we didn’t know that parkways are for passenger vehicles only). The city was physically second-guessing our bold move: “Are you really sure this is a good idea?” But I wasn’t about to keep a minor issue like that from achieving my goal, and we pressed on.

Months later, after a pathetic string of botched interviews and initially glamorous prospects that fizzled out, I realized what I needed wasn’t a job at a cooking magazine, but any job, period. A Craigslist posting caught my eye: “Open call for sausage engineers.” It sounded like my kind of gig, so I went.

I pulled on a sundress and located the open interviews in the West Village’s Bleecker Park with no trouble. Two girls about my age sat at one of the benches, next to a sign that read “DOGMATIC INTERVIEWS.” No one else was there. I introduced myself and they told me about their venture.

Dogmatic Gourmet Sausage System was to be cart serving sausage served in toasted baguettes and slathered with one of a variety of fancy sauces. The idea was inspired by sausage carts in Europe that had heated spikes; the vendor would impale the cut end of a halved baguette on the spike, which would toast it from the inside out, thus creating a warm, crunchy burrow for the sausage.

Unlike most run-of-the-mill mobile food vending carts in the city, this one had investors and an ambitious business plan. They hoped to eventually launch stationary Dogmatics in food courts across the country. For the time being, though, they’d secured a hard-to-obtain permit to vend the sausages there in Bleecker Park. To work at the cart, I’d need to get my own Mobile Food Vendor’s License, which they would sponsor me for.

I loved the idea of serving tourists and regulars sausage at cart, and it would be good research for the hot dog book I was hoping to get a contract for. Dogmatic also offered what I assumed to be a fairly generous wage for slinging cocks at a street cart. I quickly agreed, and the next day, we set about getting me a license.

To do this, one brings the necessary paperwork to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, down in the financial district. You take the elevator up to a drab floor, wait ten minutes to get our number, and then wait an hour for your number to be called. Then you approach the dour woman behind the plastic divider and discover that the paperwork you brought is incorrect. The next day you return with the correct papers, go through the same process, and are told that those papers are incorrect. After three trips and a few phone calls on Dogmatic’s end, I was enrolled in a three-day food protection course at the Health Academy.

The “Academy” was in the basement of a public school in Harlem. It looked like any typical classroom, save a mobile vending cart set up along the wall. Workbooks were available in some thirteen languages, and I noticed I was one of the few whose was English.

Our instructor had been a health inspector for years before moving to the teaching side. He seemed to had worked out an effective teaching system based on repetition, variations on correct hand-washing and proper temperatures for serving and storing food. Sadly, there were few times he used the basement food cart as a visual aid.

New York City has two categories of mobile food vending carts: processing and non-processing. A non-processing cart serves food that is not changed from one state to another, e.g. prepackaged Good Humor frozen novelties or whole bagels. To serve a cut or toasted bagel, you need to be a processing cart. Non-processing carts do not need sinks, but processing carts do, including a hot water tap. (Interestingly enough, grilled hot dogs are processing, but dirty water hot dogs are not. They are the gigantic loophole in the classification system, and our instructor told us unsavory stories about ticketing vendors who used their hot dog water for hand-washing.)

Some of my fellow students napped during class, but I managed to stay awake despite the endless reiteration of temperatures and hand-washing tips. I scored 100% on my examination without studying. An average question offered a picture of a clean-cut woman with her hair restrained in a cap next to an image of a creature resembling Pigpen, asking “Which of these workers is properly dressed?”

All that was left for me to do was return to the Department of Health and Sanitation to have my photo taken so they could issue my license. “It’ll be there in three to four weeks,” said the lady who photographed me.

But I was scheduled to work the next day, so we’d have to cross our fingers and hope no inspector came by until then.

I met the other girls the next day at the garage to pick up our cart. Mobile vending carts must be stored in an approved facility, only two of which exist in Manhattan. This one, on the Upper East Side, was an immense labyrinth of carts packed in like a game of Tetris. It took us half an hour to extract ours, fill the water tanks with a rubber garden hose, and purchase a case of Coke from the commissary, which was like a miniature Costco specializing in soda, bottled water, hot dog buns, and frozen pretzels. Our baguettes came from Tom Cat bakery, while our sauces were prepared by the chef at Employee’s Only, a fancy cocktail lounge and restaurant down the street from the cart’s Bleecker Park location.

We had arranged for a kindly Egyptian man named Jasbir to tow our cart to the park, and we tenuously piled into the back of his unlicensed van, which housed about six propane tanks rolling around in the back willy-nilly. I was pleased to escape the garage, where the summery tennis skort I’d worn was drew unwanted attention from the men; few women were there, and those present had a world-weary look, rendering me comparatively glamorous.

Finally, with the cart at the park, we set up for business. It was slow, as was the next day, the next week, and the next month. Our sausages, which were custom-made from free-range meats at a farm upstate, were $5 a piece. Tasty as they were, it took two to fill me up. Add to that a bottle of water or a Coke and you’re staring down $12 for lunch from a street cart.

The denizens of the neighborhood could afford that easily, I guessed, assessing the parade of nannies and Lily Pulitzer-clad children who headed to Bleeker Park for its popular playground. Every now and then a parent would buy their peckish child a sausage (the chewy baguettes, flavorful sausage and lack of yellow mustard didn’t holler out “kid appeal”, even to precocious toddling Manhattanites), but we sold a decent amount of bottled water to Moms.

Despite long, slow days and the stress of ferrying the cart to and from the garage, I enjoyed being outside and watching the goings-on in the park. The playground to the back of the cart wasn’t as engrossing as the bums who spent their days lounging on the Bleeker Park benches, bickering, napping and cackling. During dead spells I’d toast myself a baguette, douse it in Cheddar-Jalapeno sauce, and munch while staring at the queue of cupcake-mad tourists snaking down the sidewalk outside Magnolia Bakery. Bleeker Park’s trash cans overflowed with Magnolia boxes and daubs of forsaken buttercream. Meanwhile, my own consumption of baguettes and cheese sauce skyrocketed.

I wrote about the Dogmatic exploits on my blog, Sausagetarian, hoping that the Dogmatic people would latch onto it as a marketing opportunity, but it never happened. The hand-me-down Sony Mavica I initially used to take blog photos had long ago been crammed under the bed (a Mavica, the chunky size of a Polaroid camera, takes grainy images and stores them on a floppy disk; it’s the sort of thing you might let your two-year-old play with), and my blog posts were increasingly about the earthy characters who floated in and out of the park. Sausagetarian was clunky, amateurish and, ultimately, not about sausage.

Foul weather closed the cart early a few times. “When are you working this week?” my husband would inquire about my schedule. We were not able to spend weekends together, as I was typically at the park, and he was increasingly frustrated with the instability of the part-time sausage cart job we’d moved across the country for. But when my license finally arrived in the mail, I was thrilled. It was the one proof of legitimacy I’d managed to garner in New York.

One day early in the fall, everything was normal: dull and slow. We’d managed to sell about twelve sausages and a few custom sodas, a mixture of house-made berry syrup and sparkling water we kept stored in an adult-sized tricycle with a cooler box installed on the front. I was about to toast myself a baguette snack when a tidy man with a clipboard approached me and introduced himself as a health inspector.

“Really?” I said, knowing my moment had come. “Would you like to see my mobile food vendor’s license? I have it right here.”

“No,” he said, “but thank you. I’m more interested in the permit for that tricycle.” But I showed him my license anyway; it was my big chance, and there was no permit for the icicle tricycle. My co-worker intercepted, leaving me to twiddle my thumbs: when a health inspector approaches your cart, you must stop everything. Even if fifteen people are waiting for their food, you stop cooking until the end of the inspection.

That’s when another person approached, this time a silver-haired woman with a notebook and a sense of purpose. “Hello,” she said. “I’m Florence Fabricant from the New York Times.”

Well. I explained the situation to her, apologized, and asked if she could return later. “I’ll see, but I need to be somewhere shortly…do you know how long this might take?” I assured her it would just be a few minutes, and she stepped aside, looking impatient.

It was my big moment. “Pardon me, but I’m a food writer” I could have said. “I’m currently writing a blog about working here.” I thought about my last blog post, which detailed the man who’d fallen between two subway cars shortly before I’d arrived at the platform to find MTA authorities arriving to a bloodied spot on the tiled floor with several stretchers. Or the post I’d written before that, about coming down with the flu and giving my tuna sandwich to a bum shortly after I threw up in the Bleecker Park public restroom. I thought about the Mavica at home under our bed, and the typos on the blog that eluded Spellcheck.

Florence Fabricant proceeded to make a series of distracted calls on her cell phone. “I’m a food writer,” I could tell her. What was the worst that would come of it? She might dismiss or ignore me. But maybe she would ask what sort of writing I did, and I’d answer her in my mustard-stained Dogmatic uniform in front of the cart that didn’t even employ me 20 hours a week.

I thought about the difference between me and the people who made it. The people gainfully employed in the air-conditioned magazine offices I’d hoped to gain access to were the type to have a chance meeting with Florence Fabricant and blithely, naturally chat her up. I was the person who met Florence Fabricant and stood there with her thumb up her ass, saying nothing when she didn’t even have anything to lose.

Florence Fabricant politely excused herself, explaining she had a deadline. The inspector had kindly let our violation on the cooler slide, but he warned us that we couldn’t use it without the proper permit. That was it for the icicle tricycle.

And, eventually, that was it for the cart. Cold winter weather was coming, a factor that would surely not spike our already unimpressive sales. The Dogmatic proprietors sadly informed their small staff that the cart was going on an indefinite hiatus.

My husband and I left New York that spring, finally heeding the advice of that overpass in Forest Hills: you are not needed here. We moved to Portland, Oregon, where food carts abound, though I haven’t visited many. Even after my own brief Dogmatic stint, it feels odd to be on the other side, placing an order.

Dogmatic re-launched in a brick-and-mortar spot in Grammercy Park in the fall of 2008. The sausages are now a recession-friendly $4.50 each. The storefront’s menu is mostly the same as the one we served at the cart; if the recipes are identical, I recommend the beef sausage with Sun Dried Tomato-Feta sauce, plus a grilled asparagus spear or two slipped in there. The last bite, which will be soft and gooey from pooled sauce at the tip of the baguette, is the best.

[Comments]

Chocolate Cake from the Vaults

June 21, 2010

About five years ago, I applied for job at a highly respected cooking magazine. Along with the usual request for writing samples, they asked me to develop a recipe for chocolate sheet cake and write up a article about it in their own, very specific style. Great, I thought. And I did it, and guess what happened? Nothing. I got kind of pissed off about it. 

So now I have this great sheet cake recipe. But until last night, when remembrances of it it invaded my dreamscape for no good reason, I never did anything with the other part: the article. Until now! Ladies and gentlemen, I produce here for you the long-lost audition article. See if you can guess the publication I wrote it for. 

Simple Chocolate Sheet Cake

Can a humble sheet cake offer sublime chocolate gratification with minimal work? 

Cake, to most Americans, means chocolate cake, dark and moist. It’s handy to have a reliable recipe for a simple sheet cake for birthdays, short-notice potlucks, or unexpected guests. But too many recipes I’ve tried were dry, pale, and devoid of chocolate flavor—chocolate in name only.

I wanted a chocolate sheet cake that could be baked in a pinch with basic ingredients that would deliver gratifying but not overwhelming chocolate flavor. To me, the ideal chocolate sheet cake would offer a tender but not-too-refined crumb, satisfying enough to serve straight from the pan but versatile enough to slather with frosting. It would not require fussy steps like creaming butter, sifting dry ingredients, or melting solid chocolate over a double boiler.

Keeping It Simple

Many throw-together chocolate cake recipes I found shared a method of mixing common in quick breads: combine the dry ingredients in one bowl, wet ingredients in another, and stir both together to form the batter. From there, recipes varied mostly in ingredients, calling for everything from pureed sweet potatoes to mayonnaise. In initial trials, problems arose right away: the cocoa often came out of the box lumpy and needed to be sifted, while “exotic” ingredients like applesauce diluted the chocolate flavor.

However, a number of similar recipes had potential. They all called for vegetable oil, milk or buttermilk, and up to 3/4 cup cocoa powder, with hot or boiling water stirred into the almost-finished batter. These cakes came together quickly and showed promise, but the first one I made was distractingly moist, with a loose, gluey crumb. Switching from vegetable oil to melted butter improved the flavor and cut down on the gummy structure. Increasing the fat from 8 tablespoons to10 helped even more; 12 tablespoons of butter was perfect, tenderizing the cake and adding just enough richness.

I experimented with cake flour instead of all-purpose flour, but it yielded a dense cake; all-purpose flour was just fine, giving the cake structure without toughness.

Liquid Matters

Next I scrutinized the role of the liquid ingredients. Cakes made with milk had a finer crumb, but were dry and tasted lackluster compared to those made with buttermilk. Realizing an acidic dairy product kept the crumb moist and rounded out the earthiness of the cocoa, I next replaced the buttermilk with sour cream. The difference was subtle, but I preferred the punchier tang of buttermilk. One whole cup of buttermilk overpowered the cocoa and made the batter sloshy, while 1/2 cup was just enough to moisten the cake and brighten the chocolate taste.

I hoped that cakes including hot water would have a cleaner, purer chocolate flavor, but they had a disappointing flat taste and lacked oomph. Once recipe I saw used brewed coffee instead of water, which added a beguiling depth without imparting a distracting mocha quality. I didn’t like the idea of having to brew a pot of coffee just to make a cake, though. Would it be possible to use instant espresso powder dissolved in hot water instead? These cakes baked with the same appealing darkness and flavor as those made with brewed coffee, and I was won over.

Then I tried a technique I’d spotted in a few chocolate cake recipes: “blooming” the cocoa powder with boiling water to intensify its flavor. Better yet, this method eliminated the need to sift lumps out of the cocoa; whisking the cocoa with the hot water made the lumps disappear. I could combine several steps by melting the butter with the boiling water, then pouring this mixture over the cocoa powder and instant espresso.

To Dutch or Not to Dutch

My hope was to use only cocoa in the cake to keep the preparation simple, but I knew a small amount of melted chocolate can give a base note of complexity. An ounce of melted unsweetened chocolate added to the batter did boost the flavor, but the result, while not unpleasant, brought a torte-like intensity that just didn’t belong in a simple chocolate cake. Instead I increased the ¾ cup cocoa by two tablespoons, which made a gentle but perceptible difference.

The last step was to decide what kind of cocoa powder gave the best chocolate flavor. Natural cocoa powder, which is acidic, clashed with the buttermilk I favored so much as an ingredient, while mellower, darker Dutch-processed cocoa powder ranked higher with tasters. They noted that the cakes made with Dutch-processed cocoa were salty, so I reduced the salt to a quarter teaspoon. Tasters also preferred the cake made with two teaspoons of vanilla instead of one, sighting a deeper flavor.   

Too Much of a Lift?

I’d read a great deal about the need to be careful when using baking soda and baking powder with cocoa. Cookbooks warned that baking soda paired with natural cocoa could result in a dense cake, because the baking soda would overreact with the baking soda and create too-large bubbles that would collapse during baking. Since my recipe called for Dutch-processed cocoa this wasn’t a problem, but the matter of leavening still worried me. Baking soda and Dutch-processed cocoa are both alkaline, and the combination of the two gave my cake a metallic aftertaste. I wondered if this had anything to do with the whopping 2 teaspoons of baking soda and one teaspoon of baking powder in my recipe, so I began to adjust the levels. A combination of one teaspoon baking powder and half a teaspoon baking soda provided the necessary lift without producing a lingering off-taste. 

I’d been baking the cakes at the standard 350 degrees, but the tops of the cakes were doming and cracking. Simply lowering the baking temperature to 325 degrees kept the top of the cake flat and smooth—all the better for icing or serving straight from the pan. Though it could be made with relatively little effort, this cake was indeed chocolate through and through.

SIMPLE CHOCOLATE SHEET CAKE

SERVES 12 TO 16

Cold buttermilk and eggs bring down the temperature of the cocoa-butter mixture; they can come straight from the refrigerator and should not be at room temperature.

• 1 3/4 cups (8 3/4 ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting pan
• 1 1/2 teaspoons instant espresso powder
• 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons (3 ounces) Dutch-processed cocoa
• 1 cup water
• 12 tablespoons unsalted butter (one and 1/2 sticks), cut into 1/2 inch pieces
• 2 cups (14 ounces) sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 2 large eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 325 degrees. Grease bottom and sides of 13 by 9-inch baking pan; dust with flour, tapping out excess.

Stir together espresso powder and cocoa in medium bowl; set aside. Place water and butter in small saucepan and cook, uncovered, over medium-high heat until butter is melted and mixture just comes to a simmer. Pour over cocoa and espresso powder and whisk until no lumps are visible. Set aside.

Whisk together flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in medium bowl. Set aside. Whisk buttermilk, eggs, and vanilla into cocoa mixture until well blended; pour over dry ingredients all at once and stir together with rubber spatula until all of the flour mixture is moistened and no lumps remain. Pour into prepared pan.

Bake until skewer inserted in center of cake comes out clean, 40 to 50 minutes, rotating pan halfway through baking. Set pan on wire rack; cool cake at least 1 hour before serving. (Cake can be stored in pan at room temperature, tightly covered, for up to four days.)

[Comments]

The How Not to Cookbook

June 18, 2010

When Sicily-based artist Aleksandra Mir asked a thousand people for advice on how not to cook, she didn’t get a thousand cooking tips. She got a thousand micro-stories of cooking disasters, old wives’ tales, and family relationships, and that’s what makes Mir’s The How Not to Cookbook so irresistible.

I was one of those thousand people, via some sort of announcement on a writing or cooking website a few years ago; I hardly remember. But, as a firm believer that mistakes are the best way we learn, I eagerly typed up a few sentences regarding one of my favorite cooking debacles and submitted it. Contributors were promised a hardcopy of the resulting book, which I assumed would never happen, since I’ve been involved with enough such projects to know that less than half make it to completion. And I promptly forgot about the whole thing.

Then we moved, and then we moved again. And then, last week, my husband returned from a walk around the neighborhood with a battered parcel. “I passed by the old house and saw the girl who lives there, so I asked if she had any mail for us,” he said. Yes. Yes, she did. The parcel was my copy of the How Not to Cookbook. They’d put the street address down instead of the zip code, and instead of a street address, there was nothing (the result of what I imagine to be a flawed printout of an online address form).  Also lacking was any mention of the state of Oregon.

Yet the postal service tracked the former residence of the Sara Bir on the address label down, and I was heartily impressed with their diligence. The longest holdup of the book was not its travels across the sea from Edinburgh, but the distance of several blocks. What a strange world we are in.

It was worth the wait. Mir divided the un-tips into sections, such as “Drugs”, “Gadgets”, “Lasagna”, “Orientalism,” and “Worms”. It’s a browser’s heaven; I am going to keep this thing on my coffee table for months.

Some tips offer distinct scenarios:

• “When you have accidentally added washing-up liquid to your salad instead of oil, do not attempt to wash it out and serve it to your children. They will be able to tell the difference. Even the teenagers.”
• “Do not keep baking soda, corn flour, or any white powder for that matter, in unlabelled containers as you might think it is icing sugar and decorate cakes with it.”

Some are more like writing prompts, or fill-in-the-blanks, letting you, the reader, imagine exactly how that disaster came to be, or maybe even what the disaster was in the first place:

•  “Do not use a wooden spoon in the blender.”
• “Apparently putting things in water does not count as marinating.”
• “Do not forget that your pasta is cooking.”
• “NEVER ever use a knife with wet hands.”

Some offer very clear admissions of  ineptitude:

• “If you want a cheese sauce, do not put cheese cubes and water in a bowl and microwave them.”
• “When frying veggies, do not put the veggies in at the same time as the oil.”

Some, perhaps due to the book’s global nature (contributors ranged from Brazil, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, France, Italk, the U.K., and the U.S.A.), are perplexing to American brains:

• “Do not forget to flay the hare before roasting it. In contrast to freshly butchered poultry the skin is not singed off.”
• “Do not serve unsalted butter to British guests.”
• “Do not eat raw almonds, unless you take the skin off.” (I happily eat skin-on raw almonds every day! Yum!)

And some are playful, randy, and hopefully not firsthand:

• “Never start cooking before you have a glass of wine. But do not start cooking when you are already having a second glass.”
• “Do not wear your wife’s new dress while cooking spaghetti sauce.”
• “Do not choke the chicken after having chopped hot peppers.”

My own entry involves beets and a blender. Enough said.

Mir is an artist “whose works often take the form of social processes that are open for anyone who wishes to give work meaning.” So, as an artist, to her the collaboration is just as meaningful as the end product. We thousand disparate cooking people, who range from actual chefs like me to people who habitually boil pots dry, are now linked through cultures and continents via our admissions of stupidity. It’s a splendid reminder that almost any semi-capable person who eats also cooks. To eat, we must cook, and to cook, we must learn, and the learning never stops.

You can order The How Not to Cookbook through Collective Gallery, or look at a cute PDF pamphlet at Aleksandra Mir’s website.

[Comments]

Building a Better, Curvier Bun

June 18, 2010

A 9-year-old in Wisconsin invented curved buns to better accommodate the curve of a cooked bratwurst. Brilliant! Straight buns mess up the very important bread/sausage ratio per bite, which is partly why I don't care for bratwurst on a bun. In fact, I think that the bun itself is often the weak point in most large sausage and bun concoctions.

But the bun looks like it would be difficult to set on a plate without all of the toppings falling off. So maybe it just exchanges one problem for another. In any case, that kid still deserves kudos for being a lateral thinker.

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Everything but the Seeds

June 15, 2010

...from a watermelon, of course. Even with Portland’s tardy summer, watermelon at the market still beckons. I didn’t get one for making the most refreshing salad ever or freezing and blending into margaritas. We didn’t even eat any of it flesh, because this watermelon was for preserving.

Bryant Terry’s Vegan Soul Kitchen had a recipe for pickled watermelon rind, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I’d never had any, and the only was to change the situation was to make some myself.

And I figured while I was at it, I should go ahead and make the flesh into funky, sticky watermelon molasses (a bizarre foodstuff I expound upon in great detail right here). I rose at 5 on Sunday morning and began the peeling, grinding, straining, and boiling. By the end of the day, I had eight pints of pickles, a cup of watermelon molasses, and very little energy left.

Once the pickles age a bit I’ll re-assess the success of the whole effort. They are about twice as salty as I’d like, so they won’t be very good for snacking, but I have designs to chop them up and slip them into relishes. Joe said they remind him of bread-and-butter pickles.

The watermelon molasses…well, I’m a bit stumped. The stuff has an unusual flavor, sweet but with a savory, almost vegetal finish reminiscent of summer squash. When I made it before, I’d add it to batters and doughs for sweet baked things, as well as drizzle a little into braised greens. But now I’m thinking it might be better used (in this house, at least) as a syrup in drinks. Watermelon Kir. Beer with watermelon molasses. Maybe stirred into iced tea.

After such days of endless washing of dishes and sweeping of floors, days when my kitchen efforts generate a minimum of five or seven soiled tea towels, I wonder why the hell I even bother. Really, all day long just to make a bunch of oversalted pickles and a tiny jar of a garnet-red syrup that’s so weird in flavor I never know what to do with it? Here’s why:

• I’m kind of stupid.
• Messy, sweaty kitchen labors keep us in touch with how much work it used to be to feed a family. Multiply what I did last Sunday by ten and you have a farmwife’s typical day a century ago. And she probably had more than just one baby Frances to contend with.

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Beer Slushie!

June 11, 2010

Pok Pok always comes up in those puffy magazine articles about how great Portland's food secene is. I've only been there once, and I thought it was good but not mind-blowing.

But Pok Pok's across-the-street extension, Whiskey Soda Lounge, will be making Bia Wun ("jelly beer" in Thai) this summer, and I am very excited to try one. That's right, Singha beer slushies. From this video, it looks like the bottles of beer are frozen in a machine that agitates them. If you've ever accidentally left a bottle of beer in the freezer after popping it in there for a quick chill (ahem, I'm looking at you, dear hubby), you know that an unagiated frozen beer is an undrinkable tragedy. Leave it to people who live in a steamy-hot climate to make an unhappy situation into a refreshing one.

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Straight from the Skillet

June 10, 2010

Food tastes better when you eat it with your fingers. My infant daughter, who spends most dinnertimes perched on my lap, inadvertently prompted me to rediscover this; manipulating a knife and fork with one hand wrangling a squirmy baby is a tall order. Depending on what’s on my plate and who’s at the table, I oftentimes forgo the utensils mid-meal and dig in with my free hand.

Shrimp, in particular, benefit from a shunning of silverware. My youthful introduction to shrimp was in South Carolina, where enjoyed the crustaceans almost exclusively boiled, peeling them as we ate. I don’t eat shrimp often, and especially not in restaurants, where they tend to be already peeled when they arrive at the table. A peeled shrimp impaled on the tines of a fork is heresy. Those tails are nature’s handles, and the peels are nature’s flavor explosion.

My brother just passed though town over his birthday, and I wanted to make a celebratory but casual birthday dinner for him, something we could all linger over. New Orleans Barbecue Shrimp were perfect: shrimp cooked peels-on in a buttery, aromatic bath redolent of garlic and herbs. I’ve been tinkering with my recipe for years and this time I finally nailed it, even though I took liberties with the original.

We had couscous and lightly dressed green salad with it.

I set out a roll of paper towels and wooden bowls for greasy shrimp shells and, with one arm curled around Frances, slowly worked my way through my share, bathing the shrimp in Frank’s Red Hot as I peeled them. The couscous I worked into a ball and sopped in the sauce, and I thought about how in some cultures they eat like that every meal: communally, with their fingers.  So thank you, Frances, for prompting me to rediscover the tactile joys of dining. I love eating with you in my lap, even if you do not love it when mama has you in the sling while she slowly pecks out blog entries with a fingertip. Give and take, little lady. 

New Orleans BBQ Shrimp

Serves 4-5

This dish has absolutely nothing to do with real barbeque, but it’s a classic, and the garlicky, swamped-in-butter shrimp are irresistible. I’ve seen recipes that bake the shrimp in the oven, but I prefer to cook them in a cast-iron skillet on the stove, since I have that cheffy instinct to see what’s happening. (For a more traditional version like what my mother made, look here at The Runaway Spoon.)

Cook the shrimp in their shells for optimum flavor…and optimum mess, but I feel that peeling the shrimp at the table is part of the fun. People need to get their hands dirty when they eat sometimes—just make sure to supply lots of napkins. This can be an appetizer, but I like to serve it as a main course, just as my mother did, with everyone drawing shrimp from same the skillet. If that’s too communal for your tastes, plate the shrimp over hot white rice, and make sure to get lots of the buttery sauce on there.

• ½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
• 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 5-6 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tablespoon Creole, whole-grain, or Dijon mustard
• 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
• ½ teaspoon Tabasco sauce
• ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 2 small lemons, thinly sliced
• 2 small oranges, thinly sliced
• 1/2 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme
• 1/2 teaspoon chopped fresh oregano
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
• 3 scallions, thinly sliced
• 1-1/2 pounds shrimp, shells on
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Melt the butter in a large (12-iunch) heavy skillet over medium-low heat. Add olive oil, and, once warm, add the garlic, mustard, Worcestershire, Tabasco, cayenne, lemons, and oranges. Turn heat to low and cook gently, stirring occasionally, for about 5 minutes.

Increase heat to medium-high. Add the shrimp and cook, stirring, just until bright pink (3-5 minutes, depending on the size of the shrimp and the size of your skillet). Add the parsley, thyme, oregano, and scallions. Season with salt and black pepper. Serve straight from the skillet at the table with crusty bread and hot rice or, if you want to be very uncouth, couscous. A big green salad is nice with this, too.

[Comments]

Renegade Ketchup

June 02, 2010

My former editor at the Oregonian always dismissed the idea of doing a ketchup tasting for our Tasting Panel feature. “Everyone likes Heinz, anyway,” she’d say. And I’d think, well, yes…but how can we be sure? Everyone likes Heinz because everyone buys Heinz and, when we eat out, everyone eats Heinz.

So when I found out that Beaverton Foods introduced its own ketchup recently, I wanted to try it. It was a good excuse to finally conduct my own informal ketchup tasting and get down to the heart of the matter. I like Beaver’s mustards, and I especially like their Extra Hot Horseradish, a product that blows all other prepared horseradishes out of the water. It’s incredibly prickly and potent and alive; Joe and I call it “double Beaverton,” because we are nerds who nickname foods.

A PR gal for Beaverton sent me a bottle of the Beaver ketchup. It’s petite, only 13 ounces. They lace it with their honey mustard and sweeten it with fruit syrups and purees instead of corn syrup or tons of sugar.

The only logical way to conduct a ketchup tasting is to use french fries as the ketchup vehicle. So I made a batch of pretty decent oven fries and invited a few friends over for a cookout on our patio.

The tasting was blind, though of course I knew what was what.

Hy-Top: Hy-Top is Winco’s house brand. Everyone noticed how gloppy and gelatinous and generally inferior it was in texture and flavor. Hy-Top ketchup did not try very hard to be tasty. I buy Hy-Top canned goods, but its ketchup is totally jenky.

Del Monte: This national brand (which, I must confess, I see at restaurants and the like and think “who buys Del Monte ketchup? WTF?”)  had an instantly noticeable tomato character, vivid and brightly acidic.

Beaver: With a ruddier color and a good body, the Beaver ketchup was the fanciest-looking of the bunch. It had a distinct fruitiness, somewhat in the vein of cooked preserves, and everyone noticed its “spicy” finish, though no one pinpointed its mustardy source.

Heinz: Every one of us instinctively and immediately knew this was Heinz. Describing the flavor of Heinz is like describing the favor of bubble gum: impossible. Bubble gum tastes like bubble gum and Heinz tastes like ketchup.  

We didn’t have a winner, but that wasn’t the point. I liked the Beaver ketchup, which has a gourmet-housemade feel, like something a tawny restaurant would serve you with their $30 heritage beef burger. I’m going to use it as a finishing ketchup, I think, and not waste it in sloppy joes or the like.

But it was the Del Monte that surprised me. It’s not as balanced as Heinz, but that’s what I like about it; I prefer Del Monte’s zippy and tangy to Heinz’s sweet and salty.

Turns out there’s a reason Heinz rules the ketchup roost. Eric, who participated in our tasting, shared this Malcolm Gladwell article from the New Yorker.  When the Heinz company reconfigured their ketchup to be more shelf-stable and tasty than other turn-of-the-century ketchups (which were not as smooth, sweet, or tomato-y), they created a new template for what ketchup looked and tasted like, and what they came up with had a great balance of sweet, salty, sour, and umami flavors. Heinz ketchup is flavor harmony. 

Gladwell says that there are hundreds of mustard variations available in grocery stores to satisfy lots of individual, idiosyncratic tastes (Beaverton Foods makes over a dozen mustards alone). But, in part because of the Heinz’s Coke-like ubiquity in the ketchup field, no one is very interested in ketchup variations—especially kids, to whom ketchup is a food group. I’m hoping our baby Frances won’t grow into be a kid who needs to drown everything in ketchup for it to be palatable, but a parent only has so much control over these things. 

So I wish Beaver ketchup good luck in targeting ketchup renegades such as me. It’s good to shake things up.

In other ketchup news, Heinz has new ketchup packets (you heard it from me last!) Watch this boring video to check it out. More importantly, there has been some scuttlebutt about Heinz introducing a new, reduced-sodium ketchup. This has public health advocates smiling and cranky food libertarians scowling. To those who cry “don’t touch my ketchup, you effing Nazis,” I say: stick an apple in your pie hole and worry about more important things. Like how our pseudo-socialized health care system of the future will probably fail to address a national hypertension epidemic. Dear America, ketchup is a sometimes food.

[Comments]

Testing Tamales, a.k.a. A Huge Mess

May 26, 2010

(That's not my dog, and those are not my tamales. But so cute!)

By noon, the giant stockpot, 6-quart pressure cooker, 5.5-quart Dutch oven, three hefty stainless steel bowls, a colander, numerous spoons, spatulas, measuring cups, plates, forks, and baking sheets were dirty or in the process or becoming dirty. I’d soiled a Cuisinart with chilies and caked the edges of a heavy-duty Kitchen Aid with white crumbles of masa, both dried and fresh. Three sodden tea towels lay splayed at various locations along the countertop; two timers ticked away, and my hair, unbrushed, was tied back with a blotchy red doo-rag. Red freckles of chilie sauce speckled the stove and the faucet was inaccessible, thanks to a wobbly stack of pans and pots.

I’d been at it since 6:45 am. It’s a lot of work to make a hundred or so tamales with an assortment of fillings in a single day.

The latest cover story is a wonderfully extensive how-to of home tamale-making by Ivy Manning. I've tested a lot of her recipes, and they are almost always solid and delicious (these in particular, by the way). Ivy’s slant is that tamales are labor-intensive and quite involved, so why not enlist a bunch of friends and turn it into a party? At the end of the day you have scores of tamales and, ideally, a head full of meaty conversations and a good Negra Modelo buzz going on. The photos that go with the story are darling; you'll find yourself wanting to throw a tamale party this very weekend.

I, however, was not having a party. I was testing Ivy’s recipes, with no photogenic friends along for the ride. Usually I test Oregonian recipes in the test kitchen there at the paper’s building, but a strange handful of reasons it made more sense for me to make the tamales at home.

This means I was alone—no friends, no chips and salsa, no laughing. Just me, NPR, and an explosion of kitchen gear. Ultimately, that is what recipe testing is all about: managing a mess. When there’s no one to clean up after you, you have to clean up after yourself. So the above is a bit of an exaggeration; I’d been washing, drying, and stowing away dishes as I dirtied them. But the kitchen still felt like chaos. The recipe printouts I was taking notes on were damp and crinkled, and my green pen was in a different spot every three minutes, it seemed.

The last time I’d made tamales was in cooking school, a decade earlier. Nick, a Mexican classmate, and I were partnered up in our Experimental Kitchen class to make tamales using different types of fat. Best! Experiment! Ever! We rendered our own lard and nabbed duck fat from the charcuterie class. After comparing tamales made with butter, lard, duck fat, and shortening, the results were as follows: Nick made really effing good tamales, and the duck fat ones were especially orgasmic.

But we’d made a tiny handful of each type, perhaps a dozen tamales in all, and we had each other plus a dishwasher to tackle the project. I was flying solo in my barely adequate home kitchen, battling a bad case of working mom guilt—Frances was at the sitter, and it felt weird to be on a cooking bonanza in my own kitchen without her there, though I can’t imagine how I’d have tackled the tamales, spackle-y hands and all, with a baby in a sling.

I never turn down a chance to test recipes, though. It’s rewarding work, and I love being behind the scenes of a publication coming together.

They were very tasty in the end. I dried the last dish around four in the afternoon, picked Frances up from the sitter, and together we took tamale samples to the Oregonian for my editor to try. We picked Joe up from work, came home, and after a relaxing family walk, sat down to a big, honkin’ tamale dinner. The ones made with fresh masa rocked. I’d even prepared a garnish salad with orange, radish, cilantro, shredded romaine, and lime juice. Tamales are heavy-duty eating, and a zippy little salad is a necessity to have a well-rounded meal.

The day before, I’d gone on a shopping trip with Frances to a Mexican market way out east, where Portland borders Gresham. It was in an unassuming strip mall; the place was a bit ramshackle, somewhat dark with a deli and steam table setup tucked in the back. They had three shopping carts: one from Fred Meyer, one from Safeway, and one from Target. I got to bust out my horrendous Spanish and ask a lady behind the meat counter if they had masa fresca.

“Puro or preparado?” she asked. Her hands and arms were submerged up to the elbow in a big tub of gloppy white stuff, and I realized she was mixing tamale dough at that very moment.

I took my masa home and performed the same task the next day. One caveat: if you’re gonna go to the Mexican market to pick up fresh masa, why not go the whole nine yards and get fresh lard, too? The recipes I’d tested called for a mix of shortening and butter (Ivy Manning’s husband is vegetarian, so she needs a tamale dough that’s veg-friendly). Fine, but if I’m going through the trouble of mixing my own dough, I’ll go with good, fresh pig fat.

These are times when playa-hating attacks, and I think, "Why doesn't anyone like me? Why can't I be a successful food writer in Bon Appetit who has a pretty website? Why don't I have a story about a party at my house with an awesome photo spread?" The answer is that I didn't ask to have a story about a party at my house with an awesome photo spread. Why should I care, anyway? I got to make a bunch of tamales in my house and get paid for it. That's pretty cool.       

[Comments]

Veal-y Good

May 25, 2010

A number of months ago, a representative of Strauss Brands, who raise veal and lamb, contacted me and asked if I’d like to sample their veal hot dogs. I said yes, because: hot dogs.

So it was like Christmas in April when a huge cooler arrived at our doorstep, packed to the gills with free-raised dead little cows. It was not simply hot dogs that arrived in the box. Veal chops, veal scaloppine, and a gigantic assortment of veal sausages: hot dog, ring bologna, breakfast links, bratwurst, kielbasa, and some short links that look like hot dogs but I think are something else.

Can this girl’s affections be so easily plied with a gigantic box of top-quality meat? Um, yes. We froze a few of the sausages, as the sheer scale of the veal bounty was too dizzying for the moment. The brats and breakfast sausages (still in development) were my favorite of the sausages—especially the bratwurst, which made me reconsider the delight of the most Midwestern of sausages.

But it was the pair of generous veal rib chops that won my heart. I recall them being frenched, with the bits of flesh on either side of the rib’s end scraped off to reveal an elegant bone. Frenching a chop might seem fussy, but I enjoy how it exaggerates how gargantuan the meat of the thing is, as if it were a practical joke or a stage prop.

Dining on a big slab of animal protein goes against my sausagetarian code; when I do eat non-sausage meat, usually it’s used frugally, as part of a medly of flavors. But I was incredibly excited about those veal chops, fueled by the memory of a multi-course dinner years ago, when I was in cooking school. I was on a winning team of a culinary jeopardy tournament, and the prize was a lovely summer meal at the home of one of our chef-instructors. For the main course, he served us grilled veal chops. The experience (which also introduced me to the pleasures of Lillet Blanc served over ice with an orange wedge) so wiped us out that my boyfriend and I were forced to take a nap afterwards in a summery evocation of the post-Thanksgiving ritual.

There’s no need to frame veal chops with an elaborate meal. In fact, it’s probably best not to; why not let the chops speak for themselves? I’d forgotten how splendid a good piece of meat is, and that veal isn’t just light-colored beef. The veal chops were savory and succulent coming off the grill, their juices mingling with the olive oil, lemon zest, garlic, and rosemary I’d rubbed onto them prior to subjecting them to the inconsistent flames of our rickety backyard grill. We’d just moved and hadn’t made a grocery run in a bit, so we rounded out our plates with what was on hand: buttered noodles and salad, a very Betty Crocker circa 1962 three-point-landing presentation. I figured we’d each not be able to finish our respective chops, but they were so incredibly edible that we threw caution to the winds and celebrated the vealy bounty while it was good and fresh. Once again, appetite trumped photo op; no photographic record exists of the event. Just happy taste memories.

I think I’m going to make good veal chops a semi-annual treat. They’re all too easy to fix, and a lovely change of pace from the leathery tri-tip we sometimes cook up for our patio summer al frescos.       

Veal Rib Chops with Garlic, Lemon, and Rosemary

Veal chops are for broiling, or, better yet, grilling. They don’t need much gussying up, outside of plenty of good salt, but I can’t resist gracing them with lemon zest. You can omit any ingredient from the garlic-rosemary-lemon treatment, but I enjoy its triangular appeal.

Allow one chop per greedy person. About twenty minutes before grilling, remove the chops from the refrigerator. Season them generously with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Then slather them with olive oil and generous amounts of lemon zest, chopped garlic, and chopped fresh rosemary. (You can do this whole seasoning step a few hours in advance. But for good, even cooking, still remember to take the chops from the fridge and let them come to temperature before you subject them to the grill).

Even on our pathetic mess of a third-hand gas grill it’s hard to screw these up. Grill the chops over a medium-high flame until they reach the desired doneness. I like mine medium-rare, which will feel firm with just a hint of squishiness of you poke the middle of the chop with your finger.  

Let the chops rest for a few minutes before you get all caveman on them. Serve with some roasted fingerling potatoes and fat asparagus spears and you’re set.

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