I wanted to go over to KGB tonight and listen to Mark Kurlansky read about oysters over a glass of red wine in a red-painted room. But that would have meant getting Manhattan-presentable: the pointy boots, the non-saggy jeans, something besides the big charcoal sweater of K.'s that I've been living (and sleeping) in for the past week or so. Comb my hair, brush my teeth, put on lipstick, walk to the subway, buy yet another Metrocard, tromp along the buzzing East Village streets: I had planned to do all these things. But then it was 7 o'clock and I was still reading the story about Jehovah's Witnesses in the latest issue of the Oxford American, eating grits with smoked paprika, garlic and broccoli and again, not being able to leave the house. It's winter hibernation.
So then I was trying to salvage the evening by working on a new book idea, going through some old work to see if anything's worth filching (since it's not plagarism if you steal from yourself). Ranging through an old column about gay-pride week (or month, if you live in San Francisco), I found paens to the Go-gos, a description of girls wading through the amber afternoon as if they'd been dipped in butterscotch, and then, right after the part about letting the blueberry muffins cool in the pan for a few minutes before slathering them with the butter, the words
Cannibal
Obsession
appeared stacked one on top of another, apropos of absolutely nothing.
This is why I don't take drugs.
Now, this column--about lady-lovin' and the joys of morning-after blueberry muffins--actually ran in the Bay Guardian some seven years ago or so, and I'm sure there was nothing about cannibals in there. I don't have an obsession with cannibals, and I would think, given their tastes, that blueberry muffins would be low on the list of obsessions for actual cannibals themselves. I'm a little thrown, to say the least.
****
And speaking of obsessions, I feel kind of bad now for slagging so hard on that oil-based hamentaschen recipe. While they did taste pretty blah fresh out of the oven, those cookies got magically better after sitting around a while. I added a few drips of lemon extract to the batter before I baked a second batch, and they taste surprisingly good with a cup of tea, three days later. So maybe these would be the hament. of choice for mailing long distances, as long as you upped the lemon/orange rind quotient and added a little lemon extract too. I still think the texture of the dough is way too slick, so an oil-reduction experiment is in order before I post the recipe.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Monday, March 06, 2006
Ours is not to question why...
...platinum-topped, hottie butch pastry chef Elizabeth Faulkner of Citizen Cake is going hand-in-meringue with the Tourism Australia to fill San Francisco's Union Square with the world's largest pavlova--largest, presumably, only because it has never crossed anyone else's mind to make a pavlova bigger than their head. Still, if anyone's working downtown and has a camera, please snap a picture for the Pie Queen.
World's Biggest Pavlova
Tuesday 3/7/06
1:30-3pm
Union Square, SF
...to be followed by a chocolate tasting at Citizen Cupcake (on the 3rd floor of the Virgin Megastore at Stockton and Market) from 3-5pm.
Any thoughts from Esther and the other Aussies out there on this example of west coast/down under mind-meld?
And on the comparatively sober East Coast, a food-themed reading at the sexy KGB Bar on Tuesday, March 7. Readers are Mark Kurlansky, a man who likes to think long and hard about one thing. His unlikely best seller Cod: A History of the Fish that Changed the World set off a swarm of copycat single-subject tomes on everything from dirt to air. He's back with The Big Oyster: History of the Half Shell, a New York-centric history of Diamond Jim Brady's favorite bivalve, from which he'll be reading tonight. He'll be joined by Gabriella Gershenson from the New York Press.
KGB Bar
85 E. 4th St, second floor
7-9pm
3/7/06
Free, but bring cash for cocktails, and buy the Pie Queen a drink while you're there.
World's Biggest Pavlova
Tuesday 3/7/06
1:30-3pm
Union Square, SF
...to be followed by a chocolate tasting at Citizen Cupcake (on the 3rd floor of the Virgin Megastore at Stockton and Market) from 3-5pm.
Any thoughts from Esther and the other Aussies out there on this example of west coast/down under mind-meld?
And on the comparatively sober East Coast, a food-themed reading at the sexy KGB Bar on Tuesday, March 7. Readers are Mark Kurlansky, a man who likes to think long and hard about one thing. His unlikely best seller Cod: A History of the Fish that Changed the World set off a swarm of copycat single-subject tomes on everything from dirt to air. He's back with The Big Oyster: History of the Half Shell, a New York-centric history of Diamond Jim Brady's favorite bivalve, from which he'll be reading tonight. He'll be joined by Gabriella Gershenson from the New York Press.
KGB Bar
85 E. 4th St, second floor
7-9pm
3/7/06
Free, but bring cash for cocktails, and buy the Pie Queen a drink while you're there.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
The Quest for Hamentaschen, Part 2
The Hamentaschen-A-Rama, chez Pie Queen, has hit a snag! Marcy Goldman, usually so reliable, really screwed the pooch with her recipe for Bubbe's Oil-and-Orange cookies, made with vegetable oil instead of butter. The dough was slick and mushy, way too wet to roll out even after several hours in the fridge. When patted out and baked, it turned out bready and bland. Worst of all, it made vast quantities of dough. I hate wasting my great fillings on such a dull wrapper, which means, APO mailing be damned, I'm going to make another buttery batch of Susan's HamenT. to send to K.
Until then, I'll be staying warm in bed with my hot-water bottle, snug in its little knitted cozy. If you (or your sleeping partner) has perpetual icicle feet, this is the answer. No more ice cube feet! The water bottle alone is not enough; it may be warm, but it feels medicinal and rubbery, not what you want in your bed. (Not like that, anyway.) What you want to do is rummage through your yarn stash and pull out any abandoned half-balls of orphaned yarn. All you need to do is knit up two rectangles (keeping in mind that the bottle will plump out when it's filled), with some way of tightening the top around the neck. I knitted in a few holes a couple inches below the top, then wove in a braided strand of yarn. Mine is mostly blue, with a pink square on one side where the blue yarn ran out. On a chilly night, it's like having a kitty sleeping on your feet--a kitty that doesn't mind being shoved down under the covers at the foot of your bed, and who'll never crawl up and start meowing fish breath in your face at 6am. Dorky? Yes. But in a sweetly demented English way--and keep in mind I got this idea from the posh shops in Notting Hill, where the pink cashmere bottle covers with cute red hearts knitted into the front had 50-pound price tags. When your feet are toasty, all's right with the world.
Until then, I'll be staying warm in bed with my hot-water bottle, snug in its little knitted cozy. If you (or your sleeping partner) has perpetual icicle feet, this is the answer. No more ice cube feet! The water bottle alone is not enough; it may be warm, but it feels medicinal and rubbery, not what you want in your bed. (Not like that, anyway.) What you want to do is rummage through your yarn stash and pull out any abandoned half-balls of orphaned yarn. All you need to do is knit up two rectangles (keeping in mind that the bottle will plump out when it's filled), with some way of tightening the top around the neck. I knitted in a few holes a couple inches below the top, then wove in a braided strand of yarn. Mine is mostly blue, with a pink square on one side where the blue yarn ran out. On a chilly night, it's like having a kitty sleeping on your feet--a kitty that doesn't mind being shoved down under the covers at the foot of your bed, and who'll never crawl up and start meowing fish breath in your face at 6am. Dorky? Yes. But in a sweetly demented English way--and keep in mind I got this idea from the posh shops in Notting Hill, where the pink cashmere bottle covers with cute red hearts knitted into the front had 50-pound price tags. When your feet are toasty, all's right with the world.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
The Quest for Hamentaschen, Part 1
Clouds so swift and rain falling in...
The first entry in this year's Hamentaschen Sweeps comes from Raymond Sokolov's The Jewish American Kitchen. (Actually, according to the credits on the cover, Susan Friedland did the recipes for this book, so we'll say thanks to Susan first. Thanks, Susan!) The ingredient list may look like every other cookie dough on the planet, but check out the method. Instead of creaming the butter and sugar, adding the eggs, then stirring in the flour, this dough is made like a rich tart pastry. The butter is cut into the flour, then the eggs and lemon rind are stirred in to make a soft, rich dough.
Now, the caveats. Even though I chilled the dough very well, it was really, really sticky when I went to roll it out. If this happens to you too, be sure to flour your counter really well. I tossed some flour over a sheet of wax paper, sprinkled a little more flour over the dough, then topped with another piece of paper. This solved the rolling problem, but the dough was still so soft it was hard to cut out. I pretty much had to imprint circles on the dough, scrape them off the paper with a spatula, sprinkle each one with flour, then hand-pat the crumpled dough wads into more-or-less even circles. But once baked, they looked cute and were so buttery-lemony and delicious that any amount of fuss was worth it.
And a question: has anyone ever had yeast-raised hamentaschen? Presumably, these pre-date the chemically-leavened ones we're familiar with today. I've never had them, but recipes (usually for a brioche-style dough enriched with milk, butter, and eggs) turn up in many books; they sound like a wonderful breakfast treat.
Susan's Hamentaschen
2 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar (can increase if you like a sweeter cookie, to 2/3 cup)
1 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
1/2 cup (4 oz/1 stick) cold butter, cut into cubes
2 eggs, beaten
2 tsp finely grated lemon rind
Apricot and/or prune filling (see below)
Egg wash (1 egg beaten with 1 TB water)
Sift or whisk flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt together. Cut in cold butter as if making pastry, using a food processor or a pastry blender. Dough should look pebbly. Pour beaten egg into a measuring cup or small pitcher and add to flour mixture a little at a time. Mix and add egg until a soft dough is formed. You may not need all the egg; you want your dough to hold together well but not be so moist you can't roll it out. Mix in lemon rind. Form into a ball, wrap tightly and chill well--at least several hours or overnight.
Preheat oven to 350 F. Roll out dough on a well-floured board or between two pieces of wax paper--it should be a little thicker than you'd use for pie pastry. Using a glass or a biscuit cutter, cut dough into 2- to 3-inch circles. Lift circles onto an ungreased baking sheet. Scoop a dab of apricot or prune filling onto each circle, then fold sides in and bottom up to form a triangle with a small peek of filling showing in the center. Using a pastry brush, brush dough lightly with egg wash. Bake 15-20 minutes, until pale golden brown. Let cool on a rack, keeping in mind that filling is VERY hot when first removed from the oven. They are delicious warm, but give that filling a little time to cool off first. Makes around 20-30 cookies, depending on size.
Apricot Filling
Why this, and not jam? Because jam is way too wet, and will make your cookies soggy.
7 oz. apricot paste (available in Middle Eastern grocery stores)
1/8 cup lemon juice
1/8 cup orange juice
scant 1/4 cup sugar
1 cup golden raisins
Pull apricot paste into pieces. Put pieces into a small, heavy-bottomed pot with juices, sugar, and raisins. Simmer over very low heat for 10-12 minutes, until apricot paste is softened and raisins are plump. Stir frequently to keep from scorching. Remove from heat, let cool for 10 minutes, then puree. This makes enough for several batches of cookies, with some left over for toast. Kept in a covered jar in the fridge, it lasts a very long time.
Prune Filling
2 cups pitted prunes
1 cup raisins
1/3 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup orange juice
1/2 cup water
1/4 tsp cinnamon
Mix ingredients in small, heavy-bottomed pot. Follow instructions, above, cooking until prunes are softened and raisins are plumped. Cool and puree as above.
The first entry in this year's Hamentaschen Sweeps comes from Raymond Sokolov's The Jewish American Kitchen. (Actually, according to the credits on the cover, Susan Friedland did the recipes for this book, so we'll say thanks to Susan first. Thanks, Susan!) The ingredient list may look like every other cookie dough on the planet, but check out the method. Instead of creaming the butter and sugar, adding the eggs, then stirring in the flour, this dough is made like a rich tart pastry. The butter is cut into the flour, then the eggs and lemon rind are stirred in to make a soft, rich dough.
Now, the caveats. Even though I chilled the dough very well, it was really, really sticky when I went to roll it out. If this happens to you too, be sure to flour your counter really well. I tossed some flour over a sheet of wax paper, sprinkled a little more flour over the dough, then topped with another piece of paper. This solved the rolling problem, but the dough was still so soft it was hard to cut out. I pretty much had to imprint circles on the dough, scrape them off the paper with a spatula, sprinkle each one with flour, then hand-pat the crumpled dough wads into more-or-less even circles. But once baked, they looked cute and were so buttery-lemony and delicious that any amount of fuss was worth it.
And a question: has anyone ever had yeast-raised hamentaschen? Presumably, these pre-date the chemically-leavened ones we're familiar with today. I've never had them, but recipes (usually for a brioche-style dough enriched with milk, butter, and eggs) turn up in many books; they sound like a wonderful breakfast treat.
Susan's Hamentaschen
2 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar (can increase if you like a sweeter cookie, to 2/3 cup)
1 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
1/2 cup (4 oz/1 stick) cold butter, cut into cubes
2 eggs, beaten
2 tsp finely grated lemon rind
Apricot and/or prune filling (see below)
Egg wash (1 egg beaten with 1 TB water)
Sift or whisk flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt together. Cut in cold butter as if making pastry, using a food processor or a pastry blender. Dough should look pebbly. Pour beaten egg into a measuring cup or small pitcher and add to flour mixture a little at a time. Mix and add egg until a soft dough is formed. You may not need all the egg; you want your dough to hold together well but not be so moist you can't roll it out. Mix in lemon rind. Form into a ball, wrap tightly and chill well--at least several hours or overnight.
Preheat oven to 350 F. Roll out dough on a well-floured board or between two pieces of wax paper--it should be a little thicker than you'd use for pie pastry. Using a glass or a biscuit cutter, cut dough into 2- to 3-inch circles. Lift circles onto an ungreased baking sheet. Scoop a dab of apricot or prune filling onto each circle, then fold sides in and bottom up to form a triangle with a small peek of filling showing in the center. Using a pastry brush, brush dough lightly with egg wash. Bake 15-20 minutes, until pale golden brown. Let cool on a rack, keeping in mind that filling is VERY hot when first removed from the oven. They are delicious warm, but give that filling a little time to cool off first. Makes around 20-30 cookies, depending on size.
Apricot Filling
Why this, and not jam? Because jam is way too wet, and will make your cookies soggy.
7 oz. apricot paste (available in Middle Eastern grocery stores)
1/8 cup lemon juice
1/8 cup orange juice
scant 1/4 cup sugar
1 cup golden raisins
Pull apricot paste into pieces. Put pieces into a small, heavy-bottomed pot with juices, sugar, and raisins. Simmer over very low heat for 10-12 minutes, until apricot paste is softened and raisins are plump. Stir frequently to keep from scorching. Remove from heat, let cool for 10 minutes, then puree. This makes enough for several batches of cookies, with some left over for toast. Kept in a covered jar in the fridge, it lasts a very long time.
Prune Filling
2 cups pitted prunes
1 cup raisins
1/3 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup orange juice
1/2 cup water
1/4 tsp cinnamon
Mix ingredients in small, heavy-bottomed pot. Follow instructions, above, cooking until prunes are softened and raisins are plumped. Cool and puree as above.
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Upsy Daisy
Returning from three days of snow and lake-whipped winds up in Rochester, it actually came as a complete surprise that today is, in fact, March first. As in coming in like a lion, going out like a lamb. As in, next door to April. As in, nearly spring!
Of course, reading the posts I was writing last year at this time, there should be plenty of chilly, wet, and generally filthy weather ahead before we get to the sticky little leaves of spring and the hordes of nodding daffodils and all that. But still--not February, March! And there are lots of things to look forward to, to wit:
First Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum, Sat. March 4, 5-11pm. The museum gets shaking to a Cajun/Brazilian beat this Saturday, with live music, samba lessons, Cajun storytelling and performance, art projects for kids, tours of the museum, and more. I seem to remember plastic cups of red wine in here, too. Really fun, FREE, and filled with a roaming cross-section of happy Brooklynites.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden's 25th Annual Making Brooklyn Bloom, a day of lectures, panels, and workshops, is happening on Sat. March 11, from 10am to 4pm. This year, the theme is Keeping It Fresh! City Gardeners Grow Food--a subject always close to my country-yearning heart. The workshops will cover all kinds of cool stuff, from container gardening for fruits and vegetables to an agricultural history of New York City. Plus canning! Show up at the Palm House at 10am for coffee and registration.
Trader Joe's, opening March 17th (according to the Post, and what, you'd doubt them?) next to PC Richards at 14th St and 3rd Ave in Manhattan. Oh joy. Will they be as good and as cheap as they are in San Francisco? I don't need to take the enamel off my teeth with 2 Buck Chuck, but their house-brand dried fruits and nuts, their juices, their wine and cheese and crackers and pantry staples--they're all good.
And on March 13 and 14, Purim! Which means--hamentaschen!! (My religious affiliation? Baking Jew.) There's a recipe here from last year (look in the archives under "Queen Esther", 3/23/05) that's always worth making, especially if you go to Sahadi's on Atlantic Avenue, get a little cellophane-wrapped packet of apricot paste (they're to the right of the main door, on the lower shelf) plus some prunes and raisins from the bulk jars, and make your own tasty lekvars.
Happy as I've been with my usual recipe (from Marcy Goldman's excellent book, A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking) still I yearn for that one true best-ever hamentaschen. Right now I've got a very simple, pastry-style dough chilling in the fridge, with prune and apricot fillings cooling on the counter. Will report back and post the recipe, if it's tasty. Next up: Goldman's orange-and-oil (no butter) version, which I'm hoping might survive the 10-day trip to K. better than a typical butter cookie. Are there many Jews out there on the base? Probably not, I'm guessing, but you never know. Might just have to throw in a couple of noisemakers, just in case.
Of course, reading the posts I was writing last year at this time, there should be plenty of chilly, wet, and generally filthy weather ahead before we get to the sticky little leaves of spring and the hordes of nodding daffodils and all that. But still--not February, March! And there are lots of things to look forward to, to wit:
First Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum, Sat. March 4, 5-11pm. The museum gets shaking to a Cajun/Brazilian beat this Saturday, with live music, samba lessons, Cajun storytelling and performance, art projects for kids, tours of the museum, and more. I seem to remember plastic cups of red wine in here, too. Really fun, FREE, and filled with a roaming cross-section of happy Brooklynites.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden's 25th Annual Making Brooklyn Bloom, a day of lectures, panels, and workshops, is happening on Sat. March 11, from 10am to 4pm. This year, the theme is Keeping It Fresh! City Gardeners Grow Food--a subject always close to my country-yearning heart. The workshops will cover all kinds of cool stuff, from container gardening for fruits and vegetables to an agricultural history of New York City. Plus canning! Show up at the Palm House at 10am for coffee and registration.
Trader Joe's, opening March 17th (according to the Post, and what, you'd doubt them?) next to PC Richards at 14th St and 3rd Ave in Manhattan. Oh joy. Will they be as good and as cheap as they are in San Francisco? I don't need to take the enamel off my teeth with 2 Buck Chuck, but their house-brand dried fruits and nuts, their juices, their wine and cheese and crackers and pantry staples--they're all good.
And on March 13 and 14, Purim! Which means--hamentaschen!! (My religious affiliation? Baking Jew.) There's a recipe here from last year (look in the archives under "Queen Esther", 3/23/05) that's always worth making, especially if you go to Sahadi's on Atlantic Avenue, get a little cellophane-wrapped packet of apricot paste (they're to the right of the main door, on the lower shelf) plus some prunes and raisins from the bulk jars, and make your own tasty lekvars.
Happy as I've been with my usual recipe (from Marcy Goldman's excellent book, A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking) still I yearn for that one true best-ever hamentaschen. Right now I've got a very simple, pastry-style dough chilling in the fridge, with prune and apricot fillings cooling on the counter. Will report back and post the recipe, if it's tasty. Next up: Goldman's orange-and-oil (no butter) version, which I'm hoping might survive the 10-day trip to K. better than a typical butter cookie. Are there many Jews out there on the base? Probably not, I'm guessing, but you never know. Might just have to throw in a couple of noisemakers, just in case.
Monday, February 20, 2006
Cheesecake and Biscotti
Having spent many formative hours in New Jersey diners, gazing at the rotating cake displays, perusing the endless offerings of the laminated menus (despite the fact that anyone knows the only things to get at a diner are breakfast, burgers, and Greek salad) and drinking endless cups of washy coffee, I'll always have a fondness for cheesecake, especially the kind with enormous aspic-gelled strawberries or goopy cherries on top. Eating cheesecake at diners is what you do in Jersey in high school when your best friend has a car and you're too young to go to bars.
And hot coffee and last night's cheesecake eaten cold straight from the fridge is still the best breakfast ever.
All this to say that cheesecake is diner or suburban-bakery food to me--I don't know that I've ever baked one. But now that my phone number is just two reversed numbers away from Junior's, the mythical cheesecake place on Flatbush, I get a lot of calls from acolytes seeking cheesecake. Perhaps I could make my fortune keeping them on the line long enough to order a cheesecake from me instead of the production line in Fort Greene. It's a thought...would you buy a cheesecake from the Pie Queen?
Also in very local news, I'll be subletting my apartment this June, when I go off to Arkansas to cook and write. So if you know a swell, responsible, NONSMOKING person who will be kind to my stuff and my neighbors for a month, let me know.
What I have been making this week: not cheesecake, but chocolate biscotti. The first round was baked for last week's pre-snow dinner party, to accompany the ginger-poached pears made in lieu of Nora Ephron's elusive caramelized baked pears. These were quite tasty, peeled and poached in a syrup of sweet white wine, water, sugar, lemon, cloves, and candied ginger, with the syrup strained and cooked down and then ladled over the cooling pears so it formed a softish gingery jelly. For the biscotti, I used the delectable-sounding and rich recipe from the Missouri baker/sheepherder who posts over at Farmgirl Fare, adding toasted hazelnuts and a bit of espresso powder. They were nice, but not as chocolate-y as the recipe (which calls for 4 ounces of bittersweet chocolate plus 1/2 cup of cocoa powder) might lead you to believe. And they crumbled mightily during the cutting and rebaking process, although this may have been the fault of my blast-furnace oven.
Up next: the chocolate-pistachio version in December's Food & Wine. Ahhh--these are tasty, even though they were, if possible, even more insanely crumbly. But the crumbly bits, as everyone knows, contain no calories, and so may be eaten with abandon. Note that the method is really strange, but works. You may need to add a teaspoon or two of water to make the dough hold together enough to press into logs. The bright-green pistachios look really sci-fi and cool against the dark cookies.
Chocolate Pistachio Biscotti
Whisk together:
2 cups flour
3/4 cup dutched cocoa (such as Droste)
1/2 tsp baking soda
pinch of salt
Using a hand-held or stand up mixer, beat in 3 eggs to make a crumbly dough. In a separate bowl, cream:
1 1/4 cups brown sugar, packed
4 tablespoons soft butter
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 tsp almond extract
1 tablespoon strong coffee or espresso (fine to use espresso powder and water)
Now scrape butter mixture into flour-and-egg dough, and mix til you get a soft, crumbly dough. Stir in 1 cup chopped pistachios and 1 cup chocolate chips. Add a few drops of water if necessary. Form into logs about 2 inches wide and 3/4 inch high. Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes, until tops are set and springy when pressed. Let cool on racks for an hour or so. Slice each log into skinny slices and place on cut sides on baking sheets. Bake for another 30 minutes (or until firm and crunchy) at 200 degrees, flipping cookies over halfway through. Let cool and store in airtight container.
*****
Today's obsession: knitting the "kitty-ears" hat from Debbie Stoller's book Stitch and Bitch. So far, I've done everything BUT the kitty ears, and have a very cute pink-and-white, vaguely Heidi-looking hat, with earflaps and long cords hanging down off the flaps, ending in puffy little pom poms. The question now: do I add the kitty ears to the top? 1. YES, so witty! so cute! 2. NO, you will look insane. your thoughts?
And hot coffee and last night's cheesecake eaten cold straight from the fridge is still the best breakfast ever.
All this to say that cheesecake is diner or suburban-bakery food to me--I don't know that I've ever baked one. But now that my phone number is just two reversed numbers away from Junior's, the mythical cheesecake place on Flatbush, I get a lot of calls from acolytes seeking cheesecake. Perhaps I could make my fortune keeping them on the line long enough to order a cheesecake from me instead of the production line in Fort Greene. It's a thought...would you buy a cheesecake from the Pie Queen?
Also in very local news, I'll be subletting my apartment this June, when I go off to Arkansas to cook and write. So if you know a swell, responsible, NONSMOKING person who will be kind to my stuff and my neighbors for a month, let me know.
What I have been making this week: not cheesecake, but chocolate biscotti. The first round was baked for last week's pre-snow dinner party, to accompany the ginger-poached pears made in lieu of Nora Ephron's elusive caramelized baked pears. These were quite tasty, peeled and poached in a syrup of sweet white wine, water, sugar, lemon, cloves, and candied ginger, with the syrup strained and cooked down and then ladled over the cooling pears so it formed a softish gingery jelly. For the biscotti, I used the delectable-sounding and rich recipe from the Missouri baker/sheepherder who posts over at Farmgirl Fare, adding toasted hazelnuts and a bit of espresso powder. They were nice, but not as chocolate-y as the recipe (which calls for 4 ounces of bittersweet chocolate plus 1/2 cup of cocoa powder) might lead you to believe. And they crumbled mightily during the cutting and rebaking process, although this may have been the fault of my blast-furnace oven.
Up next: the chocolate-pistachio version in December's Food & Wine. Ahhh--these are tasty, even though they were, if possible, even more insanely crumbly. But the crumbly bits, as everyone knows, contain no calories, and so may be eaten with abandon. Note that the method is really strange, but works. You may need to add a teaspoon or two of water to make the dough hold together enough to press into logs. The bright-green pistachios look really sci-fi and cool against the dark cookies.
Chocolate Pistachio Biscotti
Whisk together:
2 cups flour
3/4 cup dutched cocoa (such as Droste)
1/2 tsp baking soda
pinch of salt
Using a hand-held or stand up mixer, beat in 3 eggs to make a crumbly dough. In a separate bowl, cream:
1 1/4 cups brown sugar, packed
4 tablespoons soft butter
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 tsp almond extract
1 tablespoon strong coffee or espresso (fine to use espresso powder and water)
Now scrape butter mixture into flour-and-egg dough, and mix til you get a soft, crumbly dough. Stir in 1 cup chopped pistachios and 1 cup chocolate chips. Add a few drops of water if necessary. Form into logs about 2 inches wide and 3/4 inch high. Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes, until tops are set and springy when pressed. Let cool on racks for an hour or so. Slice each log into skinny slices and place on cut sides on baking sheets. Bake for another 30 minutes (or until firm and crunchy) at 200 degrees, flipping cookies over halfway through. Let cool and store in airtight container.
*****
Today's obsession: knitting the "kitty-ears" hat from Debbie Stoller's book Stitch and Bitch. So far, I've done everything BUT the kitty ears, and have a very cute pink-and-white, vaguely Heidi-looking hat, with earflaps and long cords hanging down off the flaps, ending in puffy little pom poms. The question now: do I add the kitty ears to the top? 1. YES, so witty! so cute! 2. NO, you will look insane. your thoughts?
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Black Hearts
I have it all planned: first
violent love, then
sweetness.
-Louise Gluck, “Heart’s Desire” from Meadowlands
Hearts and flowers, fluff and frills--who needs 'em? One of the best Valentine's Day parties I know took the St. Valentine's Day Massacre as its theme, and Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" as its black-hearted anthem (hey, it was the late 80s. We were in college, a passle of black-sweatered, clove-smoking artistes finding refuge from our sweatshirted preppy brethren in the ratty mock-tudor environs of Terrace Club. Suicidal Brit pop was required). The dining room was decorated with dozens of shiny red cupids hanging from tiny nooses. Suggested dress was black and red, and all the food was, more or less, black and red. Tiny beet hearts decorated dark green salads; spicy shrimp fra diavolo nestled into licorice-shiny ink-black pasta. Dessert was dark chocolate cake that, when prodded with a fork, released a gush of garnet raspberries --bleeding heart cake! It was bitter, bitter fun.
In the same vein, as it were, is Susie Bright's Eternal Cherry Devotion Pie recipe. “Don’t make this pie if you’re just toying with someone—you’ll be sorry. Don’t make this pie for your lover if you don’t want him or her by your side forever, then moaning at your grave when you’re gone. This is serious stuff.” Involving cognac and fresh black Bing cherries, her recipe is a killer one, and well worth making, even if frozen cherries are all that's available at this time of the year. Since Susie's a pal, I'm going to hold out and not reprint her recipe; trust me, it's well worth the price of her book Mommy’s Little Girl: On Sex, Motherhood, Porn, and Cherry Pie. What I can give you is a different recipe, one you can call Black Heart Tart. It began with an elusive memory of an 17th-century combination dubbed "black tart stuff"* (finally tracked down to one of the last entries in Elizabeth David's collection of essays An Omelette and a Glass of Wine), and fleshed out with a couple of more modern recipes, including the harvest tart from the original Silver Palate cookbook and the winter fruit tart from the wonderful Bay Wolf Cookbook. But mostly I just made it up in the kitchen of someone who made my heart leap on a snowy afternoon years ago.
Thanks to the prunes, raisins, and red wine, the filling really is black, which is cool by itself. But even better is how making it perfumes the house with a deep medieval scent of winter at bay—a whiff of whisky, a breath of ginger and cinnamon, a sparkle of fresh tangerine. And since it's made with dried fruits and citrus, both of which are available in abundance in the wintertime, you don't have to run around buying dopey out-of-season fruit, like those oversized cotton-ball strawberries dipped in squiggles of chocolate wax.
There’s a certain kind of alchemy about steeping the dried fruits in the red wine and spices. As they’re slowly swelling up soft and plump, soaking up the warm wine, the object of your affections can wander in and out of the kitchen, peering over your shoulder as you raid the whisky stash and scent your hands with the peel of a fresh tangerine.
A sweet tart dough, richer and more tender than regular pie crust, works best here. To make it, mix together two and a half cups of flour, a quarter cup sugar, and a half-teaspoon salt. Cut in 12 tablespoons (one and a half sticks, or 6 ounces) of cold butter. Then, instead of the usual ice water, moisten the flour with two egg yolks, one teaspoon vanilla, and three to four teaspoons of water, as needed. Press into a round, wrap in plastic or slide into a zip-lock bag, and chill for several hours while the filling is cooking and cooling.
Black Heart Tart
Filling:
1 large apple, peeled and diced
1 cup each dried apricots and prunes, chopped
1/2 cup raisins
2-3 TB candied orange peel
1 cup red wine
1/4 cup whisky
1/8 tsp each ground cinnamon and ginger
Big pinch of freshly ground pepper
1/2 cup each brown sugar and white sugar, or to taste
Zest and juice of 1 tangerine
1/2 cup toasted walnuts, chopped
Dough for two-crust tart (see above)
In a heavy-bottomed pot, mix all filling ingredients except for the walnuts. Warm over low heat for 15 minutes. Turn off heat and let fruit absorb the rest of the liquid for an hour or so. Add chopped walnuts. Divide the tart dough into two rounds and roll out. Line a tart pan with dough and spoon in filling. Cut remaining dough into strips. Lay strips in a criss-cross pattern to cover most of the filling. As Susie Bright writes, “Yes, you can be crafty and do it so that it is a perfect basket weave. But who cares. It looks totally adorable no matter how you lay the strips down and it’s actually more personal just to make it up yourself.” Chill in the fridge for an hour or so, then bake in a preheated oven at 375 degrees until crust in golden brown and filling is bubbling. Cool and serve with whipped cream.
Songs for Chocolate
1. Passionate Kisses, Lucinda Williams
2. My Doorbell, White Stripes
3. Just like Heaven, The Cure
4. You Ain't Goin' Nowhere, Bob Dylan
5. Brown-Eyed Girl, Van Morrison
6. Langue d'Amour, Laurie Anderson
7. Romeo and Juliet, Sergei Prokofiev
*David's recipe, she writes, "is adapted from a dish evidently popular three hundred years ago in the days of the Stuarts, when a puree of dried prunes, raisins and currants cooked in wine was used as a filling for tarts and pies...It is rich and dark without the cloying and heavy qualities of mincemeat. It has also a certain originality which provides a small surprise at the end of the meal." In her recipe, a half pound of prunes are baked in 1/4 pint of red wine or port and water to cover, in a covered earthenware dish at 300F for 2 to 3 hours, until the fruit is swollen and very soft. During the final hour of cooking, 4 ounces of raisins and 2 ounces of currants are covered with water in a separate dish, covered and baked the same way. Then the prunes are sieved, the raisins are drained and sieved, and the purees are mixed. She suggests serving it well chilled in glasses with a layer of thin pouring cream floated on top and shortbread or ladyfingers alongside.
violent love, then
sweetness.
-Louise Gluck, “Heart’s Desire” from Meadowlands
Hearts and flowers, fluff and frills--who needs 'em? One of the best Valentine's Day parties I know took the St. Valentine's Day Massacre as its theme, and Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" as its black-hearted anthem (hey, it was the late 80s. We were in college, a passle of black-sweatered, clove-smoking artistes finding refuge from our sweatshirted preppy brethren in the ratty mock-tudor environs of Terrace Club. Suicidal Brit pop was required). The dining room was decorated with dozens of shiny red cupids hanging from tiny nooses. Suggested dress was black and red, and all the food was, more or less, black and red. Tiny beet hearts decorated dark green salads; spicy shrimp fra diavolo nestled into licorice-shiny ink-black pasta. Dessert was dark chocolate cake that, when prodded with a fork, released a gush of garnet raspberries --bleeding heart cake! It was bitter, bitter fun.
In the same vein, as it were, is Susie Bright's Eternal Cherry Devotion Pie recipe. “Don’t make this pie if you’re just toying with someone—you’ll be sorry. Don’t make this pie for your lover if you don’t want him or her by your side forever, then moaning at your grave when you’re gone. This is serious stuff.” Involving cognac and fresh black Bing cherries, her recipe is a killer one, and well worth making, even if frozen cherries are all that's available at this time of the year. Since Susie's a pal, I'm going to hold out and not reprint her recipe; trust me, it's well worth the price of her book Mommy’s Little Girl: On Sex, Motherhood, Porn, and Cherry Pie. What I can give you is a different recipe, one you can call Black Heart Tart. It began with an elusive memory of an 17th-century combination dubbed "black tart stuff"* (finally tracked down to one of the last entries in Elizabeth David's collection of essays An Omelette and a Glass of Wine), and fleshed out with a couple of more modern recipes, including the harvest tart from the original Silver Palate cookbook and the winter fruit tart from the wonderful Bay Wolf Cookbook. But mostly I just made it up in the kitchen of someone who made my heart leap on a snowy afternoon years ago.
Thanks to the prunes, raisins, and red wine, the filling really is black, which is cool by itself. But even better is how making it perfumes the house with a deep medieval scent of winter at bay—a whiff of whisky, a breath of ginger and cinnamon, a sparkle of fresh tangerine. And since it's made with dried fruits and citrus, both of which are available in abundance in the wintertime, you don't have to run around buying dopey out-of-season fruit, like those oversized cotton-ball strawberries dipped in squiggles of chocolate wax.
There’s a certain kind of alchemy about steeping the dried fruits in the red wine and spices. As they’re slowly swelling up soft and plump, soaking up the warm wine, the object of your affections can wander in and out of the kitchen, peering over your shoulder as you raid the whisky stash and scent your hands with the peel of a fresh tangerine.
A sweet tart dough, richer and more tender than regular pie crust, works best here. To make it, mix together two and a half cups of flour, a quarter cup sugar, and a half-teaspoon salt. Cut in 12 tablespoons (one and a half sticks, or 6 ounces) of cold butter. Then, instead of the usual ice water, moisten the flour with two egg yolks, one teaspoon vanilla, and three to four teaspoons of water, as needed. Press into a round, wrap in plastic or slide into a zip-lock bag, and chill for several hours while the filling is cooking and cooling.
Black Heart Tart
Filling:
1 large apple, peeled and diced
1 cup each dried apricots and prunes, chopped
1/2 cup raisins
2-3 TB candied orange peel
1 cup red wine
1/4 cup whisky
1/8 tsp each ground cinnamon and ginger
Big pinch of freshly ground pepper
1/2 cup each brown sugar and white sugar, or to taste
Zest and juice of 1 tangerine
1/2 cup toasted walnuts, chopped
Dough for two-crust tart (see above)
In a heavy-bottomed pot, mix all filling ingredients except for the walnuts. Warm over low heat for 15 minutes. Turn off heat and let fruit absorb the rest of the liquid for an hour or so. Add chopped walnuts. Divide the tart dough into two rounds and roll out. Line a tart pan with dough and spoon in filling. Cut remaining dough into strips. Lay strips in a criss-cross pattern to cover most of the filling. As Susie Bright writes, “Yes, you can be crafty and do it so that it is a perfect basket weave. But who cares. It looks totally adorable no matter how you lay the strips down and it’s actually more personal just to make it up yourself.” Chill in the fridge for an hour or so, then bake in a preheated oven at 375 degrees until crust in golden brown and filling is bubbling. Cool and serve with whipped cream.
Songs for Chocolate
1. Passionate Kisses, Lucinda Williams
2. My Doorbell, White Stripes
3. Just like Heaven, The Cure
4. You Ain't Goin' Nowhere, Bob Dylan
5. Brown-Eyed Girl, Van Morrison
6. Langue d'Amour, Laurie Anderson
7. Romeo and Juliet, Sergei Prokofiev
*David's recipe, she writes, "is adapted from a dish evidently popular three hundred years ago in the days of the Stuarts, when a puree of dried prunes, raisins and currants cooked in wine was used as a filling for tarts and pies...It is rich and dark without the cloying and heavy qualities of mincemeat. It has also a certain originality which provides a small surprise at the end of the meal." In her recipe, a half pound of prunes are baked in 1/4 pint of red wine or port and water to cover, in a covered earthenware dish at 300F for 2 to 3 hours, until the fruit is swollen and very soft. During the final hour of cooking, 4 ounces of raisins and 2 ounces of currants are covered with water in a separate dish, covered and baked the same way. Then the prunes are sieved, the raisins are drained and sieved, and the purees are mixed. She suggests serving it well chilled in glasses with a layer of thin pouring cream floated on top and shortbread or ladyfingers alongside.
Monday, February 13, 2006
Snow and Waffles
Wheee! Snow! Woke up Sunday morning to two good things--a call from K. and a marshmallow landscape pillowed high and satin-white. It being 6 AM, I wasn't quite completely awake, but as I lay in bed, I was sure I could hear...thunder?? And see flashes of lightning--in a snowstorm? Well, yes. It's a quirky phenomenon known as thundersnow (which sounds like a 7-year-old's idea of a heavy-metal band name). Unlikely, but it does happen, this time while I was congratulating K. on getting out the circus tents and into her very own plywood hut. Whatever you can build out of scrap lumber and fit into your hut, you can have--an aviary! Bookshelves! An opera house!
Well, back to the snow. After I'd made coffee and fallen back asleep for a while, Jane called from down the street with another good wake-up idea: waffles! This is one of the joys of city living--breakfast with your neighbors, with no need for driving. So I put on my boots and --wearing no less than three hand-knitted garments (a blue-and-white striped hat, a hot-pink scarf, and the years-in-the-making lumpy green sweater)--tromped through the knee-deep snow for Jane's swell homemade waffles scented with vanilla and cardamom. And Irish coffee, because when it's snowing like crazy outside and you only have heavy cream in the house, why not whip it up, get out the sugar and whiskey, and start the day right?
This was followed by hot mulled cider and a little dance down the snowy, windy streets, silent but for the gentle scrape of snow shovels on pavement. And the whine of a snow blower, and the truly annoying screech of a dude riding a red-white-and-blue ATV down Sackett Street... SUVs turned into cliffs; brownstone stairways turned into snowboard runs. And the rest of the afternoon was tea on B.'s couch, with the kitties curled up in front of the fireplace and the speed-skaters in their Power Ranger outfits on TV.
Then home to leftover beef stew (the great joy of a dinner party--a clean house, and leftovers!), and banana pancakes this sunny, snowy morning, adapting from Nigella's Feast cookbook. Much as I love Nigella's writing, I've found her recipes to be singularly untrustworthy. But these pancakes--fluffy, moist, and very light, with a gentle banana flavor--do live up to her promises. As she says, "Whenever I'm trying to be Nice Mummy, instead of normal Bad-Tempered Impatient Mummy, I make pancakes." A good way to use up that solitary blackening banana at the bottom of the fruit bowl, and tossing everything into the blender means almost no clean-up afterwards. Just be sure that the bottom of your blender is screwed on very tight, so you don't get batter leaking all over the place. And if you're at the farmer's market, and someone's selling grade-B maple syrup, buy a bottle and give them a kiss. Grade B is thicker and darker than the usual dark-amber Grade A, with a rich mapley flavor. Just a few swirls will make your pancakes taste like wintertime in Vermont.
Nice Mummy's Banana Pancakes
1 very ripe banana
1 cup buttermilk
1 egg
1 tablespoon vegetable oil or melted butter
1 cup flour--I like a half-and-half mix of whole wheat and buckwheat
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp sugar (optional)
sprinkle of cinnamon or 1/2 tsp vanilla
a small handful of chopped toasted pecans (optional)
Throw banana, buttermilk, egg, and oil in blender, and buzz until mixed. Add dry ingredients, and buzz until just blended. Cook on a lightly greased griddle, and serve with butter and maple syrup.
Well, back to the snow. After I'd made coffee and fallen back asleep for a while, Jane called from down the street with another good wake-up idea: waffles! This is one of the joys of city living--breakfast with your neighbors, with no need for driving. So I put on my boots and --wearing no less than three hand-knitted garments (a blue-and-white striped hat, a hot-pink scarf, and the years-in-the-making lumpy green sweater)--tromped through the knee-deep snow for Jane's swell homemade waffles scented with vanilla and cardamom. And Irish coffee, because when it's snowing like crazy outside and you only have heavy cream in the house, why not whip it up, get out the sugar and whiskey, and start the day right?
This was followed by hot mulled cider and a little dance down the snowy, windy streets, silent but for the gentle scrape of snow shovels on pavement. And the whine of a snow blower, and the truly annoying screech of a dude riding a red-white-and-blue ATV down Sackett Street... SUVs turned into cliffs; brownstone stairways turned into snowboard runs. And the rest of the afternoon was tea on B.'s couch, with the kitties curled up in front of the fireplace and the speed-skaters in their Power Ranger outfits on TV.
Then home to leftover beef stew (the great joy of a dinner party--a clean house, and leftovers!), and banana pancakes this sunny, snowy morning, adapting from Nigella's Feast cookbook. Much as I love Nigella's writing, I've found her recipes to be singularly untrustworthy. But these pancakes--fluffy, moist, and very light, with a gentle banana flavor--do live up to her promises. As she says, "Whenever I'm trying to be Nice Mummy, instead of normal Bad-Tempered Impatient Mummy, I make pancakes." A good way to use up that solitary blackening banana at the bottom of the fruit bowl, and tossing everything into the blender means almost no clean-up afterwards. Just be sure that the bottom of your blender is screwed on very tight, so you don't get batter leaking all over the place. And if you're at the farmer's market, and someone's selling grade-B maple syrup, buy a bottle and give them a kiss. Grade B is thicker and darker than the usual dark-amber Grade A, with a rich mapley flavor. Just a few swirls will make your pancakes taste like wintertime in Vermont.
Nice Mummy's Banana Pancakes
1 very ripe banana
1 cup buttermilk
1 egg
1 tablespoon vegetable oil or melted butter
1 cup flour--I like a half-and-half mix of whole wheat and buckwheat
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp sugar (optional)
sprinkle of cinnamon or 1/2 tsp vanilla
a small handful of chopped toasted pecans (optional)
Throw banana, buttermilk, egg, and oil in blender, and buzz until mixed. Add dry ingredients, and buzz until just blended. Cook on a lightly greased griddle, and serve with butter and maple syrup.
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Narcisse and Nora
Go out right now and get the anniversary double issue of the New Yorker, the one with the classic Eustace Tilly cover. There are lots of goodies inside--Peter Hessler on the life of a Beijing alleyway, Adam Gopnik on the art of the Shakers, Susan Orlean on pigeon racing (possibly the world's most boring sport, though, and even Orlean can't pep it up much), Joan Acocella on the evolution of Mary Magdalene, even a long R. Crumb cartoon. (The fiction slot, alas, goes to yet another squashed-flat Murakami story, although this one does feature an eleventh-hour appearance by a talking monkey, always a plus.)
But the main reason to get this week's issue is Nora Ephron's extremely entertaining personal essay about her life in cookbooks, and the interior dialogues she's had over the years with their authors. Forget the syrupy screenplays; before Ephron started churning out tripe like You've Got Mail, she was a sharp, witty writer and gimlet-eyed observer of 1970s social mores. Any would-be Tom Wolfes should read Crazy Salad, her pungent, snappy book of essays, circa 1976, on everything from Watergate and the Pillsbury Bake-Off to feminine hygiene sprays and Linda Lovelace, which shows up something like David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster for the big ball of tangled knitting it is. (But make sure to track down the original 1976 edition, not the recently reissued version, which omits several of the best essays.)
Her piece has way too many good lines to quote, but I can't resist this: "This was right around the time arugula was discovered, which was followed by endive, which was followed by radicchio, which was followed by frisee, which was followed by the three Ms--mesclun, mache, and microgreens--and that, in a nutshell, is the history of the past 40 years from the point of view of lettuce."
I'm a sucker for snappy prose, as you may have noticed, and I'm also easily swayed when people with whom I have a mental (or actual) friendship tell me--and anyone else reading them--that this book, this recipe, is the best ever. The other night, I was reading Julie Powell's book Julie and Julia and she described making Paul Prudhomme's Spiced Pecan Cake for a famous actor on whom she had a huge, if completely abstract, crush.
Well, the way she wrote about that cake, I wanted to get up and make it right at that very moment, no matter that it was 1 AM and I had neither butter nor pecans, nor any need for a three-layer pecan cake with a frosting that required three sticks of margarine and 8 egg yolks. Ephron does the same thing with a casual mention of a dessert of caramelized baked pears with cream, taken from a little 1960s book called The Flavour of France by Narcisse Chamberlain. She doesn't say much about them, only that they were great and she made them for years. And yet--damn. I want me some of them pears! Since google has been no help in tracking down the recipe, I forsee a trip up to Kitchen Arts and Letters--the best time-waster I know, always in the guise of getting useful information. But two pals are coming over for dinner on Saturday, and I've already thought out a menu of beef bourguignon, green salad, and something with pears for dessert. What could be better than caramelized pears a la Narcisse et Nora?
But the main reason to get this week's issue is Nora Ephron's extremely entertaining personal essay about her life in cookbooks, and the interior dialogues she's had over the years with their authors. Forget the syrupy screenplays; before Ephron started churning out tripe like You've Got Mail, she was a sharp, witty writer and gimlet-eyed observer of 1970s social mores. Any would-be Tom Wolfes should read Crazy Salad, her pungent, snappy book of essays, circa 1976, on everything from Watergate and the Pillsbury Bake-Off to feminine hygiene sprays and Linda Lovelace, which shows up something like David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster for the big ball of tangled knitting it is. (But make sure to track down the original 1976 edition, not the recently reissued version, which omits several of the best essays.)
Her piece has way too many good lines to quote, but I can't resist this: "This was right around the time arugula was discovered, which was followed by endive, which was followed by radicchio, which was followed by frisee, which was followed by the three Ms--mesclun, mache, and microgreens--and that, in a nutshell, is the history of the past 40 years from the point of view of lettuce."
I'm a sucker for snappy prose, as you may have noticed, and I'm also easily swayed when people with whom I have a mental (or actual) friendship tell me--and anyone else reading them--that this book, this recipe, is the best ever. The other night, I was reading Julie Powell's book Julie and Julia and she described making Paul Prudhomme's Spiced Pecan Cake for a famous actor on whom she had a huge, if completely abstract, crush.
Well, the way she wrote about that cake, I wanted to get up and make it right at that very moment, no matter that it was 1 AM and I had neither butter nor pecans, nor any need for a three-layer pecan cake with a frosting that required three sticks of margarine and 8 egg yolks. Ephron does the same thing with a casual mention of a dessert of caramelized baked pears with cream, taken from a little 1960s book called The Flavour of France by Narcisse Chamberlain. She doesn't say much about them, only that they were great and she made them for years. And yet--damn. I want me some of them pears! Since google has been no help in tracking down the recipe, I forsee a trip up to Kitchen Arts and Letters--the best time-waster I know, always in the guise of getting useful information. But two pals are coming over for dinner on Saturday, and I've already thought out a menu of beef bourguignon, green salad, and something with pears for dessert. What could be better than caramelized pears a la Narcisse et Nora?
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Indian Pizza, with grits!
In recounting my recent San Fran romp, I forgot to mention the truly fabulous, sui generis dinner I had at Jen's house. Yes, you Bernal/Mission dwellers know what I'm talking about: Indian pizza from Zante's, delivered. Although Zante's usually has two speeds--slow and stop--we got our veggie pizza in a trice, the scent of cumin and garlic and cilantro wafting down the hallway like an invitation to the best party ever, about to happen right there in our mouths.
But it did raise a years-long puzzlement: why doesn't anyone else make Indian pizza? There are a few copycat places in SF, but in New York, the birthplace of the next new thing, zip. Much as I love regular pizza, putting Indian food on it--spinach, eggplant, spicy cauliflower, lots of cilantro, cumin, garlic and ginger, plus cheese--makes it about million times better. It's even awesome cold the next day, eaten out of hand straight from the fridge. And I'd love, love some right now. I could call and get takeout from a dozen place right this minute, but the one thing I'm craving is, alas, 3000 miles away. Which is, nevertheless, much closer than K., who is on the other side of the planet, sleeping on a cot but getting good cheese grits every morning, at least.
And speaking of cheese grits, the Park Avenue cooking class at Diane's convened again last night, with a menu of pan-roasted wild quail (shot and field-dressed in Georgia), baked cheese grits, and butter beans with Asian pears, with almond trifle (Bread Alone's splendid almond pound cake, sprinkled with dark rum, dabbed with raspberry jam, and layered with creme anglaise and toasted almond slices) for dessert. All delicious, but the grits were the star, made with lovely coarse stone-ground grits from South Carolina, baked with Cabot cheddar, eggs, garlic, butter, paprika and Tabasco. If you've made this right, the fat from the cheese and butter will ooze out around the edges so that the grits fry themselves into golden crispness on the outside and creamy goodness inside. Mmmm. This is the dish served at every bride's pre-wedding brunch in South Carolina, according to Diane, alongside shrimp cocktail, crab cakes, country ham, and biscuits. I told Diane about K's discovery of the affinity of smoked paprika and cheese grits, and she promised to try it next time.
Clearly, my affinity for grits--not very common in a Jew from Jersey, although my great-grandfather was born in Charleston--has been nurtured by my similar affinity for Southern girls, and butch ones to boot (or in boots, more like.) Jaime from Tulsa was the first to show me how to make her grandmother's cheese grits. Yankee that I am, I came armed with a block of good cheddar. She recoiled, just a little, then apologized. "It's just that you're really supposed to use Velveeta." She also swore that the longer they were in the oven, frying in their own fat, the better they'd be. And they were good. Really good. But K's grits, made on the stovetop with Irish cheddar and Spanish paprika, are even better, because when she's here she cooks them for me. This is the treat all cooks, even just amateur home ones, yearn for: to be cooked for, with concentration and some measure of joy.
Which leads me to Valentine's Day, just around the corner. I have to say, after years of writing where-to-take-your-sweetie roundups for various newspapers, I just haaate all that prix-fixe, two-top, mylar-confetti and passion-fruit-mousse crap. (The exception would be Prune in the East Village, where brazen chef-owner Gabrielle Hamilton led her menu one year with a dish called Tongue and Pussy, made from lamb's tongue and octopus. Now that's a girl with the right attitude.)
Valentine's Day, like New Year's Eve, is a sucker punch. Who wants to be surrounded by the inane chatter of other couples, served by waiters who'd rather be with their own squeezes, and overcharged for cheap champagne and too many fiddly amuse-bouches? A meal made (or assembled or ordered in) by the one who doesn't usually do the cooking is the perfect mood-setter for the private delights to come. And what matters is not fanciness but enough of the one thing your sweetheart loves. Those dim-sum shrimp dumplings. Raspberries. Steak. Simple, luscious things. And then, the next day, cheese grits.
Baked Garlic Cheese Grits
1 cup stone-ground coarse grits
5 cups water
Bring water to a boil. Stir in grits, lower the heat to medium-low and cook, stirring frequently, until thick and porridge-y, about 25 minutes. They will spit and spatter like molten lava, so be careful. Mix in:
8 oz. cheese, grated
2 eggs, beaten
4 cloves of garlic, minced and sauteed briefly in 2 TB butter
salt and pepper
Tabasco to taste
1/2 tsp paprika or smoked paprika (start with a 1/4 tsp of smoked, and add to taste)
Spread in a baking dish and bake at 400 F for an hour, or until a nice golden crust is formed.
And if you're lucky enough to live in SF, Zante's Indian Pizza--a neighborhood institution--now does citywide delivery. 3489 Mission St, SF, CA. (415) 821-3949.
+++
Just as the numbers on Amazon are every author's secret obsession, so are site meters to bloggers. These little digital turnstiles tell you how many people are checking out your goofy grits obsession by the hour. Even better, they'll tell you how those dear readers got there--whether they googled gay penguins or dirt cake, and what server they used. So hello, happy readers from the Akron Public Library! And you with the Pentagon.mil address, glad to see my tax dollars at work! Surf away! And to everyone at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Maryland, howdy! I hope the Army's brushing up on its piemaking skills. Just keep inventing stuff to keep my girl safe, and I'll bring you all the cheese grits you want.
But it did raise a years-long puzzlement: why doesn't anyone else make Indian pizza? There are a few copycat places in SF, but in New York, the birthplace of the next new thing, zip. Much as I love regular pizza, putting Indian food on it--spinach, eggplant, spicy cauliflower, lots of cilantro, cumin, garlic and ginger, plus cheese--makes it about million times better. It's even awesome cold the next day, eaten out of hand straight from the fridge. And I'd love, love some right now. I could call and get takeout from a dozen place right this minute, but the one thing I'm craving is, alas, 3000 miles away. Which is, nevertheless, much closer than K., who is on the other side of the planet, sleeping on a cot but getting good cheese grits every morning, at least.
And speaking of cheese grits, the Park Avenue cooking class at Diane's convened again last night, with a menu of pan-roasted wild quail (shot and field-dressed in Georgia), baked cheese grits, and butter beans with Asian pears, with almond trifle (Bread Alone's splendid almond pound cake, sprinkled with dark rum, dabbed with raspberry jam, and layered with creme anglaise and toasted almond slices) for dessert. All delicious, but the grits were the star, made with lovely coarse stone-ground grits from South Carolina, baked with Cabot cheddar, eggs, garlic, butter, paprika and Tabasco. If you've made this right, the fat from the cheese and butter will ooze out around the edges so that the grits fry themselves into golden crispness on the outside and creamy goodness inside. Mmmm. This is the dish served at every bride's pre-wedding brunch in South Carolina, according to Diane, alongside shrimp cocktail, crab cakes, country ham, and biscuits. I told Diane about K's discovery of the affinity of smoked paprika and cheese grits, and she promised to try it next time.
Clearly, my affinity for grits--not very common in a Jew from Jersey, although my great-grandfather was born in Charleston--has been nurtured by my similar affinity for Southern girls, and butch ones to boot (or in boots, more like.) Jaime from Tulsa was the first to show me how to make her grandmother's cheese grits. Yankee that I am, I came armed with a block of good cheddar. She recoiled, just a little, then apologized. "It's just that you're really supposed to use Velveeta." She also swore that the longer they were in the oven, frying in their own fat, the better they'd be. And they were good. Really good. But K's grits, made on the stovetop with Irish cheddar and Spanish paprika, are even better, because when she's here she cooks them for me. This is the treat all cooks, even just amateur home ones, yearn for: to be cooked for, with concentration and some measure of joy.
Which leads me to Valentine's Day, just around the corner. I have to say, after years of writing where-to-take-your-sweetie roundups for various newspapers, I just haaate all that prix-fixe, two-top, mylar-confetti and passion-fruit-mousse crap. (The exception would be Prune in the East Village, where brazen chef-owner Gabrielle Hamilton led her menu one year with a dish called Tongue and Pussy, made from lamb's tongue and octopus. Now that's a girl with the right attitude.)
Valentine's Day, like New Year's Eve, is a sucker punch. Who wants to be surrounded by the inane chatter of other couples, served by waiters who'd rather be with their own squeezes, and overcharged for cheap champagne and too many fiddly amuse-bouches? A meal made (or assembled or ordered in) by the one who doesn't usually do the cooking is the perfect mood-setter for the private delights to come. And what matters is not fanciness but enough of the one thing your sweetheart loves. Those dim-sum shrimp dumplings. Raspberries. Steak. Simple, luscious things. And then, the next day, cheese grits.
Baked Garlic Cheese Grits
1 cup stone-ground coarse grits
5 cups water
Bring water to a boil. Stir in grits, lower the heat to medium-low and cook, stirring frequently, until thick and porridge-y, about 25 minutes. They will spit and spatter like molten lava, so be careful. Mix in:
8 oz. cheese, grated
2 eggs, beaten
4 cloves of garlic, minced and sauteed briefly in 2 TB butter
salt and pepper
Tabasco to taste
1/2 tsp paprika or smoked paprika (start with a 1/4 tsp of smoked, and add to taste)
Spread in a baking dish and bake at 400 F for an hour, or until a nice golden crust is formed.
And if you're lucky enough to live in SF, Zante's Indian Pizza--a neighborhood institution--now does citywide delivery. 3489 Mission St, SF, CA. (415) 821-3949.
+++
Just as the numbers on Amazon are every author's secret obsession, so are site meters to bloggers. These little digital turnstiles tell you how many people are checking out your goofy grits obsession by the hour. Even better, they'll tell you how those dear readers got there--whether they googled gay penguins or dirt cake, and what server they used. So hello, happy readers from the Akron Public Library! And you with the Pentagon.mil address, glad to see my tax dollars at work! Surf away! And to everyone at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Maryland, howdy! I hope the Army's brushing up on its piemaking skills. Just keep inventing stuff to keep my girl safe, and I'll bring you all the cheese grits you want.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
One-Hit Wonders
Getting a reputation as a good cook is not that hard. You can take the hard-working, honorable route, and actually go to cooking school or work as a chef. Of course, cooking for a living tends to take the edge off chopping garlic on your days off. For real chefs, anything too complicated or dangerous for ordinary civilians--spit-roasting an entire suckling pig over an open fire, tending a cassoulet made with home-preserved duck confit, going deep-sea fishing and serving sushi on the deck— is cool. Boiling pasta for the kids, making a salad for the wife: just work.
Or you can go the obsessive-amateur route, taste-testing olive oils and actually, painstakingly cooking from The French Laundry Cookbook (a beautiful work of art that, in my mind, resembles a cookbook the way The Tres Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry resembles a Filofax).
And then there's the easy, lazy way: lying around reading cookbooks but actually honing your skills on just a few signature dishes.
This is the route urged by every earnest how-to book. Cook one recipe--roast chicken, short ribs, mashed potatoes--a dozen times, until you really feel the ingredients and understand the technique. Could any suggestion be more boring? Who buys a cookbook just to make the same thing over and over? I hate this advice, and of course it's exactly what I do.
I have a great kitchen-stained book called Polenta, written by Sonoma author Michele Anna Jordan. It's a lovely little book, full of everything you could ever want to know about or cook with polenta. In the 10 years that I've had it, I've gotten at least a dozen dinners out of it. And they've all been the same dish: a tomato-cheese tart with a polenta crust, served with a basil mayonnaise. Have I learned more about polenta from making that tart a dozen times? Probably not, but what's more important is knowing how to make it without even needing the recipe anymore. And who doesn't want to be the sort of person who can whip up a swell tomato-basil tart out of her head, aided only by a bag of polenta and some grated Cheddar cheese?
Having a few dishes down cold can fool anyone into thinking you can, therefore, cook anything. What goes by the name of Thai Peanut Noodles in my house has convinced several rounds of guests that I can cook Thai food. This is not true. As far as I can tell, there is nothing authentically Thai about this dish, besides a vague (but pleasing) resemblance to satay sauce. But I love it, and am ever grateful for the original formula, found in quirky book of essays, recipes, and extremely opininated advice called Cooking As Courtship, by Susan Wiegand. Wiegand, who insists that she is no cook, nevertheless presents numerous useful recipes, all of which are funny and chatty and very observant, because she assumes that you, like her, can't cook. For this dish, you make some noodles or rice, steam a few vegetables, stir up a sauce (mostly made of pantry staples like soy sauce and peanut butter), and top the whole thing with a crunchy fresh salad of cucumbers, carrots, and cilantro, or a mixture of mint and basil for those who feel that cilantro is soap masquerading as parsley.
I hold fast to unsalted natural (meaning made of nothing but peanuts) peanut butter in all things; make this with Skippy and you didn't get the recipe from me.
Thai Peanut Noodles
Sauce
8 cloves garlic, chopped finely
a thumb-sized chunk of fresh ginger, peeled and grated or finely chopped
1/4 cup (scant) soy sauce
1/4 cup rice or balsamic vinegar
1 TB honey, or to taste
1 TB toasted sesame oil or tahini
1/2 tsp hot sauce, such as Siracha chili sauce, or to taste
3/4 cup natural unsalted peanut butter
1/4 cup water or cold black or green tea (or coconut milk--a recent brainstorm, which would make it more like legitimate satay sauce. Note that since I hate coconut, I haven't made it this way, but you coconut lovers out there, go crazy.)
1 block firm tofu, cubed
1 bunch broccoli, separated into bite-size flowerets and stalks peeled and chopped
1 large cucumber, peeled if waxed, halved, seeds scooped out
2 large carrots, peeled
5-6 scallions, roots and top half of green stem removed
about 1/2 a bunch of cilantro, stems removed
5 or 6 sprigs of mint or basil (optional)
Noodles or rice (I like brown basmati or jasmine rice)
Make the rice or bring water to a boil for noodles. Mix all sauce ingredients except the peanut butter and water. Add peanut butter a large spoonful at a time, beating well. At first, the peanut butter will resist you, but keep stirring. It will relax and form a thick cream all at once. Add water/tea/coconut milk, a little at a time, until sauce is thick but pourable. Taste for seasoning. Add honey, soy sauce, or vinegar to taste. Set aside. Slice cucumber and carrot into thin, matchstick-sized strips. Chop scallions, cilantro, and mint or basil leaves.
Cook noodles if using. Using a vegetable steamer, steam broccoli and tofu together, until broccoli is bright green and just tender. In a large bowl, top noodles or rice with cooked vegetables and tofu. Drizzle on sauce to taste, and toss until well mixed. Top with cucumber and carrot strips. Scatter scallions and chopped cilantro (and mint or basil) lavishly over the bowl.
Note: This recipe makes a lot of sauce, so don't dump it all on at once. The vegetables and noodles should be lightly coated but not drenched. Any extra sauce keeps well in the refrigerator.
Or you can go the obsessive-amateur route, taste-testing olive oils and actually, painstakingly cooking from The French Laundry Cookbook (a beautiful work of art that, in my mind, resembles a cookbook the way The Tres Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry resembles a Filofax).
And then there's the easy, lazy way: lying around reading cookbooks but actually honing your skills on just a few signature dishes.
This is the route urged by every earnest how-to book. Cook one recipe--roast chicken, short ribs, mashed potatoes--a dozen times, until you really feel the ingredients and understand the technique. Could any suggestion be more boring? Who buys a cookbook just to make the same thing over and over? I hate this advice, and of course it's exactly what I do.
I have a great kitchen-stained book called Polenta, written by Sonoma author Michele Anna Jordan. It's a lovely little book, full of everything you could ever want to know about or cook with polenta. In the 10 years that I've had it, I've gotten at least a dozen dinners out of it. And they've all been the same dish: a tomato-cheese tart with a polenta crust, served with a basil mayonnaise. Have I learned more about polenta from making that tart a dozen times? Probably not, but what's more important is knowing how to make it without even needing the recipe anymore. And who doesn't want to be the sort of person who can whip up a swell tomato-basil tart out of her head, aided only by a bag of polenta and some grated Cheddar cheese?
Having a few dishes down cold can fool anyone into thinking you can, therefore, cook anything. What goes by the name of Thai Peanut Noodles in my house has convinced several rounds of guests that I can cook Thai food. This is not true. As far as I can tell, there is nothing authentically Thai about this dish, besides a vague (but pleasing) resemblance to satay sauce. But I love it, and am ever grateful for the original formula, found in quirky book of essays, recipes, and extremely opininated advice called Cooking As Courtship, by Susan Wiegand. Wiegand, who insists that she is no cook, nevertheless presents numerous useful recipes, all of which are funny and chatty and very observant, because she assumes that you, like her, can't cook. For this dish, you make some noodles or rice, steam a few vegetables, stir up a sauce (mostly made of pantry staples like soy sauce and peanut butter), and top the whole thing with a crunchy fresh salad of cucumbers, carrots, and cilantro, or a mixture of mint and basil for those who feel that cilantro is soap masquerading as parsley.
I hold fast to unsalted natural (meaning made of nothing but peanuts) peanut butter in all things; make this with Skippy and you didn't get the recipe from me.
Thai Peanut Noodles
Sauce
8 cloves garlic, chopped finely
a thumb-sized chunk of fresh ginger, peeled and grated or finely chopped
1/4 cup (scant) soy sauce
1/4 cup rice or balsamic vinegar
1 TB honey, or to taste
1 TB toasted sesame oil or tahini
1/2 tsp hot sauce, such as Siracha chili sauce, or to taste
3/4 cup natural unsalted peanut butter
1/4 cup water or cold black or green tea (or coconut milk--a recent brainstorm, which would make it more like legitimate satay sauce. Note that since I hate coconut, I haven't made it this way, but you coconut lovers out there, go crazy.)
1 block firm tofu, cubed
1 bunch broccoli, separated into bite-size flowerets and stalks peeled and chopped
1 large cucumber, peeled if waxed, halved, seeds scooped out
2 large carrots, peeled
5-6 scallions, roots and top half of green stem removed
about 1/2 a bunch of cilantro, stems removed
5 or 6 sprigs of mint or basil (optional)
Noodles or rice (I like brown basmati or jasmine rice)
Make the rice or bring water to a boil for noodles. Mix all sauce ingredients except the peanut butter and water. Add peanut butter a large spoonful at a time, beating well. At first, the peanut butter will resist you, but keep stirring. It will relax and form a thick cream all at once. Add water/tea/coconut milk, a little at a time, until sauce is thick but pourable. Taste for seasoning. Add honey, soy sauce, or vinegar to taste. Set aside. Slice cucumber and carrot into thin, matchstick-sized strips. Chop scallions, cilantro, and mint or basil leaves.
Cook noodles if using. Using a vegetable steamer, steam broccoli and tofu together, until broccoli is bright green and just tender. In a large bowl, top noodles or rice with cooked vegetables and tofu. Drizzle on sauce to taste, and toss until well mixed. Top with cucumber and carrot strips. Scatter scallions and chopped cilantro (and mint or basil) lavishly over the bowl.
Note: This recipe makes a lot of sauce, so don't dump it all on at once. The vegetables and noodles should be lightly coated but not drenched. Any extra sauce keeps well in the refrigerator.
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
No love, no nothing, until my baby comes home
"Are you sure you still live here??"
Posed my old Time Out co-worker and pal Melisa, it's a legit question, given that I've slept overnight in NYC maybe 10 times over the past month and a half. But after a long, slow train ride alongside the Hudson, hauling a painting, a pile of photographs, a suitcase stuffed with K.'s extra civilian clothes, a large, lumpy hand-knitted pine-green sweater (needing only three-quarters of a sleeve), and half a pound of Peet's coffee, I'm back in Brooklyn again, to eat the leftover cream-cheese brownies from the freezer (which is like eating really excellent fudge, without the molar shudder of the tourist-town item) and finally put away the piles of laundry strewn all around the house.
Since mid-December, it's been three weeks driving through the South, four days in San Francisco, a week or so in Brooklyn, then another week in SF, then a 14-hour layover in Brooklyn--just enough time to wash a pair of pajamas, go to the bank, and get back on the A train to JFK for a 45-minute quickie flight upstate to see K. The only good thing about sending your girlfriend off to a military base in a combat zone is that when you're driving back to an empty hotel room at 11 at night through dense fog you cannot cry, because you can already barely see the white lines on the blacktop, especially with a snorting truck riding your bumper as you crawl along squinting for the turnoffs.
I have pictures, and a bouquet of flowers delivered this afternoon, and an Army-girl action figure, complete with bayoneted M16 and flak vest.
All I can do is be USO girlfriend, writing letters, baking cookies, sending shampoo and CDs. So if anyone has good recipes for things that can survive the two-week trip halfway around the world, or ways to make long-distance work, let me know.
Posed my old Time Out co-worker and pal Melisa, it's a legit question, given that I've slept overnight in NYC maybe 10 times over the past month and a half. But after a long, slow train ride alongside the Hudson, hauling a painting, a pile of photographs, a suitcase stuffed with K.'s extra civilian clothes, a large, lumpy hand-knitted pine-green sweater (needing only three-quarters of a sleeve), and half a pound of Peet's coffee, I'm back in Brooklyn again, to eat the leftover cream-cheese brownies from the freezer (which is like eating really excellent fudge, without the molar shudder of the tourist-town item) and finally put away the piles of laundry strewn all around the house.
Since mid-December, it's been three weeks driving through the South, four days in San Francisco, a week or so in Brooklyn, then another week in SF, then a 14-hour layover in Brooklyn--just enough time to wash a pair of pajamas, go to the bank, and get back on the A train to JFK for a 45-minute quickie flight upstate to see K. The only good thing about sending your girlfriend off to a military base in a combat zone is that when you're driving back to an empty hotel room at 11 at night through dense fog you cannot cry, because you can already barely see the white lines on the blacktop, especially with a snorting truck riding your bumper as you crawl along squinting for the turnoffs.
I have pictures, and a bouquet of flowers delivered this afternoon, and an Army-girl action figure, complete with bayoneted M16 and flak vest.
All I can do is be USO girlfriend, writing letters, baking cookies, sending shampoo and CDs. So if anyone has good recipes for things that can survive the two-week trip halfway around the world, or ways to make long-distance work, let me know.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Information Gladly Given But Safety Requires Avoiding Unnecessary Conversation*
It's been a beautiful week in San Francisco, and Shifra and Stephen's wedding was just swell. Shifra looked absolutely gorgeous (all brides should wear tiaras!) and they liked their little lemon cake, which got frosted with lemon-cream cheese icing and decorated with June Taylor's lovely candied Meyer lemon peel. Note that putting a lot of lemon juice into cream cheese icing, while making it tasty, also makes it really goopy, which means the nice icing bags and star-squiggle tip were moot as decorating aids.
Otherwise, I was eating, working, and couch-surfing from Oakland to Bernal, laying my flannelled self down on Aerobeds and fold-out couches all over the city. A new find: Bar Tartine, on Valencia near 17th, across from the old Slanted Door space. An elegant white marble bar, sprays of quince blossoms and peach-colored long-stemmed tulips the exact color and texture of my 1930s silk tap pants, and pink pomegranate bellinis, not to mention butternut squash soup with chestnuts and apples, and a lush porcini salad with frisee, beluga lentils, and a poached egg. Dessert was three egg-shaped ovals of sorbet--kiwi, orange-anise, and pineapple, scattered with a crunch of pomegranate seeds and pink grapefruit segments--and two sticky little wedges of a sublime panforte, deep and wintery with spices, cocoa, and almonds.
Dinner at Delfina was marvellous, as always, although the pizza at the pizzeria next door was just good, not fabulous (although I was very happy to have the leftovers to eat cold on the plane the next day). But the antipasti--spicy cauliflower, wild nettle soup, house-stretched mozzarella, house-cured tuna with cannellini beans--on which the staff was chowing as the kitchen shut down last night looked quite delicious.
But what was truly delicious, if I say so myself, were the persimmon/blue cheese/proscuitto bites made to accompany a bottle of champagne poured with the Red Meat Ranger and Papa Sueno. These were in imitation of the sublime fig/goat cheese/proscuitto mouthfuls fed one by one to K. last summer. Since figs were nowhere to be found, I subbed wedges of peeled Fuyu persimmon, dabbing them with creamy-funky St. Agur bleu and wrapping them in proscuitto di Parma. Heated them for a few minutes at 400 degrees F until the proscuitto was slightly crisped, highlighting its bacony flavor against the slippery-sweet warm fruit and melting cheese. While the bites were heating, I boiled down about half a cup or so of balsamic vinegar (mixed with some pomegranate molasses, should you have such a thing on hand, and believe me, you should) until it was thickened and slightly syrupy. (It will continue to thicken as it cools, so don't go too far or you'll get balsamic taffy that will stick to your teeth.) The bites went onto a warmed plate, generously drizzled with syrup.
We ended up swabbing everything we could through the drips of balsamic syrup on the plate, from slices of baguette to our fingertips. We didn't lick the plate but I think that might have happened had we not been on good champagne behavior. Alongside there were rosemary grissini from A.G. Ferrari, tiny blood oranges, a little tub of Redwood Farms fresh chevre, more blue cheese and proscuitto, and a flat slice of white lemon Stilton, described by the wags at Rainbow Grocery as "Nothing like regular Stilton. Tastes like cheesecake, rhymes with Paris Hilton." And it did, if you were thinking of the dry-ish, Italian-ricotta kind of cheesecake, studded with tiny flecks of candied lemon peel. A good time, especially with a glass of champagne tinted sunset-pink with a squeeze of blood orange juice.
*This phrase is posted at the front of all Muni buses and trains, to give the drivers a legitimate excuse not to listen to the legions of crazy people who ride the bus all day. I am shocked! shocked! that it has not become a bumper sticker or t-shirt already.
Otherwise, I was eating, working, and couch-surfing from Oakland to Bernal, laying my flannelled self down on Aerobeds and fold-out couches all over the city. A new find: Bar Tartine, on Valencia near 17th, across from the old Slanted Door space. An elegant white marble bar, sprays of quince blossoms and peach-colored long-stemmed tulips the exact color and texture of my 1930s silk tap pants, and pink pomegranate bellinis, not to mention butternut squash soup with chestnuts and apples, and a lush porcini salad with frisee, beluga lentils, and a poached egg. Dessert was three egg-shaped ovals of sorbet--kiwi, orange-anise, and pineapple, scattered with a crunch of pomegranate seeds and pink grapefruit segments--and two sticky little wedges of a sublime panforte, deep and wintery with spices, cocoa, and almonds.
Dinner at Delfina was marvellous, as always, although the pizza at the pizzeria next door was just good, not fabulous (although I was very happy to have the leftovers to eat cold on the plane the next day). But the antipasti--spicy cauliflower, wild nettle soup, house-stretched mozzarella, house-cured tuna with cannellini beans--on which the staff was chowing as the kitchen shut down last night looked quite delicious.
But what was truly delicious, if I say so myself, were the persimmon/blue cheese/proscuitto bites made to accompany a bottle of champagne poured with the Red Meat Ranger and Papa Sueno. These were in imitation of the sublime fig/goat cheese/proscuitto mouthfuls fed one by one to K. last summer. Since figs were nowhere to be found, I subbed wedges of peeled Fuyu persimmon, dabbing them with creamy-funky St. Agur bleu and wrapping them in proscuitto di Parma. Heated them for a few minutes at 400 degrees F until the proscuitto was slightly crisped, highlighting its bacony flavor against the slippery-sweet warm fruit and melting cheese. While the bites were heating, I boiled down about half a cup or so of balsamic vinegar (mixed with some pomegranate molasses, should you have such a thing on hand, and believe me, you should) until it was thickened and slightly syrupy. (It will continue to thicken as it cools, so don't go too far or you'll get balsamic taffy that will stick to your teeth.) The bites went onto a warmed plate, generously drizzled with syrup.
We ended up swabbing everything we could through the drips of balsamic syrup on the plate, from slices of baguette to our fingertips. We didn't lick the plate but I think that might have happened had we not been on good champagne behavior. Alongside there were rosemary grissini from A.G. Ferrari, tiny blood oranges, a little tub of Redwood Farms fresh chevre, more blue cheese and proscuitto, and a flat slice of white lemon Stilton, described by the wags at Rainbow Grocery as "Nothing like regular Stilton. Tastes like cheesecake, rhymes with Paris Hilton." And it did, if you were thinking of the dry-ish, Italian-ricotta kind of cheesecake, studded with tiny flecks of candied lemon peel. A good time, especially with a glass of champagne tinted sunset-pink with a squeeze of blood orange juice.
*This phrase is posted at the front of all Muni buses and trains, to give the drivers a legitimate excuse not to listen to the legions of crazy people who ride the bus all day. I am shocked! shocked! that it has not become a bumper sticker or t-shirt already.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Left my heart in San Francisco...
Oh, California! I'm back again, to the sunshine and beautiful white light in the morning, bearing cake pans and spelt flour, cornstarch-free powdered sugar and a microplane grater. It's lovely to be here again, and now that my sister Amy and her family (my 2 nieces and 1 nephew, plus my super-nice bro-in-law) are probably moving from Connecticut to Minneapolis this spring, well, that's one less thing to keep me in NYC. What I'm going to do in CA: go to Delfina with Bucky, take the Larkspur Ferry with Paige, hang out and eat organic clementines with Jen, read stories to Charlotte and Sebastian (my niece and nephew by friendship, since I've known them both since they were born), and see Shifra and Stephen get married! And make their little cake, of course--the whole reason I'm here. It was none too hard to leave the half-melted slush and mittens behind me. More on the cake adventures to follow...
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Fishing in Brooklyn
K., being a Florida girl, has had a lot of great seafood in her life. But among all the grouper and stone crabs, she's missed one great thing:
Lobster Rolls!
We were browsing around in Book Court, down by the cookbook section (hey, how'd that happen?) and I found Pearl Oyster Bar founder Rebecca Charles' book, full of sepia old-timey photos of Maine and then, tucked off in the corner, a little color snap of a lobster roll on a paper plate.
"So, are you asking me out for a lobster roll?" asked K. It was 4 o'clock, and we had to leave to catch her plane at 8.
"You bet," I said, and we went back home, drank tea, and went over to Brooklyn Fish Camp, at Fifth and Degraw. Now, a little backstory: Rebecca Charles and her former partner Mary started Pearl, serving oysters and lobster rolls to the West Village hordes, inspired in equal parts by New England seafood shacks and San Francisco's Swan Oyster Depot. Then, Rebecca and Mary had a nasty breakup, and Mary started her own seafood joint, Mary's Fish Camp, just a few blocks away, inspired in equal parts by the menu at Pearl's and the original Mary's Fish Camp, in Florida. Both thrived, with Pearl expanding next door and Mary's begetting Brooklyn Fish Camp in the Slope. Making it across the river was dangerous: on what was to be opening day, a fire upstairs damaged the restaurant, postponing the opening for a month, and early Chowhound reports whined about inconsistent cooking and indifferent service.
But they were close by, which meant we didn't have to consign ourselves to the vagaries of the F train to get there, and I knew they had lobster rolls--which, if they were anything like Mary's, would be swell.
And didn't we have fun, with a Florida waitress, Belle and Sebastian on the stereo, and big, fat, cold-weather lobster chunks spilling out of a buttery bun. The roll was almost eclipsed by the enormous haystack of hot shoestring fries, but it was there, holding its own. No celery, no fripperies, just lobster and mayo. Mmmmm.
Meanwhile, I had the grilled French sardines over lentils--three nice meaty specimens, but damn, these were some bony fish. I'm well-practiced at peeling out the backbones and heads, and liberating the odd whiskery bone, but this was a little too reminiscent of the afternoon we'd just spent up in the dinosaur-fossil section of the Museum of Natural History. Still, it was a good time.
And then we came back, for K. to grab her bag and head out, and for me to realize yet again that she really is going away in just a couple of weeks, off to Afghanistan for a year, where an M-16, not me, will be keeping her company.
But if you need to cheer up, as I do, just go to Canadian singer Sarah Harmer's web site and listen to her song "I Am Aglow" from her upcoming album I'm a Mountain.
I am aglow with thoughts of you
Are the stories that you told me true?
It doesn’t matter if they are
They are to me
You’re a map of a place maybe someday I’ll go
With thoughts of you I am aglow
Does it matter that all I can think of is you?
Is it obvious? Does it show?
With thoughts of you I am aglow
Lobster Rolls!
We were browsing around in Book Court, down by the cookbook section (hey, how'd that happen?) and I found Pearl Oyster Bar founder Rebecca Charles' book, full of sepia old-timey photos of Maine and then, tucked off in the corner, a little color snap of a lobster roll on a paper plate.
"So, are you asking me out for a lobster roll?" asked K. It was 4 o'clock, and we had to leave to catch her plane at 8.
"You bet," I said, and we went back home, drank tea, and went over to Brooklyn Fish Camp, at Fifth and Degraw. Now, a little backstory: Rebecca Charles and her former partner Mary started Pearl, serving oysters and lobster rolls to the West Village hordes, inspired in equal parts by New England seafood shacks and San Francisco's Swan Oyster Depot. Then, Rebecca and Mary had a nasty breakup, and Mary started her own seafood joint, Mary's Fish Camp, just a few blocks away, inspired in equal parts by the menu at Pearl's and the original Mary's Fish Camp, in Florida. Both thrived, with Pearl expanding next door and Mary's begetting Brooklyn Fish Camp in the Slope. Making it across the river was dangerous: on what was to be opening day, a fire upstairs damaged the restaurant, postponing the opening for a month, and early Chowhound reports whined about inconsistent cooking and indifferent service.
But they were close by, which meant we didn't have to consign ourselves to the vagaries of the F train to get there, and I knew they had lobster rolls--which, if they were anything like Mary's, would be swell.
And didn't we have fun, with a Florida waitress, Belle and Sebastian on the stereo, and big, fat, cold-weather lobster chunks spilling out of a buttery bun. The roll was almost eclipsed by the enormous haystack of hot shoestring fries, but it was there, holding its own. No celery, no fripperies, just lobster and mayo. Mmmmm.
Meanwhile, I had the grilled French sardines over lentils--three nice meaty specimens, but damn, these were some bony fish. I'm well-practiced at peeling out the backbones and heads, and liberating the odd whiskery bone, but this was a little too reminiscent of the afternoon we'd just spent up in the dinosaur-fossil section of the Museum of Natural History. Still, it was a good time.
And then we came back, for K. to grab her bag and head out, and for me to realize yet again that she really is going away in just a couple of weeks, off to Afghanistan for a year, where an M-16, not me, will be keeping her company.
But if you need to cheer up, as I do, just go to Canadian singer Sarah Harmer's web site and listen to her song "I Am Aglow" from her upcoming album I'm a Mountain.
I am aglow with thoughts of you
Are the stories that you told me true?
It doesn’t matter if they are
They are to me
You’re a map of a place maybe someday I’ll go
With thoughts of you I am aglow
Does it matter that all I can think of is you?
Is it obvious? Does it show?
With thoughts of you I am aglow
Friday, January 13, 2006
Eureka!
An all-expenses-paid month in Arkansas in June, that's what I won today. And what more could a girl want?
No, really. What I've actually got is a fellowship to go to the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow, in Eureka Springs, to putter around a beautiful, airy, sunny dream kitchen, make pies and jams, and write.
Of course, what I mostly do in my regular life is putter around in my dark, no-counter-space kitchen, make cranberry bread, and write. But this will be infinitely prettier, and heck, out in the Ozarks, which means not in steamy summer concreteland. Yippee! And someone else makes dinner! No more Grape-Nuts on the bed, at least not for 4 weeks. There's even a front porch--just what I need to cement my unrealistic move-to-the-country fantasies.
First thanks are due to the lovely Bakerina, who sang the praises of this place on her blog, and convinced me to apply. It's lucky I didn't look at the photos on her site first, or I would have been way too entranced to consider offering up my bits of honey lore and restaurant wit in pursuit. And piles of thanks are also due to Jen and Tori, for writing recommendations that promised the fine folks of Dairy Hollow that I would be a charming dinner guest and a happy writer bee.
Well, enough about me. What you really need to know is that according to the National Pie Council (and no, until today I didn't know there was one), January 23rd--just mere days away--is National Pie Day. You know what this means, don't you? A perfect, nationally-sponsored reason to EAT PIE. I'll be in San Francisco that day, staying at the aforementioned Jen's house, and I might just have to make her a pie. Because when my country (or the National Pie Council) says bake, well, the Pie Queen bakes.
No, really. What I've actually got is a fellowship to go to the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow, in Eureka Springs, to putter around a beautiful, airy, sunny dream kitchen, make pies and jams, and write.
Of course, what I mostly do in my regular life is putter around in my dark, no-counter-space kitchen, make cranberry bread, and write. But this will be infinitely prettier, and heck, out in the Ozarks, which means not in steamy summer concreteland. Yippee! And someone else makes dinner! No more Grape-Nuts on the bed, at least not for 4 weeks. There's even a front porch--just what I need to cement my unrealistic move-to-the-country fantasies.
First thanks are due to the lovely Bakerina, who sang the praises of this place on her blog, and convinced me to apply. It's lucky I didn't look at the photos on her site first, or I would have been way too entranced to consider offering up my bits of honey lore and restaurant wit in pursuit. And piles of thanks are also due to Jen and Tori, for writing recommendations that promised the fine folks of Dairy Hollow that I would be a charming dinner guest and a happy writer bee.
Well, enough about me. What you really need to know is that according to the National Pie Council (and no, until today I didn't know there was one), January 23rd--just mere days away--is National Pie Day. You know what this means, don't you? A perfect, nationally-sponsored reason to EAT PIE. I'll be in San Francisco that day, staying at the aforementioned Jen's house, and I might just have to make her a pie. Because when my country (or the National Pie Council) says bake, well, the Pie Queen bakes.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
does your monkey do the dog?
Another reason for the Monkey Bread title: Monkey Yoga, right next door to Arizmendi. Do the yoga people come and eat yummy nut bread after their downward dogs? We'll just have to see.
And wedding-cake report: success! The lemon cake is excellent, and tastes just like regular cake. Maybe a smidge more dense, but it's a pretty dense cake to begin with, thanks to all that butter. In fact, I might try leaving out 2 tb of the butter on the next go-round, just to lighten it up a little, but the taste is great--beautifully bright and lemony. I usually make this with Meyer lemons, but even with plain old regular lemons from the supermarket, it's excellent.
The first time I made this cake, it tasted great but didn't rise, and in fact completely fell apart coming out of the pan. Happily, I knew author Fran Gage, just from the food-world circuit, so I could buttonhole her the next time I saw her at the farmers market, and ask what went wrong. Turns out there was a mistake in the first print run of the book, and the recipe called for half the amount of leavening it should. I doubled the baking powder next time, and voila! Excellent lemon cake. So, here's the correct recipe (with spelt/eggless/cornfree variations, should those be your issues).
Lemon Cake (adapted from Fran Gage's Bread and Chocolate)
Zest of three lemons
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
I like to take the zest off the lemons with a microplane, which gives very fine shreds. If you don't have a microplane, it's okay to take the zest off in bigger pieces. Bring water and sugar to a boil. Boil for 1 minute, add lemon zest. Remove from heat and let cool. Refrigerate overnight, or up to 1 week.
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (or white spelt flour)
1 tsp baking powder (or 3/4 tsp cream of tartar and 3/8 tsp baking soda--this is because regular baking powder contains cornstarch)
10 TB butter (I would use a little less, like 8 TB)
1 cup sugar
2 eggs (or a scant 1/2 cup of firm silken tofu, pureed until smooth)
1/3 cup lemon juice
Lemon zest from above
Grease a loaf pan or cake pan. Drain lemon zest, reserving syrup. Chop zest finely, if necessary. Mix flour and leavening, and set aside. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, or tofu, and beat well. Add flour and lemon juice alternately, stirring gently until smooth. Stir in lemon zest. Add a tablespoon or two of lemon syrup to make a thick batter. Spoon batter into pan. Bake at 350 until golden brown and cake tester comes out clean. Let cool. Can drizzle with reserved lemon syrup if deserved.
And wedding-cake report: success! The lemon cake is excellent, and tastes just like regular cake. Maybe a smidge more dense, but it's a pretty dense cake to begin with, thanks to all that butter. In fact, I might try leaving out 2 tb of the butter on the next go-round, just to lighten it up a little, but the taste is great--beautifully bright and lemony. I usually make this with Meyer lemons, but even with plain old regular lemons from the supermarket, it's excellent.
The first time I made this cake, it tasted great but didn't rise, and in fact completely fell apart coming out of the pan. Happily, I knew author Fran Gage, just from the food-world circuit, so I could buttonhole her the next time I saw her at the farmers market, and ask what went wrong. Turns out there was a mistake in the first print run of the book, and the recipe called for half the amount of leavening it should. I doubled the baking powder next time, and voila! Excellent lemon cake. So, here's the correct recipe (with spelt/eggless/cornfree variations, should those be your issues).
Lemon Cake (adapted from Fran Gage's Bread and Chocolate)
Zest of three lemons
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
I like to take the zest off the lemons with a microplane, which gives very fine shreds. If you don't have a microplane, it's okay to take the zest off in bigger pieces. Bring water and sugar to a boil. Boil for 1 minute, add lemon zest. Remove from heat and let cool. Refrigerate overnight, or up to 1 week.
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (or white spelt flour)
1 tsp baking powder (or 3/4 tsp cream of tartar and 3/8 tsp baking soda--this is because regular baking powder contains cornstarch)
10 TB butter (I would use a little less, like 8 TB)
1 cup sugar
2 eggs (or a scant 1/2 cup of firm silken tofu, pureed until smooth)
1/3 cup lemon juice
Lemon zest from above
Grease a loaf pan or cake pan. Drain lemon zest, reserving syrup. Chop zest finely, if necessary. Mix flour and leavening, and set aside. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, or tofu, and beat well. Add flour and lemon juice alternately, stirring gently until smooth. Stir in lemon zest. Add a tablespoon or two of lemon syrup to make a thick batter. Spoon batter into pan. Bake at 350 until golden brown and cake tester comes out clean. Let cool. Can drizzle with reserved lemon syrup if deserved.
Monkey Girl Wedding Cake
OK, Monkey Bread: Esther over in Australia wants to know. Now, unlike say, pudding (meaning a custardy bowl of sweet goo, not the dessert course at large) or Mallomars (excellent cookies aka biscuits, with a bottom layer of shortbread, a big puff of marshmallow, the whole thing coated in dark chocolate and only sold from October to April, when the weather's cool enough not to melt the chocolate), monkey bread is not some only-in-America thing.
I've seen the phrase used occasionally to refer to something like pull-apart rolls, meaning wads of dough dipped in butter and squished together in a large pan, to be baked and "pulled apart" into fluffy hunks at the table (because monkeys don't slice their bread?). But this monkey bread was a different animal altogether, something purely made up by the nice bakers at Arizmendi Lakeshore, a collective bakery in Oakland, CA. In fact, we sat around in our PJs wondering the very same thing. Why monkey bread?
Well, there were a lot of nuts in it. It was a small loaf of slightly brioche-like yeast bread, full of walnuts and probably other good things like brown sugar. The top was sugary and really crunchy along the edges, especially when the whole loaf was reheated until toasty. I'm going to be back in Cali next week, and if I can, I'll go back to Arizmendi and ask, "Why monkey?"
(And speaking of animals you can toast, even better than the monkey bread, to my taste, were the Wolverine rolls, chewy-crusted whole wheat rolls full of sweet dried apricots and pecans. Warm 'em up, put a little goat cheese on, and you're one happy monkey.)
And the wedding-cake countdown continues...Today's purchase: a set of disposable icing bags and a cute lil' star tip. Now, I just need a big can of cheap icing and a lot of practice, since the bridal couple has, alas, nixed the idea of one of those plastic bride-and-groom sets on top (although they did, for a moment, consider a little Yoda figurine, hand in hand with...whoever Yoda sleeps with.) Did I mention that I've been tapped to make Shifra's wedding cake? The same couple who got the eggless-spelt-flour carrot birthday cake back in May are getting married in SF next weekend (yay!) and I'm making a little cake, just for them. Which means, of course, lots of cake baking, in order to find an eggless, wheat-and-corn free item that's also very, very tasty. The first try (almond-lemon-cardamon) was a washout; next up, the excellent Meyer lemon cake from Fran Gage's charming book Bread and Chocolate. Lots of butter, a delicious lemon syrup (made from the zest of four lemons soaked in a syrup that's equal parts water and sugar), and in this case, buzzed silken tofu instead of eggs. Wish me luck! And if you have any tips for eggless baking, let me know! Will anyone mind if I whip out some wax paper and start piping rosettes on my JetBlue tray table?
And another request, for all you knitters out there: I need a pattern for a very long, rather weirdly shaped, tube-like cozy. A cover for an M16, in fact. One of the Pie Queen's nearest and dearest is about to go overseas to serve her country, to a place where she's going to need to keep her rifle with her all the time, and don't you think a little pink yarn would make all the difference on those chilly nights? This may sound like a joke, but actually, I would knit this, if I could, if only to make a tentful of soldiers laugh out loud. If you have a pattern, let me know!
I've seen the phrase used occasionally to refer to something like pull-apart rolls, meaning wads of dough dipped in butter and squished together in a large pan, to be baked and "pulled apart" into fluffy hunks at the table (because monkeys don't slice their bread?). But this monkey bread was a different animal altogether, something purely made up by the nice bakers at Arizmendi Lakeshore, a collective bakery in Oakland, CA. In fact, we sat around in our PJs wondering the very same thing. Why monkey bread?
Well, there were a lot of nuts in it. It was a small loaf of slightly brioche-like yeast bread, full of walnuts and probably other good things like brown sugar. The top was sugary and really crunchy along the edges, especially when the whole loaf was reheated until toasty. I'm going to be back in Cali next week, and if I can, I'll go back to Arizmendi and ask, "Why monkey?"
(And speaking of animals you can toast, even better than the monkey bread, to my taste, were the Wolverine rolls, chewy-crusted whole wheat rolls full of sweet dried apricots and pecans. Warm 'em up, put a little goat cheese on, and you're one happy monkey.)
And the wedding-cake countdown continues...Today's purchase: a set of disposable icing bags and a cute lil' star tip. Now, I just need a big can of cheap icing and a lot of practice, since the bridal couple has, alas, nixed the idea of one of those plastic bride-and-groom sets on top (although they did, for a moment, consider a little Yoda figurine, hand in hand with...whoever Yoda sleeps with.) Did I mention that I've been tapped to make Shifra's wedding cake? The same couple who got the eggless-spelt-flour carrot birthday cake back in May are getting married in SF next weekend (yay!) and I'm making a little cake, just for them. Which means, of course, lots of cake baking, in order to find an eggless, wheat-and-corn free item that's also very, very tasty. The first try (almond-lemon-cardamon) was a washout; next up, the excellent Meyer lemon cake from Fran Gage's charming book Bread and Chocolate. Lots of butter, a delicious lemon syrup (made from the zest of four lemons soaked in a syrup that's equal parts water and sugar), and in this case, buzzed silken tofu instead of eggs. Wish me luck! And if you have any tips for eggless baking, let me know! Will anyone mind if I whip out some wax paper and start piping rosettes on my JetBlue tray table?
And another request, for all you knitters out there: I need a pattern for a very long, rather weirdly shaped, tube-like cozy. A cover for an M16, in fact. One of the Pie Queen's nearest and dearest is about to go overseas to serve her country, to a place where she's going to need to keep her rifle with her all the time, and don't you think a little pink yarn would make all the difference on those chilly nights? This may sound like a joke, but actually, I would knit this, if I could, if only to make a tentful of soldiers laugh out loud. If you have a pattern, let me know!
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
True Grits
So, grits. At San Francisco's Just for You ("the best Louisiana truck stop on Potrero Hill") they're described on the menu as "that white stuff you ate in prison." At the Waffle House*, they're what comes with your eggs and Coca-Cola** on Christmas morning, when it's just you and K. and a bunch of cops drinking coffee, plus the cheery waitstaff, cheery because hopefully they're making extra cash working on a holiday while you're reading the laminated menu with all the pictures as one of the waitresses feeds quarters into the jukebox, yelling back to the kitchen "You sure she wants ten dollars' worth?"
The best grits I've ever had, though, happened in my very own Yankee kitchen, thanks to K slow-cooking them first and then mixing in some grated Irish cheddar, a shake of cayenne pepper and, after ransacking my spice rack, a brick-red spoonful of smoked paprika, from a little red tin bought ages ago at a Spanish-food stall in London's Borough Market. Smoked paprika, also called pimenton, is the bomb, especially for vegetarians who want to fake a smoky bacon flavor. But I'd never have thought to put it in grits. That's why it's good to rub up against other people's cooking: they know stuff you don't. Hopefully, these grits will happen again this weekend, when K. returns, or at least some variation on them. If we get around to leaving the house (to go see the gay cowboys or the butterflies swatting around the Museum of Natural History) we might even check out the oyster po-boys at South, the new incarnation of Blue Star on Court Street.
*Despite my deep fondness for waffles, I didn't know what a Waffle House was til we hit Georgia. What diners are to New Jersey, Waffle Houses are to the South: all-night greasy spoons out on the highway, where you go for eggs and toast late at night or early in the morning, with a lot of drinking behind you or driving ahead of you. Alas, the waffles, at least at the one we went to, were flat and gummy. But as K. pointed out, it's not about the waffles at a Waffle House.
**K. had the Coke, by the way. I had coffee.
Now, back to work, and the all-important question: will Shifra and her beau want a plastic bride and groom on the top of their vegan no-wheat almond-lemon wedding cake? The recipe testing continues...counting down for the big day, back in SF next week...
The best grits I've ever had, though, happened in my very own Yankee kitchen, thanks to K slow-cooking them first and then mixing in some grated Irish cheddar, a shake of cayenne pepper and, after ransacking my spice rack, a brick-red spoonful of smoked paprika, from a little red tin bought ages ago at a Spanish-food stall in London's Borough Market. Smoked paprika, also called pimenton, is the bomb, especially for vegetarians who want to fake a smoky bacon flavor. But I'd never have thought to put it in grits. That's why it's good to rub up against other people's cooking: they know stuff you don't. Hopefully, these grits will happen again this weekend, when K. returns, or at least some variation on them. If we get around to leaving the house (to go see the gay cowboys or the butterflies swatting around the Museum of Natural History) we might even check out the oyster po-boys at South, the new incarnation of Blue Star on Court Street.
*Despite my deep fondness for waffles, I didn't know what a Waffle House was til we hit Georgia. What diners are to New Jersey, Waffle Houses are to the South: all-night greasy spoons out on the highway, where you go for eggs and toast late at night or early in the morning, with a lot of drinking behind you or driving ahead of you. Alas, the waffles, at least at the one we went to, were flat and gummy. But as K. pointed out, it's not about the waffles at a Waffle House.
**K. had the Coke, by the way. I had coffee.
Now, back to work, and the all-important question: will Shifra and her beau want a plastic bride and groom on the top of their vegan no-wheat almond-lemon wedding cake? The recipe testing continues...counting down for the big day, back in SF next week...
Monday, January 09, 2006
Home again, home again, jiggity jig
Well, hello there. Happy New Year! Hope you all had a very, very happy Christmas and Chanukkah and Boxing Day and Epiphany and New Year's and all other champagne-drinking, cookie-baking, latke-frying excuses for wearing red velvet and spilling powdered sugar down your front.
It is, weirdly, something like 60 degrees out on the streets of Brooklyn this evening, which is a very strange backdrop to the still-sparkling Christmas lights and discarded holiday trees sprawling in the gutters, but nice for the Pie Queen, just recently re-entered from warmer climes, notably her beloved San Francisco, preceded by a two-week tour of K's friends and family down South, from Richmond, VA to Charleston, SC and all across and around the balmy state of Florida, home of alligators, manatees, flamingo paddle boats and key lime pie. And the Weeki Wachee mermaids! But more on them later.
There will be lots about Florida in the next few days-- a place I'd visited only once, at age 9, and then just en famille to Disneyworld. What I remembered were palm trees in the hotel lobby and being so terrified by the build-up to Space Mountain as to completely melt down while standing in line (something I still tend to do, even when medicated, at airports everywhere). The real Florida, revisited at 38 alongside hometown girl K., still had lots of palm trees, not only growing inside the Orlando airport but all over the place, from bushy palmettos to swaying royal palms, along with bald cypress and hibiscus bushes and poinsettas growing in big showy bushes right in the front yard. We didn't see alligators eating household pets, or pythons trying to eat alligators (and exploding as a result) but otherwise the dream state completely lived up to expectation, and more, with skee ball and fireworks on Daytona Beach for New Year's Eve, barbecue in Miami, the Gulf of Mexico lapping at the shores of Cedar Key under a pink-streaked dawn sky, and orange trees and gator-head key chains everywhere.
It was fabulous all around, but I did miss cooking. I grabbed it when I could--frying up latkes for breakfast at K's mother's house in Lake Mary, making oatmeal/currant/apricot scones for Molly and K. when they got back from running around Lake Merritt, practically weeping with delight in the circus-colored citrus aisles of Berkeley Bowl before making pints of guacamole, a pie pan full of Meyer lemon bars, and two roast chickens for the See-Me/Meet-K. party at the Red Meat Ranger's house in Oakland, then serving the RMR's continental needs with cafe au lait and warmed-up Arizmendi Bakery's monkey bread in the morning. Back in the real world on Monday, I needed to hit the chopping board even more than I needed to pick up my mail or get started on the pile of work due at the end of this week. I just needed to eat my own food again: a big cast-iron pan of cornbread, a pot of red-bean chili, handfuls of spinach melted down in the chili, followed by freshly peeled blood oranges toted home from CA.
And yogurt! Ah, the joys of plain, plain, live-culture, unflavored yogurt. I had not realized my utter dependence on plain yogurt for breakfast until I had 2 weeks of mornings in Other People's Kitchens, generously stocked with Starbucks holiday blend and milk and bagels (even, in one happy instance, a can of pineapple chunks and an unopened box of Grape Nuts, oh joyful day) but alas, no yogurt. Here is the key to road-trip happiness: do not let your digestive system become dependent on anything not readily available in a Kwiki Mart. Had I needed kiwi-strawberry or key-lime-pie-flavored yogurt, I'd have been happy as a clam; as it was, my only chance at scoring a spoonful of plain old no-sugar 'gurt was a jumbo 32-ounce tub of Dannon from the Winn Dixie--not the most practical option when you're in a 70-degree car for most of the day. Honestly, I liked the grits and eggs, and the chocolate croissants served with French press coffee while watching Ray Liotta chewing up the seat cushions in Turbulence, perhaps the worst Christmas-Eve/serial-killer-on-board/flight-attendant-flies-the-plane- movies ever. But it wasn't until San Francisco that we were back in the land of sixteen kinds of plain yogurt--cream on top! non-fat! organic! goat! The golden West, gracious land of lactobacillis.
It is, weirdly, something like 60 degrees out on the streets of Brooklyn this evening, which is a very strange backdrop to the still-sparkling Christmas lights and discarded holiday trees sprawling in the gutters, but nice for the Pie Queen, just recently re-entered from warmer climes, notably her beloved San Francisco, preceded by a two-week tour of K's friends and family down South, from Richmond, VA to Charleston, SC and all across and around the balmy state of Florida, home of alligators, manatees, flamingo paddle boats and key lime pie. And the Weeki Wachee mermaids! But more on them later.
There will be lots about Florida in the next few days-- a place I'd visited only once, at age 9, and then just en famille to Disneyworld. What I remembered were palm trees in the hotel lobby and being so terrified by the build-up to Space Mountain as to completely melt down while standing in line (something I still tend to do, even when medicated, at airports everywhere). The real Florida, revisited at 38 alongside hometown girl K., still had lots of palm trees, not only growing inside the Orlando airport but all over the place, from bushy palmettos to swaying royal palms, along with bald cypress and hibiscus bushes and poinsettas growing in big showy bushes right in the front yard. We didn't see alligators eating household pets, or pythons trying to eat alligators (and exploding as a result) but otherwise the dream state completely lived up to expectation, and more, with skee ball and fireworks on Daytona Beach for New Year's Eve, barbecue in Miami, the Gulf of Mexico lapping at the shores of Cedar Key under a pink-streaked dawn sky, and orange trees and gator-head key chains everywhere.
It was fabulous all around, but I did miss cooking. I grabbed it when I could--frying up latkes for breakfast at K's mother's house in Lake Mary, making oatmeal/currant/apricot scones for Molly and K. when they got back from running around Lake Merritt, practically weeping with delight in the circus-colored citrus aisles of Berkeley Bowl before making pints of guacamole, a pie pan full of Meyer lemon bars, and two roast chickens for the See-Me/Meet-K. party at the Red Meat Ranger's house in Oakland, then serving the RMR's continental needs with cafe au lait and warmed-up Arizmendi Bakery's monkey bread in the morning. Back in the real world on Monday, I needed to hit the chopping board even more than I needed to pick up my mail or get started on the pile of work due at the end of this week. I just needed to eat my own food again: a big cast-iron pan of cornbread, a pot of red-bean chili, handfuls of spinach melted down in the chili, followed by freshly peeled blood oranges toted home from CA.
And yogurt! Ah, the joys of plain, plain, live-culture, unflavored yogurt. I had not realized my utter dependence on plain yogurt for breakfast until I had 2 weeks of mornings in Other People's Kitchens, generously stocked with Starbucks holiday blend and milk and bagels (even, in one happy instance, a can of pineapple chunks and an unopened box of Grape Nuts, oh joyful day) but alas, no yogurt. Here is the key to road-trip happiness: do not let your digestive system become dependent on anything not readily available in a Kwiki Mart. Had I needed kiwi-strawberry or key-lime-pie-flavored yogurt, I'd have been happy as a clam; as it was, my only chance at scoring a spoonful of plain old no-sugar 'gurt was a jumbo 32-ounce tub of Dannon from the Winn Dixie--not the most practical option when you're in a 70-degree car for most of the day. Honestly, I liked the grits and eggs, and the chocolate croissants served with French press coffee while watching Ray Liotta chewing up the seat cushions in Turbulence, perhaps the worst Christmas-Eve/serial-killer-on-board/flight-attendant-flies-the-plane- movies ever. But it wasn't until San Francisco that we were back in the land of sixteen kinds of plain yogurt--cream on top! non-fat! organic! goat! The golden West, gracious land of lactobacillis.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
pecan pie thoughts
What no one needs to put on the cover of their newspaper/magazine: raw turkey. Both the NYT and NY mag both produced spectacularly unappetizing holiday spreads last week, more redolent of that disturbing John Currin painting Thanksgiving--which is at least sardonic and touched with some acid social commentary--than a celebration of good cheer and good cooking. Although I did love the picture of the Haitian turkey, just because it looked so awful--as if a turkey had somehow gone through a very bad Harry Potter spell turning it into--a giant scorched olive loaf!
But now it's pie time, pie time at last! I'm off to the Greenmarket this morning for apples, apples, apples, Ronnybrook cream, cider, lettuce for the salad and cinnamon doughnuts to keep me happy. Because K. is a Southerner, she's hinted that a little pecan pie wouldn't be amiss on Saturday's table, so this might be the time that I finally try out John Thorne's very simple, very tasty-sounding pecan pie. Yankee that I am, I am wondering if maple syrup could be subbed for the golden syrup. Or if I can find some Steen's Cane Syrup, I'll use that, maybe half-and-half with maple syrup, and bourbon--just to be all-American--instead of the rum.
John Thorne’s Pecan Pie
1 cup muscovado or Sucanat brown sugar
2/3 cup (scant) Lyle’s Golden Syrup or cane syrup
2 TB dark rum or bourbon
4 TB butter
3 eggs
1/4 tsp. salt
2 cups pecans
single crust pie shell, partially prebaked blind
Preheat oven 350 degrees. Boil sugar, syrup, rum, and butter for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Let cool. Stir in salt, eggs, and pecans. Pour into pie shell and bake 50 minutes.
But now it's pie time, pie time at last! I'm off to the Greenmarket this morning for apples, apples, apples, Ronnybrook cream, cider, lettuce for the salad and cinnamon doughnuts to keep me happy. Because K. is a Southerner, she's hinted that a little pecan pie wouldn't be amiss on Saturday's table, so this might be the time that I finally try out John Thorne's very simple, very tasty-sounding pecan pie. Yankee that I am, I am wondering if maple syrup could be subbed for the golden syrup. Or if I can find some Steen's Cane Syrup, I'll use that, maybe half-and-half with maple syrup, and bourbon--just to be all-American--instead of the rum.
John Thorne’s Pecan Pie
1 cup muscovado or Sucanat brown sugar
2/3 cup (scant) Lyle’s Golden Syrup or cane syrup
2 TB dark rum or bourbon
4 TB butter
3 eggs
1/4 tsp. salt
2 cups pecans
single crust pie shell, partially prebaked blind
Preheat oven 350 degrees. Boil sugar, syrup, rum, and butter for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Let cool. Stir in salt, eggs, and pecans. Pour into pie shell and bake 50 minutes.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
The Salad You Need to Know
Mostly, I’m on pie duty this holiday—apple and pumpkin for Amy’s on Thursday, apple, cranberry and pecan for the T-day redux with my family on Saturday. But for Thursday’s dinner I’ll also be bringing the salad, if only because I have become a fierce champion of this recipe and feel strongly that no Thanksgiving table is complete without it.
I first had this salad at a dinner at Bay Wolf, a lovely French/Italian/California-cuisine fixture in Oakland, possibly at the same dinner where I was served what remains one of the best pasta dishes of my life-- buckwheat ravioli stuffed with goat cheese, tossed with beets and walnuts—along with their dreamy duck-liver mousse, which practically floats off the toast. When Bay Wolf finally came out with their cookbook, I bought it immediately, just in hopes of finding this salad and that pasta. (As for the duck, it turns out to be more mousseline than mousse, equal parts liver and whipped cream). The pasta was there, albeit in two separate recipes--one for goat-cheese ravioli, the other for buckwheat noodles in a beet-and-walnut pasta sauce. (I have not yet united the two, but I sleep better knowing that I could.) But the salad was right there, tasting just like it did in Oakland.
As an autumn charmer, this beautiful salad makes slightly more sense in California, where pomegranates and persimmons are grown locally and show up in the farmers’ markets in October and November. But I've made it all over the place and it's a hit every time--a little sweet, soft and slippery, then crunchy, toasty from the nuts and creamy with the goat cheese. And the colors are very much like a frolic in the woods—glowing drops of red, wedges of deep orange, shiny brown nuts and deep green lettuces.
Bay Wolf’s Autumn Salad
This salad calls for Fuyu persimmons, which are the round, firm, flattish ones, not the deep-orange, pyramid-shaped ones. If you can’t find persimmons, substitute sliced Bosc or Asian pears.
Pecans
1 cup pecans
2 tablespoons sugar
cayenne pepper to taste
Preheat the oven to 350F. Fill a medium pot with water and bring to a boil. Drop in pecans and blanch for a couple minutes. Drain. Toss pecans with sugar and cayenne. Spread on a baking sheet and bake, stirring frequently, until crisp and toasty. Be careful; because of the sugar, they can burn easily. Let cool, then break up into smallish pieces.
Dressing
1 shallot, minced
1 sprig of fresh thyme
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
salt and pepper
1/2 cup olive oil
Let shallot and thyme soak in vinegar for 30 minutes. Strip the thyme leaves off the sprig. Add salt and pepper and whisk in olive oil.
Salad
A couple handfuls of arugula
A small head of red-leaf or oak-leaf lettuce
Seeds of 1 pomegranate
3 Fuyu (flat) persimmons, peeled and sliced
4 ounces soft, fresh goat cheese (chevre), crumbled
Pecans
Toss lettuce, persimmons, and pomegranate seeds with half the dressing. Add more dressing if needed. Top with pecans and goat cheese.
I first had this salad at a dinner at Bay Wolf, a lovely French/Italian/California-cuisine fixture in Oakland, possibly at the same dinner where I was served what remains one of the best pasta dishes of my life-- buckwheat ravioli stuffed with goat cheese, tossed with beets and walnuts—along with their dreamy duck-liver mousse, which practically floats off the toast. When Bay Wolf finally came out with their cookbook, I bought it immediately, just in hopes of finding this salad and that pasta. (As for the duck, it turns out to be more mousseline than mousse, equal parts liver and whipped cream). The pasta was there, albeit in two separate recipes--one for goat-cheese ravioli, the other for buckwheat noodles in a beet-and-walnut pasta sauce. (I have not yet united the two, but I sleep better knowing that I could.) But the salad was right there, tasting just like it did in Oakland.
As an autumn charmer, this beautiful salad makes slightly more sense in California, where pomegranates and persimmons are grown locally and show up in the farmers’ markets in October and November. But I've made it all over the place and it's a hit every time--a little sweet, soft and slippery, then crunchy, toasty from the nuts and creamy with the goat cheese. And the colors are very much like a frolic in the woods—glowing drops of red, wedges of deep orange, shiny brown nuts and deep green lettuces.
Bay Wolf’s Autumn Salad
This salad calls for Fuyu persimmons, which are the round, firm, flattish ones, not the deep-orange, pyramid-shaped ones. If you can’t find persimmons, substitute sliced Bosc or Asian pears.
Pecans
1 cup pecans
2 tablespoons sugar
cayenne pepper to taste
Preheat the oven to 350F. Fill a medium pot with water and bring to a boil. Drop in pecans and blanch for a couple minutes. Drain. Toss pecans with sugar and cayenne. Spread on a baking sheet and bake, stirring frequently, until crisp and toasty. Be careful; because of the sugar, they can burn easily. Let cool, then break up into smallish pieces.
Dressing
1 shallot, minced
1 sprig of fresh thyme
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
salt and pepper
1/2 cup olive oil
Let shallot and thyme soak in vinegar for 30 minutes. Strip the thyme leaves off the sprig. Add salt and pepper and whisk in olive oil.
Salad
A couple handfuls of arugula
A small head of red-leaf or oak-leaf lettuce
Seeds of 1 pomegranate
3 Fuyu (flat) persimmons, peeled and sliced
4 ounces soft, fresh goat cheese (chevre), crumbled
Pecans
Toss lettuce, persimmons, and pomegranate seeds with half the dressing. Add more dressing if needed. Top with pecans and goat cheese.
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Pumpkin Pie!
Oh, where has the Pie Queen been? Spirited back to the South? Whisked up to a wood-stove cabin on the Canadian border? Or, more prosaically, trapped in Brooklyn under a mountain of deadlines? Well, the last 2 are true, at least, although I will be heading back across the Mason-Dixon Line come December, on the Civil War Isn't Over Yet tour of Virginia, South Carolina, and Florida come December, followed by a quickie breeze through San Francisco (o bliss! o Tartine!) in early January.
But right now I'm in Tazza, the month-and-a-week new cafe/bakery/enoteca at the corner of Henry and Atlantic (just north of Atlantic, on the B'klyn Heights side). Such a lovely place, spacious and pleasant, with coffee served in real cups on little round orange trays, with your own beaker of milk on the side, and a tasty selection of cakes and sandwiches, even a wine bar for lingering once the typing's done. Open at 7am, closes at 10pm. It's like being at home, only much tidier--they even play all my CDs, from Satie and Kiri Te Kanawa to Paris Combo. These days, it's all about staying local--last night, my downstairs neighbor Amy and I ran through the rain to get to the cozy, David-Bowie-soundtracked environs of Chip Shop--a lady's half-pint of Old Speckled Hen for me, a Guinness, a plate of baked beans on toast and a pair of deep-fried Reese's PB cups for her.
[Long silence. Chirp. Chirp.]
So, Thanksgiving. Did anyone find Kim S's long turkey-roasting piece in the Times to be well, kinda pointless? At last, after all those dopey, fussy articles (put an ice pack on the breast! brine, brine, brine!) the Times is now paying their writers to talk to their moms and make turkey the way everyone actually does it: just put on some salt and pepper, maybe a little butter, a few veg inside, tent it with foil and stick in the oven til it's done. Honestly, there's no great mystery. Just roast the damn thing and stop talking about it.
Pie, now, I could talk to you all day about pie. And if you're making pumpkin pie this year--which you should, otherwise you'll end up with something like that scene in A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, where Peppermint Patty, confronted with Snoopy's turkeyless offerings of popcorn and toast, flips out and demands, "Where's the cranberry sauce, Chuck? Where's the PUMPKIN PIE???" Trust me, I made ginger-pumpkin mousse one year, for a group of about 30, and it's not a mistake I'll make again.
So, pumpkin pie. Two things you want to do: pre-bake your pie crust, and use roasted fresh butternut squash. Pre-baking (aka blind-baking) the crust until it is lightly golden solves the whole soggy-bottom-crust thing that bedevils most custard pies. To blind-bake, make your crust, tuck it into your pie pan, and refrigerate the whole thing for an hour or so. Then line the pan with foil or parchment paper, and fill with a handful of pie weights (those little silvery drops sold in fancy cooking shops) or old dried beans (note that once a pie weight, always a pie weight--you can't eat those beans once they're baked, but you can use them as pie weights again and again). Let crust bake at 400-425F (depending on your oven) until pale golden. Then take out the foil etc. and let bake a few minutes more, until golden brown.
And as for the filling,butternut squash has vast flavor reserves that pumpkin can't even dream of. Using fresh squash will give your filling a lovely, fluffy texture that's very different from the usual heavy, stodgy wedge. Just slice your butternut--no mean feat, so be careful and don't slice your hand up--in half lengthwise, put it face down on a baking sheet and roast until squishy. Flip it over, scrape out the seeds and goo, and scoop flesh into a colander. Mash throughly--I like to pass it through a food mill to get really smooth, but you can buzz it in the processor, beat it with a spoon, or be totally insane and push it through a fine-mesh strainer with a wooden spoon, which is probably the fastest route to just scrapping the whole deal and opening a can of Libby's. But you do need to do something to get rid of the stringiness. I just cranked a bunch of stringy chunks through the fine disk of my cheapie plastic food mill, and was amazed at the lovely velvety puree that resulted. Heave the puree into a strainer and let drain for a hour or so.
Then just find a nice recipe--most people I know have bailed on the old evaporated-milk deal and use heavy cream now instead, but I stick by my little can, mixed with eggs, brown sugar, and spices. Shuna over at Eggbeater likes to add slivered sage; the lovely Bakerina swears by Rose Levy Bernbaum's double-cooking technique, in which one sautes the pumpkin, sugar, and spices for a few minutes before mixing in the eggs and milk--a technique I think I'll try, because why NOT make life a little more complicated?
Remember that the pie will continue to cook a bit as it cools, so leave the center a little jiggly, to avoid giant fault-like cracks cratering through the custard.
Pie Queen's Pumpkin Pie
Essentially the exact same recipe as published in the 1939 Yankee Cookbook, just with more squash and with the addition of a quick pre-cooking of the filling.
15 ounces roasted, mashed butternut squash or pumpkin (approx. 1 1/2 cups)
2/3 cup light brown sugar, packed
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups evaporated milk, or a combo of milk, half and half, or heavy cream
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
single-crust pie shell, baked blind to a pale golden
Preheat oven to 350F. Mix squash, sugar, spices, and salt in a heavy pot. Bring to a sputtering simmer and cook, stirring, for 3 or 4 minutes. Let cool for a few minutes, then add milk, stirring until smooth. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in vanilla. Pour into pie shell and bake until slightly puffed and set, with the center still a little jiggly. Let cool on a rack. Serve with whipped cream.
Now, the Harry Potter movie, opening tomorrow! I can't wait!
But right now I'm in Tazza, the month-and-a-week new cafe/bakery/enoteca at the corner of Henry and Atlantic (just north of Atlantic, on the B'klyn Heights side). Such a lovely place, spacious and pleasant, with coffee served in real cups on little round orange trays, with your own beaker of milk on the side, and a tasty selection of cakes and sandwiches, even a wine bar for lingering once the typing's done. Open at 7am, closes at 10pm. It's like being at home, only much tidier--they even play all my CDs, from Satie and Kiri Te Kanawa to Paris Combo. These days, it's all about staying local--last night, my downstairs neighbor Amy and I ran through the rain to get to the cozy, David-Bowie-soundtracked environs of Chip Shop--a lady's half-pint of Old Speckled Hen for me, a Guinness, a plate of baked beans on toast and a pair of deep-fried Reese's PB cups for her.
[Long silence. Chirp. Chirp.]
So, Thanksgiving. Did anyone find Kim S's long turkey-roasting piece in the Times to be well, kinda pointless? At last, after all those dopey, fussy articles (put an ice pack on the breast! brine, brine, brine!) the Times is now paying their writers to talk to their moms and make turkey the way everyone actually does it: just put on some salt and pepper, maybe a little butter, a few veg inside, tent it with foil and stick in the oven til it's done. Honestly, there's no great mystery. Just roast the damn thing and stop talking about it.
Pie, now, I could talk to you all day about pie. And if you're making pumpkin pie this year--which you should, otherwise you'll end up with something like that scene in A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, where Peppermint Patty, confronted with Snoopy's turkeyless offerings of popcorn and toast, flips out and demands, "Where's the cranberry sauce, Chuck? Where's the PUMPKIN PIE???" Trust me, I made ginger-pumpkin mousse one year, for a group of about 30, and it's not a mistake I'll make again.
So, pumpkin pie. Two things you want to do: pre-bake your pie crust, and use roasted fresh butternut squash. Pre-baking (aka blind-baking) the crust until it is lightly golden solves the whole soggy-bottom-crust thing that bedevils most custard pies. To blind-bake, make your crust, tuck it into your pie pan, and refrigerate the whole thing for an hour or so. Then line the pan with foil or parchment paper, and fill with a handful of pie weights (those little silvery drops sold in fancy cooking shops) or old dried beans (note that once a pie weight, always a pie weight--you can't eat those beans once they're baked, but you can use them as pie weights again and again). Let crust bake at 400-425F (depending on your oven) until pale golden. Then take out the foil etc. and let bake a few minutes more, until golden brown.
And as for the filling,butternut squash has vast flavor reserves that pumpkin can't even dream of. Using fresh squash will give your filling a lovely, fluffy texture that's very different from the usual heavy, stodgy wedge. Just slice your butternut--no mean feat, so be careful and don't slice your hand up--in half lengthwise, put it face down on a baking sheet and roast until squishy. Flip it over, scrape out the seeds and goo, and scoop flesh into a colander. Mash throughly--I like to pass it through a food mill to get really smooth, but you can buzz it in the processor, beat it with a spoon, or be totally insane and push it through a fine-mesh strainer with a wooden spoon, which is probably the fastest route to just scrapping the whole deal and opening a can of Libby's. But you do need to do something to get rid of the stringiness. I just cranked a bunch of stringy chunks through the fine disk of my cheapie plastic food mill, and was amazed at the lovely velvety puree that resulted. Heave the puree into a strainer and let drain for a hour or so.
Then just find a nice recipe--most people I know have bailed on the old evaporated-milk deal and use heavy cream now instead, but I stick by my little can, mixed with eggs, brown sugar, and spices. Shuna over at Eggbeater likes to add slivered sage; the lovely Bakerina swears by Rose Levy Bernbaum's double-cooking technique, in which one sautes the pumpkin, sugar, and spices for a few minutes before mixing in the eggs and milk--a technique I think I'll try, because why NOT make life a little more complicated?
Remember that the pie will continue to cook a bit as it cools, so leave the center a little jiggly, to avoid giant fault-like cracks cratering through the custard.
Pie Queen's Pumpkin Pie
Essentially the exact same recipe as published in the 1939 Yankee Cookbook, just with more squash and with the addition of a quick pre-cooking of the filling.
15 ounces roasted, mashed butternut squash or pumpkin (approx. 1 1/2 cups)
2/3 cup light brown sugar, packed
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups evaporated milk, or a combo of milk, half and half, or heavy cream
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
single-crust pie shell, baked blind to a pale golden
Preheat oven to 350F. Mix squash, sugar, spices, and salt in a heavy pot. Bring to a sputtering simmer and cook, stirring, for 3 or 4 minutes. Let cool for a few minutes, then add milk, stirring until smooth. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in vanilla. Pour into pie shell and bake until slightly puffed and set, with the center still a little jiggly. Let cool on a rack. Serve with whipped cream.
Now, the Harry Potter movie, opening tomorrow! I can't wait!
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Down South!
Just a quick note, since it's 1AM and I'm wiped out--but I'm in the South, for the very first time, at the Southern Foodways Alliance symposium, all about sugar and sweet things. Driving from Memphis to Greenwood, seeing fields of cotton for the first time, listening to pop country and then in the surprise of the chic Alluvian Hotel, eating pig candy (sugar-rubbed bacon with pecans) and getting a taste of that sweet southern hospitality. More on brandy milk punch, Julia Reed, and Doe's Eat Place later....now to bed.
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Come on in, the water's fine
"These people have a lot of parties," Teddy said sleepily.
"These people have a lot of money," Jane Louise said. "Maybe we should give a lot of parties. It feels just like family life, but everyone goes home afterwards."
-Laurie Colwin, A Big Storm Knocked It Over
Well, there's no getting around it. My birthday is making its annual appearance this weekend. Apart of the whole getting-older thing (note to self: hair dye), I'm actually fond of birthdays. Cards, cake, funny presents (goofy socks! fridge magnets!)--what's not to like? Given that there's only one day of the year when you can get total strangers to be nice to you for no reason, I don't understand those sour don't-make-a-fuss types hating on their birthdays every year.
But then again, Libras love a party. And we especially love a party together, preferably one with lots of little tea sandwiches and an endless assortment of nibbles at which to pick. No decisions, lots of little sweet and salty things, champagne: that's paradise, when you're born in October. And that's what my tiny birthday party is going to be: not dinner, but just nibbles, and chocolate (especially since K. mailed me a whole stack of Gianduja bars, sweet thing that she is), and of course, cake. Since it's autumn, finally, I'm going to skip the usual layer-cake-n'-icing thing and make the awesome gingerbread-apple-upside-down cake. The recipe's on here already somewhere; I'll link to it if I can find it.
Until then, the fire-escape garden has produced its last handful of tomatoes, ripening on a pie plate in the kitchen. The morning glories have been replaced with yellow-and-bronze chrysanthemums, and ivy is twining up where the petunias once flowered and fretted. The heavy seed heads on the sunflowers are slowly being emptied by the birds, and there's a bagful of crab apples and quinces sitting in my hallway, waiting to be turned into paradise jelly, using the lovelyBakerina's recipe, which is the same as the one in my 1940s edition of the Joy of Cooking, back when the Joy still had a full chapter of preserving and canning recipes. (The recent, much-vaunted redo of the book left jams and jellies out completely, thanks to a bunch of snitty NYC editors who live on soy lattes and Thai takeout and DO NOT CAN.)
So happy birthday to all you Libras and Scorpios out there, and now, go make a wish.
Songs for a Birthday
1. Beautiful Child (Rufus Wainwright)
2. I Was Born (Natalie Merchant)
3. You've Got What It Takes (Brooke Benton and Dinah Washington)
4. That Was Your Mother (Paul Simon)
5. Really Rosie (Carole King)
"These people have a lot of money," Jane Louise said. "Maybe we should give a lot of parties. It feels just like family life, but everyone goes home afterwards."
-Laurie Colwin, A Big Storm Knocked It Over
Well, there's no getting around it. My birthday is making its annual appearance this weekend. Apart of the whole getting-older thing (note to self: hair dye), I'm actually fond of birthdays. Cards, cake, funny presents (goofy socks! fridge magnets!)--what's not to like? Given that there's only one day of the year when you can get total strangers to be nice to you for no reason, I don't understand those sour don't-make-a-fuss types hating on their birthdays every year.
But then again, Libras love a party. And we especially love a party together, preferably one with lots of little tea sandwiches and an endless assortment of nibbles at which to pick. No decisions, lots of little sweet and salty things, champagne: that's paradise, when you're born in October. And that's what my tiny birthday party is going to be: not dinner, but just nibbles, and chocolate (especially since K. mailed me a whole stack of Gianduja bars, sweet thing that she is), and of course, cake. Since it's autumn, finally, I'm going to skip the usual layer-cake-n'-icing thing and make the awesome gingerbread-apple-upside-down cake. The recipe's on here already somewhere; I'll link to it if I can find it.
Until then, the fire-escape garden has produced its last handful of tomatoes, ripening on a pie plate in the kitchen. The morning glories have been replaced with yellow-and-bronze chrysanthemums, and ivy is twining up where the petunias once flowered and fretted. The heavy seed heads on the sunflowers are slowly being emptied by the birds, and there's a bagful of crab apples and quinces sitting in my hallway, waiting to be turned into paradise jelly, using the lovelyBakerina's recipe, which is the same as the one in my 1940s edition of the Joy of Cooking, back when the Joy still had a full chapter of preserving and canning recipes. (The recent, much-vaunted redo of the book left jams and jellies out completely, thanks to a bunch of snitty NYC editors who live on soy lattes and Thai takeout and DO NOT CAN.)
So happy birthday to all you Libras and Scorpios out there, and now, go make a wish.
Songs for a Birthday
1. Beautiful Child (Rufus Wainwright)
2. I Was Born (Natalie Merchant)
3. You've Got What It Takes (Brooke Benton and Dinah Washington)
4. That Was Your Mother (Paul Simon)
5. Really Rosie (Carole King)
Monday, October 17, 2005
Pudding in Paradise
A bunch of years ago, when I was writing a dessert-and-pastry column called Queen of Tarts for the San Francisco Bay Guardian (yes, this Pie Queen concept has been going on for quite a while), I got an invitation to go down to a warehouse in South San Francisco. South San Francisco is what you first see from the airport, its claim to fame laid out in huge white Hollywood-sign letters: "South San Francisco: The Industrial City," framed by identical rows of boxy pastel houses, And the garage-like space I'd come to find was identical to every other locked box in a long row of corrugated metal and concrete.
Except for the smell. It was like all the brownies on earth baking together, tantalizing and warm and unbearably seductive. "I don't even smell it anymore," confessed Robert Steinberg, one of the founders of the then-nascent Scharffen Berger Chocolate company. A doctor turned self-taught chocolate maven, Steinberg was overseeing the company's tiny chocolate-making operation in tandem with co-owner John Scharffenberger, who'd recently left his family's successful sparkling-wine business in the Anderson Valley. Together, they were doing what no one else in America was doing on such a small scale: making bean-to-bar chocolate. (As far as I know, Jacques Torres's new Hudson Street operation is the only other small-scale chocolate-making operation in the States.)
In the land of home-grown behemoths like Hershey's, they had to import their fire engine red, Willie-Wonka-ish machinery from Germany, where family-run chocolate companies still had old, small machines to sell. The beans came in rough burlap sacks, stamped with their country of origin--Venezuela, Cote d'Ivoire, Ecuador. We toured the room, pausing at each machine as the beans went from roaster to concher to tempering vat. The chocolate itself was startling: intensely flavored, with a vivid smokiness balanced by fruitiness.
Professional pastry chefs were Scharffen Berger's target market, and soon, in San Francisco, menus were touting Scharffen Berger chocolate the same way they bragged of Frog Hollow peaches and Acme bread. But Steinberg and Scharffenberger were caught off guard by the public's clamour for their chunky slabs of baking chocolate.
Now, Scharffen Berger has a sleek new home in a rehabbed brick warehouse in south Berkeley (where you can take a fragrant tour of the whole chocolate-dusted works, then taste their wares in the adjoining Cafe Cacao). The product line includes both the original big baking blocks and a whole wide range for straight-up chocolate eaters: smooth, slender 3-oz bars of various cocoa-bean percentages (the higher the percent, the darker and stronger the chocolate), cute chunky two-bite bars, cocoa powder, cocoa nibs (tiny bitter tidbits of the roasted bean itself), even milk chocolate (something Steinberg swore, in the beginning, that he’d never do). And the company has a corporate parent: the original rubber-candy-bar company itself, Hershey's.
But so far, Scharffen Berger's still doing what it does best. And their brand new Gianduja bar--ahhh, my sweet, I insist! Dark chocolate mixed with pure hazelnut paste into a silky toffee-colored bar, it's like Nutella for grownups, not too sweet, with that special smoky edge roughing up the smooth suaveness of the hazelnut. Melt this onto a baguette, or some toasted brioche, and you will have died and gone to breakfast in heaven’s youth hostel.
On the Scharffen Berger website is a recipe for a chocolate pudding made with this. Fair warning: anyone making this for me better show up with a ring.
*****
And elsewhere in the news, Cafe du Monde is back! They're up and frying down by the French Market, bringing the sweet smell of sugar-dusted beignets and chicory coffee back to the French Quarter. When times are tough, the tough start frying.
Except for the smell. It was like all the brownies on earth baking together, tantalizing and warm and unbearably seductive. "I don't even smell it anymore," confessed Robert Steinberg, one of the founders of the then-nascent Scharffen Berger Chocolate company. A doctor turned self-taught chocolate maven, Steinberg was overseeing the company's tiny chocolate-making operation in tandem with co-owner John Scharffenberger, who'd recently left his family's successful sparkling-wine business in the Anderson Valley. Together, they were doing what no one else in America was doing on such a small scale: making bean-to-bar chocolate. (As far as I know, Jacques Torres's new Hudson Street operation is the only other small-scale chocolate-making operation in the States.)
In the land of home-grown behemoths like Hershey's, they had to import their fire engine red, Willie-Wonka-ish machinery from Germany, where family-run chocolate companies still had old, small machines to sell. The beans came in rough burlap sacks, stamped with their country of origin--Venezuela, Cote d'Ivoire, Ecuador. We toured the room, pausing at each machine as the beans went from roaster to concher to tempering vat. The chocolate itself was startling: intensely flavored, with a vivid smokiness balanced by fruitiness.
Professional pastry chefs were Scharffen Berger's target market, and soon, in San Francisco, menus were touting Scharffen Berger chocolate the same way they bragged of Frog Hollow peaches and Acme bread. But Steinberg and Scharffenberger were caught off guard by the public's clamour for their chunky slabs of baking chocolate.
Now, Scharffen Berger has a sleek new home in a rehabbed brick warehouse in south Berkeley (where you can take a fragrant tour of the whole chocolate-dusted works, then taste their wares in the adjoining Cafe Cacao). The product line includes both the original big baking blocks and a whole wide range for straight-up chocolate eaters: smooth, slender 3-oz bars of various cocoa-bean percentages (the higher the percent, the darker and stronger the chocolate), cute chunky two-bite bars, cocoa powder, cocoa nibs (tiny bitter tidbits of the roasted bean itself), even milk chocolate (something Steinberg swore, in the beginning, that he’d never do). And the company has a corporate parent: the original rubber-candy-bar company itself, Hershey's.
But so far, Scharffen Berger's still doing what it does best. And their brand new Gianduja bar--ahhh, my sweet, I insist! Dark chocolate mixed with pure hazelnut paste into a silky toffee-colored bar, it's like Nutella for grownups, not too sweet, with that special smoky edge roughing up the smooth suaveness of the hazelnut. Melt this onto a baguette, or some toasted brioche, and you will have died and gone to breakfast in heaven’s youth hostel.
On the Scharffen Berger website is a recipe for a chocolate pudding made with this. Fair warning: anyone making this for me better show up with a ring.
*****
And elsewhere in the news, Cafe du Monde is back! They're up and frying down by the French Market, bringing the sweet smell of sugar-dusted beignets and chicory coffee back to the French Quarter. When times are tough, the tough start frying.
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Rained out, but apple pie prevails
Good morning from rainy, rainy NYC. I had high hopes of showing K. the glories of an East Coast autumn over this long weekend--all the tasty treats they don't have in warm states, like hot apple cider, pumpkin patches, and apple-cider doughnuts made in goofy Rube Goldberg machines right before your eyes. Every orchard in the Hudson River Valley was having a hayride-and-apple-picking extravaganza for the weekend, it seemed. There would be cider-pressing and performances by the Magical Puppet Theater at the nifty biodynamic Hawthorne Valley Farm, even a Civil War re-enactment in Montgomery, just in case K. needed a little taste of home, albeit with a Union slant. She packed up her tent--how cold could it be?--I made a reservation at the sweet-sounding Milk & Honey b&b for the first night, and we synchronized our watches to meet in Albany.
Well, you already know how this goes, right? The b&b was homey and laid-back and fun. We learned that Chatham, NY is not on big-city time, which means the Blue Plate restaurant closes its doors at 8:45pm (and meaning, of course, that we didn't get to try it, since we didn't actually get it together to leave our room seeking dinner until 9pm). And that the Greig Farm orchard, on a cloudy Friday, was virtually empty, save for us and a whole bunch of little trees laden with dozens of kinds of apples and acres of pumpkins scattered in the most unlikely of places.
But then the rain started to fall. And fall, and fall, and fall. Unlike the few other hardy campers in the park, we didn't have tarps and canopies rigged up over our tiny tent. At 2:30am, one of the tent poles collapsed. By 6:30am, the nylon walls were running with water, the roof of the tent was bowed down to within 2 inches of our heads and we were caught like a couple of almost-drowned cats in a sack. We spent the morning thawing out over coffee and sausage at the diner in Red Hook (a very classic 1920s Silk Cut model, for you vintage-diner fans), then another hour reading the New Republic at the laundromat as our muddy socks and sodden sleeping bags churned around in the industrial-sized washers. And by the afternoon, we were on the thruway, heading back to the one warm place we knew--my apartment in Brooklyn.
Which was, by contrast, a blissful oasis of hot showers & clean flowery sheets. With the car parked, we stayed in the neighborhood, walking to Prospect Park (trees! waterfalls! squirrels! who needs the country?), eating curried salmon with pineapple at Blue Star, catching a movie at the Cobble Hill cinema (Tim Burton's Corpse Bride--ehhh. Not original, not funny, in fact lame all around. Skip it. The preview for the Johnny Cash movie, however, looked hot), shooting free pool at b61, and drinking hot mulled cider all day long.
And since we did come home with two big bags of hand-picked apples, I scooted out of bed early on Monday morning and whipped up a homemade apple pie. It looks squashed in this picture, but actually it was very pretty (and tasty!), with squirrel and leaf cutouts on top. And while the pie baked, K. made apple-orchard scrambled eggs, with sauteed onions, apples, and chunks of pork sausage. You could throw in a little thyme, too, and maybe some sharp cheddar cheese. Serve with some hot cider, toast and apple butter, and be happy for flannel pajamas and a roof over your head.
Apple Pie to Save the Day
Crust
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 TB sugar
1 1/2 to 2 sticks butter (3/4 - 1 cup), depending on how buttery you want your crust
6 TB ice water
Mix dry ingredients, cut in butter (leave it chunkier than you think!), and toss in ice water. Flatten into two rounds, wrap in plastic or stick in a zip-loc bag, and chill. After at least an hour or so of chilling, roll out the crusts between sheets of wax paper.
Meanwhile, peel, core, and cut up a bunch of apples. Since I already had way more apples on hand than I knew I'd need, I just kept peeling and slicing until I had enough to fill my pie pan in a nice heap. But buy at least three or four pounds of apples; having too many apples is always a good thing. Toss apples with about 3/4 cup of sugar (more or less, depending on your taste), 1 tsp cinnamon, a handful of raisins (optional), a scant tablespoon of flour, and a pinch of salt. You can throw in a little nutmeg, cloves, allspice, or ginger, too, but be gentle--you want the mellow apple taste to prevail.
Line the pie pan with the bottom crust, heap in your apples, and top with top crust. Press edges together and crimp the crust edge. If you want, you can brush the top with an egg wash (1 egg yolk beaten with 1-2 tb water), and top it with little cutouts of leaves or apples or squirrels, if you're like me and collect goofy cookie cutters for just this purpose.
Bake at 375 degrees for 1 hour. You may need to cover the edges with foil for the last 20 minutes or so to prevent them from burning. Crust should be well browned and filling bubbling. Let cool to warm, then serve with vanilla ice cream or sharp cheddar cheese. After all, as the New Englanders say, Apple pie without the cheese/Is like a hug without the squeeze.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
A Sweet Year
Come sundown on Monday, it will be Rosh Hashanah, the start of the two-day celebration of the Jewish New Year, and of the two-week-long stretch known as the High Holy Days, which ends with Yom Kippur. Me, I'm mostly a baking Jew. I do challah for Friday nights, hamentaschen for Purim, latkes for Chanukkah, flourless chocolate cake and matzoh-meal muffins for Passover. But Rosh Hashanah is a lovely holiday, and it even gets me back to temple, sometimes. Determined by the lunar calendar, Rosh Hashanah floats around, cropping up anytime from early September to early October. In 2001, it fell just a few days after Sept. 11, and I was definitely not the only sloppily observant Jew who suddenly needed to hear the familiar liturgy. What I realized at the end, though, was that I was really there for the headliner: the blowing of the shofar, the long ram's horn that drones like a wild, Biblical bagpipe at the close of the day's services.
The sound of the shofar is a wake-up call, blowing all the past year's dust out of your head. At the same time, you don't get off scot-free. The two weeks of the High Holy Days are a time to clear debts, to make amends, to call anyone you've been behaving badly to and rub the slate clean. No Hail Marys, no priestly intercession; you have to go out and do it yourself.
But back to the baking side of things: every culture has its symbolic New Year's foods--lentils with a stuffed pig's foot in Bologna; noodles in China; hoppin' john (black-eyed or field peas with rice) down South. And where most traditions take long life and prosperity as their metaphors, the dishes of Rosh Hashanah are all about sweetness. Nothing sour, nothing bitter: New Year's foods are honey-sweet, full of fruit and warm spice. This is the year still perfect, a full glass of health and happiness. It's a rare moment of bubbly hope for a religion and culture more used to looking over its shoulder for the Cossacks coming round the corner.
New fruits--something freshly harvested in the fall, something still yet new for the season--get pride of place on the table. Here on the East Coast this means apples, just coming into season now. But I like to add pomegranates, Concord grapes, and fresh figs, a mix of autumn bounty both local and Biblical. Slices of apples are dipped in honey and eaten to ensure a sweet year, followed by chunks of round, raisin-studded challah, spread with yet more honey. I love to make a huge challah at this time of year, studded with golden raisins, with extra honey and extra eggs. The next morning, it makes the best French toast ever, French toast that will spoil you from making it with any other bread.
Last year, on a freakishly hot night in mid-September, a dozen friends sweltered in my living room, rubbing ice cubes over their necks and arms, drinking everything cold in the house and tearing a challah the size of a Thanksgiving turkey apart with their hands. Sugarkill's Moroccan chicken tagine, a bowl of couscous, a salad with roasted figs, a gingerbread-apple cake--they all got eaten. But a year later, what everyone remembers is the bread.
Honey-Glazed Challah for Rosh Hashanah
2 tsp yeast
1 1/2 cups lukewarm water
2 eggs plus 2 egg yolks
1/4 cup vegetable oil or melted butter
1/2 cup honey
1 TB salt
7-8 cups flour
1 cup golden raisins
1/2 cup honey, for glaze
Sprinkle yeast over water and let dissolve for a few minutes. Beat in eggs, yolks, honey, oil, and salt. Stir in several cups of flour and beat to a thick batter. Add more flour, a cup at a time, to make a medium-soft but not sticky dough.
Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and let rest 10 minutes. Knead for 8-10 minutes, until dough is smooth and stretchy. It should feel warm and pliable, like a soft stomach or a relaxed inner thigh. Turn dough back into mixing bowl, cover with a damp towel or plastic bag, and let rise for 1 1/2 hours, or until doubled in bulk. Punch down and knead again for another couple minutes. At this point, depending on your schedule, you can let it rise again or go straight to shaping the loaves.
Divide dough into two lumps (or you can, if so inclined, use all the dough in one massive loaf). Stretch the lumps into flattish rectangles, and sprinkle with golden raisins. Roll up into a log, and generally push and pull the dough around so the raisins get distributed. You can, of course, add the raisins back when you're putting in the flour, but kneading dough with raisins in it is a pain, as the raisins are continually popping out and needing to be shoved back in. It's like raisin whack-a-mole.
Anyway, pull the lumps or logs or whatever into two long ropes of dough. The best directions for making a round loaf that doesn't list and collapse in the oven comes from Marcy Goldman's excellent cookbook, A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking. "Form a rope of 18 to 24 inches, thicker at one end, tapered at the other. Take the rope of dough and with one hand, lift the narrowed end and wind the entire length around the thicker end of the strand so that the thick part becomes the middle of the challah. Tuck the tip under the coil and press it down to seal it closed." You can also cheat and form your loaf in a big round cake pan, which will help keep the shape.
Otherwise, place the loaf/loaves on a parchment-lined or greased baking sheet. Drizzle with honey. Let rise again for 30 minutes. then bake in a preheated 350 oven until well-browned and hollow-sounding when you thump it. Let cool on a rack.
*****
And you know, if you want this recipe and more for your very own, you can search out my lovely little book all about honey, available on Amazon and, if you're very lucky, in the occasional nifty gift shop or bookstore. It's called Honey: From Flower to Table, and it's full of weird bee facts and beautiful flower-and-honeybee pinup photos, not to mention the ultimate non-sucky bran muffin recipe and a cool DIY beeswax-honey lip balm.
*****
And speaking of Jewish food, NOSH is finally open. It's run by Marc Elliot, of seafood hangout Blue Star, and promises all things deli, from pastrami and brisket to matzoh ball soup and blintzes. 214 Atlantic Ave, between Court and Smith Sts., Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
The sound of the shofar is a wake-up call, blowing all the past year's dust out of your head. At the same time, you don't get off scot-free. The two weeks of the High Holy Days are a time to clear debts, to make amends, to call anyone you've been behaving badly to and rub the slate clean. No Hail Marys, no priestly intercession; you have to go out and do it yourself.
But back to the baking side of things: every culture has its symbolic New Year's foods--lentils with a stuffed pig's foot in Bologna; noodles in China; hoppin' john (black-eyed or field peas with rice) down South. And where most traditions take long life and prosperity as their metaphors, the dishes of Rosh Hashanah are all about sweetness. Nothing sour, nothing bitter: New Year's foods are honey-sweet, full of fruit and warm spice. This is the year still perfect, a full glass of health and happiness. It's a rare moment of bubbly hope for a religion and culture more used to looking over its shoulder for the Cossacks coming round the corner.
New fruits--something freshly harvested in the fall, something still yet new for the season--get pride of place on the table. Here on the East Coast this means apples, just coming into season now. But I like to add pomegranates, Concord grapes, and fresh figs, a mix of autumn bounty both local and Biblical. Slices of apples are dipped in honey and eaten to ensure a sweet year, followed by chunks of round, raisin-studded challah, spread with yet more honey. I love to make a huge challah at this time of year, studded with golden raisins, with extra honey and extra eggs. The next morning, it makes the best French toast ever, French toast that will spoil you from making it with any other bread.
Last year, on a freakishly hot night in mid-September, a dozen friends sweltered in my living room, rubbing ice cubes over their necks and arms, drinking everything cold in the house and tearing a challah the size of a Thanksgiving turkey apart with their hands. Sugarkill's Moroccan chicken tagine, a bowl of couscous, a salad with roasted figs, a gingerbread-apple cake--they all got eaten. But a year later, what everyone remembers is the bread.
Honey-Glazed Challah for Rosh Hashanah
2 tsp yeast
1 1/2 cups lukewarm water
2 eggs plus 2 egg yolks
1/4 cup vegetable oil or melted butter
1/2 cup honey
1 TB salt
7-8 cups flour
1 cup golden raisins
1/2 cup honey, for glaze
Sprinkle yeast over water and let dissolve for a few minutes. Beat in eggs, yolks, honey, oil, and salt. Stir in several cups of flour and beat to a thick batter. Add more flour, a cup at a time, to make a medium-soft but not sticky dough.
Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and let rest 10 minutes. Knead for 8-10 minutes, until dough is smooth and stretchy. It should feel warm and pliable, like a soft stomach or a relaxed inner thigh. Turn dough back into mixing bowl, cover with a damp towel or plastic bag, and let rise for 1 1/2 hours, or until doubled in bulk. Punch down and knead again for another couple minutes. At this point, depending on your schedule, you can let it rise again or go straight to shaping the loaves.
Divide dough into two lumps (or you can, if so inclined, use all the dough in one massive loaf). Stretch the lumps into flattish rectangles, and sprinkle with golden raisins. Roll up into a log, and generally push and pull the dough around so the raisins get distributed. You can, of course, add the raisins back when you're putting in the flour, but kneading dough with raisins in it is a pain, as the raisins are continually popping out and needing to be shoved back in. It's like raisin whack-a-mole.
Anyway, pull the lumps or logs or whatever into two long ropes of dough. The best directions for making a round loaf that doesn't list and collapse in the oven comes from Marcy Goldman's excellent cookbook, A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking. "Form a rope of 18 to 24 inches, thicker at one end, tapered at the other. Take the rope of dough and with one hand, lift the narrowed end and wind the entire length around the thicker end of the strand so that the thick part becomes the middle of the challah. Tuck the tip under the coil and press it down to seal it closed." You can also cheat and form your loaf in a big round cake pan, which will help keep the shape.
Otherwise, place the loaf/loaves on a parchment-lined or greased baking sheet. Drizzle with honey. Let rise again for 30 minutes. then bake in a preheated 350 oven until well-browned and hollow-sounding when you thump it. Let cool on a rack.
*****
And you know, if you want this recipe and more for your very own, you can search out my lovely little book all about honey, available on Amazon and, if you're very lucky, in the occasional nifty gift shop or bookstore. It's called Honey: From Flower to Table, and it's full of weird bee facts and beautiful flower-and-honeybee pinup photos, not to mention the ultimate non-sucky bran muffin recipe and a cool DIY beeswax-honey lip balm.
*****
And speaking of Jewish food, NOSH is finally open. It's run by Marc Elliot, of seafood hangout Blue Star, and promises all things deli, from pastrami and brisket to matzoh ball soup and blintzes. 214 Atlantic Ave, between Court and Smith Sts., Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
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