I made a tart!

I made a tart out of spring vegetables! Wanna see how?

1 leek
10 asparagus
Butter
3 egg
1/2 c cream
Salt, pepper, nutmeg
1 pie crust


First I chopped up the vegetables and sauteed them in butter:



Then I patched together a tart crust from some dough bits left over from last week's pie. I baked it 20 minutes at 375. Then I painted it with the yolk of one of my eggs and returned it to the oven to set. This seals the crust in case of small holes or fissures and also keeps it from getting soggy.



Then I sprinkled in my veggies:



And I poured in a custard made from the rest of my eggs, the cream, and seasonings:



Then I baked at 400 for 20 minutes or so until the egg was just set. Easy and fun!

Cherry pie, babies. Cherry pie.

If you were smart last summer, you froze some cherries. If you were smart all winter, you have eaten most of what’s in your freezer.

I apparently think that if I hoard frozen cherries, I am somehow wealthy beyond imagination. Now it’s spring and I am yelling at myself. “Wise up, kitten. It’s going to be July again before you know it. You will feel like a real dope with a freezer full of last summer’s fruit.”

Time to bake a bunch of pie before everyone finds out what a blockhead I’ve been.

Cherry Pie
To freeze fruit for use in pie, scatter it in one layer on a cookie sheet and freeze solid. Then pack the individual frozen fruit pieces in a freezer-proof bag or container for long-term storage.


The crust
2 ½ c flour
1 t sugar
1 t salt
1 c shortening
5 T ice water

The filling
5 c frozen sour cherries
1 ¼ c sugar
¼ c cornstarch
2 T butter, cut in 6 to 8 pieces

For the crust, mix the dry ingredients. Cut in the fat. Sprinkle with the water and stir with a fork. Make a ball, divide the dough in half, and refrigerate for at least ½ hour.

Set the oven rack at the lowest position and preheat the oven to 400°. Get three pieces of tin foil about 2” wide and join them, end to end, to make one long strip.
Roll out bottom crust and fit into pie pan. Roll out top crust.

Now move fast:

Knock any ice off the cherries. Toss them with the sugar and cornstarch. Put them in the pie pan and pour any remaining dry ingredients evenly over the fruit.

Space the butter pieces evenly over the fruit. Lay the top crust over the pie, trim the overhang to 1 or 2 inches, and crimp the pie shut.

Put on some decorative pie crust cutouts or other hoo-ha if you like. Cut steam vents in the top crust. Wrap the strip of foil around the pie like a collar, bending it in half over the crimped edge. This will keep the pie edge from charring to a crisp.

Bake for 50 minutes, then turn the heat down to 350° and bake until juices are bubbling out of the steam vents, another half hour or so. You can put a cookie sheet under the pie to keep pie juice from blarping all over your oven. You can also take off the little collar at this juncture.

Cool completely to give the pie a chance to congeal. Or cut it warm and suffer the runny, yummy consequences.

Beach House Seafood

So, let’s say you go on vacation. Let’s say you go to a little island in the Gulf of Mexico where you get accommodations that include a kitchen with three pans, a dull knife, and a cookie sheet. Let’s say that on this island, all the good restaurants are expensive and all the cheap restaurants are crap. And let’s say that you have access to either a fish market or a fishing pole.

Wouldn’t you rather just be your own restaurant?

I would rather, yes, I would. With a few staple items at the overpriced grocery store, I can cook various sea creatures using different techniques to highlight their unique flavors and textures.

The groceries:
Get as many of these as are available, convenient, or attractive to you.

• Butter
• Olive oil
• A lemon
• Parsley
• Other herbs, i.e. bay or thyme
• Salt
• Pepper
• Garlic
• Shallot
• A big bottle of dry white wine
• Cocktail sauce

The sea creatures:
Ideally, you will buy/catch different ones every day. Get something shelly or bony the first night so you can make a nice stock that will only get more delicious the rest of the week.

• Crustaceans (shrimp, crabs, lobster)
• Mollusks (mussels, scallops, clams)
• Fish

The cooking techniques:
Boil/steam: Throw some parsley stems, dried herbs, and shallot peels in some water, wine, or a combination of the two. Bring it to a rolling boil. Throw in your sea creatures. When the water returns to a rolling boil, shrimp and scallops are cooked. Mussels and clams should be boiled until they open.

I like to make a shrimp cocktail and then throw the shells back in the cooking liquid. Simmer this for a half hour and you have a lovely stock that can be used for more shrimp cocktail. Or use it to finish off sautéed fish. Or use it as the base for a sauce.

Grill/broil: This is easy. You just, um, broil things. Scallops need just a few minutes. Shrimps too. Fish can go as long as 7-10 minutes per inch of thickness depending on how done you like it.

Sautée: Heat butter, oil, or both in a pan. Toss in garlic and shallots and cook until translucent. Put in fish skin side up, or throw in crustaceans/shelled mollusks. Cook only a couple of minutes for crustaceans/mollusks. Cook 3-5 minutes per inch of fish, flip over, season the top, pour in a splash of wine or stock from your fabulous shrimp cocktail, cover, and cook the remaining 3-5 minutes per inch of fish.

Pasta: If you boil up a nice linguine or capellini while you’re cooking your sea creatures, everything can be done at once. You can toss the sea creatures with the pasta, as I did with these sautéed scallops. You can put the sea creatures on a serving plate; splash your pan with more stock; then reduce it for a nice little sauce to go on your pasta. Or you can just butter the noodles. Or maybe serve them with garlic and olive oil.

The possibilities are not endless, but they will see you nicely through a week at the beach.

Mangiamo!

Beware the Ides of March: Fallen Caesar Cookies

Cook ‘Em if You Got ‘Em is pleased and proud to present you, for the first time EVER, a holiday recipe well in advance of a holiday: Fallen Caesar Cookies for the Ides of March!

OK, so it’s not really a holiday, and I’m the only one who celebrates it, and the cookies usually freak people out. But still!

Here, I’ll let you in on the backstory. When I first moved to the Twin Cities, it was in the middle of a recession. I worked for a school library book publisher. A lot of the staff were, like me, Gen Xers right out of school. In college, we’d been writers, visual artists, English majors, theater minors. Now we were working for abysmal pay in a company with a World War II–era business model. We were energetic but cynical; creative but financially crippled.

Those times were an anxious mix of compliance and defiance. The myth of the American Dream was evaporating for college graduates across the country who would NOT be doing better than our parents. As well, I didn’t know anyone my age who was interested in the Baby Boomer live-to-work ethic. We didn’t want to be like the older adults around us, but we were scrambling to establish adult identities. For me and everyone I knew at Lerner, this included finding and using our creative voices as artists.

So we were constantly doing things like, say, composing haikus about our lunches. Or making Jello aquariums, complete with Swedish fish, for the company potluck. Or using decorative gourds to create dioramas of famous characters in literature.

Or commemorating the Ides of March by baking sugar cookies decorated with stab wounds and staging a recital, in a Boston accent, of Marc Antony’s funeral speech from Julius Caesar. This was so much fun that I started doing it every year.

Now we’re in a much worse recession than the one in which I came of age. I look at the young adults around me and I can remember how it felt, but I can’t imagine what’s going to happen: what career paths will they have? How will the world change because of them, and how will it change them?

And THAT is why I’m putting out the call: everyone bake these cookies for March 15. Take them to work if you have a job. Or take them to school, or to church, or send a box to a distant friend. Just share them however you can. Read the funeral speech. Not for any logical reason. Just because it’s the Ides of March, and we should all beware, and tough times call for ridiculous measures.

Fallen Caesar Cookies
Use your favorite cookie dough recipe to make my traditional non sequitur response to The Man. My favorite is Rich Rolled Sugar Cookies from Joy of Cooking.

1 recipe sugar cookie dough
1 tube of red Cake Mate decorating gel
1 cookie cutter shaped like a person, i.e. gingerbread boy

Roll out the dough and cut out the shapes. Transfer shapes to a cookie sheet. Use the decorating gel to make seven marks—one for each conspirator in Caesar’s assassination—on each cookie. Use a little pressure to make a slight dent in the surface of the dough.



Bake the cookies, watching carefully. You want to bake them until they are just done, rendering as pale a cookie as possible without underbaking. This will make for more lurid contrast between the cookie and the stab wound. The decorating gel will bake into the cookie and will not brush or smear off after the cookie cools.

Beans and Sausage Belong in Soup

Honestly, you guys, I don’t set out to cook cauldrons full of undifferentiated glop. This cauldronful is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from the vat of stuff I made last post. This is bean soup, a magic soup full of protein and fiber and flavor. It will fill you up on a cold night. It will make your house smell so good.

Beth and I invented this soup because we wanted to make dinner for some friends. But we did NOT want to spend the last hour fussing in the kitchen while the friends stood about awkwardly, wondering if they should offer to help. The beauty of this soup is that it is easy to make. The secret of its deliciousness is in patience, not effort. Give it enough time on the stove for the vegetables to soften and melt a bit. The mellow bean flavor is punched up with sage and sausage*. Kale adds bright color as well as vitamins and minerals.

Add a salad and some good bread, and you’re done.

White Bean, Kale and Sausage Soup
Serves 6-8
Dry beans are more planning and monkey business than canned beans. Of course, they are correspondingly more delicious. You can soak and cook some extras, then pop them in the freezer to cut down your prep time for a future soup.

1 lb white beans: cannellini, great northern, or navy
2 bay leaves
4 peppercorns
3 carrots, chopped
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic
8-12 oz sausage*: sweet Italian, hot Italian, andouille, chorizo; anything with garlic and/or chile
1 bunch kale, roughly chopped
4-6 leaves of sage
Salt to taste

*If you are a vegetarian, then instead of sausage, get some olive oil, a chopped bulb of fennel, some cayenne, and some chopped parsley.

Soak the beans overnight.

The next day, put the beans and their soaking water in a soup pot. DO NOT discard the cooking water. All the deliciousness is in it. I don’t care what your mom said about how throwing out the water will reduce bean gas. It won’t. It will only reduce my regard for you. Don’t you step to me.

Ahem. Make sure there is enough water to cover the beans. Add the bay leaves and the peppercorns. Bring them to a boil, then simmer them until they are tender.

Keep a kettle of water on the stove while you cook beans. If they need more water, bring the kettle to a boil. Adding cold water to beans makes their skins tough. Passive-aggressive little sulkers, aren’t they?

Toss the carrots, onion, and garlic cloves in the pot. Keep simmering until these soften. The garlic should break down. You can stir this into the broth, which by now should be getting thick and creamy as the beans break down, too.

About an hour before you plan to serve the soup, add the sage.

Meanwhile, brown the sausage. Or heat the olive oil and saute the fennel bulb, adding the cayenne for the last few minutes. Put the frying pan contents in the soup, reserving the cooking fat.

Sauté the kale, then pour a half cup of water in the pan and cover it tightly. Turn the heat down and steam until the kale is tender, maybe 20 to 30 minutes. (Keep an eye on it so the pan doesn’t get too dry.) Stir the kale into the pot. If you have parsley, sprinkle it on top of each bowl of soup.

Mangiamo!

Dear Thailand: Thanks for Curry

Dear Entire Nation of Thailand,

I am only one person and you are all Thai people considered in context of your history, culture, language, geography, and cuisine. So the weight of my awe and gratitude will be as nothing to you, less than the weight of a fly upon the back of an elephant.

Even so, I would like to express my deep happiness to have been put on the same planet as you, Entire Nation of Thailand. On a winter evening, in the gathering darkness and the unrelenting cold, a person comes to crave something lush and tropical. The muted colors and sounds of the icebound landscape leave little to see and hear, and other senses can make known their demands. Smell, touch, and taste clamor for something sensual and wildly delicious—something that will make the body feel life and warmth again.

And that, Entire Nation of Thailand, is why I am so indebted to you. From your collective imagination springs curry: a dish that bursts with flavor and color. As I eat a bowlful, the fragrant steam curls around my frozen heart. The melting ice loosens, slips, and falls in a shattering splash.

Simmered Curry
This makes a big old pot of curry, 6-8 servings. If I were up to usual caliber for this blog, I would make my own curry paste. But I am too tired, sad, and sick of winter today. Look, just make this and eat it, and I don’t think you can stay mad at me.

2 cans regular or light coconut milk
A 4oz jar of curry paste. I like Thai Kitchen.
½ c or more of chicken stock
2-4 T fish sauce
A kaffir lime leaf (you can find these at an Asian grocery or at Lunds - ask the produce manager to order you some)
1 sweet potato, peeled and cubed
1 white potato, peeled and cubed
3-4 carrots, peeled and cubed
1 zucchini, sliced
1 red bell pepper, cubed
A handful of frozen green peas
A package of seitan
Jasmine rice (or white rice if you can’t find it)

Stir the coconut milk and curry paste together until they bubble, then simmer for a few minutes. Put in the stock, fish sauce, lime leaf, potatoes, and carrots. Simmer for 20 minutes. It’s OK if the potato starts to get crumbly.

Add the zucchini and pepper. Simmer a few minutes until the vegetables are tender. Drop in the peas and seitan; heat through. Serve over cooked rice.

Love, Betrayal, Spaghetti Sauce

Yesterday was my mother’s birthday. She and my stepdad came to eat a Char’s Birthday Dinner. And afterwards, Mom retold some food stories about her immigrant grandparents, who arrived at an Italian-American community in Northern Minnesota around the 1910s–1920s.

Mom told how her nonno, her grandfather, was famous for being the best winemaker in town. How her nonna would grind pork, beef, and spinach together to fill ravioli. How Nonna didn’t teach her own daughter, my grandmother, to put wine in the tomato sauce. How Grandma found out one day because Nonno was watching her make a sauce in her own kitchen and asked, “Where’s the vino?”

To this I say: a) What the hell?! and b) Thank goodness.

Now, it’s family lore that Grandma and her own mother were not close. In fact, they were downright uncomfortable around each other. Grandma’s father had died when she was small, and Nonna had remarried. There was a large blended family of Grandma’s sibling, half-siblings, and stepsiblings to help the two keep their distance from each other. But even so, what the hell was Nonna thinking, keeping the wine a secret? Did she see her firstborn child as a painful reminder? A disappointment? A rival? What could have been more powerful than the responsibility to teach her daughter to cook? What could motivate a culinary betrayal of this caliber?

Whatever it was, thank goodness Nonno wasn’t clued in to the scheme. And thank goodness he was the sort to poke his nose into the cooking pots. Because if he hadn’t, would Grandma ever have learned the trick? Would Mom have found out? Would I?

Today I am cooking up a pot of the family sauce. My home is filled with the smell of wine and tomatoes, a familiar perfume that saturates my memories of growing up in my mother’s house. This sauce is, to me, the most important relic of a world that will disappear forever someday when Mom’s memory of it fades away. But since she never made any secrets about how to cook this recipe, our heritage will maybe linger on the stove for a few more generations.

Nonna’s Sugo
Nonna made this with round steak or chicken, according to Mom, who makes it with ground beef or meatballs. I am making it with mushrooms today.

The carrot fixes it so you don’t have to put sugar in the sauce. My brother and I used to fight over the carrot, so Mom got smart and started putting in two.

2 T butter
3-4 big fat cloves of garlic, minced
1 large onion, chopped
1 lb Something (beef, chicken, sliced mushrooms—whatever you want, I guess)
3 pints tomato purée
2 oz or more of tomato paste
2 c fruity red wine
2-3 t dried oregano
2-3 t dried basil or marjoram
1 big, thick carrot, peeled

Melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed pot over high heat. Sauté the garlic and onions until translucent. Add the Something and sauté until browned, if meat, or tender, if mushrooms.

Add the rest of the ingredients and stir well. Let the sauce come up to a bubble, then turn down to a low simmer. Cover loosely or leave uncovered. Cook for hours and hours and hours until the carrot starts to melt into the sauce. For best results, you should drag this out all day long until the carrot completely dissolves. But if you are in a big hurry, I guess you could simmer for just three hours. The sauce should be a deep, rich red and reduced in volume by a third to a half. Add salt to taste.

Use a spoon to find every last piece of carrot. Make sure they are evenly divisible by the number of people who will be mad if they don’t get some. If no one is looking, eat the odd carrot piece quickly before anyone finds out. Careful, it’s hot.

Serve over pasta. Mangiamo!

They Can't All Be Champions

Two things converged today. First, my friend Judy found out last week that if you do a Google image search on "bacon cupcakes," you get 55,000 hits. Second, the temperature failed to reach her minimum threshhold for us to go to the Art Shanty Projects. That's how we ended up in my kitchen trying to make our own bacon cupcakes on a Sunday afternoon.

They say you learn not from your successes, but from your failures. Today has been an education. Did you know that you cannot make a credible peanut butter frosting from the Joy of Cooking recipe using natural peanut butter? Did you know that there is a razor-thin line between crisp-cooked bacon and burned-to-a-crisp bacon? Did you know that a quarter pound of bacon is nowhere near enough to make any kind of flavor impression on the old Walker Museum Gallery 8's Wellesley fudge cake?

That's OK. We learned all kinds of things for next time. For instance, next time we should cook a full pound of bacon to crumble into the batter. Next time we might try a spice cake with brown butter frosting instead of fudge cake with peanut butter frosting. Next time we might even try replacing a tablespoon or two of the butter with bacon grease.

Next time. Except there's probably not going to be a next time. Upon tasting our handiwork, Judy commented, "It's not the best use of bacon, but if you're going to make cupcakes, you might as well put some in."

Meh. We should have gone to the shanties.

Julia Child, and Beef, in Real Life

Skip straight to the photos if you hate essays.

I was at the airport, in desperate need of something to read on the flight home, when I spotted Julia Child’s My Life in France. Now, I get that Julie & Julia has renewed people’s interest in the book, but still. The cover is plastered with images from a movie made from a book about Julie Powell’s one-sided relationship with her concept of a mentor that she knew only from books and television. By my count, that’s at least five layers of embroidery between the reader and Julia Child, and all of them are about some other book. Is anyone else bugged by this?

While reading, I recognized sections of the book that had been source material for the Meryl Streep scenes of the movie. It was tempting to visualize Streep’s Julia Child romping through antebellum Paris, good-naturedly exclaiming over everything, winning the hearts of everyone, and marching clear-eyed toward her preordained success as an author and television personality. But I put this temptation aside. I didn’t want Meryl Streep’s Julia Child, or Nora Ephron’s, or Julie Powell’s. I wanted Julia Child’s Julia Child. And even though it is filtered through the lens of her great-nephew and coauthor, Paul Prud’homme, My Life in France is the closest thing the world will ever get to Child’s authentic self-account of her life.

The film did show some things that jive with My Life in France. Julia Child was a scientist in that all outcomes were equally valuable sources of knowledge. She was an engineer who relentlessly applied knowledge and technique to a problem until she achieved her desired result. There’s no question that she was an artist. She understood the world and herself through experiences with food: cooking it, eating it, talking about it. Child connected to other people through shared culinary truths.

Anyone who has seen a scrap of The French Chef found Meryl Streep’s physical portrayal spot-on. But in the film, Streep/Child is unfailingly forward-thinking, gregarious, attractive, and lovable. Her perfect life is a product of Julie Powell’s (as rendered by Amy Adams and Nora Ephron) imagination: an ideal to strive for and a foil highlighting Powell’s self-perceived shortcomings as a cook and a human being. Child’s own recollections reveal a much different person.

Child was, by her own account, stubborn. She sometimes missed opportunities by failing to heed the nuances of personal politics. She was not a graceful handler of conflict, especially in intimate relationships. On occasion, she did the easy thing and kept silent when she should have spoken up. She sometimes made up her mind without consulting, or notifying, the affected parties. Quite often, she let the perfect be the enemy of the good. In short, despite doing her best, she sometimes screwed up. Like every other human being on our planet, she was flawed… and still lovable, and much beloved.

I am one of the other human beings on our planet, and so is my much beloved Beth, who is having a flawed winter semester. A thousand little things have turned out wrong, and they are all stressing her out. So I asked her to let me cook for her in the coming weeks. When she said yes, I turned to Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Julia Child’s boeuf bourguignon.

Child’s stated goal for her recipes was that they be foolproof: a typical American cook, using American equipment and ingredients, should produce accurate and consistent results by following her clear, well-tested instructions.

Thank you, Mrs. Child. You made all the big mistakes for me so that in recipes, if not in life, we can do everything perfectly.

Bouef Bourguignon
Knopf Doubleday has posted the recipe here.

This is my mother’s old copy of Mastering. It is some goofy pirated version from Taiwan. It looks to me as though someone shot very poor stats of the pages, then reassembled them in a smaller format on fewer pages. The colophon is in Chinese, though. What a lot of nerve!


The pages are onionskin-thin, there is broken type everywhere, and the index was not adjusted for the new pagination. But the recipes, advice, and opinions of the Trois Gourmandes are all here.

My ingredients: onions and carrots, blanched Tollefson’s bacon, and beef chuck. I didn’t even have to dry off the beef chunks. The meat from The Wedge is that good.



You are supposed to have a casserole, e.g. Le Creuset, that can go from the stovetop to the oven. I make do with a cast-iron skillet and my big Emeril covered casserole. Emeril and Mrs. Child cooked together when she was alive, so I figured nobody would mind.

First you brown the bacon...



Then the beef...

Then the vegetables.

Into the charméd pot they go. They get tossed with flour and then toasted for a bit in the oven.


In real life, next you would pour wine into your casserole and start things simmering on the stovetop. Instead I put wine and stock in the skillet. This gets all the browned deliciousness out of the pan so it can go in my stew.


The pot full of meat, vegetables, and sauce gets to hang out in the oven for four hours. Meanwhile, it's time to sauté mushrooms in butter. When you do this, you can expect three stages. First, the mushrooms will soak up all your butter and you will think you didn't use enough. Don't be tricked. Keep stirring, even though the pan looks dry. Second, the mushrooms will lay down the treasures of their bodies, and the pan will fill with mushroom juice. Third, the juices will cook off, leaving tender and flavorful mushrooms.



By this point the kitchen smells like heaven and neighborhood dogs have lined up on my front sidewalk to beg. Now I get to make braised onions. Peel them, brown them, and braise them in stock. All this only takes another hour and a half.

It's possibly time to take that bourguignon out of the oven. I must pour off the sauce, reduce it, put the onions and mushrooms in the pot, and pour the sauce back on. I don't know about you, but I am starting to have some predatory feelings toward this dish. I am starting to leer at it and sing to it. Hey, pretty, don't you wanna take a ride with me?

The dish is getting uncomfortable with my attention.

I served it with wide noodles. Mrs. Child would have said, "Bon appétit!"

Six meals in Boston

Wha... where'd my January go? I meant to take a week or two off for the holidays. Then I got really sick (no disease named after me, though). Then I got mailed to a suburb of Boston on a business trip. Holy crap! I feel like I haven't cooked anything in a million years and probably all my 23 readers have left for sexier food blogs.

Readers! Come back! I miss you, too. Here: as a gesture of my good intentions, I will give you a little food porn tour of Boston. I went with a colleague, Kurt; my lovely consort, Beth, flew in later for funsies. Kurt and I worked all day and then, by night, explored Boston as much as we could. The two characters in the pictures are Ruby Mae Owl and Fred, Beth's and my respective finger puppet alter egos.

Meal #1: Legal Sea Foods


A steamed lobster met its end in my belly at this regional fine dining chain. The whole lobster came with the requisite drawn butter; also with sides of garlic mashies and spicy seaweed salad. Mr. Lobster (pretty sure it was a mister; I found no coral) was preceded in death by a bowl of creamy potato-studded clam chowder. Wicked ahhhsome.

Meal #2: Ye Olde Union Oyster House

Established in 1826, this oldest restaurant in America has the dark, cramped dining space and insanely plumbed, drafty bathrooms to prove it. Not that I'm complaining; I live in a (much younger, yet still) old building myself, and I find the scale perfectly human and dottily charming. Our barman served us Harpoon beer and chatted us up in a fantastic Boston accent. There was a Ben Franklin impersonator drinking at the end of the bar. When we were seated, our waitress mothered us like a hen. The menu was large and impossible to winnow, as there didn't appear to be a bad or boring dish on the list.

I decided on a plate of fried clams that came with buttered boiled potatoes. My two companions had scallops with pasta Alfredo and lobster ravioli in cream sauce.

Odd as it seems to me now, it did not occur to any of us to order oysters.

Meal #3: Amarin of Thailand

The next day, Kurt flew home. Beth and I were staying for another two days. We did not feel like venturing downtown this night, and Beth had found a Thai restaurant on her way to the local Starbucks that morning.

Amarin was a lovely change of pace from the seafood. They had fresh, flavorful, spicy, and inexpensive dishes like this beef with holy basil. The restaurant was filled with Thai paintings, prints, carvings, and sculptures. I felt disloyal to Minneapolis, home of so many exemplary Thai places, for enjoying it so much.

Meal #4: Artú

My professional obligations concluded by Friday early afternoon, leaving some daylight hours for exploring Boston's neighborhoods. In Beacon Hill, we found this small Italian restaurant. I had the "Preferito" panini: huge leaves of prosciutto nestled into provolone-lined Italian rolls and filled with thin-sliced eggplant marinated in olive oil, white wine vinegar, red pepper, basil, parsley, and oregano. Mmmm, mangiamo!

On our way out of Beacon Hill, we stumbled across Cheers across from Boston Commons. It was a great TV show, but we are over it. We satisfied ourselves with a picture.

Meal #5: Cafe Jaffa

Cafe Jaffa is a Middle Eastern restaurant. And yet they had cabbage rolls, a favorite dish of my late Croatian grandfather. I guess Croatia clings to the Near East by its fingernails. Whatever. Jaffa made a fine version of this comfort food from my childhood.

Meal #6: La Summa

And that about sizes it up: La Summa (roughly, "Everything" or "All That" or "It" as in "that's it") was all that, that's it, everything I wanted for lunch. The space was elegant. The food was sublime. The prices were absurdly low, especially considering the neighborhood (North End, historic/expensive).

I had this dish of house-made fresh penne with generous hunks of ham, sun-dried tomato, and spinach in a rich cream sauce with a sprinkling of chopped basil. Che bella.

On our post-prandial stroll, we passed (but did not enter) the Parker House, birthplace of the Parker House roll and Boston cream pie.

And then it was time to fly back to Minneapolis! I'm happy to be home, grateful to be well, and looking forward to cooking my own food this week.

Welcome back to my blog, and thank you for reading!

Ravioli pa' Natale

According to Mom, her nonna—my great-grandmother—spent hours and hours making ravioli for Christmas each year. They truly are a labor of love: between preparing the filling, making the pasta, rolling and assembling the ravioli, and making their sauce, it's like you've made the meal four or five times. When the food passes so many times through the hands of the cook, it cannot help but absorb what's in the heart of the cook.

And in my heart, there's joy to see the ravioli spring into the world out of nothing but flour, egg, pumpkin, and cheese. There's the warm companionship of cooking with my partner, Beth. There's a sense of connection with the women in my family, whose hands have also kneaded dough, rolled it thin, doled out filling, and set trim little pasta shapes on a floured towel to dry. And there's the anticipation of delight when, on Christmas Day, people we love will take pleasure and nourishment from the food we're making.

Ravioli di Zucca pa' Natale
That is to say, pumpkin ravioli for Christmas. This is my recipe, not Nonna's, but I hope she'd be proud. You can make the filling ahead of time and freeze it. You can also freeze the ravioli.

This recipe will make perhaps 80 or so ravioli. For a side dish, plan on 6 per person. For a main dish, plan on 9 to 12 per person.

The filling:
A pumpkin, 3-4 lb.
½ lb. grated Parmesan
Salt and black pepper to taste

The pasta:
5 c semolina flour (any other kind will work)
5 eggs
A tablespoon or two of olive oil

The sauce:
For every 6 ravioli you plan to serve,
1 T butter
2-3 sage leaves, fresh or dried
1-2 baby spinach leaves
1 T shaved Parmesan cheese
Ground black pepper

Cut the top off the pumpkin. Hollow it out, then replace its lid. Place in a pan and bake at 375° for one to one and a half hours or until tender. Let cool.

Peel the pumpkin, cut the flesh into small pieces, and mash it. Mix it with the Parmesan and seasonings to taste.

On a wooden cutting board or directly on your work surface, make a mountain of the flour. Make a volcano crater in it with your fist. Crack the eggs into the crater and add a splash of olive oil.

Use a fork to whisk the eggs in the volcano crater. Whisk all around the edges of the crater. Flour from the volcano mountain is incorporated into the eggs as you go, and soon you are whisking a pale yellow batter. Go slowly so that the eggs whisk evenly and you avoid lumps.

Soon, the batter has become a soft dough. It will grab your fork and you won't be able to whisk anymore.

Abandon the fork, toss a handful of flour on top of your dough, and start kneading in more flour. Gather, squeeze, and turn until the dough is like Play-Doh and does not feel tacky any more. There will still be flour left on your work surface; don't worry about that.

You must be tired by now. Your dough sure is, so wrap it up in foil, plastic wrap, or a barely damp cloth and let it rest 20 minutes. This will allow it to become stretchy.

Now it's time to roll. Get ready a barely damp cloth. Roll your dough out paper thin. You can do this by hand if you are very stubborn. I have an Atlas pasta machine, which is much easier.

Rolled-out pasta is susceptible to drying, so keep it fresh by covering it with the barely-damp cloth while you roll more sheets.

We rolled out to setting 6. We made rectangular sheets by cutting lengths, brushing the edges with water, and rolling the pieces together with the pin.

Work quickly to avoid drying but carefully to avoid tearing.

While I was fussing with the pasta sheets, Beth made tidy little balls of filling. We placed them on a sheet several inches apart, keeping in mind that we would need a seam allowance between each dumpling.

Use a damp pastry brush to moisten (barely!) the space in between each filling ball.

Cover with the other pasta sheet. Allow the pasta to drape over the filling. Seal the fillings in between the pasta sheets by pressing with your fingers. Avoid air pockets; you can get rid of trapped air by making a tiny slit with a paring knife, pressing out the air, then pressing the slit closed.

If you tear the pasta sheet, you can patch it with a dampened scrap of pasta. It doesn't look like America's Top Chef made it, but it tastes the same. And none of those people are invited over, anyway.

Dust a dish towel with flour. Cut between the ravioli with a knife or pizza cutter. Use a bench knife or spatula to pick them up and transfer them to the towel. Let them rest until they are dry enough to handle.

You can pack them up in the freezer at this point. But before you do, make sure to boil some water and test them out. You know, to make sure they're delicious enough to serve.

Set a pot of salted water on the stove to boil. Heat the butter in a skillet or saucepan. Gently sauté the sage leaves until they are crispy; break them up in the butter a little. Sliver the spinach leaves.

Cook the ravioli. If they are fresh, this will take less than five minutes. If they are frozen, just drop them right in the boiling water without thawing.

Drain them well and arrange them on a plate. Drizzle them with the sage butter, sprinkle with shaved parmesan, and toss on a smattering of the spinach slivers. Finish with a grind or three of fresh black pepper.

Buon Natale, mios amicos.

Bûche de Noël Challenge

(artist's concept)

Updated: See actual!

When friend Katrina mentioned that she wanted to attempt a bûche de Noël, I can't remember who first suggested making the traditional French Christmas dessert together. But I do know it was me who proposed "Bûche de Noël Smackdown."

Katrina laughed nervously at that idea. She is the embodiment of kindness and gentility, and I don't think she has a competitive bone in her body. I, on the other hand, freely trade good-natured insults with friends and often cross the line in my efforts to top their putdowns. Katrina is the one person for whom I try my hardest to be kind. If I ever hurt her feelings, even in a friendly cake contest, I could never forgive myself.

"If I set my dial at Lovefest and you set yours at Smackdown, we'll meet in the middle," I said. And so we agreed to a Friday night baking party.

A classic bûche de Noël is made with a chocolate génoise sheet cake and buttercream frosting. After investigating simpler cake and frosting schemes and assessing their levels of difficulty, we opted to take on the challenge of the traditional recipes. We decided, while we were at it, to make two—one for each of us. "How long do you think this will take?" asked Katrina. "Hmmm... three hours," I replied.

Boy, was I wrong. Katrina, her friend and my partner Beth, and I worked together for five hours on the two bûches. Katrina's poor little hand mixer labored away on high speed for at least two solid hours. We were amazed at how many eggs and how much butter disappeared into the cake batter and frosting. And by the end, I was making only indirect requests; and Katrina was threatening, as a joke, to throw me out of her kitchen.

Bûche de Noël: the great leveler, the great reverser of roles.

The cake:
The génoise cake batter requires that eggs be whipped with sugar until they triple in volume. We doubled the recipe, so there were eight total. Here are four eggs at the start.







Beth whipped the eight eggs for nearly an hour to get them ready. We were afraid to imagine how strenuous it would be to whip them by hand. Clearly French cooking is based on a feudal business model, as it depends on a lot of strong young kitchen workers.





Beth adds equal parts cake flour and cocoa. We spread this into two sheet pans and baked them.







Meanwhile, the frosting:
To make buttercream, first cook two cups of sugar and a cup of water to the soft ball stage. Then pour it in a thin stream into beaten, pasteurized eggs. Since the mixer was in use, I opted to beat by hand. This was fun at first. By the time I finished, though, it was a matter of pride.

Then Katrina beat an appalling amount of butter into the frosting. I am ashamed to tell you how much. Oh, OK, six sticks.






This is what a pound of chocolate looks like when melted with a half cup of water.









And here it goes into the buttercream. You must talk like Julia Child when performing this operation.

By the time this buttercream was ready, the cakes were baked, cooled, and brushed with a quarter cup apiece of equal parts brandy and simple syrup.

Assembling the bûche:

Frost the cake generously.









This was the scary part. We were four and a half hours into this job. The last step was to roll up the cake. And if we screwed this up, all our work would come to naught. Those are Katrina's hands rolling the cake. My hands, at the right, are "helping" because I'm terrified.







My fear was groundless. Katrina rolled it up like a pro.

We wrapped up our cakes tightly, packed up buttercream to spread on the outside, and popped them into the freezer. In a couple of weeks, we'll take them out, frost them to resemble logs, and serve them at Christmastime.

By then, each cake will have taken about 8 or 9 person-hours of work. The moral of the story is this: if you see a bûche de Noël in a bakery for any amount of money, pay it. It's worth it.

Bon appétit!

Post-Christmas Update: Here it is in all its splendor.