Straitened Circumstances

For the next four weeks or so, this will be my kitchen:

My house is a foursquare built in 1908; the original kitchen was most likely a tiny, dark, and utilitarian 19th-century cubby. At some point, someone rearranged a few walls and added four feet to the back of the house to create a galley. If the style of cabinets is any indication, this might have been done sometime between 1967 and 1978. In 1999, a hasty do-it-yourselfer slapped on some quarter-round molding and vinyl flooring to prepare the house for sale to me.

I cook in an awkwardly designed kitchen with a four-foot-square work triangle. The unvented stove is in a corner. The fridge is directly opposite. They share the end of the narrow room with a defunct radiator. The sink is eighteen inches to the left of the stove. It’s impossible for more than one person to work comfortably.

Over the past few years I’ve been feeling increasingly grumbly about the kitchen. The final straw came one morning this past November when I made pancakes. My bedroom upstairs smelled like an IHOP for three days afterwards. OH! That was IT!

So I’ve been working for a couple of months on figuring out what I want and whom to hire. Demolition starts this coming week. I won’t get to cook anything meaningful in my own kitchen until April. But when it is finished, I will have new cabinets. I will have hardwood floors to match what’s in the rest of the house. I will have more light, a new sink, a dishwasher (for the first time!), a better workspace configuration, and more countertops. The materials, style and colors will be appropriate to the era in which my house was built.

Meanwhile, though, I will be eating like a college student out of the microwave that lives on a cart in the basement. I'll keep you posted.

Crocktodogs!

This is ridiculous. It is my guilty pleasure: hot dogs violate every food ethic I hold dear. But I somehow still love them. I wish I knew how to quit you, hot dogs.

You’re welcome/I’m sorry.

Cranberry Crunch: Not Brown

It’s the time of year again where everything is boring. The markets are boring: there’s nothing seasonal in them and everything is from somewhere else. The weather is boring. All the food I cook seems boring lately. For one thing, it is very brown. The last four things I cooked were brown. Browwwnnnnnnn. Booooo-rinnnnnng.

But hey, my neighbor gave me a bag of fresh Wisconsin cranberries leftover from Christmas. She didn’t quite get around to rounding up her kids, stringing the cranberries with popcorn, and garlanding the tree. The berries were about to go ‘round the bend, too. Quick! Make them into something!

Maybe I will make crunch. Crunch is easy. It has very few ingredients, and they are almost always on hand for most cooks. Plus it is all pioneery and Little House on the Prairie. Crunches, crumbles, and crisps are the birthright of every American who is middle class, has a northern European ethnic background, and has an ancestor who settled west of Ohio anytime before 1890. (Oops. Only two out of three for me. Does that make me a poseur?)

Hey, this isn’t boring. It is sweet yet zingy, warm and bubbly, and best of all—garnet red! Yay, this is so NOT brown. I feel alive!

Cranberry Crunch
OK, fine. The topping is brown. So sue me.

1 c oats
1 c brown sugar
½ c flour
Pinch salt
1 stick butter
1 bag cranberries
½ c sugar

Mix the oats, brown sugar, flour, and salt. Cut in the butter until crumbly. Pat half this mixture in the bottom of an 8 x 8 pan. Dump in the cranberries and sprinkle them with the sugar. Sprinkle the rest of the crunch stuff on top.

Bake an hour, then cool for 20 minutes (or don’t). Serve with ice cream maybe.

Easy and fun!

A Day to Celebrate Pie

The American Pie Council® has declared January 23 National Pie Day! The APC’s web site proclaims a day “dedicated to the celebration of pie.”

According to the APC’s notes about pie history, “Pie has been around since the ancient Egyptians. The first pies were made by early Romans who may have learned about it through the Greeks.” So not only is pie A) delicious; but it B) has the power to transcend space/time and C) is not subject to the laws of cause and effect.

Hooray for Pie!

Zwiebelpastete

I brought this dish, based on a recipe from Marianna Olszewska Heberle’s German Cooking, to a Pie Day party. The original recipe called for bacon, but I (rightly) guessed there’d be vegetarians and left it out. Instead, I used repeated simmering to draw out and deepen the flavor. When people asked how to say this word, I explained it is pronounced “onion pie.”

½ cup butter

1 c flour

1 pinch sugar

1 pinch flour

2-3 T milk

1 T olive oil

3 large sweet onions, sliced
1 c vegetable broth
¼ c vodka
½ c sour cream
1 egg plus 1 egg white, lightly beaten
1 T chopped fresh chives
Salt and pepper to taste
1 egg yolk, beaten with ½ t water
¼ t caraway seeds
Paprika

Mix flour, sugar and salt; cut in butter until mixture is like coarse meal. Sprinkle on the milk, mix with a fork, and form the dough into a ball. Roll out and line a greased 10" or 11" pie pan with the dough. Crimp or flute the edge and trim off the extra. If you have time, wrap loosely and let the crust rest from an hour up to overnight. This will keep fancy edges from puffing out of shape in the oven.

Heat the oven to 350°. Prick the crust all over with a fork, weight it, and bake until browned, perhaps 20 minutes. Remove the weights and set the crust aside.

Meanwhile, heat the oil in a big sauté pan. Cook the onions gently until they begin to soften. Splash in half the stock and continue stirring until the liquid evaporates. Splash in the rest of the stock and repeat. Splash in the vodka and cook the onions down one more time. Set them aside.

Turn the oven up to 375°. Separate one of the eggs and set the yolk aside. Beat the white and the other egg, then mix with the chives, sour cream, and salt/pepper to taste. Mix this into the onions. Spread the onion mixture evenly in the bottom of the pie crust.

Beat the leftover yolk with the half teaspoon of water and brush all over the top of the pie. Sprinkle on the caraway seeds and dust the top with paprika. Bake until the pie is set and the top begins to brown, about 20 minutes.

Let cool slightly and serve warm.

Happy Pie Day!

Bienvenue Bluie!

Welcome to the family, petite chou!

This holiday season, through a combination of comparison shopping, lurking in cooking stores, and fortuitous receipt of gift cards, I made a longtime dream come true. I bought a 4.5 quart cobalt blue French oven from Le Creuset.

There was my new baby, all round and smooth and perfectly blue! What would I do to welcome her to the family?

I knew: I’d make cassoulet from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. No, I had never made it before. But it’s one of my favorite kinds of food: making it once is like making four other different things! Twice!! And I would get to put Bluie through her paces.

First there was shopping. I did not want to use lamb, as Mastering suggests. (My better half does not want to eat anything cute and fluffy.) Goose, duck, and partridge were uncomfortably expensive—especially right after the excesses of Sparklemas. I decided to use pork.



Polish sausage and ham hock

from Tollefson. Pork rind from

Finer Meats.

Even on a regular day, this dish calls for four different kinds of pork: roast, side or salt pork, sausage, and pork rind. I thought a nice, flavorful ham hock would be the perfect economical stand-in for rich duck or goose confit. I went to the Minneapolis Farmers Market to see Dan Tollefson, my favorite pork farmer in the world. He set me up with everything but rind. After calling all over the city, I found it at Finer Meat Company just a few blocks from my house. Who knew that this store was there? And why didn’t they tell me?! Finer Meat has a beautiful array of fresh, smoked, and salted meats. They have a shelf of meat-related groceries. (They have butcher hats on, for crying out loud!) They sold me a half-pound of lovely pork rind for a buck.

I’m not going to recite the recipe, since it is tiresome in its length and also it’s not mine. My Google fu turned up this, which will get you there. Instead of goose, I used a pork roast per Mastering’s original instruction. Instead of lamb, I used a ham hock per my imagination.

First, make a roast. Brown a pork loin and then some onions and carrots. Throw in a bouquet garni, then cover and pop in a 325 degree oven for an hour and a half.

(Just so you know, I used some bean cooking water to wash this tasty brown stuff back into the pot.)

Pork rind: weirdly elegant?

While all that jazz is going down in the oven, time to start the beans. Child specifies the quick-soak method. While the beans soak in their hot bath, freshen the pork rind in two changes of boiling water. Then cut it into quarter-inch dice and simmer it for a half hour. You’re essentially making gelatin here: the softened pork rind will melt to nothing but collagen. It will add velvety body to the finished dish.

All the stuff in the picture to the right, here, has got to get crammed into the same pot to simmer for an hour and a half. Julia wasn’t kidding about an 8-quart pot. I didn’t listen. I’m using the gray pot because Bluie was in the oven during this part.

C'est magnifique! Also I don't

speak French.

While the beans are cooking, or maybe the next day, you can make another meat dish. Mastering has many suggestions, including lamb braised with browned bones that add flavor. I had some meaty pork bones left over from Sparklemas dinner. I browned those in Bluie, then browned two chopped onions and two diced carrots. The bones went back in the pot along with a ham hock, a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, a can of tomato paste, two bay leaves, four cloves of mashed garlic, and a half teaspoon of thyme. I braised that in the oven for an hour and a half.



Finally, everything is cooked and it smells like a French chophouse in here. Time to assemble...

...and top with crumbs and butter.









After baking it looks... um, it looks rather brown.

But it tastes like the heavenly congress of pork and beans. Which it is!




And though I scrubbed her with an enamel-safe pad and plenty of soap, Bluie has a few brown battle scars on the bottom of her. Ah, c’est la vie, little one. You work hard in this family of pots and pans. You get a mark here, a ding there. But you are no less beloved for it; no less beautiful to me.

Kabocha is Squashspeak for “I Love You”

New Year’s Eve used to be my third most hated holiday.* But Beth has changed all that. New Year’s Eve is our anniversary!

I love Beth more than I can explain to you. I love the complement between her formidable intellect and her capacity for abject silliness. We laugh together every single day.

I love her giant heart: I have never met anyone who works as hard as Beth does to understand herself, to take responsibility for her actions, to extend a hand of compassion to others.

I love the fact that, though she’s a little tiny thing, she can eat an entire New York strip in a sitting. My baby can put the steak away, aww yeah.

So of course I made a steak for her on our special day. And there had to be something good to go with it. Bread? Pah! Baked potato? Fwuh! My girl loves squash. Imma make her some kabocha gratine.

Oh, kabocha. It is the most fine-grained, sweet, and creamy vegetable you could ever hope to meet. Its Crayola-colored rind peels away to reveal carrot-orange flesh streaked with green, yellow, and red. Can you resist sneaking a raw bite? It is crisp and sugary as a carrot, too.

Layer the slices in a baking dish and cover them with velvety cheese sauce, and you have decadence incarnate. The squash bakes to melting tenderness in a surprisingly short amount of time. The gratine is unctuous and rich, bathing the senses in deep flavors and smooth texture. Want to render your lover speechless with pleasure? Just slip a few spoonfuls of this onto her plate.

*After Christmas and Valentine’s Day. We fixed Christmas, but we still hate Valentine’s Day.

Kabocha Gratine with Four Cheeses

The remains of our Sparklemas cheese plate went into the sauce. More fun than the traditional Swiss!

A kabocha squash, peeled, seeded, and sliced
¼ cup (half a stick) butter
2 T flour
1 c milk or cream
1 c grated/shredded/mangled cheese, divided. I used scraps of chevre, Manchego, Parmesan; and mostly mozzarella. Swiss would have been better than mozzarella, but that’s what I had.
A dash of fresh-ground nutmeg
Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 350°. Butter a glass or ceramic baking dish. Arrange the squash slices in one layer, slightly overlapping them so the bottom of the pan is covered.

Melt the butter in a saucepan and sift in the flour. Whisk until smooth. Pour in the milk or cream and cook, whisking constantly, until thick—right before the liquid comes to the boil. Take the pan off the heat and stir in ¾ cup of cheese. The sauce should be thick and the cheese completely melted. Add the nutmeg, salt, and pepper.

Pour the sauce over the squash, taking care to cover it up well. Put the pan in the oven and bake until bubbly and browned, about 30 minutes. The squash should be tender. Sprinkle the remaining cheese on top and put back in the oven until melty and toasty, another 5 to 10 minutes.

Serve to acclaim.

A Sparklemas Pig

It was love that made me ask. Not chauvinism, not disrespect or failure to acknowledge, understand, or embrace my vegetarian friends. But the pork shoulder was so transcendant and amazing; I simply could not bear the notion that another person might live in the same world with such flavors and miss tasting them.

Thinking it through, I decided the risk of offending them was pretty slight; and, anyway, less weighty than the opportunity to bring this potential experience to their attention.

I called their names. “Are you sure you don't want to expand your definition of ‘vegetable’ to include pigs just for tonight?”

They didn't. They were plenty blissed out on the oven-roasted tomatoes (from Lynne Rossetto Kasper's The Italian Country Table) and the raw kale salad with walnuts, mandarin oranges, and dried cranberries (from the "A Year to Eat Freely" calendar from Kim Christensen's AffairsofLiving.com).

Eh, more for me.

Porchetta
There are, possibly, as many slight variations on this roast as there are families who cook it. My grandmother dictated the instructions to be over the phone many years ago, and I still have the notes I scrawled in red felt-tipped pen on the back of a research request form from the Geography Department at Lerner Publications, where I worked at the time.

Porchetta is pork stuffed with fennel, garlic, and black pepper. How much, you ask? “Some,” I answer. A bunch. Just the right amount. Whatever you think is good. This is a food I know in my heart, not in my head. I chopped up garlic until it looked like enough, ground pepper until I was satisfied. Earlier this year I chopped up and froze the fronds from Harmony Valley fennel. I could have used less, but I felt bad for it because it had been frozen. I wanted it to feel loved. So I broke up the entire quart container I’d preserved. I mixed in the garlic (say about a head of it? Maybe two?) and half the pepper (A handful. Perhaps a quarter cup) and some salt (I dunno. A few tablespoons?).

The dish is made with a pork shoulder or a Boston pork butt. This is the roast made from the thick end of the shoulder. This year, our fabulous 18” snowstorm prevented Tollefson, my favorite pork farmer, from procuring a fresh pork shoulder for me. Instead I chose a pair of roasts to piece together.

A Boston butt (hee hee hee! “Boston butt”) weights three to five pounds; the whole shoulder weighs eight to ten. One pound of this weight is the shoulder bone, which must come out. The flat part of the bone is a piece of cake; one straight slice across the width of the roast and it’s done. The other side, though, is much trickier. Viewed side-on, the bone is shaped like a triangle. From the end, though, it is a T-shaped affair that swoops and curves through the muscle, fat, and connective tissue that make the pork shoulder an incredibly flavorful and tender cut when cooked long and slow.

I finally cajoled the bones out of the roasts. Normally I’d cut two or three layers across the width of the meat, but boning had left me with four big pieces. I butterflied the thick pieces and flattened out the thinner ones. Then I spread my herb mixture over it all. I folded over and shoved together , cramming herbs into every crevice and cut surface. I used four yards of butcher string to tie up the meat any which way I could, ending up with a seven-pound roast.

I mixed the other handful of pepper with some more (another couple tablespoons?) salt and rubbed this mixture all over the porchetta. I wrapped it up tight in foil and put it in the fridge overnight.

The next day, I allowed two hours for the roast to come to room temperature; then started it, still foil-wrapped, in a 300° oven. I used a meat thermometer, since I was planning to cook it for five hours or more. But if I didn’t have one, I simply would have worried less and trusted more. Pork shoulder is so forgiving of overcooking. It is so well marbled and shot through with collagen. I’m not sure what it would take to dry one out. Maybe a volcano. Or someday when the earth consumes the sun. Not my partner’s little gas oven, that’s for sure.

For the last hour and a half, I peeled back the foil and cranked the temperature up to 350° so the meat would brown. I pulled it out of the oven at the five-hour mark, tented it, and let it rest a half hour. At this point, six or eight people suddenly needed to come in the kitchen. Where was the ice? Could they have some water? Did I need any help?

I had to insist, three times and increasingly loudly, that everyone get the hell out of my kitchen.

Finally, we carve. Another fun thing about pork shoulder is the grain: it is meaningless. You can start out cutting across it, but a) it doesn’t matter – the meat is falling-apart tender; and b) it is just going to change direction in about three slices. Do what you can. It doesn’t matter if you are a good carver or a poor one. Everyone is going to have one taste and forget everything except how delicious the meal is.

Buon Scintillina, e mangiamo!

(Happy Sparklemas, and let’s eat!)

My Kung Fu Is the Best

Check out how small my cookie scrappins is.

Aww, that's right. The one in the center is all that was left. The rest of the dough got rolled out and made into Sparklemas cookies.

My recipe is here.

Gluten-Free Sparklemas Cookies

I feel a little bit sick to my stomach from eating 15 square inches of mistakes, and I’m wondering what kind of gastrointestinal hell there will be to pay later. But overall, I’m going to declare a success of my first foray into gluten-free baking. Yay!

Last weekend I made the season’s first gingerbread cookies to share with friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family. A small but growing number of people in my life are eating gluten-free. Many are trying to avoid refined sugar, dairy, and other animal products. I want to include these people in my cookie plans, but who wants to get a cookie they can’t eat?

Thanks to Kim Christensen, who pointed me in the direction of The Whole Life Nutrition Kitchen blog, where I found a recipe for Spiced Teff Cookie Bars. I dialed down the vanilla to 1 teaspoon, the cinnamon to 2 teaspoons, and the ginger to the full 2 teaspoons. Well, I measured the ginger kind of sloppy because I like ginger.

This recipe tasted great—just like traditional gingerbread. The texture was a little bit gritty, as gluten-free baking is wont to be. Once the bars cooled, I could make fairly clean cuts using a sharp knife. The bars held their shape well, too.

I thought I’d use my deep metal cookie cutters to make Sparklemas shapes, which I would then decorate with nuts and dried fruits. Pushing the cutter into the pan was easy, but convincing the cookie—like a very soft brownie—to pop out of the cutter in one piece was more of a challenge. Cutting the bars warm definitely did not work. Cutting them cold was better, and cutting them slightly frozen was best of all. The larger and simpler the cutter, the easier a time I had. (No gingerbread people shapes, alas.) I used the side of a knife tip to push down on the corners a little at a time, and soon my cookie slid free.

I set out to make a dozen or more cookies, but I only got eight usable ones. I screwed several of them up while learning the principles outlined above. There was a high ratio of trimmings to cookies as well. I think I will make these again, but perhaps I will cut them into squares or diamonds and decorate each one with a dried cranberry, a slivered almond, a sprinkling of coconut flakes, or a dusting of cinnamon. They will not be as cute, but they will still taste great. And as my overfilled belly will attest, you don’t really have to eat very many of them to feel like you’ve had an abundant amount of gluten-free Sparklemas cookies.

Zucca Due Colori

It’s that time of year again. Sparklemas is on its way, and I’m experimenting with what we should have for dinner. Last year I made a giant porchetta and pumpkin ravioli. This year, I want to mix it up a little. I like the flavors of squash and sage, but I don’t want to paint myself into the corner of making labor-intensive ravioli every year.

I tried a pan-fried squash dish and served it over gnocchi. Gnocchi are a favorite of mine: pillowy little dumplings of potato and flour, chewy and surprisingly filing. They’re comfort food and just the thing for me on a deep, dark winter night.

Problem, though: the softness and blandness of the gnocchi do not make much of a contrast for the squash. And, as it turns out, not everyone likes their texture. (Cough. Beth. Ahem.) I felt the sweetness of the dish needed a little something… perhaps a splash of balsamico.

Overall, I’d call the squash a win as a side dish. The squash is sumptuous and sweet; the savor of onions, garlic, and sage complement it well.

Zucca Due Colori
That is, two-color squash. Butternut and Festival are what I happened to have in the fridge. Who knew they were going to look so pretty together?

1 butternut squash (orange flesh), peeled, seeded, and cubed
1 Festival squash (yellow flesh), peeled, seeded, and cubed
1 onion, diced
3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
12 dried sage leaves
3 T butter
Salt and pepper
A pound of cooked pasta, if you want
A fistful of Italian parsley, chopped
A sprinkling of grated Parmesan

Heat the butter in a large sauté pan and fry the onion until it is translucent. Toss the garlic and sage in after it and fry a minute more until they start to give off scent.

Throw in the squash cubes. They should fit in one layer; if they are too crowded, you may need to do this part in two shifts. Stir and toss the squash constantly until they start showing sear marks. If your pan is getting too sticky, throw in a tablespoon or two of water to release the caramely bits and keep things moving.

When the squash shows evidence of browning, add a quarter cup of water to the pan, turn down the heat, and cover. Let the squash cook until soft, ten or fifteen minutes. You should start the pasta during this time if you are going to serve the squash on top of it.

Turn the squash into a serving bowl, deglaze the pan with a little more water, and pour all the browned delicious bits over the squash. Toss with pasta if you are going that route. Sprinkle the bowl, or each serving, with the parsley and cheese. A splash of balsamic vinegar might brighten things up, too.

Mangiamo!

Compearison

Clockwise from bottom center: Concorde (large yellow), Bartlett
(large yellow), two Forelles, Bosc, two Seckels. Center: D'Anjou

Oh, jeez, sorry about that title. I really am. But… but… but it’s just that I’m comparing pears! And as I write this, it is STILL FUNNY!

OK, OK, OK. Down to business. So, this holiday coming in December: Beth and I have renamed it Sparklemas. Neither of us considers herself Christian, but we still want to celebrate the holiday of our childhoods. She likes the decorations. I like the food. And we know the reason for the season: it’s midwinter, the darkest time of the year, the time when we turn the corner. For thousands of years, people have celebrated because even though we might still starve or freeze to death this winter, at least we will do it during increasingly longer periods of daylight.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be getting ready. Beth will ornament her home with light and music. I will immerse myself in experiments of scent and flavor. On the big day, we’ll bring it all together: with sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, we’ll welcome light, hope, warmth, joy, and comfort into our own hearts and offer these gifts to those around us.

To do that, we’re going to need some pears.

But what kind? To find out, I bought a selection from the grocery store on Wednesday and let them ripen in a bowl until today, Sunday. They were beautiful: all sensuous curves, glowing colors, and perfume. It was almost a shame to eat them. But we tried each kind and we settled on our favorites.

Each of us agreed on our second favorite: good old Bartlett, the standard canning pear. Its classic shape and flavor, plus its cheerful yellow color, would make it a welcome guest on any fruit plate.

My favorite was Concorde. I think it’s the prettiest. It has a musky, almost melonlike flavor redolent of vanilla.

Beth’s favorite was Bosc. “Hands down,” she said. This pear is sweet with plenty of fragrance, but with a clean taste that appeals to her.

Here, in no particular order, are our tasting notes. Click on them to make them legible. Enjoy!

Tiramisu as Big as You!

Last night was Big Goddamn Steak Night. It’s a time to celebrate, to gather with friends, to reflect, and to eat a really high-fat meal. Well, all except for the part about reflecting. Big Goddamn Steak Night would sum up everything that’s wrong with America if it weren’t all done ironically.

Except for dessert. The “Tiramisu as Big as You” course is in deadly earnest. And this year, when eggs are filled with salmonella and the world’s chocolate supplies dwindle, nothing could be a better reminder of how precious and fleeting our lives really are.

And because life is short, BGDSN tiramisu is special. For one thing, there’s a ton of it. For another thing, it does not have ladyfingers. Who wants to eat some stale-ass, nothing-flavored cookie the size, color, and texture of a tongue depressor? Not me. That’s why I make my tiramisu with chocolate cake.

If, before you leave this world, you want to eat a holiday dessert as spectacular—and as big—as a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon, then I have here just the thing for you.

Tiramisu as Big as You
There are four steps to tiramisu: cake, zabaglione, cream, and assembly. This dessert takes four or five hours to make and dirties up every bowl you own. When you’re done, though, you can serve twelve people.

Cake
Why take a perfectly good, made-from-scratch chocolate cake and tear it down? Trust me. Everything the cake lost shall be restored a hundredfold. It’s like the cake is Job.

I cut this recipe in half and changed the pan from a 9" × 13" because I always have too much cake left over.

½ c milk
2 t lemon juice or vinegar
1 c sugar *
¼ c butter
1 egg
¼ c cocoa powder
1 ¼ c flour
¼ t salt
1 ½ t soda
½ t vanilla
½ c boiling water

Stir the lemon juice into the milk and set aside. Combine the dry ingredients and set aside.

Cream the butter and sugar; beat in the egg.

Beat in half the dry ingredients, then half the milk, then the rest of the dry stuff, then the last of the milk. Stir in the vanilla.

While the batter isn’t paying attention, dump in the boiling water all at once and blend it in! AIIEEEEE!

Pour into a greased, floured 8" × 8" pan and bake at 350° for 20-25 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean.

Cool the cake for 10 minutes, then turn it out of the pan and cool some more until you can handle the cake. Cut it in half and cut each half into 12 to 16 slices. Lay each slice on its side on a cookie sheet and pop those back in the oven for 10 to 15 minutes. Turn the slices over and toast them for another 10 minutes. Lay the cake-toast-slices on the cooling rack until perfectly cool. They will be crunchy. This is a good thing.

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Zabaglione
Next up: you are making a super-eggy-licious traditional Italian dessert (or breakfast, depending on whom you ask). Zabaglione is quite fine in its own right, rich with eggs and the raisiny-caramel flavor of Marsala. But stay strong and keep going. This is going to be fantastic!

10 eggs
⅔ c sugar
⅔ c Marsala wine
2 T water

Get yourself a heat-proof bowl, a candy thermometer, a whisk or hand mixer, a rubber scraper, and a pan of not-quite-simmering water.

Separate 10 eggs and put the yolks and the sugar together in a heat-proof bowl. Beat until lemony-yellow and thick, maybe three to five minutes. Beat in the Marsala and water.

Now the tricky part. Plunk your bowl in the pan of simmering water and start beating those eggs. As you beat them, they will cook and thicken and turn amazing. You are in a race against the hot water: you want the eggs to reach 160°, which is safe eating temperature. But you don’t want to work so slowly that the eggs stick to your bowl. So beat like crazy, scrape down quickly if you need to, and periodically check the temperature.

If you don’t have a candy thermometer, you might want to resign yourself to the fact that life is dangerous. You might want to use trustworthy eggs from a known-to-be-safe source, either way.

When you have achieved the proper temperature and your egg mixture is the consistency of softly whipped cream, you can stop. You did it, rock star! Take the bowl out of the water and set it aside to cool for at least 15 minutes.

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Cream
This part of the recipe seems pedestrian, but everything’s about to come together. You’ve done the hard parts! Now it’s time to torture an appalling amount of dairy fat into behaving like a solid instead of a liquid.

1 c heavy whipping cream
1-2 t vanilla
16-24 oz mascarpone cheese

Combine the vanilla and heavy whipping cream and beat at least to the soft peak stage. Maybe you could stop just short of stiff peaks.

In another, much larger bowl, beat the mascarpone until smooth. Blend in the whipped cream and the cooled zabaglione. You may need to pop this in the refrigerator while you get ready for…

Assembly!
1 c strong coffee, cooled
2 T sugar
3 T brandy
6 oz bittersweet chocolate, grated
2-3 T cocoa powder
In a shallow dish, mix the coffee, sugar, and brandy until sugar is dissolved.

Assemble your friends: cake-toast, booze-spresso, vat of creamy cream cream, and the two kinds of pulverized chocolate. Find yourself a glass bowl, too. There are at least two schools of thought on bowls. Some people like to use a wide, shallow bowl. They divide the cake and cream in halves and just do two layers. I have a tall V-shaped bowl that allows me to make many layers. Think about what kind of drama you want to create and how you will manage to serve the dessert, then make your choice.

Dip pieces of cake in the coffee mixture and arrange them in the bottom of the bowl. It’s OK to leave some space between and around the cake. Cover the cake with a layer of cream, burying it maybe a half inch thick. Sprinkle the cream with grated chocolate, covering up the surface.

Repeat layers of cake-cream-chocolate until you reach the top of the bowl or you are going to run out of something. The topmost layer should be grated chocolate.

Put the cocoa powder in a sieve and dust the top of the dessert artfully. Cover the bowl tightly and refrigerate overnight, or at least 6 hours, to give the cream a chance to set up.

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Mangiamo!
On 12.23.2010 the quantity of sugar was corrected to 1 cup from 2 cups. I am so very sorry, Amy Rea.

The Ballad of Mr. Turnip

This here’s a story about a giant turnip, the woman who destroyed him (that would be me), and his ultimate redemption (I hope).

I was looking for someone else when I found Mr. Turnip at a Minneapolis Farmer’s Market stall. I’d never seen anything like him: a giant turnip almost as big as my head. He was grotesque… yet magnificent. He only cost a dollar! How could I pass him up?

And once I got him home, well, what the hell was I going to do with him? I put him on my kitchen scale, but I did not have enough weights to measure him. I stacked up a package of gnocchi; cans of coconut milk, tomato paste, and Amy’s brand lentil vegetable soup; two bars of Ghirardelli unsweetened chocolate; a bag of Bob’s Red Mill oat bran cereal; and a stray ounce of bittersweet chocolate. Mr. Turnip weighed slightly more than all of it put together. That put him at around five pounds.

Hmm… five pounds. If Mr. Turnip were a cabbage, I could make a gallon of sauerkraut out of him. I’d read that turnips, if given the same treatment, turn into sauerruben: reputedly even better than kraut. We’d just see about that.

As I peeled him, Mr. Turnip released a sulphurous odor that stung my nose and made my eyes water. Had I made a huge mistake? Maybe I should have left him whole and gone as Zaphod Beeblebrox for Halloween. But when I cut him in half, my fears were quelled: Mr. Turnip’s heart was clean and sweet.

With a few minutes’ work, he was a mound of snowy white shreds. I tossed him with three tablespoons of canning salt and packed him into a bag.

“There you go,” I told him. “Get to work.”

I left him alone for a few days. He made plenty of brine, but I didn’t see many of the bubbles that would tell me he was fermenting. This I didn’t like: he turned brown. What was he doing in there?

Ugh, who wanted to know. I left him alone until this afternoon, when I hauled him out into the light of day. I plunked him on a table, opened up his Ziploc, and had a taste.

Mr. Turnip—Herr Sauerruben, I should call him now—still has the faintest whiff of sulphur about him. But fermentation has turned him complex and flavorful. He is milder than sauerkraut, but he has a hint of the same bite as horseradish. There’s a meaty umami flavor to him. He reminds me of daikon pickled in soy sauce.

So here we stand. Mr. Turnip has emerged from his ordeal a transformed being. But I am asking the same question: What the hell am I going to do with him?

A Creative Waste of Food

Usually I don't carve a jack o'lantern. I think it’s a waste of a perfectly good, delightfully edible pumpkin.

But this year one of my decorative-until-I-kill-and-eat-you pumpkins developed a soft spot. Eh. Why not. I’ve been threatening to do this for years. I just hope my house doesn’t get egged.

Of course, I can still eat the seeds:

* Separate the seeds from the goop as well as possible.
* Soak overnight, then rinse. This helps get rid of any remaining innards.
* Toss with salt and olive oil.
* Spread the seeds in a shallow pan. Make one layer.
* Toast in the oven at 350° for about 30 minutes. Stir and/or shake up the pan once or twice during toasting so everyone gets a chance to turn golden and delicious.

Happy Halloween, everyone. And you kids: get off my lawn!

Beer/Pie Pairings with Amy and Joe

Did you know Curran’s Restaurant has Pie Happy Hour? I kid you not. From 2pm to 5pm and from 7pm to close, you can waltz in there and have a slice of pie for a dollar.

This is the kind of friendly customer-centric, get-‘em-in-the-door promotion I’d expect from Curran’s. They have been a neighborhood standard for more than sixty years. Think of a homegrown Perkin’s or Country Kitchen with career waitstaff. The clientele is a mix of families, elders, and high school couples on weeknight dates. So it is a little bit of a surprise to learn that Curran’s also has a long list of foreign, domestic, and craft beers in bottles.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

My friend Joe and I headed over for a flight of beer and pie. We ordered two beers and two slices of pie each. We split each beer and managed to eke out eight bites from each slice, eight sips from each half-beer. Our tasting notes are transcribed below. We were, in spite of ourselves, surprised by what we learned.

The worst beer overall, to my chagrin, was my own longtime favorite: Summit EPA. It performed poorly with every pie we tried, although it was tolerable with apple. Apple, we found, was the all-around good beer companion. While it did not excel with any beer we tasted, it made an acceptable sidekick to all of them. “The Will Smith of the pies,” remarked Joe.

The worst pie was blueberry. Curran’s blueberry pie is nothing to write home about in the first place; it’s an uninspired assembly of canned blueberry filling and pale crust. But had it been a better pie, it would only have been a bigger shame to eat it with beer. Time after time, flavors clashed like a pair of second-rate drag queens angling for the same spot on the dance floor. The Summit EPA and blueberry pairing was a complete loser.

The overall best match was Blue Moon and pumpkin. Curran’s tremblingly tender custard tastes strongly of fresh pumpkin and nutmeg. When that flavor combines with smooth, clean Blue Moon, it’s a magical moment.

So what’s next for beer/pie pairings? Curran’s has other beers to try, other pies to probe. Maybe a beer/pie potluck, where everyone brings either a six-pack or a pastry?

Beer and Pie Tasting Notes
Click to enlarge!

Cardoons: Once is Enough

Note: There is an F-bomb in this post. You were warned.

Cardoons! Limited supply! Only take some if you can experiment with them and report back! So said the CSA announcement this week. Cardoons! I’d heard of them and been hoping for years to try them.

According to a British gardening book that I have somewhere in my house but can no longer find, cardoons are a tall and dramatic-looking member of the thistle family, a relative of artichokes, and a back-of-the-garden oddity. It used to be a common vegetable but fell out of favor sometime before the invention of the combustion engine. I’d filed the bit of information away in case I ever met this plant. And now, thanks to Harmony Valley, it was staring me in the face!


Cardoon looks like celery crossed with an iguana. It is flocked with grayish-green fuzz....














....and studded with quarter-inch spines. It’s as if aliens planted a Jurassic-era garden; or some mild-mannered vegetable got blasted with gamma rays and then got pissed off. Wow! This was going to be so cool!

A little checking around revealed that cardoon should be de-leafed, de-thorned, and cleaned of tough strings; then boiled for fifteen minutes to an hour. It can then be made into things like crudités or salads. Joy of Cooking suggested it might taste like artichoke. I decided on a gratine. This was going to be great! I’d serve it as a surprise treat to Saturday’s dinner guests.

As I prepared the cardoons, excitement soured into doubt. These stalks were awfully big and stringy. That gray bloom turned out to be a layer that sometimes peeled off like onionskin. I cut them into the two-inch lengths that Joy suggested and set them to boil in water spiked with salt and lemon juice.

Beth arrived to help with dinner preparations. “What can I do?” she asked. “Oh,” I tossed back breezily, “how about if you make the Mornay sauce?” I rattled off the directions over my shoulder as I poked the boiling cardoons with a spoon. “Like this?” she asked, some minutes later. I looked into the pan. Beth had made a textbook sauce. It was perfectly smooth, white, and uniform. The sides of the pan weren’t even dirty. Damn!

I drained the cardoons. They looked as if they had lost an election of some sort, or perhaps as if they owed money to the Mob.

I poured Beth’s beautiful sauce into a buttered dish and started laying cardoon pieces in, grumbling all the while. “You don’t sound too confident. You’re going to serve this to guests?” Beth demanded. So, drums rolling, I tasted a cardoon.



A high note of baking soda sang above a base taste of overcooked silage, followed by a convulsive sourness. “Oh, try this,” I gasped. “No way,” said Beth, backing away. I snatched the pieces out of the Mornay, horrified that they would taint it. And then I looked down at them, all sauce-smeared in the colander.

I never until this day met a vegetable I didn’t like. And I hate to waste anything. I screwed my courage to the sticking point and picked up one of the sauced pieces. This one was tenderer. The silky Mornay smoothed away most of the bitterness. The flavor and texture were like a mild, soft artichoke heart. I saw how this might have worked: tender inner stalks broiled up with sauce and cheese could have made a not too unattractive presentation, and they might even approach enjoyable.

But you know what? Fuck it. Cardoons are a lot of work for something only a little bit delicious. And a lot of people, my guests included, don’t even like artichoke. I dumped the whole mess straight in the trash. Sorry, cardoons.

I can see why people stopped eating these things. What I can’t see is why anyone ever decided to eat this in the first place. Maybe some feudal peasant saw her donkey munching a roadside thistle and shoved him out of the way to grab it for herself. Maybe when the choices were cardoons or nothing, cardoons were worth the fuss.

Even though I didn’t like them, I’m thankful to Harmony Valley for the opportunity to try cardoons. It had been a longtime dream, and now I can mark it up as a lifetime achievement.

Don’t try this at home
Here’s what I was going to do, had my initial bite not been so shatteringly unpleasant.

1 lb de-thorned, de-leafed, de-stringed cardoon stalks, cut in 2" pieces
2 T lemon juice
1 t salt
2 T butter
2 T flour
1½ c whole milk at room temperature
¾ c grated Swiss cheese, divided in half

Put the cardoon pieces in a pot with 8 cups of water, the lemon and salt. Boil for 15 to 20 minutes and drain.

Meanwhile, melt the butter in a saucepan and whisk in the flour. Whisk until very smooth. Add the milk, whisking constantly to avoid lumps. Whisk and whisk over medium heat until the sauce thickens. Take it off the heat and whisk in half the cheese.

Butter a glass or ceramic baking dish and pour in half the sauce. Lay the cardoon pieces in the sauce, overlapping each other slightly, and cover them with the rest of the sauce. Sprinkle with the remaining cheese. Bake in a 375° oven until the sauce is bubbly and the cheese is toasty and just browned, about 20 minutes.

There’s a country song in here somewhere

I had a notion I was going to get my heart broken when I walked up to him in the lunchroom.

“John,” I said, twirling the kitchen knife in my hand, “would you help me out with something?”

John looked up and smiled—not at the knife, but at the two large apples I held in my other hand. When John’s not at work, he’s an epicure with a well-trained palate. He was exactly the person I needed. I sat down, arranging the objects on the table between us. “We’re going to do a little experiment,” I said.

“As you know, this is the second year of SweeTango—the controversial new apple from the University of Minnesota. It’s touted as even better than my beloved favorite, Honeycrisp.”

“I have here two apples,” I continued. “One is a Honeycrisp. One is a SweeTango. We’re going to try them, talk about what we taste, and decide which one is better. Then I’ll tell you which is which. I’m too biased to be objective, so I’m interested to hear your opinion.”

John was in.

We started by looking at the apples. They were lovely, their rosy red skins striated with yellowish green. The only way to tell them apart was by size. “Not much difference,” John said.

I cut each in half. One of the apples had yellower flesh than the other. The second apple had a hurt spot in the center, but we dismissed that as unimportant. Texture appeared otherwise identical.

We tasted the first apple. Good crunch! We both found it very sweet, but it also had a contrasting acidic kick. “Nice tang,” John remarked. The flavors were high, sharp, and bright, with a cidery undertone. John gave his approval, and I agreed.

On to apple number two. Upon biting in, John exclaimed, “This has a grapey flavor to it.” He was right. Though sweet and equally crunchy as the first apple, the flavor was more muted and rounded. It was a softer, fruitier taste. Another very good apple, we concluded.

“So,” I asked, “which is better?”

John guessed that the first apple was Honeycrisp and declared that he liked it better.

I smiled sadly. I agreed with John’s judgment. The bright, tangy apple was indeed the tastier of the two. But he guessed wrong: it wasn’t the Honeycrisp.

Cue the music:

Dang you, SweeTango, I hate you
Like I hate the sun in the sky.
I hate you so bad, I hate your mom and your dad,
I hate you so much I could cry.

Dang you, SweeTango, I hate you
Like I hate the stars up above.
They don’t have to flaunt you, I hate you ‘cause I want you
Even more than the one that I love.

¡Vivan Chiles Rellenos!

If you’re all wondering what to do with a poblano pepper, then you should go stuff it.

Har har har! No, really. And then you should batter it and fry it and serve it with a bunch of its friends.

Perhaps once a year I make chiles rellenos (say “ray-YAY-nohs.” Do not call them “reh-lennowz” unless you are still eating tor-til-ah chips.) from Diana Kennedy’s The Art of Mexican Cooking. To me, they epitomize the complexity of Mexican food. Even the most seemingly simple Mexican dish can involve multiple cooking methods and several iterations of processing. Making rellenos is like making four different dishes: roasting, peeling, and seeding the chiles; making the stuffing; making the sauce; and, finally, battering and frying the chiles. Add some side dishes to the meal, and you could be cooking all day a la Like Water for Chocolate.

This time, though, I tried to keep things simple. I used a good brand of canned refried black beans, and I used cheese for the filling. I made a very quick and easy tomatillo salsa for an appetizer and an even quicker and easier red tomato sauce to nap on the chiles. I rounded out the meal with a pot of white rice and a simple stewed zucchini with yellow cherry tomatoes and oregano. I forgot to set out the corn tortillas I’d bought, but nobody missed them. Dessert was vanilla ice cream or muskmelon, a cup of coffee, and a sliver of chocolate spiced with cinnamon and cayenne.

Chiles Rellenos
There are four stages: the chiles, the sauce, the filling, and the frying. Finally, we eat!

The Chiles
You can stuff any pepper, but traditional cooks use the poblano. These dark green, glossy triangles are relatively mild and about the size of a fist. Start with more chiles than you’re planning to serve; I promise at least one of them will end up in shreds while you are preparing it. Roast them on a grill or under a broiler, then peel them (here’s how). Find the weakest part of the chile, slit it open lengthwise, and sweep out the seeds and veins, being careful not to tear the flesh. You may need to wipe off your fingers, or your chile, with a towel as you work. Put the cleaned chile on a plate or cookie rack. You can do this a day ahead.

The Sauce
According to Kennedy, rellenos are traditionally heated up in a sauce—essentially, a very simple tomato reduction thinned with chicken broth. I opted to skip the broth and ended up with a tangy and fresh-tasting tomato sauce. You can make this ahead of time.

2 or 3 tomatoes
2 T chopped onion
1 clove garlic, chopped
1-2 T oil
Salt to taste

Put the tomatoes, onion, and garlic in a blender and liquefy. Heat the oil in a well-seasoned skillet. Dump in the tomato mixture and fry until reduced, maybe 5 or 10 minutes. (At this point Kennedy has you add 2 ¼ cups of chicken broth and cook 5 minutes more.) Salt to taste.

The Filling
Recipes abound for the relleno, or stuffing, part of chiles rellenos. You can use seasoned meat, or maybe potatoes and chorizo. I found queso Chihuahua, the quintessential Mexican melting cheese, at the Wedge. Muenster would be the next best choice. I cut it in strips about the size of my index finger. A large poblano will take two or three of these pieces; for a tiny chile, I cut one in half.

Put cheese inside the chile, being careful not to tear it. The chile should be nice and full, but the sides of the hole should overlap a bit. If you opt to close the slit with a toothpick, be sure to warn your guests.

The Frying
Cover a plate with several layers of paper towels and put it in the oven at 200° F. Get out a big frying pan and pour in about an inch of oil. Canola is nice. Put the pan on a medium-high burner.

Now make the batter. For every four to six big chiles, get these things:

3 eggs
¼ t salt
⅓ c flour

Separate the eggs. Beat the whites until they are stiff and turning dry. Beat in the yolks, one by one, and the salt.

OK, here we go. It’s showtime. I always get very scared at this point. I’m convinced that the chiles will come apart, stick to the pan, catch on fire, splatter everywhere, or burn black. But not one of those things has ever happened. They always fry up like magic.

Plan to work with one or two chiles at a time. Dredge a chile in flour...











then hold it by its stem and dunk it in the batter.


































Gently lay the chile in the hot oil and let it cook golden brown. Use two spatulas to turn it on its side (or flip it right over if it is very small). Fry each chile on all sides...





then remove to the plate to drain.

Hey, look at that! It worked!

Let’s eat!

If you did the broth thing, you can put the rellenos in the sauce and heat them up for five minutes or so. Otherwise, plate ‘em up! Serve each guest one big chile or two smaller ones. You can pool the sauce under them or nap it on top.

¡Buen provecho!