Sara Bir

Fear and Self-Loathing in Candyland

December 04, 2013

Do you have close relatives who express their love through making rich, carb-laden holiday recipes that rely heavily on processed foods?

Does the word “potluck” evoke feelings of massive ambivalence?

Does the seemingly universal consumer embrace of pasteurized, artificially flavored, fat-free “holiday nog” weigh upon your soul like a brick?

Do you feel like an asshole for being such a downer food snob in the face of heartfelt goodwill and cheer?

Has vomiting or contemplating vomiting ever been an annual tradition for you in the throes of these wintery grey months?

Welcome, friend, to Food Fear and Self-Loathing in Santaland! Pull up a chair with me by the fire, and feel free to skip the eggless holiday nog; tonight, it’s whiskey, neat, in a cut-glass tumbler.

This is the time of year when abundance and dread bleed together ominously under shiny paper wrappings. This is the time of year when gentle people put giant platters heaped with exactly the kind of food we try to avoid in front of our faces at every turn. This is the time of year when demons dance jigs in the hearts and gurgling bellies of people with eating disorders, and since you are still reading this, I’m betting you are in that club with me. High-five!

I want to be a good sport, but I also just want to be good.

I love Johnny Mathis, I love baking cookies, I love playing board games post-Thanksgiving dinner. Succulent meat picked off the turkey carcass, sparkling wine aperitifs, nibbles of dates and fine chocolates, port wine cheese balls, plump and petite clementines, eggs benedict on Christmas morning, anything made with cranberries: I love love love these things.

I don’t love the canker sores and swollen taste buds that break out in my mouth from overindulging in sweet and acidic foods. I don’t love sleeping badly because I couldn’t help myself from having a giant wedge of flourless chocolate torte at midnight, straight from the fridge, when no one was looking, in about thirty seconds. How many calories is that? Will we even do that family hike tomorrow everyone was talking about before the freezing rain started falling? Do I have parched eyeballs and a pasty tongue because I’m hung over, or because I drank seven cups of coffee while we leisurely extricated all of our tiny presents from our stockings, or because I skipped breakfast and proceeded directly to the slow, endless march of empty-calorie grazing that began at the close of November and won’t stop until well after the second hand sweeps past twelve on New Fucking Year’s Eve.

We just do the best we can do. I try to allow myself a few slip-ups, even though the emotional lacerations of those slip-ups can ruin an entire day. Not to being too hard on myself seems like a good idea, but being hard on myself is, twenty years ago, what helped me triumph over this eating disorder in the first place. It took an elaborately constructed regimen of reasonable portions, sit-down mealtimes, and freshly-prepared, healthful food to keep it at bay, and eventually weeks or even months could go by without even thinking about it.

But every year November comes, and, like Scrooges’ ghosts, the Past, Present, and Future specters of my ugly food binges materialize to haunt me. It fills me with this crackling, frantic, unfocused bad energy, and then Johnny Mathis rings hollow; the act of baking cookies, futile; the invitations to buffets, terrifying. Another goddamn buffet. Ugh. It’s like inviting a junkie to an all-you-can-shoot heroin spree.

What I need to do is find one of you people who get so full of seasonal despair you can’t even move, let alone rally to eat peanut brittle. Give me a bell. We can hang out, and my spazzing will neutralize your lethargy.  I’ll be the acid and you can be the base, just like Pepto-Bismol soothing indigestion. I’m experienced at drinking Pepto. I do it straight from the bottle, in shots. It’s soothingly pink and just slightly minty, almost Chritmasy.

But I hope I won’t need it. There’s always hope. This is a season of hope, right? And giving. This year I’m going to give myself the benefit of the doubt. They don’t make that in Santa’s workshop. You have to craft it yourself. I’m going to heap a ton on my plate, because for most of us, there’s no harm in binging on self-confidence.

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Join Me for a Knife Skills Workshop

December 02, 2013

Bring me your dull, your time-worn, your discount blades! Bring me your chopping, your hacking, your unrefined slicing! Mainly, bring yourself to my upcoming Knife Skills Workshop at Jivaka Wellness Center in Elkins, West Virginia on Saturday, December 14! It's part of the shimmery and stupendous Potomac Highlands Food and Farm cooking class series.

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Use a Scale, Dummy!

December 02, 2013

Holiday time! You've got new recipes to try and dozens of cookies to bake for that exchange party. Hours and hours in the kitchen to look forward to. Want to make it fun and easy?

Use a scale, dummy!

But isn't that what measuring cups are for? For all these years we've been getting along just fine using those dinky cups and spoons, right. Why start now?

Just use a scale, dummy!

A digital kitchen scale pays off with speed, accuracy and greatly reduced dirty dishes. Don't be afraid of it. Especially if you bake. Because dry ingredients and volume measurements are as inconsistent as the latest Katy Perry album. Lightly spooning sifted flour into a one-cup measure might get you 3 ounces, while heartily dipping the cup into the flour and leveling it could result in as much as 5 ounces of flour. That's a 2-ounce difference. That's significant, enough to ruin an otherwise great recipe. Enough to affix that annoying #fail to. You don't want to join the #fail club.

Use a scale, dummy!

Oh, but why get another kitchen gadget when you have a perfectly useful set of measuring cups and spoons? First of all, you can keep your cups and spoons. I still use mine, sometimes, though usually because I'm dumping volume measurements into a bowl on my scale so I can convert all of my favorite baking recipes to grams. Second, a decent digital scale is cheap. Mine, a Salter, cost about twenty bucks. It's lasted ten years, with very frequent use (I've changed the batteries twice). A nice set of stainless-steel measuring cups can cost more than that.

Just get a scale, dummy!

People in the know use scales: Chemists. Pharmacists. That hottie who works in the boulangerie. Do pot dealers use measuring spoons when they sell weed?

Right. I'm talkin' scales, dummy.

And don't even get me started on pounds and ounces. Metric all the way. Because if there's anything as annoying as a recipe that calls for 2/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons of an ingredient, it's a recipe that calls for 5-5/8 ounces of something. Know what tool will convert to weights to metric? Yup.

Your digital scale, dummy.

But let's not put the cart before the horse. What, dear foodie person, will you ask Santa for this Christmas? Or hell, what are you going to march to the store and just buy for yourself outright?

A scale. Because, smarty, you're worth it. Love, Sara.

Try your new scale with this colorful cookie recipe from The Sausagetarian. I promise your scale will make you feel powerful and capable. "You have more confidence in yourself as a cook when you do things directly in the professional manner rather than using subterfuges," a wise woman once said. Her name was Julia Child. She didn't say "use a scale, dummy," but I wouldn't put it past her.

This originally appeared on Food Riot, where I contribute weekly.

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Cook Up Adobo Aid for the Philippines

November 14, 2013

Food and travel writer (and Filipina) Maida Pineda came up with Adobo Aid as a way to raise funds for emergency relief in the Philippines. It's a brilliant idea: cook adobo in your home, invite friends over to share dinner, and pass a hat. It's not just about money. It's about healing, a hemisphere away, across a table, over a meal cooked with love.

You can join people all over the world in cooking up Adobo Aid on November 23. Look at Maida's Touch for suggested charities, and for Maida's pork and chicken adobo recipe. 

Sacrilegious Chicken Adobo

Serves 4-6

Since I'm not of Filipino heritage, I don’t feel guilty about imposing my stuffy, classically French-trained cooking methods on a culture’s signature dish. In a classic adobo, you throw everything together, let the sauce evaporate, and then the chicken browns; it’s like a backwards braise. Since I like a lot of sauce and a controlled sear, I do it all Euro-style. There are a million adobo recipes online if you are looking for something different. 

You can purchase adobo mix in envelopes. Don't.

1 whole 3- to 4-pound chicken, cut up as you like (make sure to include the wings for a silky, unctuous sauce)
2 to 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 head garlic, peeled, cloves smashed a bit with the side of a knife
1 two-inch piece of fresh ginger, sliced into coins
2 bay leaves

2 whole pods star anise, optional but highly recommended
1/2 cup rice vinegar (You can use white vinegar, but as a wise chef friend once told me, “That shit’s for cleaning floors.”)
1/2 cup soy sauce

1 teaspoon granulated sugar

Salt to taste

Sprinkle the chicken pieces very liberally with salt on both sides. Heat a heavy-bottomed 12” skillet or large Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add the oil and heat for a few seconds, then add the chicken pieces skin-side-down (ideally, this step should be done in two batches, but crowding the skillet won't kill anyone, either.)

Put the garlic, ginger, bay leaves, peppercorns, and (if using) star anise into the pan and shuffle everything around. (You may tie them up in a cheesecloth bundle first, but I prefer to be rustic.) Add the vinegar, soy sauce and sugar, plus enough water to immerse the chicken halfway in liquid.

Reduce the heat and simmer gently until the sauce is reduced by at least one-third and the chicken is cooked through and tender, about 20 to 30 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings (you may need to add more salt, soy sauce, or vinegar--the flavor should be bright, but the tartness should not be harsh or overpowering). If the sauce reduced too much, just add a little water back to it.

Serve with hot white rice and cold bottles of San Miguel beer. We usually have steamed broccoli with chicken adobo; the florets are perfect for drinking up lots of that delectable sauce.

about 10 peppercorns

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Sweet California Fennel

November 14, 2013

Toasting those seeds is what did it. “It smells like the Bulb in here,” Mr. Bir Toujors said wistfully when he came into the kitchen. I stood at the stove, gently rattling the seeds in the skillet so they wouldn’t burn. He was right.

They were fennel seeds, but he was not talking about a fennel bulb. Mr. Bir Toujours was talking about the Bulb, the Albany Bulb. There we were in a small Midwestern town, but the aroma of those seeds was pure California summer afternoon, so brightly sunny the burnished golden hills hulking over the Bay stood in crisp relief, impossibly tangible in the early Ohio evening of our reality. I didn’t expect to journey across a continent and an era via the preparation of a simple pasta dinner.

California is where we met, Mr. Bir Toujours and I.  We were in the San Francisco Bay Area, a million moves and failures and successes ago. We each had apartments decorated with flyers from rock shows, jobs that easily covered our modest expenses, and our lives open and free at our feet. We blithely went to indie movies late on Friday nights and groggily out to diner breakfasts the morning after. We walked through our neighborhood and out to the Bulb, together and apart.

The Bulb began as an industrial waste site, a watery grave for untold tons of jagged construction rip-rap that piled up and up until they fused into a bizarre little peninsula with a mind-blowing view of San Francisco Bay.  Scrubby plants sprung up, king among them fennel.

Fennel–Foeniculum vulgare–is an assertive plant. It pushes through cracks in the pavement in parking lots; it thrives on a huge mound of rebar and busted concrete that rises, defiant, from the saline depths opposite one of the world’s loveliest cities. Its sweet musk dominates the Bulb, where nature’s more tenacious species–bums ,seagulls, renegade art collectives, eucalyptus trees—have triumphed.  Fennel, invasive and intoxicating, is the emblematic plant of the Bulb, the no-man’s-land for all people.

That prolific, wild Bulb fennel of memory isn’t even in the same cultivar group as the vegetable we cook with. Florence fennel—what I’d call grocery store fennel—is the kind with the swollen white and green bulb at its base (it’s actually the plant’s inflated leaf base). Their smell, though? Identical.

Foods transfer us to a long-ago places and mental states, but this was the first time I past-tripped on something I’d never before eaten: an improvised pot of pasta, beets, and fennel tossed together under darkening November skies in the cultural subduction zone where Appalachia meets Midwest. There are enough rewarding things here, where we live now, that I stay very much in this unremarkable middle-aged present in Mid-Ohio Valley, perhaps too much so. Those times that formed who we are now were too splendid to toss aside in a dusty jumble of memories.

Our eternal fault line is where our yesterdays grind against our tomorrows. It’s a different kind of fault line than the San Andreas, the one I gaily trod upon and around in heady air perfumed with the sublime stench of fennel friends bronzing in the sun. Often beside me was Mr. Bir Toujours, destined to become a lifelong displaced Californian, the father of our daughter, and a miraculously trim devourer of fatty, carb-rich dinners laced with fennel.

Grab your skillet and some fennel seeds. Boil some pasta. Come to the Bulb and past-trip with us. (No, really. Make this beety fennel pasta recipe and brighten up a dreary fall night.)

This piece originally appeared on Food Riot, where I contribute from time to time.

[Comments]

Beety Fennel Pasta

November 08, 2013

Fennel seeds are something we mainly encounter in Italian sausage. And they are fine there, but fennel seeds are too great of a flavor asset to leave it at that. I like to pair them with other strong flavors, like...other parts of a fennel plant, the fronds and the bulb. This is triple-fennel pasta, not for those who detest savory anise flavors. It's a play in the pasta-vermouth-green veg combo I'm fond of.

This is a robust, rib-sticking dinner. The creamy, rich mascarpone is a nice foil for the fennel, but you can leave it out for a leaner, brassier dish. In the past, I’ve omitted the beets and increased the peas.

Serves 2-3

1 large or two small bulbs fennel
2 medium beets, peeled and cut into ½-inch cubes
2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 teaspoons fennel seed
8 ounces orecchiette or penne pasta
¼ cup dry white vermouth or white wine
1 cup frozen peas, optional
1/3 cup mascarpone cheese, optional
½ cup finely grated parmesan or asiago cheese

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Trim the brown root end of the fennel bulb(s). Pluck off the nice-looking green fronds from the top of the bulb. Rinse them off, pat them dry, and chop them. Reserve ½ to ¼ cup of chopped fronds for garnishing the pasta, and do whatever you like with the remaining fronds.

Now, dice the fennel bulb into 1/2 –inch pieces. Discard any of the little green shoots, which will turn bitter after roasting. On a large rimmed baking sheet or roasting pan, toss the diced fennel bulb and beets with the olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. Roast until the beets are a little shriveled and can easily be pierced with a fork, about 20-25 minutes.

Meanwhile, toast the fennel seeds in a small skillet over medium heat, stirring frequently, until the seeds are aromatic, about 5 minutes. Transfer the seeds to a cutting board and chop them a bit with a sharp knife. (You can also do this part with a mortar and pestle, but I’ve always found it easier to chop them, because the seeds jump out of the mortar. If this whole bit is too challenging for you, just skip it and use the seeds whole. But don’t skip toasting them! Your finished pasta won’t taste nearly as robust.)

Bring a large pot of generously salted water to a boil. Add the pasta, stir, and lower the heat a bit. Cook until it’s just a half-hair shy of al dente. Before draining the pasta, reserve 1 cup of the cooking water. Let the drained pasta sit in the colander for a bit.

Return the now-empty pot you cooked the pasta in to the burner and increase the heat to high. Add the vermouth or white wine and cook until it’s reduced to a few tablespoons. Add the frozen peas, if using, to the pot, along with the roasted beets and fennel. Add the mascarpone cheese and drained to the pot, along with a third of the reserved pasta-cooking water. Stir until the mascarpone cheese is creamy distributed well, then stir in the parmesan or asiago cheese. Add more of the pasta-cooking water to smooth out the sauce so it’s a bit loose and not sticky or stiff. Taste and adjust the seasonings with salt or pepper. Stir in half of the fennel fronds, divide the pasta between serving bowls, and garnish with the remaining fronds.

1. 

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Pâté: A Grownup Love Story

November 08, 2013

Nothing smells as pungent as sizzling liver. Some may call it a stench; the vapors of cooking liver will overrun a kitchen and bleed into other part of the house we prefer to be liver-free: boudoirs, linen closets, living rooms. You either think liver is worth stinking up the house, or you think liver is worth sending away on reeking, garbage-laden barges for an elated flock of pesky seagulls to peck at. Liver is polarizing that way.

When I was a small child, the smell and a taste of liver struck me as a perfect distillation of the most boring, excruciating qualities of adults. There must have been a dinner party at our house, the kind that dragged on hours after I got tucked in bed, the kind with bottles of wine and the gustatory, obnoxious laughter of big people enjoying the warmth of that red wine in their bellies. Even the desserts served at such parties—tarts or mousse with bitter chocolate and dry flaky, crusts—were of tiny appeal to a kids, and maybe I gamely took a few bites anyway because hey, it’s dessert. At one of these parties, there must have been pâté, pâté with liver that stunk like the wretched brown-pink braunschweiger my dad smeared on his pumpernickel toast in the morning. A grownup must have designed pâté specifically out of hatred for young people.

At some point, I grew up. Several million of my once-tender taste buds shriveled up from overuse; major life events and the reality of this sad and beautiful world left me wanting to embrace what is baffling and super-intense, the faces so ugly only a mother could love them. I started drinking coffee and listening to weird instrumental Sonic Youth records and sprinkling seaweed flakes on my pizza. Smoking cigarettes was, at times, alluring. I understood the smell of what’s between a naked adult’s legs, strong but clean and full of life. The stench of cooking liver is the life force of the slaughtered animal echoing from it. A liver is one of the most nutrient-rich parts of an animal you can eat.

Then you add eggs and cream and white bread to it and call it pâté, and it’s not very nutritious anymore. Pâté is to meatloaf what chocolate mousse is to chocolate pudding. As a kid, I loved meatloaf; as an adult, I enjoy meatloaf, but adore pâté. You nibble a little slice slowly with smears of food that are likewise pungent, forceful mustards and tart, pickly things. Then maybe you read James Joyce or Virginia Wolf or Dante and put on Metal Machine Music. You speak with a dear old friend and let out peal of gustatory, obnoxious laughter. You drink red wine to the lees and it stains your lips, the same lips you kiss the top of your little girl’s head with when you tuck her into bed.

I made pâté for the first time in years last week, using pork liver I’d bought from my hog man at the farmer’s market. He sold me a pound for two bucks. “You’re doing me a favor,” he said. “No one wants this stuff.” I ground it up with other strong-arm ingredients like shallots and brandy and parsley, and then I cooked it slowly in the oven so that once it cooled, the gelatinous ooze left in the loaf pan was succulent and almost clear. I asked my daughter if she’d like a taste of the pâté, and she amazingly said yes, and then she amazingly ate two bites before she said she didn’t like it. This is a girl who has spat knobby half-orbs of grapes into my hand. She can go on spitting out grapes and shrugging off pâté as long as she likes. The years I spent loathing dinner parties and loving picture books and playgrounds were some of the happiest in my life. Then you grow up, and in exchange for your lost innocence, you can decide what you like and when you want to have it. Your daughter wants meatloaf, but because of that, you can have your pâté and eat it, too.

Look here to make your own pâté. It’s easy.

This post originally appeared on Food Riot, where I have been contributing from time to time.

[Comments]

Chemistry! Bacon! Mid-Career Epiphany!

November 07, 2013

Once again, I am so pleased to share a new essay from Full Grown People with you. This one is about a test, or rather multiple tests. One is the kind you can study for (I didn't). The other is the kind no one can study for. Home-cured bacon makes a few cameos.

Full Grown People is a fantastic site, offering meaningful essays by talented, knockout writers. I heavily encourage you to sign up for the FGP newsletter.

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Five Surprising Drugstore Kitchen Tools

November 01, 2013

Like most people, I oil my wooden cutting boards and kitchen utensils with a laxative. Don’t you? It’s called mineral oil. You can pay about six dollars for it at the fancy cooking store, or you can pick up some at Walgreen’s for less than two bucks. It’s the exact same thing (trust me, I’ve worked at fancy kitchen stores), but they keep them in different spots, since most fancy cooking stores don’t carry laxatives.

Drugstores aren’t just for photo prints, nail polish, and condoms. You can get useful kitchen tools there, but they are not shelved with the jenky drugstore kitchen tools like $5 nonstick skillets that that fall apart of you look at them the wrong way. These tools are incognito.

Floss: Our home economics teacher—because yes, I went to school back in the days when they still offered home ec—taught us to slice sheet cakes with dental floss. Since floss has minimal surface area, there’s no way sticky cake gunk can build up and clog the blade as it would on a knife (I happen to love slyly eating that cake gunk, by the way, but it is messy and inefficient). You can also slice through soft, crumbly cheeses like chèrve with dental floss. Just don’t be like Bridget Jones and use blue floss, or any flavored floss.

Drinking straws: I use drinking straws instead of wooden dowels to support stacked tiers on a wedding cake. In fact, they support the cake better than dowels; it has something to do with cake displacement and load-bearing, but mostly I know that plastic straws work, and I like how easy they are to cut.

Tweezers: Cheap tweezers never cost more than a dollar. I deliver them with wedding cakes so the people serving the cake can easily extract the drinking straws before they cut the cake. Yes, I know, hardly any of you make wedding cakes. However, tweezers are also useful for times when you want to futzily arrange flowers or micro-greens on top of fancy plate presentations. Or you might get a splinter from a skewer, or find a pin-bone in your salmon fillet that the fishmonger overlooked. You never know.

Knee-high nylons: In Nigella Bites, Nigella Lawson recommends using a “knee-high hosiery sock” in lieu of cheesecloth to make a sachet for soup and stocks. “I am just not one of those efficiently traditional domestic types that keep cheesecloths and muslins on hand,” she writes. Once again, avoid the Bridget Jones blue floss fiasco by skipping the tie altogether and folding the lip of the stocking over the opening to make a pouch. This substitution only works one way. Alas, I must be an efficiently traditional domestic type, for I keep no hosiery of any kind on hand, and cheesecloth is a terrible stand-in for a night on the town.

Mineral Oil: Yes, it is a laxative, and that’s why you find it at the drugstore. But I hope you only have need for it in the kitchen. Do your cutting boards have that whitish bloom on them? Do your wooden spoons feel fuzzy? Your utensils need a good moisturizing, and not with cooking oil, such as olive oil, because it can go rancid. Mineral oil doesn’t. Cut a piece of an old, clean t-shirt and pour a few good glugs of mineral oil on there. Then rub and rub and smooth. I start with my cutting boards and finish with spoons and spatulas. It’s a 5- minute investment of time that will prolong the life span of your tools, keeping them from smelling gross and splitting. I do it about once a season. Also, your own hands will be so soft afterwards.

I like a top-quality cooking vessels and tools as much as anyone. I’m just in favor of skimping when possible, hopefully so I can later invest in a foxy new piece of Le Creuset. What are your favorite incognito tools for cooking?

This originally appeared on Food Riot, where I contribute from time to time.

[Comments]

Meatloaf in Black Pumps

October 29, 2013

Everyone loves meatloaf, and some people like pâté. Then there are people who love pâté. The difference between pâté and meatloaf is probably liver, and maybe a glass and a half of Petite Syrah; meatloaf does not have liver, and pâté usually does. Meatloaf is also baked at a higher temperature, and its texture is coarser.

Making pâté is involved, but not difficult. It's the sort of thing that impresses people, including yourself, and if you are okay with having liver breath, you should make pâté at least once. My loaf was both delicious and very professional-looking, and for about a minute I dreamed of starting up a mail-order pâté business, because pork liver is really pretty cheap, and I could charge a ridiculous amount for 4 skimpy ounces. And then I realized making pâté was so very fun because I wanted to do it, not because I had to.

Pâté Grandmère
Serves 12-24
This began as the pâté grandmère recipe in Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. Life presented me with different quantities of pork butt and pork liver from their recipe, so I did the ultimate grandmère thing and improvised to use up what was on hand.

That is what you should likewise do, if you feel comfortable doing so. The pâté you get at a restaurant or in shrink-wrapping from the fancy food producer is all about sticking to the formula so the customer gets a consistent product. Pâté de maison is all about what’s happening in your maison at the moment. It’s about using sherry instead of brandy, if you don’t have brandy. It’s about using a hot dog bun for the breadcrumbs or an onion instead of shallot, or omitting the allspice because, hey, not everyone has allspice! (In which case I’d say add more black pepper to go in a different flavor direction).   

• 14 ounces pork or chicken liver
• 1 pound 6 ounces boneless pork shoulder butt, cut in 1-1/2 inch cubes (if you don’t have a meat grinder, you can use ground pork, but make sure it’s good and fatty)
• 25 grams kosher salt (about 1-1/2 tablespoons)
• 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 2 bay leaves, crumbled
• 2 sprigs thyme
• about 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• ¼ cup sliced shallots
• 3 tablespoons brandy (or red wine or white wine)
• 2 large eggs
• 2/3 cup fresh breadcrumbs, from about 2 slices of crustless white bread
• 3/4 cup heavy cream or half and half
• 1/3 cup minced fresh parsley leaves
• 1/4 teaspoon mace or freshly grated nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon allspice 

1. If using pork liver, either slice it or cut it into large chunks (chicken livers can stay as-is). Toss about half of the salt, black pepper, bay leaves, and thyme with the livers in a non-reactive bowl or zip-top plastic bag. Toss the pork butt with the remaining salt, pepper, bay leaves, and thyme and place in another bowl or zip-top plastic bag. Refrigerate for about 8 hours, or overnight. (You can even skip this step entirely, if you are pressed for time, but it’s not very fun to make pâté when you are pressed for time, so make sure not to rush through the other steps.)
2. Freeze the pieces of your grinder.
3. Discard the bay leaf and thyme sprigs from the cured meat. Heat a 12-inch skillet over high heat. Add the vegetable oil, then the liver, taking care not to crowd the pan. Cook on all sides until the liver is deeply browned. This part is kind of stinky, so make sure you have the vent on. Tansfer the seared liver to a pan a plate. Add the shallots to the hot pan, reduce the heat and cook until the shallots are translucent and limp, about a minute or less. Add the brandy and cook, scraping the bottom of the skillet with a wooden spoon to loosen all of the tasty, flavorful bits. When most of the brandy has evaporated but the shallots have a glossy, jammy look, scrape the shallots to the plate with the liver. Stick the plate in the freezer.
4. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F.  Beat the eggs in a large bowl, then add the breadcrumbs and cream or half and half. Stir until the crumbs are moistened, then set aside.
5. Line a pan with a 1-1/2 quart capacity (I used a standard-size loaf pan) with plastic wrap, leaving an overhang on all sides.
6. Grind the cured pork butt (you removed the thyme and bay leaf, right?) though the fine or medium die of the grinder. Then grind the cooled, cooked liver and shallots. (If you don’t have a grinder and are using pre-ground pork, puree the liver in a food processor fitted with a steel blade.) Combine the ground meats with the breadcrumb mixture, parsley, nutmeg, and allspice. Mix on low speed in an electric stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment for about a minute, until the whole works begins to get sticky. (You may also do this by hand with a strong wooden spoon).
7. Pack the lined loaf pan with the ground mixture, taking care to get the sticky mixture into the nooks and crannies of the pan. You want to avoid air pockets in your finished pâté. I like to wet my hand with cold water and press down on the top so I can smoosh it down and smooth the surface. Fold the excess plastic wrap over the pâté so it’s completely covered. Cover the filled loaf with aluminum foil and set it in a roasting pan. Add enough hot tap water to come halfway up the sides of the loaf pan. Set the pan in the center of the oven.
8. Cook until an instant-read thermometer inserted in the center of the pâté reads 150 degrees F if using pork liver, 160 degrees F if using chicken liver. Carefully life the pâté out of the water and set on a wire rack to cool completely. The pâté will have shrunk a bit and pulled away from the sides of the pan. It’s okay; don’t freak out. For the optimum pâté-eating experience, refrigerate overnight to let the flavors mingle and mellow. Slice the pâté and let the slices come to room temperature before serving. I like to eat my pâté on toasted coarse German-style rye bread that’s smeared with whole-grain mustard and a little something sweet, like cranberry ketchup. I know, I know, who has cranberry ketchup sitting around? The pâté will keep for about a week in the refrigerator. You know what’s really fun? Having a slice or two for breakfast.

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Wonderful Foods I Can Never Make Again

October 21, 2013

Here’s how to make Pawpaw Ha-ha Habanero Sauce. First, gather your ingredients.

• A plastic bag brimming with neon orange habanero peppers, a gift from friends who grew them but ultimately could not fathom what to do with that many of the hottest peppers on the planet.
• A quart of mystery peppers purchased at farmer’s market, under the assumption they were mild frying peppers, but actually they rivaled the habaneros for Scoville sear.
• A tub of sweet and tangy pawpaw puree, made from pawpaws gathered in the woods behind that one building no one pays attention to.
• Overcooked spaghetti squash no one wants to eat because it’s bland and mushy.
• A generous pour of syrupy watermelon molasses, because type-A cooks have that sort of thing around.
• Lime juice, cider vinegar, an onion, garlic. Carrots. Sugar.
• Latex gloves pilfered from the supply closet at work. Do not overlook this item.

Potent, sinus-clearing vapors overran our house for hours after I bottled the sauce. I sampled a drop and scrambled for a soothing spoonful of yogurt. Then, after a week of aging, Pawpaw Ha-ha Habanero Sauce mellowed into a masterpiece. I’ve shared the ingredients with you, but sorry: you can’t make it. I can’t again, either, even if I wanted to. It cannot be duplicated without a time machine. That’s how serendipitously inspired cooking works.

There are more things I can’t make again.

Pear butter from the undersized, misshapen bruised pears that fell from the tree in our dilapidated old rental house’s backyard. The tree was ridiculously tall for a pear tree, some 40 feet, but still it bore fruit. Fruit that was impossible to pick without a ladder and misguided bravery. I collected fallen, beat-up pears that scattered on the ground and spent hours trimming out the buggy and bruised spots. They were ugly pairs, far from ideal for eating out of hand, but their flesh yielded the silkiest, most complex pear butter ever, with a flavor so vivid I hardly needed to add any spices.

Coq au vin simmered in a gallon of uber-chickeny sauce from a previous batch of coq au vin. The sauce, which was a horrid brownish-purple hue, was left over from a cooking class I’d taught. The recipe packets the corporate offices provided for “French Bistro Night” were always of dubious trustworthiness, but I was not allowed to alter them. Thus, we had about 12 pieces of braised chicken swimming in a vat of red wine sauce, where it collided with a forest of sliced mushrooms. After the class, I nabbed the sauce, froze it, and then one evening braised a new chicken in it. I also added a drop of red food coloring, which perked the color up quite a bit. Hey, if it’s good enough for tandoori chicken and red velvet cake, why not coq au vin?

Glace de canard, or roasted duck glace. I worked in the kitchen of a Dean & Deluca store in St. Helena, CA, where the zoning regulations were more restrictive than Edith Wharton’s corset. Our kitchen was not permitted to have a range--no stove, no oven. We did have a rotisserie, and the crispy carcasses of the twelve ducks that had revolved inside it one day could not go into the trash. I rescued them, the oddest-looking cargo to ever grace the inside of a Dean & Deluca extra-large shopping bag. I cooked them into a stock that bubbled sleepily  overnight, and awoke to an invisible cloud of vaporized roasted duck. I reduced the stock, and then reduced it some more. The resulting pint of stuff was so mind-blowingly ducky I had no idea what to do with it--duck is far too distinctive a flavor to toss about casually--so I froze the glace in an ice cube tray and finished stir-fries with cubes of duck glace for months.

Ramps grilled over an open fire in the backcountry of the Catskill Mountains. My boyfriend at the time and I went into the backcountry with a marinating flank steak and a bottle of Petite Sirah. That we set up camp next to a ramp patch was purely coincidental. Of all the ramps I hope to eat in my life to come, none will ever be as satisfying as those, which we washed down with wine and steak juices and starry skies unencumbered with the burden of light pollution. Sometimes location is an ingredient.

What dishes have you made that you can never make again?

This piece originally appeared on Food Riot, where I contribute from time to time.

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Charcuterie at Home (in Thomas, WV)

October 14, 2013

Home-preserved meats ahoy! Thanks to the Potomac Highlands Food and Farm Initiative, I'll be teaching a class on charcuterie at home in Thomas, West Virginia on Saturday, October 26.

1. Charcuterie is a fancy word for the art of preserving meat.

2. We'll explore curing, brining, sausage-making, pate-making, and smoking. (Listing brining and curing is redundant, since brining is a style of curing, but there you go. Also, we won't smoke meats in the class, but we will discuss it.) We will grind sausage, taste home-cured bacon straight from the oven, and delight in the crispy-meaty pleasures of duck confit.

3. Evidence mounts that store-bought preserved meats are one of the worst things you can put in your body. However, I doubt many of us are ready to give them up. So why not preserve meat at home and enjoy responsible portions of the best-quality product possible?

For more information or to register, contact Kimmy Clements of the Potomac Highlands Food and Farm Initiative at 304.259.5388 or phffi@frontier.com. Remember: It’s about good food!

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Pawpaw Fever

October 04, 2013

Of course I went back to my trail in the woods today, because there are pawpaw trees there. Do you know what pawpaws are? I didn’t, either, but now that I do, I want everyone else to know about them, too. The fruit of the pawpaw tree is beyond delicious, too wonderful to keep a secret.  It is intoxicating, elusive, and truly exotic. My woods, I should note, are in Ohio, a state generally lacking in exoticism. To know these things rise from our soil is baffling and miraculous.

Pawpaws grow outside of Ohio, too, in a swath down the eastern Canada and the United States that spills into the Midwest. A pawpaw on the tree is blah green with black freckles of ripeness, nothing special at all.  The party is on the inside; strip away the skin and the flesh you discover is the saturated color of the yolk of a duck egg, with a mango-banana flavor that can knock flat any tropical occupant of Carmen Miranda’s hat. You can’t dice or cube a pawpaw, because the pulp of the best ones relaxes into a chunky puree the moment you dig into the thing with your fingers (pawpaws evolved to be mangled by rapt human hands, don’t you know).

Maybe you’d like to try one, but probably you won’t be able to. You must come to the pawpaw, as they do not travel well. The trip will be worth it, though, as the pawpaw will bewitch you, and then we will be friends. Liking pawpaws means you are an okay person, because assholes are incapable of caring about pawpaws.

But my pawpaws, the ones growing on my trees in my woods, are all for me. The trail is just several miles long, and I sneak off there to walk my dog before heading to work and the woes of civilization. The trail is civilized, too, with litter here and there and a cell phone tower and a glorious view of the Interstate, but even in those few miles of quasi-civilization, there’s a sense of plunging deep into a primeval zone. A massive chorus of insects clicks out a drone of white noise, mushrooms sprout from decaying logs, and hundreds of pawpaw trees flank the path.

I can’t leave the trail until I have at least four pawpaws. I’m not sure how this became the magic number, but I like the symbolism: four seasons in a year, four directions on a compass. Four chambers in a heart. Finding four ripe pawpaws has been challenging. The most wonderfully ripe pawpaws fall from the trees and instantly camouflage themselves on the forest floor among browning leaves and creeping fronds of poison ivy, where savvy possums and squirrels then pounce upon them, leaving behind a smashed-looking specimen with its wonderfully vivid yellow guts and glossy black seeds all splayed out.

That pawpaws are fruit is significant. I think of Eve reaching for that damned apple, and as much of a pain in the ass as knowledge can be, I want to egg her on. “Take it, take it! Eat it.” Out in the woods, I am Eve, plucking the fruit and gleefully wrecking everything.

As my dog and I seek pawpaws, I let him off the leash, lest we become entangled in branches and brambles. He is a restless little thing at home, always over-grooming and nibbling at himself, but out in the woods he transforms into the task-oriented created he was bred to be, and he purposefully sniffs at the ground and moves ahead, thinking about things he’s smelling that he could kill and/or eat. It seems cruel to deny Scooter this part of himself, to dole it out in our family strolls on neighborhood sidewalks, but who else are we denying? There were times in my life I spent hours and hours in the wilderness, alone, hiking and exploring, and then I had a job and a husband and a kid, and once you’ve clocked in your hours and read your bedtime stories and bought your groceries and paid the bills and folded the clean laundry that’s been sitting in the basket for three days, you’re already over-budgeted for time.

So maybe it’s Scooter who’s taking me out to connect with my nomadic self, the self that equates moving forward out of doors with obtaining food to stay alive. I have four grocery stores nearby hawking hundreds of produce SKUs from sunny climes in Mexico and Chile, and I thrill at the sight of the pawpaws. Not just because of pawpaws themselves, but the marvel of finding them, of capturing food from a wild tree growing unassumingly on land that no one person owns. My insatiable credit card balance, the obscene number of resumes I’ve emailed out into the ether, the engine light glowing menacingly on the console of our rusty car: pawpaws do not care. They are these for anyone who bothers to nab them. Nature is the great equalizer.  

I’m afraid the pawpaws will disappear if I don’t check in on them daily. Once I bake pawpaw pudding and fold together a pawpaw fool and churn a quart of pawpaw gelato and can a batch of pawpaw preserves, then I will share. Until then, it’s just me and Scooter and the woods, clandestine.

This piece originally appeared on Food Riot, where I contribute articles from time to time.

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Watermelon Alchemy

September 30, 2013

Every year I ritualistically hack apart and boil down watermelons, all because of a book I bought at the Goodwill years ago. It was an unassuming 1979 spiral-bound cookbook from Fresno, full of casserole and Jell-O salad recipes. But once I browed deeper through its yellowed, typewritten pages, I noticed something puzzling about Our Favorite Recipes. Besides otherwise standard 1970s fare, the book had recipes with East European-sounding names like vareniks, glase, and berrocks. Most intriguing of all, a number of recipes called for something called watermelon molasses.

It’s an unlikely ingredient with an unlikely background. When the Internet and all of the Russian and German cookbooks as I could get my hands on failed me, I decided the best way to learn why a bunch of ladies in California’s Central Valley once reduced vats of watermelon juice was to do the same thing myself.

Thus, one hot summer day, my clothes spattered with rosy blotches and my sink full of sticky strainers and stockpots, I followed the cryptic procedure outlined in Our Favorite Recipes and haplessly transformed four watermelons into a quart of grainy, garnet-red syrup with a musky aroma reminiscent of freshly picked summer squash. While sweet, it wasn’t very fruity—hardly the rediscovered delight I’d imagined pouring over pancakes or mixing into cocktails. I was flummoxed over what do to with the stuff. Who would go through so much work to make something so esoteric?

Resourceful, frugal people, that’s who. As it turns out, the Volga Germans who came to Fresno in the late 1800s were ancestors of some of Our Favorite Recipes’ contributors. And Volga Germans had an unrivaled fondness for watermelon.

Between 1763 and 1767, Germans of a number of faiths, including Lutherans and Mennonites, took up Catherine the Great’s invitation to Europeans to immigrate to Russia. They farmed along the Volga River and collectively came to be called Volga Germans. During their years in South Russia, they maintained their language and culture and didn’t pick up many of the local ways, but they did acquire the region’s mighty affection for growing watermelon and enjoying big slabs of the fruit at social gatherings.  Watermelon molasses—nardek in Russian—allowed them to preserve any melons they couldn’t enjoy fresh or pickle.

About a century later, many Volga Germans emigrated from Russia to America and parts of Canada.  California’s Central Valley lured some of these experienced dry land farmers, and that’s how Russian-flavored German food heritage arrived in Fresno.

I used my watermelon molasses in a few of Our Favorite Recipes’ coffee cakes, but discovered that I liked its subtle vegetal character best in savory dishes: drizzled into braised greens like kale or collards, whisked into dressing that can use a touch of complex sweetness, and even added to pan sauces for meats like duck or pork—a rustic gastrique. Every summer I reconsider the wisdom of devoting hours to the messy project of making watermelon molasses, but then I remember how disgruntled I get come winter, when I reach for my almost-empty jar and know it will be months before I get the chance to replenish my bizarre larder. I might not adore nardek by itself, but I value the time-travel experience of making it in my own kitchen, which introduced me to Volga Germans and reminded me how precious sweetness is, wherever it comes from.

This piece, one of several I've written on the topic, originally ran on Food Riot, where I contribute from time to time.

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New Essay on Full Grown People!

September 13, 2013

Yay! I have an essay up on Full Grown People, the fabulous new site put together by Jennifer Niesslein, a co-founder of Brain, Child magazine. How much do I love Brain, Child? It's the only magazine I subscribe to.

Read the essay, "Smelted". It's about food and relationships, or, as it's tagged on the site, "love & sex". I promise the ending is not sad.

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Fruit of the Appalachian Tropics

September 03, 2013

Perhaps you have a sliver of wild space you flee to when the overdeveloped and exploited world we usually inhabit becomes too much to handle. I fled to my secret wild sliver today in an especially nasty cloud of dread and sorrow, and the wilds placed miraculous fruit at my feet.

It's either a paw paw or a pawpaw or a paw-paw, and how did I manage to grow up in this backassward magical place an not know about them? Why doesn't everyone know about pawpaws? It's like not knowing about umami, or Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, or the clitoris. Pawpaws were growing here all along, and when I lived in Southeast Ohio as a young person I was too busy thinking about dubbing cassette tapes and breaking into dangerous abandoned buildings to care about things like obscure forest fruit.

Pawpaws are about the size of an adults fist. When ripe, their greenish skin may become black in spots; under that skin is a riot of bright custardy flesh redolent of tropical island sunsets and rainforests. Papaya, mango, and banana come to mind, floral and tangy. A ripe pawpaw will keep for only a few days, and the fruits of a pawpaw tree ripen maddeningly far apart. The pawpaw was not destined for industrial agriculture, and thus enjoys a tiny reputation as a folkloric food item. Not even Berkeley Bowl is likely to offer pawpaws.

And so, having only recently returned to this Appalachian Interzone, I've been on the lookout for the elusive, storied pawpaw; to find multiple fruiting trees on the winding 1-mile trail I frequently hit up for quick nature fixes both soothed and delighted me. From the highest point of the trail, I can see both I-77 South and the parking lot of my daughter's daycare center. And, now, I can see pawpaw trees, too.

I was able to gather four good pawpaws from the ground and take them home. My paring knife glided easily between their skins and their soft, starchy flesh; after skinning, you must use your hands to extract their plump, glossy black seeds. Their perfume clung to my hands for hours afterward.

We shared the unadorned pawpaw pulp for dessert. Frances, a finicky fan of mangoes but not of peaches or apples, approved and asked for seconds. I want seconds, too, but mostly I want to find more pawpaws. I want to make pawpaw cream pie, and pawpaw gelato, and dense pawpaw cakes. As a person with a deep affinity for produce underdogs--rhubarb, quince, persimmons--loving pawpaws was inevitable. 

Squirrels and raccoons nibble on pawpaws in the woods, but on my trail I half expected to look up and see monkeys swooping down upon these unlikely things growing in the same deciduous forests that host teenage litterbugs and Skoal-spitting ATV riders. Somewhere behind the community college, between the cell phone tower and the picnic shelter, there are exotic pawpaw trees, and those trees don't care where you grew up or how difficult it is to get belong anywhere, even the places it's obvious you should belong. The trees give you the fruit, and you can take it if you like, and then it's yours.   

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The deliberate precedes the impulsive: Summer Squash Chutney

August 16, 2013

There are plenty of glorious summer tomato days left, but I am anxious. I want to eat as many tomato-centric sandwiches as possible, and I feel those opportunities slipping away as the calendar marches on. We seem to get homegrown tomatoes in giant infusions; I ate the last tomato remaining in the house yesterday, on a sandwich smeared with squash-tomato chutney made a few days ago from many of its tomato siblings. How delightfully perverse to ingest multiple forms of tomato carnage in one petite sandwich.

This year’s summer sandwich absolutely requires the squash-tomato chutney to be fully successful. You could buy something approximate at the store, but the homemade stuff is the best. The tomatoes melt into a gel, suspending cubes of squash that are nearly candied, betraying not a hint of squashy flavor. Not challenging to make, squash-tomato chutney is a fine entry-level preserving recipe, and creates a significant dent in the bulbous summer squash that seemingly spontaneously generate on kitchen counters and in produce drawers of all citizens during hot months. Even if you don’t have garden, or especially if you don’t have a garden! In any case, I will never turn down a gift of homegrown produce, especially when it leads to such a sticky, sweet-tart sandwich spread. I use it all year long. It’s the best thing to put on a grilled cheese sandwich, and it has also eclipsed ketchup here as a topping for hamburgers. So now you can invest an afternoon in making this chutney so you may later make the ideal, ephemeral summer sandwich. The deliberate precedes the impulsive. Balance.

The key to chutney working as a sandwich spread is the dice of the squash and peppers; if too large, they sit clumsily and chunkily on the bread. I’ve never diced them too small, because that would take hours and hours. If your knife skills are somewhat wobbly, it might take you an hour to perform the correct dice, which is ½ to ¼ inch. Look at is as therapeutic. 

Yellow Summer Squash and Tomato Chutney

Makes about 7 to 8 half-pint jars

This is a great way to use up homegrown summer squash that’s prohibitably large, like a human’s femur bone. Yellow squash makes the prettiest chutney, but you can add green zucchini, too. I also like to use patty pan squash. The important thing is to use mostly the outside part of the squash, with its smooth, firm, colorful skin. The bulk of the spongy/seedy inner section of the squash should go into the compost. If I have a particularly femur-esque specimen, I cut off about ¾ from four sides and pitch the elongated cube of mealy interior. This might mess with your yield, so if you are using older or bigger squash, make sure to weight it post-cutting.

This came from a British cookbook, recent in the past five years or so. I photocopied the recipe from a library book, and the title is now long lost to me. I’ve made a few tweaks to the original. 

• 2 pounds summer squash, preferably yellow, diced between ½ and ¼ inch
• 1 pound onions, finely diced
• 1-1/2 pounds ripe tomatoes, cored and chopped
• Up to ½ pound not-too-spicy gypsy or wax peppers, seeded and diced ½ inch, optional
• 3-1/2 cups granulated sugar
• 2-1/2 cups apple cider vinegar
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 teaspoons minced fresh ginger
• ½ teaspoon dried red pepper flakes
• 1/8 teaspoon sweet paprika
• 1/8 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
• 1 teaspoon salt

Combine all of the ingredients in a large (about 5 quart) non-reactive pot, such as stainless steel or enameled cast iron. Stir to combine, cover, and bring to a boil over high heat.

Once at a boil, uncover and continue to cook (in a well-vented room if you don’t want to wipe everyone out with vinegar fumes) over high heat. For the first 20 minutes or so, you probably won’t need to stir very often; there will be plenty of liquid. If you see any scum ride to the surface, skim it off, but there won’t be anywhere near as much as, say, a batch of strawberry jam might produce.

Once the chutney starts to thicken, stir it with a wooden spoon every now and then. Adjust the heat of you feel like it’s too high. When the chutney starts getting glossy and the bubbles get smaller and make little snapping noises when they pop, it’s very close to being ready. You should feel a decent amount of resistance when you stir. It will take between 45 minutes to over an hour for the chutney to be ready, depending on many factors: how high of a heat you are cooking it over, the liquid content of the veggies you’ve used, and particular character of the day.

Pack the chutney in warm sterilized mason jars, leaving ¼ inch headspace. Process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. The chutney isn’t too bad at all right after you make it, but it gets better if you allow the jars to age a month or so before opening. Store any jars that didn’t seal properly in the refrigerator for up to one month.

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Sandwiches of Summer

August 05, 2013

A summer sandwich is all about the moment. The whims of the person building it and the stuff that happens to sit on the counter or grow in the garden at that exact time result in that most personal of constructions, the produce-heavy Dagwoodian mess bookended by bread. It's about the watery tomato liquid mingling with mustard that drips down your arm and all over your magazine or paperback book as you sit outdoors wherever your happy place is. It's about the satisfaction of putting together a bunch of ingredients that make sense to no one’s palate but your own. Its about the ephemeral pleasure of wolfing the thing down before it collapses all over your lap, a slithering mess of cucumber slices and lettuce and relish and god knows what else.

My latest lovely wreck of a summer sandwich came about because of a story I heard on NPR. They broadcast a contest for the ne plus ultra summer recipe, and finalist Marti Olesen’s entry was for a crazy assemblage of tomatoes, sweet onion, cucumbers, and white cheddar cheese between whole grain bread that’s been smeared with peanut butter. As with any great sandwich, the order of the ingredients is as important as the ingredients themselves; it’s got to do with the messy mechanics of what hits your tongue first when you sink your teeth into the thing. Olesen assures listeners that the sandwich functions best when built thus, from top to bottom: cheese, tomato, cucumber, onion, peanut butter.

The other two finalists in the NPR contest offered recipes for strawberry trifle and Baja slaw. Trifle is trifling; slaw is slaw. A sandwich is a meal. I rooted for Olesen, and she won, to the great satisfaction of sandwich aficionados across the nation.

But I haven’t made her sandwich; she inspired me to create my own (I don’t keep sweet onions around the house). It was the cheese and peanut butter aspect that hooked me. As an alternative to jammy-sticky-sugary PB&J, my mom started making peanut butter and cheese sandwiches for my daughter when she watched her over lunchtimes. They’re not bad if you’re three years old, but an adult needs something more. Likewise, a sandwich of homegrown tomatoes and cucumbers sounds magnificent on paper, but in practice it’s wan and bland. But to combine the two…

So here’s my sandwich. Lightly toast two slices of whole-grain bread, though you may use a hamburger bun if you must (the lightness of the bread makes the filling the star player). Generously spread crunchy natural peanut butter (it has to be salted) on one slice, and tomato-squash chutney on the other slice. (You probably don't have tomato-squash chutney; pickle relish may work in a pinch). Then put thinly sliced cucumber on the chutney-smeared bread. This is your base. Top the cucumber with thickly sliced ripe red tomato (beefsteak, please), then with one slice of Swiss or pepperjack cheese. Place the peanut butter-smeared bread over it all, then grab a lot of napkins. You will need them. Note: this sandwich does not travel well. At all. That’s what makes it even more special. You need to be at home to enjoy it.

My own all-time favorite sandwich involves peanut butter, carrots, and Thai sweet chili sauce. It’s appropriate year-round, while any number of spins on Marti Olesen’s sandwich are not. And so, in this unusually tomato-scare year here in the Mid-Ohio Valley, I am scrambling to pack as many tomato-cheese-cucumber-peanut butter-whatever sandwiches as possible into the season. I really love the double tomato action of fresh tomato slices with sweet-tart tomato-squash chutney, and I love the protein wallop of the peanut butter and cheese. You get creamy, nutty-crunchy, crisp-crunchy, slippery, greasy, fresh, and cooked flavor and texture sensations all in one package. Now, go make your own summer sandwich, with your own favorite ingredients, in your own order. I promise it will be perfect for you.

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Ramps: Forever Sexy!

April 30, 2013

Ramps—wild, unspoiled, robust ramps—have become fashionable in certain circles. This isn’t objectionable or perplexing, as ramps are totally awesome. It is, however, worrisome. I fret that my own deep affection for ramps is cheapened by association. The New York Times Magazine included ramps on last week’s Meh List, a compilation of frivolous trends that are not bad, not good, but…just okay.

Ramps are not just okay. They are just the most stupendous allium to be found growing anywhere on this continent. Urbanites are at a marked ramp disadvantage, as these feral mountain leeks proliferate deep in primeval Appalachian woodlands, and to sell them in expensive little bundles at farmer’s markets set up on concrete in the shadows of skyscrapers is to neuter them somewhat. Few Americans have the luxury of foraging in hollers, of course, and I’d snatch up that displaced bundle of big-city ramps in a second.

Ramps are a litmus test: anyone with general ramp awareness is probably someone worth knowing. Anyone who knows a lot about ramps should be your future boyfriend or girlfriend (or, more likely, future honorary grandparent).

I had a boyfriend once who knew a lot about ramps. He was from West Virginia, the epicenter of ramp lore. I grew up right across the river from West Virginia, and I never heard of ramps until we met. Not even all West Virginians are familiar with ramps. West Virginian palates can be a bit timid, and the garlicky pungency of these little buggers can be divisive. There are concerns about bad breath, about post-ramp B.O. (an odiferous badge to flaunt with pride, I say!)

Daniel embraced ramps. He told me of ramp dinners, big fundraisers held in churches and community centers, where volunteers cooked up vast quantities of ramps to serve with potatoes, beans, ham, and cornbread. I had a hard time picturing it, these oddly-named vegetables being the focus of an entire springtime subculture. “How are they cooked?” I asked. “You just cook up a big mess of ramps and eat them with all of the other food,” he replied matter-of-factly.

He even cooked ramps for me in his preferred fashion, frying up potatoes in a skillet and adding blanched, chopped ramps at the end. Cooked down, they look a bit like wilted spinach. I liked them.

We later went on an overnight backpacking trip in the Catskills. I packed a flank steak marinated in chimichurri and a bottle of syrah, and not far from our campsite we happened upon a little patch of ramps. They looked so unassuming, nothing my untrained eye would ever consider eating. Daniel dug about a dozen of them up and we grilled them alongside the flank steak. And so, yes, when your native West Virginian boyfriend cooks freshly dug ramps for you over an open fire, ramps are a million miles away from inclusion on the Meh List.

Quantity also comes into play. Ramps are best deployed in dishes that have no subtlety whatsoever, as I found out recently when I made a ramp risotto using five of the pencil-diameter ramps I dug up in the woods behind my parents' house. Dad, fancying himself a mountaineer, planted some ramps down there about three years ago (I have no idea where he obtained the contraband infant ramps), and he has since refrained from picking any because he wants the patch to mature undisturbed and then hopefully grow exponentially, taking over the hillside. There’s a tinge of something covert in the whole operation, as if he were growing marijuana instead of a redneck delicacy. I talked him into sampling just a few from his rampy little brood, and risotto seemed like a decent way to showcase a small amount. 

It wasn’t. The risotto was fine, but I wanted to be bowled over with bombastic ramp action, and we could barely taste the ramps. I had minced the slender little bulb ends and sautéed them at the beginning of the dish, later adding a chiffonade of ramp fronds once the rice was halfway done. As you can see in the photo, I had to splash the whole works up with some extras, like a half-nibbled sausage and some beet salad. A better approach would have been to prepare a standard risotto and garnish it with a big mess of ramps flash-cooked in hot oil. We’re talking, like, 10 to 15 ramps per serving, minimum. That’s how to make ramp risotto. My maximum willpower is employed in not pillaging the remainder of Dad’s fledgling ramp patch.

I think these jaded city slickers are unimpressed with ramps because they are not getting enough of them. Begin stingy with ramps brings them down to a cameo role when they need to be the star. It’s not practical to feature a big mess of ramps on a fine-dining menu; since an armload cooks down to maybe a pint on a good day, those tiny New York City upscale restaurant kitchens would have to be overrunning with ramps. Look at the heaps and heaps of ramps piled on tables in this sweet little ramp documentary to get an idea of it.

To fully understand the allure of ramps, you can’t wait for ramps to come to you. You have to go to the ramps. Even so, a little taste of ramp heaven is nothing to sneer at. Give those ramps at the farmer’s market a good home in your tummy. I recommend chopping them up, stems and leaves and all, and swishing them around a bit in hot olive oil before scrambling them with eggs. Breakfast of champions. Then, instead of plotting your cruise to Croatia or middle-aged-crisis pilgrimage to Burning Man, dream of next spring’s ramp festivals to come.  

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Stalking Green

April 14, 2013

Note: I found this in an old file on my computer. It's not dusty like a real folder would be, but it has gathered a patina of age in my mind; I wrote this in 2004 or thereabouts. That's about how long it's been since I've made Asparagus Mousseline. We may have to change that. 

We always have a bundle of asparagus in our refrigerator. It’s fake. A friend gave us a bunch of plastic asparagus spears a few years ago as a joke, which—mostly because we didn’t know what else to do with them—we bound together using two wide purple rubber bands. Now our crisper drawer, even in the dankest days of winter, perpetually teases us with an empty promise of spring; more than once have I glanced into the drawer and thought, for a split second, that we really did have asparagus—live asparagus, the kind you can cook about a million ways. The kind that’s meaty and grassy all at once. The kind that sidles up to goat cheese, olives, sesame seeds, or prosciutto with equal dexterity. The kind that makes your pee smell funny. The kind that we love.

Asparagus is one of the first harbingers of spring. During its season, which stretches from March to early June, asparagus becomes one of life’s few affordable luxuries; that’s when it tastes best, and that’s when it’s cheapest. Buy pounds and eat tons.

 Just as an ear of corn still encased in its silken threads will being to lose flavor the second it is severed from its stalk, asparagus benefits from consumption as soon after harvesting as possible. Most of Sonoma County’s loamy soil (the kind growing asparagus prefer) is understandably given over to the cultivation of grapes, but definitely don’t pass up locally grown asparagus if you have the luck of stumbling across any. If not, buy the stuff grown in our state’s Central Valley, which today leads the nation in production. When buying asparagus, look for closed tips and smooth stalks. The cut ends should not be dried out (ideally the market will display the asparagus bundles with their cut ends in a shallow pool of water, which is exactly how you can keep them fresher at home on your refrigerator.)

 Let asparagus inspire you: pair it with other locally-grown seasonal delights, especially if you have a CSA box brimming with goodness that’s short on variety. One of my favorite spring soups is comprised of several bunches of asparagus and nearly every other tender green vegetable I get my hands on. I chop the vegetables, sweat them in butter, simmer them with chicken stock until tender, puree and strain the mixture, then fortify it with cream. This soup can be served warm or cold, and it makes a wonderful supplement to a grilled cheese sandwich.

Asparagus dazzles us with its versatility. Boil it, steam it, grill it, roast it, fry it—virtually no cooking method will do asparagus a disservice. Decades ago, tall and slender cylindrical asparagus pots were the preferred cooking vessel, as they boiled the thicker, tougher ends and steamed the more delicate tips. However, today’s cook need not worry about splurging on specialized cooking equipment to properly cook asparagus. If you have a skillet, a stockpot, a steamer basket, or even a wok, you can cook lovely asparagus.

Some cooks prefer slender stalks that equal a child’s pinkie in diameter, but real asparagus aficionados know that burly spears the size of a farmer’s thumb deliver the best flavor and meatiest texture. These thick spears are the best type to roast; medium-sized spears, meanwhile, are the best option for chopping and tossing into a savory bread pudding or casserole, because when cut into 1 to 2-inch lengths they still appear in proportion with the other ingredients (fat spears look clumsy when cut into sections).

The fibrous lower third or so of an asparagus stock needs to be removed before cooking. To do this, bend the bottom half of the stalk, which will naturally break off right at the woody part. Hang on to those bottoms and use them to buff up the flavor of homemade vegetable stock.

Thicker spears sometimes benefit from paring the tougher skin near the base; this is not a necessity, but it does make the presentation nicer, especially if you are serving whole steamed spears. Peel the spears with a heavy-duty vegetable peeler prior to trimming. There’s no need to peel those pencil-thin asparagus, whose dainty size makes ideal for salads, slaws, and the clichéd but always welcome party crudité platter. Especially fresh and tender specimens can be eaten raw and savored for their sweetness, but in most instances, when serving asparagus cold, you should blanch it first.

Asparagus tastes a lot better cooked to a limp, army-green mess than you’d think (see long-cooked asparagus recipe below). Prepared this way, it becomes rich and meaty, almost stew-like. When cooked briefly to a bright, vibrant green, asparagus’ other attributes—its pleasantly assertive, toothsome grassiness—rise to the forefront. What you don’t want to do is cook it al dente; the stalks’ flavor is fuller when fully cooked. When you can easily insert a knife into the thickest part of the stalk, it's done. My favorite method is pan-steaming, which is somewhat of a lazy shortcut but effective nonetheless: set trimmed asparagus in a skillet and add about a quarter inch of water. Cook over high heat; if most of the water has evaporated, add more as needed. The asparagus should be ready in five to seven minutes.

Don’t forsake asparagus at the breakfast table. Eggs love asparagus: fold a fluffy omelet around three or four cooked spears and a shredding of gruyere; glorify eggs benedict with a few tips nestled in between poached egg and Canadian bacon; liven up a fried egg sandwich with asparagus and crisp bacon. 

Ultimately is appropriate to eat asparagus any time of day; perhaps my favorite way is to pluck leftovers straight from the refrigerator, holding a fat spear between my fingers like Groucho Marx wielded his cigar. It is our duty to pack our days with asparagus when we can, for during the rest of the year there’s nothing but the cruel tease of the fake plastic bundle in our crisper.

Asparagus Mousseline

This charming recipe, which comes from the Junior League of Charleston’s 1950 spiral-bound cookbook Charleston’s Receipts, is very ladylike and delicate. Served with melba toast and baby greens tossed with vinaigrette, it make a wonderful light lunch. For mousseline with a bolder flavor, reduce the cream to ½ cup and whip with 8 ounces chevre.

Serves 8

1 pound asparagus, trimmed with tough ends reserved

1/2 rib celery, roughly chopped

3 scallions, roughly chopped

2 sprigs parsley

2 cups chicken stock

½ cup frozen peas

1 tablespoon unflavored gelatine

¼ cup cold water

1 cup cream

salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1. Break off about half the asparagus tips. Set in a small skillet and fill with about 1 inch of water. Bring to a boil over high heat and cook until asparagus is tender, about 5 minutes. Drain, then plunge asparagus tips into an ice bath to cool. Drain, pat dry with a paper towel. Arrange asparagus tips in the bottoms of up to eight 6- to 8-ounce molds or ramekins; set aside.
2. Gather the tough ends of the asparagus tips into cheesecloth and tie with kitchen string. Place in a medium saucepan with celery, scallions, parsley, chicken stock, and remaining trimmed asparagus. Bring to a boil over high heat; reduce to a simmer and cook until asparagus is very tender, 15 minutes.
3. Remove and discard the cheesecloth bundle. Add frozen peas to saucepan, stir, and let sit 5 minutes. Transfer the cooked asparagus mixture to a blender and puree very well. Pass through a fine wire-mesh strainer, discarding solids (you should have 1-1/2 cups puree). Season with salt and a few grinds of pepper (the mixture should be a little salty). Set puree over an ice bath, stirring frequently.
4. Meanwhile, sprinkle the gelatine over cold water in a small microwaveable bowl. Let sit 5 minutes, then microwave in 15-second bursts on high powder, stirring at each interval, until gelatine is dissolved. Stir into puree.
5. When puree begins to set, whip the cream to soft peaks. Fold 1/4 whipped cream into puree, then fold in remaining puree. Pour mixture into molds; place in refrigerator until set. To unmold, dip molds into hot water for 10 seconds and invert onto serving plate. 

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The Goldberg Variations of Bean Soup

March 20, 2013

Recipes travel around like a culinary game of telephone. We’re not even talking about the internet here. Between recipe cards, photocopied cookbook pages, and word-of-mouth, a dish can wind up having a hundred variations, these little adjustments that individual cooks make in a knee-jerk sort of way without even noticing it. It’s one of my favorite things about cooking, and it’s why there’s no definitive chocolate chip cookie recipe or chicken adobo recipe or matzo ball recipe.

Spanish Bean Soup is a great case study. A little background:

1. My parents visit Tampa, Florida sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s and become fans of a hearty potato and chickpea soup at Ybor City’s Columbia Restaurant. 
2. On a subsequent trip to Florida, Mom and Dad purchase a copy of The Columbia Restaurant Cookbook and bring it home to Ohio. Mom asks me to follow the book's Spanish Bean Soup recipe to make for dinner. We lack the beef bone, salt pork, and dense Spanish chorizo the recipe calls for, so I use a ham hock and greasy, fresh Mexican chorizo instead. I likewise fall in love with this significantly altered Spanish Bean Soup.
3. Years later, in California, I improvise a preparation based on my recollection of the soup I made in Ohio. This time I use smoked Spanish paprika instead of regular paprika, and I eliminate the meat products. It’s fantastic.
4. I develop an official Spanish Bean Soup recipe for a story on smoky vegetarian food that I’m writing for The Oregonian’s FOODday. The recipe goes over very well, especially with the FOODday staff.
5. Fast forward to 2012. My Spanish Bean Soup recipe is included in The Oregonian Cookbook, and I am thrilled because it’s a fantastic book (buy multiple copies to give as gifts!) Eventually I look at the recipe itself and am surprised to see that during the testing process, the test kitchen staff chose to eliminate the saffron and substitute canned chickpeas for the dried ones I called for. How did I fail to notice this?

In my role as a recipe tester for big publications, I tweaked many recipes to streamline the preparation or create workarounds for hard-to-find ingredients; asking the writer for permission just isn’t part of the equation. So I wasn’t upset to see the changes FOODday made to my recipe. People still loved it, and maybe more readers were apt to make it with the convenience of canned beans.

But I’ll always prefer my version. Canned chickpeas are handy, but they have a subtle tinny taste and an inferior, mushier texture. And the saffron that FOODday omitted, to my palate, adds an elegant brightness of flavor that transcends the humble bones of the soup.

I had just heated up a pot of Spanish Bean Soup when my friend Caroline was visiting a few weeks ago. She asked me for the recipe, and of course I wanted to give her mine—saffron and dried chickpeas and all—because it’s the best. Although the originator of the Columbia Restaurant’s Spanish Bean soup might sample mine and guffaw “That’s not even the same soup! Where’s the chorizo? Where’s the beef and ham bones?”

Once Caroline prepares this recipe, it will become her own. She might add something I didn’t, or use regular paprika instead of smoked (though I would not recommend doing so). And you can make this, too, and keep the game of recipe telephone going and going.

Spanish Bean Soup (Potaje de Garbanzos)

Makes 3 quarts

Much of this hearty golden soup’s beguiling flavor comes from smoked Spanish paprika and small but crucial amounts of saffron. The potatoes fall apart and thicken it as it cooks. This version happens to be vegan.

• 1 pound dried chickpeas beans, soaked overnight and drained
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for garnish, if you like
• 4 medium onions (about 2 lbs), chopped
• 5 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tablespoon smoked Spanish paprika
• 2 small russet potatoes (about 1 lb), peeled and quartered
• generous pinch saffron (more than 1/8 teaspoon but less than 1/4 teaspoon), soaked in 1 teaspoon warm water
• salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1. In a heavy-bottomed stockpot or Dutch oven (at least 5 quarts), combine the chickpeas and bay leaf. Add enough water to cover the beans by an inch or so. Bring to a boil over high heat; reduce the heat, cover, and simmer until the beans are not quite fully cooked (about an hour or two, depending on if you have a lazy simmer or a hard simmer). Add water as needed to keep the beans submerged.
2. Meanwhile, now that you have a head start on cooking the chickpeas, cook your sofrito. Place a large skillet over medium heat. Add the olive oil; once it shimmers, add the onion and cook until translucent and lightly browned, about 20 minutes. Don’t rush this part; it’s the flavor base of your soup. Add the garlic and paprika and sauté for another minute.
3. Taste a chickpea. It should still be a little toothy. Add the potatoes and the sofrito and the saffron with its soaking water to the pot and continue cooking until the beans are very tender and the potatoes fall apart (about 30 minutes). Don’t freak out when you see the potatoes falling apart! It’s what makes this soup so rib-stickingly good. Season very generously with salt and a little black pepper to taste. Using a potato masher or the back of a spoon, mash a portion of the beans and potatoes until the soup is especially think and chunky. Float a little extra-virgin olive oil on each bowl of soup at serving time if you’d like to make it extra glimmery and rich. This soup does not freeze especially well, as the potatoes don’t hold up, but it will keep in the refrigerator for about a week.

Here’s the original Columbia Restaurant’s Spanish Bean Soup recipe. And here’s my recipe as it appeared in The Oregonian’s FOODday, with canned chickpeas and without saffron. Now you can compare all three recipes for fun, because I know that’s the kind of person you are, and that’s why I love you.

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Roasted Strawberries

June 29, 2012

The strawberries in our garden are in full swing now. We’re picking about a pint of ripe ones a day. All year long I wait for these little gems, the pleasure of plucking them right from our own backyard.

“They taste kind of weird,” says Joe, and he’s right. They’re a tad too acidic, or a tad too ripe, or just wan and watery. I blame the late-season rain, because it’s handy to blame things on the rain here. They’re not terrible berries, just not as mind-blowing as I’d like. I can go to the farmer’s market and get a flat of Oregon-grown Hood strawberries that will blow some minds. Our backyard strawberries are convenient and passable.

But they’re ours, and we’re kind of a weird family, so it’s fitting they taste weird. I still think they are miraculous in their way. I planted them three years ago after my brother and I walked past a house in our neighborhood with a bunch of strawberry starts laid out in the front yard next to a FREE sign. I get to ignore them all year long, and then for about a month they give me fruit.

A friend growing strawberries in her Portland yard shared that she feels so blessed in numbers that she spits out any offending berries that aren’t up to flavor spec. A luxury, yes, and one we could adopt here as well, but I love our underwhelming strawberry children, and I can’t bring myself to write them off.

So I’ve been blasting them in the oven a bit to intensify their flavors. Roasting fruit is de rigueur, so I’m not blazing any culinary trails here. I think some people roast strawberres on a parchment-lined sheet pan, but I want some syrup to go with it, so I put them in a small gratin dish that collects their gooey liquid. It’s almost like making jam in the oven, and it’s a jillion times easier, and I don’t have enough ripe backyard strawberries at a time to make jam, anyway. The vanilla bean is really what makes this amazing. It fills in that gap of exquisiteness my berries suffer from.

Roasted Strawberries, a.k.a. Oven-Baked Strawberry Compote

Makes about one cup

• One pound (about a pint) strawberries, washed and hulled
• 2-3 tablespoons turbinado sugar (though you could use any kind of sugar you had on hand; I like the fruitiness of turbinado)
• ¼ vanilla bean

Position a rack in the center of the oven. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

If the strawberries are those big honking ones, you may want to cut them in half, but you don’t have to. Put them in a medium-sized shallow baking dish, preferably non-reactive (ceramic, enameled, or Pyrex vessels are good choices). Add the sugar. Split the vanilla bean vertically and scrape out the seeds; add the seeds and the scraped-out vanilla bean hull to the berries. Toss it all together a bit, but don’t worry about it too much. It’ll all even out in the oven.

Place the dish, uncovered, in the oven and bake for 30 to 45 minutes, stirring a little bit midway though if you remember. You want to see the berries collapse and lots of juice rapidly bubbling all around them. The whole mess will thicken and become jammy as it cools. 

Store, covered, in the refrigerator for up to five days. Leave the vanilla bean hull in there so that the flavors both deepen and mellow as it all sits.

Here’s what you should do with this stuff:

-Spoon it over nice, thick plain Greek yogurt (full fat!) 

-After scraping the warm mixture into a container, there will be a bunch of syrup clinging to the spoon. Lick this off because you don’t want to waste it. It’s so sweet and a little wine-y and it might make you feel a bit sick, but it’s worth it. Wipe off your face when you are done; you will have ruby streaks all around your mouth. You can also share this spoon-licking part with your kid.

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