Meat, Braise, Love II: Chocolate & Lamb. Seriously.

Braised lamb w/ bitter chocolate-rosemary sauce, preserved Meyer lemons, and minty gremolata

Sometimes, despite all the planning, the search through my personal Library-of-Congress of cookbooks, the endless page views on epicurious.com, and all that frigging prep work, I'll find out the hard way that it's what I don't have, what I didn't plan for, what I can't do, that ultimately determines my success or failure in the kitchen. Maybe it's a forgotten ingredient, poor time management, or, most frequently, just a simple mistake, something I've done with ease dozens of times, but that, in the presence of friends/kids/wives/copious wine/whatever, suddenly becomes daunting.

Typically, the requisite discipline will be imposed by some highly technical flaw, like spacing out on the kitchen timer when I'm roasting nuts (great tip I read somewhere but can't place: always put a nut on your cutting board as a reminder whenever you're roasting nuts) - a clear indication if ever there was one of too much fun, too much wine, and too little focus on the task at hand. Typically, but not always; sometimes, discipline is imposed because, for a lack of a better turn of phrase, stuff happens.

To wit, I was recently tooling around the market in anticipation of a visit by our dear friends, the C's, and the dinner I had volunteered for. I wanted most of the cooking to be done in advance, the weather was still unseasonably cool, I had a great bottle of Syrah floating around, and I had just been chatting with Deborah Owen of the Owen Family Farm about their humane and healthy ranching - in short, we were having braised lamb. In keeping with our MO here in the Proximal Kitchen, my intent was to keep it as simple as possible, to highlight the quality of the ingredients in a simple, well executed dish, so I decided on a classic preparation: Shoulder of lamb, in a braise of Syrah wine with lots of garlic and rosemary from our own garden. The catch? Ms C does not, can not, eat garlic. But of course, I wouldn't find this out until all the marketing was done and the meat was literally searing in the pan, mere minutes before the garlic cloves were destined to meet their flaming cast iron maker.

Cooking With Friends

Cold Sandwiches of Pork Loin Sous-Vide, Onion-Cranberry Marmalade, and Pt Reyes Original Blue

Cooking for friends and cooking with friends can both be immensely rewarding, but they require different rules, different ways of thinking about food, different ways of physically traversing the kitchen floor, of juggling burners, pots, and knives, because - no matter how social the event and how much enthusiasm (and aptitude) for minor prep, plating and service the guests show up with - cooking for company remains an inherently solitary undertaking, while cooking with company is as much about social interaction as it is about food. Partly, this is a function of logistics (unless you're talking about a pot luck or whatever, but a pot luck is not cooking with anybody), but not principally. True collaboration, my home turf, with another cook whom, in all likelihood, I've never shared a kitchen, requires humility, compromise, and adaptability - three words that, truth be told, I very nearly had to spell-check, as rarely as they enter my lexicon. I am not, as a rule, much beholden to the way other people things should be done, and I tend to cook that way. Of course, I also drive that way, talk about politics that way, and do math that way, so this is hardly a unique pattern. And, really, it's a reasonably effective pattern, so long as I have room to maneuver and I more or less know what I'm doing; the downside is that the converse - in which I'm boxed in, confused, and resolve turns to obstinance - isn't pretty, but that's a story for another post.

The thing to remember, if you invite a friend to come over and help you cook, is that it's a good bet that they aren't expecting to show up for the express purpose of prepping your mise or doing your dishes; no, they'll want to contribute, in some way related to the application of heat and knife-force to starch and protein, to the final product. Indeed, they're likely already to have a dish, or at least a central component of one, in mind, if not par-cooked and in-transit. And, of course, they may well fail to appreciate that you know the right way to do something, all of which necessitates a degree of flexibility I generally lack: Seasoning to taste, presentation, and the menu itself all become a product of more than one person's labor. But that needn't be a bad thing, and that is the point of this post: To the contrary, it means less work for me, a chance to check out someone else's chops and maybe even learn something, and - this is the key, really - the opportunity to come up with something, working together, that neither would have come up with alone. Courtesy of my friend B, his love affair with thermal circulators (the technical gastro-toy used to cook sous-vide), and an escalating afternoon party at our casita, I recently had just such an opportunity, and received the commensurate payoff: A near-perfect little sandwich, constructed on a foundation of B's perfectly prepared homage to swine, accompanied by some of my favorite local goodies from the previous day's famer's market, and all tied together with a recent experiment of my design, an Onion-Cranberry Marmalade that I adapted from Tom Colicchio and a staple of many years' worth of Gramercy Tavern menus.

Palate Fail

I have a pretty good palate, generally speaking. I don't lay claim to the sensory capacities of a professional cook, merely to the ability to perceive, in a broadly objective sense, whether or not a dish tastes right - whether or not it has been properly seasoned, is in or out of balance, consists of flavors that work well or poorly together, that sort of thing. The flip side of training one's palate to taste objectively (OK, fine, "objective taste" may be conceptually oxymoronic, but I'm sticking to my guns on this one - there is such a thing as objective quality with respect to food, and no matter how many shades of subjective gray might litter the middle of the spectrum, the "good" and "bad" at the extremes remain unequivocal) is that one must - eventually and, more likely, frequently - face the fact that what is good and what one likes do not always describe the same mouthful.

Case in point: Coffee. I recently posted about the merits of local, "micro" roasters, and specifically why freshness - of both the roast and the percolation - has such a dramatic impact on the flavor of coffee. The thing is, once you understand why the flavor of coffee goes bad (it's all about the reduction-oxidation process, as explained by the Specialty Coffee Association people here), you must also accept that the most popular, commercially available "fresh" beans are overcooked: Heat is ultimately an enemy of coffee aromatics, so really hard roasting, at least as practiced by the industry leaders such as Starbucks and Peets, inevitably raises the proportion of "bad" flavors and certainly degrades the proportions of many "good" ones. My personal coffee mea culpa is this: I like bad coffee. Not shitty coffee: I care not at all for the taste of two-day-old-and-tasting-of-burnt-gym-socks coffee, of low-grade beans apparently canned sometime during the early days of the Cold War, of Dunkin' Donuts or McDonald's "Cafes".

Naughty and Nice: Salty Vodka Whipped Cream

Vodka Whipped Cream: Naughty & Delicious

Last Saturday night was date-night-at-home for us. In and of itself, this was not an uncommon occurrence - our preference for what passes, in our house, for a big Saturday evening oscillates between getting a sitter and going out like real grown-ups, and spending the evening raiding the wine cellar and figuring out what do with whatever we picked up earlier at the farmer's market - but it was a particularly special one, because we were celebrating the opening of my wife's new business. If you've ever watched anyone open their own business (much less done it yourself), I think you'll agree that there aren't many better reasons to celebrate; and if you like to eat (much less cook it  yourself), surely you'll agree that big celebrations and great meals flatter one another like familiar lovers, both habitual and new, relaxed and exciting, and loads and loads of fun.

Armed with such an excuse, I'll often feel inspired to spend half the day prepping and to concoct some relatively elaborate dish; but at least as often, either I won't have the time or inclination to spend in the kitchen, or perhaps I just won't be in the mood to do something complicated. Indeed, increasingly I find my tastes, both in the eating and in the cooking, running to the simple rather than the complex - finding a few really good ingredients and trying not to screw them up being a sort of Proximal Kitchen mantra. In any case, the choice was made for me yesterday, because between my wife's open house and the munchkins, I simply didn't have the time. So I took the kids to the market with a loose sketch for dinner: Something based around whatever we found at the market; something suited to my wife's palate; something relatively quick and easy; and something very adult, even a little naughty even - this was, after all, to be a date night. Oh, and in an ideal world, something suited to Champagne.

The market was really rocking, with lots of stuff - tomatoes and peppers in particular, having waited through our abnormally cool summer - the best it has been all year. But in keeping with my tactical objectives, I grabbed a dozen eggs from the good folks Wyeth Acres, purveyors of good vegetables and even better meats, thinking that breakfast-for-dinner might be just the ticket: Eggs and Champagne are a classic combination, not too much prep, and a house favorite. Next stop, a loaf of Full Circle sourdough for toast and some just-dug Yukon Golds from Foggy River Farms. Other than the wine and a bit of color for the plate, I figured I was just about done. But, as good as I know it would be, it wasn't quite enough. After all, this was a celebration, and a date night. In short, I wanted to dress my country breakfast in a suave dinner jacket.

Luckily, I remembered one of my favorite recipes to steal from: Louis Outhier's fabulous Caviar Eggs, popularized (and I believe still served) by Jean-Georges Vongerichten at his eponymous NYC restaurant. However, I didn't want to deal with the egg shells, and I wanted to use the potatoes, so I figured I'd make potato gallettes, top them with creamy scrambled eggs, and garnish it all with Outhier's outrageously decadent Salty Vodka Whipped Cream. A dollop of caviar on top - with its shot of dark color, bright, salty tang, and ability to shine with Champagne - but, alas, for all the cosmopolitan development of our little wine country town, nobody had caviar. The horror! I should have thought of using some smoked salmon instead, for the same reasons, and serving it with a pink Champagne, but I wasn't thinking; in the event, it wasn't half-bad without the fish - but, to be clear, it would have been better. I'll get around to posting the full recipe (scrambled eggs are a chapter unto themselves - so simple, so good when done properly, and yet so frequently butchered in the kitchen), but for now, here's my adaptation of Outhier's topping. It is outrageously good and could just as easily be used on top of fresh berries for dessert as with eggs or caviar.

Salty Vodka Whipped Cream (adapted from L Outhier)

1. Whip a half cup of heavy cream until stiff
2. Whisk in a tablespoon of good Vodka and a large pinch of salt - maybe as much as half a teaspoon. It should taste savory, not sweet.
3. Optional, and depending what you're serving it over (e.g., impeccable with caviar, but skip the cayenne for berries), whisk in 1-2 teaspoons of freshly squeezed lemon juice (Meyers, if possible), a pinch of cayenne, and - if you want a little color - some very finely minced lemon zest.

Naughty and nice. Trust me.