The Proximal Kitchen

We're Moving

2010-10-07T08:24:00.000-07:00

The Proximal Kitchen blog is in the process of moving to our new semi-permanent home at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat - please visit us there!

(I will try to maintain this site as I transition the content over, but will inevitably fall behind...)

WTF is up with 'Man v. Food'?

2010-09-24T14:14:00.000-07:00

Truth In Advertising: The Knucklehead Challenge
(photo credit: http://www.travelchannel.com/)

Lying around in full couch tuber regalia, following the heartbreakingly tantalizing 49er game, I had the misfortune to channel-surf through the treacherous waters of Monday Night Television, only to find my mental Minnow festooned around the awful coral head of Adam Richman's Man v. Food. As if driving past an overturned car in a highway ditch, or probing a sore inside a cheek, I sat there, glassy-eyed and I must suppose mildly brain-damaged, for perhaps 15 minutes (an amount of time that, at roughly 0.00003% of my expected life span, strikes me as too long by at least half), transfixed, seemingly incapable of averting attention from either Mr. Richman's ham-handed narrative or the grotesque display of gustatory abuse which forms the dubious premise of the show.

This particular car-wreck happened to be an episode in Philadelphia, in which the host must face down a single, titanic cheese steak from Tony Luke's, the sandwich in question (although to call it that is surely to insult the Earl's good memory and proper sandwiches everywhere) weighing in at an appalling 5lbs in total, and constructed from 3lbs of meat, 1lb of American cheese, and a half-pound of fried onions, all stuffed into a 20"-long sub roll, which I suppose we're meant to infer weighs another half-pound. This is not the foul pile of landfill masquerading as food and pictured above-right; that unfortunate distinction belongs to Parker's Hot Dogs in Sacramento, home to yet another 5lbs of televised obscenity at the hands of said Mr Richman. But even to debate the particulars is to offer the offer the show far more quarter than it deserves; the what he eats is irrelevant in comparison to the why.

I've been puzzling over what bothers me so much about the show for the last couple of days: Notwithstanding the puppy-dog eyes and smarmy winks, Mr Richman himself seems inoffensive enough, and arguably knows what he's doing, both in front of the camera (he studied drama at Yale) and in the kitchen (he claims to be a trained sushi chef); nor is it the quality of the food itself, as he generally chooses destinations of some culinary merit (I have nothing against his roadie-food strong suit of cheese steaks, chili dogs, and burgers), or at least so they seem prior to his blasphemous display of eating whatever it is that they make. No, I think the problem lies with the premise of the show itself, the very idea that eating - to me, an inherently pleasurable, and literally life-giving, enterprise - should be reduced to a contest between the eater and the stuff on the plate

The great writer and patron saint of food bloggers everywhere, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, once said that the "enjoyment of the art of living, as well as of eating... are, or can be, synonymous." Man v. Food is predicated on nothing less than the complete moral inversion of Ms Fisher's guiding principle - the title itself proclaims mouth and fork to be enemies - and I'm guessing that that is what chafes me like a dull razor. Food is (or at least should be) enormously enjoyable and, served in proportion to its purpose, satisfies one of the most basic conditions for life; the absence of food implies hunger and death (the millions so afflicted are a tragedy of global proportions and a blight on our collective social conscience), and food in excess implies death by means other than hunger, but death just the same (we are a nation of over-eaters, on this the data is incontrovertible). And yet here is a major television production that exists solely by virtue of our ability to transform good food into something dangerously unpleasant. Worse still, this transformation is effected by the application of quantity: What would otherwise be nourishing, or at least tasty (I'm not sure if even the finest chili dog could ever be called 'nourishing'), becomes a threat, simply because of the sheer size of the serving.

I know, I get it, it's all just entertainment, you don't need to post a reply with a litany of even-worse sins; we can just stipulate that competitive eating likely fails to represent one of the clear and present dangers to civilization as we know it, and that there are any number of significantly more disturbing examples of televised programming (certainly, The Swan and anything even peripherally related to Toddlers and Tiaras would rank higher on both lists). But its relative innocuousness in relation to graver threats in no way obviates my argument with Mr Richman and his self-destructive quest for ad revenue: The fact remains that the Travel Channel, by aggrandizing gluttony for a nation of the epidemically obese, sells our collective good sense of what food can and should be right down the river.

Should I buy local wines at Costco?

2010-09-17T09:08:00.000-07:00

Outstanding local Pinot Noir at big discounts

We've talked about Costco before, a conversation in which I argued that monolithic, small-business-destroying category killers still have a place in the kitchen, even proximal kitchens, if for no other reason than because saving money on staples allows us to allocate a larger share of our budget to the locally produced goods of premium quality (and, let's be honest, at a premium price), that we like to cook with. But what about buying locally produced goods at the Big C?

If the identical local product is offered at the farmer's market, the local health food store, and Costco, and I choose to buy more of it, at a lower price, at Costco, should I pat myself on the back for being such a savvy, sustainably-minded locavore and supporting the production of good, local food, all while saving my family money? Or, should I offer myself up as whipping boy du jour for the inevitable and copious tongue lashing and politically correct cacophony emanating from the barbarous hordes of checkbook liberals and self-described apostles of some quasi Pollan-esque faith lying in wait?

Let's consider the case of wine: The wine industry is Sonoma County's largest single employer (directly accounting for some 19% of all jobs county-wide, excluding all the ancillary but clearly material employment in restaurants, hotels and gift shops generated by wine country tourism), and total wine-related revenues account for 40% of the County's entire contribution to the nation's GDP. So one thing is clear: Where and how I spend my wine dollars matters to Sonoma County.

Or does it? If I buy Bordeaux in-bond from a broker in London, then you might argue that I'm not doing much to support artisanal winemakers (not that that should stop anyone from drinking the occasional Bordeaux, mind you - the road to deprivation is littered with the carcasses of overzealous locavores, and I, for one, have little interest in dinner-table asceticism), but it's far from obvious that I'm doing harm to our local economy. Suppose I take the total number of dollars that I would have otherwise spent on Sonoma County wines, at tasting rooms and specialty retailers in my neighborhood, and instead spend those same dollars, on the same wines, at Costco? Who wins, who loses, how much is at stake, and should I care? The answer is not as obvious as you may think. (Unfortunately, this post is about to run quite a bit longer than usual; call it the curse of the two-handed economist. I promise to get back on-thread tomorrow.)

Costco, the nation's largest (although I'm never sure if this statistic refers to volume, revenue, or both) wine retailer, is the elephant in the cellar, and their fine-wine pricing can be very competitive, provided you can separate wheat from chaff, because their selection, and the price/quality ratio thereof, can be inconsistent; the prices are never bad, but some of the wines are distinctly mediocre, and at prices no better than you'll find in about 5 minutes on Google. That being said, here is what I picked up the other day on a completely random visit, 3 outstanding examples of Sonoma County Pinot Noir (out of at least a half-dozen options), each from a premium local winery that I could easily drive to, and collectively a representative sample of just what is at stake, from my wallet's perspective:

2006 Keller Estate "La Cruz Vineyard" Pinot Noir. Costco price: $18.49. Winery: $44.00 (current release, 2007).
2007 J Vineyards "Russian River Valley" Pinot Noir: Costco price: $24.99. Winery: $35.00 (identical bottling).
2008 Pellegrini Family Vineyards "Olivet Lane" Pinot Noir. Costco: $19.99. Winery: $35.00 (identical bottling)

Thus confronting the data, we find an average savings of 43% of retail, or better than $200/case, and moves a few of what I would otherwise consider "luxury" wines back into the "maybe not for every day, but plausible and guilt-free" category. Still, while total dollars spent remain constant, who gets those dollars does not. I'm a trained economist with a weak suit in micro, so I enlisted the help of former classmate and top-shelf game theory wonk, Mad Dog, and we came up with the following economic implications:

My wallet, and my palate (although perhaps not my liver) win, because I get to consume more and/or better wine for the same outlay.
The County coffers are indifferent, because my total taxable consumption, as well as overall wine industry receipts, remain constant.
The wineries are a slightly trickier story: Definitively, some of what they would have made now goes to Costco, and their gross margins suffer; their cost-of-goods-sold likely falls (e.g., less labor, no tasting room lease), but I think it's safe to assume that, on balance, winery profits decline on a per-bottle basis. But there is a price and volume story here: It's entirely possible that the winery sells so many additional bottles, by virtue of the Costco distribution channel, that the absolute level of winery profits actually increases.
Even if total profits in the economy may remain unchanged (it's hard to see them falling, or else why would the business model persist), the reallocation of profits from the winery to Costco would shift some income out of the County, inasmuch as winery capital is locally owned and Costco capital is not. Still, that does not necessarily imply a net loss to the County, because of gains from trade: If Sonoma has a competitive advantage in making wine but not in selling it, then we, collectively, will be better off if we "pay" Costco to sell it for us, thereby reallocating our resources to more productive ends. (This is, essentially, the "gains from trade" argument. Don't let the "anti-globalization" whack jobs bamboozle you, they have no idea what they're talking about, a world without trade would be a far darker, colder, and generally poorer place for nearly everyone.)
Employment at Costco gains, but at the expense of jobs at the wineries. I'd rather work in a tasting room than Costco, but that's a purely personal preference, it's not my place to say which job is "better". I do, however, think it's fair to assume that Costco labor is more productive (in the economic sense, i.e., it takes less person-hours to sell the same dollar volume of wine), which would imply fewer total jobs for the County. However, one has to be careful, because that does not necessarily imply a net loss of income, but rather a reallocation of the share of total profits away from labor and toward capital, which is unequivocally bad only if you're still reading that threadbare copy of Marx from your freshman year.
All the preceding is an inherently partial equilibrium analysis, and there may be more complex, general equilibrium considerations, particularly along the temporal dimension: It is possible, for instance, that the winery will eventually go out of business by selling via Costco, even if doing so maximizes its short-run profitability (or minimizes its losses, as the case may be). The Keller wine is a case in point: I don't know what Keller's cost structure looks like, but I seriously doubt they are making money by selling a $44 Pinot for well under $19 (remember, Costco has a margin in there too, of that we can be certain). More likely, they lose less, which is a perfectly rational thing to do, but hardly a sustainable business model. It is at least possible, therefore, that I will contribute to the demise of the local wine industry by consuming its wines exclusively through Costco. (General equilibrium analysis can get very complicated: One could argue that the failure of an otherwise unsustainable business leads to a more overall economic efficiency in the long-run, in which employment, consumption, and tax receipts could all actually be higher in the absence of the business than they were in its presence.)
You could argue that one should "shop locally" in order to "support" the local economy, which is all fine and dandy, but starts to get awfully close to subsidization, if not outright charity. While I've got no axe to grind with charity, it's not at all clear what that should have to do with my consumption decision: If I want to subsidize a winery, I don't need to overpay for their wine, I should just write them a check and save everyone the trouble. And if you don't think that makes much sense, then you probably didn't want to subsidize them in the first place.

For all that, I think the lesson is pretty simple: First and foremost, you should buy the wine you like to drink at the best possible price. If knowing the wine is local confers other, non-pecuniary benefits (e.g., it makes you feel better about yourself), then by all means, buy locally - heck, I like our wines, and purchasing them makes me feel good. Similarly, if tasting rooms have value to you - as they do for me - then, again, buy some wine directly from the winery. If you can only afford to drink local wines from Costco, don't sweat it - you may be doing more for the local economy than you think. Above all, don't kid yourself: The wine aisle at Costo is neither good, nor bad, it simply is, and where and how you spend your wine dollars is nobody else's business but yours.

We're Moving!

2010-09-15T11:54:00.000-07:00

Dear friends, family, fans, and followers:

The Proximal Kitchen blog is in the process of migrating to its new home at the Press Democrat.

I am going to try to keep the original site populated but will inevitably fall behind, particularly during the transition period.

Also, although new material will be going up all the time, you may notice some or even all of my old posts reappear in slightly modified versions on the new site, until the new site is fully populated with my old archived stuff.

Thanks again for your support, and come check out our new home!

- Rorschach

Alexander Valley Chardonnay Calls BS on ABC (Part 1 of 2)

2010-09-11T14:33:00.000-07:00

Preparing to enter AV Chard Country from the 101 North

Google "ABC Anything But Chardonnay" and you'll get something on the order of 19,000 hits in the first few tenths of a second. The oldest reference I could be bothered to find dates to 1995 in a column by Frank Prial for the NY Times, but as recently as 2008, someone actually took the time to write a book with the same dated and misguided tag line, so we know that wine writers, at least, have had the ABC bug up their collective keester for the better part of 15 years now. A cursory review of the literature, such as it is, will tell you that the ABC crowd (or "movement", as they are wont to call themselves, if they're feeling more plucky and self-important than usual) represents a backlash against the hegemony of that ubiquitous style of California Chardonnay that assaults the palate in a blitzkrieg of sweet butter, vanilla, and sodden oak.

The ABCers have a valid argument, to a point: Too many California Chardonnays taste too much alike, lacking both individuality and varietal character. I have read, but cannot confirm, a plausible hypothesis that the tsunami of monolithic and uniform Chards washing over the marketplace some years ago was the industry's natural reaction to Kendall-Jackson selling of hundreds of thousands (millions?) of cases of wine in the 80s and 90s that were made in that particular style. Whatever the roots of its family tree, this style - the oenological equivalent of Marshmallow Fluff - reaches its dubious apogee in Rombauer's eponymous bottling, which I used to care for, truth be told, but - both to its winemaker's credit and ultimate failing - now strikes me as inscrutably cloaked in wood and stupefyingly uniform, regardless of the vintage, with an inescapable impression of chewing on a handful of buttered-popcorn Jelly Bellys while licking an oak tree. Maybe that's harsh, and a bit unfair to the Rombauers (whom, unlike downmarket Marshmallow Wines that spend the tender days of their vinous youth literally soaking in a bath of oak chips, at least produce a product of quality), but one thing the ABC folks got right is that too many Chards taste indistinguishably alike in a not-very-Chardonnay sort of way, and where's the fun in that?.

What they got wrong, however, is that Chardonnay is somehow ill-suited to oak barrels and malolactic fermentation, and that Americans (or anybody else, for that matter) would stop drinking Chardonnay: In the first instance, not only do the undisputed heavyweight champions of the Chardonnay world - counting amongst their ranks the who's-your-daddy of all Chardonnays and possibly all dry white wines, Le Montrachet; some of the world's finest Champagnes (any Tete de Cuvee designated blanc de blanc, including such luminaries as Salon, Taittinger, and Krug's mythical Clos de Mesnil); and New World "cult" offerings (such as those from John Kongsgaard and Helen Turley) make extensive use of new oak and ML fermentation; and as to the second claim, it's just plain false. To wit, Americans guzzle 5-10% more California Chardonnay each year than the one previous, and have done so since that very same NYT article appeared in 1995.

So what gives? A winemaker friend of mine once told me, "Americans talk dry, but drink sweet". He was talking about the oaky, extracted, blue-black ink wells of Cabernet Sauvignon that continue to define most of our neighboring Napa Valley, but I think the song remains the same further west as well, here in the Land of Chard: We, the American palate, like to fill our glasses with big, rich, succulent, gobs of toasty, creamy Chardonnay unctuousness. Decry it all you want, but the sales statistics don't lie, and I, for one, am proud to hold my hand up as one of the many whom they represent, provided the wines in question reflect their varietal character and a retain a sense of balance between fruit and wood, richness and structure, winemaker and vine because, at the end of the day, these are flirty, sexy, flattering wines, and a well-made, sexpot of a Chard is the sort of wine that will get you lucky.

I may live in the Russian River Valley - indisputably, home court to any number of world-class Chardonnay winemakers - but I'm here to tell you that, if well-made, sexpot Chards are your thing, then you need to get your Chard-guzzling booty over to the Alexander Valley, and stat. You won't find nearly the selection (the simple math of fewer wineries making less wine), you'll drive a few extra miles (it's a sparsely populated region), but for quality, value, and, especially, stylistic consistency, nobody is producing better hooch than the cellar rats of the Alexander Valley.

If you can picture RRV Chardonnays as the archetypal beauty queens of today's cinema (think Nicole Kidman or Michelle Pfeiffer), and Sonoma Coast as the edgy up-and-comers (say, Emma Watson or Kristen Stewart) of tomorrow's, then AV Chards would have to be the voluptuous blonde bombshells of the classic silver screen, all Mae West, Marylin Monroe, and Betty Davis, with their graceful curves, inimitable class, and breathy sex appeal. What I find so special about these wines is that, much like these actresses, they each maintain a fierce individuality, one might even say attitude, while at the same time sharing an unmistakable common thread, a sense of place or terroir that even the most die-hard ABCer would begrudgingly respect, that sets them apart from their more westerly cousins.

All of which lines me up for The World's Best Unpaid Job: I'm going to spend a few days next week soaking up the postcard-perfect scenery of the Alexander Valley, bar-hopping the tasting rooms of 128 (yes, I'll spit), and talking to the men and women that grow these special wines. Check back in for Part 2, coming soon to a theater near you.

Just Three: Tomatoes, Chilis, and Parsley

2010-09-08T11:48:00.000-07:00

Tomatoes, dressed with tomatoes, and not much else

If you've spent any time at all with me, you already know I talk too much, so today's project is to keep it tight. Tight lips, tight keys, tight dish. Put up or shut up. Make it count. Insert cliche here, but make sure it all nets down to a tight little post.

As I've already confessed, I'm a pretty lousy gardener, but - as with most things in life - luck trumps skill, and Lady Luck planted a big, wet snog on my tomatoes this year. Seriously, to judge by my Green Zebras, she might even have used some tongue. If you're lucky enough to live here in the 707, you already understand that tomato season can acquire near-mystical qualities, spoken about in the same hushed tones normally reserved for yield, brix, and how badly hosed the wine industry may or may not be in the latest rags, so I take this bit of fortune seriously: What can I do to flatter all this sexy fruit?

Yesterday's project: Construct a complete tomato dish that even my kids would eat, using only three ingredients, all of which we grew. To hand: Tomatoes (Lemon Boys, not technically an heirloom, with their lower acidity and mildly tangy sweetness; and the aforementioned Green Zebras, their distinctive, racy zing a great match to the Lemons), chili peppers (Serranos, a great go-to chili for heat and flavor, and particularly good raw), and a bed full of herbs (a whole Simon-Garfunkle reunion of parsley, sage, rosemary, and culinary thyme, alongside basil, lavender, and chives), from which - basis the chili - I could have plucked basil, but thought the flat-leaf parsley a bit more interesting and marginally less obvious pairing. The clever if likely unoriginal (296,000 Google hits in 0.21 seconds) insight: A vinaigrette, described (as far as I know) by none other than Thomas Keller as "the perfect sauce", consists of nothing but acid, oil, and seasoning. So, why not use tomatoes as the acid, for a tomato vinaigrette? (A truly excellent discussion of vinaigrettes, citing all my favorite cook-book sources and getting it right, can be found here.)

Tomato Salad with Green Zebra Vinaigrette and a Fresh Parsley and Chili Garnish

The same tomato-tomato salad, but fast-plating version

Concasse a few Green Zebra tomatoes, maybe 1/2 to 1 tomato per salad (click the Foodista widget below for an explanation of the proper concasse technique) and, while slightly annoying, can be done in bulk, stored, and used later in any number of preparations). Seed, rib, and finely mince a fresh Serrano (or other red, say Arbol) chili pepper. Pick a handful of small leaves off the parsley.

Tomato Concasse

Push the tomatoes concasse through sieve or ricer or whatever to get a smooth texture and ensure that all the seeds have been removed (tomato seeds tend to add an unpleasantly bitter flavor and odd texture to smooth sauces) into a small mixing bowl. Season with a dash of white wine vinegar, finely milled salt and fresh white pepper (you don't want black flecks in it).
Whisk olive oil into the tomato base, in roughly equal proportions (a typical vinaigrette requires a 3:1 ratio of oil to acid, which would be fine here as well, but I prefer to let the tomato remain center stage, and its textural weight seemed to hold the oil just fine in this ratio), and adjust seasoning as required.
Spoon the dressing to cover the bottom of shallow pasta bowls.
Cut the Lemon Boys, remaining Green Zebras, and/or whatever other tomatoes you have to hand (Tangerines, Cherokee Purples, and Early Girls would all look and taste phenomenal; you can't go wrong, just try to balance the zesty acidity and color of the greens with sweeter, and yellow-red colored, cousins) into roughly uniform medium-dice.
Sprinkle a little of the minced chili on the sauce and judiciously place the tomato cubes (skin-side up or not, depending on their look) on the sauce, adding a leaf of parsley to the top of a few of the not-green cubes.

As a speedier alternative, simply give the parsley and the whole tomatoes a rough chop, toss the tomatoes with the sauce, and then sprinkle the chili and parsley over the top.

Just Three: Polenta, Eggs, Mushrooms

2010-09-07T15:31:00.000-07:00

Which came first, the bottle or the plate? Chicken/egg, TV/commercial, food/wine, show-me-yours/I'll-show-you-mine. In our house, such questions carry weight, a seriousness you might consider more properly reserved for electrocardiograms, or matters of national security. The thing of it is, in wine country, at least in the fractional hectare of the 707 area code delineated by my family's split-rail fence line, the debate over the hierarchical structure of food vis-a-vis wine matters, not least because you'll be neither fed nor drunk until we've settled the matter. And I seriously doubt that I'm alone in building menus around bottles at least as often as choosing wines to match food.

Context, perhaps, is warranted: My wife is on what I can like to call a Chard bender, and the wine racks where we keep our whites look a bit like the maples of her youth (she's a transplanted Right Coaster) come the first snows of November: You know they were full, you can quite clearly remember seeing them shot through with color and promise (although you can't quite place the date), but all that stands in front of you today is dry wood and the lonely spaces between. This is, to be clear, an issue of frequency, not of quantity, because my wife doesn't really drink all that much. However, and here again I count my blessings, she is happy enough to drink small quantities frequently, thereby encouraging both my regular raids on the family cellar and my predilection for pigging, but also - when the Chard bender is in full effect - leading to Saharan absences of the one white varietal that will acceptably whet her cute little whistle.

Result: Me, along with my youngest daughter, the inimitable Miss M, on a late afternoon restocking mission. I wanted to go to Alexander Valley where, we think - heretically, to most of my Russian River Valley neighbors, given its warmer climes and historical affinity for Cabernet - some of the very finest Chardonnays in the New World are produced (if you're skeptical, check out Stuhlmuller Vineyards and Robert Young Estate Winery first, and then we'll talk). Unfortunately, poor little M was not feeling well, so rather than strap her into the back of the car and drag her around the next valley over, we played turistas and tooled around the Healdsburg plaza, her with an organic chocolate frozen yogurt from Snow Bunny (outlandishly overpriced by the calorie, but healthy and delicious all the same), and me with a visit to one of my favorite makers of local Chardonnay, Ms Susie Selby of Selby Winery. Another very accomplished winemaker (Bill Parker, currently making outstanding wines for White Oak, and previously for Matanzas Creek and BR Cohn) once told me that Chardonnay, more than any other varietal, reflects the influence and intentions of the winemaker, and I've repeatedly found this to be the case: Just as a great vineyard will display its terroir in the wine that it births, so too will a fine Chardonnay reflect the hand of its maker. This turns out to be great news for Chard drinkers, because it means that if you can find a winemaker whose style of Chardonnay agrees with you, you can pretty much stop worrying about the rest.

My wife and I share an affinity for the style of Chardonnay, somewhat unfashionable these days, defined by a dense core of fruit framed in toasty oak and featuring flavors like sweet butter, toasted coconut, and creme brulee; we're much less keen on either the overtly tropical, almost sweet, or the steely and austere styles that have become so much the rage in our Valley. To get back on point, Selby makes just the sort of Chard we love, from local fruit (one of her vineyards is across the street from our kids' elementary school, an endearing factoid for me), using classical techniques and French oak barrels. Plus, we think it's kind of cool to support female winemakers: Not only do women, in my opinion, tend to have finer palates than men but, like professional chefs, their presence in big-time wine making keeps growing, despite the inversely stacked odds of an industry historically dominated by men. The other really cool thing about Selby is that the White House (not just Obama's - this has been going on for quite some time, which says great things about the ability of good wine to transcend poor politics) regularly serves her Reserve Chardonnay at big-wig state dinners, and the menus are all over the tasting room walls. This provides a serious tactical edge to the home cook who, like me, having already fallen in love with the wine, now needs to build a menu around it. Engage your mental palate and taste the wine while you peruse the menus, and I will assure you of this one thing: You will want buy the wine, and you will almost surely try to cook some scallops or corn to match.

I adore scallops, but my wife inexplicably doesn't (and she loves seafood, which strikes me as peculiar, almost like saying that you love Italian cheeses but not mozzarella, but maybe I'm biased and it's more like saying you red wines but not Merlot or something), and in any case I still had leftover polenta from a recent edition of Just Three, so I figured, why press my luck, just go with the corn. We also share a love of breakfast-for-dinner, and the rest, as they say, is history. This is a really easy recipe and a good way to leverage leftovers and stuff you've probably got lying about; the only downside is the number of pans, but I think you could quite easily do the polenta first, then the mushrooms, hold them both, and finish with the eggs, all in one pan).

Crispy Polenta with Sunnyside-Up Eggs and a Creamy Mushroom Sauce

Get your pans hot. Then, rewind time and spread the leftover polenta from the other night's dinner onto a lightly oiled sheet tray and stick it in the fridge (yes, I actually did this the other night - it's second nature now, I almost always double the polenta recipe specifically so I can do this, the possibilities are endless and the effort minimal.) Carefully turn the sheet of polenta onto a cutting board and cut in triangles (or squares, or use a cookie cutter for fun shapes - the kids will love it).
Cook the polenta, the tray-side down, in a little butter or olive oil, over medium-low heat, until it forms a crunchy, golden-brown crust. This can take some time.
While the polenta is cooking, wash and thinly slice a bunch of mushrooms. I used criminis (I like the vaguely truffle-like quality of criminis with the corn and eggs, but anything, or a mix, would be great). Sautee with a little butter over medium heat until the 'shrooms have lost most of their volume, their water is gone, and they start to color up. Season liberally with salt and pepper. If this wasn't "Just Three" and I still didn't need to use eggs, I'd say toss a teaspoon or so of fresh thyme leaves in with them - thyme and mushrooms do amazing things for one another.
While all this is going on - it sounds like a lot happening at the same time, but it is all trivially easy - pour the eggs, two by two, into small nonstick pans along with a little butter and a few drops of water. Cover with foil and cook over very low heat.
When the polenta is done and the eggs are nearly so, deglaze the mushrooms with a few tablespoons of heavy cream (again, if I had another ingredient, I'd use a little white wine first, cook it off, and then add the cream). As soon as the cream bubbles and begins to thicken, plate and serve.

Mac-n-Cheese, Cheese, and More Cheese (v3.0)

2010-09-06T11:04:00.000-07:00

Mac-n-Cheese, Cheese, Cheese and Cheese

I think all cooks, from the diligent amateur to the dedicated professional, have at least a little bit of OCD in their bones. Consider the working cook: Why else would someone repeatedly construct the same thing, in precisely the same manner, under extreme and unrelenting pressure, with the specific aim, not only of doing it well, but of doing it the same way, every time that knife meets board or a pan clangs down on a flat-top? Not that that's a bad thing. To the contrary, that trendy new place you've been gagging to try, the innumerable souls saved by much-needed hangover brunches, and every great sushi bar all depend on it. Can you imagine playing Russian roulette with the crust at your favorite pizza joint, the temperature of your steak, or the hardness of your egg yolk? Take away the obsessive cooks, and we'd all be eating Swanson's Hungry Man or instant ramen with a plastic spork.

All of which is a roundabout way of rationalizing my third installment of Why I'm Trying To Make Perfect Mac-n-Cheese. My wife will testify to the mountains of grated cheese, the errors like some pagan fortune engraved in burnt milk at the bottom of a sauce pot, the sweet, nutty smell of flour frying in butter that filled the house as I worked my way through v1.0 (a white version, based on Italian cheeses), on into v2.0 (a cheddar-like orange version, with breadcrumb topping), and - finally - to where I am today, Mac-n-Cheese, Cheese, and More Cheese (v3.0), wherein I learned that, unlike Crisco or tickles, if some is good, then more is better.

I can't claim that my perfect mac-n-cheese will also be yours; we may, and likely do, have different ideas about the Platonic ideal of this American classic, as heterogeneous as it is ubiquitous. I can, however, state definitively that I'll not try to make a better one, because this bad boy - all gooey, creamy, sharp, melted, cheesy goodness, with layers of richly textured pasta, glowing with a natural orange that Kraft's chemical engineers would envy, and infused with a distinctly adult intensity and depth of flavor - is, as far as my palate is concerned, the shit. My kitchen, my blog, my palate - get on board, or get your own! Seriously, I think it's the benchmark that matters in a project such as this: You need to be able to see and taste clearly, to define without ambiguity or waffling, precisely what it is that you're trying to do. If your ideal is warm in the middle, or you're certain that chocolate pudding means milk chocolate, then I probably can't help you, but that shouldn't stop you from trying to perfect it anyway. You just need to accept that, like my ideal my mac-n-cheese, the elusive version behind the shadows on the cave of your palate remains intensely personal.

All that being said, if you love mac-n-cheese (and if you don't, well, you may want to get "help"), I can't recommend strongly enough that give this one a shot. It's a bit of a pain in the ass, particularly for so pedestrian a dish, and one for which a far more modest effort can still produce acceptable results. But this isn't about acceptable, it's about perfect, and that means there are a few more corners not to cut, longer blocks to traverse. (In truth, you could cook almost the same dish with a lot less hassle by skipping the onion brulee, the milk-poaching of the pasta, and the layering of the noodles. It will still kick ass, but inevitably you'll be left wondering whether merely near-perfection was worth the time saved. Still and all, better to skip those steps than never to have made this dish.)

Mac-n-Cheese, Cheese, and More Cheese (v3.0)

A typical Onion Brulee in pan

Bring a gallon of salted whole milk to a gentle simmer (don't scorch it - if you do, throw it out and start over, it will be irredeemable and will ruin the entire dish) in a pasta pot and prep a half a sweet (Vidalia, Maui, Walla Walla) onion and make an onion brulee: Stud the onion with a few cloves, put a single bay leaf in a knife-slit in the top, and grill it in a plan until the onion begins to soften and the underside turns a deep caramel color. Preheat a 350F oven.
Grate 1+1/3 pound of aged Mimolette and 1/3 pound each of cave-aged Gruyere, Appenzeller, and yellow American cheeses (grate the American if off a block, but slices are fine as-is) cheeses and, once the onion is done, add it to 6 cups of whole milk and warm it up (it doesn't need to boil but it does need to be hot, or the sauce will get lumpy). While the milk and onion are warming, cook 1/2 cup of flour into 3/4 cup of butter for a light blonde roux in a sauce pot.
Add two pounds (it might be 1kg, depending on the brand) of high quality boxed penne (preferably not regate), three whole, peeled cloves of garlic, and some white pepper corns to the pasta pot and poach the pasta until just shy of al dente: If it's a good Italian brand, you'll want to take it off about 1 minute before the lower end of their suggested cooking range (it should be just barely too undercooked to eat, as this will allow it to finish cooking in the sauce). Stir the pasta from time to time to prevent the noodles from sticking to each other (the milk makes this a little trickier than normal).
While the pasta is cooking, make the cheese sauce; Whisk the hot, onion-infused milk into the roux, in order to make a thick bechamel. If it lumps a little, don't stress, we'll strain it out later. Bring up to a gentle boil, back off the heat, and season with salt, white pepper, and nutmeg (something like a and 1/8 teaspoon each nutmeg and pepper, bu you'll need to adjust to taste - it should be neither salty nor peppery nor bland, with just the slightest background note of baking spice from the nutmeg). Whisk in 1 teaspoon each of mustard powder and sweet (not hot) paprika (the paprika should have a rich, dark red color; if it looks dark brown and dirty, it's either too old or of poor quality). Grind a small pinch of saffron threads between your fingers and stir in. In addition to flavor, the mustard-paprika-saffron seasoning is the secret to a great color. Finally, once the base for the sauce has been finished, stir in 1lb of the Mimollette and all of the Gruyere, Appenzeller, and American cheeses, working in large handfuls. When the sauce is uniformly blended and smooth, check the seasoning, and turn off the heat. If it has any lumps, or hard ends of cheese, or anything else that is not uniformly smooth, run it through a chinois or fine-mesh strainer.
Either during or after making the sauce, drain the pasta when finished, making sure to remove the garlic cloves and peppercorns. Shake the noodles gently so that they don't clump together.
In order to assemble the casserole, lightly butter a 9x13 baking dish, and alternate single layers of pasta and sauce, and beginning and ending with a layer of sauce. When laying down the pasta, line up the little pencils end to end in neat, parallel rows, alternating direction by 90 degrees - check out the picture. (Yes, it's a pain, but it looks really cool and, more importantly, allows the final product to set up and to be cut in neat shapes for service.) After the last row of pasta, add an extra thick layer of sauce, and then top it with the final 1/3lb of the grated Mimolette. (Note, based on your exact baking dish, pasta quantity, evaporation while cooking, and personal touch, you may or may not use all of the pasta, sauce or both - it's not a big deal, just make sure that each layer of pasta is covered and that you begin and end with sauce, the rest will take care of itself.)
Bake at 350F for 20-25 minutes, until bubbling up the sides. Remove, let rest for 10 minutes, return to the oven and broil the top until golden brown and bubbly - this will ensure that you can serve neat, "set" pieces, that they food is piping hot, and a cheesy crust on top, all important features, as long as we're going for "perfect".

Layering pasta and cheese in rows

Just Three (Leftovers): Rib Eye, Mac-n-Cheese, Onion Marmalade

2010-09-03T12:20:00.000-07:00

Stove-top Rib Eye, basted in Butter and Fresh Herbs

A clear violation of my self-imposed rules of "Just Three", using leftover like this, but the principal advantage of blogging, and self-imposed rules generally, lies rooted in the simple fact that one may ultimately do whatever one wishes. Of course, your readers may kvetch, but that's part of the game.

I could drape my transgression with pearls of wisdom and wit, or I could lean on my earlier arguments (e.g., here, and here) that leftovers play a fundamental role in the kitchen - the avoidance of waste, the efficiency of leveraging time already invested, and, above all, the enforced discipline of making something new out of something old - but the simple truth is that I cooked for company last Saturday night and one of the invited couples was a late-day no-show. Ergo, come Sunday, I had a spare steak (a rib eye from Painted Hills, who really do things right, by the way) and several cubic meters of seriously high-density Mac-n-Cheese (recipe forthcoming from the thread started here). I was also pretty sure I had some more of my spiced onion marmalade somewhere on an upper deck, and a plan came together, a plan with the elusive trifecta of zero prep, zero shopping, and a single pan.

Stove-top Rib Eye with Spiced Onions and Mac-n-Cheese

Get a good rib eye. Make sure it's thick - less than an inch and you'll struggle to get a crust on the outside and keep it rare and juicy on the inside. Try to get one that was grass fed, humanely raised, nicely marbled. Or buy whatever you want, I'm not a zealot about it, but it will taste better, be better for you, and let you sleep easier knowing your cow had a nice life before being brutally slaughtered for your dinner.
Take the mac-n-cheese out of the fridge cold, and cut it into cylinders using a biscuit cutter. Warm them - SLOWLY, or the cheese sauce will break - in the oven. Maybe 250? Or, horror of horros, nuke 'em on low power. Warm the onions (and yes, a microwave is perfectly acceptable for this task, just be sure to stir them afterward).
While the pasta is warming, get a cast iron pan good and hot (the rarer you like your meat, the hotter), and season both sides of the steak liberally with kosher salt and pepper. Put a knob of butter in the pan and add the stead as soon as the butter foams. Toss a few sprigs of rosemary and thyme and a couple cloves of whole, peeled cloves of garlic in the pan while the steak is cooking - this will smell incredibly good, and adds a subtle but impossibly good aroma and background flavor to the meat. Once you turn the steak, baste it repeatedly with the herb-infused butter and fat in the pan.
Do not, not, NOT overcook the steak - it will taste crap, and it's an insult to the animal that died for your pleasure. Also, remember that it will continue to cook as it rests (and it must rest - good discussion here). Please try to avoid the temptation to cut the damn thing to see what it looks like; use a probe if you must but, if you're going to cook steaks, you need to get over the temperature thing and just go by the feel of it when you press down gently (you can gauge the done-ness of most proteins by comparing how it responds to pressure to the flesh of your thumb muscle, or whatever that muscle is called, as shown here, although you'll have to tweak those guidelines to your own hand and musculature).
After the steak has rested, slice thinly and layer on the plate, alongside a mac-n-cheese cylinder and a quenelle of the warmed onion marmalade.

Just Three: Strawberries, Tomatoes, Balsamic

2010-09-02T09:22:00.000-07:00

Cruising the Tuesday market with my youngest daughter, under strict orders to return home with the makings of a salad but little other guidance, we walked by Lou Preston's stall, and were stopped in our tracks by Lou's strawberries. As a rule, I'm not a big fan of strawberries, finding them a poster child for the over-engineered style of supermarket fruit: Big, firm, nice to look at, but overly dry and hard to the tooth and utterly devoid of taste. On Tuesday, however, with the oblique angle of the late day sun glancing off their perfectly ripe, almost impossibly red skins, Lou's teeming baskets of rubescent little berries were like traffic lights stopping our egress down the aisle.

Farmer's markets are all about quality over quantity, and the rest of the stall was a case study: Small, compact, efficient, and I wanted to eat everything in it, the rainbow-in-a-box of plump tomatoes, the short and squat sweet peppers and the long, lean, twisting, and vaguely sinister fiery ones, the progressive shading of green into crimson and yellow tracking the late-season maturation of the fruit. On the corner of the table, a wicker basket full of crusty sourdough loaves, labeled "country white", but, to my taste, more closely resembling a dense, chewy version of the classic French miches, with its distinctive tang of rye flour. (Etymological specificity notwithstanding, I took a loaf home. It barely lasted through breakfast the next day.)

Anyway, back to dinner, and our latest installment of "Just Three". Armed with strawberries of such high sugar content, I wanted something with a bit of bite to provide ballast to the dish: Green Zebra heirlooom tomatoes (the little guys in the upper left corner of the picture), with higher acidity and more tartness than most of their heirloom cousins, would balance the flavor profile and a splash of color at the same time. Now, strawberries and tomatoes may or may not sound odd to you - they are both fruits, after all - but the what makes the match particularly interesting is that the tomato is a berry, while the strawberry is not: A botanist will insist that most of what we instinctively classify as berries (with the notable exception of the blueberry, which is a true berry) actually comprises a peripherally related cousin-class called aggregate fruit (many little fruits grouped together), while tomatoes (and bananas, which always surprises me)with their fruit, comprised of flesh from a single ovary, are true berries. Lest you think that's the end of the story, the strawberry is, in fact, neither berry nor aggregate fruit, but is instead an accessory fruit, in which the edible portion has not been produced from the ovary (apparently, the little bunches of seeds are the true "fruit" of the strawberry, but I don't really get that).
The rest, as they say, is history, because I was now short one, and only one, ingredient, and there is no more classic accompaniment to either strawberries or tomatoes than balsamic vinegar. You could make a reasonable case that balsamic vinegars, ubiquitous throughout professional and home kitchens alike, have developed into something of a crutch, and I'd likely agree. Certainly, when encountered in excess (and in increasingly suspect applications, such as a heavy-handed drizzle on the cloyingly sweet, sticky pizza I recently had the misfortune to order), their oaky sweetness has a tendency to become monolithic and wearing on the palate. Still and all, for my money, you'll not often go wrong if you drizzle balsamic vinegar on your strawberries or tomatoes (I would almost always add olive oil and certainly salt and pepper to the latter, although not to the former, and not in combination, as in this "salad").

I served this as a dessert, to rave reviews from a 10- and an 8-year old with particularly finicky, and not wholly adventurous tastes, so I'm thinking it's pretty solid.

Strawberry-Tomato 'Salad' with Balsamic Syrup

Pour a quarter cup (this is for about 4 plates) of good balsamic vinegar into a small sauce pan and reduce to a syrupy consistency. Watch the heat carefully - balsamic vinegar scorches easily, and even before then, with all the sugar, it will turn into caramel, which you can't work with (if it starts to foam, start over, because by the time it cools, it'll be a hard, sticky mess).
While the vinegar is reducing, wash the fruit and cut the stems off the strawberries perpendicular to their long axis (i.e., so that they will stand straight up when plated on the cut side). Cut the Green Zebra into uniform small or medium dice (I cut them small and plated them in piles, but it turned out they were a little tricky to eat; I think I'd cut them larger next time, and keep the fingers out of the sticky vinegar drizzle).
Once the vinegar syrup starts to cool and thicken, drizzle or splatter the plate and arrange the fruit on top (do it in that order, it'll look cleaner).

Just Three: Cornmeal, Ham, & Cheese.

2010-09-01T13:04:00.000-07:00

Polenta with Crispy Serrano Ham and Melted Raclette

I'm going to try something new and sort of gimmicky: I'm going to see how many different dishes I can make, using just three ingredients.

The idea came in response to the frustration of cooking for my kids. Don't get me wrong: I love, love, to cook for, and especially with, my children; I find great joy in bringing children into the kitchen and watching them learn to cook, and I believe strongly that it is every parent's responsibility to help their littles learn what real food tastes like, what tastes good to them, what doesn't, and why. Nevertheless, when the homework hasn't been finished, the bath is getting cold, and our routine is less off-track than it is careening-off-the-rails into some life-imitating-art version of Wiley Coyote piloting a locomotive into a swan dive off the rim of the Grand Canyon, I will readily confess that I find preparing three separate versions of a dish, just to accommodate this week's litany of idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, exceedingly trying.

I recently found myself staring down the barrel of yet another Monday night meal (Mondays are always the hardest, for me, maybe it's the hangover from cooking fun stuff straight from the market all weekend; or perhaps the kids are grumpy with the first homework assignments of the week; and of course, there are lunches to be made; the TV is crap; all in all, I suppose it's mainly that the whole family has lived in some semblance of Party Mode since we all got let out on Friday) and figured, why not put the question back to them? I did a quick inventory of the cupboards and laid out the simplest (for me) and most likely to succeed (for them) options: The ubiquitous pasta-with-butter; some leftover mac-n-cheese; a breakfast burrito; polenta; or, barring one of the above, go get yourself a bowl and a spoon and have some cold cereal, because I'm done. The polenta took it by several lengths, leaving me with the sort of problem I like best: How should I transform a simple ingredient into a main-course dish with a minimum of fuss?

Another quick scouring of lower and forgotten drawers, a few experimental unveilings of mysterious shapes shrouded in plastic wrap or foil, and a quick mental palate-check succeeded in coughing up a few slices of still-good Serrano ham and a hunk of really stinky (in a good way - the unique ability of fine French cheeses to make "gym-locker aroma" a compliment), washed-rind Raclette.Without really thinking too much about it, certainly without any conscious attempt to use only three ingredients, a dish came together:

Polenta with Serrano Crisps and Raclette

Prepare a basic polenta, as described on the package or here. I've heard that you can make acceptable polenta with a "no-stir" method, and Marcella Hazan agrees, but I've not tried it; I do know that if you do it the right way, it takes a little work, but it's not hard, and the result is outstanding.
While the polenta is cooking, separate several slices of the ham (Serrano is particularly good, but you could use a Prosciutto or any number of thinly sliced charcuterie and get much the same effect), tear it into pieces, and saute it over low to medium-low heat, either in a nonstick skillet or a lightly oiled fry pan. Flip and toss the meat from time to time, breaking it up with the edge of a spatula, until it is lightly crispy (it will scorch easily, so be careful with heat). Reserve on a paper towel.
Grate the Raclette (again, it needn't be Raclette, but try to use something with a pungent flavor and good melting qualities) across a microplane or the smaller side of a box grater.
When it's finished, mound the polenta in the middle of a pasta bowl, cover with a handful of the cheese while the cereal is still piping hot, and top with the ham chips.

Piles of Possibility / Farming on Freeways

2010-09-01T09:06:00.000-07:00

Farmers Zoey & Jay (photo credit www.exploratorium.edu)

Walking by a cracked and decrepit freeway on-ramp - reclaimed from the morning commute and relegated to the urban wasteland by the Loma Prieta earthquake - two San Franciscans, thinking more like old-school farmers than new-age city dwellers, look at the cracked blacktop bleeding with weeds and saw, incredibly, an orchard. And the topsoil, so manifestly absent in the windswept concrete col, in which these imagined trees would sink their roots? Heaps of rotting compost, strap-compressed cardboard, leftovers from nearby markets, and landscaper clippings - organic detritus, otherwise sentenced to serve out a capital term as landfill, from across the City.

The best bit of the slide show, the whole point really, is the lens through which the farmers see this hard, raw wasteland: Where you and I see trash and blight, they see "piles of possibility". Making soil out garbage. Growing fruit trees on a freeway. Why? Because these farmers believe that everyone - even those of us that, by choice or happenstance, live in high-density, high-land-cost forests of concrete, glass, and steel - should be able to grow at least some of the food that they eat, and that vacant space, by the miraculous fact of its mere presence, offers an invitation (an obligation?) to do so.

The punchline, o at least rwhat resonates most deeply about the project for me, is its preordained impermanence: This orchard can only ever be transitory, because, as we all know, the Bay Area's great armies of cars march through their morning commute with all the inevitability of a glacial ice floe. The trees will be uprooted; the soil scraped away; the pavement once again returned to its urban birthright as. This is not speculation: The City will take the land back - there is no question about this - and yet (or perhaps because) the farmers persist, and until such time as the rubber of our tires replace the soles of their work boots, people will, of all things, eat off that land. I don't know about you, but I think that is just uber cool.

The slide show will eat up about 5 minutes out of your life - which, truth be told, at about 4 minutes, 30 seconds longer than I typically allot to any given byte of digital cellulose, is quite a bit. But it will repay your investment every time you pass a dusty vacant lot, or wonder what to do with your terrace, your windowsill, or that weedy scrap of long-forgotten dirt in the far left corner of your yard.

The Intransitivity of Taste: Pickles, Cheese, and Chocolate

2010-08-31T12:48:00.000-07:00

Which of these does not belong?

Pickles, cheese, and chocolate: Three ingredients, three possible pair-wise combinations, two really good and interesting tastes, and one impossibly disgusting mouthful of gag reflex (no prizes for guessing which). If I like chocolate with cheese, and I like cheese with pickles, why don't I like chocolate with pickles? I mean, other than the painfully obvious - in point of fact, it tastes even worse than it sounds - why the apparent lack of transitivity?

As an amateur cook and a professional economist, I find this apparent logical inconsistency of the human palate fascinating. If you ever signed up for an economics course - or, like my family, found yourself living with an economist - one of the very first things you learned was how economists think consumers make choices, what it means to assume that people are rational, and the behavioral implications of that basic assumption. If you study economics for long enough, you'll find that these first-semester models form the bedrock for pretty much everything that follows, from the ubiquitous demand curve to sophisticated general equilibrium models of the macroeconomy. Grouped under the catch-all heading of "choice theory", these models are simple, elegant, and powerful. However, just like the Brooklyn Bridge, Newtonian physics, and the portfolios of residential mortgage backed securities held by banks, they tend to fracture, and even topple over in spectacular fashion, if you tinker too much with the underlying assumptions.

Newton needed his Three Laws of Motion: Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest; for every application of force, there is an equal and opposite reaction; and of course, the simple little formula that put man on the moon, Force = Mass X Acceleration. That bridges generally remain standing and astronauts usually return to earth constitutes a powerful argument in favor of Sir Isaac. Less so, the big banks: To nearly everyone's (although, importantly, not absolutely everyone's) surprise, home prices actually could go down as well as up, the Upper West Side and Upper East Side of Manhattan, despite the fact that New Yorkers think you need a visa to travel between them, were not, in fact, two uncorrelated real estate markets separated by a big lawn, and - this being one of the Big Lessons of the past two years - if you violate these two basic assumptions, then a multi-trillion-dollar edifice will collapse on your collective heads like the crescendo of a James Cameron movie.

Economists, for their part, require "reflexivity" (if good A and good B are identical, I will be indifferent between them), "monotonicity" (if I like A, then I prefer more A to less), "completeness" (faced with a choice of what to consume, I am capable of making a decision), and - the centerpiece of today's conundrum - "transitivity" (if I like A more than B, and B more than C, then I also like A more than C). Transitivity, at least, seems not to apply to the sensation of taste. But why?

I recently read a review of a fascinating book called The Flavor Thesaurus, by Niki Segnit (at least I hope it fascinates me, as I'm planning on purchasing the thing new and in hardcover). Her basic them, as I understand it, is to break down as many foods as possible into 99 distinct components (grassy; fruity; earthy; zesty...), and then to consider why some of the 4,851 possible combinations thereof taste good, while some - like chocolate and pickles - make you, and I now know this from bitter, personal experience, wish you were sucking on a day-old sock, or worse. I believe, but cannot yet confirm, that Ms Segnit discusses the chemistry as well as the gustatory dimensions of the problem, thereby providing a molecular basis for food pairings and, in the process, suggesting new and interesting things to try together, with a more scientific roadmap than my usual home cook's idea closet, filled as it is with ideas spun from too much wine and half-remembered meals prepared by chefs of "cutting edge" status, or some such.

What I can't say, at least note yet, is whether the intransitivity of taste will ultimately figure prominently in the theoretical foundations of classical microeconomic theory, or whether we could have avoided the mortgage meltdown simply by acknowledging that pickles and chocolate really suck when you put them in your mouth at the same time. Sociologists and psychologists (and - increasingly - behavioral economists as well) will debate the appropriateness of the "rationality" assumption, and - increasingly - it seems to me that they have the data on their side. Certainly, I've come across legions of irrational fools in my life (I even live next door to a couple of them right now), and that is only speaking from direct, personal experience; I've not bothered to so much as footnote the broader historical record of human folly, much less the consummate evil of the modern terrorist.

I can say, however, that I would like to know a bit more about how our sense of taste works, and why I nearly vomited cheese, chocolate and pickles all over the butcher's block. I'm hoping the book is really cool and I get to do a bit more of this.

Pickles, Cheese, and Chocolate

Secure a few chunks of bitter chocolate (I used 85% cacao), dark, no milk - dairy is a different cup of tea entirely.
Choose a stinky, wash-rind cheese (I used French Raclette).
Slice up a good dill pickle (I used Alexander Valley Gourmet's Spicy Bread and Butter pickles - the sweet, hot, vinegar-y tastes made the results literally pop on your tongue).
First try the two combinations with cheese (doesn't matter which, but cleanse your palate in between). The stinky cheese and pickle is just awesome - the acidic, sugary crunch of the pickle really contrasts nicely with the musty, creamy cheese. Now try the pickle-and-chocolate. Sounds weird, but really it isn't (even somewhat "conventional" - here is a blog that describes a whole "tasting" of cheese, chocolate, and wine at a well respected restaurant); the bitter, earthy chocolate fits nicely with barnyard impression from the cheese. Finally, steel yourself, and take a bite of the pickle and chocolate together. WTF!

What Would Mae West Say? A Tomato Manifesto.

2010-08-30T13:49:00.000-07:00

Lemon Boys and Pesto, on Cranberry-Semolina Sourdough

I thought it was Mae West who said something about good sex being great, and bad sex being pretty good too, but I can't find the attribution, so maybe I'm wrong; apparently of similar mind, I did come across one Jimmy Williams (and again, I'm honestly not sure which, but my money is on the old Red Sox manager), who said, “Sex is like money, golf and beer - even when it's bad, it's good.” Whatever the case, I'm going to argue that sex is a really lousy analogy for tomatoes.

Because the thing about tomatoes is this: There is perfect, there is nearly perfect, and there is wholly unacceptable. "Middle ground" is a term better reserved for debating the relative merits of cooking beef to rare vs. medium-rare specifications, or figuring out how to get your tween daughter to clean her room. No, with tomatoes, the territory between "good" and "bad" is more like a DMZ: It's right there in front of you, it's clear and well-defined, and if you spend too much time inside it, you're likely to end up shot. Or, if we're talking about the kitchen, with a mouthful of mealy, watery, flavorless red mush of only the most casual, and likely offensive, relation to what your palate had greedily anticipated. Come to think, maybe that's the better analogy: If your favorite, wisened grandparent, full of love, spark, and pithy bits of folksy wisdom, were a succulent, ripe heirloom cultivar, then the drab supermarket tomato, mass-farmed for the ketchup-and-shitty-pasta-sauce market, picked sufficiently close to granite-like hardness that it will endure hundreds (if not thousands) of miles of open roads, piled en masse atop eighteen-wheeler bin trucks, without suffering so much as a blemish, is a bit like that woebegone uncle or black sheep cousin in a Chevy Chase family vacation movie (or, perhaps, from your own Thanksgiving table). You know that if you actually went out and ran a DNA test, it would confirm that he does in fact share genetic code with the rest of the family, but no empirical evidence, physical nor behavioral, exists to support that conclusion.

To bite into a fine tomato- one grown from an old school cultivar with a funny name like Purple Cherokee, Early Girl, or Green Zebra, and then picked from the vine within a day or two of true physiological ripeness - dressed with nothing but a pinch of good salt, is to hear a the voice of a properly tuned instrument: It attacks your palate, demanding attention, with notes of acid, sweet, and salty in varying degrees of dominance; it is simultaneously firm and contained (as your tooth pierces the skin), and supple and explosive (as the flesh comes apart in your mouth). Maybe there is a bit of Mae West in the tomato after all, so long as it's a good tomato? Never forget that the tomato is a fruit, and, really, it ought to taste a lot more like a fruit than a vegetable. But the not-good tomato, that is another story entirely, it is the festering swamp to the crystalline mountain lake, the yellow jacket to the honey bee, the mani/pedi to the ingrown nail. The skin is either as taught as a drum and nondifferentiable from its own flesh, or slack and loose as a failed botox, a wrinkled skin slipping across the mealy flesh underneath; the flesh will be hard and grainy if it has only just reached been unloaded from the truck; or it may be soft and farinaceous, if it's been on left on the shelf for too long. I'm not sure which version is worse, but it doesn't really matter, because they all suck. And I haven't even talked about the flavor: The most optimistic impression on the palate will be that of an unadulterated lack of flavor, because whatever flavors it does possess - bitter, green and vegetal - will, like the ne'er-do-well cousin come home for the holidays, inexorably offend.

Fortunately, there is an easy answer: Don't Eat Out-of-Season Tomatoes. We are, here and now and forever, adding this to the Proximal Kitchen's semi-official manifesto of eating. Or, to paraphrase the child-labor advocates over at Nike, Just Don't Do It. If it were up to me, I'd have everyone follow the approach of the crew over at the Healdsburg Bar and Grill who, during the many long months of Tomato Winter, will only put a tomato on your burgers if you force them to do it, over the chef's printed admonition on the menu, and at a grossly inflated charge (presumably intended to compensate the kitchen for the forced abrogation of the cook's Hippocratic oath only to serve you food that they actually believe will taste good as much as it is to disincent your poor decision).

Saturday's Tomato Matinee, couretesy of Soda Rock Farms

The good news, at this particularly proximal moment, is that our local tomato season, has truly sprung. Not exactly on-time, however. More like, Finally. As in, Finally, it's about [expletive] time, because I live where some of the finest tomatoes in the known universe grow, and it's just plain wrong to make me wait until late August to get my fix. To live in Sonoma County is hardly to subsist amongst the forced deprivation of an extended tour on a nuclear submarine or offshore oil rig; I could certainly purchase the irredeemable supermarket facsimile year-round, and I've seen a few, peripherally local, heirlooms, since the last real vintage in the fall of 2009; but, as I've already tried to explain with a vigor equal to its , I won't - I can't - subject my family's taste buds to such effrontery, and neither should you to yours. Finally, however, the farmer's market is literally teeming with tomatoes, at the stalls of the dedicated specialists (Soda Rock Farms), as well those of the many other outstanding growers I'm lucky enough to shop with (Wyeth Acres, Preston Vineyards, and Early Bird Farm, to name but a few). I'm even getting regular contributions from my own garden, and I really suck at growing tomatoes.

I'll cook all sorts of things with tomatoes over the next couple of months, and you'll hear about some, if not most, of it here. Once in a while, I may get a little cutesy and try to dress them up a bit. For years I've been tempted, but failed to muster the courage, to mount an assault on Alain Passard's legendary tomate farcie confit aux douze saveurs at L'Arpege. Still and all, I will typically treat a tomato much the way I'd treat a peach, erring on the side of simplicity over complexity, mainly in an effort simply not to screw up a good thing. However, unlike a peach - the peach being one of those rare foods that seems almost impossible to improve either by fiddling with or adorning it - the tomato is a remarkably versatile foil, tolerating heat to cold, playing condiment to centerpiece, presentable from highly processed to nearly naked, served as an accompanying element in a dish of anything from seafood to steak to cheese. The first tomatoes of the season, however, deserve a special respect, a period of honest assessment and contemplation, and this - and here, I'm sure, Mae is with me - seems best done naked, or at least nearly so.

Thus, as we continue eat our way through the first few batches of ripe little gems from our own garden, the dominant themes resonate around salads and sandwiches. The variations are truly limitless, but I really liked the most recent incarnation, as pictured at the top of this post, so here you go:

Heirloom Tomato Sandwiches on Cranberry-Semolina with Pesto, Olive Oil, and Salt

You could use virtually any tomatoes here, and - ideally - I think you'd serve a few different ones, both for variety of color and flavor. A red-toned beauty (Purple Cherokee, Pink Lady, or Early Girl), a yellow (Tangerine or Lemon Boy), and a green (Green Zebra) would provide a gorgeous array of color as well as a distinctive breadth of flavors, sweetness, and acidity. Similarly with the bread, you could use anything, really, but a lightly toasted, crusty sourdough works particularly well. I hadn't planned it ahead of time, but this one - Cranberry-Semolina from the Full Circle Bakery in Penngrove - really worked well, with the chewy, sweet-tart bite of the cranberries adding just the right balance against the acidic tomatoes and the licorice notes in the pesto.

Toast some slices of the bread, preferably a crusty sourdough with a baked-in dried fruit (cranberries, apricots... nuts in the bread, for some reason, sound unpleasant to me, although I can't say why, because nuts and fruits go well together, there are already nuts in pesto... hmmmm...)
Top each slice of bread with a thick slice of tomato - ideally, a few different color - and then top each slice of tomato with a small quenelle of pesto. (Why bother with a quenelle? Because it takes almost zero effort and the uniform shape will look nice against the slightly irregular backdrop of the heirloom tomato and crusty bread, and because it will show off the effort you put into your pesto.)
Sprinkle with fleur de sel and drizzle the plate with olive oil, preferably from Dry Creek, such as that from Preston or the pricier, but unimpeachable (qualitatively speaking), Da Vero.

Classic Pesto (from M Hazan)
I've talked at length about pesto and its Mediterranean cousin, pistou here, and I like all sorts of variations, and many have a particular place (with cheese; without cheese; for fish; for pasta Genovese), but nothing - and I've made and consumed many hundreds in my life - is ever quite the equal of the classic Italian variety, and no version seems quite so perfect as the simple food-processor method of M Hazan's, described accurately, along with some pretty decent comments and observations, here, in case you don't have the book (Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, which, by the way, is one of my few "must have" cookbooks, certainly a Top 10, maybe a Top 5).

Hazan's is so easy, and so perfect, that I can not possibly add anything without also diluting it. However, I will emphasize that, if you're going to make pesto, in addition to following Ms Hazan to the letter, you must heed a few basic rules (these are, of course, common to all cooking, but the simplicity and intensity of pesto offers even less slack than usual):

Use good basil. You really ought to grow your own - it's cheap and easy, even for a challenged gardener like me. Make sure it's the Genovese varietal: There are many basils, but you only want to make classic pesto with the particularly aromatic Genovese basil and its distinctive note of licorice.
Use good olive oil (it needn't be your best - Costco's organic extra virgin is just fine, in fact), something with leaning more toward the grassy style, rather than a really buttery one.
Use only freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano and Pecorino Romano cheeses. Seriously, don't buy the waxy, shrink-wrapped, Swiss-cheese-tasting crap from the market, don't buy it pre-grated in tubs from Trader Joe's, and never, not ever, shall you pour grated cheese from a shiny green can.
Be careful about your garlic: First, try to find a grower that offers more than one kind, and that can describe the difference. Some are just way too hot and spicy. Rose de Lautrec is my go-to garlic if I can only have one, but obviously whatever the Italians classically use for pesto would be fine. Just be careful, because they are not, not at all, all the same thing. This extends to measurements: What, precisely, is a "clove" of garlic? The same bulb could have cloves varying in size by a factor of 4; and different types of garlic could have their heat vary by a factor of 4; so you could have a recipe calling for "2 cloves" and it could mean 2 or 32, from one extreme to the other. There is no way to deal with this uncertainty except to learn to do it by taste, to learn the garlic you use, to learn how much for your pesto.
Don't forget to season it, but don't risk over-salting until all the cheeses are incorporated, as Romano in particular is very salty.

The only other thing

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

2010-08-25T11:35:00.000-07:00

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.

The thing about a garlic-and-rosemary scented lamb is this: In the absence of the garlic, something important - depth, spice, aroma - will be missing, and the dish will fall short of its potential. But I had neither time nor resources to reconfigure my dish, other than to look around the kitchen and see what was to readily to hand. I can't say why (if only because I don't know why) but chocolate came to mind. Perhaps it was the first time that I had herb-infused chocolates, easily a decade before such things were de rigeur, from the brilliant Joel Durand in St. Remy en Provence (see the letter "R" under the "Alphabet"); or maybe it was the ragu of game with Barolo and bitter chocolate at Scalini Fedeli, with its peripheral echo of my lamb and Syrah, that I still remember from an anniversary dinner with my wife several years ago, before they lost - correctly, in my opinion, their Michelin star.

Whatever the case, I dropped the garlic in deference to Ms C, and reworked my recipe around Syrah, Rosemary, and Bitter Chocolate, and set to work on garnishes. I had already planned on using some preserved Meyer lemons from the folks at the Cheese Shop, and the salty-citrus bite of the lemons only sounded better and better against the chocolatey undertones that were now to be a part of the sauce. The only remaining puzzle at this point was my other garnish, a gremolata, which contains a bunch of garlic and is classically paired with Osso Bucco. But again, the forced discipline was also the liberator: Lamb and mint jelly at my grandmother's house... chocolate and mint, in all its myriad and uniformly tasty variations... why not substitute mint for the parsley, drop the garlic, and call it minty gremolata? If you spend enough time mixing ingredients together and tasting the results, you can usually tell when something is going to work, and I just knew this would fly. So there you have it: A new dish, certainly more interesting and arguably just better than what I had planned, all because I couldn't do what I wanted and had to deal with it.

Braised Shoulder of Lamb with a Bitter Chocolate- Syrah Reduction, Preserved Meyer Lemons, and Minty Gremolata

This dish is considerably more complicated than the vast bulk of what I do; frankly, it is something of a pain in the ass. But I did it, and I'm telling you, it will impress the heck out of your next dinner party.

Start with a 3lb (+/-) shoulder of lamb from a good local rancher (you could use a couple of shanks; I just used the shoulder to do something different, and because I knew I was going to pick the meat for replating anyway). Prepare as for a basic braise, with the following substitutions: (a) Use a Syrah-based wine, something stylistically similar to a Gigondas, with it's leathery, gamey notes; (b) Add a few sprigs of fresh rosemary to the braising liquids; and (c) add a couple of tablespoons of unsweetened chocolate, either melted into some of the cooking liquid or - easier - made into a paste from powdered baking chocolate and water. An untempered bitter chocolate, such as the 100% cacao from local purveyor Choco Vivo would work particularly well, and could simply be crumbled into the braise.
While the meat is cooking, cut the lemons into neat dice and prepare the minty gremolata: Mince up some fresh mint and mix gently with the zest of a lemon (preferably Meyer, to match the other garnish, and for its wonderful and not overly aggressive smell). Note that this can and should ideally be combined close to service, as the citrus will cook the mint.
When the meat is done and while it's resting, strain the liquids and reduce to a syrupy consistency, skimming for grease and impurities. Mount with a few chunks of cold butter to give it body and shine and adjust the seasoning with finely milled salt and pepper.
In order to plate, pick the meat from the bones and use a ring mold to set it neatly in the center of the plate. If you're feeling particularly motivated, or you already have some Onion Marmalade (recipe at bottom of that link) sitting around, first heat and then layer the onions thinly at the bottom of the ring mold - it's another step, but this is a very rich, dense dish, and the extra acidity does wonders for it. Finally, arrange some of the lemon dice, drizzle the sauce around the disc of lamb and top the lamb with a spoonful of the gremolata.

Cooking With Friends

2010-08-23T14:52:00.000-07:00

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.

Despite my undying enthusiasm for the popularity of sous-vide cooking, the technique (to say nothing of the required infrastructure) remain outside my culinary bandwidth. My inadequate bandwidth is hardly restricted to gently warmed, tightly monitored water baths - there are all sorts of interesting ways to cook that are either beyond my ken, my natural abilities, or simply strike me as an upside down cost/benefit analysis given my limited resources of time, money, and storage space - but offers up a perfect example of how and why collaboration can work effectively: I simple would not have made this dish (the dish in question being, as I understand it, a pork loin, dressed in bacon fat, and then cooked in the usual sous-vide fashion, cooled, and sliced), and yet it played perfectly off things that I would, and in fact did, cook (grilled cranberry-semolina bread from the Full Circle Baking Company, Pt Reyes Original Blue, and a home-made onion-cranberry marmalade, the recipe to which follows). The sweet spiciness of the onions, the salty tang of the cheese, and the melt-in-your-mouth richness of the pork, all contrasting with the hard crust of grilled semolina sourdough, combined to make, I have to say, one of the better sarnies I've had in quite some time.

So I let B do his thing (he absolutely killed it), let his cooking taking the driver's seat, and played off of that bass line: Add some thin slices of the cranberry-semolina bread to a grill pan for texture and color, layer with medallion-like slices of the pork loin, and topped each medallion with a dollop of the onion marmalade and a small chunk of blue cheese (the cheese and onions can easily overwhelm the delicate pork - a little goes a long way). Garnish with fresh thyme flowers or, as pictured here, lavender blossoms. Damn good finger sandwich.

And I never would have had it, had I not let someone else screw around in my kitchen.

Onion-Cranberry Marmalade (Adapted from T Colicchio, "Think Like a Cook")

Heat a large pan over medium-low heat and slice 4 medium onions, preferably Vidalia or Walla Walla.
Put a small amount of neutral fat in the pan - canola, peanut, or similar oil - and add the onions, along with few pinches of salt and a tablespoon of mixed spices (I used roughly equal proportions of cloves, ginger, nutmeg, and white pepper - the key is to incorporate some of those "baking spice" flavors without letting them become overpowering).
Sautee gently until the onions are all soft and begin to give up their water and shrink down in the pan. Do not let them caramelize or develop texture - they must remain soft and translucent.
Add about a half-cup of good balsamic vinegar, a quarter-cup of sugar, and a 1/2-1 cup (depending on what you want to serve it with) of dried cranberries. Turn the heat down to low, and cover the pan (it needn't be air tight, aluminum foil is fine). Continue to cook, checking and stirring occasionally, for at least an hour - probably close to 90 minutes. If the onions begin to dry out, taste them, and more balsamic vinegar or water, depending (they onions should take on a deep reddish brown color and should have a pronounced acidity, balanced by sweet spice).
Adjust the seasonings and cool. This is quite a lot of the stuff, but it should keep for weeks in the fridge.

Serve cold on pork or turkey sandwiches, in a stinky cheese tart, or warm over steak or game.

Palate Fail

2010-08-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

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".
But I do love my Peets. Starbucks may be a godsend in an airport or the middle of Interstate 5, but otherwise, you can keep your SBUX. But seriously - all those bitter, smoky, dark-chocolate flavors in a good cup of Peet's? If the price is that I lose some subtlety, that I should probably buy blends in preference to "single origins", that maybe there is just a hint of burnt? I will happily settle up on those terms, because everything else strikes me as watery or, worse, dirty. That being said, I can also recognize when I'm wrong, and in this case, I'm wrong - Peets uniformly roasts their beans for too long, or too hot, or both - I'm not sure which - in order to get their exceptionally dark roast. And while I love it, I also accept it for what it is, and more importantly, what it isn't: If I really cared about the terroir of coffee the way I do about wine, I would buy it from somebody like Blue Bottle, or our own local roaster, the Flying Goat: Both specialize in fair-trade, organic beans of the highest quality, emphasize the importance of individual terroirs, and - in order to express this specialization, both roast to a significantly lesser degree than Peets or any of their ilk.

The impetus for this particular post is that we just received a gift of Blue Bottle Yirgachefe from our good friends, the B's. I hadn't heard of Blue Bottle, but the B's, by any definition, remain unrepentant foodies, and I tend to take their views of local purveyors of just about anything that goes in my mouth quite seriously. Roast date? The 20th. Not bad, as my wife J brewed up our fine gift into an extremely fresh cup this morning. We dutifully let the water come off the boil; we patiently await the French press and tolerate its sludge; in short, we give this coffee whatever chances we can to show its true colors. The result? Pretty damned good, if you like it in all its medium-roasted, slightly dirty glory. It is more balanced, more complex, more unique than my Peets. But still and all, I'm sorry, but give me the black-as-night, stain-your-gums brew any day. I know I'm wrong, but I just like it that way.

Naughty and Nice: Salty Vodka Whipped Cream

2010-08-22T07:57:00.000-07:00

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)

Whip a half cup of heavy cream until stiff
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.
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.

Putting down roots

2010-08-20T09:09:00.000-07:00

Salad of Purple Cherokee, Green Zebra, & Roasted Peppers

I'm a slow learner. I can live with that, provided the emphasis ends up on the noun rather than its descriptor, at least in the main. You might think that slow learners would also be gradual learners, that the rate at which we assimilate knowledge might be in some sense proportional to the time it takes for the process to complete. You might think that, but you would be wrong, as I just learned from the tomato plant.

No, by far the more common experience is a long period of time spent hacking away at a thicket of ignorance, with far more heat than light to show for the effort, punctuated by occasional, if profound, moments of clarity in which the constant drone of spurious noise dies down, cause and effect delineate, and logical patterns emerge. Certainly, that was my experience with physics in high school, calculus in college, most of what I studied in graduate school, and virtually everything I've learned out in what I'll summarily dub the real world. Watching my youngest daughter learn to ride a bicycle this week, I strongly suspect that the same basic pattern is at work there, too, but whether that indicates an inherited flaw or an immutable law of human behavior ultimately makes no difference: The important thing - and this is equally as true of riding a bicycle as it is of basic calculus - is to get it. In the long run, getting it will eventually work out for you, provided of course that you do in fact get it.

Back to my case-in point: Tomatoes. The climate zone (14) in which I live should, by all rights, be tomato mecca: Cool nights and mornings, lots of sunshine, great soils, all very friendly to Mediterranean plants. So, for several years, I have dutifully planted a few tomato seedlings - classic beefsteak styles for burgers and salads, some Roma types for sauce. And for several years, I've grown mediocre tomatoes. Like, really mediocre, as in, often not worth eating. To add insult to injury, the best tomatoes I have ever in my life eaten are grown just up the valley from me, by Dan Magnuson of Soda Rock Farms. (To be fair, Dan's tomatoes are tied for first with a giant heirloom of impossible redness that I picked up at a farmer's market in Aix many years ago, one of my personal Proustian madeleines.) Years go by, each season's crop is as mediocre and fundamentally disappointing as its predecessor; I learn nothing.

So this year, I tried something different: I bought the best rootstock I could, from the guy that I know, with absolute certainty, grows great tomatoes - I bought big, beautiful, heirloom tomato seedlings from Dan. (You might think that that was an obvious solution and you may well be right; but you'd be forgetting that I'm a slow and episodic learner.) We just started picking the first of this year's crop - a year, by the way, characterized by unusual cool and generally lousy growing conditions - and, lo and behold, miracle of miracles, our tomatoes rock. They're not just good, they are frigging awesome. I got excited as soon as I bent down to pick the first one to ripen - a gorgeous Purple Cherokee - and I could smell ripe tomatoes, because the best guide to a fruit's flavor is how it smells before you even cut it; my confidence rose as the blade of my knife pierced the flesh, because you can judge tomato by the way it cuts (the skin should be taught but easily cut, the flesh should feel firm but offer no resistance); I was almost sure when the first slices fell away, and I saw the richness of the color and uniformity of texture all the way through. And then I tasted it and I knew: I grew a kick-ass tomato. A drizzle of olive oil, a dash of vinegar, a pinch of fleur de sel, a grind of pepper, and - feeling more than a little chuffed - a chiffonade of Genovese basil, also from our garden: If there's a finer salad with fewer ingredients, I'd love to know about it.

The moral of the story is that the quality of your rootstock matters. Like I said, this may not be news to you; it certainly doesn't strike me as particularly insightful. And yet, for years, despite all the accumulating evidence, I persisted in my belief that all this sunshine, all this great soil, would inevitably produce great tomatoes, and I went on planting mediocre seedlings, with what I now see were predictably mediocre results.

This year, I learned something. Maybe next year, I'll figure out how to apply the lesson to more than my tomatoes.

Too Much of a Good Thing? Mac-n-Cheese, v2.0

2010-08-19T10:45:00.000-07:00

All-American Super Cheesy Mac-n-Cheese

In our first post, we waxed philosophical on the gustatory wonder and sundry therapeutic benefits of a classic macaroni and cheese, but offered precious little in the way of actual cooking. On our next pass, we began to think about actually making the dish, and wondered about the the appropriateness of breadcrumb toppings, cheeses other than cheddar, and the optimal pasta shape. While the end result - ziti baked in a sauce of bechamel, provolone & parmigiano - was good, maybe even satisfying, it nevertheless fell short of transporting. And a truly classic mac-n-cheese must, above all else, transport us somewhere: Perhaps to a time when we were younger, or in circumstances more care-free, or maybe precisely where we are now, but with softer edges.

With this schmaltzy sentiment firmly ensconced, for this week's installment, I decided to try a riff on the undeniably classic, if not particularly gourmet, version from 1937 known simply as Kraft Macaroni and Cheese (or, if you're Canadian, Kraft Dinner). What could be more iconic than a lifeboat-orange, rib-gluing plate of Kraft? The problem, of course, is that it basically tastes like crap. Which is not surprising, considering you could probably whip up a box from the original 1937 production run and probably eat it without getting sick. Hey, give credit where it's due: I've fed it to my kids, more than once, and I invariably sneak a bite. So what I'm after is the essence of Kraft - a thick, creamy sauce; a blazing orange so rarely found in nature - but with the taste of real cheese, minus the food colorings, some texture to the pasta, and ideally a consistency a bit less like Elmer's.

The tricky part was the color: Even with loads of sharp cheddar, it's going to be a distinctly pale orange by the time you melt it into your bechamel (without which you won't get the right sauce). No substitute for primary research, so I took a quick trip down the cheese aisle, and lucked out: Mimolette. Mimolette - the hard, aged, dark-orange French take on Edam - is not one of my favorite cheeses, generally speaking; it has relatively little flavor until it's been aged at least 6 months, and then the texture becomes a bit hard to chew. However, for our purposes here, it seemed like an ideal candidate: Lots of color (naturally produced using annatto, by the way) and a sharp tang not unlike an aged cheddar.

I was worried about its melting properties, but figured to solve that by tempering it into the bechamel and rounding out the sauce with - insert horrified gasp here - processed "American" cheese. (How sad is it, by the way, that the only cheese whose proper name contains "American" is a "processed cheese product". No wonder the French send us all their Beaujolais Nouveau and wheels of unripened, characterless brie cheese.) It turns out that the processed cheese - e.g., "American cheese" - offers some distinct technical advantages to the aspiring builder of a great mac-n-cheese. Because processed cheese has been emulsified (with water, whey, and/or milk, typically), it melts smoothly and does not "break". Try to melt an aged, orange cheddar on its own and see what happens: Fats and solids separate, the melted cheese gets grainy, it's just plain nasty, and has no place in my mac-n-cheese. Still, I didn't want to serve a Cheese Whiz casserole, so I kept the proportions 2:1 in favor of the French.

For all this talk of Kraft, I still wanted to dress up the final product, to end up with an all-grown-up homage to the iconic childhood classic that resides in our collective cheesy consciousness, a dish for the 40-something toddler that lurks just beneath the surface of well-adjusted adults everywhere. To that end, I added a few bells and whistles, some of which you could probably short-cut around and not miss too much, but which, when taken together, transform the humble, baked casserole into a deeply complex, satisfying plate of pasta. And, while it's certainly several branches removed from where we started - with a blue cardboard box on the mac-n-cheese family tree - I think you'll agree that the family resemblance remains unmistakable. .

Mac-n-Cheese II

Turn on the oven and set a large pot of salted water for the pasta to boil, and make an onion brulee (for the life of me, I can't find a link to a simple description, so here's my own: To make onion brulee, split an onion in half, stud it with several cloves, and make a slit into which you slot a bay leaf. Drizzle with a little oil and put under a broiler until the onion begins to char. That's it.). As long as you're working under a broiler, quickly toast several thick-cut slices of sourdough bread. While the onion is in the oven, whisk together 1/2C (each of flour and butter) into a blonde roux.When the onion and the toast are out of the oven, set the temperature to 350F.
Scald two cups of whole milk with the onion brulee and cook the pasta (I used cavatappi in order to get the classic "elbow shape", but you could certainly use classic elbows; really, any tube-style pasta will do, it just depends how Kraft-like you want the final look and how you want it to set up for service. Don't overcook the pasta! If you're using a basic Italian boxed pasta like Barilla or De Cecco, take the lower end of their suggested cooking range, and subtract 1 minute. Pull the pasta - it will be slightly too tough still - and drain.
Make the sauce, beginning with a bechamel. This is the key to this particular recipe - it is all about this sauce. Remove the onion and whisk the hot milk into the roux. Bring to a very low simmer and, while it cooks, prep the cheeses: 1lb of Mimolette, coursely grated, and 1/2lb of Kraft yellow American cheese, either cut in strips or grated, depending on the form in which you buy it. Season the bechamel with salt and freshly ground nutmeg and white pepper and add the cheese in batches. Once all the cheese has been incorporated, whisk in 1/4C of beer, 1 tablespoon of dry, ground mustard, 1 teaspoon of paprika (use a decent quality paprika - nice and deep red - or the color will be off), a few dashes of Tabasco sauce (you don't want a spicy sauce, this is just a background note), and - the other secret weapon for color - a small pinch of saffron threads, ground between your fingers. The saffron is really just there to bring up the yellow in the sauce which, together with the dark red of the paprika and the orange of the Mimolette, will result in an almost impossibly bright and Kraft-like orange. While the sauce comes together, chop the toast slices, whiz them in a food processor until they are a uniform bread-crumb consistency, and gently saute them with some butter, salt and pepper. Remove from the heat, cool, and toss with a handful of finely grated Parmigiano or Romano cheese. Check the sauce for seasoning and adjust - it should be pretty sharp and a little salty, remember it has to flavor all that pasta. It will be very thick - that is fine, and what you want.
Fold the pasta and the sauce together gently. You may have too much sauce, so reserve a cup or so until you know. The pasta should all be thickly slathered. Pour into a buttered 9x12 (-ish) casserole dish, or pie plate or crock pot or whatever you like, of similar volume. Press down gently to pack it together and get rid of air between noodles. Pour the breadcrumbs over the top, cover with foil, and place in the 350F oven for 20-25 minutes, until it's bubbling and just starting to brown at the edges. Remove the foil and return to the oven until the top is a deep golden brown and the bread crumbs are nice and crunch, taking care not to burn - 5, maybe 10 minutes tops.
Let is set for at least 10 minutes and cut in slices. Enjoy!

Meat, Braise, Love

2010-08-18T12:48:00.000-07:00

Short Ribs, Carrots, and Potatoes in a Zinfandel-Chili Braise

Just for the record, I've neither read the book, seen the movie, nor, for that matter, given any serious consideration to either, for the simple reason that, fairly or unfairly, I'm reasonably certain that I'd be repulsed but, like a car accident, find it impossible to look away. I strongly suspect that the experience would be very much like being force-fed Indian desserts while attending one of those made-for-TV mega-church Sunday sermons: Cloyingly sweet and offensively preachy, all at the same time. Although, come to think, perhaps there's a novel strategy in there for producing a decent fois gras.

Still, while I don't really mind dishing out snippy reviews of books I haven't read, this post is about food, specifically the sort of food that you get to smell all day long while it cooks, that makes you want to open your best red wine and eat in your PJs at the same time, the sort of food that can make a girl's toes curl. For better or worse (likely both), my wife doesn't really eat land animals, so my best shot at getting a toe-curling endorsement, inasmuch as cooking is concerned, is probably mac-n-cheese, but that is the subject of another post. Today, I want to talk about braising. Specifically, braising hunks of prehistoric-looking meat, wrapped in butcher's paper and replete with large bones and the potential to disturb small children when first unwrapped. Producing a braise in your own kitchen is a bit like making porn in your own bed: It rewards practice, because if you can get it just right, it's the best you'll ever have, and all the times you can't, it'll still be a long way from sucking.

The zin-chili short ribs pictured above, re-plated for service.

There is so much to love about the braise: Purely from a gastronomic perspective, no other cooking technique, at least in my kitchen, comes close to creating the depth and concentration of flavor that I can get from a properly executed braise. It rewards the intelligent use of cheaper cuts and transforms, as if by magic, what would otherwise be too tough to chew into fork-tender nuggets of gustatory gold. It produces exceptional sauces and gravies as a byproduct, almost as if by accident. It can accommodate protein, starch, and vegetables all in one pot, which can then be served family style in the cooking vessel or re-plated and dressed up in style. And provided one follows some basic principles, an effective braise provides the cook with an exceptional amount of interpretive girth, requires no careful measurements, no indentured servitude to recipes and cookbooks.

I'm not going to provide recipes, except for maybe one really basic catch-all, in this post - I've got lots of favorites, some entirely mine, some not, and I'll put a bunch of them up over time. All I really want to do here is to inspire anyone who hasn't braised to do so forthwith, and for everyone who has, to do it better, and more often. Larousse describes a braise as "a moist cooking method using a little liquid that barely simmers..." and goes on to point out that the classical technique involves browning the meat in a little hot fat, which is then arranged on a bed of cooked vegetables, partially covered in cooking liquid, and allowed to simmer slowly in a tightly covered pan so as not to lose moisture (or flavor) to evaporation. That pretty much sums it up, although there are some other basic guidelines (e.g., you want to use a cut with some connective tissue, you want to have some acid in the liquid, some aromatics, some general sense of how the flavors all work together, to work in proportions that fit the pot, to finish the sauce at the end) that, if followed, will invariably improve the results.

In his essential On Food and Cooking, McGee further advises that the meat be kept in relatively large pieces; that the initial browning kills microbes in addition to creating flavor; and - in a departure from most of the cookbooks I've read - recommends starting the pot in a cold oven and restricting the final cooking temperature to around 200F, which is considerably cooler than most recipes you'll find. I have, in the past, used pre-heated oven at a temperature of anywhere from 250-350F, depending on the particulars of the cut the dish is based upon. However, I make a general rule of listening to McGee, so I'm going to do another one soon using his particular technique.

A Basic Braise

Shoulder of lamb in a Syrah-Rosemary-Garlic braise.

Choose a cut such as a shank, shoulder, or short rib - something that is flavorful, adequately fatty, and has collagen and gelatin in the connective tissue and bone that will break down during cooking and thicken the sauce. Grass-fed beef and especially lamb from a local rancher would be obvious choices (if you're in the 707 or surrounding environs, I've been using meats from Black Sheep, the Owens Family, and the grass-fed locker at Willowside meats, all with great results). Make sure the cut will fit in your pot. (The pot, by the way, must be tall enough to accommodate the meat, vegetables and liquid below the top, be oven-proof, and must have a heavy bottom and lid that fits.). Figure at least a half-pound per person, assuming it's a bone-in cut.
Put a small amount of neutral cooking fat in the pot and get it good and hot, medium or medium-high. Pat the meat dry with a towel, season reasonably aggressively with salt and paper, and thoroughly brown in the pan on all sides, turning to ensure even cooking and to avoid scorching.
Remove the meat, turn the heat down to medium or medium-low, and add a couple of cups of mirepoix. Thomas Keller, in Ad Hoc at Home, suggests putting the vegetables in a sack of cheesecloth to keep the meat and sauce separate from particulate matter (in typical Keller fashion, much like wiping down prep bottles to avoid getting fingerprints on plates, perfectly emblematic of how, for all the well-deserved hype, he is a cook first and foremost); I think it's a terrific idea, but must confess that I'm typically too lazy to bother. After the mirepoix has been cooked through and caramelized, add a tablespoon or so of tomato paste; continue to cook until it gives off a sweet aroma and loses its raw-tomato taste.
Deglaze the pan with some wine, maybe a quarter- to a half-bottle, scraping the bottom and sides to release all the concentrated bits of flavor. A hearty dry red is the smart-money bet, not necessarily too fancy, but - as ever - only cook with what you'd drink (a Cotes-du-Rhone or modestly priced Syrah from the Russian River Valley would do wonders for lamb, and a merely decent Sonoma County Zinfandel would pair perfectly up with short ribs, pot roast, osso bucco, you name it.)
Arrange the meat on top of the vegetables and fill the pot with enough stock to reach about 2/3rds of the way up the sides of the meat. Home-made stock would be ideal and will improve the final product immensely, but you can make an awfully good one with store-bought chicken or beef stock, provided you're careful to get the one with the shortest list of ingredients, and preferably without salt (pre-seasoned stocks will screw you up later, because they'll reduce heavily and mess with your ability to adjust seasoning at the end). Cover with the lid and transfer to an oven pre-heated to around 300F (200-250 for a really long braise, maybe 350 for a shorter one).
You will ultimately braise the meat this way in the oven for a total of 2-3 hours (a baby lamb shank could take as little as 90 minutes, a tougher, larger roast might want 4 or more hours), basting with the cooking liquids from time to time, and adding water if the pot begins to dry out. However, if you are adding vegetables, and you are going to want to - classically carrots and potatoes, but you could try mushrooms, turnips, or peas with great confidence - have them cleaned and prepped into medium-sized, uniform pieces, and add them 45-60mins before the final cooking time is up.
The meat is ready when it is fall-apart-fork-tender. If the veggies are ahead of schedule, you can always remove them and reserve until the meat is done.
Once the food is cooked, carefully remove the meat and vegetables to another plate and make the sauce by straining out the mirepoix and any other particulates left over from cooking and heating in a clean sauce pan. De-grease it as you go. The sauce, when finished, should have a smooth, glossy texture and should have the nap to coat the back of a spoon. Check the seasoning and adjust.

All those astoundingly good short ribs that seem to have made their way on to every menu in the City? That's all they are. Really.

It matters where it's roasted

2010-08-17T11:15:00.000-07:00

Buy it, grind it, brew it, and serve it. Fresh.

I hate the taste of oxidation. Or, having puzzled over the chemical processes involved, I should say that I hate the change in flavors and aromas caused by reduction-oxidation, but that takes too long, and efficiency matters in the kitchen. Furthermore, while my math skills may be passable and I find physics fascinating, chemistry has, at least since the 7th grade, given me a headache: Something about all that rote memorization and what I always took to be an unhealthy and mind-numbing emphasis on the "what" at the expense of the "how".

In any case, suffice it to say that the taste and smell of foods - and, more to the point, beverages - changes due to contact with the air we breathe, and most of these changes are not for the better. Oxidation creates that nasty metallic taste, the perception of acridness, of overcooked. This process is particularly acute in two of my favorite beverages, wine and coffee (water, by my accounting the only other liquid truly essential to the sustenance of life, seems a bit more stable).

In the case of coffee, the important thing to know is that the process of oxidation begins immediately, and the engine for this process is heat (the excellent if slightly more technical discussion I base this on may be found here).
As soon as the bean is roasted, its taste and smell begins to degrade, in ways both subtle and profound: The compounds responsible for "good" flavors fade away, and the concentration of those responsible for "bad" flavors increases. The good news is that Mother Nature is also a coffee lover and, as is her wont, she designed the bean in a particularly clever way: First, the external structure of the bean itself traps and protects many of the desirable features of coffee's flavor profile inside; second, even after grinding, some of the aromatics remain inside the coffee by virtue of the bean's naturally occurring oils and waxes known as lipids.

So what's a deeply entrenched caffeine addict to do?

Buy your beans in smaller amounts, as frequently as practical, and as close as possible to the date on which the beans were actually roasted. Clearly, this gives a huge edge to your local micro-roaster, and not because it's "free trade", or "local", or even because they buy better beans (all of which may, or may not, matter to you), but because the chemistry itself dictates that locally roasted coffee will taste better. Funny how often this basic lesson seems to come up so frequently in food and cooking, and how much better suited to good eating (albeit more time consuming) is the old-school model of grocery shopping, in which we would buy our daily bread from a baker, our vegetables from the produce stand of a farmer who grew them, the fish from a fishmonger who just caught it. Easy rule: If you can't figure out when it was roasted, you probably don't want to buy it.
If you're going to store your beans for any length of time (and we do this as a matter of course - there is idealism, and there is keeping the family sane and the parents well-fueled at all times), try to get them in vacuum packs (to reduce air contact), and store them in the freezer (to mitigate the deleterious effects of temperature).
Grind it when you're going to drink it, and only brew what you're going to drink. I don't know about you, but I just don't buy the argument that grinding your own beans is messy and time-consuming; and since the actual science tells me that I can drink better coffee simply by grinding my own, that seems to me a pretty cheap and easy way to consume a superior product. If you must brew a larger quantity first thing in the morning, then at least transfer it to an airtight carafe or thermos or whatever in order to slow down the nasty effects of heat and air on your beverage.

There is, as ever in the kitchen, a moral object lesson in all this: Simply by buying my coffee fresh and close to home, by preparing it when I actually want to drink it, and by only making the quantity that I actually want to drink, I will get to drink better coffee.

The Pirate Lord of the Hot Line

2010-08-16T10:01:00.000-07:00

Prologue: Two cross-country flights with three young children and unavoidable transfers in both directions, separated by less than 72 hours in-country, on my non-native coast, for a theocratic church wedding packed with in-laws and people I don't know well enough to drink with... Clearly, quality reading material is essential packing, somewhere just below, and possibly preceding, a decent pair of shoes and a clean shirt for the wedding itself. I show up to SFO without so much as a day-old copy of the Times.

Actually, I'm taking at least a little literary license. Not with the horrors of the 15 or so hours my family would spend in the care and company of commercial air carriers, not with the other factual particulars, but with the implication that I forgot to pack something to read. I spent many years traveling for work in a previous life, mostly long-haul, and, while I have forgotten virtually every essential one can forget at one point or another (passport, socks and underwear, foreign currency), I have learned - the hard way - never, not ever, to travel without a book. If at all possible, not without backup. I left our house without a book on Thursday morning because I knew we'd be at the airport with loads of time and access to a passable bookstore, and I really, really like picking out new stuff to read with my hands: The tactile sensation of the pages, their weight in one's hand, even the font chosen for printing - all these things matter. While I, like you, buy most of my books online for convenience and price, I will mourn the inevitable death of the physical bookstore, and I regret that my children will, in all likelihood, never even know what I'm talking about.

Also, for the record, any insinuation that either my in-laws, or the family they're marrying into, were anything other than lovely would be grossly unfair: They were, to a name, lovely people who had the foresight to cater cute little mac-n-cheese ramekins and chicken in zinc buckets for the kids alongside plenty of booze for the grownups. I can't speak to the wedding cake, except to say that it looked very classy, without so much as a single square meter of overworked fondant in sight, and it got raves from the munchkins. (Granted, the bar for that last bit consists of little more than sugar, but still.) Even the church service was manageable, and I say that as a non-practicing Jew: I don't think we had to spend more than a few hours on our knees or otherwise flagellating ourselves. Kidding.

In the event, I bought two books with vastly inflated, travel-desperation sorts of profit margins: "All The Pretty Horses", by Cormac McCarthy (arguably America's greatest writer of fiction and whose work I carefully ration in order to extend for as long as possible the literary cherry-popping that only a McCarthy first page can deliver), and "Cooking Dirty", by Jason Sheehan (a food writer I had not previously heard of and whose book I bought largely on a whim). Jay Sheehan's book is a revelation if only because, like food itself, so much of what is produced is irredeemable shite, the moral equivalent of an Applebee's salad bar, that one often forgets what the real thing, done properly, can be like.

Sheehan writes well. Not just well-enough, mind you, but the sort of writing that makes you wonder how he ever got that good, that seems somehow unfair. He also happens to have a vast wealth of personal stories about working in kitchens that, for the most part, strike just the right balance between making the reader cringe and laugh out loud. He also knows an awful lot about professional cookery at all levels, in and of itself a worthy diversion, because it's not every day that you get to hear a cook talk intelligently about the short-order counter at Waffle House and Escoffier's preparation for oxtail consomme with equal respect, enthusiasm, and first-hand knowledge. And the book is dirty: Filthy, in-the-gutter, foul-mouthed, grossly-inappropriate, richly-laden-with-highly-questionable-lifestyle-choices dirty. You like him in spite of his Himalayan faults. Did I mention that he's funny? I'll say it again: You'll cringe, but you'll be laughing. Out loud. He's also the perfect antidote to a foodie culture that considers the candy-ass veneer and slapstick cookery of Guy Fieri or Rachel Ray in any way relevant to the actual preparation of real food.

The other thing, maybe the thing, that makes the book so successful is that, despite being about nothing but cooking, it is really about everything but cooking. It is kitchen-as-parable: His career in the kitchen, while fundamental to the story line, including his descent toward near-dearth and the eventual righting of his life, is also just a means of explaining what I took to be much larger truths about the choices we all make in our lives, loves, and work. The point is made most succinctly and directly when, near the very end, he tells us that the most important thing for any would-be restaurant critic to understand is that the food is always the least interesting part of the review.

In a perfect world, I'll be able to say that here, in this blog, as well.

Why do wedding cakes usually suck?

2010-08-12T06:37:00.000-07:00

I've probably had a good slice of wedding cake, but I can't recall it. My wife and I went to some length to make sure ours was better than average - we ordered carrot cake w/ cream cheese icing, figuring that we'd have better odds if we could avoid entirely the words "butter cream" and "genoise" - but, in the event, it was disappointing. Don't take this personally,but in all likelihood, your wedding cake sucked, too.

But why? I'm about to spend all day on an airplane in order to attend a wedding, so I have vested interest in the answer. On the face of it, the problem is not a budget constraint: We Americans spend, by most counts, between $3 and $5 per slice on our wedding cakes. A slice of cake from a quality baker generally costs a bit more than that, but I've had plenty of very good slices of cake for that sort of price, and that is by the slice. Clearly there are economies of scale to cakes: The cost of the ingredients may be roughly proportional to the number of servings, and perhaps even declining, because you use less frosting per unit of cake as the cake gets larger (butter costs more than flour, and ratio of surface area to volume should fall with size); and the larger input, labor, should clearly exhibit increasing returns to scale (it takes no more time to bake 2 layers than 1).

So if we spend enough to get a good cake, why do so often fail to do so?
My pet hypothesis is that two factors come into play. First, the cake supplier is often secured in some "captive" fashion: Many spaces (this was true of our wedding) insist that you use their florist, their baker, whatever, with predictable results. The incentive conflict is clear. Second, we, the consumer, have exhibited a preference for visual aesthetics at the expense of taste, and it is hard to make a big cake look good. Ergo, the money that should have gone into better baking skills gets reallocated into fancier decorations. And, to be fair, it takes a lot of time and effort to make a cook look pretty. I'm not saying this is a bad thing: It may be perfectly rational to exchange the taste of a great cake for the images we fantasize about.

But I am saying that it comes at a cost.

In praise of street food

2010-08-11T15:41:00.000-07:00

What could be a more proximal kitchen, at least from the consumer's perspective, than street food? In my own cooking, I generally think about the proximity of my primitive food sources to my kitchen, but the cart warrior offers another perspective: He (or she) cooks it fresh, all day long, right in front of you, not in some glass-walled, Michelin-starred kitchen, but on the sidewalk. I don't know about you, but I reckon whipping up massive quantities of super tasty food, on a sidewalk in midtown Manhattan, without giving your customers food poisoning, with Mobius-like repetitive consistency, is one of the great culinary feats of our times. I mean, seriously, are you kidding me? The best of the best of the street food community - not to be confused with the ones serving stale pretzels and three-day-old boiled hot dogs, I mean the ones preparing food of real quality, fast, cheap, and on the street - is, if you'll excuse the language, the effing bomb.

This particular thread occurred to me because the finalists for the Vendy - the biggest award in the street food hierarchy, the moral equivalent of a third Michelin star or a food-tops rating in Zagat's - were just announced. If you're not familiar with NYC street food, and you get the opportunity, I highly recommend working off of NY Mag's list of the Concrete Elite (it is to the undying credit of the city and the vendors that this list, while dated, remains virtually unchanged by either name, location, or qualitative scale). Seriously, the Vendys are fine, but why bother buying tickets and fighting the throngs on Governor's Island? If you had the choice, would you rather have Thomas Keller cooking for you in his own kitchen at the French Laundry, or at some kitschy demo for the Food Network? I say, go to the carts. You can do unfathomable arterial damage well inside of a 10-block radius in midtown, so why mess with it?

I have not had the pleasure of eating at any of this year's finalists, but I was in NYC last month, and I made a point of visiting what I take to be The Best Halal/Gyro In The Known Universe, the guys on the southwest corner of 53rd St and 6th Ave. There are dozens of impostors, and many within a one-block radius, so if you go, be sure to check the corner; you'll know when you're there, because the line is longer than the competition by a thoroughly justifiable order of magnitude. What other gyro-style stand has its own Wikipedia page? Who else make lamb-on-rice so good that you can get knifed for cutting in line (yes, it really happened). Where else have the customers taken to referring to the white sauce as "crack sauce"? Trust me, it's worth it.

I'm sure the other guys (they are almost exclusively guys, sorry) have their own merits, but if I were to do the street-meat tour, and I faced either temporal or gastrointestinal constraints, I would - in addition to the Halal gurus above - make sure to stop by Rolf's Hallo Berlin sausage cart at 54th and 5th (between the Democracy Special and the Dictator Special, you can't go wrong) as well as Mohammed Rahman's Kwik Meal at 45th and 6th (the only street chef I know of who trained at the Russian Tea Room and marinates cubes of lamb - not pressed into gyros, fresh cubes - in his own concoction of papaya juice to tenderize it - be sure to try it with a side of his freaky, very hot, not-quite-Middle-Eastern green jalapeno chili sauce).

Pie for Breakfast

2010-08-10T09:19:00.000-07:00

Championship Brunch: pie, coffee, Mimosa

Come-clean: This is not my pie. In point of fact, I don't really do sweets and, with the notable exception of pizza, I rarely bake. Suffice it to say that we all have our place in the kitchen, and mine is not at the pastry station.

Which is by way of saying how exceedingly fortunate I am to have married a woman who can bake her butt off, because just saying the word "pie" makes me happy. Seriously, until you've had one of my wife's pies, your gastronomic bucket list will remain at least partially incomplete. She has no weak suit: My birthday happily coincides with our own lemon crop, so Lemon Meringue has always been my personal favorite. But they are all exceptional: Chocolate Pudding (filled with a homemade dark chocolate custard), Apple (which I otherwise don't even eat), and - one of the Himalayan peaks of the pie-baking landscape - Mixed Berry, defined by whatever local berries are currently at their peak, and what I was lucky enough to have for breakfast this past Sunday.

What makes a great pie? The trivially obvious: A great crust (consisting, as I understand it, of all of three ingredients, flour, fat and salt), and a great filling (which can be relatively complex, as in puddings, as well as incredibly simple, as in most fruits). It is this very simplicity which belies the difficulty in achieving pie-greatness:

Just-filled with Middleton Farms' berries

Consisting of almost nothing while demanding great attention to small technical details, a great crust offers the cook boundless opportunity to screw things up; the crust must remain structurally sound in the oven, it must cook evenly, and it must not only be flaky - both light and rich, crunchy and soft - but it should exhibit the same flakiness on the bottom as it does on the top. When it comes to crusts, technique is everything.
Fillings are similarly unforgiving, if for different reasons: When it comes to filling a pie, there is nowhere to hide. No amount of sugar, lemon juice, and stove-top wizardry will impart flavor to bland berries, texture to mealy apples, or the scent of a perfectly ripe Meyer to bitter lemon juice. When it comes to fillings, there is no way around the imperative to start with great fruit.

My advice, as a non-participant in the pie kitchen, is this: First, buy the best fruit you possibly can. Almost any fruit can make a great pie, but no great pie can be made from fruit of poor quality. (Please don't list for me the virtues of instant pudding mixes. They have their place, but not in homemade pie. If you are going to roll out your own crust, then by all means, cook your own custard.) Second, read up on pie crusts, paying particularly close attention to the technicalities of temperature and speed (see McGee or Corriher, for instance - and sorry for the AMZN plug, I don't care where you buy it, the link is just to get you the title).

And last, but most certainly not least, always save a slice for breakfast.

Mac-n-Cheese, v1.0

2010-08-09T12:05:00.000-07:00

Mac-n-Cheese I: Ziti regate w/ provolone & parmigiano

OK, it's Monday, enough of the booze chatter. We promised to engage in the pursuit of mac-n-cheese perfection, and here in the Proximal Kitchen, we don't take such promises lightly.

If you caught my previous post on mac-n-cheese, despair not yet another trip by the culinary pulpit, because today's post - our introductory foray into the mac-n-cheese sweepstakes - is all business. I have little doubt that my previous wax-on, wax-off meanderings will return to this thread, but not now.

I've been reading up on mac-n-cheese. Unsurprisingly, the Internet produces information overload: Lots of great-sounding recipes, a far larger number of suspect ones, and all sorts of claims and factoids, both interesting and banal, about the history of this profoundly American dish (Thomas Jefferson apparently loved to serve a baked macaroni and cheese). My first realization: I will need to focus and compartmentalize this project. I am not going to try every conceivable variation; nor do I think I have to, because I have a pretty good idea about what I want the final result to be, and it doesn't include broccoli, brie, or artificially-low fat substitutions. I also believe quite strongly that you can train your palate to 'think', to envision the character of a recipe, and the likelihood of its success, before you ever make it.

Having now read a goodly number of varations of, and hypotheses concerning, macaroni and cheese recipes, I would separate the key decision variables as follows:

Unadorned or All Dressed Up? You can make a compelling case for mixing in diced ham or broccoli, for a crispy shallot topping, for any number of additions that raise the apparent sophistication of the dish. I don't object to any of them, so long as they serve a purpose. But none of them are essential, and that is what I'm after; howsoever wonderful bacon may be, the soul of mac-n-cheese does not depend on it, and neither will our recipes. (I'm undecided on breadcrumbs; my intuition says "no", but I'm kind of a sucker for crumbly toppings, and I'm reserving the right to try one variation.)
Sauce or Just Cheese? Most of the classic recipes start with some version of a bechamel sauce, and then build a cheese sauce from there - essentially, a variation on the classic Mornay. But not everyone agrees; there are those who argue that flour has no place in a true mac-n-cheese, and that the cheese alone should be sufficient to bind the pasta. Like the question of adornment, I don't need to cook to answer this one: I will never get the texture and depth of flavor I want - both crusty, gooey, and creamy all at the same time, with layers and layers of flavor permeating into the noodles - without some sort of a mother sauce in which to embed background flavors, to mix and bind the cheeses, and to fill in the the spaces between the layers of pasta. All our recipes will start with a basic white sauce based on the classic bechamel.
Just Cheddar or Something Else? Most of the recipes I read, and particularly those of the more "classic" variety, depend heavily, if not entirely, on cheddar cheese. I'm unconvinced, and this is where I expect to invest the most time, because, quite obviously, the dish will ultimately fail without the right mixture of cheeses. Furthermore, when I think about the classic cheese sauces, typically some variation on Mornay, I tend to think of Swiss, Alsatian, and Italian cheeses, more than I do cheddar (both Larousse and Michel Roux, in his essential "Sauces", agree). Cheddar also presents some textural challenges, as I find that it has a proclivity for breaking (the fats separate during cooking) and for turning grainy. For all these reasons, I'm going to try Swiss- (broadly construed), Italian-, and cheddar-styled cheeses before taking my final stand.
Choice of Pasta. It may seem oxymoronic to debate the shape of pasta for a dish that is named after one particular shape, but in fact the Italian root - maccherone - is used to refer to most any tube-shaped pasta cut into short, regular lengths. The more important feature, it seems to me, is how particular shapes hold the sauce and whether they maintain their integrity during the second cooking (baking in the sauce after boiling). Also important is how a particular shape sets up because - no disrespect to the oozing-pile approach - I'd prefer to serve a structurally coherent slice of the final product without it spilling all over the plate.

A quick inventory of the cheese drawer yields some aged Provolone, a chunk of Parmigiano Reggiano, but no real cheddar or Swissy-type stuff. The pasta shelf has a few options, most of them (spaghetti, capellini, and a variation on the corkscrew the kids are fond of) inappropriate to the task at hand. I spy some ziti regate, an over-sized, grooved version of penne, which sounds like a good test-case of a larger, straighter tube than th elbow-macaroni benchmark, and also strikes me as fine in its own right. As regular followers already know, I depend heavily on leftovers (indeed, I take the creative and productive use of what is already sitting around to be a badge of honor - it saves time and money, it reduces waste, and it forces me to think like a cook), and thus my first attempt at mac-n-cheese is born of a Provolone-based white sauce over some big, fat pasta tubes.

Mac-n-Cheese I

Cook the pasta: Boil about a 1/2 lb of dried, large-ish tubular pasta, preferably grooved to help grab on to the sauce, such as ziti or rigatoni, in a large pot of salted water (I tend to cook a little extra and then adjust the final quantity of pasta to match the final volume of sauce). Cook only until just barely al dente - the pasta will continue to cook in the oven, and you don't want it turning to mush. In practice, assuming you are using an Italian boxed pasta that has been packaged for American distribution, this will generally mean you want to pull it off the burner about a minute before the low end of the recommended range (and certainly no later than said lower end). While you're at it, pre-heat the oven to 350F.
While the pasta is boiling, start the sauce: Make 1/4 cup of blonde roux by cooking 3 tablespoons of flour in 3 tablespoons of butter over medium-low heat. You want to cook the flour, but whisk it around and watch the heat so as not to let it color. Scald 2 cups of whole milk or even cream (although, honestly, I used 2% and it still came out fine) add it slowly to the roux, whisking constantly to avoid lumps (if it gets lumpy, your milk was likely not hot enough, or you added it too quickly; you can always strain it out if that happens). You have what is now a bechamel sauce, but you need to season it - add a pinch of freshly grated nutmeg (maybe 1/8th of a teaspoon - not too much), white pepper (black pepper will screw up the color - this isn't sausage gravy, it's a white mac-n-cheese), and salt. Don't skimp on the salt; it's important to season each layer of the dish, or the final result will be under-seasoned and bland. Bring to a gentle boil and cook until the sauce thickens up and you no longer taste a raw, floury taste. Don't forget to take the pasta off the heat and drain it while this is going on!
Stir in the cheeses, starting with about a half-pound of shredded, aged Provolone (slices will melt OK as well). I would not use Mozzarella (not the right texture for melting, or flavor profile, really), but a 50/50 blend of Provolone and Fontina would probably work very well. Once the Provolone has melted completely and the sauce is hot, turn off the heat and stir in most of a gently packed cup of finely grated Parmigiano Reggiano, either by itself or mixed with a little Pecorino Romano for extra bite; reserve a small handful. Check the final sauce for seasoning and adjust, if necessary.
Combine the pasta and the cheese sauce: Transfer most of the pasta back to the pot from which it came, or to a large mixing bowl (glass better than metal, because everything will still be quite hot), pour most of the sauce over the pasta, and gently fold them together to avoid damaging the pasta. Reserve a small amount of pasta and sauce so that you can adjust the quantities, if necessary. Make sure to distribute the sauce uniformly in order to coat all the noodles. The stuff should look like almost as much sauce as pasta, with every noodle heavily coated in a thick slathering of the sauce.
Bake the pasta: Gently fill a small, buttered casserole dish, pie plate, or earthenware crock, pouring the pasta and sauce down in layers; delicately compress the pasta as you go in order to ensure it is basically solid and of a uniform density throughout. Pour any remaining sauce over the top and then sprinkle with the reserved cheeses and dot with butter. Transfer to the bottom rack of a 350-degree (F) oven for about 20 minutes; it will be done when the top and sides are bubbling and just starting to brown. Turn the oven to broil - this will brown the top and create a bubbly, cheesy crust. But watch it carefully, now is not the time to do anything else! (I never, not ever, turn the broiler on without setting a timer for a minute or two.)
Let it set: Do not attempt to taste or serve for at least 10 minutes - 15-20 is probably better (I'm assuming your kitchen is pretty warm; if not, adjust accordingly). Like any baked pasta, you need to give it time to cool and bind up with some structural integrity; it will also save you and your family from a blistering case of pizza-mouth. Alternatively, if you're worried about the top getting cold, or timing it for service, remove it from the oven when it's done, but before broiling it, let it set, and then return to the broiler just before you're ready to serve it.

My family had the version pictured above for dinner last night, and found it very satisfying. It was a little too sharp for the kids, but I knew going in that this would be a more adult version (the same basic recipe with just a bit blander cheese, and a little less of it, would be more kid-friendly). However, this was only an experiment, and I'll definitely change some things next time:

I'm not sure the large pasta shape was ideal; next time, I'll either use a smaller shape like penne, or the classic elbow macaroni.
The cheeses had great flavor, but were a little one-dimensional, so I'm going to move into the Swissy or Cheddary families next, although I can definitely envision a cheese blend including some of what was used here (particularly the final sprinkling of Parmigiano). Also, the texture was good, but not perfect - the final sauce, out of the oven, would ideally be a bit smoother and more consistent.
I think I would raise the proportion of cheese in the sauce in order to make it slightly less like a cream sauce and slightly more chew in texture.

In short, this is very much worth making, but stay tuned for future upgrades.

Lavender Gimlets (sort of)

2010-08-09T08:23:00.000-07:00

I'm not a big drinker of cocktails in general, and I'm even less of a drinker of gin. That being said, cocktails clearly have their place: Less so with food, and more before - or after, or occasionally instead of; as an alternative to beer, when the weather or environs don't seem conducive to wine; and certainly, as a welcome to guests who have just endured the Bay Area's northbound assault on wine country traffic on the first Saturday in August, a category which counted my wife's brother and his family as victims this past Saturday. Gin, for its part, is still rarely my favorite, but I'm being slowly one over by two things: First, I've had some exceptional gin cocktails, most recently a crisp, refreshing, and generally excellent Cucumber Collins, with just the right balance of aromatic gin, citrus, sweetness and acidity, at the new SpoonBar here in town - in point of fact, the Cuke Collins was so good, I skipped the other 8 pages of the bar menu and ordered another straightaway; second, gin does exceptional things with lime juice and, as a rule, I can't get enough limes in my cocktails. I cannot tell a lie, I do in fact have a lime tree in the yard.

Thus, with guests on the road, the fog burning off, and a small vat of lavender simple syrup in the fridge, I tooled around with the idea of a lavender-infused Gimlet. If you like odd factoids from history, spend a few minutes reading about the history of the Gimlet at the Thinking of Drinking blog, For our purposes, the salient facts are that (a) the Gimlet, named eponymously for a British naval surgeon in the 1860s, Dr. Gimlette, was invented as a means to get sailors in the Royal Navy their ration of lime juice, and thereby to prevent scurvy; (b) the historical use of the Rose's Lime Cordial dates to the same period, when Lauchlan Rose invented Rose's Lime as a means of preserving the citrus juice for long journeys without the use of alcohol. (One can infer the history of the derogative "Limey" easily enough from there.) You have to love the British sense of irony: Mr. Rose patents a means of preserving lime juice for sailors without the use of alcohol, and a Royal Naval surgeon simultaneously invents a cocktail with which to get sailors to drink it.

Long and sundry is the list of arguments and citations to the effect that a Gimlet must contain Rose's, but I can't agree, and I think the argument stops here: The modern-day Rose's is no longer the same stuff as it was in 1867 (it now includes natural flavors other than lime, artificial preservatives, and - in the US, where I would buy mine - high fructose corn syrup in lieu of sugar). The other thing about Rose's is, well, it's kind of disgusting.

Since Rose's is basically just sweetened lime juice with preservatives, and since I'm not subject to the uncertainties of 19th century refrigeration technology, I figured, how hard can it be to make a proper lime cordial from fresh lime juice? Equal parts lavender simple syrup and freshly squeezed lime juice (which I passed through a strainer for seeds and pulp), and voila, a fresh, homemade, lavender-infused lime cordial. Mix with an equal part of your favorite gin or vodka for a Gimlet, or add soda water and serve over ice for a quasi-Rickey, and garnish with sprigs of mint, fresh lavender, a lime peel, and a straw, if it's watered down and over ice. Whichever way go, the perfume of the lavender really plays off of herbal aromatics of the gin; yo just can't go wrong.

Lavender Gimlet

Mix about a quarter-cup of chilled lavender simple syrup with your favorite gin. I like Sapphire, as I find it less assertive than some gins, so if you like a more pronounced herbaciousness, try something like Junipero. (Gin, more than most liquors, varies greatly in style from brand to brand, so it really comes down to personal preference.)
For a straight up Gimlet, shake over ice and strain into martini glass or tumbler.
Or, add 1/2 to 1 cup of water - plain or sparkling (the latter making something like a Ricky) - and serve over ice in a high ball glass or, as I've done here, with the cut up limes in a mason jar. This version is highly recommended for a warm weekend afternoon, and would be well-suited to a by-the-pitcher version. I also made a version of the watered-down, over-ice and cut-limes version with Hanger 1 vodka - maybe not quite as interesting or complex as the gin version, but an outstanding cocktail in its own right.

Kampai, and drink responsibly.

Beer snack

2010-08-08T13:30:00.000-07:00

Soda Rock Farms' Padron Peppers & Racer 5 IPA: Two of a Perfect Pair

Every once in a while, I'm lucky enough to find a combination of flavors that just works. At its best, a food pairing transcends the individual elements, and the dominant sensation on the palate is something else entirely, something distinct from any single component, a taste uniquely created by the interaction of all the elements working together.

Many of the finest and most classic examples are, of course, well-known, and I use them in my own cooking all the time and without apology: Rustic lamb and vin rouge from Hermitage; mint and dark chocolate; Sauternes and fois gras; scallops and bacon; sushi and soy sauce; baseball and Dodger Dogs. (Despite a birth certificate proclaiming San Francisco as my rightful home, I'm really a life-long recovering Angelino, but that doesn't change the empirical fact that the hot dogs at Dodger Stadium put any tubed pork products served up by the A's or Giants to shame.)

Then again, someone will on occasion serve me something so completely unexpected that it completely changes how I think about flavors, not because it is so radical, but because it sounds radical at first, but is in fact perfectly natural: Think of white chocolate and caviar or salmon poached in licorice (both found at the Fat Duck), or the French Laundry's justly celebrated dish of tapioca with oysters and caviar.

But my favorite flavor pairings are the ones that I stumble upon in the normal course of every day life, that I know, with absolute certainty, will sing on the palate before I even taste it. This was my experience at the farmer's market yesterday while talking to Dan the Tomato Man of Soda Rock Farms (Dan is, in my book, the undisputed heavy weight champion of heirloom tomato growers. Seriously, he's that good. He's better than that. A multiplicity of future posts, I'm sure...). Dan was expounding the wonderful properties of Padron peppers to another shopper, and he issued the following guarantee: "If you sit down and try these peppers with a cold beer, you'll finish them off, or I'll give you your money back." And it was a big bag of peppers.

I immediately had one of those light bulb-moments of total clarity and conviction that are so tragically rare, at least for me: Blister the peppers in a pan, toss them with olive oil and fleur de sel, and serve with a chilled Racer 5 from the Bear Republic Brewery: Padrons have a mild heat and a fairly pronounced bitterness which, I felt certain, would pair perfectly with the bitter hoppy-ness of the Racer 5; the dish would require virtually zero prep, one pan, and three ingredients (OK, four, if you count the beer); and, in keeping with our theme of the proximal, both the peppers and the beer come from my town.

No offense to salty nuts, but these Padrons are, hands-down, my new favorite beer snack:

Padron Peppers, and Not Much Else

Toss over high heat to blister evenly.

Put a saute pan on relatively high heat (medium if you have a high-BTU cooktop, more like high otherwise) and, while the pan warms, wash the peppers and pat them dry (it's important for them to be dry - you seriously don't want to be putting water into a blistering hot pan of oil).
When the pan is good and hot, add a small amount of neutral, high-heat oil, and add the peppers - do them in batches, if necessary, to avoid crowding the pan. Toss the peppers frequently until they are blistered and beginning to char on all sides; they will go from hard to soft.
Remove from the heat, toss with some good olive oil (something with a really pungent, green, grassy taste would be ideal), and salt liberally with fleur de sel or course-grind kosher sea salt. Serve immediately with an ice-cold Race 5 IPA (or any other beer, but preferably something with some bitterness to it).

You'll finish the beer and the peppers, or your money back.

It's Happy Hour Somewhere

2010-08-06T17:13:00.000-07:00

Lavender: Looks good, smells good, and makes a mean mixer

It's Friday afternoon, the sun has won its daily battle with the fog, and I'm making cocktails. Never let it be said that the Proximal Kitchen does not count booze as a food group.

We have lavender planted all over the property (wine country residents alternate between delusions of Tuscany and ones of Provence) and I often wonder what to do with all the precious stuff: We occasionally dry it and bundle it for gifts, we often use large quantities as our house-brand air freshener, and my wife has a great eye for incorporating it into our homegrown floral arrangements. However, as a cook, I always feel a bit guilty about not doing more with it - I mean, here we have this beautiful plant that we have paid to plant and water, that commands what strikes us as an absurd price in the marketplace, and that often gets cut and dumped into the green waste recycle bin at the end of the summer. Somehow, that just seems wrong.

My gut reaction is, unsurprisingly, to think of more ways to eat it. Lavender is, after all, a culinary herb: It does wonders for certain salads, I've seen all sorts of interesting lavender desserts (I'm not really a sweets person, but I'll take it on faith that they didn't all suck), and it provides a great touch of color and aroma as a garnish on the plate. But what I've come to learn is, the easiest and arguably best use of lavender is in cocktails: Try it in mojitos, margaritas, or - as I'm planning on doing as soon as I finish this post - just simply mixed with vodka and lots of fresh lime. And it's outstanding in (non-alcoholic, if you must) lemonade. The way to do it is to make a lavender simple syrup, and then use that in lieu of whatever sweet syrup your drink would have otherwise called for. It takes no time at all and can be stored for long periods in the fridge.

Lavender Simple Syrup

Combine 2 cups of sugar with 1 cup of water and bring to a low boil (watch it, you don't want to scorch it).
Throw in a large handful of lavender blossoms. It doesn't really matter which kind; we grow several, I just grab them all and strip the blossoms from the stems. Simmer gently until the flavor is extracted - maybe 15 minutes, there's plenty of slack here.
Pour through a fine-mesh strainer, pressing gently on the blossoms to get all the goodness out.
Use in place of simple syrup in any cocktail or sweetened juice drink.

Guacamole Bomb

2010-08-06T07:41:00.000-07:00

Avocados are in season. By that I mean, California's seasonal crop of perfectly ripe Haas avocados is on the market shelves, and the fruit can be had for a buck per - less, if you find them on the roadside. Ergo, we're ordering in from one of our favorite local taquerias, mainly to acquire the means of transferring the vat of guacamole I'm making from the bowl to boca.

Guacamole, for me, has many optional elements, but there are, as ever, several rules that ought always to be respected:

First, accept that 'guac' is seasonal. Please don't tell me about the ones from Florida, or the dubious merits of the aguacate so common further south. Only the proper Haas develops the fat content that is so essential to the texture of great guacamole.
Second, don't get it from a restaurant. I don't care how good your taqueria is, I assure you, they make crappy guacamole. I'm sure there is the exception that proves the rule, but seriously, it is significantly cheaper, and takes almost no time, to produce a vastly superior guacamole at home.
Third, some components are optional, and some are not: Take cilantro, for instance; for me, it's essential, but my wife hates the stuff, and so I've learned to make a passable version without it. Tomatoes are optional, but never too many, and only if they're at the peak of summer ripeness - there is no more common offense than the bulking up of an otherwise fine avocado with too much mediocre tomato. I believe that a little red onion is close to mandatory, but you could probably skip it. Chilies are an interesting question: I, for one, do not believe that guacamole needs to be spicy (although certainly finely minced, fresh jalapenos make an unimpeachable addition). Lime juice, on the other hand, is not optional: Not only is it essential in maintaining the color of the final product, but the dish really cries out for a little acidity, particularly in the absence of heat.

5-Minute Kick-Ass Guacamole

Mince whatever condiments you're going to use before dealing with the avos (keeps them from oxidizing unnecessarily - brown guac is just nasty). A good baseline is to have on hand a tablespoon each of finely-diced red onion, tomato, cilantro, and jalapeno for each avocado. (Please take the time to mince the tomato and especially the onion and the chili pepper quite finely and uniformly, it makes a huge difference in the end.). Slice and seed a lime into sections.
The unlikely PK addition: Garlic. Cut a small amount of garlic - you'll want to end up with a quarter or an eighth of a teaspoon of garlic paste per avocado - and mince it very finely. To turn it into a paste (which is essential in order for it to incorporate properly), sprinkle a good pinch of kosher salt over the garlic and drag and press the flat side of a knife over it. The blunt force of the knife and the grinding action of the large salt crystals will turn the garlic into a uniform, oily paste that can be mixed.
Scoop out the flesh of the avocados (reserve the pits), turn it into an adequately large bowl, and mash with a fork. Incorporate the garlic paste and - here's the other PK secret ingredient - a teaspoon or so of olive oil for each avocado. I know, I'm adding fat to avocados, but trust me, it adds depth the to the flavor, and makes for an incomparable textures. And it's the good fat!
Squeeze in the lime to taste (hard to say on quantities, as limes vary so much, but I'd guess a half to one teaspoon of juice per fruit) and then gently mix in the desired proportions of the various condiments and season with salt and freshly cracked pepper, tasting as you go. (You'll need more salt than you think. Really. Don't go to all this bother to prepare and eat a bowl of pure fat and then skimp on seasoning.) Add the tomatoes after you've got an otherwise finished product to avoid breaking them up.
Garnish with the pits from the avocados, some slices of lime, maybe a whole chile, and a sprig of cilantro. An earthenware or wooden bowl would be ideal, but anything non-reactive will do, it's just aesthetics at that point.

Why I'm trying to make a perfect mac-n-cheese

2010-08-05T15:21:00.000-07:00

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

An old friend of mine and nascent PK supporter, a certain Ms T (you know who you are), recently put in a request in for my best take on mac-n-cheese. Not just any mac-n-cheese, mind you, but a "rich, rich, rich, very adult mac-n-cheese". This, T must have intuited, sits squarely in our wheelhouse because, here at the Proximal Kitchen, we love cheese, we love pasta, and we're not scared of butter. But for me, and I suspect for T and probably most of you, it's also about much more than that: A deeply satisfying mac-n-cheese is the very epitome of comfort food and the right bite at the right time can transport us, in Proustian fashion, to a happy, child-like place. In short, I'm working on this recipe for T because mac-n-cheese makes me smile.

While I've made any number of variations on the classic, I haven't ever felt like I quite "got it"; maybe it's just that I've not yet made a mac-n-cheese that is my mac-n-cheese, that expresses everything I associate with mac-n-cheese in one piping hot, gooey, luxuriant mouthful of sclerotic wonderfulness. So I'm starting with primary research (aka, my favorite cookbooks), after which will come some experimental work on the cook top, and what I hope will end with my own personal favorite take on this definitive nectar of the home-cooking gods.

I say "my own personal favorite" because this particular little exercise - developing a recipe for a hugely nostalgic dish, on request, for a friend - is a microcosm of why I cook: I truly love preparing good food for, and enjoying it with, other people, but I also prefer to do so exclusively with foods that I like to eat, prepared how I think they ought to be prepared. Self-centered? Probably, but that misses the point: Cooking is at least as much about process as it is about product, and we should all like what we engage in, because when we choose an activity - any activity, excepting perhaps sleep - we are, by definition, choosing not to do all sorts of other, and otherwise wonderful, things with that particular piece of our life. Returning to the kitchen, it takes a considerable investment of time and money in order to construct a quality dish; the proper preparation of even the most humble and simply-dressed salad of leaves or box of dried pasta comes at the expense of the multitude of other things you could have done with that time or eaten instead. This may seem trivially obvious when the topic is food, but I really believe that it applies equally to the choices we make in our education, our career, the time we spend with our kids, the time I spend writing this blog.

I suspect I'll be on this thread for a little while, as long as it takes to build a recipe that makes me smile, and while I'm at it, I'm going to try to remind myself what Thoreau, who died at 45, had to say about the cost of a thing.

To market, to market

2010-08-04T14:19:00.000-07:00

The Ortiz Brothers' fabulous vegetables.

In our little corner of the County, Tuesdays and Saturdays are market days. I don't know about your town, but I sincerely hope that you're fortunate enough to have convenient access to a weekly farmer's market; at the very least, if we all have to tolerate the silliness of the word "locovore", we should get some payback in the form of good, local foodstuffs, right? If I cared to do so, I can find a very good (and often larger) market on almost any day of the week, within a relatively short drive. But that, to me, would seem to defeat the point: I'm trying to eat stuff that was dug out of the same ground, in a largely literal sense, that my own house is built on. Avoiding car-time also offers its own attractions and advantages (less gasoline consumption, less wasted time, less opportunity for kids to whine, etc). I also like the imposed structure, because it forces, or at least encourages, me to think about what I'm buying, and why, and to actually use it, or risk the guilt of seeing good food go bad in the fridge while we chow down on boxed mac-n-cheese or whatever.

Of the two options, Saturday is by far the larger, and has some truly exceptional vendors that don't come to the Tuesday market, but I often prefer the Tuesday market by virtue of its navigability and more personal feel - the Saturday market can engender sensory overload, which is not necessarily conducive to a coherent approach to marketing, and almost invariably promotes impulse purchases of stuff that, as much I truly love, I really didn't need; and the shoppers at the Tuesday market, while more sparse, also tend to be more serious about buying food, which I find improves my dialogue with the farmers and subtly shifts the character of the market a shade further from tourism. (Hey, I love tourists - my town couldn't exist without them - I'm just saying.) But whichever format you prefer, it remains a basic truism of shopping for food that selectivity and purpose should be the final arbiters of what ultimately comes home. That, for me, is far easier said than done, particularly when confronted by a cornucopia of summer delights in all shapes, colors and sizes.

I believe there are at least two essential tactics to successfully navigating the market (and by success I mean getting the best products the market has to offer, that you actually want to eat and will in fact cook, in the appropriate quantities):

Take a lap. Walk past all the stalls, taking mental notes of which crops look like they're at their prime from a seasonal perspective, and which vendors have the finest examples thereof. You may see a gorgeous peach, only to see even finer ones later; or maybe you'll realize that, as nice as the peaches are, nectarines are better right now (this is, in fact, the case in our County); or, perhaps you'll realize that you've had enough of stone fruits and you'd rather have berries (which are just beginning to explode into their full potential right now).
Make a plan. Form an idea of what you're going to do with all this food. Don't just buy asparagus, peaches, and lamb because they all looked good individually - how are you going to prepare them, and will they work well together? Do you want to spend a lot or a little time in the kitchen, and do you want the oven on all day? Sometimes, I'll thumb through a cookbook, or I will have eaten something at a restaurant or seen something on TV, whatever, that I really want to try - this is the easy, although somewhat less interesting case, and all that it requires is a shopping list. More often, and both harder and more fun, is to go without much of a plan, except for some basic guidelines, such as "I need to feed several people, some of them don't eat meat, and I don't want to spend all night cooking while they're eating and drinking."

By way of a little case study, here is why I was shopping on my most recent trip: I am going to feed 2 couples, centered around a protein but with a starch and veg on the side; I want easy plating and very little a-la-minute prep; I'd like to have natural 'byproducts' from the main project to feed to the kids; and I'd like to serve it with some Rhone-style reds, including the Syrah that grows in our own backyard; and, as ever, I'd like it to be as locally sourced as possible."

Shiitake from the Alexander Valley

So I take my first lap around and perform my due diligence (this is not window-shopping, I move pretty efficiently; I don't piss around talking to everyone, unless there is a reason to do so, such as "what kind of potatoes are those", or "how old were the lambs at slaughter and who does your butchery").

Initial thoughts: Green vegetables of all sorts are in epic form, but not quite as 'baby' as they were a month ago; stone fruits lean more toward nectarines and plums than peaches by now; berries are getting revved up; and root veggies - potatoes, carrots, turnips, garlic - look exceptional. I notice the most astounding box of shiitake mushrooms - this one catches my eye and gets me thinking, because shiitake, in addition to being damn good in their own right, are, for me, the definitive example of the umami component of the palate.

Bernier Farms digs it up

Next, I strike up a conversation with a delightful woman from the Owen Family Farm,who describes their lambs as "humanely raised on our own local, evironmentally sustainable, family-owned farm in Hopland". OK, Hopland is technically in the next county, but c'mon! And when I ask her about butchery, she knows exactly who kills the animals, who cuts them, and in what conditions. This gets the ball rolling: Shiitake mushrooms - earthy, meaty, fresh from the next valley over; lamb - gamey meat, from what looks to be a great rancher in our neighboring county; and remember my Syrah - a gamey, earthy, leathery, bad-ass, big-boy red, grown in my backyard, which, to my palate, literally screams for lamb's meat. I also don't want to spend all night cooking and plating while my in-laws attack the wine cellar without me, I want leftovers, and it hasn't been that hot, so braising in the oven seems an obvious route. I grab a nice little shank, which just happens to be cut to exactly the right size for my cast iron braising pot, a box of little button-sized shiitake, and then - again thinking about the braise - grab a sweet torpedo onion the size of a nerf football from the Ortiz brothers and a bunch of baby carrots, some new Yukon Gold potatoes, and a head of garlic from Bernier Farms: Patiently Braised Shank of Owen Family Lamb with Shiitake Mushrooms and Home-Grown Syrah. I can't wait for Friday night! Keep an eye out for the final product in this weekend's post.

Carbo-Loading: Tagliatelle alla Bolognese "Old School"

2010-08-03T12:04:00.000-07:00

Apologies, but the PK staff has been out of commission these last few days; a weak and unadvised deviation from the accepted rules of a young blog (which is to say, don't let the fields fallow), but my wife, our new young Italian friend V., and I were entered in a triathlon relay race over the weekend. Between the pre-race prep, the race itself, and the shattering after-effects, all I can really say is, I dropped the proverbial ball. I did not, however, stop cooking.

That being the operative point - cooking - because, politics aside, this is a cooking blog, and what better excuse to cook than a pre-race meal? Case in point, a long-distance event (on the order of 10 hours as a team), from an exercise-physiology (and therefore culinary) point of view, means lots - lots - of carbs. Indeed, speaking purely from a personal perspective, one of the essential motivating factors in training for an endurance event is that you get to eat enormous quantities of food, and carbs in particular. And here in the Proximal Kitchen, carbs means pasta, and copious quantities thereof. Preferably served with bread. And, in a perfect world, washed down with a local wine (which, technically, is of course a carbohydrate - although the risk of poor performance and/or puking argue for not doing so on the night before an event). So, setting aside the pre-race alcohol constraint, I started rummaging around the fridge to see what was to hand.

I had a couple of boxes of tagliatelle that I really like, it's an organic, dried version of fresh egg pasta from an Italian maker called Buonaturae (relatively easy to find at natural food stores), so that seemed like a good start. Yes, I am well aware that dried tagliatelle is likely an Italian culinary heresy of some significance, but my view is this: Better to use a high-quality, properly-cooked dry pasta than a poor-quality fresh one, even for dishes calling for fresh pasta. The particulars of making pasta by hand is fodder for another post, but for the purposes of this particular meal, suffice it to say that I find making good pasta at home a fairly difficult task, and the home cook must always be honest in assessing his or her strengths and weaknesses. Learn new things, but always play to your strengths - it's your kitchen, so cook what you like, in your style, and you will invariably end up more successful in both the process and the product.

The essential components of ragu

Next up, the sauce: I already had fresh garlic from my recent experiment with pistou, some really nice onions from Bernier farms and, although I always try to keep canned tomatoes in the cupboard for just such an eventuality; I also found some leftover basic tomato sauce that I figured should be used, so I grabbed that as well. Finally, I pulled open the bottom-most drawer in our freezer, which is where I store all the bits of left over meat from other meals: A pack of Saveur chicken-pistachio sausages (sounded great, but not over pasta); an odd-looking piece of a lamb's shoulder that wouldn't fit in the braising pot the last time I use it; a pack of Hebrew National hot dogs (which, bizarre as it may sound, I have used to good effect as an endurance fuel, but again, hard to see it over pasta); and - last but certainly not least - a few packs of ground-to-order, grass-fed ground beef from my favorite local butcher, the Willowside Meats and Sausage Factory. I had ordered the ground beef for burgers (the background slider-shot from my recent french-fry post, and the subject of another forthcoming post), but I have found that the same 50/50 blend of brisket and chuck I often use for burgers makes an excellent ragu, and a plan began to coalesce: Tagliatelle alla Bolognese, the classic dish of pasta with a ragu of meat and vegetables from Bologna. All I'd need was a carrot for the sauce and some crusty bread to round out the plate. (All my favorite veggie stalls at the farmer's market, folks like Bernier Farms, the Ortiz Brothers, Foggy River, and Love Farms, have been overflowing with beautiful carrots, so things were looking up.)

You will find as many variations on the classic Italian ragu as you care to look for, but the essential ingredients, and the cooking process, are relatively consistent. It's also been a staple in our kitchen for a while, so I've been doing background research, both theoretical (cook books) and applied (prepared and eaten), for a while now. Personally, for a basic set of unimpeachable guidelines, I don't think you can do better than Marcella Hazan's version of the Bolognese classic (if you're going to own just one Italian cookbook, hers is an obvious choice; I could spend a long, happy life cooking and eating out of that one book). Note, however, that I've not mentioned pork, which is called for in the recipe-link previous; in the book itself, the basic version uses only beef, and pork is mentioned as a variation. This, too, got me curious, and so I did a little more digging.

It turns out that Bologna - much, I suppose, like the regulation of true pizza in Napoli, although I'm really no expert - has clearly defined rules for what constitutes a true Bolognese-style ragu, as codified by the Accademia Italiana della Cucina, and they include pancetta, which one presumably renders and then uses the fat of for the cooking of the vegetables. However, there are many variations on the basic formula, even from within Bologna, with and without pork, often including chicken livers (something I've not tried but just has to be good), and sometimes even mushrooms (which I think would taste great, but does not jibe with my reading of what constitutes a true ragu). While the intricacies of the proper pairing of pasta shape and texture to sauce are worthy of a dissertation-like effort, one thing on which it is universally agreed is that tagliatelle is unimpeachable. The economies of scale in home ragu production, and the ease with which it can be stored, dictate making enough for leftovers, and I would not hesitate to dress a stuffed pasta like cheese tortellini, but - for me - the ultimate application is actually in lasagna. That, however, involves an even more serious investment in time, one in which home-made pasta is essential, and therefore a project that I was not about to entertain for our pre-race feast. Larousse describes dressing a timbale of macaroni and sauteed mushrooms with ragu, something I've never had, but definitely plan to try - it ought to look impressive on the plate, and should please kids and company alike.

Considering the broad popularity of "Spaghetti Bolognese" in both the US and the UK, it remains a somewhat fascinating factoid that, much like polpettone (or "meatballs"), Italians would never serve a ragu over spaghetti. For what it's worth, this is a heresy that we at the Proximal Kitchen have practiced happily for years, to great effect, particularly for the kids - but still, truth be told, tagliatelle is far superior, as the flat shape of the noodle and the fresh-pasta consistency hold the sauce in a far more pleasing manner than will dried spaghetti.

Although hardly the definitive text on Italian cooking, I thought it would be interesting to see what our good friend Larousse had to say on the topic: The basic description is of "a thick sauce based on beef and vegetables, particularly tomato", so pretty much what I'd have expected at this point, although they also include chicken livers, and omit milk, which I take to be essential (and the Accademia is with me on this). The most entertaining, if not particularly informative, except from Gastronomique is that the sauce known as ragu is "a corruption of the French word ragout". I suspect a cultural anthropologist could make significant hay of that one statement in the broader historical context of continental European history.

Before we get to the recipe, I have to mention a quick lesson in the practical realities of multi-cultural cooking that I was lucky enough to receive, gratis, from my new friend and comrade with whom I shared this pre-race meal, the aforementioned Signore V. V. is from Rome and, being from Rome - arguably the spiritual capital of pasta - had an interesting opinion on the topic of what constitutes ragu. Firstly, upon my introduction of the dish as alla Bolognese, I was mildly embarrassed to learn that V. had no idea what I was talking about: Apparently, the definition of classic ragu as specifically Bolognese is, to a Roman, rather overly provincial. For V., ragu is ragu, and that is really the end of the story. Since I always think of the generic term 'ragu' as referring to almost any thick, stewed sauce of meat and vegetables, I asked about using other meats, as I've had all sorts of terrific ragu of rabbit, boar, oxtail, and of course with and without pork added to the classic beef version. On this, my Italian friend was clear: ragu is made from beef. Don't think too hard about it.

Tagliatelle alla Bolognese "Old School"

Prepare about two cups of small-dice soffritto for the base. Soffritto is just the Italian name for the classic French stock base, mirepoix. Or, just grab one large carrot, one large rib of celery, and a small onion (or double and halve accordingly, depending on the size of your veggies). Sweat the veggies over medium-low heat in a little olive oil (and/or butter) until soft, using a large, heavy pot (the classic Italian version calls for earthenware, but cast iron or - as I have done here - a heavy copper sauce pan works just fine).
Break up about a pound of ground beef, with a strong preference for a cut that is flavorful, not too lean (I would say minimum 20% fat), and of course from grass-fed, pasture-raised cattle. Turn the heat up to medium, add the meat to the veggies, and continue to stir and break up with a fork to ensure even cooking. There is no need to brown the meat, simply cook until it loses its raw color throughout.
Pour a cup of milk, along with some freshly grated nutmeg (not much - maybe an 1/8th of a teaspoon), to the meat and vegetables and allow the milk to cook off completely. This is important, as the fat from the milk will help protect the meat from all the acid to come.
Pour a cup of dry white wine over the meat and allow that to boil almost completely away. (Always take care to stir in order to avoid any burning on the bottom, and to scrape the flavors concentrating on the walls of the pot back into the nascent sauce.)
Add a large can (28 to 32oz, typically) of crushed or pureed canned tomatoes to the pot. You can also use leftover basic tomato sauce, provided it is of very good quality and is very simple. And please, if you're going to all this trouble, don't use pre-made sauces that have more than a few ingredients. The other important thing here is the type of canned tomato: Cooking locally be damned, and you won't find them organic (if you do, please let me know), but you should only ever buy San Marzano tomatoes imported from Italy for use in tomato sauces. I'm sorry to be strict here, but this is really critical. And don't get suckered by "imported plum tomatoes" - if it doesn't say "San Marzano", don't buy it. It is the only tomato in the world that is acceptable for the multitude of sauces that depend on canned tomatoes. (With the notable exception of a classic pomodoro made from local heirlooms at the peak of ripeness, canned San Marzano tomatoes are almost invariably cheaper, far less work, and actually taste better, than fresh tomatoes. Trust me, or do the taste test, it really is true.)
Once the tomatoes have come to temperature, reduce to a low simmer, stirring occasionally. Allow to cook for at least 3 hours - 4 or 5 would be better, but really, I've found 3 to be plenty. You can actually leave it to its own devices, for the most part; just add a little water (or beef stock) whenever all the moisture evaporates. The sauce will be very thick when finished, will have almost no liquid, and the fat will separate (see picture above). Once fully reduced, season with salt and fresh black pepper. Sauce may be cooled and stored and even frozen with little deleterious effect.
Serve over tagliatelle, accompanied by freshly grated Parmigiano (Romano is less classic but also excellent), and garnished with chopped flat-leaf parsley. A hunk of crusty garlic bruschetta would be welcome.

Tagliatelle alla Bolognese with Sourdough Garlic Bruschetta and a glass of RRV Pinot

French Fries @ Home: Fresh, easy, and not that bad for you (really)

2010-07-30T12:13:00.000-07:00

First, potatoes. I love potatoes. I mean, I really, really, love them. I could probably eat an entire meal of potatoes and enjoy it (at least until it caught up with me). I love potatoes mashed, grated and pan-fried into pancakes, diced and pan-roasted as home fries, baked, oven-roasted, and, of course, deep-fried into french fries. Is there any food that is, on appearances, simpler and more spectacular than a perfect french-fried potato? I, for one, think not.

It is to the humble tuber's credit that it remains edible, if perhaps not at the peak of flavor, days, weeks, even months after it is pulled from the ground; certainly, the ease with which potatoes can be stored played a material role in wintering over food supplies for many peoples prior to the advent of refrigeration, particularly in Europe (Europeans still produce the most potatoes per capita, but the fastest rate of change is in Asia, and China is now the world's leading producer). As usual, lots of good info here at Wiki, and if you're really in a potato mood, check out the British Potato Council (you have to love the Brits). The catch is that storage comes at a cost - once the potato begins to decompose, however slowly, the starches that are so essential to its cooking properties begin to break down, and texture and flavor are compromised - so if you whenever you find truly farm-fresh taters (you have to ask - I used to see last-season's crop for sale at the Union Square market in NYC all the time, when the stalls were otherwise lean), by all means, buy them, and cook them post haste.

Thus it was with considerable enthusiasm that my eldest daughter and I rummaged through the basket of just-dug Yukon Golds at the Bernier Farms stall. I would have sworn they still carried the warmth of the topsoil they were unearthed from, but that seems logically unlikely, given the cool weather we've had; in any case, they were gorgeous in all their dirty splendor and, if you listened closely, the breeze through the market seemed to whisper "fry me... FRY ME!". OK, maybe that was just my stomach, but the end result was the same - homemade french fries.

French fries, however, present the home cook with a few obstacles, notably deep-frying (messy, dangerous, and requiring special equipment), and health (fat, fat, and more fat, although I'm not really very concerned with fat per se, the health issue having more to do with the types of fat and total calories consumed, rather than the percentage or grams of fat in isolation). Inspired by Heston Blumenthal's approach, I've experimented with "oven fries" for years now, with greater and lesser success, and I've now convinced myself that a good - no, a very good - oven fry is possible, even likely, with relatively little effort, and not much guilt on the health front.

Oven Fries

Start with proper potatoes. If you're going to go the trouble, and bear the caloric consequences, of making and eating home-made fries, surely it's worth a good potato. Most important is that the potato be of the waxy variety, and ideally fresh from your favorite local grower's patch of dirt. My go-to waxy potato is the Yukon Gold, great flavor, texture, color, and you can almost always find them.
Pre-heat the oven to 450F and boil a pot of salted water that is large enough to accommodate all the fries without crowding. (If you don't know how to salt water, go with the Italians' advice for pasta: It should taste about like the sea - this works for pasta, vegetables, whatever.)
While everything else is getting hot, proceed to cut the potatoes into roughly rectangular shapes. You will waste a bit, but you can use the trim for something else, or compost; but it's important to start with the right shape. A bit oblong is fine, as length is not so critical; what is essential is that the four "sides" of your potato are parallel, so that you can subsequently cut it into fries of uniform thickness. Cut the potatoes into planks of uniform thickness, typically 5-10mm per side; I like about a 1/4", but, while this is a matter of preference and aesthetics, cooking times and temps must be adjusted. Take the planks and stack them and cut them into sticks of width equal to their height - this will give you nice fries of uniform thickness, a pleasing square shape, and - most importantly - equal cooking time. As you cut the sticks, drop them into a bowl of cold water; this will help rinse starch off their surfaces and prevent them from sticking together.
Dump the potato sticks into the boiling water to blanche - carefully! use a slotted spoon or something to avoid splatter - and cook for about 5 minutes. 5 is my number, for my size fry (pictured); it will vary, so watch them. They should come out just barely starting to be tender, but not at all falling apart - if they don't 'bend' at all when you pluck one out, they're not ready; if they start breaking or fail to hold their clean-cut shape, they're over. This step is critical: There is no such thing as a decent fry that has been cooked only once. There is no short cut. You can use water, as I do here, instead of oil (not quite as good, but still quite good, and much healthier, easier, less messy, and safer at home), but you MUST blanche them before frying, or your fries are destined to suck. Seriously. It has everything to do with giving the starch molecules in the outer layer time to glue together before frying, which is what creates a crisp crust and a flaky interior. The chemistry is unforgiving on this, you can take my word for it, consult McGee, Corriher, or this excellent discussion from the French Culinary Institute, or you can eat shitty fries.
Gently - gently - drain, rinse, and pat-dry the potatoes (laying them out on a kitchen towel which you then fold over works well). Transfer to a large bowl and coat them liberally with good-quality olive oil. When in doubt, keep it local - I'm still working through the bottom of a bottle of TJ's Spanish EVOO, but I'd prefer to have used DaVero's 40-weight. And when I say liberally, I mean it, now is not the time to skimp on fat. The fries should be coated and glistening with oil.
Transfer to a sheet tray, moving the fries around to ensure that they all have room to breathe. Don't "crowd" the tray! Transfer the sheet tray to the 450-degree oven and bake for about 20 minutes. Watch, listen, and check them frequently from 15 minutes on, but I suspect you'll find about 25 minutes total cooking time.
Take them out and salt the hell out of them. Nothing worse than a bland, under-seasoned french fry. Kosher salt is a staple around here, but sometimes it doesn't stick to fries very well, so a finer grind of good sea salt, or - better - one of the more powdery sel gris would really make them sing.
Serve IMMEDIATELY! Heinz (and no other) ketchup is optional.

Good vittles...

In defense of Costco

2010-07-29T12:55:00.000-07:00

I'm taking time out of the kitchen today, mainly because I actually have commitments aside from cooking and writing about it, but also because, as much as I love to make and consume homemade goodness, sometimes I just want to eat a bowl of cold cereal, put the bowl in the dishwasher, and move on.

That being said, this is a new blog with precisely zero readers, and apparently - if I ever want to get a reader - it's important to keep posting. This leaves me with two choices: Recycle a story from an old recipe I've got filed away somewhere (I'm not above that, and reviving 'vintage' food photos from my pre-blog days will undoubtedly play a material part in the near future), or talk about something altogether different. So I thought this would be a good excuse to address a topic that, at first blush, might seem not-very-foodie-friendly, and downright heretical to the locovore crowd that one would be excused for thinking (however erroneously) we at PK are trying to ingratiate ourselves with.

Let me begin today's tirade by stating, for the record, what must by now be obvious to even the most casual reader (as if I'd have any other kind): I am not a zealot. I am not a fanatic. I love to shop, cook, eat, and drink locally, but I don't lose any sleep over imported dry pastas, cheeses, cured hams, canned tomatoes, or wines; neither do I abhor the occasional short cut in the kitchen, if it allows me to make better food, on average, more of the time, than I otherwise would or could.

And, to get back on piste, I occasionally shop at Costco. Yes, this particular local cook provides material, if episodic, financial support to All That Is Evil in the world of category-killing food mongers. My defense is this: With a bit of selectivity, I can purchase certain high quality foodstuffs at deeply discounted prices. The money I save by doing so increases the amount of money I have to shop for high-priced groceries and, by extension, my financial support of local food producers. (Let's be clear, farmer's markets are anything but cheap - don't get me started on the "if you only understood the true economic cost of mass food production" b.s. I'm an economist, and I say you're elitist, delusional, and just plain wrong. But I recognize that that line of argument requires some supporting evidence, so I'll leave it for another post.) All of which means that, buy shopping at Costco, I buy and prepare a higher average quality of food for my family.

By "averages", I am not talking about eating free-range, locally ranched lamb one day, subsidized by pre-prepared, Costco Mystery Loaf on another day. I'm talking about good, generally basic, ingredients, of substantially the same quality that I would have otherwise purchased, at a vastly reduced price. A few simple examples to illustrate the point:

Organic, extra virgin Italian olive oil: Works out to be about $7/liter at the Big C, which is on the order of 1/2 less than I would get a comparable product at our local natural foods market, and probably 1/3 less than I would find at TJ's. (I won't even bother to talk about Whole Paycheck. The checkbook-liberal, self-described locovore who pats his or her self on the back for buying poorly butchered wild salmon of dubious provenance from Whole Foods at an inflated price has a lot to learn about buying food, is all I'm saying. This, too, is fodder for another healthy, rant-filled post, so I'll reserve further comment for now.) Oh, and it's not because the oil isn't good. Does it taste like DaVero's Estate? No - but it is fresh, grassy, and generally everything you'd expect from an everyday staple EVOO.
Milton's Multigrain bread: We go through it like locusts once "sandwich season", AKA The School Lunch Dilemma, is upon us. At about $5 for two extra long loaves, this, too, is on the order of 1/2-1/3 less than I'd otherwise get the identical product.
The cheeses can be excellent: I buy Redwood Hill Farms (who are about as local as it gets) outstanding goat's milk cheddar, as well as basic "cooking" cheeses from Tillamook or Bella Gioso or whomever. If you use Kraft American cheese - and we at PK swear by it, without shame, for diner-style cheeseburgers and omelets - why not get it in bulk? It's not like it's going bad.
Organic butter and milk. It's fine, trust me. (I don't buy their eggs. I am fanatical about eggs, particularly as we eat them raw or barely cooked on many an occasion. I'll devote many future posts to the various and sundry wonders of the chicken egg, and why, of all things, you should only buy incredibly fresh eggs from farmer's you trust.
I didn't go there with the intent to use, or even knowledge of, their car stuff, but saved some $0.30/gallon on a full tank of gas, and will save about $200 on a set of tires that my wife's car very badly needs.
Oh - this being a personal bugaboo of mine - they actually have remarkably consumer-friendly return policies.
I could go on, but it would be pointless; if that sort of stuff doesn't seem worthwhile to you; if you are simply and completely price-inelastic, either because money is irrelevant to you or because your theological in your beliefs about shopping, nothing I am going to say is going to change your mind, and life is far too short for me to give enough of a shit to try.

What is nevertheless unequivocal is that going to Costco is an aesthetic assault on your senses. It is poorly organized (or, more precisely, unnecessarily difficult to navigate), vast, noisy, and ugly in virtually every sense of the word. I won't even try to sugarcoat it. If you tell me those non-pecuniary costs are too high, I won't argue; they are for my wife, but not for me, which is why I draw the short straw in this particular division of household labor.

The key to shopping at Costco is to understand it for what it is - a quasi-military exercise in efficiency and restraint in the unavoidable application of force. Laugh this off and, like my wife, you'll go once, leave feeling dirty, disgusted, and out $300, never to return. Like any pseudo-military campaign, there are certain rules of engagement that raise the probabilities of success:

The first thing to understand is that, like Gulf War I (and in stark contrast to nameless wars before and since), you must clearly define your objectives before engaging the enemy. The first rule of Costco is, Buy Only What You Are Certain To Use. Generally, this means only stuff you would have bought anyway. However, that is not strict enough, because no matter how cheap it is, it is not necessarily economically efficient to buy stuff that is either costly to store or that is certain to rot.
The next rule, which might properly be a corollary of the first is, Avoid All That Crap By The Front. For the most part, this means electronics, but I would extend its scope to home furnishings and almost anything that comes in "coupon" form (EasyPass may be an exception; Day Passes to an amusement park you had no plans to visit, however deeply discounted, are not).
Never forget the third rule, Be Ruthlessly Selective. Do not buy something that is "almost the same" but which you will likely be disappointed in; do not sacrifice quality; do not downgrade from organic; if they don't have an acceptably close substitute for what you want, Move On.
It is generally permissible, and even advisable, to Purchase Dry and Bulk Goods. Cleaning products, paper products, bottled water (insert outrage at the relevant catastrophic environmental impact here), etc. There is probably even an "eco-friendly" version much like, if not identical to, the one you would have bought anyway. Just be sure you can store it.
As an over-arching principal, always remember, when buying foodstuffs, to Avoid Complexity. This actually goes far beyond Costco, and we'll talk about it more later - certainly in a forthcoming post on buying pre-made tomato sauce - but for now, take it on faith: The longer the list of ingredients, the worse it will be. This will generally, but not exclusively, preclude all pre-made food, which is a good starting place (there are notable exceptions - depending on the topping, for example, the organic pizzas on Viccolo cornmeal crust - but they are the exceptions that prove the rule).
Finally, Focus On Staples and Avoid The Fresh Stuff. Staples is the obvious strategy: Organic olive oil, bulk cereals and breads (of the right brands), wine, beer, and liquor (yes, the ARE staples, although always heed Rules 1 and 2 when purchasing booze), etc. The Fresh Stuff may be more controversial, and may even be unfair; I confess, I've not bought much if anything. But fruits and vegetables, both because of quantities and provenance, strike me as dubious. And, if you like to shop at farmer's markets, certainly fruits and veggies should be at the top of your list. I am less clear on the meats, but I'm fanatical about meats (I am tempted to try the whole organic chickens, if I could persuade myself that they were truly raised and slaughtered in a humane manner), and I'm inherently skeptical.

Good shopping, and good luck.

Leftovers: Wild Salmon Two Ways - Wrapped in Prosciutto with Creamy Polenta, and Simply Raw with Pistou

2010-07-28T19:43:00.000-07:00

Leftovers, I often think, are the home cook's best friend. At the very least, leftovers provide motivation: One of the cook's, any cook's, moral imperatives is not to waste food. And of course, using leftovers saves money - no mean feat, if your goal is to cook good food, on a regular basis, for a rapidly growing family of [insert your number here - it's not cheap for one, or for five].

But leftovers are more than that: Like the sonnet or the haiku, their inherently limited structure becomes the foil for improvisation, for efficiency, for making something new out of something old. Or maybe I've had that one-glass-of-wine-too-many and I'm blabbering, but I'm sticking to my guns on this one: I gain considerably more satisfaction as a cook by constructing a good dish from leftovers than I do by cooking from a well-supported recipe, replete with multiple stops at multiple markets (not that I mind that either, mind, but I'm trying to make a point).

Last night's dinner consisted of salmon; pistou; and polenta. And a salad of arugula, but I have limits on eating raw greens, so no salad tonight. Tomorrow, surely. In any case, I had a couple of nice chunks of salmon, some polenta, and a boatload of the pistou. It sounded like a coherent meal last night, why not another, different, coherent meal tonight? Enter my middle child, who - bless her culinary soul - believes that few foods are better cooked than raw. She was at 6, and remains at 8, an emphatic believer in steak tartare. And tonight, she sagely pointed out that, "Hey Dad, it's all well and good how you've cooked it, but can I have some of that salmon raw?" So we tasted it (this being one of the principle advantages of buying food locally, at the peak of freshness, from people you trust - raw meat need not be anathema), and sure enough, the kid had it nailed - if anything, better raw than cooked (I suppose that's the nickel version of why sushi is one of the finest cuisines in the history of human civilization; but I digress).

I rummaged around the fridge, found nothing noteworthy, except a pack of still-good-but-ought-to-use-it prosciutto. Add the fact that I was cooking for the kids (last night's dinner was behind schedule, so the kids got hosed on their portion, which is also why I had the leftover salmon in the first place), and kids have taste buds, and thus love bacon. They don't, however, appreciate a crispy salmon skin, tragic as that may be. And, speaking for myself, bacon can really make seafood (well, some seafood) kick ass. And so the genesis of the meal: Wrap the salmon on prosciutto before cooking it rare, and serve it on top of the creamy polenta, and alongside a hopelessly naive sashimi cut of the odds and ends of the raw salmon, with just a touch of the pistou.

Wild Salmon Two Ways

Trim off a few nice sashimi-like slices of the raw salmon using a very sharp knife (wipe the blade with a damp cloth between cuts - and if your knives aren't sharp, and you don't know what to do about, we have to talk). You want to end up with a nice, almost cube-like chunk of salmon. I've farted on about the pistou for two days now, so I won't bother again; grab it from the fridge. Put the polenta in a pot to warm, or what the hell, just nuke it before plating.
Take two slices of prosciutto, and wrap the salmon, first in one direction, then - after rotating it 90 degrees - in the perpendicular direction. Tuck and fold the prosciutto so that it's all wrapped up snugly, basically a birthday present of wild salmon in a wrapper of pig fat, what more could you one ask for? Except that I suck at wrapping presents. But less so, food.
The whole key to this is cooking the salmon such that (a) the prosciutto forms a nice crust, and (b) the salmon is cooked uniformly around the edges and rare to the center. On my stove, that means medium-medium-low heat, a few minutes on each side, just enough to brown the pork; but it took me a trial batch, which I overcooked, and asymmetrically at that. The hard truth is, you have to cook it by touch - feel it raw, and keep feeling as it cooks, because once it's firm in the middle, it's over done. And you know we feel about overcooking fish.
Season the sashimi with fleur de sel, plate over a bit of the pistou, and garnish with a basil leave. Slice the cooked salmon and plate over the polenta.

Wild salmon with fresh pistou, creamy polenta, and arugula

2010-07-28T10:32:00.000-07:00

This dish came about, like so much of what transpires here in the PK, simply because it was the obvious thing to do: I was driving home with my eldest daughter last night, and we have a small but exceptional farmer's market on Tuesdays; we had very little time, not enough to really walk the stalls, so we had to choose quickly; we were already behind schedule for dinner, so prep time had to be short; and, of course, in keeping with our MO, we wanted to be fresh, seasonal, and local.

The salmon are apparently running late this year, which is not a bad thing from my perspective, as it gives me a better shot at working this wonderful fish into my posts. Dave, our local market fisherman, either catches it locally, or - because of tragic overfishing - sources it from Alaska; in this case, somewhat disappointingly, we couldn't get the local stuff. But better to buy wild, from Alaska, than from an industrial farm or at the risk of wiping out the local population entirely. And if you've been following the Proximal Kitchen at all, you've already figured out that we're hardly zealots - we love local, but above all, we love good.

Two stalls down from Dave was Bernier Farms, who consistently produce, amongst other things, fabulous produce. Today, they had basket upon basket of different varietals of beautiful garlic, blazing green Genovese basil, and - a personal favorite here at PK - bags of crisp, leafy, young arugula. Having just picked up some organic polenta, the menu clicked: salmon goes well with corn; basil and garlic make pistou, and pistou is delicious on salty, oily fish; and simply dressed arugula always provides a great contrast in bitterness and acidity. (And yes, if you're wondering about the mythical Mediterranean salmon, you're right - you will not likely fine salmon in much Provencal cooking. But many of those same flavor profiles that work so well with bass and other Med-centric fish seem to do just fine with salmon... and my kids love salmon, which is generally enough for me.)

Wild Salmon with pistou, creamy polenta, and arugula

If you're making polenta from scratch, start it first, following the directions on the package. Heresy, but I will on occasion - as I did on this particular mid-week night - cheat, and start with a pre-cooked polenta. Yeah, yeah, I know. But it's better than you might think, and cuts the total cooking time of this dish by more than half. To make it 'creamy', simply whisk in some heavy cream or, better, mascarpone cheese right at the end.
Pin-bone and trim the salmon into neat shapes of roughly uniform thickness. Carefully score the skin side and pat dry.
Prepare the pistou - see my other post on the topic here.
Heat a pan over medium heat and add a little olive oil. Place the salmon cuts in the pan once the oil is hot but not smoking, skin-side down.
While the salmon is cooking (90% of its cooking time will be done on the skin), dress the salad. A simple vinaigrette would be unimpeachable, but I chose to keep it even simpler and save another bowl in the process by using one my favorite Italian methods: Simply toss the leaves with olive oil to lightly coat, season with salt and fresh ground pepper, and squeeze a lemon over them.
Once the skin is crispy and the flesh is still rare to the middle, turn the salmon over, cook briefly just to set the other side, taking care to keep not to overcook the fish. There is really no worse crime to an already dead fish than to overcook it; better to be raw than dry. And, for those who abhor "fishy" taste, it's worth noting that, generally speaking, fish gets "fishier" the longer you cook it.
Arrange some salad on a plate, make a little bed of polenta, place a salmon filet in the middle of the polenta, and spoon pistou over the top.

A final note on wine: Garlic and basil are not particularly food-friendly flavors, and a spicy pistou can be really tricky. The Italians will, correctly, suggest a Ligurian white of some sort, but I had none to hand, and very few of our local wines here in the Russian River Valley seemed obvious. In the end, I had an inexpensive white from the Cotes-du-Rhone, made primarily from Marsanne & Rousanne; the lack of oak, the barely-sweet fruit and young exhuberance, and the local-by-extension pairing of a Provencal wine with a nearly Provencal dish proved just about right.

In search of pistou

2010-07-28T09:03:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Bernier Farms' produce, 4 ingredients & no cooking for a perfect sauce

Let me start with the essential fact: Pistou is seriously good stuff. Made in minutes, from very few (and entirely raw) ingredients, it turns a vegetable soup transcendent, it transforms a pasta from the simple to the sublime, and, perhaps less conventionally but no less successfully, it works wonders with certain seafood.

The problem is, unlike in the case of its far more famous (and near-mystical-when-done-right) cousin, pesto, there seems to be no clear agreement on what actually constitutes a true pistou. Or, at least that is what is to be gleaned from a quick perusal of my personal collection of cook books. In the case of pesto, one need go no further than Marcella Hazan (Essentials of Italian Cooking). OK, sure, the exact proportions change, but how exact is a "cup of loosely packed basil", never mind "2-4 plump garlic cloves"? My point is, there is broad agreement amongst serious cooks (or at least the subset of those whose cookbooks I both possess and have bothered to read) as to what constitutes pesto. I cannot say the same for pistou. To wit:

Julia Child, in her classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, suggests a relatively small proportion of basis, a relatively large proportion of tomato, and the more-or-less-usual quantities of olive oil and garlic. And - this being, in my opinion, the critical point, Julia includes grated cheese (Italian cheese, in point of fact - fascinating to the point of uniqueness, in classical French cooking). But no butter - this isn't pesto, after all.
In Mireille Johnston's really good, if overlooked, small tome on Provencal cooking, The Cuisine of the Sun, we find basil, garlic, olive oil, and, again, grated Parmigiano - but here the proportions are distinctly pesto-like, with something like 5-10 times the amount of basil Ms Child would have me use (and a bit more garlic than most Italians would use).
Patricia Wells, in the consistently excellent At Home in Provence, provides a very similar recipe to Ms Johnston, with pesto-like proportions, but - critically - no cheese.
Finding such inconsistencies, and lacking the motivation and resources to track down primary historical sources, I went to the Gastronomique, who provides (perhaps unsurprisingly) very similar guidelines to Ms Child in the basic recipe. However, in the description of the condiment, it makes clear that the base is a paste of garlic, basil, and olive oil, and that tomatoes and cheese are sometimes added.

One may fairly ask, "So what?" Because, while I'm not quiet a zealot about it, I generally count myself amongst the Italian school of "no dairy with seafood", and wild salmon was on the menu (more on the not-so-classic combination of this garlicky concoction with salmon in my next post). So where I come out is this: If you're going to serve pistou with seafood - and it can be truly exceptional with sea bass, crab, salmon, and perhaps most of all, rouget or red mullet - then follow Ms Wells, use lots of basil, and leave out the cheese. As to the radical variation in proportions, I think it really comes down to taste and application: The Childs/Gastronomique versions are really closer to a flavored olive oil, almost a vinaigrette with the acid, whereas the Wells/Johnston versions show case the aromatics of the basil and form a thicker, paste-like consistency, both of which are features I adore (even more so if you're spreading it on crusty bread, and why wouldn't you do that). One thing that is always and everywhere uncertain is the garlic: Which varietal, how young or old, the size of the cloves, and whether you want a mere background hint, or a spicy wallop in the front of the palate... it just depends, is about all I can say.

The other advantage of Ms Wells' version is that it can readily be converted to proper pesto at a later stage, simply by beating in a few tablespoons of soft butter and mixing in the requisite quantities of finely grated parmigiano and romano cheeses, although I'd have to think about how to deal with the missing pignoli.

I have less of an opinion with respect to the tomatoes, mainly because I've not spent much with tomato-laden pistous; that being said, I can easily imagine a simply grilled whole bass, dressed with Ms Child's version of the sauce. In fact, seeing how much of the rather intense and concentrated elixir is now sitting in my fridge, I test that hypothesis next weekend...

In the event, my eldest daughter and I decided to stop by the Tuesday farmer's market in town and, as we were under a bit of time pressure, made only one stop for produce: Luckily, we landed at the Bernier Farms stand, and they had an exceptionally fragrant Tuscan garlic and big, bright green bunches of Genovese basil, so the decision was easy.

Pistou (food processor method)

Mince 1-2 large (2-4 small) cloves of fresh garlic and form a paste by sprinkling with kosher salt and using the flat side of large knife to mash the salt and garlic on a cutting board.
Gently wash and de-stem 2 cups of loosely packed basil leaves, taking care not to beat the leaves up too much at this stage. Get the Genovese varietal if at all possible, nothing else has the fragrance. (On a side note, if you have sun, basil is a frightfully productive and easy-to-grow plant.)
Put the garlic paste and basil into a food processor and puree, while slowly adding a quarter to a half cup of good quality, extra virgin olive oil. And if you want to be strict about the whole cooking-local thing live in California, you can probably get a very good olive oil from not too far away. (I love our local oils, and I buy but I'm no zealot, and have no objection to buying organic extra virgin Italian olive oil in bulk from the dreaded Costco.) Continue with the oil until it reaches the desired consistency.
Puree just until smooth or you'll bruise the leaves beyond recognition, a few minutes should suffice. Transfer quickly to a tightly-sealing container that fits the quantity as well as possible - oxidation takes away the wonderful color of the pistou, so the less exposed surface area the better. Keep refrigerated, but allow to come to room temperature before serving.

Figs, figs, figs, Part III: Salty Fig Paste

2010-07-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

Our family vacation was due to start a couple of days after I filled up a shopping bag full of first-crop green (or white, or whatever they are) figs, and if there's one thing ripe figs were not meant for, it's sitting around on your counter, waiting to rot. Also, first-crop figs not quite being all that, I figured a heavier hand might be warranted, and beat the crap out of them, until they cried "salty-fig-paste-Uncle":

Salty Fig Paste:

Scoop out flesh (discard skins) and cook gently, over low or medium-low heat, until it reaches a jam-like consistency (likely closer to 1/4 than 1/2 of the original volume). For my first experiment, and as pictured here, I cooked the paste down after the puree in Step 2 below, but I think, on reflection, that that was a mistake, because it's better to blend in the oil after it's been reduced.
Transfer the figs to a food processor - here is where I try to heed Boyle's law and let it cool a bit, so as to avoid a steaming-fig-paste facial - and puree until smooth, adding a good, fruity olive oil as you go. How much depends on your taste and what you're going to do with the paste, but the paste should have a smooth, glossy look and you should be able to taste the olive oil underneath the fruit. In the spirit of keeping it local, my go-to cooking oil is DaVero's "40-weight", although I was out, so in this particular instance, I cheated and used the bottle of TJ's Spanish EVOO I had to hand. Season to taste - I just used salt, but I can see an argument for a few grindings of fresh white pepper.

OK, now I've got a few cups of the stuff, what do to with it? I think fig paste is good with all sorts of things, but shows a particular proclivity for sharp, salty cheeses and cured meats. My wife and kids don't like fig paste at all, so I'll be eating it for a while, with the attendant posts to this blog when, as, and if I come up with any other clever ideas. But it's a Monday, so it's got to be simple, and I don't want to go shopping; and, since this is a cooking-locally blog, I want to keep it local. Herewith, a simple salad of sorts, made almost entirely of stuff from within my county (and mainly from within my city limits):

Chevre with Fresh Herbs, Fresh Figs, and Salty Fig Paste

Prepare Salty Fig Paste (above) and use the back of a spoon to apply a heavy smear to the plate.
Slice a fresh baguette thinly on a bias - I'd use sweet rather than sour bread for this (my local favorites are Costeaux and Full Circle). Spread a spoonful of chevre on each slice of bread (so many good local goat dairies, this time I used Redwood Hill Farms' excellent young chevre) and sprinkle with roughly chopped fresh herbs (basil, flat-leaf parsley, and a little rosemary from our own garden worked great here), some fresh cracked pepper, and a few dried chili flakes. Arrange on the plate, next to the fig paste.
Cut a fresh fig in quarters - our black Mission fig tree had a few first-crop ripe ones, so I used those instead of the greenies for color and because they tasted pretty damn good - and arrange down the other side of the cheese-breads.
Drizzle the breads with olive oil and sprinkle the fresh figs with a bit of fleur de sel.

I think I'd round out this local meal with any number of the excellent and reasonably priced Sauvignon Blancs we produce here in the Russian River Valley.

Figs, figs, figs, Part II: Salad of fresh figs with posciutto, goat's milk cheddar, and herbs from the garden.

2010-07-26T16:32:00.000-07:00

Inspired by the urgent need to do something with the early-season fig crop, I tried a salad:

Cut a few figs into shapes and drizzle with olive oil and a little balsamic vinegar, just enough to provide acidic balance.
Drape prosciutto (a sweet San Danielle would be great, but a saltier Serrano might kick even more ass) judiciously over the figs and sprinkle with a finely grated goat's milk cheese (we have wonderful goat dairies all along the North Coast; I used Redwood Hill Cheddar), taking care to keep the flesh and skin of the figs in view as much as possible. At this stage, a little fleur de sel to bring up the seasoning wouldn't hurt.
Garnish with whatever herbs you have to hand - I find basil to be exceptional with the sweet-salty combination of fruit, meat and cheese, a small bit of thyme was nice, but sage was overpowering (I love sage, but it so often is). I finished it with fresh lavender, because we grow it ourselves, it makes for great color contrast, and really, what's more seasonal in summer than fresh lavender from your own garden?

Hello, world, it's me, over here, in the kitchen.

2010-07-26T15:34:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: This is my first post on my first blog. I haven't the slightest idea what I'm doing, not even a clear sense of precisely why I'm doing it. But I love to buy, prepare, and consume food, and I've always been prone to pontification, so here I am, writing a food blog.

The point of my blog is to articulate, in stories and words, what I see in my local markets, why I buy what I buy, how I think it ought to be prepared, and what actually ends up on my family's plates as a result.

I'm hoping a thread emerges, but as of yet, I'm not sure what that will be; however, a dear friend of mine, who shares my passion for local food and the effect of heat and knives on raw ingredients, suggested that perhaps we launch a virtual cook-off between NorCal (where I reside) and SoCal (where she lives), shopping at our respective local markets, and posting the results of subsequent forays into the kitchen.

So, whomever and wherever you are, please stay tuned, and thanks for your time and patience as I figure all this out.

Figs, figs, figs

2010-07-26T13:58:00.000-07:00

Digression: Every year, I'm struck by the ways in which each season in Sonoma County is individual and unique. This, of course, is hardly news to the oenophile, for whom vintage can at times be as fundamental as terroir in differentiating quality and character of a wine; and certainly, as a region beholden to the economics of grape-growing, all of us here in the County are aware of the climatological particulars of each year's growing season. However, it is cooking (or, to be more precise, shopping for the foods with which to cook) that has taught me the strange and wonderful ways in which the vagaries of weather come to life in the farmers' stalls at our local markets. My unscientific and largely baseless hypothesis is that the defining characteristic of the 2010 growing season will turn out to be a relatively cool and wet spring: Our average temperature has been about 3 degrees lower, and our cumulative precipitation about 4" higher, than normal. Ripening will run late, and yields appear to be low for grapes but, for reasons that elude me, very, VERY high for the common fig.

In any case, what I know definitively is this: Our personal crop of white figs will be off the charts. We have two fig trees on the property, what I believe to be the Mission (or black) fig, and the Adriatic (or white) fig, but it is only the Adriatic cultivar that has been sneaking the 'roids. We will get more white figs this year than cumulatively over the past several.

All of which leads the home cook to one obvious question: What do I do with all these figs?!