Meg'sfoodandwinepage

Cooking for the New Year Part 1: Pasta and Vegetables

Tarnation, I just don’t know what happens to the time!  The last few weeks veritably flew by in a blurry haze.  I spent considerable portions of last week (whenever I found a moment that is) wondering just what happened to the month of December.  The final month of the year was thankfully – wonderfully even – by far the best month of a year that I am frankly in a hurry to forget as quickly as possible. . .  but it did go by in quite a flurry.

 

The culinary highlights of last month include my most successful Holiday Baking Issue Ever (maybe it was just my good mood; maybe it was because I stuck for the most part to the old standbys, cookies I’ve made enough times to have tweaked the recipes – with the exception of these, the new cookie of the year, which turned out better on a second batch where I used slightly less flour – but I could swear I hit a pretty good baking groove this year and got many grateful thank-you’s for my all-too-willing trouble.) 

 

Side note:  just proving that a little positive reinforcement goes a long way with me, tonight I kept on the baking roll by making these super-wonderful, completely superlative cookies (which I came across the recipe for too late in the game for the Holiday Baking) and am planning to dispatch most of them to my favorite friends and colleagues this week (that beginning-of-year meeting seemed a perfect opportunity to offload some home-baked goodness.  There’s nothing like sitting in a chair all day to make you want to eat sweets.) These sweet-spicy-crunchy ginger cookies pretty much do everything I want a cookie to do and more!

 

Then of course there was Christmas at my sister’s in Cleveland, wherein all the crazy cooks in the family converged on one house and there was much deliciousness.  We basically elbowed each other out of the way to take turns in the small kitchen and did dishes nonstop for days.  The results were fantastic – my brother-in-law’s newest craze is home Charcuterie and his pancetta pretty much rocks.  I got to use some left-over sausage filling for the base of some meat cannelloni, and so I can also attest to the rockingness of that sausage.  Two kinds of Cannelloni (meat filling with béchamel; ricotta filling with marinara sauce) were for Christmas Eve. Christmas day began with my sister’s homemade pannetone and ended much later with a fantastic peach cobbler, with leftover cannelloni (lunch) an incredible grilled pork loin, collards from the garden with the fantastic pancetta, and au gratin potatoes to die for (dinner) in between.

 

Meantime there were dinners with friends (a choucroute garni extravaganza in Greenpoint comes to mind most notably), lunches and dinners with colleagues (oh, the Thai food we ate!  Oh the German Riesling we drank with it!), a few dinner dates with a Very Nice Someone (one to my New Favorite Restaurant I can Actually Afford to Eat at Often, which is an offshoot of one of my other favorites as well as a long-overdue trip to Blue Ribbon for their super-great oysters – had it been a year?!) and a few too many late nights.

 

Whew, what a tear. After all that fun I am craving work, routine, and good sleep (aren’t we all?).  But oddly enough, despite the couple of extra pounds that resulted from all that, I still find myself getting hungry at mealtimes.  Usually I make up a big batch of Hoppin’ John for New Year’s day – it seems the perfect remedy to excess, being flavorful and comforting and virtuous all at the same time.  This year I didn’t think ahead enough to get, let alone soak, the beans, but on the drive back from New Year’s Eve and Day in Vermont I mulled over dinner possibilities and settled on another dish that also falls in the Flavorful, Comforting, Virtous camp (subset:  Pasta with Vegetables, about which John Thorne has a wonderful essay in his book Pot on the Fire): the dish I think of as My Special Orecchiette with Cauliflower Thing.

 

Oddly enough, Orecchiette with Cauliflower does not appear in either of the cookbooks which I consider the Canon of Italian Cooking (Marcella, natch, and also my new obsession:  the Silver Spoon.  What’s not to love about a book that features lettuce as a cooked vegetable (and where was this book when I had a garden full of lettuce those past couple of years?)).  However a quick Google turns it up in many variations, so apparently I did not come up with it on my own, although I do not remember ever having seen a recipe.  The flavor combination is just so perfect, though, that trial and error must eventually lead one in the right direction.  There is also something perfect about the way the dimples in the orechiette hold the pieces of cauliflower, so I always use that shape of pasta (despite it’s being a little hard to eat neatly with a fork, but it isn’t a “company dish” so no matter).  Discussion yesterday led me to cede that fusili might work, too, if you don’t have orechiette.

  At any rate, this seemed like a perfect first dinner of the year with after a crazy month and a long car-ride home.  Delicious, virtous, easy, and fast (you can wash the salad and do the chopping while waiting for the water to boil and from there it’s done in 15 minutes!).

 

Orechiette with Cauliflower

Half a box of Orechiette

1 good-sized head of cauliflower

3 cloves (or more if you like!) of garlic, minced

½ tsp whole cumin

generous pinch of red pepper flakes (to taste)

generous amounts of good olive oil

optional:  anchovy fillets, pine nuts

salt, pepper, grated parmigiano (this dish is good with some romano mixed into the cheese, too.

 

Start by setting a pasta pot on the stove to boil.  Preferably one with a steamer attachment on top (for some reason I prefer to steam rather than to boil the cauliflower; not sure why but that’s how I do it.).

 

Meanwhile cut up the cauliflower into little florettes (the smaller the quicker it will cook!) and mince the garlic.  Once the water boils, throw the cauliflower in, or over (in the steamer basket) and cook until tender – 5 minutes or so – check it.

 

 

Pull the cauliflower out and set aside, then add the orechiette to the boiling water. On the side, generously coat a skillet with good olive oil and turn it on low.  Throw in the garlic and cook gently (do not brown!); as it begins to bubble salt and sprinkle the cumin over (variation would be to add anchovy here, too).  After 3 minutes, turn up the heat and throw the Cauliflower in, sprinkle with red pepper flakes, more salt, and pepper.  When all the cauliflower is nicely warmed through and coated with oil, turn off heat. (variation would be to toss some toasted pine nuts in at this stage.)

 

Mix the cauliflower sauce with the orecchiette when they are ready; drizzle some more good olive oil over the dish before serving and serve with grated cheese on the side.

 

Happy New Year!

Something Old, Somthing New (or how to make great risotto on a Monday)

One of the things that is most off-putting to someone just learning to cook is a recipe that includes ingredients that have to go through multiple steps (ie onions that need to be caramelized, squash that needs to be roasted, mushrooms that need to be soaked, dough that needs to be chilled, and so on).  It is a true and discouraging fact that much of the real work – or not even the work so much as the time – of great cooking is most often not in the final assembling of ingredients but rather the having to do the initial steps.

 

But it is also true that if you cook all the time a lot of this work happens incidentally, on the side and around the edges.  If you cook on an ongoing basis, there are always leftovers or byproducts or pieces of one dish that can be well used in another.

 

And so it was that the other night, which was a Monday, and a cold day on which I had schlepped seven bottles of wine up and down the length of Manhattan after a night of too-little sleep, I was happily able to assemble a delicious roasted acorn squash risotto with porcini broth.

 

When I arrived home, what was going to make everything good was the fact that despite feeling much like I’d been hit by a truck, I had the better half of a bottle of Dolcetto amongst the pile of bottles that I had been lugging around and trying to sell all day.  Not only that, but a bottle of the Dolcetto that is my current favorite wine for being delightfully fresh, with the balance of tartness and broadness on the palate, brightness and bitterness, that is to me the elusive quintessence of Dolcetto.  (And, at 12.5% alcohol, a deliciously quaffable wine that will make you happy without knocking you out, even on a rough Monday.)

 

So I had it in mind to make a good dinner, though no particular plan for what that dinner would be.  I did some reconnaissance and the contents of my fridge and freezer yielded the following:

• A packet of tin foil containing about half an acorn squash which had been sliced and roasted to go with a roast chicken on Saturday night.
• The bag of amazing limited-production organic Carnaroli risotto I brought back from Alba (lo, the land of Dolcetto) after being served an amazing risotto made from it at the Perrone estate. . .  and which I had yet to use!  Was storing in fridge based on reading something in a Ruth Reichl piece saying the stuff spoils quickly. . . which means it doesn’t come to eye when I’m thinking rice.  But now I was searching through the fridge with Alba on my mind and couldn’t miss it.  . . .
• A container of liquid that had been used to soak porcini mushrooms for another dish, lurking in the freezer for just such an evening.
• The last of my freezer stash of chicken stock (itself a byproduct made from sundry fridge-lurking vegetables and leftover bones from roasted birds.  Needing to make more of which is as good an excuse as I ever need to roast a chicken.)
• A container of my new favorite Prep-Time-Saving Product: Citterio Cubetti (pre-cubed pancetta in a nifty package for $1.99!)  I don’t know why I am so delighted by this. . . something about not having to stand in the deli line at Fairway?  Or not having to hack up frozen pancetta into bits?  But every time they have the pancetta cubetti in stock at Fairway, and it’s a rare occasion, I buy several and lob them into the freezer with delight.
• A near-finished rind of good parmigiano from Buon Italia.
• No white wine (rats, I dropped off all my white wine samples with customers.)  But a bit of Amontillado sherry.  That’d do.

Given these ingredients, Roasted Acorn Squash Risotto with Porcini Broth became inevitable.  With a burst of new energy, I threw Cheikh Lo on the stereo to dispel the mood of exhaustion and poured a glass of Dolcetto. Chopped an onion while the frozen porcini liquid and chicken stock thawed and heated in a saucepan.  Gently browned the onion with the cubetti (and with total glee at having cubetti; I am so easy to please!).  Threw in a cup of Carnaroli and stirred it up real good. The porcini/chicken stock smelled heavenly!  Threw a small hit of sherry into the pan with the rice (a little goes a long way), let it evaporate, and started stirring broth into the rice.  Turned it down to super-low, checked/sent some emails, stirred some more, hummed to Cheikh Lo, repeated.  Cut the skins off the roast acorn squash and cut/mushed it up (it was nicely roasted, caramelized on the bottom but not falling apart on top – not too mushy overall!).  When the risotto was almost done, stirred the squash in with a little dried sage (actually from LAST year’s garden; I never got around to drying any this year) and the last of the broth (I’d added a little water because I needed more liquid and it was quite intense).  Grated a little black pepper and microplaned as much cheese as I could over. . .

 

And dinner was delicious!   There was the bass note of the porcini in the broth, the slight earthiness of the squash (and its slight sweetness, too, balanced with the nutty/sweet of the sherry), the bitter echo of dried sage, a hint of meatiness from the pancetta.  And the wonderful Carnaroli rice, whose flavor is subtle enough to be drowned out by all that, but whose texture is more perfectly wonderful than any other rice I’ve worked with for this type of dish (it turns out soft and toothsome at the same time no matter how many emails you might read and type in an attempt to overcook!).

 

And alongside the risotto the Dolcetto was of course delicious (how could it not be; it’s a delicious little wine!).  All light on its feet, earthy and sweet and bitter in measure to the dish and so happy to wash it down.

 

And now, at risk of belaboring the worn-out simile “how cooking is like life,” I have to admit that as I cooked and ate this risotto the phrase “something old and something new” kept running through my mind. . . thinking how that old saw for weddings applies not only to marriage but to cooking or really to any proper beginning. And for the first time in a while, my mind was able to go in that direction while specifically not dwelling on failure.  It seems that I’ve finally reached a point, in my life and in this waning year itself, where I am tired of dwelling on endings and am much more interested in beginnings and maybe most especially re-beginnings.  It’s a new phase, an optimistic one where regret and by extension waste have no place.  My mind has at the back of things been mulling over what good and useful things might have been stored or are lurking in the past and how those old things can be carried through to combine nicely with what is new or in the future.  And despite the inherent danger that lies in pressing inanimate objects into the service of an idea, in this case I’ll go on ahead. Because it was by far the best dinner I’ve made in a long time. 

Soup I can Do

Well, hello.  There it was the half-marathon in October, and here it is the end of the week after Thanksgiving.  What happened?  Well, I guess that last half-marathon race was followed by what has to be the equivalent in the life of a wine salesperson:  namely the insanely draining weeks from October to Thanksgiving.  Although of course I did some wonderful cooking projects (including inventing a terrific pumpkin and Roquefort tart!  And cooking osso bucco for 7 with the Best Osso Bucco Ever from Florence Prime Meats! Making some super-sweet and delicious apple sauce!), there just didn’t seem to be any energy left over for blogging about it. 

 

Here it is, though, finally the busiest wine retail season of the year. Which might leave me some time for cooking adventures and a catch-up in blogging.  I aim to try and fit in some posts on the above-mentioned projects before my traditional onslaught of Extreme Holiday Baking sets in . . . we shall see.

 

But in the meantime I set out the other night to clean out my fridge before leaving for Thanksgiving make the first Escarole and White Bean soup of the season.  (It seems a crime to think of something so delicious as merely a way to clean the fridge, though it’s true I did have some lurkers: the inevitable limp celery, and a head of escarole that kept not getting used because the weather has been oddly warm and there miraculously keeps on being salad in the garden in Taghkanic.  And I was afraid that the little bitty end of delicious Pancetta was going to end up lost in the bottom of the cheese drawer if I didn’t use it up.)

 

Anyhow, I’d surveyed the fridge lurkers and, inspired by some guilt provoked by the ongoing sight of that escarole, thought to pre-soak some white beans.  I put them on to gently boil.  Washed the very sandy escarole.  On the side I sliced some onion (yes, a half-used onion!  More fridge lurkers), what of the celery I could salvage, minced up the pancetta and finely chopped some garlic.  How nice it felt to be making something I have done so many times before, making tidy piles of familiar ingredients on the cutting board and going through the steps I know will make something good . . .

 

So into a soup pot went the onions for a gentle sauté with a little salt and olive oil, followed by the pancetta, then the celery, everything on low heat and covered for a few minutes to sweat and soften up.  Then the garlic, always the wonderfully sticky garlic from my garden – I don’t think I’ve bought garlic for two years now! Everything fragrant and nice. . . I reached up to the herb cupboard for a little thyme. . .  and then I saw the magic surprise ingredient that would take my cozy soup up just a notch – Morton and Basset Herbs from Provence with Lavender. 

 

(Aside: I broke down at Fairway a few weeks back and bought the Morton and Basset bay leaves -- when cooking osso bucco from Florence Prime Meats, why mess around with the usual sad dry flaky bay leaves?  I happened to be out of bay leaves that week, so Morton and Basset it was.  And here I will add, that $5 for bay leaves or no, I am never going back!  It really makes a difference having fresh dried herbs (oxymoronic as thay may sound). Somehow at the same time I grabbed the Herbs from Provence with Lavender.  While I was being profligate (and I was having a dinner party, so I was indeed being profligate.  Very Much So.) I guess I figured I wouldn’t notice another five bucks or so going missing. . . .  Anyhow, the lavender just sounded so wonderful. . . .)

 

So I finally opened this magic little jar, sniffed it (yum, garlic and bay and savory and thyme and that little whiff of lavender) and decided that in lieu of plain old thyme just a little pinch would do to add the right amount of fragrance to my soup.  In it went, and it smelled fabulous.  In went a quart of chicken stock (a good rich batch that I made with chicken backs and lots of carrots last time I needed to clean root vegetables out of the fridge).  In went the beans, which were just getting soft enough to thicken the soup.  In went the escarole, all of it, and I stirred until the escarole shrank down to fit in the pot (amazing how enough greens to totally fill the pot can quickly shrink enough to fit in the liquid at the bottom!).

 

20 minutes later, there was my favorite winter soup, as comfortable and welcome as a long-lost friend.  Maybe I’d just forgotten since last winter how great this soup is, but this seemed like the best version I’d made so far – the escarole and beans all fragrant and earthy and chewy and the soup rich from the chicken broth.  And it was so deliciously flavored with those Herbs from Provence, which added a tiny floral note without being overwhelming.

 

This pot of soup made me incalculably glad.  Being able to spot the ingredients in my fridge and make a dish from memory and feel made me realize how much I have moved on from being a cook who needs to work with recipes.  In fact I scarcely read them any more, except for references of scale or perhaps for an idea of how to create what I am thinking of.  I am thrilled that I have been able to invent some things through experimenting (I will have to post that squash and Roquefort tart!). I also love, maybe even more, that there are dishes that I can make with the utmost of love and care but hardly a thought because I have done them so many times.   And I also love that I can find something small and terrific to add to these old friends of familiar dishes, the little variations that make them more delicious.

And I am so glad to be reminded that how ever complicated and difficult life can be (has been, this year, hell!) soup I can do.

Breaking out the Le Creuset is the best reward for 13.1

I am such a firm believer in my ability to control destiny according to Murphy’s law that I will hereby offer you a word of advice:  If you are inclined to run any road races in New York City, and you don’t like running in the rain, check which races I’ve decided to run in before entering.  Because so far I’m two for two on having at least one torrential downpour occur during half marathons.  Yesterday’s race was the capper:  darned if the light rain (fine for running, fine!) didn’t turn into an absolutely miserably torrential downpour at precisely 8:30 as we lined up at the start.  And then the rain continued until pretty much precisely the moment I got into my car to drive home after (sitting on garbage bags I was dripping that much).  After which, of course, it turned into a lovely sunny afternoon.

 

Fortunately I seem to run faster in the rain (I guess everyone must in order to get it over with; it was a rather grim-faced crowd yesterday) so I was able to blow my last time out of the water (1:49:55!) and remain totally cheerful despite the amazingly annoying discomfort of running 13.1 miles in soaked running shorts.  My shoes are still wet this morning; I checked.

 

Buoyed either by my complete insanity, or by the happiness at a respectable race time, or both, upon getting back to the apartment I enjoyed a long hot shower, did some household chores, and had a restorative nap.

 

At which point I was ready to haul a le Creuset down off the shelf and make the dinner that my body craves, post-race:  braised beef with carrots.  After the effort of a long run at racing pace anything with calories would do, I suppose.  But the deeply satisfying flavors that come from braising are the best way to go . . . not in the least part because it’s so easy to do (a little chopping, a little browning, then put the lid on the pot and collapse on the couch with a glass of hefty red and the newspaper while dinner makes itself).   This dish is essentially poor-man’s osso bucco (beef shank going for less than half the price of veal shank).  Or, if you happen to have some gorgeous little fingerling potatoes from the Greenmarket, as I did yesterday, you can call it “rich man’s Irish Stew.”

Post Half-Marathon Braised Beef with Carrots

Use per absolutely starving person:

1 hefty slice of beef shank (with marrow bone)

3 carrots peeled and coarsely chopped

½ large onion, thinly sliced

3 cloves of garlic, peeled and smashed, not chopped

½ cup chicken stock

a couple of sprigs of fresh time, or a good sprinkle of dry

optional: a splash of red wine, some peeled chopped tomatoes (fresh or canned), or fingerling potatoes for the irish effect

garnish:  parsley finely chopped with lemon peel

if not using potatoes, serve over buttered egg noodles

     Salt and pepper the beef on both sides, then brown in a heavy pan (bottom coated with olive oil) over high heat for two minutes a side.  Set beef aside, lower heat to medium, and add onions and a pinch of salt.  Turn quickly to make sure onions don’t burn until they’ve released their liquid, then throw in carrots and garlic, reduce heat to low, and turn a couple of times.  Put lid on pot, keeping an eye on it to make sure the vegetables are sweating without browning (I usually chop the parsley/lemon peel garnish at this point).  After 3-4 minutes, uncover and turn the heat up to high; add the stock/wine and bring to a boil, then put the beef back into the pot and add whatever optional ingredients you might be using.  Reduce heat to low, cover, and retire to couch.  It needs to cook for 45 minutes to an hour; rouse yourself a couple of times to stir, turning the meat once or twice in the process.

       I'm such a fan of braising that I own a vast battery of cast-iron pans.  The crowning glory of my collection, however is this le Creuset.  It's a veritable vat, big enough to make osso bucco for a crowd.  I think I must have a dinner party, and fast!  to make sure it gets proper use.

Essence of Late Summer Tomato Soup for la retour, no la Rentree!

I admit that I’ve been a little scarce lately as things have suddenly gotten busy work-wise what with the sudden onset of “back-to-school” or “the Season” or whatever you want to call it.  The French call this event la retour la rentree (see comments where I stand corrected!), – which is ever so much nicer than “Back-to-School,” isn’t it?  French is so good for having a single word that means an entire concept (as in terroir for example, a word so powerful it takes an entire paragraph to define in English).  At any rate, suddenly everyone is back to being overbooked and overscheduled and everything is happening at once and wine is being -- or ought to be -- sold and drunk at a suddenly alarming pace and New York is back in action. 

When not busy with work I suppose I have just been lazy.  Or rather lazily enjoying what is just the very lovely loveliness of early fall days.  Having spent my impressionable teen-aged years living in the Frozen North  I still find it difficult to believe that here in New York you can make it through September still wearing short little pants and cute shoes with no socks and not even a proper jacket.  I mean, here it is all but October and the leaves haven’t even changed yet.  I ate dinner OUTSIDE last night (and in aforementioned outfit for crying out loud) and it was not only not in the least too cold  (being a rather surprisingly soft breezy warm night) but all the nicer for seeming like perhaps one of the last nights when outdoor dining would be possible.

This pump-not-boot-wearing weather happens to be a very good thing for me at the moment because due to the amount of running I’ve been doing I simply cannot get my lovely tall boots on any more (calves now the size of Nebraska) and will have to cough up an insane amount of money to get a new pair.  However I simply HAD to go to Blue Hill at Stone Barns this month (if only for the tomato water revelation, see below, it was worth it) and to be honest there went the boot money.  Ah, the sad woes of the urban over-privileged.

In addition to enjoying the weather and the overspending overeating of course I’ve been enjoying the flood of fresh produce that continues in garden and Greenmarket.  Haven’t been able to go up to my house for a couple of weeks, but it was nice to get to Union Square last Saturday for some salad (frisee!  And a great bag of gnarly mixed greens including some tiny chard, which was delicious raw).

 

A lot of cooking energy at this time of year, of course, still centers around All Those Tomatoes.  Except now that we’ve had our fill of fresh tomatoes, and now that it’s cool enough to cook, tomatoes are a whole new ballgame.  Cooked, they become more intensely sweet and sharp and I think maybe even more delicious.  Concentrated, reduced more to their pure essence.

The problem with cooking tomatoes, however, is dealing with all the skins, seeds, and juice.   Really the amount of prep involved is kind of a pain.  I have several ways to deal with them, which are as follows:

1. For when you can deal with boiling water and peeling the damn things:  core your tomatoes, score their bottoms, dump them into boiling water for a few seconds.  Pull them out, run them under cold water, and slip off the skins. Slice into quarters, scoop out seeds, throw flesh into colander to drain off juice. At which point you can either use, freeze, or can the tomatoes.   And by the way,  save that juice!!  At BHSB they serve ‘tomato water’ in shots as an amuse-bouche. You, too can do this! Just garnish some tomato water with olive oil and basil and be tres haute barnyard (‘cause if the Tasting Room is haute barnyard, Blue Hill is certainly tres) at your next dinner party! Could it be frozen?  I think so. . .  I’ll see Dan Barber his tomato water and raise him granita!! 
2. For when you can’t deal with the peeling of tomatoes (and lets face it, sometimes the whole pot of boiling water, colander, tongs, general wetness, etc is just too much), you can just core and quarter the tomatoes, scoop out the seeds and pulp, again put them in colander to drain (saving the precious juice!) then cook them down slightly with some garlic for sauce.  Put through the coarse setting of your food mill.  Use or freeze
3. Or, when the weather is cool enough to put the oven on, you can do all of step 2 except rather than cooking down the tomatoes in a pan, toss them in olive oil and roast them (skin-sides up) at 400 degrees for about 30 mins or so. Let the tomatoes cool for a minute and then you can pull the skins off with your fingers (or just put them through the food mill if you mind burning your fingers, which after years of cooking and/or working in restaurants I don’t).

Anyhow, just think how all that piddly boring tomato prep-work will be but a vague memory as you happily pull containers of tomatoes out of your freezer in deep mid-winter.  The joy of sweet tomato sauce in midwinter is incomparable.

And in case you want to partake of their glory immediately, here is a wonderful soup that pretty much sums up the flavor of late summer.  I made this soup last week and then promptly set aside a full quart of the roasted tomatoes I was freezing so I can make it again sometime in January when it’s dark and I’m blue:

Essence of Late Summer Tomato Soup

3 lbs (or more) tomatoes – peeled, seeded, juiced by any method above (about 1 full quart if you have them in the freezer)

2 medium-sized carrots, peeled

one medium-to-large sweet onion

one yellow or red pepper

(substitute for pepper or add some finely chopped fennel or celery if you like)

3 cloves garlic (if you did not use any in the initial tomato prep)

pinch of whole fennel seeds

pinch of red pepper flakes (optional)

1 tsp mild curry powder

salt to taste

splash of dry white wine

3 cups chicken broth (use low sodium if you use pre-prepared)

fresh herbs (basil, parsley, whatever) to garnish

Finely chop carrots, onion, pepper, other vegetables if using.  Gently cook the onions over medium heat in a generous amount of olive oil until the start giving their liquid, then stir in curry powder, a sprinkle of salt, and the fennel seeds; turn to mix well.  Turn heat down slightly and add other vegetables (garlic goes in now if you are using plain tomatoes).  Sprinkle with salt and turn until everything is well coated with the curry powder, then gently sweat until the carrots and peppers are starting to get soft (you can cover partly if you like).

Turn up the heat, add the prepared tomatoes and a small pinch of red pepper flakes (if you like).  Heat until bubbling, then add a splash of white wine and the chicken broth.  Start with 2 cups and see how much liquid you have (depends on your tomatoes) and adjust as necessary.  Let simmer for 15 –20 minutes and serve.  Garnish with fresh herbs, serve with rustic toasty bread.  If you want to get really crazy, toast the bread, drizzle it with olive oil, then rub it with smashed cloves of garlic.

This dish needs a wine that is ripe but has ample acidity (like the tomatoes).  Lately I’ve been digging wines like Apremont from Savoie, and there’s always my standby Marc Olivier Muscadet. . . . or some other racy little Loire white (Cheverny?) . . .  for reds, well, there’s always cru Beajolais!  Do I sound like a broken record?  I also tend to drink these wines that I happen to sell for a living not only for matters of convenience but because there in a nutshell is one good reason I chose to work for the people who sell them.  It is a true fact that I would almost say that I could be happy if the only wines left in the world were Marc Olivier’s Muscadet and several good cru Beaujolais. . . except then there would be no other wines (Burgundy, you know, is rather hard to give up.  Oh, and Cornas. And Barolo, and great champagne and lots of other wines I can’t afford to drink often.  Not to mention Cabernet Franc from the Loire, which I can. . . ) And actually that would be a little sad, wouldn’t it?  But at least it would be a world in which I could somehow go on living.

I guess I could have made a Plum Cobbler. . . .

How do you suppose plums would work for a cobbler?  You could add the lemon zest and nutmeg (which absolutely made the plum cake) to the plums directly but then finish with a more crispy topping. 

Having said that, I am really enjoying the soft and slightly almond/lemony cake-y-ness of my plum cake right now (it was better the next day.  And yes, I will admit that I had plum cake for breakfast. . . . further signs of impending terminal decadence around here, especially since it is likely that I will do the same tomorrow.)

On second thought, maybe the plums do need a softer and more batter-y element to counteract their delicious acidity.  Maybe I'll wait until next week (when we will be firmly and incontrovertably in apple territory for the duration of the fruit season) and make an apple cobbler. 

Plum Cake

I may have decided that plums are my favorite fruit.  Heavy qualifiers are required for such a weighty decision (I use, or ought to, the same such for speaking of favorite restaurants or wines).  But nonetheless, I generally weigh in on the side of plums. Herewith the justification by comparison:  Blueberries are indeed a very close runnerup.  But they are berries and perhaps have their own category.  I tentatively qualify blueberries as my favorite berry until next Strawberry season.  Peaches: wonderful when perfectly tree-ripe, which you find perhaps once a year and so peaches are perfectly delicious in their fleeting way but out of the running for a constant favorite.  Apples:  they are varied in their own way but apples are always apples.  I only eat them in the fall when they are in season and love them then, bake with them often in their turn, but never, ever think of them longingly at other times.  Pears:  hm, I do love a good pear.  Especially the tiny, sweet Sekels. But they are too sweet when ripe to be quite as thrilling as plums (and as with apples are always so insistently pearish in nature, despite the variety).

What I love about plums is the way in which they balance their ripe juicy sweetness with a bracing skin acidity.  Here I must readily admit that I do not have a sweet tooth.  And  I am often heard to say about wine that “acid is your friend” (as a balancing note, of course, but acid, especially in its absence, can come to seem everything!).  I believe that the same holds true for food (and ditto for a bit of salt).  So plums are marvelous for their sweetness balanced by acidity. I also love plums all the more because they are the only fruit that starts appearing in July and continues on, in various forms, through the very end of the fruit season.

I will admit, in fact, that plums are something I never properly understood until I spent much of the last three summers up in the Hudson Valley.  The big black mealy monsters from California that populate East Coast grocery stores have, at their best, something to do with Real Plums (sweet juicy flesh and tart skins).  But what makes plums so wonderful is their sheer local variety. 

It starts with the tiny red sweet/tart beauties called “sugar plums” around these parts.  They bear no resemblance to what I could find on Google (barring lots and lots of Christmas candy recipes) but they are tiny and red and round and perfectly bite-sized.  Wonderful to burst the sweet juicy flesh in your mouth and then get the sour tang of skin and pit (which then gets spit out the car window as I can never wait to get them home to try some!) and reach for another. . . . I dearly love a generous handful of these served sliced in two over vanilla ice cream. . . .

Then come little yellow plums (firm-fleshed and sweeter; better for baking or jam then they are for eating but still good) and little blue ones and big black ones (these are so ripe and sweet that the juice runs down your chin, and the shock of skin-tartness is almost a reprieve) and finally in September the big Prune Plums.

This weekend past I stopped at my favorite Columbia County farmstand on the way back from a visit to my mom in Vermont and (not quite yet in the mood for apples) could not resist a box of those prune plums (just starting to go soft!).  And for whatever reason (maybe because today was the first decidedly cool-feeling day of early fall? perhaps because today's all-too-recognizable date created a longing for doing, for comfort) what I wanted to do with them was bake.  I’ve been getting the odd urge to bake and these plums were begging to be made into something.  I first thought of some sort of short-crust-bottomed creamy tart (I have a recipe for apricots like that) but ruled that out as too much labor on a Monday. 

Instead I thought of a variation on my favorite cake/tart,  one I found amongst my stepmother’s copious collection of clipped recipes years and years ago and which no one but me apparently remembers.  It was called ‘Swedish apple cake’ I think and it appealed to me in its simplicity – nothing but chopped fruit laid in a pan with a simple batter poured over.  I have been searching and searching for this recipe (as I say, no one but me even recalls its existence – but I swear I didn’t make it up!! It was a standby of my teenaged baking, such as it was).  At long last Clotilde published something similar, last year, which I have since adopted.

Anyhow, I thought it might be great adapted for plums. . . .  and it was.  The recipe can still use a bit of tweaking to account for the higher liquid content of plums, but even as is it is as easy as can be and a wonderful “grown up” dessert (ie not sweet enough for children, but wonderful for grownups with a dollop of sweet vanilla ice cream).  Tweak away, and if I experiment further with plum baking projects I will duly report. . .

Easy Monday Night Plum Cake

10 large and ripe prune plums (or more; enough when halved to cover the bottom of a standard-sized tart or pie pan, preferably one with a removable bottom)

(optional but recommended) a generous grating of fresh nutmeg

¾ cup sugar

1 stick and 1 TBSP butter, plus some for greasing pan

½ cup flour

2 TBSP ground almonds (or almond flour)

1 ½ tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

2 large eggs

½ tsp vanilla

½ tsp finely grated lemon rind

Cut the plums in half, remove their pits, and sprinkle with ¼ cup sugar and the nutmeg.  Toss to coat and let sit for 20 mins or so.

Meanwhile, preheat oven to 400 degrees, then butter a 9-inch tart or pie pan (best to use one with a removable bottom).

Arrange the plums (I alternated cut side up and cut side down) on the bottom of the greased pie pan.

Set the rest of the butter to melt on low heat.

Spin the flour, salt, baking powder and ground almonds for a moment in a mixer or food processor to fully mix and set aside in a bowl.

Spin the eggs and remaining ½ cup sugar in the fp or mixer until white and fluffy.  Add the vanilla and lemon rind and mix.  Add the flour and briefly mix, then add the melted butter and ditto.

Pour the batter over the plums, set the tart pan on a cookie sheet and bake at 400 for 40 minutes (it will puff up and brown on top – let it brown up quite a bit).

Remove from oven and let cool for 15 minutes or more before removing the sides of the tart pan and inverting on a plate.  Gently lift the tart pan bottom off (if some bits of plum are stuck you can scrape them off and replace them.)  You can re-invert so it is served cake-side up if you want, but I think it’s prettier to see the plums.  Let it cool completely before serving, as it is quite a bit softer than the apple version (given the liquid in the plums) but so delicious. . . .  vanilla ice cream if you have a sweet tooth, a second slice if you don’t!

Back from the land of plenty

I’m back from a super-long extended weekend in my dear-and-as-yet-unsold house in Columbia County.  This was supposed to be the last weekend of summer, but since summer had quietly yet quite suddenly disappeared at some point during the last rainy week, it felt more like the first weekend of an alternate Keatsian pre-fall “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”

It was a 5-day weekend in which there were cucumbers that were so sweet in their over-ripeness that they tasted faintly of melon.  There was juicy peach pie made from the ripest of peaches.  There was corn and there were tomatoes and there was a tomato-corn gratin that expressed the quintessence of corn and tomatoes (this month Gourmet hit several nails on the head!).  There was grilled lamb that rewardingly became the entirely other dish that is cold grilled lamb the next day.  And with the cold lamb there was the Ultimate Farro Salad to cap my Farro salad season (an adaptation of that linked recipe that used farro, left out the zucchini, and was spicier).  There was a Pissaladiere with a perfectly thin flaky crust to serve to company.  And to use up the rest of the pastry there was a tiny tomato tart I made for myself with mustard and a little crème freche (an idea I got from here, but used the sliced and salted beefsteak tomatoes I use for my usual, less-fancy tomato tart instead of roasting plum tomatoes because the plum tomatoes just don’t want to ripen all at once this year). And despite the season’s desire to leave us with almost nothing but green tomatoes there were a few cans of tomatoes put up, and some sauce with garlic made and frozen for winter.   A few bags of chard and Italian bitter greens blanched and frozen too, waiting for winter soups and frittatas.

There were a couple of long runs in the Columbia County hills, and more than a couple of long afternoon naps.  Some friends thankfully came to share all that food and indulge my completely unfashionable taste in wines (and they brought their delightful dogs!  Who eat cucumbers!).  We had Mondeuse, from Savoie, which tastes like a willowy mountain love-child of Syrah and Gamay; we had the Mondeuse’s companion white, made from Jacquere, which tastes like what perfectly bracing and delicious mountain mineral water might taste like if it could be made from grapes.  We had my favorite Muscadet (the Clos de Briords), always deeply mineral and satisfying.  We had some Donnas, which is not a girl band but another delicious mountain wine from Italy, made (mostly) from Nebbiolo.  We had some bottles of the lip-smackingly delicious Julienas 2005 from Michel Tete (cf Joe’s comments on 2005 Beaujolais, all true). All wines that are a joy to drink:  light and fresh and perfect for washing down good food, conducive to good talk, followed by sweet sleep and pleasant mornings.  (And it is this final test that is the acid test that separates the truly good wines from all others.)

All in all, I ate so much that I skipped an entire meal today and didn’t even notice.  It was a beautiful time from which to emerge in order to plunge into the next 12 weeks, which mark my busiest and most stressful time of year . . . .

If you smell garlic someplace, it's probably my pesto-breath

Some things are sacred, and for me pesto is one of them.  I seem to post about Pesto every year. 

It's really a family thing: the Birthday Dinner of Choice amongst my immediate O'Connell clan has always been pesto on homemade fettucine followed by medium-rare grilled steak (the better to wipe the pesto off your plate with).

I've eaten pesto four times now in the last two weeks (two times in California, because there was a birthday to celebrate and then leftovers, and also two times at home in NYC).  I plan to make much more up at the house this weekend.  It's full-on pesto season!

Of course it goes without saying that all pesto made in any of the O'Connell homes comes with the "garlic breath or your money back" guarantee. . . . That, and bits of green things in your teeth, are just a fact of life with good pesto, the eating of which is therefore by its nature a group activity. 

I know I've posted this before, but in case you need an immediate pesto fix now that you have that wonderful image of post-pesto teeth in your mind, here's the pesto recipe I use when I want to be exact (it actually comes out better if you are, for all my previous "throw-some-stuff-in-the-fp" advice) and which my dad has always used too.  It's Marcella Hazan's from Essentials of Italian Cooking.  My dad and have both decided against using butter these days since if you use good parmesan and good olive oil and pine nuts it isn't necessary.  Which just shows how terribly posh and spoiled we've gotten, gawd.  The butter does help w/stepping up the richness if you can't get your hands on (or conscience springing for) one or two or even all three of the above.

2 cups tightly packed fresh basil leaves (washed and dried, which is such a pain and always leaves me with green stuff under my fingernails for days, oh well)

1/2 cup good EVOO

3 tablespoons lightly toasted pine nuts (Trader Joes sells them already toasted!! I love this store!!) You can use pepitas or walnuts instead if you like.  It's richer and (lets face it) tastier with pine nuts, but the little buggers sure are expensive, darnit.

2 garlic cloves (start with this and see if you need more.  If you're lucky enough to have freshly harvested garlic -- and it should be available in the farmer's market nowadays -- even better.  The flavor will be clearer and fresher and the aftereffects less, well, pungent.)

salt, pepper to taste

1/2 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano (again, use the good stuff if you can.  if not working a couple of TBS of soft unsalted butter in can add richness)

2 TBS grated romano

Throw the basil, olive oil, chopped garlic, pine nuts and a good pinch of salt into the food processor and puree smooth.  Taste for salt and pepper, remembering that it will get more salty when you add the cheese. . . . At this point you can freeze the pesto; add the cheese after you thaw it just before serving.  If you want to eat it right away, add in the cheese and stir by hand.  Serve over preferably just-made fettucine.  Because it's so good that way. 

(Don't tell my dad but I also sometimes use pesto to make a pasta salad, adding chopped tomato and tiny pearlini mozzarella.  Which is good but sort of violates the code of pesto purity.)

I'm expecting my basil to have reached its usual heroic proportions at this point in the summer, so I'm planning on at least a double batch this weekend myself. . . . it freezes well and is always a hit at dinner parties in mid-winter. . . .

The Farro Salad Days of Summer

Farro became one of the culinary themes of my summer following last month’s company trip to Italy, which began in Tuscany (the land of farro, as well as of olive oil and the sometimes brilliantly pure examples of Sangiovese that you can find in Chianti). 

But first, a little background is due about these trips.  The whole idea sounds just wonderful, I know – ah, to gallivant about Italy (or France, California, wherever) seeing vineyards, tasting wines. . .  the Romance of it All, and so on.  And if in fact you planned this sort of trip as a vacation, I suppose it could be very like that.

But for us these trips are not vacation.  No sane person would even attempt this sort of density as vacation.  Density of personalities (between the traveling group and the group of winemakers, all of whom are complex and many of whom are eccentric), density of meals, density of experiences, places visited, time in the car, lack of sleep (can there be dense lack of sleep? judging from the numbers of photos that are taken of people sleeping in the van, yes) and so on.  Being a slow processor of experience, it usually takes me about four times as long as the trip is to digest it all when I get home.

For this very reason of density (especially as meals are concerned), our office had the Brilliant Idea of sending a rather stern letter to many of the producers we were visiting this year, instructing them to, for the love of god, NOT go all-out on the meals.  There is nothing worse for everyone than having to bolt a rich multi-course meal double-time to avoid being extremely late to the next appointment . . . this is not only disappointing to the person who prepared the meal, and deleterious to the digestion of those eating it, it’s just plain WRONG.   Everyone is left feeling saddened or a little put out.  Instead, we urged them to prepare food that was simple, light, perhaps what they would eat themselves on a normal day (just, you know, multiplied by 18 or so)?

And the results were quite marvelous (for example the pasta e fagioli served to us in the Dolomites by Elisabetta Foradori whose mere presence is enough to elevate the most humble fare into a meal fit for royalty)!  I for one am always pleased to be served a fine level of home cooking, and there many dishes that I immediately filed away to try and replicate as soon as I got home.

And in Tuscany, at  Fattoria Rodano, (the estate of the wonderfully unassuming Enrico Pozzesi), there was a farro salad.

Here we were taken out of the hot Tuscan sun into the house, where couches had been pushed aside to make room for a couple of big tables.  Lunch was a buffet that included the best fresh mozzarella I’ve ever eaten (incomparably silky and milk-rich) and bowls of local fruit (which we fell upon like a pack of hungry jackals – fresh fruit and raw vegetables are usually a rare commodity on these trips!).  And there was this effortlessly, simply, good Farro salad with tuna, tomatoes, and thinly sliced red onions.  It was a delicious combination – the nuttiness and chewiness of the grain nicely offset by the tuna, in turn nicely refreshed by the sweetness and freshness of the ripe tomato.  As it turned out, in the farro discussion that ensued, this particular farro was grown near Lucca, and was a local specialty.

At any rate, this little farro/tuna salad lodged itself in my mind, and resurfaced immediately upon my return.  A trip to Fairway is usually one of the first things I do after getting off a plane (the obvious need to restock the larders, but also a way reconnect with that most banal of realities –- having to provide one’s own food again -- after a week of being catered to).  This time while staggering around in the daze of jet-lag and dislocation that being back in New York always brings (as I ask myself, a la David Byrne, “How did I get here?), I found myself throwing a can of Italian tuna in the cart and nosing about for farro.  They did have some farro at Fairway, but only pre-soaked, vacuum-packed, and $5 for what looked like a rather small package.  Even jet-lagged this seemed like a bit much for a product that might be disappointing, so I looked on and settled on a bag of American pearl barley which reminded me enough of how the Rodano farro looked that for two bucks I figured it would do the job.

It turns out, in fact that barley did the job pretty nicely – and had the added benefit of cooking in 15 minutes after being soaked overnight.  In a Manhattan apartment in summer, quick cooking times are of the essence!  So I soaked, cooked, and mixed up the barley with my can of tuna, thinly sliced shallot (from the garden!) and the best tomatoes I could find.  Salted, peppered, liberally doused with the olive oil from Felsina I had gladly lugged around for the duration of the trip.  A mere touch of my cheap Trader Joe’s aged balsamic . . .  and it was delicious!  I’m sure that tasted side by side with the Rodano version, mine would have paled.  But a week later in Manhattan, it was more than just fine and brought fine recollections of that lunch (but, oh to find a piece of that mozzarella!)

Getting some actual farro was still in the back of my mind about a week or so later when this month’s issue of Gourmet arrived, including the Totally Wonderful supplement of food writing.  (Get your hands on a copy of it if you haven’t seen it, go here for an account of a roundtable discussion by many of the authors, or ask anyone you know who loves food writing what they loved in it; it seems to have made the rounds deservedly quickly.)  Of course I made a bee-line for the Calvin Trillin piece on farro, which I read on the subway and read again and sighed for the Tuscan landscape (food as much as countryside) once or twice.  An immediate longing to make the farro salad he mentioned  (which I envisioned with fresh tender garden vegetables and fresh garlic and lots of that olive oil) set in.

As it happened, that very subway ride was taking me to the Chelsea Market, where I was pouring wine for a customer.  In my world, Chelsea Market is most notably home to Buon Italia (a place I love to forage in! and, you can order from them online if you don’t live in NYC!).  I snuck out of the tasting for a moment and was able to grab a bag of organic farro, easy as that (and four bucks, which was maybe a little steep but oh so much simpler than a ticket to Tuscany).  I was bound for my house the next weekend, where in my Trillin-style reverie the Tuscan farro salad would be served as part of a perfect summer lunch under the umbrella on the back deck, surrounded by the Columbia County green and the chir of late summer bugs.

There were no cooking instructions for the farro on the bag , and I was a little dismayed by the varying cooking times I found with some Google research (45 minutes, 2 hours, which is it?!).  I soaked the grain overnight and figured I’d just keep an eye on it when I cooked it in the morning.  In fact, as it turned out, 20 minutes seemed to do the trick – some of the grains were splitting at that point and there didn’t seem to be any difference in chewiness between 15 minutes and 20 minutes, so out it came.  I brought from the garden: some fresh beans (which were cut into half-inch pieces and blanched for 3 minutes and set aside); a couple of carrots (which were diced and gently sweated in olive oil); to which I added diced zucchini (and continued to gently sweat them until all was just barely tender); at the last minute added to that a couple of minced cloves of fresh sweet just-pulled-up garlic.  Stirred these into the farro with a liberal dousing of olive oil (I’m ashamed to admit how quickly the treasured Felsina olive oil has disappeared!) and a dash of balsamic vinegar (I’ve learned to tread lightly with balsamic. . . but then again maybe I just need one of higher quality.  I think this will be my next food investment).  Salt, pepper, a sprinkling of chopped herbs (oregano and parsley). . .  and it was delicious. 

The rich nuttiness of the farro, the rich nutty greenness of the just-cooked zucchini, the sweet earthiness of the carrots, the crunch of the fresh beans, and the savory/sweet fresh garlic . . . Lucky me, I had a friend on hand that day for lunch, so we put up the umbrella and assembled a few other things to eat and, in fitting homage to Trillin and the kindness of our Tuscan host, finally realized my farro salad dream.

Post-script – If you can’t find Farro, apparently wheat berries also do the trick.  And in point of fact, I think I might actually prefer the Rodano Tuna/farro salad with the barley I used, given that the variety of farro I bought here was much more assertively flavored than the mild one they used.

Enrico Pozzesi of Rodano

Elisabetta Foradori