A WordPress Site

Category: Food and Drink

What I cooked Wednesday

I am terribly spoiled. Every week I get a delivery of fresh shiitake and oyster mushrooms from a local grower. I first encountered him at the Rhinebeck Farmer's market, where I became a regular customer. When the market closed for the winter I learned that he delivers to local markets and restaurants weekly, including some here in Hyde Park. My house is right on his delivery route, much to my advantage.

So I am always looking for perfect things to do with my mushroom bounty, not that this is a burden mind you.

Last night I made sockeye salmon with oyster mushrooms in red wine and it was fabulous. This recipe is a new staple in our house as the presence of red wine and oyster mushrooms is pretty much a given and salmon is a favorite as well.

The recipe is from the latest issue of Food & Wine magazine and can be found on the web here.

September 29, 2010
What I Cooked Wednesday

I adore September. I adore fall generally, but September holds its own special place because of the way it lies just on the edge between summer and fall. The nights and the mornings are crisp and cool, and often the days also are on the cool side, possessing that unmistakable feeling of fall with its sparkling crisp feeling, and its brittle, humusy, dried aroma which is so different from the warm wet floral earthy must of summer. There are still warm days but they lack the oppressive humidity of August, they feel precious and fleeting.

And then there are the vegetables and fruits. The fruits of September are definitely of the autumnal variety, pears and apples, crisp and sweet with a hint of tartness and an occasional melting tenderness but without the lushness of summer fruits. They are like the autumn air. But the vegetables, the vegetables are another matter all together. Yes there are fall vegetables coming in, pumpkins and winter squash, crisp greens that shunned the summer heat. But, here in the Mid Hudson Valley at least summer vegetables tend to reach their peak just as August begins to fade into September leaving September full to bursting with eggplant, and peppers, zucchini and tomatoes. In September we have a wealth of tomatoes and eggplant, peppers if we are lucky, and the summer squash is still prolific even as the winter varieties start to ripen.

Of course it will all come to a halt with the first frost. But in the meantime we are allowed to savor the waning warmth and bounty of summer. It will be gone soon enough.

Chicken Breasts with Zucchini Pappardelle. Thinly sliced raw zucchini, wilted slightly by tossing with hot sauteed chicken breasts. From this recipe. Perfect for a summer evening by the pool. Perfect for a September lunch on the deck, savoring the warm sunshine and crystal clear skies.

September 22, 2010
An Hour at the Culinary Institute

Yesterday morning I sat out on the plaza at the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) for half an hour, sipping a cappuccino and just enjoying the cool, sunny September morning. I had been there a couple of days before, over the weekend, when the plaza was pretty empty. But on a Tuesday morning the plaza was busy with students walking back and forth and few visitors toting bags from the bookstore or just enjoying the view.

Truthfully I was one of those people toting bags at one point. I had an hour to myself while G was taking an exercise class at his gym, a mere quarter mile down the road. Usually I get the house to myself a couple of hours in the morning while G and J go to the gym and then go out for coffee, but J wasn't available Tuesday and I volunteered for car duty, knowing full well that I had the perfect opportunity to indulge in a little cookbook shopping.

I had no particular reason to be there, especially not in the bookstore. I already own over 300 cookbooks and certainly don't "need" any more. (The photo shows only a small portion of the cookbook shelves.) But need is such a subjective term, and I love cooking and cookbooks. I love reading them. I love cooking from them. In fact there are over 150 cookbooks on my cookbook wish list. I would probably find most of them necessary as well, if I owned them. I am no minimalist, especially not where cookbooks are concerned.

Truthfully, every cookbook in my collection is used, although not perhaps in steady rotation and has been saved for a specific reason. This is not to say that mistakes aren't made, or that a well-meaning interloper does not occasionally invade the space. The books that can't keep up usually fail pretty quickly.

Like everything else in my life, I tend to cook in cycles. We might go through a Middle Eastern phase in the kitchen, or a Mexican phase, or a seafood phase. Or I might just glom onto one or two cookbooks purely on whim and cook from them over and over for days or weeks until something else catches my fancy.

I had seen a few books I was interested in on Saturday, but at the time we had a reservation and I knew I could come back anytime. And come back I did. But I didn't come back without a plan or rules. I checked my cookbook wish list and even printed a copy of it to take with me. And I decided that no matter how many books I wanted to buy, and there would be many, I could only come home with three.

I think my choices worked out well. I indulged in one frivolous, just because I want it book, David Tanis' A Platter of Figs. Then I purchased two books that helped to fill holes in my existing collection.

Andrea Nguyen's Asian Dumplings will not be universally applicable as wheat starch doughs are far more common that doughs I can actually eat, but there are things I can use directly here, and I am hoping that there is enough information that I can understand other doughs better with the hope of eventually creating my own, compromised versions of old favorites. I do have Florence Lin's book on Chinese Noodles and dumplings, but this book covers a much wider variety of doughs and I think I will learn much and enjoy the process.

It seems odd to me to think that I have very few Indian cookbooks, but it is true. I have longed liked Indian food, but until about a year ago, G wouldn't touch it, always blaming the yellow rice he ate in the cafeteria during the late night shift at Passavant Hospital in Chicago during his internship. But a year ago he discovered a little Indian restaurant near us that he loved, and he loves going out for Indian food. We've been exploring more Indian cuisine at home as well. He likes to help grinding the spices and is eager to try new dishes. 660 Curries should allow for quite a bit of exploration with new tastes. Now that the weather is cooling down a bit the idea of cooking is getting more appealing. Cooking curry might be just the thing.

(photo of the plaza at the Culinary courtesy of the CIA's website)

September 15, 2010
Other entertainments

I seem to run in fits and starts. At times making time to play and write seems easy, at others I fall into bed exhausted at the end of the day and wonder where all my time went. Sometimes I distract myself as well and end up on completely new tangents.

I started the weekend looking for a piece of blue knit. I knew I had it but I couldn't find it and this really ticked me off. Somehow in the middle of the searching process I decided that it was time to finish cataloging the yarn in the yarn/fabric closet, a job I had worked on extensively last December, stopped for holiday guests, and never resumed.

The impulse to organize yarn may have also been prompted by the fact that I came home from knitting group with four bags of yarn Thursday night. My LYS is going out of business and I did my part to reduce the inventory. I did finish the yarn inventory though, and got everything put away (whew, room for everything!) And I also mentally revised my "to knit" list to fill a few gaps and knit what I think I need now.

The blue fabric eventually turned up, pretty much right where I was originally looking. I put it on the cutting table where it has been sitting ever since. It is an inexpensive knit I purchased just for its stretch factor and because I liked the color. At $3.00 a yard it was a good fabric to play with, to experiment with knits and hopefully learn a little something. The plan was to test a summer dress and a top or two, items I actually intend to make in other fabrics, but which I am just unsure enough about that I would prefer to make a first version. If v1 works, at least it is in a color I love, and if it doesn't, no beloved fabric has been wasted. Somehow though, my motivation got washed downstream with all the rain and the change in the weather.

My work in the fabric closet was more than just an organizational exercise however. As I photographed new yarns, folded fabric and reorganized I found myself being revitalized with new ideas swirling around in my head. Although not finding something was frustrating, and at that moment the idea of a stash felt stifling, having it organized and accessible, being able to take out the pieces and let the ideas flow is liberating and inspiring.

Before my fabric closet foray I was stuck in a rut of a few summer outfits. I was thinking about what I would make next, but only in a limited way, as a single piece to add into the mix. Playing with fabric and yarn, and taking inventory, opened my eyes to connections and possibilities I had forgotten.

The blue fabric and those dresses offer possibilities beyond the immediate. Besides it is still August, and although it feels like fall now, there are still summer days ahead. So this fabric remains on the table, and I hope to get started on it this week, but that may be iffy. We are going up to Lake George on Thursday to see my brother who is up from Texas and on Saturday I am having a passel of the neighbors over for dinner, all a great deal of excitement and interruption to our normally quiet routines. We'll see how it all goes.

I'll leave you with a plate of cookies. I whipped these up last night from this recipe by Aran Goyoaga, who writes the blog Canelle et Vanille, and they are half gone already.

In fact I seemed to do a lot of baking over the weekend. G had a chocolate craving so I baked brownies, then I baked brownies again. My baking pantry has seen little use of late and at this point I was out of chocolate and cocoa so I needed to make something else. This cookie recipe had been at the top of my file, waiting for the perfect opportunity. They are fabulous. In fact this is my second batch. Did I mention G has been suffering from a major sweet tooth? Better him than me. Anyway the first batch, which I made with shortening, looked more like the original photos in the blog, but mine are darker because I used unprocessed cane sugar rather than regular white sugar. That first batch was devoured in a day. For this second batch, I was out of shortening, so I used butter. Butter causes the cookies to spread more, but they are still soft and delicious. I do love to bake, especially if someone else will eat the goods and save me from myself.

Not only had I forgotten how much potential I had in my fabric closet, I had forgotten how much baking calms my soul and eases stress. Back in my college days I would bake cakes and cookies and brownies for the dorm before finals. And I continued to bake for years, until the combination of relearning to bake with gluten-free flours, and just the other stresses of life seemed overwhelming. This may have been a mistake, luckily one that is easily rectified.

August 24, 2010
A Reader Cooks

Or is it the other way around? I'm not sure. I love to cook. I love to read. I am not sure I am either a "cook" or a "reader" though. I do know that I love cookbooks and that I love not only to browse through them and ogle the recipes and cook from them, but that I actually do enjoy reading them, front to back, just like any other book.

Recently I was cataloging my cookbook collection and the process was making me think about all the different books and why I had them. I decided to randomly work my way through some of them, cooking and reading, mostly out of curiosity about why I originally purchased them and what I thought about them now.

The first book I grabbed, Cookwise by Shirley Corriher, was chosen because although I remembered that I have used it for reference, I couldn't actually remember that I had cooked much from the book. So I started reading and cooking. Well, actually in this volume there was more reading and less cooking because it is basically about the techniques and materials of cooking and the recipes are designed and arranged to illustrate the points. This is good from the perspective of learning, but not necessarily so good when you just pick up the book looking for something to cook for dinner.

Cookwise was a very interesting book to read and it contains a lot of valuable information. As I mentioned, I have used if for reference, and I will refer to it again and again as it has some tables and charts that are either not available or not as clearly presented in my other cookbooks. It has a very thorough discussion of baking, which doesn't directly affect me any more as it is based on wheat, a grain I can no longer use. I don't do much baking anymore anyway. But there is still good information here that I can apply to good gluten-free baking because success requires understanding the underlying principles and knowing what one is trying to emulate.

As for the recipes; I find these less successful. There are really only two recipes I have tried in this book that I will make again. One is for my favorite sour-cream cornbread, a recipe that I easily adapted to hold up better as a gluten free bread, and one which my guests adore. It is not dry minimalist cornbread. I will save the book forever just for the reference materials and because it contains this cornbread recipe. The other recipe is for a cake by Rose Levy Beranbaum and I actually bake it from Ms. Beranbaum's original version.

Notice that the two recipes I use are for baked goods. There are other recipes in this book but I find they all emphasize sugar and starch too much as a substitute for fat. Now I enjoy me a good dessert now and then, but everything that I have tried is too sweet for my taste. And I am not convinced that adding more sugar and starch to food to make up for fat and flavor is all that healthy of a choice either. I certainly find it less satisfying.

In the end I find Cookwise excellent as a reference work and only so-so as a cookbook.

The other book I pulled out of the shelf was a book by Rick Bayless called Mexican Everyday. Now this book is more of a cookbook than a reference book, but I still read it all, and cooked quite a few things as well. I found more to cook here than I did in Shirley Corriher's book, and although there are several things I will make again and again, I did not actually find that I was happy with many of the recipes as they were written. I made a fair number of changes and revisions to suit my own taste.

Now I must admit that I am a huge fan of Diana Kennedy. I have all her books. I have cooked extensively from all of them, and although I am not a purist and do not always cook everything the classic traditional way she describes, I can do so when I am in the mood to put in the time. I also have several of Rick Bayless's other books, which I have also used, and I am a fan of his restaurants, where I have eaten several times. And being a bit of a Diana Kennedy and mexican food snob, I'll admit that when I received this book, I was not particularly impressed. Mexican Everyday takes quite a few liberties with traditional Mexican techniques and flavors. But I didn't really give the book a chance.

To my mind this is not Bayless's best book, but it may be his most accessible, at least of the books I have read. And I do find the book inspiring. Reading this book filled with me with all kinds of ideas for making things I would not have made had I not read the book, and although I don't find all his techniques for simplifying things agree with me, or there are some things I do differently, I have to admit that I will use this book again. So far there are many recipes that I have been inspired to make, and many that I will make again and again, using my own techniques and changing them, often a good bit. So far there is only one recipe that I have liked pretty much as it is written, a recipe for slow-braised lamb Jalisco-style. I am not saying the recipes are bad; they aren't. I am not saying they don't work; they work beautifully. I am merely saying that that the actual execution does not really resonate with me although many of the ideas do.

So in the end, I think I rate this book pretty highly, even if I change most of the recipes. It seems pretty evident that I am more interested in ideas and inspiration than I am in recipes that work but which I find insipid, no matter how good the information surrounding those recipes.

June 29, 2010
Sugar Snap Pea and Radish Salad

Both the peas and the radishes from the salad came from a tiny, 5 x 5 foot plot in the vegetable garden. This the only plot that is currently producing anything other than weeds as I have spent most of the rest of my garden time in the front yard and the flower beds.

Today I have decided to take a break from gardening. There will be sewing. There will also be a little bit of moving around of furniture as the solution to something that had been plaguing me suddenly popped into my head late last night.

May 31, 2010
“twofer” vegetables

I do love my vegetables. And although I do truly miss my vegetable garden, which I just didn't manage to get started this year, I am grateful that there are still farms and farmer's markets in my area which provide a wonderful assortment of good, fresh things to eat.

I am particularly fond of green leafy vegetables, have been for quite a while, and I am especially thrilled with vegetables where I get two vegetables in one plant. Beets are a thrill as I love the beets themselves and I also love the greens. When I have a garden I have been known to plant the rows of beets a little heavily so that I have more baby greens to thin out and eat before the beets themselves can grow.

Turnips and carrots fall into the same "twofer" category. These are small japanese turnips which are wonderful raw in salads and are sweet when steamed. I love the turnip greens even more than the turnips though, especially when sauteed with a little olive oil, garlic, chopped black olives and a bit of lemon.

Carrots are also a multiple use vegetable. Of course we all eat the carrots. But did you know the greens are edible too? My favorite farm stand doesn't remove the greens from the carrots even though they recognize that most people don't eat them, and I've been known to offer to take unwanted greens off fellow customer's hands when the farm stand won't. I now carry a pocket knife with me when I go to the farmer's market. In the winter my gourmet/farm market keeps a box on the floor where people may discard the greenery from the carrots, and they don't object if I gather up a bag full of greens.

Last night we roasted these carrots. I simply peeled them and tossed them with a little olive oil, salt and pepper and tossed them in a 350 degree oven until the were soft, a little wrinkly and caramelized; they were sweet and good. Later in the week I will make soup with the greens.

September 26, 2009
New food mag and a long-simmering rant

My first issue of Edible Hudson Valley arrived Friday (two issues actually since they sent me a copy of the first issue as well) and I started reading them on my way to the butcher shop while G drove. While we were there I picked up a copy of Edible New York so I had even more to look at between other marketing stops.

I was thinking how happy I am that we take the time to go to the butcher, and the better fish market when it is open, and how lucky we are to have these things: farmer's markets, a butcher specializing in grazed, grass-fed meats and free-range chickens and their eggs, creameries, and several cheese makers as well.

Every year I become more convinced that it is not just what you eat, but the quality of what you eat that is important, and that hidden costs of cheap food show up in higher health care costs among other things. Perhaps it is just that I still have The Queen of Fats which I only finished reading last week on the brain. But I remain steadfast in my conviction that I would rather spend my money on food — not just expensive food — good food; although better quality food is unfortunately often more expensive, often because it takes more time and care to produce, transport, and store. Good fresh food, and healthy fats (I am thinking of Omega-3s here) are far more unstable and perishable which is a big problem in a food industry that is geared at making cheap food that has a long shelf-life.

While I was walking back to the car from the butcher shop, I was thinking about a conversation we had with a houseguest a couple of months back. Food had actually been a frequent topic of conversations, mostly not slanted favorably toward my own preferences. There was the discussion about how we spend too much time, meaning I spend too much time, planning menus and eating actual sit-down meals. And although it is true that I have always gone to several stores, and been more interested in the WHAT of my purchases, than the convenience, it is also true that I cook even more now than I did a few years ago. Many of the individual meals are simpler, I no longer prepare wild gourmet meals that might take up an entire weekend, but I do cook three meals a day. When I was working this was not the case, although we did always have some kind of breakfast at home. And I am sure that things would have been different still if we had small children as well. Lunches were usually purchased although I did plan some kind of lunch on weekends, if we weren't out running around, and we often packed picnics when we were traveling to concerts and the like. I suppose that is something G and I shared, this belief that mealtime was something important to be shared, and the food was part of that sharing. Like all things in life, other things were sacrificed. Besides, I find that I am far more likely to eat something healthy if I plan a meal: when playing catch-as-catch-can it is all to easy to fall back on chips, cookies, peanut butter, cheese, and chocolate, not that those things are bad, and I do indulge, but they do not a meal make.

The other topic of conversation was about how grass-fed meat was just not worth the money, that they (the houseguests) had tried it and it was a total waste. I managed to keep my mouth shut and not point out that everything they had eaten in their week here was grass-fed, free-range, or in the case of fish either wild or sustainably and organically farmed. Not that I have anything against a good prime steak. I still maintain that quality is worth it. But G and I have always liked the flavor of grazed beef since we first had it in Spain and in Argentina. Besides I am increasingly convinced that if I am going to eat meat, it should be the healthiest meat I can find. I will acknowledge that it does take a little time to learn to cook the leaner, more muscular meat found on an animal that actually had to walk to find its dinner. Again, it is a matter of priorities. These are mine, and they are exercised in my house. When traveling and visiting others I adapt and accept.

Speaking of meals, today we had a fabulous salad that I hadn't made since last summer. We found fabulous fresh, never frozen shrimp, which I cooked on the grill after grilling an eggplant for Burnt Aubergine with Yellow Pepper and Red Onion from the Ottolenghi cookbook. I should have taken a photograph. It was so fabulous, the kind of fabulous where each bite is just the perfect combination of flavors, the kind of fabulous where I wonder why I eat anything else, or remind myself that I should strive for this kind of bliss in everything we eat. Well, that is a long shot and an impossible standard.

But I do highly recommend the cookbook. Many of the recipes are quite easy, such as the salad above, some are more complicated. Absolutely everything we have tried has been excellent. I even baked some of the pastry, back before I knew I shouldn't. That is what I still have to work on: gluten free baking that is fabulous, because if it isn't fabulous, it just isn't worth it. But I've got lemon meringue pie and a chocolate cake under my belt so life isn't so bad.

July 19, 2009
Binging

So despite my exhortations to myself after the house-guests left, and the last of the birthday cake, tapioca pudding, and other dessert-like concoctions were finished, that I would settle down and cut out the carbs and knock of the few pounds I had put back on over the last month, it hasn't happened yet.

Of course I just should have thrown those things that I didn't really want out. But I have a complex of some sort about throwing out food, even food I don't really want. Well that's not completely true. I have a sweet tooth, always have, and although I can go for long periods without a fix, once my body gets ahold of a little sugar it want's more, more, more. And even though I don't want to eat more, at least on the rational side of my brain, my little fat cells are jumping up and down saying things like "one more piece of chocolate cake won't hurt", which we all know is the worst kind of self-deception. I should convince myself that eating the stuff is a greater crime than just tossing it.

But I was doing better.

Then we were at the store an G saw these little gluten free pizza's in the freezer case. And we tried them.

They weren't bad; they needed to be cooked longer than the instructions specified, and I think they would have been better off put on a hot brick or something to make the crust a little crispier. We both agree that they are no where near as good as the pizza we used to get from Napoli & Sicilia Pizza; but I can't eat real pizza anymore and G, bless his heart, refuses to go get one if he can't share with me.

They were probably the best of the packaged gluten-free pizzas I have tasted. But they weren't so good that they would cure any pizza-craving. I think the pizza crust I used to make, the first time I was gluten free, before the doctors all told me I was wrong and I went back to bread, was better. I proved the doctors wrong didn't I?. Anyway, all this did is remind me that I used to make a pretty good gluten-free pizza crust, one good enough that my non-gluten-free friends actually liked it and asked for it, not knowing it was gluten-free. And it reminded me that I need to start baking again, but only eventually, because the pizza also started up that little carb-craving cycle, you know the one where you burn through the carbs real fast, then crash and feel tired and loggy and want more carbs. Really, I might be able to say no easily to drugs, alcohol, or tobacco, but carbs are their own kind of crack.

And we had other carbs in the house, so I ate them. G can easily ignore whatever junk food is in the house. Chips, cookies, cake: none of these things tempt him and he can ignore them even when they are sititng right in front of him. Not me. If there are chips I will eat them. If I bake something I will eat it, not G, me.

We also picked up these little corn and flax seed chips at our local specialty market/farm stand and they are addictively good. I don't know who the manufacturer is because the store puts them in containers with the store's name on them but they are good: corn masa, salt, and flax seeds, all fried up and crispy.

G liked them and ate about a quarter of them. I finished off the rest of the package. Not all at once mind you, but still, I ate them.

The only thing G can't resist are Hershey's nuggets, and luckily despite the sugar, they completely don't appeal to me. Besides, they contain gluten, so the fact that we buy 15 pounds of nuggests at a pop is no temptation at all. G has a 3 to 5 pound a week nugget addiction, but I can look at a Hershey's nugget and see nothing but pain and suffering.

I wish I could make that work for more of life's edible temptations.

June 11, 2009
What’s for Lunch

Finally a sunny day.

And an alfresco lunch:

Local sugar snap peas, shrimp, and bell pepper in a simple dressing made of rice wine vinegar and grapeseed oil with a little pressed and minced ginger root.

June 4, 2009