Category: Sustenance

This week I cooked this (not my photo):

chicken with clementines and arak (courtesy Jonathan Lovekin via wsj.com)

It was fabulous and I will be making it many times this clementine season, and hopefully next week for family dinner night, when both of G's children are here with their families.  The recipe is from the new book by Yotam Ottolenghi that I wrote about last week, Jerusalem, but this particular recipe is available all over the web, at epicurious, and in a Wall Street Journal article from this past September.

 

Probably the only tricky ingredient in this recipe is the Arak, but as the recipe states you can substitute Ouzo or Pernod.  If it were me, I think I would chose Pastis before Pernod, as I personally find Pernod too sweet and the dish is already sweet enough, but that is just me, and I find that both Ouzo and Pastis have a drier herbal anise flavor and are less sweet than some of the other anise liquors.   Since I do have Arak, and I have to thank my lovely step-daughter and her husband for bringing some to me last summer after their visit to NY, it is not an issue in my house.  There are quite a few things I cook with Arak, so it has become a kitchen staple, but It is one of those things that I erroneously believed were available everywhere, as it was widely available in the Hudson Valley, only to find there is no Arak in Knoxville.  There are a lot of things I thought were widely available, and now I realize how truly spoiled I was, culinarily at least.  That, however, is another story.

 

Anyway, I didn't make this exactly as written, although my modifications are quite small.  The original recipe called for 3 tablespoons of brown sugar, but when I went to the sugar jar I only had two tablespoons left and I use a fair-trade dark brown sugar that I find has a wonderfully rich sweet flavor that is more pronounced than standard supermarket brown sugar.  (yes it is true, I buy everything based on how I think it tastes; no detail is too minor to ignore.)  I could have used some other kind of sugar, but felt that the dish would probably be sweet enough for my taste, given all the citrus flavors, and I left it out.  The original recipe also calls for 3 tablespoons each of orange juice and lemon juice, and I omitted the orange juice.  I am sure the original is wonderful, perhaps even more wonderful than my version, but the final dish had a rich luscious citrus flavor and was plenty sweet for our tastes.  You will have to make your own judgements.

 

Roasted Chicken with Clementines and Arak

serves 4

modified from Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi

6 tablespoons Arak

4 tablespoons olive oil

3 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

2 tablespoons grainy mustard

2 tablespoons dark brown sugar

2 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt *

1 1/2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper

2 medium fennel bulbs, cut in half lengthwise, then each half cut in quarters

2 pounds bone-in chicken thighs. **

1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves, minced

4 clementines, unpeeled, thinly sliced

2 1/2 teaspoons fennel seeds, lightly crushed

minced parsley for garnish

Put the first five ingredients in a large mixing bowl and add 2 1/2 teaspoons salt and 1 1/2 teaspoons of black pepepr.  Whisk well and set aside.

Add the fennel, chicken pieces, clementine slices, thyme and fennel seeds to the liquid and stir well with your hands.  Place chicken in the refrigerator to marinate for at least a few hours and up to overnight.  The authors say it is fine to skip the marinade step if you are short on time.

Preheat the oven to 475° F.  Transfer the chicken and its marinade to a roasting pan or baking sheet large enough to accommodate everything comfortably in a single layer.  The chicken skin should be facing up.  Once the oven is heated, put the pan in the oven and roast for 35 to 45 minutes, until the chicken is colored and cooked through.

Lift the chicken, fennel, and clementines from the pan and arrange on a serving platter; cover and keep warm.  Pour the cooking liquid into a small saucepan and place it over medium-high heat.  Bring the liquid to a boil and simmer until the sauce is reduced by one-third, so you are left with about 1/3 cup.  Pour the hot sauce over the chicken, garnish with the parsley, and serve.

 

*  I use Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt, which is produced by a different method than most salts with the result that it has half the weight per volume as does table salt or Morton Kosher salt. Therefore a teaspoon of Diamond Crystal salt will taste less salty than Morton Kosher salt because there is less salt per teaspoon. If you use a different brand you will have to adjust the quanitity of salt to your taste.  Diamond Crystal salt does not seem to be available in Knoxville. I tried many other salts before deciding it wasn't worth trying to relearn 30 years of cooking habits.  I did learn that Maldon Sea Salt is a good substitute, as it is slightly lighter per volume than Diamond, but as it costs roughly six times as much, I finally ordered the Diamond kosher salt and am a much happier cook.  I do have a box of Morton Kosher salt which is used only for cleaning my cast-iron skillets.

 

** The original recipe calls for a 2-3 pound chicken.  Chickens are variable things, and I am sure the weight and amount of meat on a chicken can be highly dependent on diet as well as breed, and this varies probably from place to place.  In Hyde Park there was a free-range poultry farm in the next town, and they raised several types of chicken.  Their small chickens (2-3 pounds) were meaty and good.  I have not found a similar locally raised organic or sustainably-raised free range chicken in Knoxville.  The small chickens I have purchased seem to be skinnier cousins of the same birds that are good at 4-5 pounds.  Hence they are all bone with little meat and do not serve 4 people.  The organic chickens sold in the stores are also larger.  If I want less than 4 or 5 pounds of chicken, but still want the flavor bones will add to the final dish, I opt for bone-in chicken thighs.

One of the things that I found particularly nice about Thanksgiving this year was that I was able to spend time cooking in a relaxed way.  This inspired me to return to my cookbook collection and to purchase a couple of new cookbooks as well, filled as I was with the joy of anticipation of happy hours spent in the kitchen.  

 

My kitchen time hasn't worked out to be quite as stress-free as I had hoped, but I have nonetheless, been playing around with new flavors.

 

This is a roasted cauliflower, celery and pomegranate seed salad from the new cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi, Jerusalem.  It was quite delicious, and better yet, it was also excellent pureed.
 In fact, it may have been even better in the pureed form.  This is my new priority in the kitchen, as long as G still enjoys eating, the food needs to be good for me and enjoyable for him as well.

 

Of course, I was not surprised. Ottolenghi's two previous cookbooks have been great successes in my kitchen, and many of our staple dishes and family favorties have come from them, especially the first, eponymously named book:  Ottolenghi.

 

One of the unexpected joys of this book has been how many salads and dishes there are that employ winter vegetables.  Now that we have returned to that season when I must rely on grocery-store produce, that alone is a great boon.

 

We have also tried, and enjoyed, roasted butternut squash and red onion with tahini and za'atar, which is also excellent left over, as shown here over lettuce (not part of the original recipe).  In fact it works better for G with the addition of the lettuce, which lightens the puree.  

 

I originally served the squash as a side with the recipe for chicken adobo, which I cooked without the potatoes since I was serving the butternut squash.  The chicken is another dish I highly recommend, although it is unfortunately not nearly as photogenic as it is flavorful. 

 

Next up will be a few recipes featuring kohlrabi, one of G's favorite vegetables.  There used to be annual skirmishes in our Hyde Park garden between G and the woodchucks over who would had first dibs on the kohlrabi crop. Now I just have to drive up the road to a local grocery store.

That was G's comment about dinner the other night.  He amended it later to say that I should forgive him if tears ran down his cheeks but he was just enjoying his meal so much that he couldn't help himself.  Pretty good, huh?

 

And what feast elicited such joyous rapture?  It was hardly haute cuisine, but even I have to admit it was good, and by that I really mean GOOD.  

 

I have been itching to make cheese enchiladas.  Perhaps it was my trip home to visit my mom, where I do believe she mentioned her famous cheese enchiladas more than once.  Perhaps it was also some little bit of cussedness that came out when I was reading Paul Fussel's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System because Tex-Mex cheese enchiladas, made with a combination of cheddar and processed cheese food (Velveeta), would definitely be non-u.  

 

So I did make enchiladas, cheese enchiladas, but not classic Tex-Mex cheese enchiladas.  Instead, I'll call them three-cheese enchiladas. In the decades since I have left Texas I have changed, and my tastes have changed, so my enchiladas, like me, were a hybrid

 

To begin with I didn't make traditional chile gravy.  Traditional gravy is made with oil, chile powder, broth, and flour.  I actually didn't know that at first.  I always made my chile gravy with cornstarch, which I believe is the way I learned to make it, but perhaps it is not, perhaps that was just something I devised on my own those early years in New York when I was trying to recreate the tastes of home.  Anyway, it came as quite a shock to me, years later, to learn that most Tex-Mex chile gravy was made with flour, because I never supposed it to be so, and I just assumed it was gluten-free. Truthfully however, I stopped making that kind of chile gravy long before I learned about my own gluten intolerance. By then I had read Diana Kennedy, and Rick Bayless, and started collecting Mexican cookbooks.  By then I made my own chili powder, and made my chile gravy using dried chile pods in whatever blend suited my fancy, although always with a base of the Tex-Mex favorite, the ancho chile.  Not surprisingly, my chile sauce started out with dried peppers, ancho and pasilla, which I toasted and pureed and cooked with broth to make a rich, slightly more complex red sauce with a nod to both the Texas tradition and its Mexican origins. 

 

Now my memories of cheese enchiladas revolve mostly around the cheese.  Perhaps these are the memories of a child, and as a child I was most fascinated by the cheese, but even so I recognize that it was the gravy and the tortilla that elevated the dish beyond just tortillas and melted cheese.  Later on, as an adult I learned to love simple stacked enchiladas which were all about the combination of the tortilla and the sauce, with just a little cheese to accent the richness of the dish.

 

My enchiladas were a combination of these traditions.  There was lots of cheese, three kinds of cheese:  Velveeta, a youngish cheddar that melts well, and a fabulous Queso Anejo that I found in a local Mexcian market with its sharp salty funky goats milk flavor, pretty much combined in equal measure.  But the enchiladas weren't all about the cheese.  I combined the cheese with minced scallions, a couple of bunches worth, because the onions this time of year are a little tired.  The tortillas absorbed the sauce, and I was generous with the sauce, so that the resulting enchiladas were a rich combination of corn, chile and cheese and scallion, with just a touch of crema that I added because the sauce came out a little spicier than I thought G would tolerate.  Peppers, like people, can surprise you.  You can't judge how sweet or piquant they may be just on outside appearances and have to wait until they reveal themselves.

 

So we had enchiladas.  We still have enchiladas.  A tray of enchiladas will make more than one meal for 2 people.  And even though I was tired and stressed and making enchiladas takes time, I enjoyed the process.  It was relaxing once the ingredients were lined up and I just moved my tortillas from through the various stages into the final dish.  It was even more relaxing while they were in the oven and I sat down to rest with a glass of wine.  

 

One day this week we will each have a single cheese enchilada for breakfast (how decadent) perhaps with Ox Eyes, which are eggs poached in salsa.  Have you eaten ox eyes?  I don't remember having them growing up, but I did have them when I was in college, during those summer days I was back in Texas between semesters. Oh my, I am getting hungry again just thinking about them.

Last week seemed to be very task- and deadline-oriented.  I literally felt driven, and a little panicked, panicked enough that sleep was fitful and I felt always behind.  I took off two days for visiting family and felt like I was behind for a week.  Can I handle a trip at Thanksgiving?  Can I balance it all, the hopes of family, the need to spend time separate from all of this with my spouse, the need to keep his life as calm and balanced as possible, and still get everything done?  Can I do all of this and still sleep at night?

 

I don't know.

 

Yesterday, I came in rushed and harried, plagued by phone calls, plagued by things I hadn't done, and by things that have yet to be done.  I came in and made lunch, which was basically pretty simple:  burgers and a salad.  But sometimes just working in the kitchen calms me.  Measuring, chopping, stirring — these things force me to slow down, to concentrate on what I am doing and let everything else slide away.  And of course the results are good too.  

 

This salad was adapted from a recipe by Mario Battali that appeared in the October 2010 Food & Wine magazine.  I reduced the quantities from 6 to 2 servings and in doing so also changed the proportions somewhat.

 

Roasted Red Pepper and Anchovy Salad

serves 2

1/2 red bell pepper (halved lengthwise)

1/2 yellow bell pepper (halved lengthwise)

3 Sicilian green olives, seeded 

3 anchovy fillets

1 teaspoon capers

12 fresh rosemary leaves

1 teaspoon sherry vinegar

2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil

crumbled goat cheese

 

Place the peppers on a baking sheet, cut side down,  and place under the broiler until the skin is charred. Let cool.  Discard the skin as well as the stems and seeds if you have roasted whole peppers. Cut the peppers into long strips.

 

Chop the olives, anchovies, rosemary leaves, and capers together until minced and well blended together.   Place this mixture in a medium bowl and add the vinegar and olive oil.  Stir to blend, then gently fold in the pepper slices, being careful not to break up the peppers.

 

Divide the salad between two plates and top with goat cheese.

——

The original recipe called for about 1 1/3 ounces of soft goat cheese per person and the instructions said to crumble the goat cheese on the salads.   The goat cheese I had didn't crumble; it was too soft. Instead of crumbles I had soft pillowy lumps.  I also used less cheese, about 1 ounce between the two salads, although if I had had a crumbly cheese I might have used more.  Either way it tasted fine.   

 

I will probably make this salad again tomorrow, using the other half peppers, serving it on a bed of baby arugula.

Yesterday was a kind of blah day, and although it was cool and rainy, I'm not talking about the weather per se even though it is possible that the dreary skies and rain did dampen my state of mind.  

 

In my head I'd had this idea that I would now have some time off to explore my own interests, that there would be a bit of  a rest between putting the house on the market and actually moving.  Yesterday it finally dawned on me how many decisions still needed to be made and how much needed to be done and my imaginary reprieve vanished like the dream it was.    The truth is that I am ready to go, even if I'm not really ready to pack.  I just want to get on with it.  I want someone to buy my house, to close the deal, and move.  But it may take longer than that.  I had hoped to move in December, but there have been delays and the new place may not be ready until January.  But January is an iffier month in which to move, and I had hoped to avoid the winter.  Now I have to make decisions and consider other plans, think about the actual options not just my hoped-for scenario.  

 

Reality has a way of kicking in like that and disrupting our fantasies.

 

I've given myself the weekend off.  This is Sheep and Wool weekend here in Rhinebeck, and I intend to spend most of my time at the fairgrounds.  Early next week is our anniversary.  After that I have to start working on plans again, decide if we are going to stay and wait for either this house to sell or that house to be finished, or just go, finding temporary space for ourselves.  Only when I know what we want to do can I figure out how best to make it happen.

 

In the meantime, I made soup.  I love soup and could eat soup every day.  G does not feel the same way.  I gave him a break this summer and there were no summertime soups. Now that the nights are cool and crisp and the leaves are turning colors however, I feel that it is once again time for the comfort of soup.

 

The inspiration for this soup came from Food & Wine magazine back in  August 2008.  It was fancier, and more fussy: a salad contained in a soup.  I suppose the original was a late summer soup.  Although my version still revolves around a summer vegetable, it is more of  a fall soup. 

 

Yellow Squash Soup with Sausage (4 servings)

1 Tablespoon unsalted butter

2 pounds yellow squash, preferably small, cut in 1" chunks

2 bay leave

1 1/2 cups chicken stock

1 1/2 cups water

1 cup buttermilk

salt and pepper to taste

12 ounces pre-cooked sausage such as kielbasa, sliced into thin rounds

 

Melt the butter in a medium-large saucepan over low heat.  Add the yellow squash and bay leaves and stir to coat lightly.  Place a sheet of waxed paper over the top of the pot and then place the lid on top of the wax paper, sealing the pot tightly, turn the heat to very low.  Cook undisturbed over low heat for 10 minutes, until the squash is beginning to soften and is quite fragrant but is not yet turning brown. 

 

Remove the lid and wax paper from the pot, discarding the wax paper.  Add the broth and water, replace the lid on the pot and bring to a simmer.  Simmer until the squash is soft.  Remove pot from heat and allow to cool slightly.

 

Discard the bay leaves. Transfer soup to a blender and puree until smooth.  Depending on the size of your blender, you may have to do this in batches.  Stir in the buttermilk and season with salt and pepper to taste.

 

While the soup is cooling heat a skillet over moderate heat.  Add the sliced sausage and heat until just hot through and perhaps beginning to brown.  Do not overcook or the sausage slices will be tough.

 

Divide sausages between 4 bowls and top with soup.

 

In the batch I made yesterday I used a local venison sausage from Highland Deer Farm.  I have used their Venison Keilbasa, and the Venison Garlic Sausage and this was the latter.  In the winter, when their sausages are not always available in local markets, I tend to prefer the Andouille sausage from Aidell's, although regular keilbasa would also work.  The soup itself has a very subtle flavor and a spicier sausage compliments it well although it is also lovely plain, without the sausage, in a cup.  This recipe would fill 6 standard mugs with soup (not the oversized variety). 

I'm not a big new year's eve fan, and never really have been.  Yes there were a few years in my youth where I would have a party, but it was more an excuse than a real celebration.  It just isn't a holiday that means that much to me.  A new year, a new beginning, but the revelry at the end of the old year somehow doesn't capture my imagination.  Birthdays seem more significant.  Perhaps I am missing something but I am just as happy to greet the new year after a good night's sleep as I am to stay up.  

 

That doesn't mean that I don't welcome the new year however.  New Year's day is a day of promise and reassessment, a day with its own traditions, at least for me, and the main tradition involves the lowly black-eyed pea. Usually I make a big pot from dried black eyes, but I didn't feel like that so much this year, perhaps because there are a few big pots of things still in my refrigerator and freezer from recent family visits.  

 

But I still needed black-eyes.  I'm not particularly superstitious but I am a firm believer in rituals. Luckily for me, Lisa, who write the blog Homesick Texan, had just posted a recipe for black-eyed pea and chorizo soup and I thought it would be just perfect for a quiet New Year's Day at home. 

 

I altered the recipe slightly.  I reduced the quantity considerably and probably changed the proportion of a few things as well.  I also used my own chorizo, which is perhaps not quite as authentic as a good Mexican chorizo, but which suits my taste better than the one currently available at my local Mexican market.  As you can see I also didn't use crushed tortilla chips, but fried up a tortilla and cut it in strips, adding them on top of the soup rather than stirring them in. Doing it my way was a tad more work but I would happily do it again.

 

Now I can rest easy, knowing that another year has gotten off to a good start.  

 

What about you?  Do you have rituals, food  related or otherwise, associated with the turning of the New Year?

 

Baked Eggs with Taleggio from Shauna James Ahern and Daniel Ahern's new book Gluten Free Girl and The Chef.

 

What's not to love about this:  eggs, butter, cream and Taleggio cheese baked to custardy goodness that is like silk on the tongue, almost dessert for breakfast (without the sugar).  G tells me he would happily eat it every day. 

 

So far this is one of only two recipes I have made from this book, although I have been reading the essays and I want to cook almost everything.   The second recipe, for white beans slowly cooked in olive oil is also sensational, although I cooked mine in a slow cooker rather than using the method described in the cookbook.  

 

The book is lovely; I've been reading Shauna's blog for a long time, even though I have not been much of a commenter.  Shauna's writing  helped me find my way from seeing my Celiac diagnosis as a burden and a struggle to making it an adventure and her books will always hold a fond place in my heart for no other reason than that.  But the recipes are good too.