burnt-out baker

Let's Lunch: Even Greener Green Chorizo

2012-03-09T07:55:00.000-08:00

SometimesI envy normal people with normal careers. When such normal people travel toMexico, they get to enjoy margaritas and sunny days at the beach. Or maybesunny days strolling through picturesque bazaars or scenic historic ruins. And when they come back, the splash of limejuice over a salt-rimmed glass or thehappy blare of a mariachi band is all it takes to bring them back.

Luckythem. My trips to Mexico were never truly fun – unless your idea of fun involvesenduring six-day work weeks filled with frantic note-taking while beingsnickered at by locals, stalked by bribe-exacting police officers, andpractically choked to death by antimalarial prophylactics the size of marbles.

So letit be stated for the record that if you’re looking for a carefree good timesouth of the border, researching indigenous languages in rural Mexico is notthe way to go.

Therewere some good things about these trips, of course. First and most importantly,they were the only opportunity of the year for me to get the data I needed formy research back when I was still in academia. Second, they were (practically)free – grants covered most of my costs. (Normal people who kvetch about howhard it is to redeem frequent flyer miles have never had to write a 20-page grantproposal every time they wanted to save themselves some money when traveling.)Third, there was the Indiana-Jones-like cachet of traveling to places so remotethey have neither paved roads nor dependable running water. Fourth was the food– locally grown and made from recipes and techniques dating to a time wheneveryone was a locovore by necessity. The food was incredible enough to keep megoing back.

But onmy third work trip to Mexico, I almost didn’t get to eat anything interesting.This was because my mealtimes were obstructed by a force that never caused any trouble on my previous trips: my travel companions.

Both ofthem – a colleague I’ll call Joel and a graduate student I’ll call Deirdre –were as gringo-y as gringos get – fair-skinned, cold-weather-lovingMidwesterners. Since this would be theirfirst trip to Mexico and we’d be traveling to a hot region in the middle ofAugust, I did my best to let them know what to expect.

Theyresponded enthusiastically to my e-mails and phone reminders to bringsunscreen, bug spray, and extra batteries for our video equipment, so Ifigured they were on top of things and ready to go. It was only when we were atthe airport about to take off did they drop a major bombshell on me.

“Well,of course I’m concerned about the sanitation issues,” Joel said as we strolledtoward our terminal. “And finding enough speakers to have a statistically soundsample. And also the language – do you speak Spanish?”

“Sure,”I said. Well, duh – we were going to be in a tourist-free, predominantly Indianregion where even urban Mexicans were a rare sight – how else would wecommunicate?

“Good,I’m glad to hear that – we’ll need your translation services.”

Holycow. “Wait,” I said. “You don’t speak Spanish?”

Joelshook his head. So did Deirdre.

“Do youread it?” I asked.

Theyshook their heads again.

Great.My Spanish wasn’t all that great either – I could read it fine and spoke itcompetently enough to muddle gracelesslythrough whatever I needed to do, but serve as the mouthpiece for two needy, helplessMidwesterners for three weeks? Not so much.

Theychose to drop Bombshell Number 2 on me a short time later, when we were lookingfor dinner in the airport.

“Oh yes,I think I should tell you,” Joel said, “Deirdre and I are both vegetarians –will that be a problem down there?”

Only ifyou want to eat, dude, I thought. Aloud, I said, “Well…”

Here’sthe deal: in rural Oaxaca, where we weregoing to be, the diet of the sustenance farmers in the tiny village where we’dbe working was, indeed, predominantly vegetarian – beans, rice, corn tortillas,home-grown vegetables – but the food available to visitors in the slightlybigger market town nearby where we’d be staying and having most of ourmeals? Our dinner options could bedescribed in three words: carne asada tacos.

From myprevious trips, I knew these tacos would be wonderful – as would be everythingelse in the market stalls and tiny food stalls here in town . Oaxaca may be oneof the poorest and most primitive states in Mexico, but its native cuisine isamong Mexico’s most baroque and creative – for instance, the region is justifiably proud of its seven distinct, equally complex mole sauces , each a colorful and elaborately wrought amalgamof roasted and finely ground nuts, spices, fruits, vegetables, and/orchocolate. Oaxaca’s dishes of pride are what one finds in most restaurants –and while many are vegetarian, many of the best and most beloved of themcontain meat.

And thisis why my mealtimes in Oaxaca on that trip – the times of day that I lookedforward to the most – were ruined.

We atebreakfast every morning at a tiny fonda – basically a little stall with nowritten menu – near our hotel in the small market town where we were staying.(Our grant allowed us the luxury of a $10/night hotel, since I figured out – correctly – that my colleagues couldn’tpossibly last three weeks in the village, where electricity and running waterweren’t guaranteed.) Every morning, theowner of the fonda, the most patient person who ever walked the earth, wouldcome to our table and recite the day’s offerings, which I’d translate into English.And every morning, my colleagues said the same thing.

“Ask ifit has any meat in it!”

“Does ithave any meat in it?” I’d ask as politely as I could in Spanish, wanting to fall throughthe floor.

Almostnone of the breakfast dishes, which mostly involved freshly made corn tortillasenrobed in various vegetable-based sauces, did. But thisdidn’t assuage my companions’ paranoia: in their minds, this alien land was just lurking with invisible critters and critter bits.

“Ask ifthe sauce has any meat in it!”

“Ask ifthe vegetables were cooked in meat broth!”

Evenafter being assured that everything was, indeed, meat-free, Deirdre rarelybelieved me (or the poor local I had been interrogating). She’d lift her plateof beans or entomatadas –tomato-sauce-covered tortillas – to her face, sniffing loudly. “It smells likeit has meat in it!” she’d wail, as ifbetrayed.

I wantedto die.

Still,there were some great things about that trip -- and my companions, when I wasn’t tryingto feed them. I'll always remember the pleasure of watching their eyes light up at the big Sunday market nearour hotel and showing them the amazing 18^th century church in the village – which would easilyqualify for national landmark status had it been located in the U.S. or Europe.And unlike the crew I worked with back home at the time, they laughed at myjokes and were (mostly) easy and fun to talk to. In the end, we became friends -- although I still wanted to strangle them at mealtimes.

So inhonor of the Trip From Hell and my vegetarian buds, I’ve devised a vegetarianversion of a little-known Mexican sausage variant, green chorizo. Most peopleare familiar with the bright-red, wonderfully greasy and spicy version ofchorizo, but a green version also exists – brightly flavored with cilantro andparsley along with spices and chile.

My greenchorizo was inspired by recipes by the two Anglophone masters of Mexicancooking, Rick Bayiess and Diana Kennedy. Bayless’s green chorizo recipe isminimalist – a few herbs and chiles ground, mixed into ground pork, and quicklycooked. Kennedy’s version is a bit more complex, involving a puree of spices.herbs, and chile mixed with meat, stuffedinto sausage casings, and aged for a short time before cooking.

Myversion combines (most of) Kennedy’s flavorings with Bayless’sweeknight-friendly technique, Using an idea from another chef I admire, DeborahMadison, I made my chorizo vegetarian by using crumbled firm tofu instead ofground pork.

It’s notauthentically Oaxacan (traditional Oaxacan chorizo is red and shaped intoping-pong-ball-sized rounds), but my version does have a lively, spicy, flavorand pretty green color. It’s lighter and less greasy than “real” chorizo, andappropriate for Lent, St. Patrick’s Day, and dinner with difficult friends youreally want to keep, after all.

VEGETARIANGREEN CHORIZO

Inspiredby recipes from Rick Bayless, Diana Kennedy's book The Art of Mexican Cooking; andDeborah Madison's book This Can't Be Tofu!: 75 Recipes to Cook Something You Never Thought You Would--and Love Every Bite

1(14-ounce) carton extra-firm tofu

½ cupchopped flat-leaf parsley

½ cupchopped cilantro

1poblano chile, coarsely chopped

2serrano chiles, coarsely chopped

½ cupcider vinegar

3 clovesof garlic, peeled and roughly chopped

½teaspoon dried oregano

1 bayleaf

1 wholeclove

5 blackpeppercorns

2teaspoons salt

¼teaspoon each cumin seed and ground coriander

3tablespoons neutral cooking oil (such as canola) for frying

Corntortillas, crumbled cheese, shredded cabbage, salsa and/or guacamole forserving

1.Usingyour hands, crumble the tofu finely and place in a colander set over a bowl.Allow to drain while you prepare the remaining ingredients.

2. Put ¼cup of the vinegar in a blender jar and add the garlic, salt, and spices. Blenduntil all is finely ground.

3.Addthe rest of the vinegar and the chiles and blend to a smooth puree.

4.Addthe parsley and cilantro and blend to asmooth puree.

5.Putthe drained, crumbled tofu into a bowl, add the puree, and mix until thoroughlyincorporated. Mixture will be a pretty green.

6.In aheavy sauté pan, heat the oil over medium-high heat. When hot, add the greenchorizo and cook, stirring frequently, until the mixture is thoroughly hot andmost of the liquid has evaporated.

7. Servewith tortillas and garnishes.

This post is part of the monthly, Twitter-based #LetsLunch series -- every month, participants share their recipes and stories about a dish reflecting that month's theme. This month is green food month! I'll post links to fellow #LetsLunchers in a bit -- now's a great time to enjoy your veggies!

Linda at Spicebox Travels on Kale Chips
Charissa at Zest Bakery on Pandan Tapioca with Coconut Cream
Grace at HapaMama on how to brew the perfect pot of tea
Ellise at Cowgirl Chef on Notos Pesto
Cathy at Showfood Chef on Matcha Green Tea Cupcakes with Matcha Green Tea Butter Frosting
Lucy at A Cook and Her Books on Green Bean Soup with Butter and Chives
Lisa at Monday Morning Cooking Club on Natanya's Soon-To-Be-World-Famous Avocado Dip
Eleanor at Wok Star on Ginger Honey Wok Brussel Sprouts
Karen at GeoFooding on Asparagus with Poached Eggs

This Is Not a Valentine’s Dessert

2012-02-13T09:21:00.001-08:00

Let it be proposedthat Valentine’s Day is the most unnecessary and overblown of holidays. A daydedicated to the celebration of romantic love seems about as necessary to me asa holiday honoring English-speaking communities or Protestantism – aren’t mostdays already dominated by these things and their looming cultural reach? As if it didn’t suck enough to be a singleadult in America the other 364 days a year, there has to be one oh-so-specialday in the darkest part of winter when a huge swath of the human population isreminded of what pathetic losers they are. And those of us who are fortunate enough to be in happy, committedrelationships (such as yours truly) are badgered into believing that cheesyjewelry and heart-shaped tchochkes are the only legitimate ways to validate ourcommitment to each other.

Bah, humbug.

Valentine’s Day wasa lot more fun in grade school, back when boys and girls considered each othergross and inscrutable. My tiny grade school had a deeply egalitarian ethos;every kid in a class exchanged a valentine with every other kid, so everyonegave and got the same number of valentines. The highlight of the holiday, back then, wasthe opportunity to eat sugar cookies with red sprinkles on them, collect thoselittle candy hearts to see how many different messages you could get, and ofcourse, eat lots of chocolate. It was also the only time of the year when theschool’s art teacher let us use pink and red together. The rest of the time,she said they clashed.

In short, it was acelebration of cordiality (albeit enforced cordiality – little kids do have tobe taught to be nice to each other), friendship, and food – with just enoughdecadence to make it memorable.

In the spirit ofTHAT Valentine’s Day, which I vastly prefer to the pressure-driven adultversion, I’m serving for dessert this year a simple chocolate-y treat thatmakes enough to share with several good friends, along with that specialsomebody in your life (should there be such a person). It’s a riff on a Valentine’s Day chocolate shortbreadrecipe presented recently in the New York Times: while the original recipefeatured a chocolate shortbread base topped with layers of cherry jam and chocolate ganacheflavored with rum, my version switches out the jam and rum for something withan even greater aphrodisiac (and conversation-starting) effect: a hot jellymade from datil chiles, a Florida specialty.

Datils, growncommercially in the U.S. only in the area around St. Augustine, Florida, have adistinct pineapple-passionfruit-like aroma and serious chile punch that marrieswell with chocolate. (Any other hot, fruity jelly would produce a similarvibe.) The combination of chocolate and chiles is traditional in Mexico –indeed, some of the earliest recorded versions of chocolate drinks drunk by indigenouspeople there were flavored with chiles – and it’s a combination that works. Andunlike those cloying supermarket chocolates in heart-shaped boxes, thischocolate treat actually tastes interesting – and is a suitable accompanimentto either a steamy relationship or a heated political debate with friends.

And this brings meto another pet peeve about Valentine’s Day: every relationship is unique, so whyare we always pressured into commemorating these special bonds with the samemass-market crap as everyone else? This guy I dated, before I met my husband,used to bring me big bouquets of roses fairly frequently. “Guys get girlsflowers because we can’t think of anything else,” he told me on severaloccasions. Wow, how romantic.

But once, heactually did come through with something personal and thoughtful, andironically, it was the evening when we finally broke up. He was a good guy –honest and well-intentioned – but we were wrong for each other in everyrespect: different tastes, values, politics, and goals in life. We finallyrealized that we liked the idea of being together more than we actually likedeach other.

The week before ourbreakup, I had accidently left the lights on in my car when I parked it atwork, and when the workday ended, I found my battery was dead. A quick call toAAA solved the problem, but my then-boyfriend was surprised that I didn’t havea set of jumper cables in my trunk. “You could have been back on the road a lotfaster if you’d just gotten a jump from someone else in the office,” he told me.

But on our lastevening together, we stood, still shell-shocked at our decision, in theparking lot of his condo complex. He gave me a long hug, then ran to his car. “Wait—Ihave something for you,” he yelled from across the parking lot. He openedhis trunk and ran back with a set of jumper cables—the ones he always kept inhis trunk.

“I want you to staysafe – always,” he said, thrusting them into my hands. “I wish I could love you forever.”

And this is thestory of the most romantic (pre-engagement ring) gift I ever got: a set of usedjumper cables. And this is also why most Valentine’s Day propaganda makes mewant to hit someone: because I understand what the spirit of love reallyis – and you can’t find it in a pre-printed card.

TORRID CHOCOLATEGANACHE SQUARES

This recipe is sucha close adaptation from the original New York Times recipe that I’ll justprovide a link to the original plus instructions for my little hack:

Bake the chocolateshortbread base as instructed in the original recipe. Replace the cherry jamwith datil jelly (if you can find it) or other hot pepper jelly, preferablyfrom a fruity chile such as a habanero. Likewise, instead of mixing twotablespoons of rum or other liquor into the finished ganache, melt twotablespoons of the datil (or other hot pepper) jelly into the cream while you’reheating it to make the ganache. Mix the heated cream with the chocolate asinstructed in the recipe. Pour the ganache over the baked shortbread base, then garnish and chill as directed in the original recipe. (If you're sharing this with kids or hard-core V-Day traditionalists, top the ganache with red sugar instead of fleur de sel.)

Let’s Lunch: Tommy’s Chili and Rock n’ Roll Dreams

2012-02-03T10:30:00.000-08:00

It was the dawn of the 80s, andwe were hard-rockin’ renegades, living life in the fast lane on the edges ofthe Los Angeles music scene. We were young – I was sixteen when we started – but worldly: we were L.A. girls afterall. Yes, we’d seen and heard it all,unlike those pathetic teenage runaways on Hollywood Boulevard who came to towncorn-fed and starry-eyed and ended up strung-out, destitute, and disillusioned.

We knew better. WE were going tobe famous!

And we knew that becoming famouswould take a lot of work. Mark, our leader, never failed to remind us of this.Mark was a motorcycle-riding veteran studio musician and a bit older than therest of us – he was already 26 – and he liked to quote from Jackson Browne’s song “The Load-Out ”: “Pack it up and tear it down/ They’re thefirst to come and last to leave/ working for that minimum wage…”

“Yeah, this is what theindustry’s all about,” he’d say as we’d collapse, hot and sweaty, after yetanother couple of hours hauling instrument cases, microphones, amplifiers,tangles of second-hand extension cordsand piles of sheet music down the rickety set of stairs from our rehearsal roomto our van for yet another concert. “Gotta pay your dues. The music world’scutthroat—no one will respect you unless you can carry your own weight. And youknow what, guys? You’re doing it.”

In those days, we never stoppeddoing it. There were eight of us: Suzanne played drums, Kentia, Maria, and/or Mark played guitar, Sandyand Sue played keyboards, Judy and Michelle provided vocals, and I played bass. Another girl, Dana, was our permanentstage hand -- she already had both adrivers’ license and free use of her dad’s van, both of which were essential toour existence as a functioning band. We rehearsed for several hours everyweekday afternoon, and sometimes on weekends. I heard our songs in my sleep and tapped their rhythms with my fingersas I ate or studied or watched TV. I grew thick, ladybug-shaped callouses on myfingertips from the ridged metal strings of my electric bass. I could hook thatbass up to my amp and troubleshoot said amp with my eyes closed.

Performances, of course, werewhat we lived for. We didn’t get too many calls for paid gigs, but when we did,boy did it feel sweet. Never mind that they weren’t in the most prestigious ofvenues – in time, we knew we’d be on regular rotation at the Troubadour or theRoxy or some other Sunset Strip hotspot where a talent scout from a recordlabel would certainly discover us – but, as Mark said, we were still paying ourdues.

So off we went to our humblegigs. There was the charity fundraiser in the parish hall at Christ the King. Andthe dinner meeting of area Catholic school principals at Notre Dame HighSchool, an especially tough crowd. (Weplayed only mellow instrumentals for them.) But no matter who we played for, we gave them our all – that was part ofthe game plan too, according to Mark. Every performance, he said, has to beyour best if you wanted to make the big time. And someday we’d be able to lookback and laugh about those evenings playing half-amplified Doobie Brothers andPat Benetar covers (had to be considerate of the neighbors!) for venues filledwith nuns and squealing children. It wasn’t ideal, but it was a necessary partof our journey.

Besides, we had no choice. Yes, we were rockers at heart, destined forstardom. But officially, we only existed for four units of fine arts credittowards our graduation. And what serious club would listen to an audition tapefrom an outfit officially called the Immaculate Heart High School ContemporaryBand?

Mark’s hands were tied. His rock’n’ roll dreams burned even more brightly than ours, but he couldn’t afford tolose his day job as the school’s music teacher. And because we didn’t want tolose the coolest teacher in the school, we dutifully limited ourselves to ourschool-sanctioned gigs.

But after our performances, weallowed our dreams to take full flight. Somehow, no matter where we hadperformed in town, we always ended up at the same place for dinner afterwards:Tommy’s, a beat-up hamburger joint in a seedy neighborhood close to downtown.It was cheap, open late, famous (or infamous, depending on whom you ask) forthe distinctive, gut-busting chili that came with every burger, and best of allfrom our perspective, known to attract a racy crowd of night owls, especiallymusicians. In short, it was a de facto industry canteen for strivers, and weconsidered ourselves card-carrying members of this club. Forget boys or horsesor whatever other stuff the other girls at school were into: nothing feltbetter to my 16-year-old self than biting down into a sloppy, shamelesslygreasy Tommy’s burger late on a Saturday night, chili dripping down my arms and bass lines still pounding in my head. It was the taste of dreams come to fruition: I’ve just been paid to rock my heart out,and my music paid for this burger! With five bucks left over! And Mom and Dadsaid I’d never make money in music!

I savored every savory, goopybite, every word of our fantastical banter about record contracts and auditionsand tours. I knew there would never be another time like this in my life, and Iwas right. For a short while, Tommy’s oh-so-dangerous burgers weren’t the onlything that rocked in our ordinary Catholic schoolgirl lives. We did, too.

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Tommy’s burgers have been afavorite late-night post-party alcohol mop for Angelenos since the 1940s. The recipe for Tommy’s chili – an object ofpassionate craving and even more passionate revulsion – remains a closelyguarded secret. Whatever’s in it, itprobably won’t win any Texas chili competitions: it is clearly intended to beused as a condiment, rather than eaten as a dish by itself. It has a distinctivelythick, gravy-like texture, and while it tastes distinctively of beef andchiles, it contains neither sizable pieces of meat nor any discernible chileheat (at least not to me -- but some peopledo go on about how spicy it is).

Those who have attempted toback-engineer the mysterious condiment (there are many) are mostly in consensusthat it involves a roux of flour deeply browned in fat, preferably beef fat.But some have suggested that the distinctly smooth, thick texture comes fromboiling the ground meat in the sauce base to cook it, rather than browningit -- this will cause it to cook into a thick paste, rather than into distinctlittle meaty granules. I’ve decided to split the difference and use bothtechniques: a dark roux based on rendered fat from the cooked meat (thereshould be a lot of it; this isn’t a diet recipe), as well as additional groundmeat simmered into submission in the dark, chili-scented sauce. Some recipescall for dried onion flakes, garlic powder, and even industrial beef patties toreplicate that deliciously sleazy, fast-food taste. Others, however, point outthat none of these things probably existed when Tommy’s first opened, so couldn’thave been part of the original recipe. Since I don’t keep those things aroundthe house, I used fresh onions and garlic, as well as freshly ground beef – butas most recipes suggested, I used the fattiest, cheapest fresh ground beef Icould find.

I won’t pretend that my versioncan pass for the original – it can’t, and I’m sure nothing can. (Tommy’s isnow a small chain in the Los Angeles area; my husband and I agree that a Tommy’sburger only tastes truly right when eaten in a dangerous neighborhood after 10p.m.) Instead, I think of my take on that chili the way I now think of mygirlhood covers of those Doobie Brothers songs – a competent, agreeable,slightly more wholesome tribute to the original.

TRIBUTE TO TOMMY’S CHILI

1-1/2 pounds fatty ground beef

2 tablespoons neutral cookingoil, such as canola

4 tablespoons flour

½ cup minced onion

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 tablespoon ground cumin

2 teaspoons chili powder

1 tablespoon cayenne (or totaste)

3 cups beef broth

1.Divide the beef in half. Heat the oil over medium-high heat in alarge, heavy pot and add half the ground beef, breaking it up as you do so.Cook, stirring constantly, until the meat is brown and crumbly and no pink remains. Transfer the cooked meat to abowl with a slotted spoon, leaving any juices and rendered fat in the pot.

2. Add the flour to the fat andjuice in the pot and cook on medium high heat, stirring constantly, until themixture turns a pale tan. Add the onionsand continue to cook until the mixture turns reddish-brown. Quickly stir in thegarlic and spices and cook for about a minute more, until the garlic releasesits scent.

3. Add the broth and whisk untilthe flour mixture dissolves. Stir in the cooked beef, then the raw beef,breaking it up as you go.

4. Simmer over medium heat,stirring occasionally, until the mixture thickens and reduces. When done, itshould be thick enough to coat a spoon. Taste and add salt if needed (both mybeef broth and chili powder contained salt, so I didn’t need any more -- so be sure to taste your chili beforesalting it).

5. Serve over cheeseburgers, hotdogs, or fries, preferably late at night in a suspect neighborhood, with goodfriends nearby to share the evening.

This post is part of the monthly, Twitter-based #letslunch series: on the first (or sometimes second) Friday of every month, LetsLunchers blog about a dish or their choice based on a given theme. This month's theme is music. At least I hope it is!

I'll try my best to post links to other LetsLunchers' posts as they come in -- check them out:

Linda at Spicebox Travels on the Buena Vista Social Club, Cuban beans and mojitos, and the Chinese diaspora

Ellise at Cowgirl Chef on Tiger Cakes, a tribute to her new favorite song, Valentine's day, and chocolate

Cathy at Slow Food Chef on Southern chicken and dumplings, inspired by Roxie Waller.

Rashda at Hot Curries & Cold Beer on "Besame Mucho", banana bread, and memories of her father.

Patrick G. Lee on what (not) to eat during an organ concert.

Rebecca at Grongar Blog on traditional Jewish kishka and a song inspired by it.

Lisa at Monday Morning Cooking Club on Hawaiian songs and macadamia wafers

Steff at The Kitchen Trials on Garth Brooks, pina coladas, and coconut cake

Free Range Cookies on how the Bee Gees inspired the creation of gluten-free Thin Mints

Sweetness and Luck: A Multicultural Cake for Chinese New Year

2012-01-22T15:29:00.000-08:00

Westerncivilization does New Year’s celebrations all wrong.

WesternNew Year’s celebrations are all about looking back – and Monday morning quarterbackingis never truly satisfying. Do you really want to hear the past year’s Top 100songs played back in ascending order of popularity, rehash every naturaldisaster and political scandal of the year, and re-read the obituaries of every importantperson who has passed on during the past twelve months? Worst of all, after the celebration itself –typically a frenzied and wildly overpriced evening on the town (look out for those sobriety checkpoints!)– there's nothing to look forward to but taking down the Christmas tree.

Nowonder everyone wakes up on January 1 with a hangover.

On theother hand, Chinese New Year celebrations – which I grew up with alongside theirchampagne-fueled Western counterparts – are all about looking forward. Sure,the past year may have been marked by screw-ups, disasters, and disappointment, butso what? The advent of a new year is achance to reset the clock, get back up, and start out again from scratch – and thatin itself is genuine cause for celebration.

In thedays leading up to Chinese New Year (which falls on January 23 this year), housesare cleaned (to ensure a fresh start), new clothes are purchased (ditto), anddecorations in lucky colors – red and gold – are put up everywhere to invitegood fortune for the following year. On a trip to Singapore several years ago,my parents loaded up on gaudy bright-red New Year decorations, the likes ofwhich they’d never seen anywhere else – a six-foot long red dragon, whichthey’ve taken to hanging over the dining room table, and long strings of fakered-and-gold firecrackers (including a battery-operated one that lights up andmakes obnoxious popping noises when you press a button). In the years whenthey’ve hosted big Chinese New Year’s parties,they’ve left the outdoors Christmas lights up to add to the festive look.(Conveniently enough, Chinese New Year typically takes place in late January orearly February, which always gives us something to look forward to in thoseblah days after the other New Year.)

Like allworthy celebrations, Chinese New Year festivities are centered around food. Butnot just any food – everything eaten during this important time must contributeto one’s good luck in the following year.

Thisfocus on securing one’s future good fortune begins the moment one wakes up onNew Year’s Day. While Western custom dictates waking up every January 1 to thetaste of Alka-Selzer and regret, Chinesetradition requires that you start the new year with a taste of something sweet,to ensure sweetness in the year ahead. (I clearly remember being fed a bit ofrock candy before breakfast one Chinese New Year morning during my childhood –right before a dental appointment!)

Toensure that your friends and family have an equally sweet start to their year,you must also have a pretty box of sweets – such as candied kumquats, melon,and ginger – on hand when they drop by. If they come over for lunch or dinner,traditionally lucky foods you can serve them (and yourself) include clams,lettuce, whole chickens, and pretty much anything round or orange or gold – allof which symbolize wealth and completeness.

Besidesbeing auspicious, traditional Chinese New Year dishes can be delectable – freshclams stir-fried with savory black-bean sauce, juicy poached or roastedchicken, and, of course, lettuce wraps – but some may be acquired tastes forthose who did not grow up with them. In particular, Chinese sweets tend to beproblematic for non-Asians – they’re generally a lotless sweet than Western desserts, and the bouncy, toothsome texture of some ofthe rice-based sweets is an unfamiliar and startling sensation for many.

Still,festive meals call for dessert, and most Chinese-Americans have plenty ofnon-Chinese friends who share in their celebrations (and also deserve any goodluck that comes along). Since sweets in general are lucky, as are round, orangeor yellow things, pretty much any sweet, round, orange or yellow thing willserve as good insurance against misfortune – this is why tangerines, oranges,and kumquats are popular New Year’s treats and decorations.

Still, pointing your non-Asian friends towards that decorative bowl of tangerines while you enjoy yoursticky-rice new year’s cake is not very classy. Instead, I’d serve a dessertthat pleases all constituencies involved (because this is America, doggone it!). This almond cake topped with candied orangeslices (inspired by a Mexican almond cake by Paty Jinich) has all basescovered: It’s round. It’s orange. It’s laden with an exceptionally lucky fruit. The cake is sweet but not too sweet, with amoist, tender texture that will please everyone at your table. And if any ofyour New Year’s guests are avoiding gluten, you’re also safe: the cake is alsoflourless and gluten-free.

Back inhigh school, one of my English teachers gave a fantastically depressing lectureabout New Year’s Eve. He told us that it was a profoundly sad occasion becausethat’s the time when people reflect upon the failures and disappointments ofthe past year and realize they’re a year older and they’ll never get that timeback. Nobody actually enjoys all those big parties and all that champagne, hesaid. All they’re doing is trying to hide from the pain.

Speakfor yourself, dude.

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Thiscake takes as its point of departure Paty Jinich’s version of a Mexican conventsweet – a flourless almond cake topped with a marmalade glaze. To make thissimple cake prettier and more festive, I’ve replaced the original marmaladetopping with candied orange slices (based on a surprisingly easy recipe from Food and Wine), and replaced the original port flavoring in the cake with a mixtureof orange juice and orange flower water.

FLOURLESSALMOND CAKE WITH CANDIED ORANGES

Forthe cake:

2 cupsblanched almonds

¾ cupsugar

4 eggs

½ cup (1stick) butter, at room temperature

1tablespoon vanilla extract

2teaspoons fresh orange juice

1teaspoon orange flower water

Forthe candied oranges:

2 largenavel oranges

3 cupswater

1 cupsugar

Sugar for garnish (optional)

1.Butteran 8-inch round cake pan or springform pan, and cover the bottom with a circleof parchment paper. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2.In afood processor, pulse the almonds and sugar together until finely ground. Addthe eggs and pulse until all is thoroughly combined. Then add the vanilla,orange juice, and orange flower water. Cut the butter into chunks and add tothe batter, processing until thoroughly combined.

6. Pourthe batter into the prepared pan and bake until the top of the cake is goldenbrown and a knife inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean, about30 minutes.

7. Allowthe cake to cool for about 10 minutes before removing from the pan and cooling it completely on a wire rack.

8. Tomake the candied oranges: If the oranges have been waxed, dip them briefly in apot of boiling water, then rinse and dry them thoroughly to remove the wax. Cutthem crosswise into ¼-inch slices.

9. In awide, deep skillet, combine the water and sugar and bring to a boil. Add theorange slices and cook over medium-high heat until the oranges are translucentand the liquid forms a thin syrup, about 20 minutes. Gently stir the orangesfrom time to time to ensure that they cook evenly.

10.Reduce the heat to medium low and continue cooking until the syrup thickens andreduces and the orange rinds are tender.

11. Oncethe oranges are cool enough to touch, arrange them decoratively over the top ofthe cake, glaze with the leftover cooking syrup, and sprinkle with extra sugar, if desired.

Let's Lunch: Low-Concept Vegetarian Chili

2012-01-06T00:00:00.000-08:00

(This is a slightly modified repost of an earlier piece)

Anyonewho has ever shared a meal with me knows I’m relentlessly curious about strangefood – the weirder the dish, the more I want to try it. “This looks likesomething YOU would order!” has becomefamily shorthand for any crazy menu item featuring odd organ meats or unexpected uses of flavorings (vanilla-flavoredappetizers or cilantro-flavored desserts, anyone?) At home, my husband knows better than toexpect any dish, except for a few treasured standards, to ever taste the sameway twice. All others are subject to change and revision without notice.

Becauseof my passion for culinary experimentation (a.k.a., pulling random objects fromthe fridge and making stuff up as I go along), the dishes I come up with duringmy cooking frenzies tend to be high-concept and, I like to believe, subversive:Crunchy pig ears! Curried popcorn! Sugary quesadilla-like objects!

Okay,maybe “high concept” is too generous a term. “Utterly random and in need ofjustification” may be more accurate. Still, some of my most random accidentalcreations are the ones I think of most fondly.

But onreally busy nights, the comfortable, immutable standards – grilled cheese sandwiches,fried eggs on toast – come to the rescue. Alternately, I’d throw together apared-down, quickie version of something I’d normally do a lot, lot better. Onsuch nights, the only guiding concept behind my cooking is “loweredexpectations.”

A Wednesday evening in November – Thanksgiving Eve – was such a night. The strange part was that myexperiment in non-experimentation went amazingly well.

ThanksgivingEve (is that even a real term?) is the one day of the year when Americans areofficially excused from even trying to make dinner – apparently, it’s one of the biggest nights of the year for Domino’s Pizza. For me, it was also a rush day atwork – a huge, last-minute, emergency project kept me glued to my computerfrom about nine in the morning until 8:30 that night. When I hit the SENDbutton for the last time that evening and finally wiped my hands of the project,I realized I had not eaten anything since breakfast but a taro-flavored mochi ball(don’t ask) and a pear. I was famished, and my husband even more so.

I hadpreviously planned to make vegetarian chili – I had all the ingredients, and itwould be a good, low-fat counterpart to all the splurge-y stuff we’d be eatingin the next few days. But I hadn’t counted on that project taking so long.Whatever. I really felt like eating chili, so I just plowed ahead. No time foranything experimental or fancy or original. Just basic, pared-down, fast-as-possiblechili, or something like it.

In theinterest of speed, I poured a thin layer of canola oil into a heavy saucepanand set it to heat as I prepped the veggies. (Back in cooking school, we weretaught to have our mise en place – preppedingredients and equipment – fully prepared and ready to go before we evencontemplated approaching the stove, but at home I’ve found that interspersingprep and cooking is even faster, if you plan things right.)

N.B. -- these photos weren't taken Thanksgiving Eve; we were too spaced out to even think of it. And in any case, I had no idea if the recipe would work, and to be honest, didn't really care. Rather, Glenn got these shots last night when I re-created the dish and calibrated all the measurements for public consumption.

While the oil heated,I chopped up some onion and bell pepper, which seemed like common-sense thingsto put in chili, then tossed them into the saucepan with the hot oil, a bit ofdried oregano, and some cumin seed. (I added the seeds because I couldn’t findmy bottle of ground cumin – now I’m glad it went missing; the seeds add a popand vibrancy that the ground stuff doesn’t.)

Then I chopped half a large tomato, a clove ofgarlic, and half a large jalapeno pepper. I tossed these into the saucepanalong with my go-to secret ingredient: a chopped chipotle en adobo, or pickled chipotle chile: these chiles add a terrific hitof sweetness, spice, and smokiness to everything, and even better, keep wellfor long periods in the refrigerator.

All thishad taken about 15 minutes, tops. Then I opened and drained a can of red beans,poured them into the veggie mix, lowered the heat, and let it simmer until thetomatoes and other veggies had cooked down. While this was happening, I pouredbeers for my husband and me and put together some tasty garnishes for the chili:a cut-up avocado, some chopped onion, a bit of grated cheddar.

Myoriginal plan that morning had been to make cornbread to go with our dinner,but there was no way that was going to happen now – my brain was too fried andI was just too tired. So I got a loaf of bread from the fridge, cut a fewslices, and put them on the table with the chile garnishes. Hey, it’s not much,but it’s better than Domino’s!

Now itwas just after 9:00. Yes! A nice pot of homemade chili for two in just half anhour! Now THIS was a conceptual coup.

And darnif it didn’t taste really nice – bright, spicy, not too heavy, and quite prettywith the colorful garnishes strewn over the top. It turned out so well Idecided I’d make it again, without any tweaks.

Of course,every experience of discovery brings with it useful lessons for the future, andhere is the lesson of my nearly-no-concept chili: Sometimes brainless,half-assed efforts pay off big time. Thankgoodness for the universe’s small favors.

LOW-CONCEPTVEGETARIAN CHILI

2tablespoons canola or other neutral cooking oil

½ cupchopped green bell pepper

¾ cupchopped onion, plus extra for garnish

½ teaspoonscumin seed

¼ teaspoondried oregano

1 clovegarlic, minced

½ largejalapeno pepper, minced (optional – omit if you’re heat-averse)

1 cup chopped tomato (fresh or canned)

1chopped chipotle en adobe

1(14-ounce) can red or kidney beans

Salt totaste

Shreddedcheddar cheese, for garnish

1chopped or sliced ripe avocado, for garnish

1. Heat oilin a heavy saucepan over medium high heat. Add onions, bell pepper, cumin, andoregano and cook until vegetables are wilted, about three minutes.

2. Addgarlic and jalapeno to the saucepan, cook until they soften and release theirfragrance, about 2 minutes.

3. Addtomatoes, chipotle, and beans to the saucepan. Lower the heat, stir, cover, andallow to simmer, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes have dissolved andthe vegetables are soft. Tasteand add salt if needed (it probably won’t need any). Serve with garnishes.

This is part of the monthly #LetsLunch series -- this month's theme is chili! Stay tuned for links to other contributions to the series; it's going to be great!

New Year's Hot Pot: Party Food for Homebodies

2011-12-25T09:56:00.000-08:00

(A slightly different version of this piece was published last year in Salon.com.)

If life were fair or logical at all, I should have been the queen of party girls. I grew up in the Hollywood Hills (yes, those Hollywood Hills), only a stone’s throw from the legendary party district where Joni Mitchell, Jim Morrison, and Frank Zappa started their careers. On weekends, our neighbors (never the ones my parents hung out with) held epic blowouts with valet parking and hired DJs playing the coolest new music for their glamorous friends. In recent years, my parents have taken to complaining about the noise from paparazzi helicopters hovering over Britney Spears’(embarrassingly close) house.

And I spent almost every evening of my teen years among the stars... sitting in my room. Doing algebra. Or writing essays about Julius Caesar. Or plowing through some other wholesome and useful activity that would allegedly make me into a better person. Even New Year’s Eve – the one holiday where staying up late, wearing lots of makeup, and actually leaving the house are practically legal requirements – was spent at home with Mom and Dad.

But New Year’s Eve was different. The rest of the year, Mom and Dad kept me (and to a lesser extent, my younger sisters) on a tight leash out of concerns for our safety and well-being. But on New Year’s Eve, we stayed home because of Dad’s tale of the loneliest night of his life.

Dad’s annual recollection of the loneliest night of his life was, and sometimes still is, the cornerstone of my family’s New Year’s Eve celebration. It also reminded us why we always spent the most festive night of the year barricaded in the family room in sweats and slippers.

Dad’s recitation could only occur if a few necessary conditions were met. First, the TV had to be tuned to the annual bacchanal in Times Square, preferably with Dick Clark chirping happy platitudes in the background. Second, Dad never volunteered the story. Just as a child obligatorily initiates the ritual retelling of the Passover story, it was up to us kids to jump-start the narrative that made our New Year’s Eve different from all others.

“Daddy! Daddy!” we’d yell as the soon-to-drop Times Square glitter ball filled the TV screen, “Tell us about the loneliest night of your life!”

Then he’d smile. And slowly begin his tale:

“The loneliest night of my life – It was New Year’s Eve, 1957. I’d come down to New York with a couple other interns from Temple. I didn’t know a soul in New York City.

“The other guys all had dates for New Year’s Eve. They offered to set me up with someone, but I didn’t have the money to treat a gal to dinner.

“So they all went off, wining and dining, And I was all by myself.

“I wandered around the city and ended up in Times Square. All those people, drunk and laughing. And I never felt so lonely in my whole life. Alone in the crowd.”

Then he’d sit back. And there would be a pregnant and solemn silence. For about half a second.

“Ooh, poor Daddy! You’re not lonely now, are you?”

“Yeah, you’ve got US!”

“Tchih!” Mom would mutter, rooting through the cupboards for champagne glasses.

And this was why, Dad would explain, we always spent New Year’s Eve at home: holidays meant nothing without loved ones nearby, no matter how much hype and glitter you threw at them. Ergo, nothing could be more meaningful than observing the passage of another year in the place we loved best, in the company those closest to us. Even if this meant our holiday was almost indistinguishable from every other night of the year.

The key word here is “almost.” The differences between New Year’s Eve and ordinary nights at our place were few, but significant. First, we kids were allowed to stay up until midnight, with no lectures about the virtues of going to bed early. Second, there was almost always caviar (and champagne for Mom and Dad), to be consumed as close to midnight as possible. The very idea of feasting on exotic delicacies at that forbidden hour seemed to me almost as decadent and glamorous as going out to celebrate.

And finally, we’d always have something special for dinner before our late-night festivities. It was never anything near as elaborate as our Christmas or Thanksgiving feasts – but always something out of the ordinary.

Very often, this something special was a Chinese hot pot, a brash, blinged-out version of Japanese shabu-shabu, traditionally served in the winter.

Technically, the hot pot is just soup, but its execution makes it special: it starts as a big pot of plain simmering broth in the center of the dining table (it’s kept hot over a heating unit), into which diners toss thinly sliced meat, vegetables, and seafood. Diners remove these goodies as they cook and eat them with rice and dipping sauces – typically, jarred Chinese hot sauces or simple mixes of soy sauce and sesame oil.

As the meal progresses and more ingredients are added and taken from the pot, the broth grows richer and more and more flavorful – and becomes a luscious and soothing final course when everything else has been eaten.

Another thing makes Chinese hot pot special, too: it can’t be made, nor eaten, by just one person. Nor is it a good choice for a first-date or business meal: getting all those morsels of meat and vegetables in and out of the pot and into one’s mouth entails lots of vulgar reaching across the table and occasionally, seagull-like theft from other diners. And no matter how careful you are, broth and sauce will end up dripped all over the table.

This means the only people with whom one can judiciously share a hot pot are those who you know will put up with you no matter what – which makes it scarily appropriate for an intimate celebration of family solidarity, observed at home in sweats and slippers.

CHINESE HOT POT

This dish is so simple and open-ended it doesn’t really require a recipe, just a few guidelines.

The Broth: Allow about 2 cups of broth (Mom uses canned chicken broth) per person. By tradition, the broth is heated to boiling and kept hot in a special hot pot with a chimney, as seen above.

Hot coals are traditionally tucked into the base of the pot to heat the broth. But the few times my family actually used this thing, we used canned Sterno (the same stuff used to warm chafing dishes and fondue pots). In recent years, we’ve switched to a less-evocative but more-powerful tabletop induction unit and an ordinary soup pot to hold the broth.

The Rice: Prepare about 1 cup cooked (1/2 cup raw) plain white rice per person.

The Good Stuff: Standard hot pot ingredients include thinly sliced beef (such as flank steak cut against the grain), thinly sliced chicken (dark meat is preferred over white by Chinese convention, and is cheaper too), cubes of tofu, fresh, shelled oysters, shelled and de-veined shrimp...pretty much any protein in bite-size pieces that cooks quickly in boiling broth. Asian markets often have packages of pre-sliced meat and chicken specifically for hot pot; these will cut your prep time even further if you have access to them. Allow about 1/3- ½ pound of mixed meats per diner. (This can vary, of course, depending on the appetites of the individuals you’re serving.)

Good vegetables to include in a hot pot are dark leafy things that cook quickly: spinach, or even better, water spinach or garland chrysanthemum leaves (available in Asian markets and every bit as fragrant and wonderful as their name suggests—and a perfect foil for rich broth and meats). Allow several big handfuls of these per diner, bearing in mind that these vegetables will wilt and shrink when cooked, so you’ll probably need more than you think.

The Sauces and Setup: Put the hot pot full of heated broth in the middle of your kitchen table. Don’t bother using your best tablecloth, or any tablecloth at all, for that matter. Turn on whatever heating unit you choose to use, and try to keep the broth at an active simmer. Set out a bowl, a pair of chopsticks or a fork, and a soup spoon for each diner.

If you can find them, also provide each diner with a hot pot basket (a small wire basket on a long handle, as seen in the photo above): the baskets are used to recover cooked ingredients from the pot. If you can’t find these baskets, have a couple of serving spoons available for diners to use.

Next, set out the rice and raw hot pot ingredients, as well as small dishes of Asian hot sauce (such as sriracha sauce or sambal oelek) and soy sauce mixed with a few drops of sesame oil. Then make sure you have lots of napkins.

To serve: Place some of the meats and/or seafood into the hot broth, then some of the vegetables. Instruct diners to hold their freaking horses and try to behave themselves until the meats are cooked (this should take no more than five minutes). Then allow them to extract whatever they want from the pot (Hey! No pushing! There’s plenty to go around!), to be eaten with rice and dipping sauces.

Replenish the broth with meat and vegetables as needed. When you’re out of meat and vegetables (or when everyone is too full to eat any more) spoon the broth into bowls to enjoy as a final course. By this time, it will have absorbed the savor of meat, vegetables, and good conversation, and will be a perfect cap to a New Year’s feast.

A Plumber Makes Pasta for Poets

2011-12-19T10:43:00.001-08:00

(A slightly different version of this piece appeared in my Open Salon blog.)

I was raised tobelieve that it was the height of rudeness to read at the dinner table. It wasnot only inconsiderate to other diners, but would cause the unfortunate bookbrought to the table to be covered with gravy or grease stains. Both of thesewere unforgivable sins.

Then I discoveredthe lovely, subversive institution known as the college-town bookstore. Not thebig, school-sponsored one on campus, with its endless supply of computerequipment, shrink-wrapped textbooks, and tchotchkes bearing the school’smascot. Nor the smaller, parasitic bookstore just off campus, where the sametextbooks, barely used, can be bought and sold for half price the followingsemester. The best and most interesting bookstore in any college town is alwaysa funky place selling secondhand books and distinguished by the presence of (a)the owner’s cat, (b) beat-up second-hand furniture of suspect provenance,and/or (c) organic coffee and really thick vegetarian soups.

These stores tendto have a countercultural bent and thus allow one to violate a lot of the rulesobserved by Nice People. Like the dictum against dawdling too long in a retailestablishment without buying anything. And the rule against reading at thetable during meals.

In my currenthometown of Gainesville, Florida (home ofthe Florida Gators – if you’re not a Gator, you’re Gator bait!) Books, Inc.fills this crucial role in the cultural ecosystem. It fills a sprawling oldhouse near the university, is furnished with the obligatory frayed armchairsand beat-up side tables from who-knows-where, and boasts a tiny vegetarian eatery(The Book Lover’s Café) that serves sturdy earthenware mugs of soup and organiccoffee to a loyal population of students, aging hippies, writing groups, andDungeons and Dragons players. No cat, though – the place has enough interestingcharacters on hand that it doesn’t need one.

I’m not a hippietype. Nor am I a vegetarian. But the first time I stepped into Books, Inc.,something about the scruffy, casual vibe of the place just felt good and right.And over the past few years, it has come to epitomize the best of Gainesvillefor me.

The cashier’s desk– a retail establishment’s place of honor – features not bestsellers andbookmarks, but an ever-changing jumble of works by local and regional writers –everything from paperbacks by nationally known locals to collections bycritically acclaimed poets to self-published zines and charity cookbooks, alongwith books about local flora, fauna, and history. (This brings up another thingI love about this place: While a lot ofbig-box outlets around here try to cop a “local” vibe by painting “GO GATORS!”in the front window and hanging a few posters of Tim Tebow, the commitment tolocal culture at Books, Inc. is deep and genuine – and miraculously, expressedwithout a hint UF orange and blue). Local writers who manage to get published alsoknow that Books, Inc. is the place tohost book-signing parties.

The store’s biggestfans, however, are the scores of would-be creative luminaries who are alsonurtured and fed (both intellectually and literally) at its dozen or somismatched tables. One of my two writing groups – the one whose memberscompensate for their chronic flakiness with peerless conversational skills andbrilliantly incisive critiques (on the rare occasions they actually get aroundto reading each others' submissions) has held its weekly meetings there for thepast two years, and is only one of several writing groups that regularly jockeyfor table space in the busy store. And all of us ate and drank, wholesomely andwell, while tapping at our laptops or flipping through our manuscripts or evenyet-to-be purchased volumes from the store’s shelves.

My husband had his first-ever photographyexhibition in their tiny art gallery – and every time I came in during the time the exhibitwas up, Anne, the owner, made a point ofcoming up to me and telling me excitedly about how some customer or another hadloved his photos. When we hosted an opening night reception in the littlegallery, she mixed up a huge bowl of punch, put out hummus and chips andcookies to supplement our supply of wine and cheese, helped us set everythingup, and waited along with us, as eager for Glenn’s success as we were.

At the end of the month-longexhibition, Anne told us that Glenn’s exhibition had been their most profitablein years. He eagerly agreed to doanother show in the following year. Now we were both established members ofBooks, Inc.’s creative community, and I envisioned Books, Inc. becoming for uswhat Shakespeare and Company was to Gertrude Stein and Hemingway.

Then last month,Glenn got a call from Anne. His next showwas cancelled: She and her husband wereretiring and closing the store in early 2012.

There had been abig “For Sale” sign outside Books, Inc. since forever, so I shouldn’t have beensurprised. But business inside the storeseemed to go on as usual, so it was easy to not to think the unthinkable. On acouple of occasions, members of my writing group speculated about it, but wedid our best to stay in a state of denial. Surely, they couldn’t be serious about selling the place. Maybe just the property was being sold, andthe store was only renting it. Books, Inc. is so well established in the community,someone would come forward to buy it – wouldn’t they?

My writing group,to my annoyance, has recently moved our meetings to a thoroughly mediocrerestaurant down the street at the request of a member who declared he didn’tlike eating “rabbit food.” (This member quit soon after for unrelated reasons.)But I’m going to petition to move our next few meetings back to Books, Inc.,for old times’ sake.

Some of my fondestmemories of life in Gainesville will always be those writing-group meetingsthere – evenings of wandering conversations that typically veer from vampiresto Watergate to space travel to food, Florida history, and gun control, and thenback again, all fueled by tempeh Reuben sandwiches, creamy-but-cream-freesoups, and a mysterious house-made fresh ginger brew that none of us have beenable to replicate. On a typical evening, Lina would struggle to get her laptopconnected to the store’s touch-and-go wireless network, Wes would meanderabout during breaks, looking for books on European history, and I would drinkin the place’s signature scent of coffee, cumin, and old paper whileeavesdropping on other groups of readers, writers, and diners, all havingconversations just as pointless and random as ours. And yes,we read and ate and wrote and talked all at the same time. Who ever knew that quietly breaking a few rules of etiquette could be so much fun?

Ineed to cement as many of these memories into my brain as I can, and soon –because in a few months, that’s all I’ll have left of one of my favoriteplaces.

**********************************************************************************

One item on theBook Lover’s Café menu that I haven’tyet gotten around to ordering was called “Our Plumber’s Pasta.” It seemed to be a typical college-townhippy-ish mixture of pasta, vegetables, and almonds in a sort-of-Asian-stylesauce. But only after buying the Book Lovers’ Café cookbook as a souvenirrecently (it was, of course, right on the cashier’s table, along with all theother local works) did I realize how true my characterization was: the base of the dish, and the source offlavoring in the original formulation of the recipe, was a notorious studentstandby: instant ramen noodles and flavoring packets! But the truly novel andcreative part of the recipe is that it requires no cooking whatsoever –instead, the “instant” noodles soak overnight in a soy-and-vinegar-basedmarinade until tender. (And according to the cookbook, the popular dish wasindeed the invention of the original chef’s plumber.) Of course, I had to trymy own version of it.

The book didn’t saywho this plumber was. But I picture him as a bright, free-thinking UF dropoutwho decided he’d rather do real work with his hands than spend his life pushingpaper around. More than any of the other, more conventionally wholesome disheson the café’s menu, with their locally sourced organic ingredients, thisplumber’s creation speaks loudly and clearly to a distinct sense of place:Where else could such a dish have evolved and flourished except in a communitydominated by starving students and aspiring artists with dreams of far-awayplaces and bigger things?

OUR PLUMBER’S PASTA

(Adapted from The Book Lover’s Café Cookbook, by IanSchliefer)

Notes: The originalrecipe called for balsamic vinegar, but I substituted Chinese sweetened blackvinegar, which has similar tangy, caramel notes and is a LOT cheaper.

For the pastaand vegetables:

3 (3.5 ounce)packages instant ramen package (according to the original recipe, all theingredients in “Oriental”- flavored ramen are vegetarian, but check theingredient list if this is a concern. If not, any basic flavor will work.)

1 large green bellpepper, diced

½ medium red onion,diced

½ cup red cabbage,diced

1/3 cup sliced orslivered almonds

For themarinade:

¼ cup canola oil

¾ sweetened blackvinegar

1/3 cup soy sauce

1 seasoning packetfrom an instant ramen

I teaspoon finelygrated garlic (about 1 medium clove)

1 teaspoon finelygrated fresh ginger

1 cup water

Combine themarinade ingredients in a medium bowl; set aside.

Break up the cakesof ramen noodles into small pieces (about ½ inch across), and put them in alarge bowl. Toss thoroughly with vegetables and marinade. (Discard remainingtwo flavoring packets or reserve for another use.)

Cover the bowl withplastic wrap and allow to rest, overnight, in the refrigerator. (Instant ramennoodles are already cooked; soaking them in the marinade will rehydrate theminto their more familiar “cooked” form.) Serve cold or at room temperature.

Eating Butterflies: Festive Treats for Ordinary Days

2011-12-08T14:21:00.001-08:00

It usedto crack me up how people on TV and in magazines portrayed “four-coursebanquets” as the very height of festivity and luxury. I was just a boringlittle kid who never got to go anywhere interesting, and I’d been to more TEN-coursebanquets than I could count. And as Dad constantly reminded me and my sisters,we were even more fortunate than other people and their trivial roast-beeffeasts, for our banquets featured the classic dishes of ancient China, and theculinary traditions of China are even older and more sophisticated and refinedthan those of France and Italy: Did you know, he liked to tell us, that theChinese invented pasta, and it only got to Italy because of Marco Polo?

Banquetseason for our family was whenever Grandma Lee came to visit us in Los Angeles.She was an expert and prodigiousnetworker decades before the term was even invented, and her week-long visitsinvolved nightly ten-course feasts, each serving seeminglyhundreds of friends, relatives, and business associates in the Chinese-Americancommunity whom she just had to see. I have no idea who paid for or plannedthese events, but I was sure Dad was right about the proper place of Chinesecuisine in the culinary pantheon -- the food was luscious: whole, steamed fishtopped with scallions and ginger, burnished marinated and roasted chicken orsquab surrounded by a ring of crunchy shrimp chips that looked like disks ofcandy-colored Styrofoam, and tender morsels of quickly stir-fried steak in apeppery sauce, along with seven other, equally appetizing courses. It made theinevitable series of lengthy Cantonesespeeches before each meal (which even my parents said were boring andformulaic) worth it.

Only onecourse was inevitably disappointing at these celebratory events: dessert. Nomatter what exotic luxuries had come before, dessert almost always seemed to bean afterthought in Cantonese banquets. There were usually orange slices andmaybe some almond or fortune cookies, and very occasionally, some vaguely sweet soupthat, like a postprandial bowl of Raisin Bran, really didn’t seem sweet or decadent enough to count as dessert. The only time whenGrandma’s banquets didn’t end anticlimactically was when the extended family met in San Francisco.This was because younger members of the local clan usually procured a rum-drenched,cream-puff-topped layer cake from Little Italy to end our otherwiseauthentically Chinese meals.

Thosecakes made me wish I were Italian.

“Chinesefood is healthy,” Dad said when I asked him why we didn’t have good dessertslike other cultures. “We’ve known for a long time that people aren’t supposedto eat a lot of sweets. Americans are just figuring that out now!”

Ilearned later that Western-style dessert didn’t exist as its own course inChinese tradition, and that the few sweets that did exist were more likely tobe served as snacks than with meals. (Some of these traditional snacks, such asthose mildly sweet soups, got co-opted into playing the dessert role at thebanquets I had attended.) I also learned, contrary to Dad's lectures,that there do exist sweet and shamelessly unhealthful Chinese treats worthpursuing.

One ofthese was an occasional treat we’d use to get from Chinatown bakeries, called abutterfly cookie. It only bore the vaguest resemblance to a butterfly, andwasn’t really a cookie – rather, it was a twisted, crunchy deep-friedconfection drenched in thick, sticky sugar syrup. It was also larger than anormal cookie – about six inches long, the perfect size for getting a gradeschooler’s hands completely sticky. Consistent with Chinese tradition, we neverhad these at the end of meals, but only as snacks – the usual routine was tobuy about half a dozen of them after a weekend dim sum lunch in Chinatown, takethem home in the standard-for-Chinatown pink cardboard box tied with redstring, and munch on them while watching badly dubbed 1950s-era Japanesemonster movies on some local independent TV station. Butterfly cookies weren’tofficially special-occasion food, but like ice cream cones, they made ordinarydays feel a little bit special.

Therecipes for homemade butterfly cookies I’ve found differ in a couple ofrespects from the ones I remember seeing in Chinatown. For one, they’re muchsmaller (they’re generally made with fried wonton skins, which are only about 4inches square), and almost always call for a simpler finish of powdered sugarrather than syrup.

But forme, that sticky syrup is what made the butterfly cookies of my childhood somuch fun to eat – both for the decadent sweetness it contributes, and thedistinctive stickiness. The great thing about eating a properly made butterflyis that while it’s crispy and brittle, it generates very few crumbs when youbreak off a piece or bite into it. This is because the syrup coating will formlong, almost tensile strings that will keep the shattered crunchy shardssecurely attached to the rest of the pastry, so none will be lost or wasted.The only mess will be from gobs of syrup on your fingers, but you can alleviatethis problem by holding the butterfly with the wax-paper square on which it is typicallysold.

Mostlikely, modern home cooks adapted the powdered sugar route because it’seasier and (arguably) prettier. But the end result will be a lot messier to eat(crumbs and powdered sugar everywhere!) and nowhere near as much fun.

Whenpreparing this post and formulating my recipe, my South-African-born husbandmentioned that butterfly cookies drenched in syrup were the standardend-of-meal treat in Chinese restaurants when he was growing up. (He remembersthem being called “bow ties” rather than butterflies, but he was definitelyreferring to the same confection.)

So it turns out thatsomewhere in the world, there are Chinese restaurants that end meals withmemorable sweets. As always, there is wisdom to be gleaned from the customs ofothers.

CHINESEBUTTERFLY COOKIES

24wonton skins

Canolaor other neutrally flavored oil for deep frying

2 cupssugar

½ cupwater
2 teaspoons lemon juice

Shapethe butterflies. Stack two wonton skins on top of each other (keep theremaining skins covered to keep them soft and pliable) and cut the stack inhalf lengthwise. Each half of the stack will form a single pastry.

Cut a 2½-inch long slit down the center of each stack.

Pick upone of the stacks. Fold one end of the stack towards you, push it through the frontside of the slit, then pull it up through the back side of the slit. This willform two twists along the sides of the cookie.

Repeatthe cutting and folding until all the butterflies are formed. Keep thealready-shaped butterflies covered with a towel to keep the wonton skins soft.

Meanwhile,heat about 2 inches of oil over medium heat in a heavy saucepan. When it ishot, drop in a test butterfly: if the oil is at the right temperature, the butterfly will immediately rise to the top and start puffing up.

When the oil is the right temperature, add as many pastries as will fit easily without touching (there should be some room around them) and fry, turning once or twice, until golden brown. Remove and drain on paper towels.

Make the syrup: Combine the water, lemon juice, and sugar in a heavy saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. (The lemon juice doesn't add much flavor; it prevents the syrup from getting crystalized.) Cook until the syrup thickens. Test the syrup by placing a small drop of it into a bowl of ice water: the syrup is ready when the drop forms a pliable, sticky ball that can be pressed flat between your fingers. When the syrup is ready, plunge the bottom of the pot into a large bowl of cold water to stop the cooking.

Dip the pastries: Using tongs, take each butterfly and dip it into the syrup, ensuring that it is completely covered. Place the dipped pastries on a baking sheet lined with waxed paper or baking parchment (do NOT put them on paper towels or they'll stick).

The butterflies can be eaten immediately, or stored in an airtight container, with layers of pastries separated by waxed paper.

This post is part of the monthly #LetsLunch series -- this month's theme is festive sides from your family heritage. Okay, I heard it wrong and just did a random festive dish. My bad.

Here are the fine bloggers also doing lunch today: The list will be updated throughout the day as more terrific posts come in, so stay tuned!

A Cook and Her Books
on festive black-eyed peas and greens -- lucky food for Southerners!

Patrick G. Lee
(no relation, but he sounds like a fun guy!) on baby pecan pis.

HapaMama
on fruitcake and generosity, two essential components of Christmas.

Spicebox Travels
on Trinidadan pastelles - Caribbean Christmas tamales -- and an easy way to make them.

Free Range Cookies
on crunchy, crunchy salads -- made of baked veggie chips!

A Tiger in the Kitchen
on a Singaporean potato-and-sausage casserole, traditional at Christmas. UPDATE: This post also contains the complete, updated list of this month's #LetsLunch participants -- check it out!

An (Almost) All-American Thanksgiving (or, What to Eat the Morning After)

2011-11-22T10:48:00.000-08:00

(This post originally appeared on my Open Salon blog last year. A slightly different version was published on Salon.com.)

Ungrateful whining is an American child’s birthright. But if you grow up in an immigrant family, you have a whole battery of things to whine about that other kids don’t.

For one, your parents and their friends will insist on infesting every event with dorky, embarrassing stuff from the old country. Back in my whiny years, all my cool friends from school got to have buttery mashed potatoes and flaky little Parker House rolls at their Thanksgiving tables. And I was stuck with... plain boiled rice.

“MOOOM! Why do we have to have RICE? I want potatoes!”

“Rice is good.” Mom would say. “And Dad wants rice.”

End of discussion. (This was another thing Chinese-American kids get to whine about: We never get to have the last word. Ever.)

Thanksgiving, according to my grade-school teachers, was the most American of holidays, a time to celebrate our common heritage by bonding around indigenous American foodstuffs. So I decided it was up to me, as a patriotic native-born American, to protect the sanctity of the holiday from creeping Sinofication.

“You know what Auntie Pat puts in her turkey?” Mom said one night a week before Thanksgiving, “Naw mai and lop cheung.”

Dad’s eyebrows raised from behind the Wall Street Journal. “Mmm, “ he said.

“MOOOM! NO!” my sisters and I yelled in unison. Not that there was anything wrong with naw mai (sticky rice) and lop cheung (dried Chinese sausage), but these weren’t Thanksgiving food. They were everyday boring food. The kind of stuff we ate while relatives interrogated us about our grades and asked us why Mom didn’t have any sons (as if we could possibly formulate an intelligent answer to this question).

Year after year, we successfully fought off rice-stuffed turkeys and stir-fried side dishes. We also managed to increase, ever so gradually, the proportion of toasted marshmallows on top of our absolutely mandatory sweet potato casserole. And as my sisters and I assumed more and more responsibility and control in the kitchen, our Thanksgiving spreads became less Norman Rockwell and more Martha Stewart: pumpkin flans and souffles are more our thing than pumpkin pies.

These days, we count our victory over immigrant dorkitude nearly complete. But the purity of our red-blooded Yuppie American Thanksgiving feast lasts only until the dishes are cleared. That’s when our Martha Stewart idyll ends, and Mom’s annual turkey jook production begins. (Jook is often described, unappetizingly, as rice porridge or gruel, but it deserves to be re-branded as a savory and soothing cream of rice soup.)

While the dishes are still in the sink, Mom puts the turkey carcass (denuded of stuffing and any pieces of meat large enough to save for sandwiches) in a slow cooker and covers it with water. She tosses in a cut-up carrot and a stalk or two of celery. (Neither of these are traditional Chinese soup ingredients, but that’s how she rolls.) Then she turns the cooker on and lets it do its thing while we do the dishes and attempt to foist foil-wrapped packets of leftovers onto our guests.

The cooker stays on all night, and early on Black Friday morning, Mom removes and dumps the carcass, and adds several handfuls of leftover rice from the night before. (Yes, we still have plain boiled rice every Thanksgiving. Since almost no one touches it except Dad, we can always count on leftovers for jook-making.) Within an hour, the rice will have dissolved, turning the rich turkey broth into a silky ivory cream – just in time for a comforting, very traditional Chinese breakfast for late risers.

In the end, that pointless bowl of Thanksgiving rice always manages to redeem itself. And we always end up with a real Chinese dish for Thanksgiving – albeit one with an All-American backbone. And none of us have ever complained about it.

As always, Mom and Dad get the last word.

***

Jook is traditionally served at breakfast or as a late-night snack. It can be made with fish, meat, or poultry broth, and usually contains pieces of the corresponding meat. (I’ve heard of jook based on plain water, but this would be unthinkable in my family.)

True confession time: I’ve never hosted a full-on Thanksgiving dinner, so I’ve have never had unfettered access to a turkey carcass. (Yes, I know – I’ve missed a crucial milestone of American womanhood and should probably just go and join the Taliban right now.) But I have made jook many times, and it’s dead easy. The recipe below produces a more modest portion than Mom’s – a good starter size for newbies and doubters. It calls for raw rice, since I assume most non-Chinese don’t typically have cold cooked rice lying around. But you can use a larger portion of cooked rice and cook the soup for a shorter amount of time.

TURKEY (OR CHICKEN) JOOK (CREAMY RICE SOUP)

4 cups turkey or chicken broth

2 ¼-inch thick slices of fresh ginger

1/3 cup raw white rice, rinsed (or 1 cup cooked white rice rice)

salt and white pepper to taste

1 cup cooked turkey or chicken, shredded into bite-size pieces

For garnishes:

2 scallions, thinly sliced

sesame oil

chile oil

1. Bring the broth and ginger to a boil in a heavy saucepan.

2. Add the rice. Cook at medium heat, stirring regularly, until the rice has fully cooked and broken down (about an hour). The mixture should have the consistency of a thick bean soup (it won’t be completely smooth; little nubs of rice will still be evident). If it’s too thick for your taste, add more broth. If it’s too thin, raise the heat and cook until the mixture has thickened to your desired consistency.

3. Add the shredded chicken or turkey and season to taste with salt and white pepper. Cook until the meat is heated through.

4. Garnish with sliced scallions. Serve with sesame oil, chile oil, and extra white pepper for diners to add at will.

A Tiger Mom’s Daughter Makes Popcorn

2011-11-21T11:26:00.000-08:00

I’ve had this brilliant idea bouncing around for a while: flavored popcorn. But not just plain old cheese-flavored popcorn or kettle corn – truly epic, sweet, salty, tangy, and spicy popcorn with crazy Indian flavors that would subvert the whole notion of what popcorn is supposed to taste like.

And it would be a cinch to make, too. I knew exactly what flavors I wanted and how to get them (basically, I’d use the spice combination in Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe for Indian snack mix, which I’ve used successfully before in other experiments). I knew how to get the flavors and the popcorn together – I’d cook the spices along with the popcorn, a technique I had learned from a spiced popcorn recipe in City Cuisine, a cookbook featuring dishes from a wonderfully original (and sadly defunct) Los Angeles restaurant.

How could I go wrong?

Let me count the ways.

First, I haven’t laid eyes on that cookbook for years. If I still have it, it’s somewhere in storage at my parents’ place, three time zones away. I haven’t made the spiced popcorn recipe from that book in years, and the exact details of the technique involved were fuzzy. I’d have to wing it, but I’m good at winging it. Usually.

I assembled and mixed my spices, per Jaffrey’s recipe: salt, sugar, cinnamon, turmeric, black mustard seeds, cayenne (I like to use a LOT), cloves, black pepper, and the secret ingredient, amchoor, or dried green mango powder.

Then I heated up some oil in a big pot to pop the corn. When it was sufficiently hot, I dumped in the popcorn kernels, let a few of them pop, then dumped in the spices. I could heat the happy thumps of popping kernels hitting the bottom of the pot’s lid, and smell the spices. And something burning.

I lifted the lid about an inch. Several kernels of corn shot across the kitchen through a puff of smoke and skidded under the refrigerator. If you make popcorn on the stove you can expect a bit of steam when you crack open the lid but this wasn’t steam. It was the whole darned project going up in smoke.

I realized immediately what had happened. The City Cuisine recipe (if I recalled correctly) involved only dried spices and salt. My recipe involved sugar and amchoor, which was essentially powdered dried fruit. Dumped into a pan with a layer of hot oil on the bottom, it cooked into a jam-like gunk, then scorched.

Duh. What did I think would happen? Here, I can hear my parents’ Pavlovian response to such mishaps by their offspring. “The problem was, you weren’t thinking!”

Well, I was thinking now. Failure is a memorable teacher, if nothing else. And one lesson I’ve absorbed from a Chinese-American childhood (other than to never put sugar in your tea at a dim sum place) is that adversity is good for you. Spending hours upon hours doing stuff you hate (Bach’s Two-Part Inventions, anyone?) makes you a better person – and really good at doing stuff you hate, a regrettably important skill for adults.

Fortunately, this training also made me better at doing stuff I like, especially when it goes bad – like now. Thankfully, I had plenty of all the ingredients I needed, and the burnt gunk on the bottom of the pan washed off fairly easily. Time for take two. This time, I’d keep the amchoor and sugar separate from the other spices and add them only at the end, after the popcorn had finished popping.

The oil was heated and the kernels were just starting to thump against the inside of the lid. I lifted it quickly and dumped in the spices, leaving the amchoor and sugar off to the side. I shook the pan to distribute the spices as the kernels popped, thinking of how pretty the finished popcorn would look – sunny yellow from the turmeric and flecked with bits of spice.

The popping slowed, then stopped. I lifted the lid: a few sunny yellow buds of popcorn, but the rest were flecked with black. The spices had burned again.

A lesser warrior would have given up. But not me. I wasn’t raised to be a quitter. Nietzsche said that what doesn’t kill you will make you grow stronger, and being stronger is always a good thing. This was a teachable moment, and I was going to learn from it, dammit!

Take three. It was obvious that cooking the spices with the popcorn was a no-go. (Was that really how they did it in the City Cuisine recipe? Now I was beginning to doubt my memory, which is normally pretty good.) Just dumping the spices onto the popcorn after it was popped wouldn’t work either; I’d tried that before and the spices never stuck to the popcorn – they just sank uselessly to the bottom of whatever container the popcorn was in. So I opted for the method Madhur Jaffrey used to incorporate the spices into her snack mix: I heated the mustard seeds in oil until they popped, removed the hot oil from the heat, and stirred in all the spices except the amchoor, salt, and sugar. Then I poured the mixture over the popcorn and stirred. Once everything was combined, I sprinkled on the amchoor, salt, and sugar and stirred again.

Close, but still not perfect. It was certainly edible, but not quite what I wanted. Some pieces of popcorn were covered with gobs of the spicy mix, while others were nearly white. Also, the mix was almost too saturated with flavor –as if there was too much spice for the amount of popcorn used. I knew exactly what I needed to do: slightly increase both the amount of popcorn and the amount of oil used to heat the spices. The problem with this batch was that the oil-and-spice mixture was thick and pasty, not the melted-butter consistency that would even cover the popcorn. These two adjustments would both improve the flavor balance and the distribution of spices over the popped kernels.

Now I was feeling both like a very proud cub of a good Tiger Mom and like a particularly masochistic minion of Christopher Kimball. The end was in sight. But my kitchen was a hot mess (literally) and it was getting close to dinnertime. The (hopefully) final denouement of my project would have to wait.

Flash forward about 20 hours. This whole experiment was beginning to feel like Groundhog Day. I assembled my spices (again), measured out a slightly larger quantity of popcorn, and popped it as usual -- again. Then I dumped it into a big bowl, wiped out the pot, and added the oil and mustard seeds. When the mustard seeds had all popped, I added the spices, just as before. This time, there was enough oil to dissolve, or at least, evenly disperse them. I poured the now- bright-orange liquid over the popcorn and stirred vigorously until the popcorn was the sunny, nearly uniform yellow I had hoped for. Then I poured over the amchoor/salt/sugar mixture and stirred again.

I tasted it. Success! About freaking time, too. Sweet, salty, spicy, tangy, and despite the seemingly copious amount of oil involved, not discernibly greasy. A perfect snack for Bollywood movie nights and beyond. Forget the Tiger Cub – now I felt like one of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: my 10,000 hours of popcorn-making practice (well, that’s what it felt like) had finally resulted in transcendence. It felt amazing and made me wonder why I didn’t do experiments like this more often.

Then I realized it was close to dinnertime again and it was time to wash and put away all that stuff in the sink before getting started on yet another group of recipes. And I was now running low on black peppercorns, one of my husband’s favorite flavorings, too. And cooking oil. Oops. Maybe that’s why.

But no regrets. The ride was totally worth it.

BOLLYWOOD POPCORN

(inspired by recipes from Madhur Jaffrey's World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cookingand City Cuisine,by Mary Milliken and Susan Feniger)

This recipe actually is really easy to make, believe it or not. It would make a fun and different cocktail nibble for a holiday open house. Amchoor (which contributes a tangy, fruity note) and black mustard seeds are available at Indian markets.

¾” piece cinnamon stick
3 whole cloves
½ teaspoon black peppercorns
¼ teaspoon ground turmeric
1 teaspoon cayenne (or to taste—this amount makes the mix quite spicy!)
1-1/4 teaspoon salt
2-1/2 teaspoons sugar
1-1/2 teaspoons amchoor (dried green mango powder)
1/3 cup popcorn kernels
½ tablespoon black mustard seeds
4 tablespoons neutral cooking oil, such as canola (or more if you need it to pop your corn)

1. In a spice grinder or mortar, grind the cinnamon stick, cloves, and peppercorns until they are powdery. Combine with the turmeric and cayenne in a small cup and set aside.

2. In a separate cup, combine the sugar, salt, and amchoor; set aside.

3. Pop the corn. If you don’t have a popcorn popper, you can do it the old-school way, on the stovetop: put 2 tablespoons of canola or other neutral oil in a large, heavy pot with a lid and drop in a test kernel. Cover the pot and cook over medium heat until the kernel pops. Then add the remaining kernels. Keep the pot covered, but shake it around occasionally to distribute the kernels evenly. When the popping stops, remove the pot from the heat and pour the popped corn into a large bowl.

4. Wipe out the pot (if you’ve used one) or use a small, heavy skillet to make the seasoned oil. Put the 4 tablespoons of oil into the pot or skillet and bring the heat to medium. Add the mustard seeds and cook until all the seeds have popped. Remove the skillet or pot from the heat and stir in the ground spices.

5. Pour the spice mixture over the popped corn and stir vigorously with a large spoon (or even your hands) until the popcorn is evenly coated. Sprinkle on the salt/sugar/amchoor mixture and stir again.

The Pleasures of PBS (and a Defense of Monkey Gland Steak)

2011-11-15T09:39:00.000-08:00

Not having cable is liberating. It gives me a perfect excuse not to keep up with the Kardashians or any of the other irritating presences hogging up the cultural universe: Sorry, I didn’t see that – I don’t have cable!

Another good thing about not having cable is that when I do feel like zonking out in front of the TV, I am forced to watch PBS, the only over-the-air station in my area that has decent reception and isn’t constantly running pawn-shop ads. It’s kind of like not keeping junk food in the house: if you feel like snacking, you have no choice but to go for the carrot sticks.

But after many hours of virtuous sloth (spacing out in front of a Ken Burns documentary somehow feels righteous and wholesome), I realized with delight that PBS isn’t all carrot sticks. Sometimes, like ripe mangoes or perfect strawberries, it’s so enchanting you forget it’s good for you. Seriously, any American who doesn’t love Big Bird or get into geeking out with the History Detectives really does’t deserve to be alive.

Even more fun than Big Bird’s adventures or the origins of that thing that may or may not have belonged to Benedict Arnold are PBS’s cooking shows. Unlike the glitz-filled drivel on the Food Network, the cooks who have shows on PBS – Ming Tsai, Jacques Pepin, and Lidia Bastianich, among others – actually know how to cook and are passionately curious about the history, origins, and uses of their ingredients. Watching those guys (and girls) at work can give you both a raging appetite and a genuinely improved knowledge of some crucial technique or regional cuisine: Did you know you can avoid getting shell bits in your eggs by cracking the shells against a flat surface such as a counter rather than against the rim of a bowl? Merci, chef Pepin. Try getting useful stuff like THAT from a gaggle of feuding sorority girls on Cupcake Wars.

Best of all for me and my husband Glenn, several of these shows happen to come on just before we normally eat dinner – perfect eye candy to relax to while stirring up a sauce or waiting for something to come out of the oven.

Like every other human institution, however, PBS sometimes screws up. Some of their B-string cooking shows look as though they were lifted from some public-access channel in the middle of nowhere. And even the true culinary stars in their lineup occasionally get things wrong.

A couple of weeks ago, Todd English’s travel and cooking show came on just before dinner and to Glenn’s delight, was to feature the foods of South Africa, where he was born and raised. And Glenn and I couldn’t wait to see the traditional foods he grew up with showcased by a master chef: What would English taste and cook as he explored Glenn’s homeland? The sweet, twisted fritters called koeksisters? Sosaties, skewers of curry-drenched lamb cooked over an open flame? The traditional meat-filled grill called a braai?

The final answer was...none of the above. Todd English’s vision of South African cuisine and Glenn’s couldn’t have been more different. The Zulu goat sacrifice and resulting goat stew that English watched being made were authentically African, but not part of Glenn’s experience as a non-African from Johannesburg. And English’s segment on safari cooking featured a butternut squash and mascarpone cheese casserole -- something Glenn never recalled having on any safari that he’d ever been on.

To be fair, it would have been impossible for English to do justice to the culinary traditions of a country as culturally complex as South Africa in a half-hour show. But the contributions of South Africa’s centuries-old Indian and European populations to its cooking – which include a full battery of eclectic dishes not found anywhere else – seemed conspicuous by their absence.

Why? Maybe English tried some of traditional Euro-Indo-South African dishes and didn’t like them. Or maybe his producers thought scenes filmed in the bush would look better on TV than those filmed in a typical middle-class urban kitchen. Or perhaps typical urban South African fare is neither exotic nor fancy enough to suit the vibe of his show.

However, I have another, less obvious theory. Some of these typical dishes – tasty as they are – have weird names that American audiences might find off-putting. And English and his team probably realized this wouldn’t go over very well during PBS pledge week: Stay tuned! After a few words from our general manager about our latest matching challenge from Gatorland Chevrolet, we’ll return to Todd English as he shows you how to make a traditional South African favorite – Monkey Gland Steak!

If this is the case, maybe I see why English and his handlers made the choices they did. Still, somebody has to explain the wonders of Monkey Gland Steak to the wider world – and it might as well be me. Fear not, this dish is, and always has been, completely monkey- and gland-free.

************

It’s unclear how Monkey Gland Steak – beef topped with a tangy sauce enlivened with chutney, onions, and tomatoes – got its name. One legend has it that the dish was invented as a joke by a group of French-trained chefs at a snooty Johannesburg restaurant: Bitter that their wealthy but unschooled Afrikaaner and rural English clientele failed to appreciate the subtlety of their classic French sauces, they threw together the dumbest, most un-French mixture of bottled condiments possible and gave it the most ridiculous name they could think of. To their surprise (and perhaps, disappointment), the philistines loved it. Another story claims that an English chef created this dish early in the last century, and it became a favorite of a prominent doctor known for grafting tissues from monkey testicles into human testicles to restore virility. The chef later moved to South Africa and brought the recipe with him – and it soon became a local favorite.

In South African, the sauce is either cooked along with the meat or offered as an optional topping for steaks (it appears on menus at steakhouses alongside Béarnaise sauce and other classic steak accompaniments). To my taste, the brash, tangy flavors of Monkey Gland sauce (it’s a bit like a South African analogue to barbecue sauce) seem wrong for a delicate filet mignon or other special-treat cut. Rather, it seems better suited for the preparation Glenn remembers from his youth: baked slowly with a cheaper, sturdier cut of beef for a hearty family dinner – it’s great served with mashed potatoes.

MONKEY GLAND STEAK

(Adapted from South African Gourmet Food and Wine: Traditional South African Food and Moreby Myrna Rosen and Leslie Loon)

4 rump, strip, or sirloin steaks
4 tablespoons prepared mustard (or more if needed)
2 tablespoons neutral cooking oil, such as canola
1 medium onion, chopped
1 pound sliced or roughly chopped fresh mushrooms
½ cup tomato ketchup
½ cup Major Grey chutney (or other sweet mango chutney)
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon (or more) hot sauce, or to taste (optional)
salt and pepper to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Spread mustard thinly on both sides of each steak. Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium high heat, and brown the steaks briefly on both sides. Remove the browned steaks from the skillet (you may need to brown them in two batches) and place in a heatproof baking dish.

2. Add the chopped onion and the mushrooms to the hot skillet and cook until wilted and slightly browned.

3. Meanwhile, combine the ketchup, chutney, Worcestershire sauce, and hot sauce and add to the skillet. Cook, stirring, until the sauce comes to a boil.

4. Pour the sauce over the steaks in the baking dish. Cover the dish with foil and bake at 375 degrees until the steaks are tender, about 40 minutes

Half-Fast Cooking: Wok-Free Chinese

2011-10-30T14:12:00.000-07:00

It's not fast food. It's not slow food. It's...half-fast food! Part of an occasional, sloth-driven series.

I admit it. I'm a total snob when it comes to Chinese food.

Growing up in proud Chinese-American family, I used to be both puzzled and annoyed by the weird ideas non-Chinese had about Chinese food. Some of these strange ideas continue to baffle and annoy me to this day: Why do non-Chinese eat Chinese take-out directly out of the box, instead of transferring it to a plate first, like we did? Why do they think it’s appropriate to pour soy sauce over everything on their plates? Why do they obsess about MSG in Chinese food but not worry a jot about the copious amounts of the stuff in Big Macs and Doritos? And what’s the deal with those crunchy noodles that come in a can? What, exactly, are they for?

More recently, I’ve noticed a more insidious and potentially harmful misconception that could wrongly turn good people away from Chinese food: the myth of the quick ‘n’ easy stir-fry. Every serious home cook has probably heard this: Stir-fries are great everyday dishes because they’re so easy! They have tons of nutritious veggies! And they cook in only seconds!

I’ve learned the hard way, however, that making a stir-fry when you’re tired and busy is almost always a bad idea, unless you REALLY know what you’re doing. (Which I don’t.)

Yes, stir-fries cook up quickly. But there’s a huge difference between “quick” and “easy.” Cooking a proper stir-fry is a lot like pulling off a successful assassination: the act itself may require only seconds, but you need serious planning, preparation, and skills to make it work.

In a proper stir–fry, everything must be cut perfectly: the shape of a cut must not only be compatible with the ingredient you’re cutting, but the other stuff in the dish as well. Every piece of a given ingredient must be exactly the same size, otherwise it won’t all cook through evenly. (Fuschia Dunlop's Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China has a terrific description of the theory and practice of of classic Chinese knife techniques.)Then, everything must be cooked in the proper order: things that require more cooking go in first, those that require the least go in last. Get the timing wrong and you’ll end up with a noxious mélange of overcooked and half-raw ingredients. And because stir-fries cook so quickly, there is very little room for fudging in this area.

Also, the wok used for frying must be the right temperature: hot. As in REALLY hot, for most preparations. If the oil in the wok doesn’t sputter violently, spewing incendiary droplets onto your face and arms as you throw in your ingredients, it’s not hot enough. If it doesn’t send up a noisy, fragrant cloud of smoke that makes you think “great, now I’m going to have to shampoo every carpet in the house tomorrow,” then it’s not hot enough. In Cantonese, there is a special term for the distinct aroma of a properly executed stir-fry: wok hei, sometimes translated as “breathe of the wok.” It’s the elusive smell of sear just before it becomes char – hot and smoky and flame-kissed, like the edges of a good grilled steak. It’s special and short lived; it dissipates almost as soon as a platter of hot stir-fry hits the table.

I love setting stuff on fire as much as the next person, but I can’t even try to make a proper stir-fry at my place: my downstairs smoke alarm is – wait for it – directly above the stove. Call it the curse of college-town housing: the unspoken assumption around here is that anyone who cooks anything more ambitious than Top Ramen will probably burn the place down.

Thankfully, there are other options when I get a jones for real Chinese home cooking but don’t want to invoke the wrath of the local fire department. Thinking of real Chinese food always makes me think of home and family, and a homey, dead-simple dish Mom makes frequently – particularly for quick weekend lunches – is a tasty and quick preparation of noodles tossed with oyster sauce and hot oil flavored with garlic and ginger. Growing up, I’d never seen it served anywhere except chez Mom and Dad – if it did show up on restaurant menus, we never bothered ordering it. It was one of those low-key staples I always took for granted, But now, living far from my family in a place where people think brown-rice sushi is an obligatory item on “Chinese” menus, I find it irresistible. Best of all, it takes all of 15 almost completely brainless minutes to make – tops.

WORLD’S EASIEST OYSTER SAUCE NOODLES

Chinese oyster sauce doesn’t look or smell anything like you’d expect from something made from oysters—it’s a dark, salty condiment, about the consistency and color of bottled steak sauce, that can be found easily in glass bottles in Asian markets. (It’s the dominant seasoning in that Chinese-American favorite, beef with broccoli.) Oyster sauce is not especially fishy, but since it’s intensely salty, a little goes a long way. it keeps for several months in the refrigerator.

7 ounces dried wheat noodles (in a pinch, I’ve used spaghetti)
4 tablespoons peanut or canola oil
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 medium clove of garlic, peeled
a 1-inch square piece of peeled fresh ginger
4 tablespoons oyster sauce
Optional add-ins: thinly sliced scallions, bite-size pieces of cooked meat and/or vegetables, Chinese chile oil

1. Put a large pot of water to boil for the noodles.

2. While the water is heating, heat the peanut or canola oil in a pot large enough to hold the noodles, and finely chop the garlic and ginger.

3. Add the garlic and ginger to the heated oil and cook, stirring for about 2 minutes or until they wilt and start to release their aromas. Stir in the sesame oil and remove from heat.

4. Add the noodles to the boiling water and cook until tender, about 10 minutes.

5. Using tongs, transfer the noodles to the pot with the seasoned oil and toss thoroughly. Add oyster sauce and toss again until all is well combined.

5. Mix in any add-ins you wish and serve immediately.

Eating (Really) High on the Hog

2011-08-21T17:40:00.001-07:00

The expression “high on the hog” is said to originate from the general belief that the choicest cuts of pork came from high on the animal’s anatomy – the back and upper legs. Thus, these cuts were more expensive, and those lucky enough afford them were said to be living (or eating) “high on the hog.”

Ironically, the highest topological point on the hog, the pinnacle of piggy anatomy, is one of the cheapest and least prestigious cuts. It has been quietly prepared and relished for centuries by African-Americans, Chinese, and others whose cultural mores or pocketbooks eschewed waste of any kind. For these reasons, it has also been embraced by ethics-driven omnivores and recession-strapped foodies.

And for good reason: done right, it can be downright decadent.

Yup – pigs’ ears can be awesome.

I used to be a skeptic, too. While I grew up seeing pigs’ ears in Chinese butcher shops (they look exactly the way you think they would, only bigger), I never had much desire to try them – they were always pink, pointy, and floppy, and it was impossible to look at them and not imagine poor Porky Pig going “Ow! M-m-m-my ear!” In an Asian deli several years ago, I saw small packages of Taiwanese-style stewed, sliced pigs’ ears – meant to be served as appetizers or bar snacks – and I made a mental note to try them sometime. But that sometime never came.

Then I saw them on a non-Chinese menu for the first time, at the unapologetically carnivore-centric Los Angeles restaurant Animal: “crispy pigs’ ears, lime, chile, fried egg.”

“How weird,” my sister said. “I wonder what THAT’S like?”

Our server must have overheard her question, because when he passed our table a short time later he stopped to show us a plate he was delivering to another table: a pretty pile of crunchy browned shreds, smelling vaguely of fresh cracklings, topped with a sunny-side up fried egg. It reminded me of bacon and eggs, but with an obscenely generous proportion of bacon.

“By the way, these are the pigs’ ears,” our server said. Then, leaning closer: “Trust me—they’re very good.”

They were.

Flash forward about two years, to the present day: I had moved from the Los Angeles area to Middle Of Nowhere, Florida – a sleepy rural college town distinguished from the surrounding sleepy rural towns by the presence of a humongous research hospital and an equally humongous football stadium. But one nice thing about being in the middle of nowhere is that old rural folkways are still observed – it’s easier to find old-school cooking paraphernalia such as canning jars here than in Los Angeles, for instance.

The same goes for food. Unfashionable cuts of meat that would never grace the shelves of Whole Foods – turkey necks, pigs’ feet, chitlins – are easy to find, and dirt cheap to boot. Last week at my favorite grocery store, I saw that they had pigs’ ears – good-sized trays of them – for about two bucks each.

It was time for an experiment.

After a quick bit of internet research, I had a plan. The pigs’ ears, as I suspected, wouldn’t be difficult to prepare, but they’d require a bit of cooking – cartilage-filled cuts of meat always do. Following the basic guidelines of a recipe (and entertaining related essay) by Chichi Wang, I simmered the ears in water and aromatics until they were soft. Then I drained and cooled them, sliced them into thin strips, and dredged them in flour and cornstarch before deep-frying them until they were browned and crispy.

To finish them off, I shamelessly plagiarized Animal’s preparation by tossing the crispy strips with salt, cayenne, and a squirt of lime, then topping the whole thing with fried eggs, one per diner. My only original contribution to the recipe was inspired by the presence of that big pot of hot oil left after the ears were fried: not wanting it to go to waste, I threw in a handful of cilantro leaves, which brightened and crisped to make a pretty garnish.

For those still grossed out by the whole notion of eating pigs’ ears (vegetarians are excused from the sermon), please consider this wise observation from M.F.K. Fisher:

“Why is it worse, in the end, to see an animal’s head cooked and prepared for our pleasure than a thigh or a tail or a rib? If was are going to live on other inhabitants of this world we must not bind ourselves with illogical prejudices, but savor to the fullest the beasts we have killed.”

Amen. Now let’s pig out.

*******************************
CRISPY, SPICY PIGS’ EARS

Adapted from Chichi Wang, with additional inspiration from Animal restaurant, Los Angeles

1 pound pigs’ ears
1 carrot, peeled and chopped coarsely
1 medium onion, peeled and chopped coarsely
1 stick celery, chopped coarsely
1 tablespoon whole peppercorns
¼ cup cornstarch
¼ cup flour
12 cilantro leaves, washed and dried
½ lime
½ teaspoon cayenne powder (more if desired)
salt as needed
canola (or other neutral cooking oil) for deep-frying
4 fresh eggs, fried to your taste.

1. Place the pigs’ ears in a pot of boiling water. Boil for three minutes to remove any impurities, then drain and set aside.

2. Arrange the carrot, onion, celery, peppercorns, and pigs’ ears in a large pot and add enough water to cover. Add about a tablespoon of salt. Bring the water to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer and allow the ears to cook, uncovered, until tender enough to pierce easily with a fork, about 2 hours.

3. Remove the pigs’ ears from the water, drain them, and allow them to cool. (Save the broth—it’ll make a great soup base.)

4. When the pigs’ ears are cool and dry, cut them into ¼ inch strips.

5. In a medium bowl, thoroughly combine the cornstarch and flour. Meanwhile, put about 2 inches of canola oil into a deep pot and heat to 350 degrees.

6. Toss the sliced pigs’ ears in the flour-cornstarch mixture. When the oil is hot, add the floured slices to the hot oil in batches, shaking off extra flour first.

7. Cook the strips until they are crisp and browned. Remove and drain on paper towels. Keep finished strips in a warm oven until all are done.

8. When all the strips are cooked, toss the cilantro leaves into the hot oil. They will sizzle and crisp up within 15 seconds or so. Remove them with a slotted spoon and drain them on a plate lined with paper towels.

9. To complete the dish, toss the pigs’ ear strips with cayenne and add salt to taste. Squirt with lime juice (exact amount is up to you) and toss again. Divide the mixture among four plates, and top each with a fried egg and some of the cilantro leaves.

Half-Fast Cooking: Brunch for the Lazy

2011-07-17T15:11:00.000-07:00

It’s not fast food. It’s not slow food. It’s... half-fast food! The first in an occasional, sloth-driven series.

Back when I worked in the pastry kitchen of a swank beach resort, I dreaded Sunday brunch. The resort’s brunch was a $75-per-person affair (this was the price six years ago) featuring a dizzying spread of dishes and bottomless servings of domestic sparkling wine. There were carving stations, seafood stations, and separate omelet and pancake stations, along with a stir-fry station and a humongous salad bar. Big silver chafing dishes held constantly replenished supplies of eggs Benedict, sausages, bacon, and assorted potato dishes. Across the dining room were tables holding a towering assortment of breads along with half a dozen imported cheeses, butter rolled into pretty little balls, and cream cheese and smoked fish to go with the bagels. Piles of croissants and filled danishes covered a nearby table. Then there was the kids’ table, a rug rat paradise of macaroni and cheese, tiny peanut-butter sandwiches, chicken fingers, miniature chocolate chip cookies, and plastic Sponge Bob plates instead of the resort’s standard white stoneware.

Finally, dominating one end of the dining room’s back wall was the dessert station, fully loaded with dozens of different types of petit fours, cookies, cakes, and tarts, along with a sundae bar and a make-to-order crepe station. This where I stood guard on most of my Sundays, wearing a ridiculous paper toque, a starched white jacket, and the fakest grin this side of a Meet the Press interview.

The truth was I didn’t dread everything about Sunday brunch. It was the only time of the week when I got to meet the people who ate the things my colleagues and I had spent the rest of the week making. Watching them coo over a cake I had decorated an hour before – then come back for seconds – was exhilarating. Nobody ever got that excited about my lectures back when I taught linguistics.

Sundays also provided unparalleled people-watching opportunities. I came to think of crepe station duty as an exercise in anthropological field work, and the natives – hedge-fund managers, B-list celebrities (David Hasselhoff and Ron Jeremy were regulars), along with their kids, mistresses, and various hangers-on– were fascinating. They showed up in everything from Chanel to flip-flops and board shorts, but the dominant look was one of ruined decadence. The preponderance of multiple gold chains nestled in thickets of graying chest hair and sequined halter tops revealing obvious boob jobs (at 10 a.m., no less) was a sight to behold, as foreign to my sensibilities as loin cloths and animal worship. And every Sunday brought another opportunity to study this exotic tribe: There must be a deep, culturally rooted reason they choose to look like that – if I observe them for a while more, maybe I’ll figure out what it is!

So technically, I didn’t dread Sunday brunch. What I really dreaded was the Saturday before, when my colleagues and I had to make all those hundreds of cakes, petit fours, and crepe fillings– while simultaneously preparing restaurant and banquet desserts, snacks, room service orders, catered beach picnics, and breakfast pastries for the hundreds of guests and day visitors expected on any given weekend. Forget the Keebler elves. On Saturdays, we looked more like a Special Forces team about to rush a fortified Al-Qaida safe house as we worked elbow-to-elbow in the kitchen or sprinted madly from one of the resort’s food outlets to another, putting out one fire after another while frantically baking, assembling, cutting, and plating stuff for Sunday’s debauchery.

It made me resent the lucky slobs who got to eat brunch.

Now, thank goodness, I’m one of them again—at least in theory. I no longer have to clock in on Sundays, but still I don’t eat or cook brunch much anymore. Even though I’m an unapologetic morning person (blame my bird-watching hobby – birds get up with the sun, and so do we dorks who watch them), there’s no way I’m going to start a weekend morning making several dozen dishes This would mean missing one of my weekend bird-watching walks, which would be unthinkable.

Just as a thought experiment, I wondered if I could have both my birds and my brunch too. I’d get up super-early as usual, head out and look for early fall migrants (yup, they’re starting to come back already), then get home about 9 in time to shower, change, and throw something festive and brunch-worthy together by 10. Is this even possible?

Hell, yes!

I normally lean towards the savory offerings at brunch, but since I love to mess with expectations – especially my own – I played with the idea of taking something that’s normally savory and turning it into something sweet. Rich and spicy Mexican breakfasts and brunches –huevos Rancheros, breakfast burritos, eggs scrambled with chiles or braised meats and served with stacks of tortillas – have always been special favorites of mine. So I turned a staple of the Mexican savory repertoire – the flour tortilla – into a crispy wrapping for a gooey, sweet, yet wholesome morning treat, filled with creamy warm bananas, peanut butter, and just enough chocolate to make it company-worthy.

My little invention is tasty and elegant enough to qualify as treat food, but its starring virtue is that it takes all of five minutes to make. So in less than an hour, even an inexperienced cook can make a batch of these, stick some good sausages in the oven, put on a pot of coffee, and call up a friend to ask him or her to pick up a fruit tray at Publix on the way over. An experienced cook will be able to handle the fruit solo and maybe cook up some bacon for extra decadence. If you work things right, you may even have time to enter all your morning’s birding numbers into eBird before your guests arrive.

I was going to dub my invention a sweet breakfast quesadilla, but my husband pointed out – rightly –that “quesadilla” implies the presence of cheese. So I’m going to follow his suggestion and call it a “chocadilla.” Yes, this makes it sound more like a kind of reptile than a brunch dish—but for some, this may even add to its appeal.

CHOCADILLA

For each serving:

1 large flour tortilla, at room temperature

2 tablespoons peanut butter

1/3 large banana, sliced thinly

2 tablespoons chocolate chips

Canola or other unflavored oil for frying

powdered sugar for garnish

melted chocolate for garnish (optional)

1. Spread the peanut butter over half of the tortilla, leaving a 1-inch margin around the edges.

2. Top the peanut butter with banana slices, then sprinkle the chocolate chips on top. Fold the uncovered half of the tortilla over the filling to cover completely. Press down on the folded tortilla to eliminate any air pockets.

3. Heat a thin layer of oil in a large skillet (at least as wide as the tortillas you’re using) over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot, add the folded chocadilla. As it cooks, press down on the edges of the tortilla to keep them sealed. When the bottom is golden brown, turn it over and cook until the second side is also golden brown. (If your skillet is large enough, you can fry two at a time.

4. Drain cooked chocadillas on paper towels, then keep them warm in an oven set on low heat, on a metal rack placed on a sheet pan.

5. Garnish with powdered sugar ( and melted chocolate, if desired). Serve immediately.

Variations: Instead of peanut butter and chocolate, substitute a chocolate-hazelnut spread such as Nutella. You can also add a scant handful of miniature marshmallows or chopped-up regular ones.

I Want My Country Back! All-American Tacos for July 4

2011-06-11T15:07:00.000-07:00

In grade school, I learned to be a patriotic American. At the front of every classroom was an American flag, and every morning for nine years (the school went from first through ninth grades), my classmates and I stood facing it, right hands over our hearts, and solemnly recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

One morning in third grade, our regular teacher was out sick. So the principal took over, as was the policy at our tiny school. As usual, we droned our dutiful way through the pledge. Then the principal spoke.

“Who here can tell me what ‘allegiance’ means?”

Whoa. This was WAY too early for a pop quiz.

“No one?”

We shook our heads.

“Here’s an easier one, then. Do you know what ‘pledge’ means? Okay, good, I see lots of hands. David?”

“It means a promise?” David said, sounding as terrified as the rest of us felt.

“That’s right, David. A pledge is a promise. A public promise. Now I have another question for you: None of you knew what ‘allegiance’ meant. But you all made a pledge – a promise – of allegiance. How could you make a promise if you don’t know what you’re promising?”

Our principal was one intense dude. But he was no Commie. Our deafening silence after his question was followed by a long discourse on the definition of ‘allegiance,’ the wisdom and courage of the founding fathers, and our responsibility, as citizens and future leaders of the greatest country on Earth, to understand and participate in the civic life of our community.

Grade school is where many kids first learn about the world outside home and family, and the America I learned about in grade school – and that I saw reflected in the values and lives of my classmates and teachers – was a wondrous place. From a vast land filled with nothing (okay, there were the Indians, who we treated pretty badly –we learned about that in seventh grade), we created a country so wonderful that people from all over the world want to live here. Like most of our grandparents and great-grandparents. And all of us, no matter what our backgrounds, could grow up to be anything we wanted! Our boundaries were only limited by how hard we were willing to work.

Nothing in the lives of my classmates contradicted any of this. We learned about horrific things that people had done to each other – like the Holocaust in Europe and slavery in the U.S.—but all those things, our teachers said, happened a long, long time ago and would never happen again, because now people knew better. A majority of my classmates were Jewish and had parents or grandparents who had witnessed the Holocaust – and they all had happy, affluent lives now in nice parts of Los Angeles. The few black kids at the school were the children of doctors, engineers, and judges. And even though I could count the number of other Asian kids there besides me and my sisters on the fingers of one hand, I never felt any less a part of the school community because of it. Life was fair.

Life was good, even. Nowhere did it feel better than on the festive days when our classes had potlucks. Sometimes these happened in conjunction with a particular class – such as a social studies class on immigration, in which each of us was supposed to bring in something representing the country our ancestors came from. But sometimes they took place to celebrate a transition in the year, such as the last day before winter break or summer vacation.

Of course, we kids did little or none of the preparation ourselves (although I took to making my own cookies around eighth grade or so). It was up to our mothers (and back then, it was ALWAYS the mothers) to bring hot dishes covered with foil to the classroom right before lunch. Through these moms, I learned that quiche Lorraine was from France (and truly rocked), and that the Japanese ate octopus, which tasted mild and bouncy. I also discovered latkes and matzos and enchiladas. Oddly, the enchiladas were usually brought by the same moms who brought the matzos and latkes, which taught me another lesson: you don’t have to be born into a culture to celebrate it.

I absorbed the values and ideals of this perfect America through my brain and my stomach. I learned that it’s not only okay to have friends and food from far-flung corners of the world at the same meal, but darned wonderful. I learned from hundreds of teachable moments at that school – like the principal’s Pledge of Allegiance lesson – that it’s right and responsible to question authority, but it’s best to do it politely. In each of these illuminating (and sometimes gluttonous) moments, I felt as though I truly understood what it felt like to be American.

The ugly, hard truth about the American Dream – that hype and luck can get you further than hard work, and the word “patriotism” is all too often co-opted by those who hate most of their compatriots – was not theirs to teach us. These things, like calculus and James Joyce’s novels, were for a later part of our educational journey. The day when we’d have to tackle them would come soon enough.

At times I still hold on to that early vision I had of America—a safe and fair place when people with roots and backgrounds from all over treated each other with respect and dignity. A place where people asked tough questions gently and use reason instead of personal invective to solve problems and work out differences. Right now, the real America seems to be moving further away from this ideal than at any time I could remember.

But I like to think the America I grew up with is somehow real, and maybe we can get there someday. It’ll no doubt be quite different from what I envisioned as a child, but I do know this: the food will rock your world..

*********************

As the child and grandchild of immigrants, I always like to throw something “ethnic” into my Independence Day feasts, to honor those who’ve come from far away to reinvent their lives here. Whatever that something is, throwing it on the grill is obligatory.

This year, I’d like to re-create a famous (or infamous) Los Angeles specialty of recent vintage: the Korean taco, first made famous by the Kogi taco truck mini-empire. The tacos – grilled meat in a Korean-style sweet and garlicky marinade, served up on warm corn tortillas and topped with kimchee (Korean pickled cabbage) – are said to have been invented and independently re-invented hundreds of times by hungry Angelenos years before Kogi hit the scene, however. Tacos, after all, are nothing more than a tasty and convenient way of conveying small bits of meat into one’s mouth, and tortillas are easier to find than paper plates in parts of Los Angeles. Perhaps Korean tacos were invented by Mexican-American cooks working in L.A.’s many Korean restaurants. Or by Mexican workers sampling leftovers from Korean colleagues’ lunches. In any case, people were quietly eating them long before they became trendy.

Much as I enjoy kimchee, I enjoy the all-American custom of crunchy greenery on top of tacos even better, so I’ve replaced the kimchee with a fresh cabbage slaw for extra textural contrast. I’ve also added an Asian-tinged guacamole, just because I love guacamole.

I’ve borrowed another Korean-American tradition too: grilling the meat outdoors, picnic-style, rather than inside on a tabletop brazier. When Mark Bittman proposed a Korean-style outdoors barbeque in a recent column, several readers gently informed him that this very thing had been done for years by Korean-American church groups and hungry families.

Before anyone gets on my case for being a treasonous bastard – Paul Revere NEVER would have put kimchee on his tacos! Why do you hate America so much?? – consider this: could the Korean taco possibly have been invented anywhere BUT in the U.S.A.?

ALL-AMERICAN KOREAN TACOS

For the meat: (adapted from Quick and Easy Korean Cooking (Gourmet Cook Book Club Selection) by Cecelia Hae-Jin Lee (no relation!))

Marinade:

½ medium onion, minced

½ bulb (about 5 large cloves) garlic, minced

¼ cup soy sauce

¼ cup sugar

½ cup pineapple juice

2 teaspoons Korean red pepper lakes

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 ½ pounds flank steak or skirt steak (don’t screw up like I did this time and try to economize by using round steak—it’s edible but not as tender as it could be)

For the cabbage slaw:

2 cups finely shredded cabbage

2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon (or more to taste) Korean red pepper flakes

1 clove garlic, minced

4 tablespoons rice vinegar

For the Asian guacamole:

1 small avocado

2 tablespoons finely minced onion

juice of ¼ lime

½ teaspoon sesame oil

salt to taste

For serving:

1 dozen corn tortillas

chopped fresh cilantro

1. Combine the meat marinade ingredients in a large baking pan, add the meat, spooning marinade over the top. Cover and refrigerate overnight, turning occasionally.

2. Remove the meat from the marinade, letting the excess marinade drip off. Broil or grill until done to your taste.

3. Allow the meat to rest for about 15 minutes after it has finished cooking, then cut it into thin slices. Cut the slices into bite-size pieces, cover and set aside in a warm place.

4. At least half an hour before serving, combine the cabbage slaw ingredients. If any liquid accumulates after the cabbage has sat for a while, carefully drain it off. Cover and set aside.

5. Mash the avocado with the remaining guacamole ingredients. Press a sheet of plastic wrap snugly over the surface of the guacamole to prevent browning, then set it aside.

6. Wrap the tortillas in foil and heat in a 300 degree oven for about 10 minutes.

7. Bring the tortillas, meat, cabbage slaw, cilantro, and guacamole to the table and invite diners to make their own tacos. Happy Independence Day!

On The Wings of (Reflected) Glory

2011-05-22T15:04:00.000-07:00

A beginning birder started showing up at my Audubon chapter’s field trips last year. She was friendly, smart, and ferociously curious; and despite starting out barely able to tell a penguin and an ostrich apart, a fantastically good sport in a group dominated by experts. She asked tons of (very intelligent) questions, and her eyes lit up at the sight of just about anything with feathers, for every species was new and wondrous to her. Birding with her was a joy – I felt the same vicarious pride in her discoveries that I did in watching my nephews learn to crawl and walk.

One day a few months back, I caught up with her after having missed a few field trips. She recounted her adventures on the last trip with her usual enthusiasm.

“Oh! And after the trip, a bunch of us went to Gilchrist County to look for Burrowing Owls and we found some right by the side of the road!”

Burrowing Owls –there’s no other way to put it – are freakishly adorable. They’re tiny for owls, with improbably long legs, fuzzy egg-shaped bodies, and standard-issue-for-owls enormous yellow eyes. As their name suggests, they live, Hobbit-like, in cozy burrows.

If they didn’t exist in nature, Steven Spielberg and Jim Henson would have probably gotten together, invented them, and put them into a movie as sidekicks to some cute misunderstood kid.

“Wow, that’s great!” I said, genuinely happy for her. “Was that a life sighting for you?”

“Oh yes! I even wrote a poem about them when I got home.”

Oh, that’s nice. I thought. I’m not an expert on poetry, but I met enough well-meaning birders and would-be poets to know that most bird poetry is awful: Why do so many otherwise intelligent people think they’re the first ever to put “fly,” “high,” and “sky” into rhyme? And I had a hard time imagining any poem about Burrowing Owls that wouldn’t be a treacle-drenched train wreck.

Summer came, and we both got busy and stopped running into each other. Then I got my weekly e-mail update from one of the Audubon ringleaders. The subject line of the message: “Local owl hits big time!”

The poem my newbie birder friend had written about the owls was accepted for publication by the New Yorker.

Wow. This was truly amazing and very cool indeed, so I immediately e-mailed her with my congratulations. She e-mailed me back almost immediately.

“Thanks! I’ve actually had several poems published in the New Yorker before, but this is the first in a few years, so it’s kind of exciting.”

This wasn’t the first time I discovered one of my birding pals to be way, way out of my league.

A few years back, when we lived in California, my husband and I started running into the same couple, several years older than us, at all the birding hotspots. He told us that they had just moved to the area for his new job on the faculty of the University of California, Irvine. Like my poet friend, both were friendly and down-to-earth. Unlike her, though, both were expert birders, but they never showed the slightest hint of impatience with our relative cluelessness.

A while later, I Googled him (I had misplaced his e-mail address – and yes, I was being nosy) and found that in his usual humble way, he had radically understated his reason for moving to California. He didn’t just have a teaching post at UCI. He had a freaking endowed chair there.

This shouldn't have surprised me. It was just the latest in a string of several similar revelations I’ve had about friends over the years.

What did astound me, though, was what didn't happen. I realized I didn’t have even the tiniest urge to throttle him. Only few years earlier, such greatness in my midst would have been triggered a week-long pity party. Why can’t I be fabulously talented and famous too?? Why do the fates hate me so much?? The idea of simply taking pride in the company I keep would have been downright insulting.

Something big must have changed between that earlier stage of my life and now – but whatever it was, it happened so gradually I didn’t notice it. And now I can only guess at what it might have been. Maybe this is just a natural developmental stage – midlife is all about navigating the shoals of one’s limitations, and perhaps, just by surviving so far with my dignity more-or-less intact, I’ve successfully maneuvered past that obstacle.

But I like to think this is because of birding. Through birding, I’ve acquired not only interesting and inspirational friends, but perhaps some of the values of the birds I spend way too much time chasing: real winners are those who find the best food and get through the day in one piece, with family and flock mates nearby.

*******************

This modest and easy dish is a tribute to several cooks who are way smarter than me. Fresh corn and tomatoes are in season now, and in looking for fun things to do with them, I found numerous simple, summery, yet slightly surprising recipes from chefs and writers I admire: One of Mark Bittman's recipes from his Minimalist column was a salad of corn and tomatoes flavored with soy sauce for yet more umami punch. In the insanely interesting and creative Momofuku cookbook, bad-boy fusion perfectionist David Chang proposes corn flash-sauteed with bacon and scallions. (Like Bittman, he also adds an Asian touch: miso and his custom ramen broth.) A recent rerun of one of Ming Tsai’s cooking shows featured dishes highlighting both cilantro and bacon, two things I love but never thought to combine. Finally, one of my go-to everyday cookbooks – Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone–– features corn and tomatoes as a rustic Mexican-themed pasta topping.

My tribute to these fine cooks (I no longer stew over why I can’t be them, but I still strive to be more LIKE them) is a quick and summery pasta topping with fresh corn and tomatoes, flavored with bacon, cilantro, and a dash of soy.

SUMMER TRIBUTE PASTA WITH CORN, TOMATOES, AND BACON

Kernels from 2 ears of corn

2 medium tomatoes, cut into 1/3-inch dice

3 strips of bacon, cut into 1/2-inch dice

3 scallions, cut into fine rounds

½ cup chopped cilantro

2 teaspoons soy sauce

1 finely chopped jalapeno or other hot pepper (optional)

1/2 pound spaghetti

Salt and pepper to taste

1. Saute the bacon in a wide skillet until crisp. Remove and drain the bacon, remove the skillet from heat, and reserve it and the bacon fat left behind.

2. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of water to a boil and begin cooking the spaghetti.

3. Return the saute pan with the bacon grease to the stove and bring it to high heat. Add the corn and cook, stirring constantly, until it is lightly seared.

4. Add the soy sauce, tomatoes, scallions, and hot pepper (if using) and cook, stirring, for about a minute, until the scallions have wilted slightly and the tomatoes start to look cooked on the outside (They should still be firm enough to hold their shape).

5. When the pasta is done, drain it and toss with the corn and tomato mixture. Toss in the cilantro and cooked bacon and serve immediately.

Rhodes to Nowhere: A Mortifying Adventure (and a Recipe)

2011-05-22T14:58:00.000-07:00

I could have been a contender.

I was SUPPOSED to be a contender. I breezed effortlessly through grade school and high school, earning A’s on almost everything I touched. I boasted an impressive array of extracurricular activities, from multiple honors societies to volunteering at a local hospital to playing electric bass in my high school’s jazz band.

Just as I was supposed to, I got admitted to Stanford (there are advantages to being both a baby-bust kid and a legacy). There, the kindly teachers at my small Catholic high school warned, my golden years as a big fish in a small pond would end. Colleges, they warned, can be cruel and merciless places. You’ll be an anonymous face in a lecture hall of hundreds, graded on a curve against kids just as smart as you – and yes, there are a lot of them out there. No one will be there to pick you up when you fall. Or to warn you against making potentially dangerous mistakes. Danger! Danger!

At Stanford, they were honest enough not to deny this.

“Almost all of you came in here with straight A’s,” the admissions director (a hero to us incoming freshmen) told us during an obligatory orientation assembly, “But almost none of you will leave here that way.”

The class work at Stanford was – just as promised – more difficult and demanding by multitudes than it was in high school. I read more in a typical week than I did in a whole semester back home. Then the day came when I was to get back the first major graded assignment of my college career: a research paper in my Western Cultures class.

“I know most of you are used to getting A’s from high school,” the fatherly British professor leading my discussion section said, “But you’re not in high school anymore. This is Stanford, and you are being held to a higher standard. Do not take my grade to you as a personal affront. Read my comments and learn from them – that’s what you’re here for.”

I took my paper, trying to control the tremble of my hands as I flipped through it, skimming past the underlined passages and handwritten comments in the margins. Finally, I got to the last page, and there it was at the bottom: A -minus.

YESS! I STILL RULE!!

I got through my first quarter at Stanford with two A’s and one A-minus (in Western Cultures). Most of my subsequent quarters were an honorable mix of A’s, A-minuses, and the occasional B+. Meanwhile, I threw myself into extracurriculars – at some point or another, I ended up editing or writing for most of the major student publication on campus. I was an English major and I qualified for the department’s senior honors program. My CV was looking pretty darn good, if I did say so myself.

I wasn’t the only one who thought so. At Stanford, almost all the undergraduate dorms had a live-in faculty member – the resident fellow –who was supposed to help organize the dorm’s cultural and social events and be a positive role model for us. He or she was also supposed to act as an informal academic advisor. The resident fellow in my dorm thought I was just the bees’ knees.

“You should consider this for next year,” he said, handing me a folded flyer one day during my junior year. “With your grades and extracurriculars, you should be a very strong candidate.”

I unfolded the flyer: announcements for that year’s Rhodes and Marshall Scholarship competition.

Wow. I was still pretty clueless then, but even I knew what these were. Dad had told me about the Rhodes Scholarship, way back in grade school: how the foundation chose two exceptional college students from each state every year, and gave each a two-year scholarship to Oxford, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious universities. Rhodes Scholars became presidents, senators, and captains of industry. Maybe, Dad said smiling, you will get one of those scholarships someday, if you work hard enough.

That someday was now on the horizon.

When the same flyer (with the dates changed) re-appeared the following year, I made note of it. At the obligatory orientation meeting for potential applicants –there weren’t as many as I had expected – we were told that the process involved several interviews. The first of these was the only one we’d all do: it was with the campus-internal Rhodes selection committee, which would recommend candidates to be sent on to the next round of competition.

Okay, this was do-able. The written application would be a boatload of work but well within my capacities. It involved several essays, and I was good at essays. And most of the other applicants – at least the ones I recognized – didn’t seem any more impressive than I was, at least from what I knew of them.

The day of my interview arrived. Suddenly, I was nervous to the point of catatonia. What were they going to ask? What if I didn’t know the answer? This was my moment of reckoning, and I was so tense and numb I could barely breathe, let alone speak insightfully about my grand plans for Oxford and the rest of my life.

I found myself in a narrow meeting room dominated by a heavy wooden conference table. Around the table were about half a dozen grey-haired figures, each of whom had a copy of my application and a yellow legal pad in front of him. A large glass pitcher of ice water was about to drip beads of sweat onto the table, and so was I.

“Miss Lee, welcome!” one of the grey-haired figures said, standing. He introduced himself as the chair of the committee. “Please let me introduce you to the other members. We’re looking forward chatting with you about your application.”

As he introduced each member – I no longer remember their names, if I even registered them in the first place – the member extended his hand and I reached out to give it an appropriately firm-but-not-too-firm handshake.

“...And this is Professor Smith,” the chair continued.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, reaching across the table towards his outreached hand--

I never reached it. Instead, something hard bumped my elbow and crashed against the table. Professor Smith leapt to his feet, water and crushed ice rolling off his crotch. The water pitcher was on its side.

My life was over.

Trauma victims often report having no memory of the very worse parts of their traumatic experiences. For that, a friend of mine told me, she is grateful: it's as if her subconscious deliberately deleted those terrifying and degrading images so she'd never have to relive them again.

That's probably why I can't remember how the rest of my interview went. But I do remember the sinking realization that my star had fallen – hard. With one stupid strike of my elbow, I had gone from Promising Young Thing to washed-up has-been.

Back at the dorm, I locked myself in my room and dialed the one person who could make this all better—my buddy Jeff. Jeff was one of the campus’ golden boys (I was surprised that he wasn’t in the running for a Rhodes himself), a perpetual optimist, and a strong brotherly shoulder to cry on. He answered on the first ring.

“Hey! How was the big interview?”

“Awful! I was being introduced to the selection committee, I tried to shake hands with one of them and guess what? I knocked a pitcher of water over into his lap!”

I heard him gasp. “Oh...my...god....”

I waited. He took a loud breath. There was a pregnant – and I assumed, sympathetic – pause on his end of the line.

“...THAT’S SOOO FUNNY!” I heard Jeff’s footsteps pounding away from the phone, then his voice somewhere off in the distance. “HEY GUYS! CHECK THIS OUT, IT’S HILARIOUS! Felicia had her Rhodes interview just now and guess what...?”

He was still laughing when he picked up the receiver again. “Seriously, they HAVE to send you on to the next round now! You know that, don’t you?”

They didn’t. And yet I’m still alive, many, many years later.

Like every other stressful, difficult thing that happened to me at Stanford, this taught me a lesson, even though I didn’t realize it at the time: Laugh and the world laughs with you. But it still won’t give you that free ride to Oxford.

************

In honor of my Oxford idyll that never was, I present an atypically luscious English dessert: banoffee pie, a toothsome combination of caramel, bananas, and coffee-flavored whipped cream. It was invented by chef Ian Dowding in the 1970s.

Appropriately enough, it was invented in an attempt to replicate a recipe for a toffee-coffee pie that almost always failed. Dowding discovered that the temperamental toffee recipe in the original pie could be replaced, and improved upon, with dulce de leche (though he doesn’t call it that) – caramelized sweetened condensed milk. He added bananas to the mix, and his new invention soon spread all over England. The pie is a flavorful and comforting reminder of the redemptive potential of embarrassing mistakes.

Banoffee pie, like a good melody, is subject to riffing and variation, and numerous versions exist. Some use pastry crust (as does Dowding’s original recipe) while others use crumb crusts. Pace Dowding, I think the relentless mush and creaminess of bananas, caramel, and whipped cream cry out for a dramatic textural contrast, so I’ve used a nubby crumb crust made with whole-wheat digestive biscuits (borrowing an idea from a recipe in Saveur) combined with finely chopped hazelnuts for extra crunch and flavor. Sadly, most banoffee pie variations use plain sweetened whipped cream rather than Dowding’s coffee whipped cream. To me, the coffee flavoring is non-negotiable: it really makes the pie special.

Besides the nuts in the crust, my other twist on the dish involves a trick I learned in cooking school: Whipped cream, if left to sit for more than a few hours, tends to separate and lose its volume and shape. Dissolving a little unflavored gelatin in cream before whipping it helps it keep its texture and shape for several days, so I’ve added a bit of it to the pie topping. The gelatin does not affect the flavor of the cream or make it even remotely bouncy, but makes the pie slice more cleanly. I deliberately kept the sugar level down in the coffee-flavored cream because the caramel and bananas provide sweetness enough.

BANOFFEE PIE

For the crust:

1 7-ounce package digestive biscuits

1 stick (4 ounces) unsalted butter, melted

1 cup whole, roasted hazelnuts

For the dulce de leche:

1 ½ cans (21 ounces total) sweetened condensed milk

For the coffee whipped cream:

1 ½ cups whipping cream

1 1/2 teaspoons instant coffee

2 teaspoons sugar

½ envelope unflavored gelatin powder

2-3 ripe bananas, sliced

finely powdered instant coffee for garnish

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Grind the digestive biscuits into fine crumbs in a food processor, then place them in a medium mixing bowl.

3. Put the hazelnuts in the food processor and pulse them until they are finely chopped but not powdery. Add them to the bowl with the crumbs, along with the melted butter.

4. Combine the melted butter thoroughly with the crumbs and butter, then press the mixture firmly along the sides and bottom of a 9-inch pie pan. Press firmly with your hands or the back of a spoon so the mixture will cohere and form a layer of even thickness.

5. Bake the crust for about 15 minutes, or until nicely browned and fragrant. Remove the crust from the oven and set it aside to cool.

6. Meanwhile, make the dulce de leche: cook the sweetened condensed milk in the top of a double boiler over simmering water, stirring occasionally, until the milk has caramelized and turned golden. This will take about an hour and a half.

7. While the dulce de leche cools, make the whipped cream: Heat ½ cup of the cream, along with the instant coffee and sugar, just until it feels hot to the touch. Stir to dissolve the coffee completely.

8. Remove the cream from the heat and sprinkle the gelatin evenly over the surface of the cream. When the gelatin has softened, stir it into the cream until it is fully dissolved. Set the cream aside to cool to room temperature.

9. When the coffee-flavored cream has cooled, add it and the remaining cup of cream to a mixer fitted with a balloon whip. Whip the cream at high speed until stiff peaks form.

10. Spread the dulce de leche evenly over the bottom of the baked and cooled pie crust. Top it with an layer of banana slices (they should cover the dulce de leche completely). Then top the bananas with the coffee-flavored whipped cream – use a piping bag and star tip to apply it in decorative rosettes, if desired.

10. Chill the pie for at least an hour before serving. Garnish with the ground instant coffee just before serving.

Eat Like a Bird!

2011-05-01T14:57:00.000-07:00

This Northern Parula flew 1,000 miles or more across the Gulf of Mexico – without stopping, eating, or sleeping – before landing in Florida during spring migration. This grueling flight took the tiny bird-- just over 3 1/2 inches long -- somewhere between 18 and 25 hours.

Before setting off on this flight, he spent some serious time fueling up. In the days leading up to his trip, he piled on the calories, ballooning from a lithe 1 ounce or less to a staggeringly obese 2 ounces – virtually doubling in weight. Wired graphically described this phenomenon of avian gluttony as “the equivalent of having a hamburger for lunch on Monday, and 100 hamburgers for lunch on Friday.”

When Mammy urged Scarlett O’Hara to eat like a bird, this probably wasn’t what she had in mind.

Those of us who enjoy watching birds also pick up strange eating habits during migration. These usually involve consuming large quantities of coffee before sunrise, feeding from ziplock bags filled with trail mix, and toting energy bars bent and flattened from hours in our back packets. Like our avian quarry, birders focus on high-protein, high-energy natural food sources when on the road. Birder snacks of choice usually involve nuts, seeds, whole grains, and/or fruit, often scented with hints of bug spray, sunscreen, and car exhaust. On the other hand, migrating songbirds – even some that typically eat seed – favor the high-calorie goodness of insects and their larvae, food sources most birders tend to avoid.

Still, our eating habits can be frighteningly similar. When shopping for bird seed for my backyard feeders recently, I saw a shiny little bowl filled with freshly shelled Brazil nuts, peanuts, sunflower seeds and unusually fat raisins. I was about to help myself to few bites when I realized it was sample of one of the store’s specialty birdseed mixes.

And it looked better by magnitudes than most of the cheap-ass trail mix I’ve lugged around on birding trips. The woodpeckers around here eat better than I do.

My husband and I joke that someday, we’ll have to buy a bag of that super-fancy fruit-and-nut mix, pour some into a pretty bowl, and feed it to our birder buddies. My prediction is that they’ll think it looks familiar, but assume it’s that pricey brand of organic snack mix they never quite felt like splurging on.

And since it’s near the end of another spring migration season and my Audubon chapter is holding its annual end-of-the-birding-year potluck soon, the occasion for our little experiment is now upon us! MWAA HA HA!

Seriously...I’m not going to do it. But I will do something very much like it. As a tribute to those hard-working birds and my friends who love them, I devised a munchable treat with the same base ingredients as that fancy bird mix – peanuts, raisins, sunflower seeds, and bigger, blingier nuts of some kind. And millet, because almost all birdseed mixes contain copious amounts of it. But being a good citizen, I resisted the urge to take these from a 25-pound bag with NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION printed on it.

Because just plain old nuts and raisins mixed together seem kind of abstemious, particularly for a festive occasion, I spiced them them up and converted them into a sweet-salty-tangy-spicy cocktail nibble. I’ve always been addicted to Indian snack mixes – exhuberently spicy blends of fried grains, nuts, dried fruit, and spices – and I’ve modeled the seasoning in my mix after these. The recipe on which I base my spice mix comes from Madhur Jaffrey's World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking.

.

The optional cayenne chile in my souped-up birdseed mix not only makes me happy (since I love hot stuff) but evokes two rituals familiar to birders. Serious backyard birders know that an effective technique for keeping squirrels off suet and other bird feeder food is to spike it with hot pepper, since squirrels can’t tolerate the taste of it. Birds, on the other hand, can’t taste chiles at all. This evolutionary adaptation both allows the birds an additional food source and enables them to propagate chile plants, whose seeds pass undamaged through their digestive systems: a win-win for both the eater and the eaten.

Spicy, salty, snacky food, of course, also goes beautifully with beer. And for some sociological reason I’m still trying to figure out, serious birders are very often passionate hopheads as well. On the last fall migration count I did, two of the guys on my team brought a nice assortment of microbrews to go with their sack lunches. One of my favorite birding blogs occasionally features knowledgeably written reviews of beers that happen to have birds on their labels. The birds, I suspect, are just a happy excuse to enjoy another beer.

And so is my “birdseed.” Enjoy!

****************

Notes: Jaffrey’s recipe – which uses a different assortment of grains and nuts than I chose to use – calls for raw nuts and grains, all to be separately deep-fried and carefully drained. She assures readers the end result will not be greasy and she’s probably right (she usually is where Indian cooking is concerned). But if you don’t need to double in weight for an upcoming trip or don't want to mess up your kitchen, oven-roasting the nuts or using already-roasted ones will work just fine, at least for the choice of nuts and grains I have used.

Spiced Birder Seed

3 whole cloves

a 3/4-inch piece from a cinnamon stick

½ teaspoon black peppercorns

neutrally flavored oil (such as canola) as needed for frying

2/3 cup roasted, unsalted peanuts (or raw peanuts, deep-fried and drained)

2/3 cup roasted, unsalted cashews (or raw cashews, deep-fried and drained)

1/3 cup shelled, roasted, unsalted sunflower seeds (or raw seeds, deep-fried and drained)

1/3 cup shelled, roasted, unsalted pumpkin seeds (or raw seeds, deep-fried and drained)

4 tablespoons raisins, briefly deep-fried until puffy and drained.

3 cups puffed (NOT raw) millet

2 tablespoons canola or other neutrally flavored oil

½ tablespoon whole black mustard seeds

3 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds

¼ teaspoon ground turmeric

1 teaspoon or more ground cayenne, or to taste (optional)

1 1/4 teaspoons salt

2 1/2 teaspoons sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons ground amchoor

1. Grind the cloves, cinnamon stick, and peppercorns together in a mortar and pestle until powdery; set aside.

2. Combine the nuts, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, millet, and raisins in a large bowl; set aside.

3. Heat a small saucepan over medium heat and add the 2 tablespoons oil. When hot, add the mustard seeds.

4. When the mustard seeds have stopped sizzling and popping, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the sesame seeds, turmeric, and cayenne.

5. Pour the fried seeds, spices and oil over the millet, nut, and raisin mixture. Add the remaining ingredients and stir until the seasonings are evenly distributed.

6. Cool the mixture, then store it in an airtight container.

Bake It Forward: A Few of My Favorite Things

2011-04-25T14:52:00.000-07:00

Last fall, Lucy Mercer initiated a project to bring Open Salon food writers – and the products of our kitchens – together in meatspace. As part of Imperial Sugar Company’s Bake It Forward program, we’d each have a turn to receive a box of home-baked treats from the kitchen of another Open Salon writer, who would then blog about the goodies she made. (“She” is the right pronoun here; unfortunately, no boys have chosen to play with us yet.) Next it would be the recipient’s turn to fill the box, send it to another writer, and blog about it. Would I be interested in joining in? Lucy asked.

At the time, Thanksgiving and Christmas were looming and I was overwhelmed with work-related matters, so I declined. Then the first few Bake It Forward posts appeared and I felt like a shmuck. (Linda’s cookies look amazing! And I could be eating them right now, if I weren’t such a lazy-ass slacker!)

But a few months later, I had my shot at redemption. Gabby Abby sent me an e-mail: would I be interested in taking her sour-cream pound cake and stewardship of that box? This time, I couldn’t say no.

Inside that box was not only some extraordinary pound cake, but a delightfully unexpected treat: a packet with about six envelopes inside, each containing a handwritten card from one of the bakers to the recipient of her treats. I was the last link in the chain:

I could never relate to people who consider online communities their lifelines and fellow bloggers or forum members their only friends. Don’t they realize most online personas are the same dude posting under multiple pseudonyms and most online groups, even the most potentially useful, are peopled with spammers and frauds? But opening and reading all these cards made me realize that there are real, warm, and decent people behind those avatars – people I’d love to meet in person, should the occasion arise.

If they are all the same dude posting under multiple pseudonyms, he makes a mean pound cake. And has a real talent for feminine penmanship.

Scarfing down Abby’s pound cake was easy. Now I had two things to figure out: who should get the box next and what to put in it.

The first question had an easy answer: the box would go to Christine Geery, who blogs prolifically about food and everything else and would no doubt enjoy thinking of a fun way to refill that box. But first, I had to think of something to send Christine.

I have no shortage of recipes for baked treats. But I’m always a bit self-conscious about cooking for people I don’t know well. I’m aware that I cook with roughly three times as many chiles and twice as much garlic as most normal people—when I give out recipes, I always dial down the quantities of these for decency’s sake. I love things that a lot of people hate, like fish sauce and coconut. And now I was baking for someone I’ve never met in real life. It’s always easier to please unfamiliar palates with sweets than savories, but still.

Then there was the issue of portability. Whatever I made had to be something that could endure whatever abuse the postal service dished out and something that could travel halfway across the country though goodness-knows what kind of temperature fluctuations and come out unscathed. So, alas, nothing with chocolate glaze or cream filling or anything that could melt or get soggy.

I decided on two of my favorite things. The first is my favorite scone recipe, Hollyce’s Oatmeal Scones from the Stars Desserts cookbook. (Stars being a now-defunct restaurant in San Francisco.) The name of the recipe really doesn’t do it justice. Yes, there are oats in there—lots of them, contributing a wonderful toasty, nutty flavor. But there is also a serious hit of orange zest, lots of butter, and chewiness and sweetness from raisins. (The recipe officially calls for currants, which would be smaller and prettier by far, but I couldn’t find any in my local supermarket.) The scones travel and freeze well, and are among the few scones I’ve had that taste good cold as well as warm.

The second recipe is a sentimental favorite of mine: a lemon-square recipe from a 1970s charity cookbook. I’ve re-christened the recipe Led Zeppelin Lemon Squares for reasons soon to be made clear, and I’ve been making them since I was about ten. This recipe has never let me down. It has gotten me invited to sleepovers (so I could teach my friends how to make it), helped me kiss up to my teachers in high school, kept several boyfriends (temporarily) loyal, and even placated the dysfunctional French family for whom I worked as an au pair.

And in one of the most awkward stages of my life, these lemon squares made me feel powerful. Back in high school, I was nerdy and shy and spent almost all my Friday and Saturday nights at home. I couldn’t be the party animal I wanted to be, but I could stay up dangerously late, listening to KMET (then Los Angeles’ premier heavy-metal station) while baking up batches of cookies, getting a serious sugar buzz, and wondering how long it took Jimmy Page to learn to play like that. I may have been a social wipeout, but even the popular kids loved my cookies. No matter what, I knew I could rock that cookie jar. On most Saturday nights, that was good enough for me.

LED ZEPPELIN LEMON SQUARES

(adapted from The Three Rivers Cookbook)

For the base:

1 cup all-purpose flour

¼ cup powdered sugar

½ cup (1 stick) butter

For the top layer:

2 eggs

1 cup granulated sugar

2 tablespoons freshly-squeezed lemon juice

finely grated zest of 1 lemon

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon baking powder.

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Combine the base ingredients; they will form a crumbly dough. Press the dough evenly over the bottom of an 8-inch square baking pan.

3. Bake the base for about 15 minutes, until it starts to brown at the edges.

4. While the base is baking, thoroughly combine the remaining ingredients in a mixing bowl. If you leave the mixture alone, the flour and baking powder will separate and form a layer on top of the lemon goop. Do not be concerned; this is part of the plan.

5. When the base is done, remove it from the oven and allow it to cool slightly. Then pour the remaining ingredients over the base and return the pan to the oven.

6. Bake for about 25 minutes, or until the surface of the lemon squares is evenly golden brown. (The flour and baking powder will have risen to form a thin, flaky crust over a creamy lemon filling.)

7. Allow the confection to cool completely before you cut it into 16 squares. Top with sifted powdered sugar if desired.

HOLLYCE’S OATMEAL SCONES

(adapted from Stars Desserts, by Emily Luchetti)

3 cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

½ cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar

11/4 teaspoons salt

11/4 teaspoons baking soda

21/4 teaspoons baking powder

10 ounces (2 ½ sticks) cold, unsalted butter

2 cups rolled oats

1 cup currants or raisins

2 tablespoons finely chopped orange zest

¾ cup buttermilk

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Combine the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and butter in the bowl of an electric mixer. Using the paddle attachment, mix at low speed until the butter is the size of small peas.

3. Add the oats, currants or raisins, and orange zest. Continue to mix, slowly pouring in the buttermilk, just until the dough comes together. It may be a bit sticky.

4. Put the dough on a lightly floured board and roll it out into a ¾ -inch-thick circle. Cut the dough into 10 circles, each 3½ inches in diameter. (If you have extra dough fragments after cutting the circles, gently press them together, roll to ¾-inch thickness, and try to cut out extra scones if you can.)

5. Put the scones on a parchment-lined baking sheet and bake for about 20 minutes, or until golden brown.

You Really Shouldn't Be Eating This

2011-04-03T14:45:00.000-07:00

In my family, cholesterol is the source of all the world’s trouble. Boatloads of the fatty stuff course through our collective veins with varying speeds of efficiency. My parents regularly interrogate my sisters and me about our cholesterol levels and warn of the horrors that will befall us if we don’t keep them under control. Everything from acne to anxiety attacks has been attributed by my parents, at some point or another, to dietary fat. I’m sure they’ve considered bacon as a possible root cause of terrorism and the ascendancy of the Tea Party.

None of this, however, stops us from sitting around the table at lunch talking about what we’re going to eat for dinner. My brothers-in-law make mean homemade sausage and barbeque marinades, and both my parents boast professional cooks among their parents or grandparents.

Cholesterol in the Lee clan has always been – as Homer Simpson famously said of alcohol – the cause of, and the solution to, all of life’s problems.

“You really shouldn’t eat so much fat,” Mom lectured one morning when I was visiting over Christmas. “That’s why your blood pressure so high.”

She was telling me this as I was pouring myself a bowl of granola and she was preparing breakfast for Dad: fried eggs and Spam.

We all know, of course, that food doesn’t have to be fattening to be wonderful. We love the custardy, string-free mangos that sometime pop up, for a mere 50 cents apiece, in Chinatown. We always look forward to the peppery salads made with the greens Mom grows in big pots on the back patio.

Still, some of the things nearest and dearest to our hearts and stomachs are not to be spoken of in the presence of respectable people – and the element of danger only increases their appeal. You’ll have to pry our pork belly sliders from our cold, dead (no doubt from congestive heart failure) hands.

Even Mom, the most vocal worrywart in the family, is not immune to the allure of fatty treats. Every so often over the years, she’d wax rhapsodic about the baroque, egg-laden Portuguese sweets she grew up with in Macau, which was at that time a Portuguese protectorate. I was intrigued by her descriptions of them and by the fact that none of these treats seemed to have a name, at least not that she could remember. One of these, she said, consisted of “tiny strands of egg yolk cooked in sugar, like a little birds’ nest”; another was “a ball of egg yolk that has crunchy sugar on the outside but is creamy when you bite into it”). How could these mysterious wonders not have names?

Later, my intrigue grew with the realization that I’d never seen anything resembling those confections anywhere – and I’ve been fortunate enough to live in places where one can track down just about any ethnic cuisine imaginable. Another reason for my fascination with those treats is that they are made almost entirely of egg yolks. Eggs in themselves, Mom liked to warn, should be eaten only in moderation. But the mystery sweets of her youth not only contained eggs, but only the bad, dangerous, cholesterol-bearing part of the egg, in lethal concentrations. And yet Mom liked to reminisce about those eggy sweets, and would no doubt eat one in a heartbeat if we somehow managed to conjure them up.

Then, last week she called me, excited by a recent discovery. While browsing an online store featuring Spanish imports, she came across something that looked strikingly familiar – tiny, round convent sweets made of egg yolks, an artisanal specialty made for hundreds of years by an order of Spanish nuns in the walled medieval town of Avila. The description said they were crunchy with sugar on the outside with insides that dissolved on the tongue “without any pressure.”

Bingo. Or as close to “bingo” as we could hope to get: Spain and Portugal are neighboring countries with many shared food traditions, including an obsession with cramming as many egg yolks as possible into the dessert course. (There is a practical historical reason for this: wine-makers in both countries required large quantities of egg whites to clarify wine, and the nuns used egg whites to starch their habits – hence, a steady supply of egg yolks was ready and waiting to be made into convent sweets.) The resulting cholesterol bombs became so beloved they spread around the world with the Spanish and Portuguese diaspora, evolving as they traveled. Local variants of Iberian egg sweets can be found in locales as far flung as the Philippines, Brazil – and Macau.

And Mom swore those pricey Spanish sweets from that online catalogue looked and sounded exactly like the ones she remembered from Macau. But no way was she going to pay to have those things airlifted in an insulated box from Spain to Los Angeles.

But, she said hopefully, there were recipes for it online, and they sounded pretty simple. Hmm.

I had myself a project. Fate nudged me along in the form of a promotional coupon from Target for a free carton of a dozen eggs. I normally keep only Egg Beaters in the house in deference to my arteries, but hey, the eggs were free! This was almost as good as getting a bucket of free, fresh yolks from the local wine-maker. Now I really had no excuse not to go through with this.

The recipes I found for this confection, officially called yemas de Santa Teresa (literally “Saint Teresa’s egg yolks,” a.k.a. “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”) all take the same basic form: make a sugar syrup, mix it with an appalling number of egg yolks, cool the resulting mixture, form it into little balls, then roll the balls in sugar. Some recipes boast only three ingredients: egg yolks, sugar, and water. Others enhance the syrup with lemon zest and/or cinnamon. I like the idea of a hit of spice and citrus to offset all that sweetness and richness; it adds to the mysterious medieval vibe of the confections and makes them feel both more and less pointlessly decadent.

I’ve always hated the term “sinful” when applied to food. It seems to reflect the worst aspects of Puritanism (free will and the Puritan work ethic I can get behind; the idea that life must be miserable to be virtuous, not so much). Besides, how could these little treats be sinful? They were invented by NUNS. And sold by nuns to support their work. Ergo, those who eat them are doing God’s work.

Given these truths, how could they possibly be bad for you?

**********

The following recipe is a combination of several nearly identical recipes I found online from different sources. Almost all of the credible-looking recipes came from web sites based in Spain, which made me glad to have functional Spanish reading skills and a digital scale that allows metric measurements. I’ve converted the measurements to standard American measures.

YEMAS DE SANTA TERESA

8 egg yolks

½ cup sugar

1/3 cup plus 2 teaspoons water

½ stick cinnamon

zest of 2/3 lemon

Additional sugar for coating

1. Beat the egg yolks, then pass them through a fine-meshed strainer into a heatproof bowl.

2. Combine the remaining ingredients in a small, heavy saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat and cook until the syrup reaches the soft-ball stage (There are two easy ways to tell: If you use a candy thermometer, this stage is between 235 and 240 degrees F. The low-tech way to test for readiness is to drop a small amount of the syrup into a bowl of ice water. If the syrup is ready, it will form a soft little ball that you can easily pick up and press flat between your fingers; if it's not ready yet, it will dissolve in the water).

3. Remove the cinnamon stick and lemon zest from the syrup, then gradually whisk the syrup into the egg yolks.

4. Return the syrup and egg mixture to the saucepan. Cook over medium heat, whisking constantly, until the mixture thickens and starts to pull away from the sides of the pan.

5. Put the mixture in a clean container and refrigerate until firm.

6. Roll the cooled mixture into walnut-sized balls and roll the balls in sugar.

7. If you want to be fancy, put the balls in frilly little paper cups for serving.

Where Are You From? It's Complicated (But the Food Is Great)

2011-03-20T14:42:00.000-07:00

Every Asian-American has to deal with The Question:

“So...where are you from?”

It wasn’t until I was in high school that I finally realized why everyone was so baffled by my perfectly truthful one-word answer (“Pittsburgh!”) I’ve grown to dread the time-sucking ritual of The Question. It’s like answering “so, how are you?” when you’re in a really rotten mood: you can either tell people what they expect to hear and waste a few seconds or tell the truth and drive people insane while wasting epic amounts of time.

Sometimes, the temptation towards the latter is too great to avoid.

“No, where are you REALLY from?”

“Well, I was REALLY born in a community called Squirrel Hill. But I think it’s technically still part of Pittsburgh.”

This helpful clarification invariably leads to the question of where my parents are from. And this sucks me into yet another lengthy digression:

“Your mom is from WHERE?”

“Macau.”

“Where’s THAT?”

I could just say Mom is from Hong Kong – it’s not as if anyone actually cares. But part of me believes that even truly tedious people deserve to know about Macau – a former Portuguese territory on the south coast of China, just west of Hong Kong – for it’s a genuinely wondrous place. Wondrous enough to make me want to stand around explaining my ancestry to total strangers.

How could any place possibly be this awesome? First, there's the architecture -- picture a medieval Mediterranean seaside village, complete with the ruins of its own seventeenth-century cathedral, plunked down only an hour from Hong Kong. Then there's the area's history, as intriguing to explore as its architecture. But most importantly, there's gambling, sex, drugs, and sixteen-century Asian fusion cuisine. What's not to love?

A few anecdotes from my family history will illustrate some of these defining cultural features in action.

1. Gambling! On my first visit to Macau – and Mom’s first visit home in years – we made the obligatory stop at Casino Lisboa, the best-known, and at the time, biggest and grandest of Macau’s apparently not-so-famous casinos. (Growing up, I thought EVERYONE knew that Macau was the Monte Carlo of the Far East, the place favored by high rollers from Hong Kong or Tokyo looking for a weekend of decadent debauchery.)

My Aunt Susie led my barely college-age sisters and me across the floor, past the baccarat tables, roulette wheels, and trilingual (Chinese/Portuguese/English) NO PERSONS UNDER 21 ALLOWED signs to the slots. Then she handed us each a Hong Kong dollar coin.

Then we noticed a stern-faced security guard closing in on my baby sister Sondra, who was then about eighteen but looked closer to fifteen.

“Now we’re in trouble,” one of my other sisters muttered.

Within seconds, the guard was at Sondra’s side. He said something in Cantonese, plucked the coin from her hand -- then stuck it into the slot machine in front of her and motioned for her to pull the handle. Then he handed her another coin.

What happens in Macau, stays in Macau.

2. Sex! One of my proudest moments in elementary school was the day my classmates and I got to present our family trees, which we'd spent the previous week researching and designing. Everyone else’s trees showed polite, symmetric pairings of circles and triangles: Grandpa met Grandma in Belarus, they immigrated to New York. Boring.

My tree – at least on Mom’s side of the family – was a proud tangle of depravity. There was Grandpa and Grandma, and underneath them, my mom, two aunts and one uncle. But directly next to Grandma were Grandpa’s three other wives/concubines (their exact legal status was never clear to me) and underneath them, their own children – Mom’s half-siblings. Grandpa supported each of my “grandmas” in a separate house and circulated among them regularly. One of my aunts later told me that he tended to drop by their place during the mid-afternoon. He spent most of their visits, she said, sequestered with Grandma in her bedroom. Ahem.

3. Drugs! I never met my maternal grandfather – he never traveled to the U.S. as far as I know, and I never had the chance to visit Macau until years after he died. But even when he was alive, he was a shadowy figure to me. I knew he was well off - he had to be to maintain four separate households simultaneously, and Mom sometimes reminisced dreamily about her childhood in a three-story house with marble bathrooms and several servants.

But when I was growing up, no one would give me a straight answer about exactly what he did for a living. Sometimes they said he was in business. What kind of business? Medicine. Was he a doctor, like Dad? Or a pharmacist, like all my older cousins? No, it was different kind of medicine. They don’t make it anymore.

Well, it turns out they do. I found out much, much later that he dealt in opium. But saying Grandpa dealt in opium is a bit like saying Bill Gates works in software. Grandpa held Macau’s sole opium franchise—essentially, he was a one-man cartel. Until the mid-1940s, this was fully legal in Macau, not to mention obscenely profitable. And like most successful drug kingpins, Grandpa never touched the stuff himself.

And to think I used to envy “normal” kids with cuddly grandfathers who’d sit in rocking chairs and whittle stuff for them out of willow twigs.

4. Sixteenth-century Asian fusion cuisine! I’ve saved the best of Macau’s many decadent sensual delights for last: the food. God, the food.

The wonders of Macanese cooking are a reflection of Macau’s long and lively colonial history. Unlike the British in neighboring Hong Kong, who kept a strict social distance from their Chinese subjects, the Portuguese in Macau were happy to embrace the locals – literally. Intermarriage was common, as was the mixing of languages and cultures. During my childhood, I was once surprised by a blonde, green-eyed woman running towards us in Chinatown, calling joyfully to Mom in fluent Cantonese. It was an old friend from Macau. When we visited Macau, we met another family friend, a Portuguese-Chinese woman everyone knew as “21”: her Portuguese father had adopted the local habit of taking multiple wives, and she was his twenty-first child.

The food is yet another result of this raucous mix. Our meals in Macau reflected the best of East and West, joyfully combined: meals came with rice AND crusty bread, chopsticks AND forks, tea AND Portuguese vinho verde – all in copious quantities. The cooking showed a mix of European techniques – lots of grilled seafood, braises, and casseroles – and Chinese flavors, augmented by African and Indian influences, a reflection of Macau’s former prominence as a stopping point on eastern shipping routes. Bay leaves and soy sauce can appear seamlessly in the same dish. Curried crabs, grilled sardines brushed with olive oil, and African chicken (a blackish spice-rubbed chicken dish not found anywhere in Africa) can all be found on the same table at the same time, if one is lucky enough.

Francis Lam recently noted that there is no one perfect cuisine in the world: Chinese cuisine, for all its wonders, is weak in desserts, for instance. But Macanese cuisine comes pretty close to being the total package: it boasts the vibrancy of eastern and tropical spices combined with European rib-sticking heartiness overlaid with distinctive Chinese flavorings – topped off with local versions of egg- and butter-rich Portuguese-influenced sweets for dessert.

In short, Macanese cooks invented Euro-Asian fusion cuisine almost half a millennium ago.

A quick and easy dish that exemplifies the hearty, homely East-West mix that is Macanese home cooking in minchee – a simple, savory meat-and-potato hash seasoned with soy sauce and spices. Minchee, like so much else in Macau, reflects a cross-cultural mix, which in this instance includes an English influence from nearby Hong Kong: the word minchee is a Cantonese corruption of the English word “mince,” and this version contains a very English ingredient, Worchester sauce. Like much Macanese cuisine, it’s a family dish, designed to satisfy and comfort, rather than to surprise or impress.

After all, if you want to be surprised or impressed in Macau, all you have to do is put down your fork or chopsticks and step outside.

*******

I wish I could say this recipe came to me handwritten on a scrap of parchment in Macau Creole by my great-great-great grandma, but because Mom was raised in a household where hired guns did all the cooking, she never learned any local recipes growing up. The recipe that follows is adapted from Taste of Macau: Portuguese Cuisine on the China Coast by Annabel Jackson, and seems to be close to the one Mom described from her youth.

MINCHEE (Macanese meat and potato hash)

1 pound ground beef

2 small baking potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch cubes (about 2-1/2 cups of cubes)

olive oil for cooking

1 medium onion, finely chopped

1 bay leaf

3 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed

3 tablespoons light soy sauce

I teaspoon sugar

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

salt and pepper to taste

Cooked rice for serving

Fried eggs (optional) for serving -- allow 1 per diner, if using

1. Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add the diced potatoes and cook, stirring occasionally, until the potatoes are golden brown. Remove the potatoes from the skillet and set aside.

2. Add 2 more tablespoon olive oil to the skillet and return the skillet to the stove. When the skillet has reheated, add the the onion and bay leaf and saute until the onion is golden. Remove the onion and bay leaf from the skillet and set aside.

3. Add 1 tablespoon olive oil to the skillet along with the garlic. Saute the garlic, pressing on it to release its aroma. Remove and discard the garlic when it has browned on all sides.

4. Increase the heat to high and add the ground beef to the skillet. Cook, stirring and breaking the meat apart until it crumbles. Continue cooking and stirring for 2-3 minutes.

5. Add the reserved onion and bay leaf to the skillet with the meat. Continue cooking for 2 minutes

6. In a small cup, combine the soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and sugar and pour this mixture into the skillet. Continue cooking and stirring for another 3-5 minutes until the meat is fully cooked and the liquid has mostly evaporated. Taste and season with salt and pepper as desired.

7. Add the potatoes, mix well, and stir just until the potatoes are heated through. Remove from heat when done.

8. If serving with fried eggs, fry the eggs to your liking now; it's almost time to eat.

9. Serve with plenty of rice. Top with the optional fried eggs if desired.

What to Cook When Your Spouse Turns on You

2011-02-27T14:40:00.000-08:00

What do you do when the person you thought you knew better than anyone else suddenly turns into something entirely different? What happens when you discover your most fundamental beliefs about the dearest person in your life turn out to be wrong? And most importantly, what the hell do you feed this person once this happens?

My story began one afternoon about six years ago with a series of increasingly desperate voicemails from my husband. When I finally caught up with him, he told me his internist, who had just seen the results of a routine blood test, had called him at work and ordered him to reduce his cholesterol level radically within a few months or else.

What the doctor said must have been far, far worse than that, because my husband declared that from that day forward, he’d be quitting cholesterol cold turkey. Starting now, we would have no animal fats in the house. Period.

“It’s the only way to get things better quickly," he said."We have to go vegan.”

‘We’ ?? What did he mean, ‘we’?

My husband. A vegan. This coming from a guy who treasured rare filet mignons and hunks of Gorgonzola above all other foodstuffs. A guy who thought buttering hot dog buns was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. A man who believed that no foodstuff couldn’t be improved by a melted cheese or a fried egg topping (or if sweet, a scoop of vanilla ice cream). You know those soap-opera turning points when a woman comes home to find her husband wearing her underwear and lipstick? It was kind of like that.

But I soon discovered that keeping vegan at home wasn’t as hard as I thought. This was in large part because I got to cheat with impunity: at the time, I was working as a pastry cook in a fancy beach resort, and the pastry chefs generously allowed us peons to snack on pretty much anything we wanted in the kitchen. So by time I got home every night, my hair smelled of chocolate and butter and I was thoroughly bloated on brownies, chocolate-chip cookies, and those endless rows of mini lemon tarts that I squirted with meringue and browned with a welding torch. And when I was home, I was happy and relieved to cook things that didn’t require separating dozens of eggs or whipping up gallons of cream. I enjoy veggies and beans in any case, so our vegan meals at home felt tonic and refreshing.

There were a few things that were truly agonizing to give up, though. The biggest one was cheese. My hubby and I LOVE cheese. Soy cheeses sort-of simulate the plastickly meltiness of cheap processed stuff, and brewers’ yeast is a wholesome near-doppelganger for that orange powder in boxed mac and cheese, but nothing in the vegetable world can approximate the nutty, funky, winy notes of a good Brie or Manchego. Or so I thought.

On one of my days off from the hotel, I was eating lunch at a Vietnamese vegetarian restaurant not far from home. As to be expected in a Vietmanese eatery, my table held a tantalizing assortment of condiments in small glass jars and bottles: dried chile flakes, bottled chile sauce, pickled chile slices, some vegan approximation of fish sauce, and a jar of soft beige cubes with a familiar smell: I recognized it as fermented bean curd, also used in Chinese cooking.

I’d never seen this used in Vietnamese cookery before. Nor had I seen it used as a table condiment. My curiosity was piqued and I smeared a bit of it on an egg roll. (I had no idea if it was intended to be used this way.) Yes, it was the same stuff Mom used to mix into stir-fried greens. But something else about it, in this context, tasted strikingly familiar—but not in a way I expected.

Honest to God, it tasted like cheese. Real cheese. It was winy, nutty, milky, and funky like a really good Gruyere. It had a pungent sharpness reminiscent of blue cheese. The texture was different from Gruyere or blue (soft and creamy rather than bouncy or crumbly) and the flavor was a lot more intense than either—it was more like a vegan cheese concentrate.

Then it struck me: I had discovered an almost perfect cholesterol-free cheese substitute – courtesy of two cultures whose traditionalists would no sooner eat cheese than eat their own children.

In the following weeks, I experimented with the cheese-substitute possibilities of fermented bean curd. I found it worked well melted into a soy-milk-based cream sauce to make a faux cheese sauce (albeit one that tasted more of Swiss-type cheese than cheddar). I tried adding kirsch to the sauce to make a faux cheese fondue, but without that stretchy stringy factor, it just wasn’t the same.

But as a sauce, it worked great. I later decided to try it as a base for a white lasagna filling with chard and sundried tomatoes – it turned out great: creamy, flavorful, and most importantly, gently cheesy. It was also super-healthful: Dark leafy greens! Soy milk! And absolutely no cholesterol or trans fats! I even made a pan of it to bring to my (non-vegan) foodie sister after she had a baby, and she ate it up.

And this was its biggest plus: it’s tasty enough to please food lovers who have no dietary restrictions. We’ve gone off our strict vegan regime (we’re still mostly vegetarian and prudent about our consumption of butter and red meat), but I still think this recipe is a keeper.

I was feeling quite pleased with myself and my amazingly original contribution to vegan cookery when I purchased The Artful Vegan: Fresh Flavors from the Millennium Restaurant, authored by the chefs of a high-end vegan restaurant in San Francisco. The recipes and photos looked spectacular—their use of sauces, textures, and flavors was utterly unlike the rustic hippie fare in most vegan cookbooks. I was flipping through the book, awestruck by their genius, when I saw something familiar: they, too, used Chinese fermented bean curd to evoke a cheesy flavor in one of their recipes.

Rats. So I’m not a total creative genius after all.

Yes, I came up with the idea independently. But they came up with it first – years before my husband and I ever dreamed of foregoing real Brie and Gorgonzola. And by the conventions of academic research, whoever gets an idea published first in credible form gets full credit for it. So props to them, they deserve it.

And remember, great minds think alike.

VEGAN WHITE LASAGNA WITH CHARD

Note: Fermented bean curd comes in re-sealable glass jars and can be found alongside other jarred condiments in Asian markets. Most well-stocked markets will offer two varieties: plain (bean curd cubes in a clear, flavored brine) and red (bean curd cubes in a red brine flavored with red yeast rice and chiles). Use the plain kind in this recipe.

Don't be put off by the strong smell or taste; it's meant to be used in small quantities as a flavoring. Like any other powerful tool in your arsenal, it works wonders if you respect its power and use it as intended.

For the chard filling:

1 bunch chard, washed and chopped into ½” pieces (stems included)

½ medium onion, chopped

3 tablespoons olive oil

3 oil-soaked sun-dried tomatoes, finely diced

salt and pepper to taste

1. Heat a large saute pan over medium-high heat and add the olive oil. Add the onions and cook them, stirring occasionally, until translucent and just starting to turn golden.

2. Add the chard to the pan. Cook, stirring, until the chard and onions are evenly combined and the chard has wilted.

3. Lower the heat to medium-low and continue to cook, stiriing occasionally, until the chard stems are fully tender. Stir in the sun-dried tomatoes.

4. Add about 1 cup of white sauce and stir to combine. Set filling aside.

For the white sauce:

2½ cups unsweetened soy milk

2 cloves garlic, peeled and thinly sliced

A ½” –thick slice onion, separated into rings

2 tablespoons unflavored oil, such as canola

3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon crushed fermented bean curd

3 tablespoons white wine

salt and white pepper to taste

1. Heat the soy milk, garlic, and onion together in a saucepan over medium low heat for about 10 minutes, until the milk is hot and the onions and garlic are soft and have given off their aromas.

2. In a separate pot, heat the oil over medium heat and add the flour. Whisk vigorously to ensure the flour-oil mixture does not get lumpy. Cook, whisking constantly, for about 2 minutes. The flour should be cooked, but not browned.

3. Strain the milk mixture and pour the hot milk into the pot with the flour mixture. Whisk the sauce base over medium heat to eliminate lumps, and continue to whisk until the sauce thickens, about 3 minutes.

4. Whisk the wine and fermented bean curd into the sauce. Taste and season with salt (start with about ¾ teaspoon) and white pepper to taste.

For the lasagna (adapted from the fresh pasta recipe in The Artful Vegan):

1 cup semolina flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup lukewarm water (or more if needed)

1. Combine the flour, salt, and water. The mixture should be stiff but pliable enough to knead. Add additional water if necessary.

2. Knead the dough on a clean surface until the pasta dough is smooth. Wrap in plastic and allow to rest for at least 30 minutes.

3. Divide the dough into four pieces. Run the pieces, one at a time, though a pasta machine at the second-thinnest setting. (Mine is a hand-cranked model with seven settings; I roll my lasagna at 6.)

4. Dip each rolled-out sheet into boiling water for about a minute to cook -- it doesn't take long.

5. Keep the cooked pasta on a sheet pan lined with a linen towel or napkin while you assemble the lasagna. Do not allow the pasta sheets to touch each other.

Assembly:

1. Smear a layer of sauce on the bottem of a 8 x 8” baking pan. Cover the bottom of the pan with a layer of lasagna. Top this layer with half the chard filling.

2. Top the chard filling with another layer of lasagna, then the rest of the chard filling.

3. Top the second layer of chard filling with the rest of the lasagna noodles, then cover the noodles evenly with the remainder of the sauce.

4. Bake the lasagna, covered, for 20 minutes in a 400 degree oven. Uncover the lasagna, raise the heat to 425 degrees, and continue baking until top of the lasagna is lightly browned on top.

Foodie Tuesday: Dreams of a Drowning Sandwich

2011-02-01T14:36:00.000-08:00

Is it possible to crave something you’ve never tasted? Could you ever have an irrational, stalker-like obsession with a dish you’ve never encountered but just know you’re destined to love? I have.

My obsession began several years ago, when I lived in California. Flipping mindlessly through the local weekly tabloid one day, I spotted a brief review in the dining section that stopped me in my tracks: it waxed eloquent about tortas ahogadas, wonderfully drippy, incendiary Mexican sandwiches offered by a taco truck in a working-class neighhborhood not far from me.

At that moment my obsession was born. Everything about that sandwich spoke to me in a powerful, primal way. The torta ahogada, the review said, consists of a dense, crusty roll, split and filled with chopped or sliced pork , tangy pickled onions, and optionally, a thin layer of refried beans. This alone would be tasty enough, but the defining feature of the sandwich – and the one that now fuels my daydreams – is that the already sumptious sandwich is drenched with ladlesful of thin, fiery tomato- and chile-based sauces. (Ahogada means “drowned” in Spanish; at that truck, the review said, the sandwich is served in a styrofoam bowl rather than on a plate – the better to contain those copious drips of spicy sauce.) And yes, you’re supposed to eat this with your hands.

I had to have one.

In my mind, I could feel the crunchy crust of that roll giving way under my teeth to the firm, spongy crumb soaked in savory meat juices and fiery chile sauce. I could taste the tangy snap of the onions against the buttery succulence of slow-cooked pork and the creaminess of the beans. I could feel the slow burn of chiles de arbol on my lips, a sensation that always makes me happy.

Then I pictured myself trying to eat that darned thing with my bare hands while balanced on the hood of my car in a neighborhood known for gang conflicts. If I were an eager gang initiate who had to pick low-hanging fruit for some face-saving ass-kicking, there’d be no easier target than a skinny middle-aged Asian woman with both hands occupied by a sandwich.

I chickened out. And regretted that decision ever since.

My cowardice went on to haunt me. From then on, the fates taunted me with constant sightings of blog posts and magazine articles mentioning tortas ahogadas – the best and most famous ones, I learned, are found in Guadalajara, where they are a local specialty. But no other places within reasonable driving distance served them. And a year after my lust was kindled, I got a job in small-town Florida, where just finding a decent taco is cause for celebration.

My lust remained unrequited. Finally, I had enough. Last week, a combination of prolonged cold weather, a mostly vegan post-holiday diet, and a seemingly perpetual string of bad luck made me desperate for some culinary comfort. Like many people, I find slow-cooked meats and good crusty bread fantastically comforting. But unlike most people, I also find solace and catharsis in chiles, the hotter the better. Their vibrant colors and flavors simply electrify me when my spirits are sagging. And chomping down on a big mouthful of edible explosives when I’m down feels like yelling a defiant “F- you!” to the cosmos: You think you can take me down? I can eat THIS and guess what, pal, it only makes me stronger!

But the only way I was going to get my torta ahogada fix was if I made it myself. So I did. But before I did, I had to research how exactly to go about doing it. And I discovered the following:

The sauces: There are actually two separate sauces involved in a traditional torta ahogada. This is because the sandwich is an inherently welcoming and democratic dish: by convention, diners choose how hot they want it, and servers calibrate the proportion of its two brothy sauces – a thin, savory tomato broth and an intense puree of chiles de arbol – to each diner’s requirements. The truly crazy can go with just the chile sauce (this is a step too far even for me). But timid palates can choose just the tomato sauce and still have a splendidly messy and comforting meal. A mix of 2 parts tomato sauce to 1 part chile sauce is plenty hot for most people.

The bread: According to Cristina Potters, author of the blog Mexico Cooks!, an authentic torta ahogada is served on a birrote salada, a kind of dense, crusty roll almost impossible to find outside Guadalajara. I didn’t even try finding one here in the Florida swamps. The second-best thing would be any roll dense and resiliant enough not to dissolve the minute it hits the sauce. I ended up using Mexican-style telera rolls, which weren't perfect (they're not crusty and a they're a bit softer than I would have liked) but they did the job.

The meat: Pork is traditional, but I’ve seen mention of versions made with beef. Potters calls for chopped freshly made carnitas (fried pork chunks) in her version of the recipe. I love carnitas, but I didn’t feel like spending the time (or calories) on a big ole batch of deep-fried meat. So instead, I used the need for cooked pork as an excuse to try Mark Bittman’s slow-roasted pork shoulder recipe. This produced WAY more meat than I’ll need for a few sandwiches, but a supply of high-quality roast pork in the freezer is never a bad thing.

TORTAS AHOGADAS (“DROWNED SANDWICHES,” GUADALAJARA STYLE)

Adapted from Mexico Cooks!

6 dense, crusty sandwich rolls

3 cups warm chopped or sliced cooked pork

1 batch tomato sauce

1 batch chile sauce

1 batch pickled onions

refried beans as needed (optional)

For the tomato sauce:

1-1/2 pounds fresh ripe tomatoes

1 medium white onion, chopped

1 clove garlic

1 bay leaf

salt to taste

1. Cook the tomatoes, onion, garlic, and bay leaf in a pot of boiling water and cook until tender.

2. Drain the vegetables, reserving the cooking water. Remove the bay leaf and blend the vegetables in a blender until smooth. Add cooking water as needed to obtain a thin sauce. You should have about 3 cups of sauce.

3. Strain the sauce through a fine-meshed straining, pressing on the solids to extract as much sauce as possible. Add salt to taste.

For the chile sauce:

1-1/2 cups dried chiles de arbol, rinsed and de-stemmed

2 tablespoon cider vinegar

1 teaspoon oregano

2 whole cloves

Salt to taste.

1. Bring 4 cups of water to a boil, stir in the chiles, cover, and turn off the heat. Let the chiles simmer until softened, about an hour.

2. When the chiles are soft, drain them, reserving the cooking water. Put the chiles and the remaining ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth, adding cooking water as needed to dilute the mixture to a thin sauce. You should have about 3 cups of chile sauce. Add salt to taste.

For the pickled onions:

1 large onion, thinly sliced

1 tablespoon salt

3 tablespoons cider vinegar

1. Toss the onions with the salt until it coats the onions evenly. Place the onions in a colander or strainer and set the strainer over a bowl. (The bowl will catch the juices drawn from the onions by the salt.) Allow the onions to sit for half an hour or more, until they sweat and look wilted.

2. Rinse the onions thoroughly under cold water to remove the salt. Squeeze out any excess water and place the onions in a clean bowl. Stir in the vinegar and allow the onions to rest for at least 15 minutes before service.

To assemble the sandwiches:

1. Split the rolls, heat them in a low oven, then spread each with a thin layer of warm refried beans if you're using them, then fill each with about 1/2 cup of the pork and some of the onions.

2. If needed, gently reheat the sauces. Place the sandwiches in shallow bowls or plates with deep rims. Cover each sandwich with a generous portion of the sauces. (The proportion of hot sauce to tomato sauce should be up to each diner.) There should be about 1/2 cup of sauce for each sandwich.

3. Serve immediately with extra sauce on the side and a big pile of napkins.

A Surprise from the Sunshine State: Minorcan Clam Chowder

2011-01-09T14:32:00.000-08:00

When most people think of a steaming hot bowl of clam chowder, they don’t think of Florida. But they should.

I didn’t think about clam chowder when I moved out here, either. But I did think a lot about how bummed I was to leave behind the culinary bounty of Los Angeles, where I had spent much of my life in a state of joyful gluttony. There are certain bragging rights to growing up in the town that invented French dip sandwiches, chili burgers, the Cobb salad, and kimchee-topped tacos.

My soon-to-be hometown of Gainesville, Florida, on the other hand, is known for only one contribution to the culinary world: Gatorade. And the few other Floridian specialties I’d heard of are tasty but shamelessly brainless celebrations of sea, sun, and culinary sloth: Key Lime pie (made with a store-bought crust and a filling based on canned condensed milk). Stone crab claws (boil, chill, and you’re good to go). Smoked mullet (invariably smoked by someone who’s not you).

There was no escaping facts: Life in Gainesville was going to be a bore, at least where food was concerned.

But then I discovered a surprise: flipping through a copy of the late, lamented Gourmet shortly before moving out here, I found Jane and Michael Stern’s review of O’Steen’s, a modest seafood shack in St. Augustine – only an hour’s drive from Gainesville. Besides delectable fried shrimp enrobed in a gossamer batter, the Sterns wrote, O’Steen’s boasted a hyper-local specialty little known even in Florida: Minorcan clam chowder, a smoky, spicy, tomato-based concoction utterly unlike the goopy white stuff called clam chowder up north.

I knew I had to make a trip to St. Augustine to try some once I settled in. And when I finally did, I fell in love with both the town and the chowder.

While Florida’s best-known places and foods reflect a carefree celebration of sea and sun, St. Augustine (and Minorcan clam chowder) are products of a darker and lesser known set of Florida traditions: slaughter, servitude, and lots of hot peppers.

St. Augustine has its share of gorgeous beaches, but it’s not a place for a spring break blowout, unless your idea of a blowout involves 17th century Spanish architecture and tales of murder. Founded in 1565, St. Augustine is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the U.S. The Matanzas River, which runs through the city, is named for the Spanish word for “slaughter” – it was by this river that the colonial Spanish captured and killed 250 shipwrecked French Huguenots in 1564. And friends from other parts of Florida tell me that the best touristy thing to do in St. Augustine is to take a nighttime ghost tour: apparently, there are few places in the historic old quarter not associated with a gruesome death or two.

The Minorcan immigrants who brought their clam chowder to St. Augustine had better luck in the town than the poor Huguenots – but their odyssey began badly. They initially arrived near present-day New Smyrna in the 18th century as indentured servants contracted to work on indigo plantations. Many died on the journey from Minorca, and yet more soon died from overwork or succumbed to starvation and malaria.

After being released from their indentures (how they got released is an intriguing story, but unrelated to the matter of clam chowder), the Minorcans moved up the coast to St. Augustine and settled in as farmers and fishermen. Descendants of these settlers still live in the area and boast of local roots spanning eleven or more generations.

Minorcan clam chowder – tomato based and flavored with bay leaves, bacon, and hot peppers – bears a superficial resemblance to Manhattan-style clam chowder, but with a distinctively Mediterranean vibe of its own. Its defining feature, which makes it uniquely Minorcan, is the presence of datil peppers – fiery little flavor bombs with a crazy-good aroma of pineapple and passion fruit. How datils came to be grown by, and intimately associated with, Florida's Minorcan community remains a mystery: the peppers are native to the Caribbean, rather than the Minorcans' Mediterranean homeland.

Like the dishes they appear in, datils remain a local specialty: even now, they are commercially grown only in and near St. Augustine. (I bought a very prolific datil bush at a farmers’ market this year; it’s one of the wisest investments I’ve ever made.)

Like many Florida specialties, Minorcan clam chowder is a product of sunshine and the sea. But its history and its layers of heat, smoke, and spice evoke not so much a day on the beach as sunshine on ancient cobblestones and a surging Atlantic bearing ships full of strangers with unknown intentions. When you live in a place defined by sunshine, lingering in the shadows can be a joy.

*********

There is not much variation among recipes for Minorcan clam chowder – the choices of vegetables included may vary a bit, and some recipes may call for salt pork instead of bacon. But all include a single bummer of a caveat: if it doesn’t include actual datil peppers, it’s not the real deal.

I hate recipes like that.

My version is a composite of several recipes. The recipe below makes two changes from some of the “authentic” recipes I’ve seen. First, most recipes add the clams close to the beginning of the cooking process, cooking them – along with the vegetables and seasonings – for an hour or more. I don’t want my poor little clams reduced to shriveled bits of rubber, so I prefer to add mine at the end of the cooking process.

Second, given that a vast majority of the world’s population lives nowhere near St. Augustine, I offer a pragmatically serviceable alternative to datil peppers: habanero chiles, which are closely related to them and very similar in appearance and (kick-ass) heat level. Like datils, habaneros have an alluring tropical fruit aroma—just not the same one. But if you can beg, borrow, or steal a datil, do it – you won’t regret it.

While a chowder made from habaneros may not boast the exact same flavor – nor the same cultural and historical resonance – as one made with datils, it will still be magnitudes better than most pasty New England or one-note Manhattan clam chowders you’ve ever had.

MINORCAN-STYLE CLAM CHOWDER

2 strips thick-cut bacon

2 cups diced onion

½ cup diced green bell pepper

2 dozen fresh clams

1 datil (or habanero) pepper, minced (use half a pepper if you’re heat shy)

1 15-ounce can chopped tomatoes

1 tablespoon tomato paste

¼ teaspoon dried thyme

¼ teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon ground cayenne

¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 bay leaf, crumbled

1 8-ounce bottle clam juice

2 cups fish stock

1 cup diced new potatoes

1. Cook the bacon in a soup pot. When the bacon is cooked and its fat has rendered out, remove the bacon and chop it finely.

2. Add the onion and bell pepper to the soup pot and cook in the bacon fat until softened.

3.Add the tomatoes, tomato paste, seasonings, clam juice, and fish stock to the pot and simmer the mixture for an hour to blend the flavors.

4. Prepare the clams: scrub them carefully if the shells aren’t already clean), then place them in a large pan over medium high heat. Cover the pan and cook until the shells pop open. Remove the meat from the shells and set aside. If the clams are large (more than 1 bite) chop them; otherwise, leave them whole. Strain and reserve any juice from the clams.

5. Add the diced potatoes and any strained clam juice to the soup pot and cook until the potatoes are tender.

6. Add the clams and cook a few minutes more, just until the clams are heated through. Taste and adjust seasonings if necessary. Can be served immediately, but some feel it’s better if made the day before and reheated later, once the flavors have melded even further.

Biscotti, Naughty and Nice

2010-12-04T19:19:00.000-08:00

Claude was my first and only – and I’m glad it was him.

He was a raffish blond who resembled a perpetually hung-over cross between Daniel Craig and Julian Assange. He spoke with a nearly incomprehensible French accent, which only added to his mystique. Women flung themselves at him, and he flung himself back at them with equal enthusiasm.

And he was the chef who hired me for my first and only full-time cooking job, in the pastry kitchen of an impossibly snooty beach resort in California. There, he showed me a strategy for making biscotti – twice-baked Italian cookies – that I’ll never forget.

I have no idea why Claude chose to hire me. Perhaps nobody else applied for the job. Or maybe nobody else applied who could pass the hotel’s strict background checks and drug tests. In any case, he was the only chef among dozens I contacted who was willing to take a chance on a freshly minted culinary school graduate who was (1) nearing middle age and (2) whose most recent job title was “Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow.”

But that wasn’t the only reason I was lucky to be hired. Claude had worked under several three-star Michelin chefs and had won numerous awards for his desserts. This was precisely the kind of chef I dreamed of working with. Someone who was serious about pastry. Someone who could teach me everything.

And I found out way more than I wanted to know.

“Ah,” he said during the pastry team’s ten-minute morning break one day, shortly after I started. “Tomorrow I go back to Las Vegas. I will finally get my driver’s license back!”

I knew that he had previously been the lead pastry chef at a luxury hotel restaurant in Las Vegas, and that he still owned a house there—but the driver’s license bit, I didn’t get.

“Oh, what happened to your drivers’ license?” I asked.

He hemmed. “Eh. It is complicated.”

Mike, one of the other cooks, beamed gleefully. “Three letters: D…U…I!”

Back in cooking school, the instructors’ mantra was “the chef is always right!” Chefs, they warned us, were like four-star generals: they were not to be questioned, challenged, or God forbid, mocked. Ever.

Apparently, Claude’s pastry team never got that memo. And neither did Claude – he just kept on feeding us ammunition for our relentless barrage of jokes (most of which went over his head) and (usually) affectionate teasing. The DUI was just the start of it.

“You know what ze womans like at Hennessy’s?” he said one day, referring to his regular watering spot, “When you bring zem tacos from ze bar. Without zem asking.”

“So wait—you introduce yourself to women by buying them tacos from the bar?” Mike asked.

“Not buy zem—zey are free. At the bar.”

“So you bring these girls tacos that are already theirs for the taking and you expect them to be all impressed?” Renata, another cook, asked incredulously.

“But zey are free—and ze womans, zey like it!”

“Allo my dahling,” purred Mike in his best French accent. “I bring you tacos from ze bar. Zey are free! Now weel you come to bed wees me?”

Claude was – in his own words – “a very bad boy.” But he treated us women in the pastry kitchen with perfect courtesy. Ditto the team’s guys. When he showed up every morning (usually hung over), he’d solemnly circle the room and shake our hands. When our shifts ended, he made a point of shaking our hands again and thanking us for our work.

By this time – late afternoon or early evening for those of us on the day shift – it was often clear that he’d taken a generous swig or two from the bottle of Jack Daniels he kept in his locker. But where his team was concerned, his professionalism never wavered.

As for women outside the pastry department, all bets were off.

“Hola, mamacitas” he’d purr ungrammatically to Elizabeth, his favorite Mexican-American dishwasher.

“EEEE!” she’d squeal in reply. Whether she squealed from pleasure, embarrassment, or bemusement with Claude’s mangled Spanish was anyone’s guess.

Claude knew he couldn’t treat women employed by the hotel the same way as those he found at Hennessy’s. And female hotel employees were smart enough to keep their clothes on around him, at least while in heavily trafficked areas. But then, a brief and wondrous window of opportunity opened for him: he was offered a job back in Las Vegas by one of his Michelin-starred mentors, and he promptly gave his two-weeks’ notice.

Now what could hotel management do – fire him?

On his last day at the hotel, Elizabeth was at the dish sink when Claude approached her with a napkin-covered plate and a big grin on his face. “I make zees for you!” he announced proudly.

Elizabeth dried her hands on her apron, pulled off the napkin -- and jumped back screaming.

“Ay! Ay! No me gusta! I don’t like it!”

The rest of us ran over to the sink and stared at the plate, which was now on the draining board.

Smack on the center of the plate sat an anatomically correct, slightly larger-than-life-size penis baked of biscotti dough. Because Claude was a consummate professional, he had carefully rolled the thing in sugar before baking it, just as our recipe required. And because he was Claude, he had decorated it in great detail with several kinds of chocolate.

I hope I never see white chocolate used that way ever again.

*******

It was easy to see why Claude chose biscotti dough as the medium for his project: we always had tons of it at the ready. Biscotti are great cookies to make during the holidays because they travel and keep well (both the dough and finished cookies can be made ahead). They're also cute – when made normally, they look like little slices of bread – and they taste great.

Biscotti are traditionally served as an accompaniment to coffee. But recently, I discovered biscotti that were actually flavored WITH coffee, and they were addictive. Here’s my version of coffee biscotti, studded with hazelnuts and topped with a safe-for-work drizzle of white chocolate.

ESPRESSO-HAZELNUT BISCOTTI

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 2/3 cups sugar

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 tablespoon finely ground dark coffee beans

1 teaspoon vanilla

3 eggs

3 eggs yolks

½ cup whole hazelnuts

Sugar for sprinkling, as needed

1 cup white chocolate chips

1. Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and ground coffee in the bowl of an electric mixer.

2. In a separate bowl, whisk together the eggs, egg yolks, and vanilla.

3. Add egg mixture to the dry ingredients. Using a paddle attachment at medium speed, mix the ingredients until almost combined.

4. Lower the speed to low and add the hazelnuts. Mix until nuts are evenly distributed into the dough. The dough will be soft.

5. Divide the dough into three pieces. Shape each into a log about 10 inches long and 2 inches wide. Place the logs several inches apart on a parchment-lined baking sheet, sprinkle with sugar if desired, and bake at 325 degrees until puffed and golden brown, about 20 minutes

6. Cool the logs, then cut them on the diagonal with a serrated knife into ¾-inch thick slices.

7. Lower the oven heat to 300 degrees. Place the slices on baking sheets and bake until hard and dry, about 20 minutes.

8. Cool the slices. Melt the white chocolate in a small bowl set over a pot of simmering water.

9. Decorate the biscotti with the melted white chocolate as desired. When the chocolate has set, store the biscotti in a covered container in a cool, dry area.

An (Almost) All-American Thanksgiving

2010-11-14T19:17:00.000-08:00

Ungrateful whining is an American child’s birthright. But if you grow up in an immigrant family, you have a whole battery of things to whine about that other kids don’t.

For one, your parents and their friends will insist on infesting every event with dorky, embarrassing stuff from the old country. Back in my whiny years, all my cool friends from school got to have buttery mashed potatoes and flaky little Parker House rolls at their Thanksgiving tables. And I was stuck with... plain boiled rice.

“MOOOM! Why do we have to have RICE? I want potatoes!”

“Rice is good.” Mom would say. “And Dad wants rice.”

End of discussion. (This was another thing Chinese-American kids get to whine about: We never get to have the last word. Ever.)

Thanksgiving, according to my grade-school teachers, was the most American of holidays, a time to celebrate our common heritage by bonding around indigenous American foodstuffs. So I decided it was up to me, as a patriotic native-born American, to protect the sanctity of the holiday from creeping Sinofication.

“You know what Auntie Pat puts in her turkey?” Mom said one night a week before Thanksgiving, “Naw mai and lop cheung.”

Dad’s eyebrows raised from behind the Wall Street Journal. “Mmm, “ he said.

“MOOOM! NO!” my sisters and I yelled in unison. Not that there was anything wrong with naw mai (sticky rice) and lop cheung (dried Chinese sausage), but these weren’t Thanksgiving food. They were everyday boring food. The kind of stuff we ate while relatives interrogated us about our grades and asked us why Mom didn’t have any sons (as if we could possibly formulate an intelligent answer to this question).

Year after year, we successfully fought off rice-stuffed turkeys and stir-fried side dishes. We also managed to increase, ever so gradually, the proportion of toasted marshmallows on top of our absolutely mandatory sweet potato casserole. And as my sisters and I assumed more and more responsibility and control in the kitchen, our Thanksgiving spreads became less Norman Rockwell and more Martha Stewart: pumpkin flans and souffles are more our thing than pumpkin pies.

These days, we count our victory over immigrant dorkitude nearly complete. But the purity of our red-blooded Yuppie American Thanksgiving feast lasts only until the dishes are cleared. That’s when our Martha Stewart idyll ends, and Mom’s annual turkey jook production begins. (Jook is often described, unappetizingly, as rice porridge or gruel, but it deserves to be re-branded as a savory and soothing cream of rice soup.)

While the dishes are still in the sink, Mom puts the turkey carcass (denuded of stuffing and any pieces of meat large enough to save for sandwiches) in a slow cooker and covers it with water. She tosses in a cut-up carrot and a stalk or two of celery. (Neither of these are traditional Chinese soup ingredients, but that’s how she rolls.) Then she turns the cooker on and lets it do its thing while we do the dishes and attempt to foist foil-wrapped packets of leftovers onto our guests.

The cooker stays on all night, and early on Black Friday morning, Mom removes and dumps the carcass, and adds several handfuls of leftover rice from the night before. (Yes, we still have plain boiled rice every Thanksgiving. Since almost no one touches it except Dad, we can always count on leftovers for jook-making.) Within an hour, the rice will have dissolved, turning the rich turkey broth into a silky ivory cream – just in time for a comforting, very traditional Chinese breakfast for late risers.

In the end, that pointless bowl of Thanksgiving rice always manages to redeem itself. And we always end up with a real Chinese dish for Thanksgiving – albeit one with an All-American backbone. And none of us have ever complained about it.

As always, Mom and Dad get the last word.

***

Jook is traditionally served at breakfast or as a late-night snack. It can be made with fish, meat, or poultry broth, and usually contains pieces of the corresponding meat. (I’ve heard of jook based on plain water, but this would be unthinkable in my family.)

True confession time: I’ve never hosted a full-on Thanksgiving dinner, so I’ve have never had unfettered access to a turkey carcass. (Yes, I know – I’ve missed a crucial milestone of American womanhood and should probably just go and join the Taliban right now.) But I have made jook many times, and it’s dead easy. The recipe below produces a more modest portion than Mom’s – a good starter size for newbies and doubters. It calls for raw rice, since I assume most non-Chinese don’t typically have cold cooked rice lying around. But you can use a larger portion of cooked rice and cook the soup for a shorter amount of time.

TURKEY (OR CHICKEN) JOOK (CREAMY RICE SOUP)

4 cups turkey or chicken broth

2 ¼-inch thick slices of fresh ginger

1/3 cup raw white rice, rinsed (or 1 cup cooked white rice rice)

salt and white pepper to taste

1 cup cooked turkey or chicken, shredded into bite-size pieces

For garnishes:

2 scallions, thinly sliced

sesame oil

chile oil

1. Bring the broth and ginger to a boil in a heavy saucepan.

2. Add the rice. Cook at medium heat, stirring regularly, until the rice has fully cooked and broken down (about an hour). The mixture should have the consistency of a thick bean soup (it won’t be completely smooth; little nubs of rice will still be evident). If it’s too thick for your taste, add more broth. If it’s too thin, raise the heat and cook until the mixture has thickened to your desired consistency.

3. Add the shredded chicken or turkey and season to taste with salt and white pepper. Cook until the meat is heated through.

4. Garnish with sliced scallions. Serve with sesame oil, chile oil, and extra white pepper for diners to add at will.

Scary Things To Do with Pumpkins

2010-10-31T19:12:00.000-07:00

My scariest Halloween involved several confused Dutch semanticists, a screaming French-Canadian dressed like a skeleton, and half a dozen seriously mutilated pumpkins.

I was living and teaching in Vancouver at the time, and attending a Halloween party hosted by a young colleague of mine and his wife. That year, Halloween fell the night before a conference our department was organizing, and my friends (who I’ll call Ben and Marcy) were not only throwing a party, but providing crash space for three conference participants from Amsterdam.

And Ben and Marcy were determined to show our international visitors the full spendor of a North American Halloween.

“Do you guys celebrate Halloween in Holland?” Marcy asked.

“No.” one of then said.

“You’ll see, it’s really fun. People put on costumes, and kids go from door to door to get candy from people. And we carve jack-o-lanterns.”

“Jack-oh—what?”

“Oh! That’s what we’re going to do tonight!” Ben replied. “See these pumpkins?—“ he pointed to the pile of basketball-sized pumpkins by the fireplace, “—We’re going to hollow them out and carve faces in them. Then we’re going to put candles in them and put them outside! It’s going to be great!”

Imagine you are a doctoral student from the Netherlands, and you have just flown halfway around the world to give a talk at a major conference. You are jet-lagged, you’re exhausted, and you’re wondering if there’s a flaw in that structure you proposed in section 3.3.1. And now the very professors you were hoping to impress want you to spend the night before your talk carving faces in fruit.

“Ah. Interesting.” one of the Dutch visitors said.

“And then we’re going to make a pie from all the pieces we cut out!” Ben added. “Have you guys ever had pumpkin pie?”

Ben and Marcy had everything all worked out. In minutes, several back issues of the Vancouver Sun were spread over the living room floor, and knives were procured for all present. We each grabbed a pumpkin and sat on the floor. I explained to our guests the niceties of pumpkin-carving, from how to cut out a lid around the pumpkin’s stem, to the benefits of saving the seeds for roasting and snacking, to the strategic wisdom of drawing your design on the pumpkin with a black Sharpie before carving.

They nodded slowly as they pondered my advice. “I really enjoyed your paper on Principle C violations in Zapotec,” one of them said.

The doorbell rang.

“Hey guys!” Ben yelled, “It’s Dave and Marie-Claire!”

Dave was the chair of our department, and an all-around good sport. His perpetually effervescent wife, Marie-Claire, was the life of every party she attended– a pretty amazing feat for a teetotaler. Tonight she was wearing a black bodysuit bearing a glow-in-the-dark skeleton design. She pulled off her latex bloody skull mask to give us all proper Gallic kisses on the cheek.

Dave and Marie-Claire immediately put our guests at ease. We settled in on the floor and began hacking away at our pumpkins as Dave chatted about Halloween traditions, snowboarding in Whistler, and his own work-related travels to the Netherlands. Almost all of us had feeble little steak knives, which were not quite up to the task of penetrating the rock-hard pumpkin rinds. But eventually, a goopy pile of pumpkin shards and innards accumulated in the middle of the floor and vaguely face-like patterns emerged on some of the pumpkins.

“Save all that stuff so we can make pie!” Marcy yelled from the kitchen, tossing us a big Tupperware bowl.

We gathered up the gloppy pieces piled on the newspaper and dumped them into the bowl. I wondered if the Vancouver Sun used food-safe ink. And if I should suggest to Marcy that we sort through the pieces to make sure no seeds, residual dirt, or soggy remains of Bank of Montreal ads got into our pie. But I held my tongue: this was Marcy’s home and Marcy’s show. Not my kitchen – not my problem.

“Do any of you guys know what goes in pumpkin pie filling?” Marcy asked.

“Wait—what the hell?” Ben jumped up and peered out the front window. “Those kids are setting stuff on fire!”

We all ran to the window. A loud group of teenage boys was working its way down the street, tossing lit firecrackers at houses. (Fireworks at Halloween are a Canadian thing.)

“That’s dangerous!” Dave said.

“Ooh! Let me take care of this!” Marie-Claire wiped the pumpkin goo from her hands, put on her skull mask, and ran out the door.

“What are you doing?” Ben yelled.

But it was too late. She was already outside.

“OOH! OOOH! WOO WOO! BOO!” she shrieked. (For full effect, imagine this in a very excited Quebecois accent.)

Our dangerous band of hooligans suddenly looked confused. “Lady!” one of them gasped, “What are you doing?”

“OOOH! OOOH! WOOOOOO!” Now she was lunging at them with her hands above her head in the classic Bela Lugosi pose. “BOOO!” she yelled, thrusting her hands and face at the largest of them.

“Oh my God, she’s trying to RAPE me!” he brayed.

“She’s crazy!”

“Let’s get out of here!” one of them yelled, even as his cohorts sprinted down the street ahead of him.

“Wow.” Ben said, stepping away from the window.

Dave smiled. “Irrational behavior tends to throw people off.”

The low-level sore throat I had been nursing all week had just exploded into a full-fledged fever, and now my brain was reeling. What the hell just happened? We didn’t know anything about those kids; Marie-Claire could have gotten beaten up or worse – but somehow, she knew she wouldn’t be. And how did she know her stunt would work? And weirdest of all, WHY did it work? Since when were teenage boys terrified of petite middle-aged women?

And exactly what was going into Marcy's pie? On further reflection, I decided I really didn’t want to know.

I’ve never been one of those with a connection to the unseen. For me, the mysteries of the living are scary enough.

*****

Here’s a non-scary thing to do should you find yourself with a pound of random pumpkin shards. Instead of making a pie, one can use mutilated pumpkin bits to make gnocchi – little Italian dumplings.

Because pumpkins are so firmly anchored to autumn, they scream for autumn flavors: I’ve topped the gnocchi with a sweet/salty sauce of crumbled sausage and maple gravy. (The gnocchi recipe is based on one by Lidia Bastianich; the sauce is loosely inspired by the sausage-maple gravy served with foie gras and biscuits at Animal, a lust-inducing Los Angeles eatery.) The combination of pumpkin, sausage, gravy and maple reminds me of all my favorite parts of a classic Thanksgiving dinner – I like to think of it as a preview of coming attractions.

PUMPKIN GNOCCHI WITH SAUSAGE-MAPLE GRAVY

For the gnocchi:

1 (1-pound) pumpkin or butternut squash (or 1 pound clean, leftover fresh pumpkin bits from carving)

Olive oil as needed

1 large russet potato, baked, riced, and cooled

1 egg

½ cups shredded parmesan cheese

½ teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour, or more if needed

Additional parmesan for serving (optional)

1. If using a whole squash or pumpkin, cut it in half, remove the seeds, brush the cut parts with olive oil, and bake uncovered at 400 degrees until soft, about an hour and a half. (If using pumpkin pieces, brush or toss lightly with olive oil and bake until soft—pieces will cook faster than halves.)

2. Scoop out the baked pumpkin flesh from its skin and place in a saucepan. Cook over medium heat, mashing the pumpkin as you go, until any visible liquid is cooked off and the mixture is smooth and thick. If using pumpkin pieces, put them through a food mill before this second cooking to remove the skins.

3. Measure out 1 cup of mashed, reduced pumpkin; set aside any remaining pumpkin for other uses.

4. Measure out 2 cups of the cooked, riced, and cooled potato.

5. Combine the pumpkin and potato with the remaining ingredients. If the dough is too sticky to handle, add more flour, 1 tablespoon at a time, until the dough is firm enough to shape. Expect the dough to stay a bit sticky.

6. Divide the dough into 8 portions. Roll each portion on a floured surface into a 12-inch rope, and cut the ropes into ¾-inch pieces. Lay the pieces on parchment-lined baking sheets.

7. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the gnocchi pieces in two batches, and cook each batch about 10 minutes. When fully cooked, the gnocchi will swell, float, and no longer taste floury. (Note that the gnocchi will probably float to the top before they’re completely done, so don’t take them out just because they’re floating.) Remove finished gnocchi with a slotted spoon and return them to the parchment-lined sheets.

8. To serve, spoon hot gnocchi into a serving bowl, top with sausage gravy (and cheese, if desired), and serve immediately.

For the sausage-maple gravy:

½ pound bulk breakfast sausage (the type flavored with sage)

¼ cup chopped onion

2 tablespoons neutral cooking oil, such as canola

1 ½ cups milk

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

¼ teaspoon dried sage, crumbled

1 ½ tablespoons maple syrupsalt and white pepper to taste

1. Heat the oil over medium-high heat in a large saucepan. Crumble in the sausage and cook until lightly browned and cooked through. Remove sausage from the saucepan with a slotted spoon and set aside.

2. In a separate saucepan, heat the milk until it starts to steam.

3. Sauté the onion in the oil remaining in the first saucepan until it starts to brown. Stir in the sage, then stir in the flour and whisk the mixture for about a minute.

4. Add the milk and continue to whisk until flour is fully dissolved and the gravy starts to thicken.

5. Return the sausage to the gravy. Add the syrup, then add salt and white pepper to taste.

Cheesecake for Dinner!

2010-10-25T19:09:00.000-07:00

When I made my ill-advised decision to go to cooking school, I chose a certificate program in pastry and baking. This choice was motivated by two factors: first, I’d heard that work in the pastry kitchen was slower paced and less stressful than work on the hot line. (This is indeed true—in the same way that life in Gitmo is less stressful than life in Abu Ghraib). The second motivator was my love of fancy desserts – they’re fun to make and even more fun to eat. Who wouldn’t want a career where you get to work with chocolate every day?

But the strangest side effect of my short life in professional baking was the crazy craving I got for savory foods. My five-hour nightly cooking school classes—where we turned out endless mousses, pies, and cakes—started right at dinnertime. So I’d arrive home at midnight longing for a big bowl of chili. Or braised lamb. Basically, anything salty or spicy and NOT sweet.

And my lust for savories only grew after I graduated and actually started getting paid to make desserts. At the (seriously dysfunctional) five-star hotel where I landed my first culinary gig, my colleagues and I in the pastry shop were free to eat as many day-old cookies and éclairs as we wanted, and we did so with impunity. Our stringent quality-control standards also required us to eat lots of goodies straight out of the oven. But nothing made us happier than the occasional plate of taco salad or bruschetta brought over by Paco, the garde-manger chef, or the occasional treat of bacon or sausage liberated from the main kitchen in the dead of night by Bob, our graveyard-shift baker.

My classmates and instructors back in cooking school clearly shared my craving. One night, a tray of fried chicken arrived in our training kitchen – the leftovers of a project from another class – and we tore into it like a pack of starving hyenas. And any time a savory item worked its way into our curriculum, we'd throw ourselves into it with lustful urgency. Beef Wellington Night—tucked into our course on puff pastry, croissants, and danishes — was one of the best nights of my culinary training, if not my life.

To encourage culinary awareness and creativity, our instructors worked more and more savories into our program, often in unexpected places. The most surprising of these was the seemingly repulsive—but addictive—savory cheesecake. Who would have expected that gorgonzola, prosciutto, and shrimp could pop up in a course entitled "International Patisserie, Custards, Fillings, and Creams"?

But pop up they did—and to amazing effect. The first thing we learned about savory cheesecakes was how to get our heads around the idea. It only took a taste of the chef’s demo cheesecake to convince us not to think of a Sarah Lee cheesecake gone bad, but of a creamy, piquant terrine, prefect for spreading on toasted baguette slices as a buffet appetizer. Or, as we presented them in class, cut into modest slices and served with a vinaigrette-dressed mesclun salad, garnished with toasted nuts, as a first course.

Of course, we didn't make savory cheesecakes in class just to prove it was possible. Our goal was for us to learn how to make great cheesecakes, period. The secrets to making cheesecakes of any sort can be summed up in two words: low and slow.

Like their sweet counterparts, savory cheesecake fillings have a cream cheese base. We learned to beat the cream cheese until soft and completely lump-free, using a mixer with a paddle attachment, before adding the other filling ingredients: this ensured that no unpleasant lumps would appear in the filling. But unlike standard cake batters, cheesecake batters must be mixed gently, at slow speed. Beating the batter too fast and hard would whip too much air in the filling which would cause it to rise, then sink, in the oven, which would make the top of the cake crack. (One of our instructors told us why so many commercial cheesecakes come topped with a thick layer of sour cream: to hide the cracks.)

Also, cheesecake fillings are technically baked custards, and like flans and related preparations, need to be baked in a water bath: this keeps the filling moist, ensures even cooking, and prevents excess browning.. And cheesecakes like a long, mellow bake at relatively low heat: this ensures the eggy, creamy filling merely sets, rather than scrambles.

Below is my version of a savory cheesecake. It’s flavored with blue cheese and sage, and based on a recipe developed by one of my instructors (his included a swirl of pesto and a sprinkling of chopped prosciutto, instead of the sage). The crust is my innovation—or rather, my mistake: on Cheesecake Night, I put the butter for the crust on the stove to melt, and went off to do something else. When I returned, the butter had not only melted, but browned. The instructor who caught the near-catastrophe said that the browned butter was not only still usable, but potentially better than plain butter. And it was.

BLUE CHEESE AND SAGE CHEESECAKE

(Makes one 10" cheesecake or two 6" cheesecakes)

Crust:

1 cup panko (Japanese dry bread crumbs)

1/2 cup walnuts, toasted and finely chopped

3 tablespoons butter

Preheat oven to 325°. Lightly grease the bottom of a 10" round cake pan or spring-form pan (or two 6" round cake pans), and line the pan or pans with a 10" circle (or 6" circles ) of parchment paper. Melt the butter and cook over medium heat until lightly browned. Combine with remaining ingredients. Press into a thin (about 1/8" thick) even, firmly packed layer on the bottom of the prepared pan (or pans). Bake until crust is set and lightly browned. Set aside the cool while preparing the filling. (If using spring-form pans, double-wrap them in foil to waterproof them--the next stage of cooking will involve a water bath.)

Filling:

1-1/2 pounds cream cheese, softened

1/4 cup sugar

6-1/2 ounces sour cream

4 tablespoons cornstarch, sifted

1 tablespoon lemon juice

2 large eggs, beaten

1 pint whipping cream

1-1/4 cup finely crumbled blue cheese (Gorgonzola or Maytag)

2 tablespoon chopped fresh sage

1 tablespoon melted butter

Salt and black pepper to taste

Lower the oven temperature to 300°. In a mixer with a paddle attachment, mix the cream cheese and sugar together on low speed until they are thoroughly combined and the cheese is soft and free of lumps. (Scrape down the sides of the mixer bowl frequently while mixing the filling.) Mix in sour cream, then the beaten egg and lemon juice.

Separately, combine the whipping cream and cornstarch, then stir them into the cream cheese mixture. Briefly saute chopped sage in the melted butter and cool. Fold the blue cheese and cooled sage into the filling. Adjust seasoning with salt and black pepper to taste.

Pour prepared batter into the crust-lined cake pan (or pans). Place the pan or pans inside a larger roasting or baking pan; fill this larger pan halfway with room-temperature water. Bake the cheesecakes, uncovered, in the water bath until set (about an hour for larger cakes; about 50 minutes for smaller ones.). Cool completely in pan before serving. If using a springform mold, gently remove the outer ring of the mold once the cake has cooled. If using a cake pan, place it briefly over a stovetop burner to warm the bottom and sides and the cake, run sharp knife dipped in hot water around the edge of the pan to loosen the cake. Place a plate over the cake pan and flip the cake onto the plate. The cake will now be upside-down (crust-side up) on the plate. Now place a serving plate over the cake and flip it over again; the cake will now be be right-side up.

Grossing Out My Inner Child: Savory Apple-Onion Galette

2010-10-17T19:05:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I had a couple of non-negotiable views about apples. First among these: they were fruit, which meant they didn’t count as dessert unless cooked and sweetened in some way. Apple pies and apple turnovers counted as suitable desserts. Slices of apple and apple pieces in fruit salad didn’t, and only marginally counted as acceptable after-school snacks.

My second fundamental belief about apples was that since they were fruit, they were sweet. And sweet things such as fruit didn’t belong anywhere near non-sweet things. Allowable exceptions were pineapple chunks in sweet-and-sour pork, which was inherently sweet anyhow, and the apple chunks Mom sometimes put in her chicken curry. But other mixtures of fruity and savory things were, quite simply, wrong. The idea of putting cheddar cheese on top of apple pie struck me as downright repulsive. And I made a point of not going to sleepovers at the homes of classmates whose tuna sandwiches contained apples or raisins. Eew.

An important part of growing is learning how to cope when your most cherished beliefs are challenged: When you’re small, you dig in your heels, cover your ears, and hope the offensive information just goes away. When you’re a bit bigger, you start thinking of ways to justify why your take on things is the only right one. Only much later does one develop the fortitude needed to consider the possible merits of an opposing view and, if needed, admit to being – gasp – WRONG!

My beliefs about the ontological status of apples were subverted, ever so slowly and sneakily, by the most unlikely of sources: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books.

I grew up devouring Wilder’s tales of her girlhood on the American frontier in the mid-nineteenth century. I loved how honestly Wilder portrayed her youthful indiscretions: she worried about her looks, got thrown out of school for losing her temper, and wrote a snarky poem about an annoying teacher that, to her horror, went viral among her classmates at her one-room school. (This itself was an education for me: based on everything adults of my acquaintance had told me about their childhoods, I believed all kids until my era were perfectly behaved little angels.) I loved – as did most grade-school social studies teachers – how vividly she portrayed the daily routines of life on the frontier. But most of all, I loved how she wrote about food.

She wrote lustfully of crackling cornbread and biscuits and homemade (and home-grown) pickles and preserves. She described unfamiliar but scrumptious-sounding treats such as birds’ nest pudding – an eggy baked confection holding several whole, cooked apples and served with cream. Apples – ever the quintessential American fruit – played a big role in the culinary workings of her books: she described drying them for winter storage, making vinegar from their peels and cores, and feeding them to horses. Farmer Boy, the volume depicting her husband’s childhood on a prosperous farm in upstate New York, is almost non-stop food porn: meals on the Wilder farm invariably ended with several kinds of pies, including apple, followed a bit later by an after-dinner snack of buttered popcorn and yet more apples.

Farmer Boy also contained the most disturbing recipe in the series – one that grated against my sensibilities and haunted my nightmares for years. Horrifyingly, it was the favorite dish of Almanzo Wilder, Laura’s future husband:

...They talked about spareribs, and turkey with dressing, and baked beans, and crackling cornbread, and other good things. But Almanzo said that what he liked most in the world was fried apples ‘n’ onions.

When, at last, they went in to dinner, there on the table was a big dish of them! Mother knew what he liked best, and she had cooked it for him.

Apples. And onions. Fried together. Good God, this was just wrong. Reading this as a youth, I felt terribly disappointed in Almanzo, who otherwise seemed like a pretty cool kid. Everyone knows apples are supposed to go with cinnamon or caramel. And onions go with whatever you had for dinner before your apple dessert. But together? No way.

I eventually grew up and gave up childish things. And I had nearly recovered from the trauma of fried apples ‘n’ onions when, a few years after I’d finished college, I got a copy of The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Classic Stories for Christmas. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one taken with an urge to make salt-rising bread and maple candy after reading the Little House books, and an intrepid soul painstakingly reconstructed many of those old-time recipes. And one of them was fried apples ‘n’ onions! Ack!

I read through that recipe with fascinated repulsion dozens of times, but didn’t quite work up the nerve to try it. But after years of trepidation, I’ve finally made peace with the concept.

The recipe in The Little House Cookbook involved sliced, unpeeled apples and sliced onions fried together in bacon fat. When I first saw the recipe, I grudgingly admitted that the presence of bacon fat made the dish seem slightly less repulsive. But now I realize why: First, bacon makes everything it touches taste better. Second, bacon has both sweet and savory notes, and could potentially mediate and meld the contrasting flavors of apples and onions. Pure freaking genius!

The more my rational adult mind thought of it, the better the apple/onion/bacon combo sounded. Onions are traditionally associated with savory dishes, but can be quite sweet when cooked. Chutneys, which I never found problematic even in my most finicky years, contain a mix of sweet fruit and savory vegetables. And now, previously unthinkable mixes of sweet and savory are almost mainstream: in some places, salt is an almost obligatory topping on caramels and chocolates, and bacon has worked its way into chocolate bars and even doughnuts.

The Little House Cookbook, written in the 1979, describes fried apples ‘n’ onions as a down-home country dish, one of those under-the-radar preparations so routine few people thought to write down recipes for it. Thirty years later, it feels downright modern, if not shamelessly trendy. And I’ve always wanted to be one of the cool trendy kids.

To make this old-time, yet weirdly prescient, preparation even more modern, I’ve enlivened the apples and onions with a touch of rosemary, and turned it into a filling for a galette – a free-form, open-face tart. (The galette dough recipe is lightly adapted from one of my favorite cookbooks, Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.) It makes a nice light meal with a salad on the side. Think of it as an apple pie for grownups – that you get to have before dessert.

SAVORY APPLE-ONION GALETTE

For the yeasted galette dough:

1/2 cup warm water

2 teaspoons active dry yeast

1/2 teaspoon sugar

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 egg, lightly beaten

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 cups flour, or as needed

1. Dissolve the yeast and sugar in the water in a medium size bowl.

2. Add egg, oil, and salt, then stir in the flour. When the dough is too stiff to stir with a spoon, turn it onto a floured surface for kneading.

3. Knead the dough until smooth and elastic, about 4 minutes. Add additional flour if the dough is sticky.

4. Set the dough in an oiled bowl, cover with a towel, and allow to rise until doubled in bulk, about 45 minutes.

For the apple-onion filling:

4 cups thinly sliced onions

4 cups sliced tart apples (such as Granny Smith)

1/4 pound bacon

1/2 teaspoon crumbled dried rosemary

salt and sugar to taste

1. Fry the bacon in a large skillet. When done, set aside. Remove all but 3 tablespoons bacon grease from the skillet.

2. Saute the onions in the remaining bacon fat until wilted. Toss in the rosemary while the onions are cooking.

3. Add the apples and another tablespoon of the bacon fat to the wilted onions. Stir and cook until the apples are tender.

4. Taste the mixture and add salt and sugar to taste. Set the filling aside to cool before assembling the galette.

To form the galette:

1. Roll the dough out into a thin 14-inch circle on a lightly floured surface. (The circle need not be completely regular.) If there is extra dough, cut it away and use for another purpose. Fold the dough into quarters and transfer it to the back of a sheet pan or a cookie sheet without sides. Unfold it. It will be larger than the pan.

2. Top the dough with the cooled filling, leaving a border 2 to 4 inches wide. Fold the edges of the dough over the fruit, overlapping them as you go. (The folded-over dough will not cover all the filling; the middle of the galette will remain exposed.)

3. Brush the folded-over dough with melted butter or an egg beaten with a little milk or cream. Sprinkle the glazed dough lightly with a mixture of equal parts sugar and salt. Bake the galette at 400 degrees until the crust is browned and the apples are tender, about 40 minutes.

The Best Time I Never Had: A Life Lesson from Hummus

2010-10-03T19:00:00.000-07:00

I dreaded every day of graduate school. I felt awkward and insecure around my brilliant and worldly classmates, and was terrified of my even more brilliant (and all incredibly famous) professors.

I shouldn’t have been. And now, after a decade of teaching in other programs, I realize my years in the doctoral program in linguistics at UCLA should have been the best in my life (okay, maybe second-best after my two years of living on wine, cheese, and pain au chocolat while teaching English in Paris). UCLA’s linguistics department, to put it in polite academic terms, kicked major ass – but I was too dim to realize it at the time.

Some of the things I dreaded about it back then were the very things that made it such a great place to learn. One of these was the Copy Room Ambush. The Copy Room Ambush worked like this: I’d be minding my own business, photocopying a journal article, when some Famous Faculty Member would suddenly pounce from behind the recycling bins:

FFM: You! You have to give a talk in the Syntax/Semantics Seminar!

ME: But what am I going to talk about?? I don’t have anything ready to present!

FFM: That’s your problem. You’re going to give a talk!

And I almost always did. And all my presentations got ripped to shreds. The discussions invariably veered off onto long digressions, and these digressions led to arguments, and these arguments occasionally led back to my presentation. Or what was left of it, after everyone had taken their shots at it.

It wasn’t just me, either. Everyone’s work got ripped to shreds. The department had a golden reputation and sufficient funding to invite prominent linguists from all over the world to come and present their latest work. We ripped that to shreds too, but not before taking the authors out to dinner.

And yet, all these famous linguists kept coming back when invited. And I kept on working on new papers that I knew would be soundly trashed.

Then, after presenting a paper, I’d rework it and rework it until the protests died down. What didn’t kill my projects – and those of my classmates, professors, and our visitors – made them stronger. And we all knew it.

The department was an insanely busy place, with people presenting research (and getting trashed) just about every day, and a constant stream of interesting visitors from around the world coming through to teach, to collaborate, or just to share their ideas.

These visitors brought non-academic benefits, too. Visitors meant receptions and receptions meant free food – an important consideration for an impecunious grad student. Fridays were a big deal in the department, for that’s when we had our weekly colloquium, usually presented by a visiting big shot. And after the colloquium was a lunch reception.

For me, these receptions were yet another vexing feature of life in the department. First, there was the sheer terror of standing around with a paper plate smeared with hummus or Boursin while trying to make small talk with people who scared the crap out of me. Second was the puzzling contents of those paper plates.

There was invariably something wonky about the food selection. A typical spread consisted of several kinds of cold salads, a fat wedge of Gorgonzola – and several bags of potato chips. Or the assortment would include hummus – served with slices of baguette. When wedges of pita did appear, so would several tubs of salsa or onion dip – but no hummus.

Student members of the Colloquium Committee were responsible for hunting down lunch, and most of my cohorts were scary smart – except, apparently, when it came to food. Perhaps this was because many of them were international students unfamiliar with how the foods they chose were meant to be eaten. Or maybe they were too absorbed in their research on optimality theory or quantifier scope to notice what they were serving us. I really didn't care why our lunches were so weird. All I knew was that it was driving me nuts.

One day, I finally had enough. We grad students were having a meeting to discuss ways to improve various things in the department, among these, the Friday reception. “You know what we need at the reception?” I said, “Matching carbohydrates. What’s the deal with the salsa and bread, and tortilla chips and Brie?”

I saw a few light bulbs go off over my classmates’ heads. “Oh God, we’ve totally been doing that,” someone said.

“Yeah, the chips and butter have got to go," someone else chimed in.

I was too stressed out worrying about my dissertation to remember if we actually did anything about the matching carb situation. But in retrospect, that meeting should have been an “aha!” moment for me: my classmates didn’t think I was an idiot. They actually thought my ideas (about food, at least) had merit and were worthy of serious consideration.

And having seen what the rest of the academic world looks like, I now find myself missing that place I spent years hating and dreading. I miss the caffeinated buzz of our seminar discussions. I miss the thrill of being among the first to hear of new research by bigwigs in the field. I miss my grubby little grad student office and the distant echo of the UCLA marching band practicing on fall afternoons.

And now that I think of it, hummus on tortilla chips wasn’t half bad.

********

The connection between hummus and tortilla chips isn’t as farfetched as it may seem. Lebanese immigrants have a long history in Mexico, especially in the states of Puebla and Yucatán. I ate at a Yucatecan restaurant in Los Angeles once and was surprised to find kibbe (a Middle Eastern meatball made with ground lamb and bulgur) listed among the appetizers. A regional specialty of Puebla is tacos arabes – tacos served on pita bread rather than tortillas. And the Mexican standard tacos al pastor – tacos filled with spice-rubbed meat sliced off a vertical spit – was, by some accounts, inspired by Middle Eastern shawarma.

Hummus ma lahma is a hearty Lebanese treatment of hummus that tops the already rich chickpea puree with spiced ground beef. Here’s what I imagine a second- or third-generation Lebanese-Mexican in Yucatán might do with this dish: give the beef a local flavor with hot peppers, olives, raisins, and capers. The beef topping is inspired by the filling in a Yucatecan specialty, queso relleno (hollowed-out balls of Gouda filled with seasoned ground meat), and is inspired by Rick Bayless’ pork-based queso relleno filling.

HUMMUS MA LAHMA WITH YUCATECAN FLAVORS

FOR THE HUMMUS:

1 14-ounce can chickpeas, drained

3 tablespoons tahini

1 small clove garlic, minced

2 teaspoons lemon juice

1/3 cup water (or as needed)

salt to taste

1. Puree all ingredients except water and salt in a food processor until smooth. With the motor running, gradually add water as needed to obtain a soft but spreadable consistency.

2. Add salt to taste.

FOR THE SPICY BEEF TOPPING:

1 cup chopped onion

1 large hot banana chile, chopped

3 cloves garlic, chopped

3 tablespoons neutral cooking oil, such as canola

1 pound ground beef

1/3 teaspoon ground allspice

2/3 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1/3 cup raisins

1/8 cup capers

1/3 cup chopped green olives

1 large pinch dried (or chopped fresh) epazote (optional)

2 teaspoons vinegar

2 tablespoons tomato paste

1. Heat oil in a large pan over medium-high heat. Add the onion, chile, and garlic and cook until tender.

2. Add spices and stir several seconds until fragrant.

3. Add the ground beef and cook until no longer pink.

4. Stir in the remaining ingredients and simmer 20 minutes to blend the flavors. Taste and adjust seasonings if needed.

PRESENTATION:

Put the room-temperature hummus in a serving bowl (preferably a wide, shallow one, but any kind will do). Top with some of the hot beef mixture (you’ll have some left over; it makes a great filling for tacos, empanadas, or a ball of molten Gouda cheese). Garnish with sliced hot chiles and/or chopped cilantro. Serve with pita wedges and/or tortilla chips.

Their Lox Is Our Gain

2010-09-27T18:57:00.000-07:00

Every family cherishes its food traditions: a secret recipe, an immutable Christmas menu, or a weakness for the starvation foods of the old country.

My family is no different. Our traditions have been largely shaped by my mother, who has a passion for matzo ball soup and gefilte fish. My sisters and I grew up thinking of the former as the ultimate in comfort foods, and the latter as a quaint relic best appreciated by older generations.

This is actually much stranger than it sounds. My mother was born and raised in Macao, with Cantonese as her first language; and my American-born father's parents came from southern China. Although my parents' devotion to Chinese cuisine borders on addiction (and has led to ill-advised pursuits of dim sum in such places as Cairo and Budapest), at home, their refrigerator sometimes resembles the reach-in at the Carnegie Deli--with a few jars of pickled ginger and chili bean sauce thrown in.

When I was small, this seemed like a perfectly normal state of affairs: there was Chinese food, and "American" food. And what could be more American than a freshly toasted bagel piled high with lox and the up-from-the-bootstraps, straight-out-of-Horatio-Alger people who claimed it as their own? Since most of my schoolmates at the tiny grade school I attended were Jewish--and comprised the vast majority of the non-Chinese kids I knew--there was little in my experience to disabuse me of the notion that most white people regularly ate lox and matzo balls.

This is all my mother's fault--largely because she began her American experience with the same misconception. Although she was educated in Catholic schools and came to America to study at a Catholic university, her most vivid food memories from that time came from her summer vacations working at Jewish resorts in the Catskills. (Watching Mom’s play-by-play fact-checking of Dirty Dancing when it showed up on cable one night was one of the stranger memories of my youth.) The food at the resorts must have been tasty and plentiful, and my mother's line of reasoning in evaluating it, back in her naïve youth, probably went like this: (1) This is yummy! (2) And so exotic, compared to plain ole winter melon soup and braised sharks' fins and curried crabs! (3) And since it's what Americans eat on their vacations, it must be really fancy too!

Years of trolling the aisles of Williams-Sonoma and watching the Food Network disabused her of the last two of these notions. Yet somewhere in her psyche she must still believe them. Why else would someone who changes our Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner side dishes every year, according to the latest dictates of Bon Appétit or Food and Wine, continue--for over four decades--to serve bagels and lox every single Christmas morning?

I only realized the strangeness of this tradition when I enrolled in a Catholic high school, where most of my classmates had never even heard of lox. Until this point in my life, there didn't seem to be anything odd about fighting my sisters for a scrap of cold fish while listening to Handel's Messiah. So I tried to justify it: Jesus was Jewish, after all (yes! that must be it!), or more prosaically, toasting up a bunch of bagels is easier for a busy mom than making omelets. But there had to be more to it than that. My parents were genuinely fond of their little tradition. Deep in her heart, Mom probably still believes our Christmas morning bagels and lox are a treat to be cherished--and growing up, so did we.

And we do still. Our family's holiday celebrations continue to evolve and change, but our Christmas lox remains an unquestioned, immutable constant.

Two Christmases ago, my then-two-year-old nephew -- himself a fairly new addition to our holiday festivities -- had his initiation into this family tradition. In classic toddler fashion, he fussed over everything my poor sister tried to feed him that morning -- he didn't want cereal, took no interest in cut-up pieces of bagel, and made it abundantly clear he would rather watch TV than eat pieces of banana and orange. Just out of curiosity, my brother-in-law offered him a tiny morsel of lox -- barely the size of my pinkie nail. And to our surprise, he happily gobbled it down -- then opened his mouth for more.

*****************

One of the virtues of salmon, besides its yumminess, is its healthfulness: cold-water fish such as salmon are supposed to be good for promoting healthful cholesterol levels and otherwise keeping one alive and well. Another virtue of salmon is that because it is so richly flavored, a little can go a long way -- especially if the salmon is cured or smoked.

Here is a good post-Christmas dish: low in cholesterol and high in flavor. Its (trans-fat-free!) creaminess, combined with the savory notes of smoked salmon echo, vaguely, the flavor profile of cream cheese and lox. The egg-free fresh pasta recipe is inspired by one in The Artful Vegan: Fresh Flavors from the Millennium Restaurant, a book that can best be described as vegan food porn.

LEMON-PEPPER FETTUCINI WITH CREAMY SMOKED SALMON SAUCE

For the lemon-pepper fettucini:

1 cup fine semolina

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

finely grated and chopped zest of 1 lemons

1/4 cup water

1. Combine all ingredients. Knead on a clean surface for about two minutes, until the dough is smooth.

2. Divide the dough into four balls. Wrap them in plastic and allow them to rest about half an hour before rolling.

3. With a pasta machine, roll the dough into sheets of medium thickness, then cut them into 1/2-inch thick strands.

4. To cook: toss the strands into a large pot of boiling water and cook until tender, about 3 minutes.

5. To store the pasta for later, coil the strands loosely into nests (the goal is to keep the strands fairly separate so they will dry evenly and won't stick together) and place in a well-ventilated area until they are completely dry.

CREAMY SMOKED SALMON SAUCE

3/4 cup shredded smoked salmon

2 tablespoons minced shallots

2 cups unsweetened soy milk

salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

chopped fresh dill or parsley for garnish (optional)

1. Simmer the soy milk and shallots together in a heavy saucepan, stirring occasionally, until the the soy milk has the consistency of heavy cream. The volume will reduce by about a half.

2. Add the salmon and simmer until heated through. Add salt and pepper to taste.

3. Toss with the cooked pasta, top with optional parsley or dill, and serve immediately.

Serves 4 as an appetizer, or 2 as a main course.

Adventures in Flakiness and Sloth: Blitz Puff Pastry

2010-09-23T18:54:00.000-07:00

Making things makes me happy. Friends and family often give me knitting yarn and cookbooks for my birthday instead of sweaters and dinners out. Nothing is more soul-filling for me than watching some useful – and sometimes tasty – object coming into being in my hands.

But last week was one of those rare periods when I feeling too stressed and slothful to make anything. And because the universe is perverse, it’s always at times when I least feel like cooking that I most desperately crave something special to eat. And last week, I really wanted something flaky and sweet.

If I still lived back in Los Angeles or Vancouver, I’d simply go out and find a French bakery that made perfectly authentic pains au chocolat, or a dim sum place with tiny tarts filled with sunny yellow custard, warm from the oven. But I’m not in either of these places anymore. Gainesville has many virtues, but its primary contribution to the culinary world is Gatorade. Enough said.

So if I wanted a comforting, flaky little treat, I’d have to make it myself.

Before dragging my sorry carcass into the kitchen, I thought about what I could make that would be flaky and sweet, yet easy to make. Then I remembered my very favorite dough from cooking school, which I haven’t made in a criminally long time: blitz puff pastry.

Blitz puff pastry is a quickie shortcut variant of regular puff pastry, which is one of the best things a human being can eat. Regular puff pastry forms the flaky, buttery, sometimes puffed-up base for classic French pastries such as napoleons. It’s also used to enclose savories, such as beef Wellington.

The beauty of blitz puff can’t be appreciated without an understanding of its dressier counterpart. When you bite into a treat made with classic puff pastry, you will encounter hundreds of brittle, paper-thin layers of buttery goodness. To make these layers, a baker must spread a dough made from flour and water with soft, but not liquid butter, then repeatedly fold the dough over the butter, flatten it with a rolling pin, and fold it again. Each fold generates new layers of dough separated by butter. The puffiness comes from steam from the melting butter as the pastry bakes: the expanding steam, trapped between the dough layers, separates and puffs up the layers as they cook.

There’s one catch to making classic puff, though. It takes several hours (the dough needs to rest and chill between folds) and a bit of finesse to make. And I was in no mood for finesse. I just wanted something nice to eat. Now.

And that’s where blitz puff comes in.

Blitz puff is an elegant crossbreed between a pie dough and a classic puff pastry, and it has the added advantage of being harder to screw up than either of these. The first part of its production is rather like making a pie dough: you mix flour, water, and pieces of butter together so that the butter stays in distinct, large lumps suspended in the dough. The second part is a speeded-up version of puff pastry production: the butter-lump-filled dough is folded over itself, rolled flat, then refolded several times so that the butter flattens and forms layers within the dough. (As with regular puff, the trick here is to get the butter warm and soft enough to flatten out between the dough layers, but not so warm that it melts into the dough.) Since the dough doesn’t need to rest between folds, a batch of blitz puff can be yours in just minutes – especially if you have a reservoir of frustration that you’d like to vent with a rolling pin.

The resulting pastry, when baked, has the buttery flavor and most of the puffiness of a classic puff pastry, but the flaky, tender texture of a well-made pie crust. It lacks the brittle, articulated layers of classic puff, but takes only a fraction of the time to make.

‘Blitz’ is German for ‘lightning,’ which suggests how fast blitz puff is intended to be made. Back in cooking school, my favorite chef once did a demo on blitz puff: he invited my classmates and I to time him as he made a batch from beginning to end. He was a huge guy, well over six feet and built like a linebacker, and when he worked that blitz dough, he threw his entire 300-pound body weight –BOOM! – onto the workbench. In less than a minute, the one-man rumble was over, and a neat little rectangle of dough sat where a mass of flour, ice water, and butter had been only seconds before..

Then he made the dough into fruit turnovers that emerged from the oven so flaky, airy and light they practically floated off the baking sheet.

It took me more than a minute to make my blitz puff – including the time I needed to measure out my ingredients, it was more like 10 minutes. I used some of the dough to make some turnovers filled with end-of-the-season nectarines, and stashed the rest away in the freezer, wrapped tightly in plastic, for later.

Yes, I know my project would have been quicker still if I had simply used store-bought frozen puff pastry (which can be quite good). But even in the midst of my slothful funk, I knew this pastry was something I needed to make from scratch, by myself. Making things always makes things better.

*********

BLITZ PUFF PASTRY

3/4 cup bread flour

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup cake flour

½ teaspoon salt

½ cup ice water (more or less, as needed)

8 ounces (2 sticks) unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch thick slices

1. Combine the flours and salt in a large bowl.

2. Add the butter slices. Rub the slices into the flour until large, irregular flakes (just under 1 inch) form. The butter flakes should be soft enough to bend, but shouldn’t be allowed to get mushy.

3. Gradually sprinkle in enough ice water to hold the flour together. The flakes of butter should still remain distinct as you mix the water into the dough. Do not over-mix.

4. If the dough seems rubbery or the butter starts to liquify, cover the dough and refrigerate it for about half an hour. This will make it easier to roll (if rubbery) and keep the butter flakes intact.

5. To roll the dough: Lightly flour your work surface. If you chilled your dough, remove it from the refrigerator a few minutes before rolling. Then roll the dough into a 12-inch by 18-inch rectangle.

6. Fold the two short ends of the rectangle so that they almost meet in the middle. Then fold the rectangle in half at the point where the folded-in ends meet.

7. Rotate the dough 90 degrees and roll it out into a 12-inch by 18-inch rectangle again. Lightly flour the rolling surface or dough if the dough starts to stick.

8. Repeat steps 6 and 7 twice.

9. The blitz puff is now ready to use! If not using immediately, wrap the dough tightly in plastic and refrigerate or freeze.

LAZY NECTARINE TURNOVERS

2/3 batch blitz puff

3 large nectarines, peeled, pitted, and cut into ¼” pieces

1-1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter

3 tablespoons sugar (or to taste)

1 beaten egg (optional)

sugar for sprinkling (optional)

1. Preheat an oven to 400 degrees.

2.Heat the butter in a nonstick pan over medium heat. When it sizzles, add the nectarines and sugar. Cook until the nectarines are tender and the sugar is dissolved. Taste as you go and add more sugar if needed. Set mixture aside to cool

3. Roll out the blitz puff on a floured surface into a 12-inch square. Cut the square into four 6-inch squares.

4. Spoon about 2 heaping tablespoons of the cooled nectarine filling into the middle of each square. Fold each square in half diagonally and firmly seal the edges. Do not overfill the turnovers or they’ll leak when baked.

5. Place the turnovers several inches apart from each other on a baking sheet. If desired, brush them lightly with beaten egg and sprinkle the egg wash with sugar. (The egg becomes golden and glossy when baked.)

6. Bake the turnovers for about 20 minutes, or until puffed and browned.

Multicultural Baklava in Honor of a Good ‘Hood

2010-09-13T18:52:00.000-07:00

A Canadian friend from college liked to say that Canada is more of a salad bowl than a melting pot. I wasn't sure what he meant by this at the time -- but I finally understood years later, when I moved to Vancouver for a teaching position at the University of British Columbia.

The neighborhood I moved to, Kitsilano, was unlike any I’d ever encountered in the States. It was centered on a street portentously named Broadway, and this was, predictably, a wide, busy thoroughfare. What was odd to my urban American sensibilities, though, was the tiny scale of the buildings and shops lining this major artery. There were a few big chain supermarkets and fast-food outlets, but the vast number of businesses along Broadway were small, quirky, and family owned. As I was soon to discover, Kitsilano was walk-able and wonderful.

What I loved most about Broadway was its colorful and varied inventory of little food shops. There was a Safeway supermarket only a block from my place, but I discovered it was cheaper and way more fun to shop like the locals: I’d buy my vegetables and fruit at a little Chinese-owned produce stand; my coffee, spices, and pasta at another Chinese-owned grocery/imported food emporium just down the road; and my cheese and other dairy products at a Greek-owned grocery that always had the freshest feta and house-made yogurt. For treats, I could go to a tiny, well stocked wine shop; an old-school Italian delicatessen and bakery, or a terrific Malaysian hole-in-the-wall that made succulent Hainan chicken rice and laksa noodle soup.

While strolling between these shops, I’d peek into the numerous Greek bakeries scattered throughout the neighborhood, all featuring unfamiliar but beautiful little pastries and cookies, and around Easter, big braided wreaths of bread studded with bright red hard-boiled eggs. On Saturday mornings, when I did my weekly grocery run, the tables at these bakeries were filled with old men in porkpie hats, conversing energetically in Greek over coffee and pastries. Occasionally, one would bark out an order to the person behind the counter, who was usually young and hip-looking enough to be one of my students—and this hip young person would answer back deferentially in Greek.

Walking into any of these places was like visiting another country: the sights, smells, and language spoken in each of them were distinct. Of course, I had shopped at ethnic markets and bakeries of every sort back in Los Angeles, where I grew up —but I’d never seen so many, representing such a diverse range of cultures, so close to each other, and so vibrantly integrated into the greater community. People young and old spoke to their compatriots in Greek or Cantonese and to everyone else in fluent English. And Anglo-Canadian customers at these little shops were perfectly at ease with this. Nobody ever asked the Greek cheese-maker where the Kraft singles were. Nobody ever shook a fist at one of those old men in porkpie hats, yelling, “This is Canada! Speak Canadian!”.

Back in Los Angeles, entering an ethnic grocery could be a fraught experience. Shopkeepers and regular customer sometimes seemed to resent or distrust outsiders. Even in Chinese markets, I’d get the cold shoulder because of my near-non-existent Chinese language skills. But on my weekend forays through the little shops of Kitsilano, I had no such worries. If I asked dumb questions about some basic Greek or Indonesian food product, someone would politely answer them – in English. And this kindly soul would usually make a sale.

At first, I merely marveled at this alien social dynamic and assumed it was a happy quirk of the neighborhood. But it later dawned on me that the cheek-by-jowl Chinese and Greek markets of Kitsilano and the welcoming attitude of local shopkeepers embodied my Canadian friend’s vision of his homeland as a grand tossed salad. Each immigrant culture proudly contributed its unique color and vision to the Canadian landscape, while remaining comfortably distinctive – and comfortable with the cultures and mores of its neighbors.

Later still, I realized why I sometimes got that weird treatment in ethnic markets back in the States: it wasn’t that the owners and regulars had anything personal against outsiders. It was that they feared their cultural distinctiveness would be lost forever in the American melting pot. And they decided -- wrongly and regrettably -- that the only way to keep what was precious to them was to keep everyone else at bay.

I’ve thought often about those little shops in Kitsilano since moving away, and I miss them still. Of course, Canada is not without ethnic tensions of its own, and the US has its share of thriving multicultural communities. My current hometown is one of these. But try as I might, I’ve never been able to find a place here where I could buy hand-made baklava and freshly pressed tofu and gai lan within walking distance of each other, with the hum of Greek and Cantonese conversation in the background.

***************

One of the things I miss most about Kitsilano is the huge number of places where one can sate a craving for sweets. In honor of my old neighborhood, I’ve engineered a love child between Greek baklava and Chinese dessert dim sum, inspired by Kitsilano’s two dominant food cultures. It has the structural bones of a classic Greek baklava (crunchy layers of buttery phyllo dough drenched in a spiced syrup) with a classic sweet dim sum filling of peanuts, coconut, and sesame. It's the type of little sweet that is often offered to visitors in both Chinese and Greek homes. And in both cultures, it would be the height of rudeness to turn it down.

FAR EAST BAKLAVA

Filling:

1-1/4 cup roasted unsalted peanuts

1/3 cup sweetened flaked coconut

2 tablespoons roasted sesame seeds

1 tablespoon sugar

1. Put all ingredients into a food processor and pulse until the nuts and coconut are finely chopped, but not pasty. Set mixture aside until you’re ready to assemble the baklava.

Syrup:

¾ cup sugar

¾ cup water

¼ cup honey

½ stick cinnamon

2 slices peeled, fresh ginger (each should be about the size of a nickel and about ¼ inch thick)

2 teaspoons lime juice

1. Combine all ingredients in a heavy saucepan and bring to a boil.

2. Remove pan from heat as soon as the mixture starts to boil. Do not allow it to reduce.

3. When the syrup is cool, transfer it to a storage container and put it in the refrigerator. The syrup needs to be cold when poured over the cooked baklava, so should be made ahead of time.

Assembly:

½ pound phyllo dough, thawed

6 ounces (1-1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted

Equipment: a 9-1/2 x 14 inch baking pan or slightly larger cookie sheet

1. Grease the baking pan or cookie sheet. Carefully unroll the phyllo dough, keeping it covered as you work so it doesn’t dry out and become brittle. Keep the butter warm and liquid as you work.

2. Place a sheet of phyllo in the bottom of the greased baking pan. Smooth it out to remove any wrinkles, and brush its entire surface with melted butter. (The brand of phyllo I used came in sheets that fit a 9-1/2 x 14 inch pan almost exactly; if your sheets are larger, cut them to fit.) Repeat this process until you have 10 layers of buttered phyllo. When layering the phyllo sheets, try to avoid getting air pockets between the layers.

3. Sprinkle 1/3 of the filling evenly over the10 layers of buttered phyllo.

4. Top the filling with a sheet of phyllo, brush the sheet with melted butter, then top with a second sheet of phyllo and brush that with butter as well.

5. Repeat 3-4 once.

6. Sprinkle the remaining 1/3 of the filling evenly over the phyllo layer, then top with 5 sheets of phyllo, buttering each sheet as you go.

7. Freeze the assembled baklava for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

8. When the baklava is partly frozen, remove it from the freezer. Using a serrated knife, trim the edges and score it into 2-inch squares, cutting through all layers of phyllo. If desired, score each of the squares into two triangles.

9. Bake the baklava until the top layer is golden brown, about 50 minutes.

10. While the baklava is still warm, pour the cold syrup evenly over it so that all pieces are covered. Allow the baklava to cool before serving.

Letter from Gainesville: We Are Not All Crazy (A Non-Culinary Rant)

2010-09-10T18:49:00.000-07:00

The time has come to state the obvious. For the past few days, my inbox has been filled with anxious messages from friends and family: the crazy Koran burners are from Gainesville! OMG! What are you going to do? I can't believe Gainesville is so filled with crazy people!

My answer: It's not. For those who don't know the city, here's the deal: Gainesville is a small city centered around the University of Florida, both physically and spiritually (UF Homecoming Day is a holiday for the entire public school system and even the city's recycling bins come in UF's colors, orange and blue). The city's population can be impressionistically broken down into the following subgroups:

Retirees: 25,000

Normal working adults and their families: 50,000

Tobacco chewin' good ole boys who hate those socialist college types but love them Gators!: 15,000

UF faculty who've developed a taste for boiled peanuts but hate those darned local hicks: 2,000

People who claim they're taking class notes on their laptops, but are actually updating their Facebook pages: 25,000

People who are, honest to God, going to file their dissertations this semester, which won't be a repeat of last semester, honest! : 500

Members of fringe religious cults that have lost their tax-exempt status and whose property is currently under foreclosure: 50

Guess which of these groups is the public face of Gainesville these days?

And what are the rest of us doing about it? Yesterday, there was this , and for a while, there has been this and this. Meanwhile, UF's Muslim student group, Islam on Campus, is planning to spend Saturday feeding the homeless and holding a candlelight vigil. They've also advised Muslim groups from out of town not to dignify the burning with their presence.

But of course, measured speeches from the pulpit and grad students in hijabs making sack lunches don't make for particularly dramatic TV. Neither do most reasonable, responsible actions people take on a regular basis. What does get attention is the loud, the obnoxious, and the stupid. Stupid ideas tend to be simple and make good sound bites ("Islam is of the devil!"), while nuanced, truthful ideas don't ("Islam has some radical anti-American adherents, but most of its followers are peaceable").

And since media attention equals legitimacy in the public eye, loud, obnoxious, and stupid people and ideas are seen as forces to be reckoned with. Terry Jones and The Situation are of a piece.

Sadly, this is why the voices of the vast majority of Gainesville's population are being drowned out. It's not that we don't care.

It's just that we're not stupid enough.

One Ton of Manly Labor

2010-09-05T18:47:00.000-07:00

My father grew up in a restaurant. His parents owned the Golden Dragon, a sprawling Chinese eatery in Portland, Oregon that offered egg rolls and grilled-cheese sandwiches on its official menu and bitter melon with black-bean sauce and birds’ nest soup on its unofficial one. He tells stories of after-school hours spent peeling water chestnuts and washing dishes with his brothers and sisters while the flare of hot woks and the rhythm of cleavers filled the busy kitchen. On New Year’s Eve, the kids stayed up all night, serving sweet-and-sour pork and cocktails to mobs of hungry revelers.

Dad’s apprenticeship at the hands of a gifted chef father and savvy manager mother gave him a lifelong love and appreciation of good food and restaurants – and drove him to stay as far away from the culinary biz as possible.

By the time my sisters and I appeared on the scene, Dad generally stayed out of the kitchen. His culinary responsibilities were limited to standard dad stuff – grilling burgers and steaks in the backyard – and a single indoors task: folding wontons.

Wontons – square pasta wrappers folded into elegant little pods around a savory mixture of ground pork, vegetables, and sometimes seafood – are dead easy to make, but there’s a catch: there are no shortcuts for folding them the right way. Our hungry family of six could go through a boatload of them in a single meal, but there was no way Mom could fill and fold all of these herself – not with so much housework to deal with and so much childhood misbehavior to monitor.

So the folding fell to Dad – who brought to the enterprise serious mass wonton-folding chops, courtesy of the Golden Dragon.

I can still see the set-up: it’s Saturday (or Sunday) afternoon, and Dad is at the kitchen table. Mom’s filling, smelling tantalizingly of scallions and sesame oil, sits in a glistening pink mound in a mixing bowl in front of him. Next to the mixing bowl is an open packet of wonton skins, which Dad keeps covered with a towel so they won’t dry out and crack when folded. At his side is a small bowl filled with beaten egg and a kitchen knife (the egg is the glue that holds the wontons together), and somewhere nearby on the table is a baking sheet soon to be filled with perfectly folded wontons.

By time I got to grade school, I wanted to fold wontons too. I was a bit of a tomboy and seriously into origami, and folding wontons fed both these impulses: because Dad was the chief wonton folder in the household, I somehow got it into my head that wonton-making was one of those noble masculine arts, like bug-collecting and compass navigation, that would be worth aspiring too. And properly folded wontons are a thing of geometric beauty. By time I was eight or so, I’d be sitting beside him, folding away. It made me feel powerful and useful.

For whatever reason, none of my sisters ever took an interest in wonton folding, so I got to see something they didn’t. My parents were masters at keeping up a unified front before us kids, but when it came to wonton folding, this seemingly impenetrable facade ever so slightly cracked. Dad often warned me not to overfill the skins, lest they burst wastefully when boiled in soup or deep fried, Meanwhile, Mom, who grew up on decadent meals Dad could only dream of in his youth, always scolded him for the stingy amount of filling he used.

“Fred! This isn’t the Golden Dragon!”

It took me a while to figure out how to fill and fold wontons in a way that kept both Mom and Dad happy. The optimal amount of filling had to be small enough not to cause the wrapper to tear or the seams to come loose when folded, but big enough to offer diners a generous meaty bite or two. In wonton folding, as in a functional family life, patience and little compromises are the boring but sure secrets to success.

***********

Mom always made ginormous batches of wontons so she could keep some in the freezer for later. To freeze uncooked wontons, lay them on a baking sheet so they don’t touch and put the sheet in the freezer until the wontons are frozen solid. Once frozen, the wontons can be transferred to a freezer bag for storage. On a cold weeknight when you don’t feel like cooking, take some out of the bag, allow them to thaw, and throw them into a pot of simmering broth for a comforting dinner.

I’ve adjusted the recipe to make a more modest number of wontons—only about 100. I’ve also included instructions for the two most common ways of serving them, cooked in soup and fried. The soup recipe serves 2-4; the fried wonton recipe makes as many or as few as you need. Unless you’re serving dozens of people, you’ll still have some wontons left over for the freezer.

Folding all of these will entail about an hour of meditative handiwork for one person, or a pleasant bonding experience for two.

LEE FAMILY WEEKEND WONTONS

For the filling:

1 pound ground pork

1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger

1 clove garlic, minced

2 tablespoons minced scallions, both white and green parts

¾ cup finely shredded Chinese (Napa) cabbage

2 tablespoons soy sauce

2 teaspoons sesame oil

¼ teaspoon ground white pepper

2 tablespoons cornstarch

For the wontons:

1 package wonton wrappers (available in the refrigerated or frozen foods sections of Asian specialty grocers or better supermarkets)

1 beaten egg or ¼ cup water

For wonton soup:

1 liter chicken broth

2 scallions, thinly sliced

sliced, cooked meat and/or chopped vegetables of your choice (optional)

For fried wontons:

Neutral cooking oil (such as canola) for deep frying

Sweet and sour and/or hoisin sauce

1. Thoroughly combine all the filling ingredients in a medium mixing bowl.

2. Get ready to fold a wonton: Take a wonton wrapper and hold it in your non-dominant hand. Place about 1 heaping teaspoon of filling in the center of the skin. Using a knife or small pastry brush, wet the edges of the skin with water or egg.

3. The first fold is simple: Fold the skin in half diagonally so that it completely encases the filling. Press the edges together, being mindful to squeeze out any air bubbles between the filling and the skin. Be sure the edges are completely sealed, with no gaps.

4. The second fold tends to throw people. Your half-folded wonton now looks like a triangular turnover, with one perpendicular corner and two “arms” (long, sharp corners). Dip one of the “arms” of the wonton into egg or water. Then pull it towards the other arm and press the arms together so that the top surface of one of them is firmly glued to the bottom surface of the other.

The finished wonton should look something like this:

5. Repeat 2-4 until the filling and/or wonton skins are exhausted. (Any leftover skins can be wrapped tightly in plastic and stored in the freezer for use with the next batch. Any leftover filling can be rolled into small balls and dropped into soup as meatballs.) Keep folded wontons and skins covered while you work so they don’t dry out.

6. For wonton soup: Heat broth in a heavy saucepan or pot until it starts to boil. Carefully place about 12 wontons in the pot along with any meat and/or vegetables you’d like to add. (Mom used wonton soup as a convenient repository for leftovers.) When the wontons float to the top of the broth and look wrinkly and translucent, they’re done. Toss the scallions over the soup as a garnish. This amount will serve two or three people as a hearty lunch, or four people as an opener to a larger meal.

7. For fried wontons: Heat about 2 inches of oil in a heavy saucepan over medium-high heat. When it’s hot enough to make a drop of water sizzle on impact, add wontons, one at a time. The number that you can add will depend on the size of your pan, but you don’t want them close enough to touch each other. Fry until the undersides are golden brown; flip and fry until the second side is also golden brown. Immediately remove from the oil, drain well on paper towels, and serve hot with sweet and sour or hoisin sauce.

The Most Exotic Thing I've Ever Eaten

2010-08-30T08:38:00.000-07:00

Far-away cultures and folkways intrigue me. But there is one culture in particular that captured my imagination and filled me with fascination and envy. For as long as I’ve known about them, I wondered what it would be like to live among these romantic souls. To breathe in their folkways, so different from mine. To speak their language and sing their songs.

And oh, their food. I wanted to taste their food. The way they wrote about their food made me drool. But none of the restaurants I frequented in my Los Angeles childhood served it. Nobody I knew made it. Mom occasionally made ethnic dishes from the classical European repertoire—osso buco, coq au vin—but wouldn’t go anywhere near the dishes I dreamed about. You wouldn’t like them anyways, she said.

But two years ago, I had the opportunity to live among these people. They tended to live in the rural outskirts of town, and no longer kept many restaurants in our area. Their best dishes, as is the case with many cultures, were well-kept secrets served at home.

Then I discovered that my bird-watching buddy Luz, a Colombian biologist, shared my fascination. It was an autumn Saturday, and we were wrapping up a happy morning looking for migrating wood warblers.

“Oh, I found this restaurant that has this crazy food!” she told me. “It’s right by I-75! I’m going with my friend Valerie for lunch—want to come?”

Would I? I’d never had a whole meal of this mysterious cuisine, and this would be my chance. “That would be awesome—what’s this place called?”

She inhaled in happy anticipation. “Cracker Barrel!”

Yes—Luz and I were fetishists for the food and culture of the American South. I always wondered what it would be like to be a real Southern lady who made fluffy biscuits and towering layer cakes, and served friends fresh-squeezed lemonade on the back porch of an ancient family plantation. Luz went so far as to marry a guy from Tennessee. Her now-former mother-in-law made killer fried green tomatoes.

Luz’s friend Valerie was a biology postdoc from Toulouse, and offerings at Cracker Barrel were even more exotic for her than for us.

“Dumplins? What eez ‘dumplins’?” she asked, peering at the menu.

“Well, they’re kind of like—well it’s hard to describe.” Luz said. “But you have to try the fried okra!”

I knew this was the tourist version of Southern cuisine, and it only whetted my appetite for the real thing. This meant I’d have to find a friendly local who could teach me more about it.

But where would I find such a person? Rumor had it the old-line Southern natives in my little college town resented – and hence, avoided – the Yankees and foreigners attached to the university. After all, people who put tempeh on their pizza and drink unsweetened iced tea are not to be trusted.

Then I remembered that I actually knew a real live Southern lady who didn’t hate me. And I’d been sitting across the table from her on Monday nights for months.

Susie Baxter heads a writing group I belong to, and is a proud native Floridian, born and raised in rural Suwanee County. (This is the north-central part of the state, just east of the panhandle.) One of the first things newcomers learn about Florida is that the more north you are, the more South you are: Suwanee County is closer geographically and culturally to neighboring Alabama and Georgia than to far-away Miami or Palm Beach.

Susie’s memoir-in-progress about her childhood in Suwannee County is a delicious mélange of everything Southern: quiet dirt roads, a homemade rope swing hanging from an ancient oak in the yard, dusty tobacco fields, mysterious bullet holes in floorboards, and of course, lots of food—all cooked lovingly on a wood-burning stove, and almost all grown on the family property.

Meals in Susie’s childhood were filled with all those mysterious Southern foods I’d read about for years, but never seen served anywhere – let alone tasted. Among these are hoecakes.

I discovered that the term ‘hoecake’ is used across the South to refer to a number of different griddled flatbreads, ranging from simple mixtures of cornmeal and water to white-flour-based breads resembling giant scones. The name ‘hoecake’ recalls the old tradition of cooking the cakes on the back of a hoe. (Most sources spell it as two words, but Susie spells it as one, and I’m following her lead – and recipe –here.)

Susie's family’s version is a cornmeal-based griddle cake enriched with eggs and milk. Her family often had them with meals in place of biscuits or bread. Here is Susie’s description of her family’s recipe, from her upcoming memoir, “I, Susanette...”

"Mama often made hoecakes for supper, instead of cornbread or biscuits that required a hot oven, which heated up the house. To make hoecakes, Mama measured the ingredients very precisely—a handful of freshly ground cornmeal, a half a handful of flour, a clump of lard, an egg or two, a pinch of salt and baking powder, and just enough fresh cow milk to make the mixture into a batter.

She checked the temperature of the iron skillet by sprinkling a few drops of water in it. When the water danced, she knew it was hot enough. She poured the batter into five separate puddles, cutting off the stream as each puddle spread to three or four inches. In less than a minute, bubbles formed on the surface of the puddles and began to pop, an indication that it was time to flip them. Her hoecakes always turned out brown and crispy on the outside but soft and warm inside..."

Like biscuits and cornbread, hoecakes can be eaten with either savory or sweet accompaniments. At her childhood meals, Susie used them to block out the taste of turnip greens, which she hated. If she managed to get down enough of those dreaded greens, she also got to have hoecakes for dessert, drizzled with cane syrup.

Susie’s mother made her hoecakes from homegrown corn (which her family brought to the mill to be ground into meal) and home-pressed cane syrup. For city girls like me and Luz, this is as strange, exotic, and wondrous as food can possibly get.

**********

Amazingly, I lucked out on my first attempt to re-create Susie’s mother’s recipe. Since Susie is small-boned and petite; I guessed her mother may have been as well, so “a handful” would have been about half a cup at most. To get the combination of crunchiness and softness, the batter would need a lot of fat and tenderizers such as milk and eggs – so I interpreted “a clump” of lard to mean about a quarter of a cup. I’m not sure exactly how close this comes to the original, but it does fit Susie’s description perfectly: the cakes are brittle and crunchy on the outside, soft and almost creamy on the inside. They look like ordinary pancakes, but their texture is distinctly different--and a lot more interesting.

Susie’s Mama’s Hoecakes

½ cup cornmeal

¼ cup all-purpose flour

¼ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon baking powder

¼ cup lard or vegetable shortening

1 egg

¾ cup milk

¼ cup neutral cooking oil. such as canola

1. Mix together the dry ingredients in a medium bowl.
2. Add the shortening and rub it into the cornmeal mixture with your fingers until it is completely incorporated.

3. Add the egg and milk and stir until a smooth batter forms. It should be about the consistency of pancake batter.

4. Heat a heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Add the oil when the skillet is hot.

5. When the oil is hot enough to cause a drop of water to sputter on contact, start cooking the hoecakes. For each hoecake, pour a large spoonful of batter into the hot skillet. It should spread into a 3-4 inch round and almost immediately start bubbling. When the top of the hoecake is riddled with bubbles and looks nearly dry, flip it over and cook until the second side is golden brown.

6. Keep the finished hoecakes warm in the oven until all are done. Serve hot as a side dish with supper, or if you’ve been very good, for dessert with syrup.

Relishing Bad Peaches, or Memories I Wish I Didn't Have

2010-08-26T08:35:00.000-07:00

They say eating peaches straight from the tree is a magical experience. They lied.

The peach trees in my life have been filled with peaches and disappointment in equal measure. When I was growing up, one of our neighbors was blessed with a runty but prolific peach tree. It was barely six feet tall, but managed to produce hundreds of small yellow peaches every summer.

And every summer the same thing happened. Our neighbor Mrs. Yung would tell us that if the birds didn’t eat them, she was going to have her gardener pick and dump those peaches. They’d tried to eat them before, she’d tell us, and they were terrible—all bitter and mealy.

And every year, Mrs. Yung’s eighty-something mother-in-law would sneak over to our house with a big paper bag full of peaches. She had lived through wartime in China and couldn’t bear to see food wasted.

One year I was the one who opened the door when she made the drop. She didn’t speak English and knew I didn’t speak much Cantonese, so she simply pushed the bag into my hands and raised an index finger to her lips. I knew the secret wasn’t one to keep from my parents, but from her daughter-in-law.

And bless Grandma Yung’s heart, but those peaches were downright wretched.

I told this story many years later to some colleagues at California State University, Fresno, where I’d landed my first full-time teaching gig after grad school.

“Oh, I can tell you why those peaches were so bad,” one of them said. “It’s because they weren’t culled. If you grow stone fruit, you have to cull the fruit as they grow. Otherwise the tree works too hard and none of the fruit can produce enough sugar. Tell your old neighbors they have to leave only a few peaches on each branch. That way, they’ll have a smaller number of good peaches rather than a bunch of bad ones.”

Fresno is in the heart of California’s farming belt, in an area known for its copious crops of stone fruit. It is also known for urban sprawl and an utter disdain for zoning restrictions, so my new-ish condo complex was right across the street from a working peach orchard. In early spring, the orchard burst into bloom, and humongous clouds of pink-and-white flowers greeted me on my run every morning. By late spring, the blossoms fell to the ground like snowdrifts and were replaced by tiny green fruit. On my morning runs, I’d see dozens of workers on ladders working intently on the trees, no doubt culling the majority of the fruit to ensure the sweetness of the rest.

And one day in mid-summer, a large sign appeared by the normally-chained-off driveway leading into the heart of the orchard: FRESH PEACHES FOR SALE—OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

YES!

My husband and I wandered down the tree-shaded driveway and bought a purple paper bag holding eight big peaches. They were still rock-hard, but we were sure they’d be great in a few days. We decided to research peach pie recipes while waiting for them to ripen.

We waited. And waited. Then some of the peaches went from rock-hard to flaccid and shriveled. I peeled and sliced them, and made my pie. Meh. Sour and boring and just...meh.

And don’t get me started on the last batch of peaches I bought, just last week. Georgia peaches, no less.

“These are awful,” my husband said after tasting one. “People around here don’t know anything about peaches.”

“They’re Georgia peaches. Georgia is supposed to be famous for peaches.”

“Well, I bet they send all the bad ones to Florida.”

So we were stuck again with another batch of mediocre peaches. Like Grandma Yung, I hate wasting food, even lame and disappointing food, so I had to think of a way to make those peaches palatable.

I cut up two of them and put them in a coffee cake with good results. When raw, the peaches were dry and mealy, but baking brought out what little juice they had and improved their texture. Surrounding them with oodles of butter and cinnamon sugar didn’t hurt, either.

But what to do with the rest of them? Whatever I did would have to mitigate all the flaws of my bad peaches – lack of sweetness and flavor, miserable mealy texture, and plain old ugliness – while bringing out whatever good qualities they had. I knew whatever I came up with would unlikely be a recipe for the ages. Dishes made from mediocre ingredients rarely are. My goal was an honorable rescue mission, rather like helping a D student gain the skills needed to earn a B.

My coffee cake showed that cooking bad peaches improves them, so that would be my first strategy. Mushy, mealy peaches don’t hold their shape well when cut up and cooked (or when cut-up and left raw, for that matter), so I needed a preparation in which the shape of the peach pieces wouldn’t matter. I also needed something that would add flavor and texture to the mushy peach pieces, and that would compensate for – or exploit – their lack of sweetness and peachy aroma.

I decided upon a peach-based relish: the peaches would form a sunny and fruity-enough base for a tangy, spiced-up condiment. Minced onions and red bell pepper add savory notes and texture. Sexiness and spice come from an only-in-Florida specialty: datil chiles, which are grown commercially only in the area immediately surrounding St. Augustine. Datils are close relatives to habaneros and are just as hot – but a bit sweeter. Like habaneros, datils have a fruity aroma (which helped bring out what little my boring peaches had) and a lingering, smoldering heat that tends to sneak up on you. It’s just what you need to breathe a little life into dull peaches.

Peach Rescue Relish

2 cups peeled and chopped fresh peaches

¼ cup finely diced red onion

¼ cup finely diced red bell pepper

1/8 cup finely diced celery

1 seeded and finely chopped datil or habanero chile (use half if you are averse to heat!)

2 tablespoons canola or other neutrally flavored cooking oil

¼ teaspoon ground allspice

1-2 tablespoons brown sugar

½-1 tablespoon cider vinegar

1. Heat a wide saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the oil, then add the onion, bell pepper, celery, and chile. Sauté, stirring, until the vegetables have softened and become translucent.

2. Add the peaches and allspice to the vegetables. Stir to combine. Lower heat to medium and cook, stirring regularly, until the peaches give off their juice and start to dissolve. Add water if they start to stick to the pan.

3. Taste the mixture and add enough sugar and vinegar to give a good balance of sweetness and tanginess. (“Good” can mean anything you want it to, so this can go as sweet or as tart as you like.)

4. Store the relish covered in the refrigerator. Serve with ham, grilled chicken, or with good bread and cheese.