Foodie Tuesday: Dreams of a Drowning Sandwich

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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.