Bitter Greens

Pie without a net

Apparently summer in Ireland smells like gooseberries. Ross and I went to the farmer's market Saturday where they had gooseberries in quantity. In the US, I've only seen a few, and never tasted them. They also had fresh blackcurrants, which I've never seen or tasted. I asked Ross if we could make pie with both, and he said it's not traditional but sure. These two photos show before & after trimming the fruit, and were taken an hour and a half apart. No fucking around either, just 90 minutes of straight work resulting in a miniscule pile of discarded stems. This explains why no one grows this stuff in the US.

I make enough pie that I felt like I could wing it - no recipe, no scale, no measuring cups, no tools. That's called hubris, folks. Here's what to do: Chill 1 250g packet of cultured butter and chop it into smallish cubes. Put it in a bowl with 3 teacups lightly spooned full of Type 405 weizenmehl (white flour with some finely-ground bran) and a pinch of salt. Use 2 knives held between your fingers to integrate the butter into the flour mixture (I learned this from TK in college). Add very cold water until the dough comes together, separate into 2 balls and refrigerate while you look for something to bake the pie in because you certainly don't have a pie plate. Thank God Ross brought all that great cookware over from Ireland including an all-metal 8.5" frying pan. Preheat the oven to 190C and roll out your pastry with a flour-dusted wine bottle. Use flour to dust the hell out of your pastry since you obviously underestimated how big those teacups were.

Add a teacup and a half of sugar, a tiny pinch of salt, and make up the pie. While it's baking, send your friend to the grocery store to buy a whisk since 1337 as you may be, there's no fucking way you're whipping cream with a fork. Serve it with a nice sweet Sauternes and sprinkle the plated pie with sugar and because it's mind-bendingly sour.

If you're really making pie with these delicious berries, I recommend you use at least 2c of sugar for 500g fruit (yes, I know, that's crazy). You could also cut the filling half and half with grated apples, though you'll stil have to use way more sugar than you'd ever consider. I wish I had the time & equipment to make jam out of this fruit before the season is over, because the taste is really stunning - viny, fresh, weedy, wild. Well worth the work, and that's saying a lot.

2 Experiments

I'm here in Berlin with very limited kitchen equipment, unpredictable food varieties, and no spices, so it's like I'm in college again, improvising, experimenting with simple combinations and base ingredients I'm not too familiar with. Eggplant, I repeat too often, can either be the best vegetable or the worst vegetable, depending on how it's prepared. I never cook eggplant because it's just so bad when it's bad. When Natalie was visiting during my first few weeks here, we tried making eggplant parmesan. We made the breadcrumbs with a mini-baguette, the sun, and the back of a spoon, and even so it turned out delicious, so I was inspired to try cooking the mysterious vegetable again.
First I diced up one small eggplant, salted it, and tossed it with olive oil. I roasted it in the oven just above 200 celsius until it was all brown and caramelized as shown. Meanwhile, I sauteed a finely diced small onion and a few cloves of garlic, roughly chopped and mashed with the side of the blade, in olive oil til they were translucent. I then threw in half a 500g jar of tomato puree, gave it a little rinse since I don't have a spatula and used the tomatoey water to deglaze the eggplant's roasting plate, then added that too. I cooked it at a very low temperature for an hour or two - I really wanted the eggplant to melt into the tomato sauce because it gets creamy, almost sticky. Then poured it over pasta. Would've been nice with cheese, but I consoled myself by noting what a nice treat it is to eat a satisfying vegan meal every now and then, especially here in Schweinland.
I'm a big fan of white bean soup with cabbage. Or with turnips. It's extra good with cured pig of any kind. Easy enough here, right?
So I soak little white beans, then add them with 3 chopped potatoes, 2 carrots, a chunk of magerer speck and some vegetable-broth-powder to a pot of water. It was Sunday evening, so I couldn't go out for the missing onions. I brought it to a boil, then turned the heat all the way to low and left it cooking overnight. The solid ceramic burners on my electric stove suck ass for sauteeing, but they're ideal for this sort of thing. A couple hours after I went to bed, I started smelling something I have no interest in eating: baked beans. The American/English kind, comes in a can with a chunk of pork fat, full of sweet yuckiness.
Apparently that flavor comes not only from the saucy ingredients, but also from the beans themselves. So in the morning I added some lovely chopped savoy cabbage and let that cook in for a while. Still gross. Then I took my remaining speck, cut it into slices (where it becomes familiar as bacon), fried it, and fried some onions in the fat. I left all that to mingle a while, then I took it downstairs to the compost bin and dumped it, assuming that if onions fried in bacon fat couldn't make soup good then nothing could.

I love Denmark

I skipped out of work at noon on Friday.  The last couple of weeks have been so tiring that just leaving work early was magical enough.  I rented a car and hoped it would have an aux input jack (don't all new cars have them nowadays?), but it didn't.  I popped into the used CD store across the street for a quickie 10 minutes/€50 driveby that turned out awesome.

8 hours later I was in tiny, windy, rainy Låsby, Denmark.  It was 11:30pm and just finally getting dark. 
I really like Denmark.  It's all low plains, rolling hills, and dairy farms, like the part of Vermont that I'm from.  Most importantly, the food is awesome.  There isn't much fancy about it, just meat, cheese, and sour rye bread, but the water is clean and the animals well-treated, so everything tastes great.  In Heat, Bill Buford quotes a butcher saying that Denmark has the best beef in the world, and it's certainly the best I've ever had.  Berit & Sune took me freezer-shopping in their garage where they have 1/4 of a cow tucked away.  We picked out 1 obscenely huge Fiorentina, a couple NY Strips, and a pair of minute steaks.
Saturday afternoon we stopped by a farm near Berit's parents house and got some potatoes.  There's a sign up assuring shoppers that the potatoes are dug several times a day for maximum freshness - the skins slip right off under running water.  They cook up creamy and silky, hardly in need of butter, salt, and parsley, but happy to accept them all.

For the steak, I made a simple red wine gravy, with a half an onion sauteed in beef fat (yes I did), stock Berit had made beforehand, and all the pan drippings accumulated when the steak was resting from its stint on the grill.  It wasn't the best gravy I've ever made, not quite strong enough, but Sune was happy to have talked me into making gravy at all.  Myself, I was happy to be drinking from Berit's excellent collection of Italian wines.

For dessert - strawberries.  Also freshly picked from the farm, with a bit of amazing local honey, and a splash of milk.  I'm not a milk drinker ordinarily, but mmmmm.  The honey is weedy and sharp, cleaning up the milky heaviness.  Heavenly.

Grocery adventures in Berlin

One of the reasons I thought I’d want to come here is that they eat food I like, and they eat plenty of healthy food. Anyplace whose default breakfast is whole grain bread and cheese is aces in my book. Angry teenagers hanging outside the subway stops munch on dried apricots while they drink their giant beers. Everyone is eating fresh fruit at the park and zoo. There are about 300 kinds of muesli at every grocery store. Not so good for me, but at least “wholesome” is that sweet jesus do they eat a lot of dairy. Ice cream, like beer, seems appropriate for any time of day. The yogurt section at the grocery store is epic. 

 “Spiese” seems to mean “food,” thus as near as I can tell, “spiesequark” indicates that it’s the food kind of quark in that package, not the sub-sub-atomic particle kind. Food-quark is a soft, spreadable cheese, probably made by draining yogurt until it’s a bit wetter than cream cheese. The plain kind is unsalted, and it comes in fruity and herby varieties. I’ve been eating it on rye bread, either with a bit of salt and sliced cucumbers, or with a thin layer of apricot jam underneath. For something so simple, it’s got a strange richness - a magnification of the flavor of yogurt, richness from protein rather than fat. 

Even though it's in a beer bottle and has a bicycle on it and bikes are cool and combine well with beer, do not buy Radler “beer” thinking it’s beer. Attentive shoppers who are not easily swayed by a picture of a bicycle might notice that it says “Biermischgetränk” on the side of the bottle – the beery equivalent of “cheese food product.” It’s not that bad, it’s just shandy – beer and lemonade. I love shandy! Except when I’m expecting beer, then I nearly spit it out.  Turns out it's a pun (everyone knows how much I like puns).  "Rad" is appropriately "bike," and "Radler' is the name for shandy, hence the picture of the bike on the bottle.

One linguistic failure at the grocery store was balanced with success – I guessed right on “cultured butter” (it’s called something like sour cream butter). I made myself a lovely dinner with my successful shopping trip - it was inspired by a lunch I had last week at a place called maybe “noodles” or some such. I sautéed slivered green asparagus (white is very popular here but I find it creepy) and onions in the butter, tossed the veg with fresh prosciutto ravioli and a few spoonfuls of mascarpone (instead of cream so it wouldn’t curdle when reheated), and finished it with a handful of arugula. All the arugula here is like the wild stuff at home - spindly and very strong.  It’s a nice counterpoint to all the animal fat I’m eating. Mmmm, fat.

Leftovers pie

I had all this leftover meat from last week - some lamb, a bit of beef.  It was getting to the refrigerator-age where I didn't really want to eat it, but I knew it was still good.  I also had a miserable collection of vegetables - a crusty, banged-up old parsnip, a bunch of high-maintenance (tiny) shallots, and some celery.  I waste so much food week to week; I thought if I could do something about it this week, perhaps I could pay a bit of karmic debt.

So yesterday (between turns of my danish pastry dough which was complicated but unremarkable) I made a couple pie crusts in anticipation of tonight's dinner.  Stupidly, I put one in the freezer.  I guess I was thinking the meat pie I'd make would be so small I wouldn't need a double crust?  I don't know.  Realizing my mistake, I took the frozen dough out of the freezer and tried to defrost it in its plastic bag in warm water.  I rolled out the first crust while a quart of light chicken stock reduced to ~1c and the vegetables sauteed in butter.

I added some wine to the chicken stock and let that reduce too.  Maybe a glass and a half's worth.  After the veggies had been cooking a while, I added some of the chicken/wine liquid, then added some more once the first had evaporated.  I added the trimmed, chopped meat to the veggies, along with some chopped parsley and a touch of rosemary.  Remember those seasoned bread crumbs I mentioned last time?  Well, I added a handful to the bottom of the rolled-out pie crust before putting in the filling, then threw some more over the top and poured the remainder of the chicken/wine on.

Defrosting that pie crust didn't really work out - it was getting soft and melty on the outside before the inside was thawed.  So I had to make do with the abundant scraps from the bottom crust.  not too bad, eh?  A bit of tinfoil over the top while it's baking and the filling shouldn't even dry out too much.  We shall see.

Delicious pig

My favorite thing to cook in the winter is a stew with turnips, leeks, white beans, and barley.  I'll eat it every week with some steamed greens.  White foods are good for the lungs (according to traditional chinese medicine), and if you've spent any time with me in the winter, you'll know I have a nasty cough that can use whatever help it can get. 

I get a bit stuck in that rut though, to be honest.  I'm still stuck there.  Today I wanted to mix it up with some delicious pig.  I started with a lot of diced leeks, a couple stalks of celery and some wee carrots, sauteed all that in olive oil.  I bought a "picnic ham" - a rolled and smoked pork shoulder - from the Fatted Calf this morning, so I cut that up and threw it in the pot with the vegetables, adding a bunch of soaked white beans and some herbs as well. 

I wanted some ribs but didn't find any at Avedano's so I settled with some amazing looking pork rib chops.  Not wanting to waste the beautiful loin, I cut out the tournedos (dinner tomorrow - wine sauce of some kind?) and threw the meaty ribs into the pot.  Looking to cassoulet as my inspiration for the dish, I made some seasoned bread crumbs for the top.  Sauteed a bunch of shallots in salted butter, then poured that over half a baguette (split and oven-dried) and chopped it up in the food processor with the zest of half a meyer lemon. These bread crumbs are now my favorite condiment.

I thought I'd bought turnips with their greens on, but it turned out they were radishes.  Rookie mistake!  They were so non-radish-shaped that I didn't pay attention to the translucency of the skin.  Thinking it could be salvageable, I stripped the greens of their stems and steamed them with the radishes in chunks.  The greens were fine - bitter and not very pungent, a nice complement to the warm unctuous stew - but the steamed radishes were fishy and stinky.  Blech.

I realized halfway through stripping the greens that I had meant to use cabbage as my green because I'd bought these baby savoy cabbages that are like the kittens of the vegetable world - just try to resist their cuteness!  You can't!!  Anyway, I forgot about them, so I'll have to eat them another time.

Pupusas, holiday baking, and a chicken

It's hard to express how much I like pupusas.  They're so perfect and delicious - the cheese sneaks out and gets all browned and crusty in spots.  The warm cheesy corn contrasts perfectly with the tangy cool cabbage relish.  So good.  At the farmer's market a few weeks ago, Primavera was selling big bags of their wonderful fresh masa for only $3.50(!!), so I jumped.  These photos were from my test run (using Heidi's instructions) before making them over at Ross's place for dinner.  I used goat cheddar (that's why it's so white), and later also refried beans as filling.  They're not that easy to shape well, but Ross got quite good at it after a few tries.

Before Xmas I did quite a bit of cooking and baking.  One thing I made was a chocolate babka, a very enriched yeasted dough - brioche, pretty much - that was lacquered with butter and covered with finely chopped chocolate, the rolled up and twisted into loaves. 
It came out fall-apart tender and richly marbled with dark chocolate.  I particularly liked it toasted slightly so the chocolate got melty.  The recipe follows at the end.  My only complaint from a process standpoint is that I wish the recipe were in weight instead of volume measure.  I think I measured my flour light for that recipe - the dough was almost unmanageably soft.

While I was in VT for xmas, my parents and I went up to Montreal to visit the excellent Atwater market.  One of the many delicious things we bought was some locally-made Toulouse sausage, a pork sausage seasoned with white wine and black pepper.  Mom and I have both been excited about trying to debone a whole chicken, so we tried that.  We chopped out the backbone and deboned the chicken splayed out flat.  Next time, I'll just chop off the wings at the shoulder - they are absolutely not worth the effort.  The legs were a bit tricky too but well worth it.  We cooked the sausage and mixed it up with some sauteed shallots and steamed, finely chopped chard.  Stuffed the legs first, sewed them shut, then tightly stuffed and sewed the rest using cotton twine and a big needle.  Leaving as much skin as you can makes the sewing much easier.  It didn't spit out a whole lot of juice, but we made gravy from what little pan drippings it made plus the stock from the discarded skeleton.  Pretty goddamn good.  Great the next day with mustard between 2 pieces of bread.

Tragedy Strikes

I got home late-ish Monday night and went to the fridge for a beer.  Oh delicious beer!  But it wasn't quite as bitter and floral as I expected.  Then I realized that it also wasn't as cold as I expected.  A moment later, I realized that the refrigerator had been not-working long enough for everything in the freezer to reach room temperature.  That photo was from a few weeks ago, I also had in there some merguez sausage, the rest of that puff pastry, a whole chicken, and a pound of irish rashers destined for the alleged best sandwiches ever (english muffin, stilton, bacon, chutney).  In the fridge were all my tasty salted pig parts from Boccalone this week, the just-opened last jar of apricot jam from the spring, and god knows what else.

I'm pretty sad about it.  New fridge comes Tuesday, just in time for Thanksgiving.

thanksgiving prep

There wasn't a whole lot of time today after I went into the office for a couple of hours.  But I needed to do something productive and fun after working on a Sunday.  I'd bought some quinces yesterday, so I made ye olde poached quinces.  This time I canned the fruit so I can use it later.  As I've mentioned before, I love the old-lady aesthetic of putting up fruit for the winter.  By contrast, I don't like the old-lady aesthetic of my brand-new, short, rather conservative a-line bob hair cut.  Not sure where the line is.

So after I put up the quince, I made two pies.  First just a simple apple pie, with a collection of random apples from my fridge.  One was a pear-tasting russet fella, 2 other very green tasting russet ones, something nice and tart (should've saved it for eating) and a winesap.  That'll be a pie to eat with a fat slice of sharp cheddar or wensleydale and a glass of white wine.  The second pie was a bunch of big wormy gnarly-ass winesap apples - carefully trimmed of course - plus one fruit's worth of poached quince.  The first was thickened with flour, the second with cornstarch.  Check back later for results.

I've got what, almost 3 weeks til thanksgiving?  Pie - check.  On the way home from work I ordered a goose from the butcher up the street.  May I tell you how fucking awesome that place is?   I asked if they had a line on a goose for my holiday dinner, mmlle. just said, "how many pounds? when do you want to pick it up?"  easy as you please.  They render their own lard there too, so if you need some for pies or whatever, just call a day or so ahead.  I also did some thinking about the stuffing: chestnuts, cherries, leeks, onions, bread?  Or something?  I should look at the recipe for that wonderful savory bread pudding that Jen made a couple years back, see if the flavors can be modified appropriately.

What else do I need?  Roasted (in goose fat??) potatoes, bitter greens (obvs)... brussels sprouts? rolls?  Suggestions?

Apples, day 2

Never one to listen to my parents' advice, I didn't go to the bar last night but rather spent the night drinking whiskey in front of the TV.  I'll leave it to your imagination whether the thing was on or not.

I got up bright and early this morning to start making puff pastry.  Puff pastry is basically like unyeasted croissant dough, or like extra-buttery pie crust folded over and over.  The one I made is "rough" puff pastry because it's started like pie crust - with the butter in cubes, rather than like croissant dough - with the butter lacquered on in a single sheet.  You mix the butter, flour, & water in the mixer, then start rolling it into a precise rectangle.  You fold the rectangle in thirds like a letter, then repeat 5 times, allowing the dough to rest in the fridge for a half hour every other turn.  It gets increasingly difficult over time.

In between turns of the dough, I made a cannellini bean and farro soup for lunch with chunks of fatty smoked pork I got from Marin Sun yesterday.  Yum.

 

  The tart (guess where the recipe came from) started with a thick "applesauce" cooked down from apples, poached quinces, and apple cider.  The puff pastry is rolled out in a rectangle, then the edges are cut off and stuck to the new edges with water.  I kinda fucked this up; I think allowing the pastry scraps to overlap a little might keep the tart together better.  Then layer the apple and quince slices for maximum cuteness, and sprinkle the whole thing liberally with sugar.

While the tart was baking, I made the sauce, which is just quince poaching liquid and apple cider cooked down to a thick syrup.  The first time, I spaced out while it was cooking down, and it was very thick and beginning to scorch at the bottom, so i poured it out into a rice bowl and started over.  When I poked at it after it was cool, I found that it was jelly!  I didn't realize there was enough pectin just in the juices, but I guess there is.  So I cut it up into pieces and tossed it with sugar.  It's wonderful; the quinces have a lovely almost rosy fragrance. 

As you can see, the sides of the tart came apart a bit, and the juice leaked out and burned the bottom and edges some.  I expect the apples will be a bit tough and dry for this reason (and because they're the kind of apples you want in a pie, that don't turn to mush when cooked).  The second batch of cooked-down juices were poured over the top once it cooled a bit.  Pectin has similar behavior to gelatin - they have very similar uses in desserts/sweets, of course, I guess I'm just used to my soups turning to a wobbly solid in the fridge, while when a fruit sauce gets all viscous and clingy, it's surprising and magical.