Bitter Greens

Apples

Although I can still get the peaches and plums I was so hungry for in the early summer, my attention has turned to apples.  Growing up in Vermont, I was spoiled by the quality and variety of apples available directly from farms in the fall.  While California dominates in nearly every other food arena (another exception noted later), apples at their best here are still only nearly as good as at home. 

Part of the problem is that I like fragrant, tart, crispy apples, the kind that are alarmingly bright but don't store well.  I think the taste for apples out here generally trends toward bland sweet ones - think Fuji or Golden Delicious.  Blech.  There are a few farms represented at the farmer's market that at this time of year have apples I really like.  At one, you talk to them and say, "I'm from the east coast, I want an apple that tastes like home" and they'll pick you out a nice one.

Anyway, I bought a crapload of apples this week.  A green russet (not shiny) kind, and some little red ones along the line of macoun / rome /macintosh.  I also had some Philo Golds from last week; pie apples that I've been eating out of hand - usually a winning strategy for me, but in this case somewhat disappointing.  So I used the little green ones in a recipe for braised chicken in calvados sauce found, once again, in the Chez Panisse Fruit cookbook.  They're tart and dry - just right.

Easily my least favorite aspect of cooking is butchery.  I admit that I most often roast my chickens so I can do a minimum of cleaver-work.  This recipe requires separating the legs, trimming the wings, then removing the back and quartering the breast.  I almost didn't make it because of that, but I was taken in by the onion-apple combo, by the mass quantities of creme fraiche involved, and by the calvados flambe.

It's pretty easy after the chicken's cut up, though there are a lot of steps. Brown the chicken, fry some onions & carrots, add Calvados and ignite it (if I hadn't been on the phone with my parents at the time, I would've taken a photo of that), then add the chicken & some hard cider and cook it through.  Then fry pearl onions very slowly in another pan.  Then fry peeled apple slices in butter with salt & pepper (they make a crust and puff up a bit - cute!).  Remove the chicken, strain its cooking liquid, add a CUP of creme fraiche, and reduce the sauce by half.  Then get all the parts together and heat them through in the sauce.

Delicious.  The quality of the chicken and the creme fraiche are probably the biggest contributors.  I was using Cowgirl Creamery brand for a couple years, but I recently tried the Vermont Butter & Cheese Co stuff because it's a hair cheaper and their butter is so good.  Winner! It's soooo nutty and rich, whereas the Cowgirl stuff is rather more fresh and bright.  I think VT B&C might ferment the creme in the package - it separates to a creamier layer and liquidier layer, so it is probably just stronger.

Probably tomorrow: puff pastry, a quince/apple tart, and maybe an apple pie for the freezer.  The freezer is hungry for pie.  For now I'm off to the bar to drink my troubles away, on the advice of my parents.

Quince weekend

I made damson plum jam last weekend and was told that that's an old-lady thing to do.  I aspire to being an old lady - filling my freezer with things, putting up jam, making my own pickles and sausage.  It seems natural that I'm also interested in overlooked, old-fashioned, and high-maintenance fruits and vegetables.  A farmer at the market on Saturday had quinces, and since I knew they were a pain in the ass AND I've never had them before, I had to buy some.
Why are they a pain in the ass?  Quinces are related to apples but with some key differences.  They're inedible raw - astringent, dry, and hard.  Their cores are tougher, so cutting them requires leaning into the knife, and cutting the seeds out is pretty dangerous.  They also oxidize faster than apples, so you have to do all that as quickly as possible.  As I found out later, they are also very tasty, like the most perfumed apple you've ever had, and their texture is denser so they hold up to long cooking.

The first thing I did was to peel, core, and slice a couple pounds of them and poach them in sugar water with a bit of lemon and half a vanilla bean.  I think I'd like to put the poached slices over a vanilla pastry cream filled tart or something like that.  For now, they live in the refrigerator.

Now, this doesn't look like much, but it's obscenely tasty.   The man I bought the quinces from told me a Persian woman had bought some earlier and said she'd cook them with lamb, so I went straight from there to Marin Sun for a chunk of lamb shoulder.  I found in the - once again, exceptional - Chez Panisse Fruit book a recipe for lamb tagine with quinces. There's a lot of reasons I was afraid I wouldn't like this.  It's got a fair amount of cinnamon, which I don't like, plus honey and fruit, and I don't much like sweet things (see blog title).  But isn't it always the case that things that tread just to one side of the "hate" line are the things that are most sublime?  People who eat with me often know I love perfumey and fragrant foods, and I just adore the flavor/fragrance of honey, the kind found in french ice cream or sauternes or tokaji, not to be confused with the american hippie brown bread with honey flavor.  So this stew turns out slightly sweet but oniony-rich, and super flowery-fragrant both from the honey and from the uncircumcised quince.  Peels on, that is.  Perfectly complemented by a Racer 5 chaser.

Sometimes I suck

A lot of my discussions about food are like, "I made this and it was so great," which I guess comes out as kinda cocky.  So for a little balance, I'll post about something I made that was an ill-conceived disaster. 
First, I roasted some vegetables.  I cored these here tomatoes and filled the cores with olive oil, salt, and a bit of pepper.  Roasted them, 2 onions, and 3 pimientos in the oven at about 400.  Removed the peels from the tomatoes & peppers, put it all in a saucepan, cooked it down until the clear juices from the tomatoes were pretty well reduced, then pureed it.  Salt & pepper to taste.  So far so good, but there was a wicked metallic tang, probably from the pan I roasted the peppers & onions in.  The salt helped mask it, but it was still detectable.
Then I cooked up some white beans.  Soaked overnight, then cooked with herbs and shallots til soft, salting toward the end.  Drained the beans, left half whole, and pureed half with some chopped parsley and ricotta.  Boy, did that need a lot of salt to taste like anything.

So then I cooked up some pasta with ridges on one side and a scoop shape that I hoped would cuddle with the whole beans.  I tossed the pasta with the bean puree & whole beans and put it in a casserole pan.  Added blobs of ricotta and dotted it with oil-cured olives.  Then poured the roasted vegetable sauce over the top in ribbons.  Baked it until the sides started getting crusty.

Yuck!  I mentioned in my post about duck that beans are really drying.  The moisture level in the pasta and beans mingled and turned into a sticky, mushy yuck, whereas I was looking for that slightly slippery pasta texture.  I wasn't really thinking about how that would be achieved.  I'd reduced the red sauce so far that it couldn't contribute any lubrication, it was just more sticky goop.  The olives that I'd expected to be a salty, tangy counterpoint ended up being way too sweet.  I ate some because I was hungry, then threw the rest in the trash.  Booo! 

I think the right way to do this dish is to toss the pasta with the red sauce, and add little blobs of the bean puree here & there, use tangier olives, and cover the top so it can't dry out too much.  Is the idea even worth it?  Not sure.

There was plenty of sauce leftover, which was salvageable.  For lunch today I heated it up with some slices of finocchona salame and a little water to thin it back out, and tossed it with pasta.  It was remarkable mostly for the delicious salame.

Chicken pie

This week's chicken was too big to eat all the leftovers as chicken, creme fraiche & arugula sandwiches, so I thought I'd make a pie.  I didn't grow up eating chicken pot pie; I don't think I had one until I was well into adulthood.  After years of kinda sucking at it, I've finally been getting pretty good at making pie crust.  I love pie; I love savory things - what could be better than eating pie for dinner?

I use Tartine's all-butter "flaky tart dough" recipe, made in the food processor.  That's my secret: doing it exactly the way my mom said not to.  3c flour, 2 1/2 sticks of butter, 2/3c water, 1t salt. I sauteed 2 small white carrots, 1 celery rib and a big waxy potato in butter (some cow, some goat - it's what I had), adding a handful of haricots verts toward the end.  Salt and pepper to taste, add a big handful of minced parsley.  The meat is from 2 legs from a 5-lb bird, plus assorted odds and ends.  Leftover gravy from the roast dinner, and 3c stock + 1c wine reduced down to less than half.

Here is the tricky part: I want to thicken it with bread instead of flour, but I am winging it, so there's no telling how much to use.  I made bread crumbs from 1/3 of a loaf of Della Fattoria  Ciabatta, and used 2 big handfuls of the coarse stuff.  Poured the meat & veg filling over the top, closed it up, and stuck it in the freezer.  It'll be dinner later in the week.  If your name starts with an "R" this dinner may be in your near future.

Gnocchi & ice cream

Gnocchi is fuckin' easy, man.  Boil potatoes, rice them (it's a special tool, but the texture it produces is worth it), salt them, add flour to make a dough, roll it out, make it into little puffs.  I will be doing this again.

The sauce wasn't *as* easy, but it wasn't hard either.  Brian and I talked about saffron gnocchi with red pepper, and this was my attempt at the dish.  I used the recipe for roasted red pepper coulis from the CIA's New Professional Chef, with the addition of a big pinch of saffron and a big handful of minced parsley.  Probably less cream too; I eyeballed it.

  Over the course of a couple days last week, I made blackberry ice cream.  The ice cream base was 2c dairy, 8 egg yolks, and about 1/2c sugar, cooked to a custard cream.  I picked a quart of blackberries on Twin Peaks (I love free food) and strained them in a chinoise, or something very much like a chinoise but cheaper.  I could use a real one, I'm afraid, my ghetto solution took about 45 minutes.  I added about 1/3c sugar to the de-seeded blackberry puree, heated it, skimmed the foam, then reduced it until I liked the looks of it.  I chilled both the creme anglaise and the fruit syrup, then ran them through an ice cream freezer.

Then I made amaretti cookies from the Chez Panisse fruit cookbook and made darling little ice cream sandwiches.  Highly recommended!  I forgot that you have to heat apricot kernels before you expose them to liquid in order to destroy the precursor to cyanide.  But I then found out that a fatal dose of apricot kernels is like 40, and each pair of cookies only has maybe 1, so uh, sorry for slightly poisoning you all.  You're feeling all right now, right? no heart palpitations?  ok.

There's lots of good music to listen to lately, here's a song.  Did I mention this is the best heartbreak album of the year?

Dinner 9/2/07

Tonight I had one of my favorite simple dinners:  roast chicken with potatoes and artichokes.

The key here is the Marin Sun Farms chicken, which must be tasted to be believed.  Their chickens are so much more delicious, so much chickenier than other chickens that it's hard to go back.  I'm gonna have to freeze a couple for the winter.

The chicken is a little sweet, the new potatoes in their jackets have an earthy bitterness, and the artichokes are really bright, bossy, and umami.  The fistful of herbs infuses the chicken with a wonderfully green, fresh fragrance.  It's a match made in heaven, I tell you.

A 3 pound chicken and the vegetables is just right for two people, with enough meat for a sandwich (may I recommend creme fraiche and arugula?) each tomorrow.  If you're single, that's sandwiches for the whole week!

Dinner 9/1/07

I haven't been inspired to draw comics, but I do cook all the time, so why not talk about food?

I made dinner & dessert for Ross & Robin last night.  Dinner was spiced & smoked duck breast from The Fatted Calf, pan-fried and sliced, atop a crushed-cannellini-bean pancake and a bed of nettles, topped with a fig sauce and finely shredded fennel.  Dessert was a fig and blackberry galette with a Chartreuse glaze, pretty much straight from the outrageously awesome Chez Panisse Fruit cookbook.  Dinner recipes follow.

Links to Robin's photos of dinner and dessert!

yo SF peeps - birthday dancing!

Come to the Rickshaw Stop to go dancing tonight!  I'll be there around 10:30. 

(if this works, i'll be mightily impressed.)

5-11-07

5-8-07