Delicious Durham

Blogging sabbatical

2009-01-18T11:15:00.002-05:00

After a hectic six months, I am determined to focus on writing and research for a couple of books this year. I suppose it is a new year's resolution of sorts though in general I don't make resolutions.

In order to focus on these projects, I will be taking a hiatus from blogging. I hope you will keep the blog bookmarked for some of the recipes I've included which are generally my favorites.

Live well and eat well!

Gnocchi with watercress and bacon

2008-12-07T20:01:00.008-05:00

I had a handful of watercress left over from the watercress soup, and I found a recipe for a sauce of watercress, garlic, red pepper flakes,tomato, olive oil, white wine and pancetta (optional for vegetarian) to serve with potato gnocchi. It turned out so good that I forgot to put the bacon (I had some on hand and substituted it for the pancetta) in it until I'd eaten half of it! I also didn't add any Parmesan, but forgoing the Parmesan meant that it required a little more salt. I used tomatoes from my friend's garden that I froze back in August.

The recipe calls for store bought gnocchi. I'm sure that works well if you are in a hurry, but I figured I should do something productive on a Sunday afternoon besides napping. I made the gnocchi with some potatoes in my cupboard that were beginning to sprout so they had to be used. I found a totally easy recipe in Cooks' Illustrated.

Ingredients

2	pounds russet potatoes (or other baking potato), washed
1 1/4	cups all purpose flour , plus more as needed
1	teaspoon salt, plus more for cooking liquid

Instructions

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Bake potatoes until a metal skewer slides easily through them, 45 minutes to 1 hour, depending on size.
Hold potato with a pot holder or kitchen towel and peel it with a vegetable peeler or paring knife (see illustration 1); rice peeled potato into a large bowl. Peel and rice remaining potatoes. Cool until potatoes are no longer hot, about 15 minutes.
Sprinkle 1 1/4 cups flour and 1 teaspoon salt over warm potatoes. Using your hands, work mixture into a soft, smooth dough. If dough is sticky (which is often the case), add more flour as needed, up to 1 1/2 cups total.
Roll about one-quarter of dough into a long 3/4-inch-thick rope. If rope won’t hold together, return it to bowl with remaining dough and work in more flour as needed. Repeat until all dough is rolled.
Cut rope of dough into 3/4-inch lengths (illustration 4). Holding butter paddle or fork in one hand, press each piece of cut dough against ridged surface with index finger to make an indentation in center. Roll dough down and off ridges and allow it to drop to work surface (illustrations 5, 6, and 7). (Gnocchi can be placed in a single layer on a baking sheet and

refrigerated for several hours. Or, baking sheet can be placed in freezer for about 1 hour. Partially frozen gnocchi can be transferred to plastic bag or container, sealed, and frozen for up to 1 month.)
Bring 4 quarts of water to low boil in large pot. Add 2 teaspoons salt or to taste. Add about one-third of the gnocchi and cook until they float, 1 1/2 to 2 minutes (about 3 minutes for frozen gnocchi). Retrieve gnocchi with slotted spoon and transfer to warm, shallow serving bowl or platter. Repeat cooking process with remaining gnocchi; see related recipes for topping suggestions.

Watercress soup

2008-12-05T21:23:00.003-05:00

I picked up a bunch of watercress somewhere with the plan to make watercress soup. When I lived in France I ate a lot of watercress soup. It's made with potatos to it is a thick soup with a nice peppery kick from the cress. I didn't know what watercress actually is so I looked it up on Wikipedia and found an interesting article. It is related to mustard and is a member of the cabbage family.

Recipe:
4 peeled and sliced potatoes
3 to 4 leeks peeled of the outer leaves and sliced (white part and tender green part)
1 T (yes, a tablespoon) salt
3 T butter
2 quarts of water (or stock or a mixture of stock and water)
A large handful of watercress

Put the water in a large pot. Add potatoes and leeks and salt. Simmer for 45 minutes. Add the cress. Simmer for 5 minutes. Puree the soup in a blender or food processor being careful not to burn yourself like I did. If you are using a blender, put a kitchen towel over the lid and hold it firmly. Pour soup back into pan. Add butter and stir until it melts. Season with black pepper and more salt if necessary.

Makes enough for a small army.

Sweet potato with goat cheese and truffle

2008-12-02T21:08:00.002-05:00

I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving. I'm very underwhelmed by turkey. Next year I will try a turducken largely because I'd rather eat duck or chicken over turkey any day including Thanksgiving Day.

Side dishes are the best part of Thanksgiving. Someone gave me some sweet potatoes from a farm in Johnston County, but I ended up not using them until the weekend. I wanted to do something besides the usual sweet potato with marshmellow (yuck) or praline (yum) topping. One thing I remembered about visiting Australia years ago was that the Aussies seem to combine sweet potato and goat cheese fairly often. Since these are two of my favorite ingredients, I searched for a recipe and found this one from Epicurious.com which also features truffle oil. How could it possibly not taste good? It turned out very well indeed.

The tartness of the goat cheese complimented the sweetness of the potatoes and also made them very creamy. Truffle oil is truly a wonder. I put it on just about everything I can think of including frozen pizza and mashed white potatoes as well as pasta. It's outrageously expensive but it lasts a while since only a few drops are necessary for a nice truffly flavor.

Rum cake

2008-11-24T20:13:00.004-05:00

One of the nice things about being Episcopalian is that, unlike the Baptists, we generally have rum in the cupboard...right next to the gin and the bourbon behind the sherry.

The other nice thing about being Episcopalian is that we have coffee and cake or cookies after church. I suppose if you have to sit through all of that prayer book stuff that we should feed you something other than a papery wafer and a sip of diluted wine.

Much to my delight the coffee hour on Sunday featured a delicious rum cake. The recipe is very easy although it employs...gasp...a cake mix and...more gasping...a box of pudding. Generally I prefer not to buy such things for political reasons because I don't approve of the industrial food economy, but I am certainly willing to make exceptions once in a while! This cake merits it.

Rum cake:

Preheat over to 35o degrees.

Mix together the following ingredients until combined:

1 box yellow cake mix
1 box vanilla pudding (small box)
4 eggs
1/2 c. oil (a flavorless one)
3/4 c. rum
1/4 c. water

Put 1/2c. pecans in the bottom of an oiled bundt pan. Pour batter.

Bake 45 minutes t0 an hour until cake is done. Remove cake from oven, but leave in pan.

Melt 1/4 c. rum, 1 c. sugar, and 1 stick of butter until boiling. Pour mixture over cake. Let stand for no more than 30 minutes. Turn cake out onto cake plate.

Cranberries: a sauce and a relish

2008-11-24T14:26:00.002-05:00

Unable to choose between a cooked cranberry sauce and a raw cranberry relish, I think I will make both.

Here is the recipe to my favorite cranberry sauce made with caramelized onions. It's good with cheese if you have leftovers.

I want to try something new so I plan to make this recipe from Susan Stanberg on NPR. I like raw cranberry and I love horseradish. I can't quite imagine how it will turn out, so we'll see. I'm not entirely sure my guests will like it because horseradish is one of those things people either love or vehemently loathe.

I am fixing a roasted turkey that I'll cover in a cheese cloth soaked in garlic, orange juice, orange rind, bay and maybe some brandy. I'll remove the cheese cloth for the last hour so the skin will get crispy.

I'm hungry just thinking of it.

Baked garlic appetizer

2008-11-23T20:32:00.004-05:00

My friend, who is a fine cook, brought this delicious concoction of sun dried tomatoes, garlic and goat cheese to a party. The recipe will now be a regular feature at my cocktail parties and dinners. In fact, I may make some for Thanksgiving in order to keep the guests happy and in the living room while I'm finishing the gravy and getting the food ready for the table.

Baked garlic appetizer:

4 heads garlic (not cloves, but whole heads)

2 cups chicken broth

2 cups sundried tomatoes, or a little less (I use the no-oil, no-salt kind)

1-3 tbs. herbs

6 ozs. goat cheese

Preheat oven to 375. Cut top 1/4 inch off garlic heads, peel off loose outer skin. Place heads of garlic in casserole or baking dish just large enough to hold them. Nestle the sun dried tomatoes in around the garlic and pour chicken broth over and sprinkle with herbs. Bake for roughly an hour and fifteen minutes, basting every fifteen minutes or so. Slice goat cheese, place over top of garlic and tomatoes, bake until cheese is melted. Serve with slices of baguette or rice crackers for the gluten free crowd or a spoon if no one is looking!

Baked pears with nuts and maple syrup

2008-11-19T23:01:00.002-05:00

For my dinner party on Saturday, I needed a dessert recipe with no dairy and no flour. The amazing sex on a plate dessert that I usually make was totally out of the question since it is loaded with cream, chocolate and flour. Then I remembered an easy baked pear recipe from the Epicurious Web site that I made years ago. In place of the butter I used margarine, which apparently has buttermilk in it....oops, and in place of flour I used almond meal. I also substituted the hazelnuts for toasted almonds. It turned out great! The original recipe is also wonderfully tasty. I suspect it would be equally delicious with apples too.

I served the pears hot out of the oven over soy ice cream which I have to confess is rather tasty.

Stuffed, baked pears:

1/3 cup hazelnuts, toasted, husked
1/3 cup (packed) golden brown sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
2 teaspoons all purpose flour
2 teaspoons Frangelico (hazelnut liqueur), amaretto or brandy

3 8-ounce Anjou or Bosc pears, peeled, halved
6 tablespoons apple juice
6 tablespoons pure maple syrup

Position rack in center of oven; preheat to 375°F. Place nuts in plastic bag; crush coarsely with rolling pin. Transfer to bowl. Mix in sugar, butter, flour and liqueur.

Using melon baller, core each pear half, creating cavity. Arrange pears, cut side up, in 11x7-inch glass baking dish. Mound nut mixture in cavities, dividing equally and pressing to compact. Pour apple juice into dish around pears. Drizzle pears with maple syrup.

Bake pears until tender when pierced with small sharp knife, basting occasionally with juices, about 45 minutes. Transfer pears to plates. Drizzle with juices.

Moroccan chicken with olives

2008-11-17T20:29:00.005-05:00

Years ago friends invited me for dinner and made a wonderful chicken and olive dish from Mediterranean Cooking by Paula Wolfert. So when I invited some friends for dinner this recipe seemed like the perfect option since all of us love olives and one of us doesn't eat dairy. I served it with potatoes and a delicious carrot salad called houriya.

Asking me to cook without butter for a dinner party is a tall order indeed, but fortunately one misses neither butter nor cheese in this dish because of the richness of the olives. I am including the recipe as it was written, but I will make adjustments next time. For example, 2lbs of green olives is a bit excessive. Even after finishing the leftovers I have tons of olives left in the dish. One pound is probably needed at a minimum though. Imagine the funny looks I got at the supermarket as I was clearing the olive bar of picholines!

Chicken smothered in cracked green olives

Serves 6 to 8

4 lbs chicken legs and thighs

2 large onions

3T olive oil

1 T chopped garlic

1t. ground ginger

1t. black pepper

½ t. ground cumin

½ t. paprika

pinch of saffron

¼ t. chopped green coriander (cilantro)

3 c. water

2 lbs. Green cracked olives (greek or Moroccan cracked or French picholine)

1/3 c. fresh lemon juice or more to taste

salt

whole wheat pita

Trim fat off of chicken. Cut up 1 ½ onions and chopped finely. Press through strainer to drain excess liquid. Measure ¾ c. and discard the rest. Thinly slice remaining half of onion.

In a 5 qt casserole blend oil, garlic, ginger, pepper, cumin, paprika, and saffron into a paste. Stir in chopped onions and cilantro. Stir while adding 3 cups of water. Add chicken and bring to boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer covered for 20 min.

Drop olives into boiling water, simmer 1 min, then drain.

Preheat oven to 450.

Remove chicken from casserole and place on a baking sheet. Bake on upper shelf of oven for 15 min. or until meat is fully cooked and skin is lightly crisp.

Add reserved onion slices and olives to casserole. Simmer 15 min. Add lemon juice to taste. Season w/ salt if needed.

Remove chicken to a serving platter and cover w/ olives and sauce and serve w/ warm triangles of pita bread.

Ethiopian restaurant: Queen of Sheba

2008-11-09T22:28:00.003-05:00

Saturday night my friend and I went to the newly re-opened Queen of Sheba in the Timberlyne strip mall on Weaver Dairy Road in Chapel Hill. It closed at its original location about 18 months ago and I was broken-hearted.

I am happy to say that the new location is an improvement over the old location which always seemed a bit rickety and gloomy to me. The new place has a warm, cheerful interior with tables packed in snuggly.

The food was as good as ever. Friesh, the owner, cooks great food. If you haven't tried Ethiopian, I recommend it although it might be an acquired taste. The dishes are heavy on curry and spices. They are served on a large piece of soft, flat bread called injera. Injera is made from teff, the grain of a tall grass. It's high in iron, fiber, and other good stuff.

To eat the dinner, you pull off a piece of injera, scoop up some food, and eat. No forks and knives required. Eating with the fingers is kind of sexy. I like it.

I ordered my usual: a garlicky chick pea starter called buticha and the vegetarian combo which is a sampling of several dishes. The meat and fish combos are good too. If you go, ask if you can have the collards side dish and the potatos side dish with your combo dinner. These two and the tomato salad are my favorite sides.

Be sure you order Ethiopian coffee after your meal. And yes, you want it with butter. It's pitch black, spicy coffee with a touch of butter melted in it. I know that sounds weird, but when was the last time you ate something with butter that wasn't tasty?

Stone crab

2008-11-06T21:24:00.003-05:00

A recent visit to Florida happened to coincide with the start to stone crab season which runs from October 15 to May 15. I first had stone crab claws several years ago in NYC while sitting at the bar at Balthazar. Then earlier this year I ate them in Tampa when I was there for my second cousin's wedding. When I discovered my October trip coincided with the new season, I was determined to have some.

I love stone crab because the only part we eat is the claw. These crabs have huge claws relative to their body size. Generally the bodies are not eaten or even killed during the harvesting of the claws. The claws are twisted off and the crabs are thrown back in the water where they grow new ones. How is that for sustainability?

Plus I grew up on steak and potatoes in the Midwest so dealing w/ crustaceans generally terrifies me: Which part am I supposed to eat and how do I get it out?? New Englanders have this figured out but I generally resort to garden tools.

Stone crabs therefore are perfect food for me: delicious, no one dies, and I don't have to pick pieces out of strange crustacean crevasses.

The most famous place in South Florida to get stone crabs is Joe's Stone Crab Shack in Miami Beach. Since I was staying in Ft. Lauderdale I decided to go to Billy's Stone Crab Restaurant in Hollywood, Florida. The meal was delightful. The stone crab claws were generous in size and full of succulent, sweet crab meat. I had a side dish of garlic creamed spinach which I could eat three times a day. I made a mental note to find a recipe for garlic creamed spinach. I washed it down with a lovely glass of sauvignon blanc. The service was pretty good for that part of Florida and my table was outside overlooking the intra-coastal waterway. Several huge yachts with happy partiers cruised by.

It would have been a great evening if it hadn't been for my date who turned out to be a cad. Fortunately I'm not the kind of woman who lets a lousy man ruin a perfectly fine meal.

Fall ice cream flavors at Francesca's

2008-10-27T17:51:00.003-04:00

I've been hosting my four year old niece this weekend. Her taste buds are fairly limited to things like french fries, pancakes, chicken fingers, and mashed potatoes. I took her to Elmo's for pancakes. Elmo's met with her discerning taste. Her mother and I were happy that Elmo's serves nice, strong coffee while customers wait for tables. I usually eat the salmon cake and eggs. Perhaps it shows my roots, but I'd rather have a salmon cake than some fancy salmon tartare or sushi.

We also went to A Southern Season because her mom hadn't been. I'm pleased to say that the Weathervane Restaurant has a good children's menu. My niece loved the sweet potato fries.

The best part of the weekend was a trip to Francesca's for ice cream. They have several seasonal flavors that we loved. Even the child liked the pumpkin, cheesecake, and rum raisin flavors, although she opted for some old regulars: a scoop of strawberry and a scoop of vanilla with a cookie crumbled in it. I tried both. Both were great. What's not to love about ice cream!

I heartily recommend the pumpkin ice cream. It's so much more interesting and possibly tastier than pumpkin pie. It is definitely worth a trip to Francesca's before they stop making it.

Queen of Sheba re-opening!

2008-10-26T19:56:00.002-04:00

It's been a long 18 months in the Triangle without Ethiopian food! The Queen of Sheba closed in 2007 after a developer bought the old location and tore it down to build condos one block from Franklin St.

Happily the owner has found a new location on Weaver Dairy Rd. The grand opening of Sheba will be in November 1. I cannot wait. This is the best news I've heard in a long time!

Fresh pasta in Pittsboro

2008-10-22T15:51:00.002-04:00

If you happen to be in the vicinity of Pittsboro, NC, around dinner time, I highly suggest a stop for take out pizza and pasta, especially the pasta, at the Neighborhood School Pizzeria on Thompson Street.

A friend of mine had raved about this place for ages. I don't live anywhere near Pittsboro but when I was driving through at 6pm on a Friday afternoon, I figured I would give the place a try. I couldn't make up my mind on what to order so I asked the owner / chef what she recommended. She suggested her most popular pasta dish -- chicken bianco.

It is a take out place, but I found a place inside to sit and watch the activity in the kitchen while I waited. While I sat there, the young girl cooking pulled a chicken escalope out of the fridge, dipped in egg and fried it in a stick of butter while I watched. She poured in a very healthy dose of brandy and added cream. While that buttery loveliness simmered, she took two lumps of fresh, pasta dough and passed them through the pasta machine turning them into thin yellow ribbons. She put them in a pot of boiling water and in no time the pasta was ready and so was the chicken. She put the pasta in a to go box and poured the chicken and sauce over it.

I could not drive myself home fast enough! After a torturous 30 minute drive, I raced into my house, put my dinner on a plate, and poured a glass of white wine.

Ahhhh heaven! The delicate, creamy flavors of butter, cream, brandy and egg melted in my mouth. It was heart-stoppingly good...and fattening. I ate half for dinner and saved the other half for my lunch.

I can't wait to go back! The owner also makes big trays of lasagna to order. One day when I need to feed a crowd I will order a couple. The pizza looked very tasty too. Maybe I'll drive out there this weekend!

Homemade donuts

2008-10-11T18:33:00.008-04:00

After reading this article about doughnuts in the NYT, I decided to give one of the recipes a whirl. Doughnuts are my favorite food. My order of preference for fatty, breakfast breadish foods: doughnuts, biscuits, bagel with cream cheese. Muffins? Forget it. If I'm going to have that much sugar and fat to start my day, it had better be a doughnut or even a piece of cake with frosting.

Anyway, after perusing my fridge and cupboards and consulting with my brother who is a fine baker, I decided to make the yeast doughnuts instead of the cake doughnuts. The recipe from the paper calls for a topping of sugar and Earl Gray tea. Isn't that awfully frou frou for a doughnut? I decided that I couldn't possibly go to all the trouble without making a chocolate glaze. Clearly I would have to try half of the doughnuts with chocolate and half with the frou frou tea topping. Then I realized I needed to try a plain glaze too.

The only problem with the yeast doughnuts is the fact that they have to raise a couple of times. For neither love nor money is there a chance that I could rise early enough to make these for breakfast. So it was doughnuts for dessert or in fact for my dinner, as it turned out.

I used the Kitchen Aid with the dough hook to make the dough. It was fairly straightforward. The dough is very sticky.

It was messy to handle. I coated my hands in flour, but I was afraid of using too much for fear of making the dough too dense. No one wants hockey pucks for doughnuts.

I rolled them out to 1/2 in thickness, cut them with a biscuit cutter into 2" circles. I decided the dough was to messy to think about holes. Besides, doughnuts without holes have more surface area for glazes and toppings.

While I was waiting for the doughnuts to raise again, I made two glazes and the Earl Gray topping suggested in the article. In order to get a really fine powder to mix with the sugar, I put the tea in a spice grinder (formerly a coffee bean grinder). It worked beautifully.

I also made a chocolate glaze that was basically a ganache by heating 1/2 c. cream and 1T butter to almost a boil then adding 4 oz of chopped, dark chocolate.

For the second glaze, I wanted something that was more like a traditional glaze but perhaps a tad more interesting. I mixed 1c. powdered sugar with cream, orange juice and vanilla. I added cream by the tablespoonful until the mixture was like a thick paste. Then I added the juice by the tablespoonful until the mixture was like a thin glue. I threw in a capful of vanilla for good measure. The end resulted tasted like an orange creamsicle! MMM.

Once the doughtnuts had risen. I heated the canola oil in a large, iron wok that I generally use for things other than stir fry. I dropped the doughnuts into the hot oil and watched them puff up into airy deliciousness. They cooked for about 45 to 60 seconds on each side. I had to turn the burner down for the last two batches because the oil was so hot.

I drained the doughnuts on paper towels and let them cool slightly. Then I dipped some of them into the glazes and some into the sugar and tea mixture.

The recipe made 30 doughnuts which is seriously a lot of doughnut for one person. I don't know how many I've eaten, but it's at least six because I had to try each topping twice. Then when I was finished I had to eat the leftover chocolate glaze because it would have been a shame to let a Caillebaut ganache go to waste!

I took a huge pile of doughnuts next door. My neighbors think I'm the fairy god-neighbor, and they are always glad to see me with a plate. I think the doughnuts turned out nicely. I'm not sure the effort is worth doing regularly but it is fun to do as a special treat. I also don't know what to do with half a wok's worth of used canola oil.

I imagine that this recipe would be a winner with kids. Plus kids would love dipping cooled doughnuts into the glazes, but keep them far away from the hot oil.

I liked all of toppings. The Earl Gray and sugar topping was surprisingly delicious. The bergamot, that flavour that makes Earl Gray what it is, gave the doughnut a high-brow, sophisticated boost. While it's hard to beat chocolate, I think my favorite topping was the vanilla orange glaze. Somehow it seemed to go best with the doughnuts. It was like an old-school glaze with a kick. The chocolate was almost too much. I thought it overpowered the airy, fried dough. My neighbor loved the chocolate, so it really is a matter of taste.

It will be a while before I can look at another doughnut. Now, I'd better figure out what to do with that canola oil.

Stuffed!

2008-10-10T23:33:00.003-04:00

Italy's culinary bible for home chefs is a cookbook called The Silver Spoon. In recent years it has been translated into English, and some friends gave it to me as a going away gift when I changed jobs in August. This epicurean tome probably weighs five pounds, but it covers everything. Do you want to know how to fix scorpion fish? The Silver Spoon has it covered.

The cookbook's section on vegetables is phenomenal with recipes that make the most unlikely vegetable very tempting: turnips with bacon (well, bacon does make everything better), peas with pancetta (close enough to bacon), Parmesan turnip greens, and so on.

I decided to try stuffed onions first. The picture looked pretty, and I had a bag of onions in the fridge that needed to be used. The Italian name for the recipe is cipolle alla grossetana, so it was translated as grosseto onions. I don't know what that means but it was easy to fix and very tasty.

1. Peel four large onions. Cook in salted boiling water for 15 minutes. Drain and cool. Using a knife, scoop out the flesh in the center of the onion and save it to be chopped later. You should have four onion shells. Do not try doing this with hot onions.

2. Combine in a bowl 1 1/2 c. lean ground beef (or veal but I buy beef from the farmers' market so I use theat), 1 Italian sausage removed from casing, 2 T freshly grated Parmesan, 2 t olive oil, 1 egg lightly beaten, pinch of nutmeg. Season with salt and pepper.

3. Stuff the onions with the meat mixture. Put the onions in a deep pan. Pour 1 c. of beef stock around the onions. I poured in some white wine for good measure too. Put the lid on. Simmer over medium low heat for 30 minutes.

Serve the onions on a plate and pour any remaining sauce over them. When no one is looking, sop up the yummy sauces and meat drippings with a great piece of bread.

I had leftover stuffing that I put in the freezer. This meat stuffing would be great in bell peppers, zucchini, or artichokes too.

Doughnut recipes

2008-10-07T15:22:00.004-04:00

Although I am a Chablis-drinking, brie-eating, east coast elitist -- according to some people's definition -- I must confess that the humble donut is near the very top of my list of favorite foods. What's not to love about fried dough? Having said that, I do not consider Dunkin' Donuts much to shake a stick at.

While Durham lacks in serious donut-making, I was thoroughly delighed to see Amy Tornquist from Watt's Grocery mentioned in a NYT article on doughnuts. Her churros, fried dough coated in cinnamon sugar with a chocolate dipping sauce, get a special mention. An adaptation of her recipe accompanies the article.

In addition to Amy's recipe for churros, there are two other recipes. I am gearing up to give one of the recipes a try this weekend. I've never made doughnuts or beignets or anything of this sort.

I am wondering if I can use a deep, iron wok for frying. This is one of the rare occasions when a deep fat fryer might actually be useful. Hot oil terrifies me. Once I caught a roll of paper towels on fire when deep frying.

Will the effort and calories be worth the at-home effort or is it better to get a fried dough fix at Watt's Grocery or Rue Cler? I guess I'll find out. If anyone has any suggestions or tip on making doughnuts at home, let me know before I burn my house down this weekend.

Onion soup

2008-10-04T14:58:00.002-04:00

Not wishing to go the supermarket, I surveyed my kitchen cupboards and the fridge for inspiration. I found a big chunk of Gruyere hiding in the freezer, and I had a loaf of delicious sourdough bread. I also had a bag of onions and lots of stock. French onion soup seemed the obvious choice for my dinner.

Melt 3 or 4 T of butter in a pot. Add 4 thinly sliced onions. I use the slicer blade on my food processor for this. It works well and the onions turn out just the right thickness. Sprinkle the onions with 1/2 t sugar. Cook over medium heat, stirring often, until the onions turn brown and begin to caramelize, about 20 minutes. Add a box (4 cups) of beef stock. Add a few sprigs of fresh parsley and several sprigs of fresh thyme (or a good pinch of dried thyme). Add 2 T of some type of alcohol. I like brandy because I usually have it on hand. White wine works or you might try some cognac. Season broth with salt and pepper to taste. Simmer for 15 minutes. Remove the sprigs of herbs before serving.

While the soup is simmering, toast two to four slices of sourdough (I like the French sourdough from Guglhupf Bakery but my favorite is from La Farm Bakery) under the broiler. Top one side of each slice with a nice pile of shredded Gruyere or other hard, salty cheese. Place under the broiler a few seconds until the cheese melts.

Put the cheesy bread into shallow, wide-rimmed bowls. Ladle the onion soup over the bread, and serve. This recipe serves four.

Thai food: cure for a stuffy nose

2008-09-30T17:42:00.003-04:00

Air travel tends to give me a cold almost every time I hit the skies. My latest trip was no exception. I woke this morning w/ a stuffy head and a sore throat so for lunch I decided to have something spicy hot to clear my head.

I trundled down to Thai Cafe to order something. I thought I would have the green papaya salad because it is cool and crisp one on hand and very spicy on the other. However, after looking at the lunch menu, I opted for grilled eggplant and grilled salmon with noodles. A red curry sauce coated the salmon, eggplant and noodles. It was topped with a garnish of lettuce which is a good foil to the hot curry.

I resisted the urge to buy some crab angels, also known as crab Rangoon, because I don't really need to eat any fried food today. I have a weakness for anything combining crab, cream cheese and a deep fryer, so resisting was no small feat.

With the onset of the cold season, keep in mind Thai food for stuffy nose relief!

Filet mignon w/ Roquefort sauce

2008-09-30T17:28:00.003-04:00

At the weekend I was in Kansas City (Missouri, not Kansas) and I had dinner at the steakhouse called Pierpont's in the renovated Union Station. The decor was great and enhanced the old, magnificent train station. I ordered a filet mignon with a blue cheese cream sauce and a balsamic reduction. I could have licked the plate!

The delicious dinner inspired me to share this recipe for a Roquefort sauce that my mother picked up from a restaurant called Miss Aimee B's Tea Room in St. Charles, Missouri. It's a recipe that you should only fix for someone you really love because it is really expensive to make. The sauce could go with any steak, I suppose, but the flavors go well with filet. I also like that it is made with Roquefort and not just any old blue cheese. Roquefort is smooth, creamy, and pungent without being too sharp or bitter. It's perfect for this dish although it does kill me to cook such a fine cheese instead of putting it on a cracker!

To find a good wine to go with this dish, head down to the Wine Authorities on University Drive and ask them to suggest a Bordeaux. I like to serve skin-on mashed potatoes because the potatoes pick up some of the yummy sauce on the plate.

1. Preheat your broiler or grill.

2. Rub 3 or 4 filet mignon with minced fresh garlic, salt and pepper. Cook on grill (or broil) until the steak is done to your liking.

3. While the steaks are cooking, combine the following in a medium saucepan:

4 oz. Roquefort crumbled
1 stick unsalted butter
2 cloves minced garlic
2 T Worchestershire sauce
1/2 t. caraway seeds

Stir until cheese and butter melt.

4. Add to the sauce 1/2c. sliced green onions and 8oz mushrooms thinly sliced. Continue cooking 2 or 3 more minutes.

5. Pour over steaks.

Cheese puffs

2008-09-22T22:40:00.004-04:00

I am not really eating cheese or cooking with it at the moment, but that didn't stop me from trying some tasty morsels at my friends' cocktail party. The puffed batter, similar to a popover and called a gougère in French, is airy and cheesy. I found them addictive so I had to stand far away from the platter they were on.

My friends who are devotees of the cooking channel found this recipe by the Barefoot Contessa, Ina Garten, on the FoodTV web site. It includes Parmesan and Gruyère seasoned with a touch of nutmeg. I've made a similar recipe with Roquefort and a tablespoon of fresh thyme. This recipe would be delicious with other combinations of cheese and herbs too.

Once my no-cheese diet is over, I'm going to make these. They have red wine written all over them as the accompanying beverage.

Mussels in wine sauce

2008-09-21T19:56:00.002-04:00

Months that end in "-ber" are the best months for eating mussels. I've bought mussels from WholeFoods, Capital Seafood Market on University Dr., and Harris Teeter. The best ones were from Capital Seafood Market. Almost all of them opened and they tasted fresh. WholeFoods is second best. Don't bother buying them from Teeter. Most of the ones I got didn't open. That means they were dead on arrival.

Mussels are a great starter course for a group or a meal for two. Store them in fridge and cook within a day of purchase. When you are ready to cook them, rinse the mussels well in cold water. Pull out any remaining beard which is dark green, fuzzy looking stuff.

In a large pot combine 2 cups of wine, 6 T butter, 1/2 chopped shallots, 1/2 t. dried thyme or 3 sprigs fresh thyme, 1 bay leaf, 8 sprigs of parsley, pepper. Bring to a boil, then cook for 2 or 3 minutes until the alcohol burns off. Add the mussels to the pot and cover with a lid. Cook for 4 or 5 minutes or until the mussels open.

Serve the museels in a bowl and then pour the sauce over them. Garnish with chopped parsley. Serve with french bread.

Cheese!

2008-09-12T11:20:00.002-04:00

Cheese accounts for a main source of protein, not to mention being my primary source of calcium, in my daily diet. Unfortunately a daily of intake of 2 to 4 oz of cheese isn't compatible with my vain desire to have washer board abs.

I could eat a piece of carboard if it was topped with melted cheese. Fortunately, I don't have to do that. So far my favorite pizza at Rockwood is the four cheese pizza. It's full of flavors. I especially like the blue cheese on it. Again, this is not compatible with my fitness goals.

I bought some pepper jack cheese made with 2% milk at Harris Teeter so I could make quesadillas when I have a cheese craving. Alas, a pepper jack quesadilla may be tasty but it does not satisfy my desire for a big hunk of triple cream brie! Yes, I'm one of the brie-eating, Chablis-drinking elitists that what's his name from Law and Order is complaining about on the campaign stump for McCain.

Anyway, I have a class reunion coming up in a few weeks so in addition to the exercise I've ramped up for the past month, I've decided to stop eating cheese for a few weeks. We'll see how that goes. I'll probably lose my mind. As soon as I reach my washer board ab phase or give it up entirely, I'm going to eat a four cheese pizza from Rockwood then drive down to Raleigh for hot Krispy Kremes!

Roasted pepper and artichoke puffs

2008-09-11T20:12:00.003-04:00

Saturday night I am taking one of my favorite hors d'oeuvre to a party. Usually I avoid recipes with more ingredients than I have fingers, but this one is worth the extra effort. It really isn't very difficult either.

Preheat oven to 400 F. Melt 2 T unsalted butter in a pan. Add 1 bunch of finely chopped green onions and 2 cloves of minced garlic. Cook until softened, and place in a bowl.

Add to the bowl, 1 can of artichoke bottoms chopped, 3 oz. prosciutto chopped, a handful of chopped basil, 1/2 c. Parmesan grated, 1/2 c. Gruyere grated, 1 T lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste. Combine, then add 1/2 c. mayonnaise to bind. Put in the fridge for an hour.

Meanwhile, remove the seeds and stems from 3 red or yellow bell peppers and cut the peppers into 2" squares and place on a baking sheet. Drizzle w/ 1/4 c. olive oil and 2 T balsamic vinegar. Sprinkle with some salt and pepper. Bake for 15 minutes. Remove from oven and cool.

Preheat the broiler. Remove the artichoke mixture from the fridge. Mound 2 t. of the artichoke mixture onto each pepper square. Arrange on a baking sheet and broil about 2 minutes or until the mixture is bubbly. Let cool for a minute or two and serve.

Dry rub for grilled pork or chicken

2008-09-02T23:23:00.003-04:00

For a long time, I thought grilling was a guy thing. I think because my dad made such a big production out of firing up the grill. I figured it must be hard or something. Eventually I bought a grill because if I was going to wait around for a man to grill for me, I might wait a long while. If a girl wants something, she really should figure it out on her own. But I digress. Imagine my surprise to find out how easy grilling is. Dad, the gig is up, I'm on to your tricks.

Rifling through my old Cooks' Illustrated mags, I found a very tasty dry rub recipe to put on grilled pork tenderloin, though I would probably even eat a stick if it were covered in these yummy spices.

This recipe makes enough for two pork tenderloins. I bet that would equal four to six chicken breasts (bone-in, skin-on if you are going to grill them):

1 T fennel seeds
1 T cumin seeds (or ground cumin)
1 T coriander seeds (or ground coriander)
1 1/2 t. dry mustard
1 1/2 t. light brown sugar
3/4 t. ground cinnamon
1/4 t. black pepper

Toast the seeds in a dry pan until they turn fragrant (3 to 5 min); Cool, then mix w/ remaining ingredients and grind to a powder in a spice grinder or pestal and mortar or hammer or whatever it takes. I have a coffee bean grinder reserved for this purpose. You can use ground spices if you have them.

Brush whatever meat you choose to grill with olive oil and then sprinkle it generously with the rub. Cook according to whatever your preferred method of grilling is.

Grilled, stuffed peppers

2008-09-01T10:23:00.002-04:00

My friend Kathryn told me this recipe that she and her husband fix with the peppers from their garden. It is my new favorite, quick recipe for the grill. It is rich and tasty but easy to make. It includes two of my favorite ingredients: cheese and bacon!

Cubanelle peppers or other long, mild pepper
Cream cheese
Bacon

While the grill gets hot, carefully cut open one side of peppers and scoop out the seeds w/ a small spoon. Stuff each pepper with cream cheese. Wrap each stuffed pepper in a piece of bacon. Place peppers on grill. Cook for 6 or 8 minutes on each side until the bacon is crisp and the peppers cooked.

Serve with bread and a salad.

Rockwood Filling Station again

2008-08-28T17:30:00.004-04:00

After going to the new Rockwood Filling Station Pizzeria on opening night, I decided to wait a few weeks to try it again. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it the first time, but I wanted to wait for the crowd to calm down and the staff to get into the swing of things.

I went back for a second try a few nights ago with a friend. I had the eggplant pizza that is topped with roasted eggplant, onions, ricotta, and fried capers. The crust was thin and crispy with the right amount of toasty brown. It was not at all burned. I loved the salty fried capers. Maybe I will try that at home. They'd be very good on a salad or in a butter sauce.

My friend had meatballs on his pizza, and he seemed to enjoy his meal. The meatballs are made with pork and duck. I confirmed this with the owner because I overheard the following conversation:

A guy said to the waiter, "There's a rumor that the meatballs are made with duck. Is that true?"
The waiter said, "The meatballs are 100% pork. Who told you they were duck?"
The guy said with a sort of satisfaction in proving someone wrong, "I read it on a local blog Delicious Durham."

It's not every day you hear your own blog mentioned in public, and I was quite certain that the waiter was telling the man inaccurate things. So I walked up to the owner in the bar to ask him to clarify whether or not there is duck in the meatballs. He said there certainly is duck in the meatballs and that he would correct his waiter.

I don't like the suggestion that I might be misleading people on this blog. Certainly I offer a large dose of my opinion but I try to be clear on what is factual. I get my facts by either reading on the menu or asking. I'm not going to make statements about what is in a certain dish unless I either know for certain or preface it with words like "I think."

Anyway, after this second visit, it seems like Rockwood is doing well and they have their act together. I highly recommend for people to give it a second try, especially those who went the first week or two it was opened.

My only complaint is that my red Italian wine showed up in what looked like a highball glass. So some people might find that hip and cool, but I'm not one of them. One of the great joys of life is that glassware comes in a variety of shapes and sizes to suit every imaginable kind of beverage. I can't see any good reason why the wine should appear in what is more suitable for a mojito.

Smokehouse baked beans

2008-08-25T20:43:00.002-04:00

Sunday I went to a picnic, and I was asked to bring baked beans. I am almost embarrassed to admit it, but until now I have never made baked beans. You know how North Carolina BBQ is practically synonymous with coleslaw? Well, Kansas City BBQ joints tend to feature quite a lot of baked beans. In fact, if you are ever in KC, you must go to this place called Smokehouse Bar-B-Que for the divine baked beans and brisket burnt ends.

I studied some old church cookbooks from my childhood to see if I could find a comparable recipe to take to the picnic. I remembered my friend Marion has a delicious and easy recipe. It is basically a can of baked beans doctored up. It requires BBQ sauce but not the vinegar kind. Be sure to use the thick, tomato-based kind like KC Masterpiece.

4 slices of bacon, fried and crumbled
1 large can (40oz) baked beans
3/4c. brown sugar
1/4c. chopped onion or 1T onion flakes
1 T chili powder
1T yellow mustard
1t. or more liquid smoke
1c. barbecue sauce
1/4c. molasses

Combine all ingredients. Taste as you go and adjust the various flavors to your preference. I like a bit more mustard than the recipe requires. Put beans in a casserole dish, top with bacon, and bake at 350 degrees for 70 minutes or so.

Make some potato salad, grill some burgers and you've got a picnic.

Potato salad is just as easy: boil taters that you've cube. Cool. Add a chopped onion or two to the potatoes. Stir in mayonnaise by large spoonfuls until it is as you like. Be generous with salt. Add some pickle juice if you have a jar in the fridge.

Tyler's Tap Room

2008-08-22T17:45:00.003-04:00

It's been party time at work. Besides going to An, we went out to Tyler's Tap Room a couple of nights ago for beer and a casual dinner.

I like the old warehouses that have been converted into something useful, but Tyler's is a bit of a barn and the lights are very bright.

Tyler's does have a good selection of beers on tap, and they were featuring some local brews that everyone seemed to like, especially after two or three. The dinner menu is loaded with greasy treats like garlic fries and fried pickles.

Fried pickles are wonderfully strange. I cannot decide if I like them or not. They are certainly worth trying for novelty if nothing else.

I had a girlie beer, Unibroue Ephemere, and fish tacos. I ordered the fish tacos thinking they might be kind of healthy only to discover the fish was fried. It included tomato and shredded cabbage wrapped in flour tortilla. It was good, not exceptional. The hamburgers looked good so I may try one at some point. Ephemere is a tasty summer beer. It is pale, refreshing and it reminds me of apples without actually being as sweet as a cider.

Asian fusion: return visit to An

2008-08-19T21:22:00.002-04:00

Last night I went with my new boss and some colleagues to An in Cary off of Harrison Ave. The cocktail list looked great but I opted for a glass of viognier. It was dry and not overly fruity. The bar is an interesting place to sit, but I have a feeling they hire the female bartenders for their looks because they didn't seem very knowledgeable about the wines.

We shared some tuna rolls and chicken spring rolls for the first course. We liked both. The spring rolls came with a sweet mango dipping sauce. There was no better way to celebrate the last bite of tuna I will take for a while. I've been pondering Greenpeace's fish/seafood red list. As much as I like fish and seafood, I like having the oceans populated with fish even better. Some fish and seafood are just not viable for us to eat. But I digress.

My main course was lemongrass beef with rice thread noodles. The cool noodles and cucumber were a good foil to the spicy fire of the lemongrass. I will certainly order it again.

The dessert list looked good but I was too full. Instead I had a cup of white tea which, if I recall correctly from my trip to China, is supposed to be good for digestion.

Tiny gem of the Caribbean

2008-08-16T20:26:00.003-04:00

I'm back, not overly excited about the real world, but there isn't much to do about that. At least there aren't ants in my cereal.

Where have I been? The highest point in the Netherlands which is a tiny place near St. Martin called Saba that no one has ever heard of except SCUBA divers. It is an old volcano that rises straight out of the sea. There are 1500 full time residents. Pretty cottages cling to the mountainside. It is quiet and outside of diving and hiking there isn't much to do, which is why I went. I logged 13 dives and wrote 10 chapters of a book. My cottage was adorable with views of the sea and the mountain.

For such a tiny place, Saba has very good food. There are no chain restaurants or stores, so everything is run by locals living there. I had excellent fish two adorable restaurants called My Kitchen and Brigadoon. Michael and Trish at Brigadoon do an excellent job. Trish makes great cocktails and is an excellent hostess.

At a place called Scout's I tried johnny cakes which are nothing like the New England version. Caribbean johnny cakes are made from white flour and are basically savory fried dough. Imagine an unsweetened beignet type of thing. They are really good w/ slices of melting gouda. Fried dough and cheese! What's not to love other than the cholesterol?

My favorite meal was at a place aptly named the Rainforest Restaurant. It is located at a sustainable, environmentally friendly hotel called the Eco-Lodge. Many of the ingredients are grown in the restaurant's own garden. Once a week the restaurant serves up an Indonesian rice table which includes a variety of wonderful dishes. I had various types of lamb, beef, and chicken curries, spicy shrimp, corn pancakes, vegetable side dishes of beans, cucumbers, and I cannot even remember what else. Spicy and flavorful. For dessert I had passion fruit ice cream. I like the tart/sweet combination.

My other favorite meal was a massive grilled steak at a little bar called Swinging Doors. The proprietor Eddie grills steaks every Sunday and chicken and ribs every Tuesday and Friday. Eddie cooked my steak to tender perfection.

The restaurant with the best view is the Tropics Café. I went for dinner and twice for breakfast. It overlooks the sea with views of the mountain. One morning I ate rum-soaked French toast served with a side of a spicy, locally made rum called Saba spice. It is rum spiced up with cinnamon, cloves and other things.

If you dive or hike, Saba is a must.

How I ate an ant

2008-08-13T13:02:00.002-04:00

My vacation and the self-imposed technology cold turkey are nearly at an end. I'm in a lovely, remote place in the tropics that, oddly, happens to be the highest point in the Netherlands. My writing projects have gone well, but I have been somewhat distracted by scuba diving. I'll tell you about it later when I can upload some pics. The land-based creepy crawlies of the tropics scare me a bit, especially when I accidentally eat them.

This morning I accidentally ate an ant. It was very traumatic, less so for the ant because he was already dead. The ant died a slow painful death by refrigeration. I bought cereal a few days ago, and I left it out on the counter overnight by mistake...because where I come from putting cereal in the fridge is not a natural reflex. Apparently some ants got in there before I thought to put the box in the fridge. So this morning I'm eating my cereal and I look down to see a dead ant in the spoon. No telling how many ants I downed before realizing this. I raced outside and dumped the bowl and spit into a bush. Then I brushed my teeth vigorously, it seems like ant legs could get stuck between the teeth, and went out for breakfast.

As I was walking to breakfast I saw a rat snoozing in the sun on a wall. What was a rat doing tanning on the wall? Then when I went for a walk a soldier crab growled at me. Yes, growled. Who ever heard of a growling crab?

The sea life is much less terrifying.

When I get back I'll give you the skinny on where am I and what I ate.

Indy's NC wine tasting panel

2008-08-07T18:46:00.002-04:00

Our local alternative rag, The Independent Weekly, featured a story on NC wines this week. As part of the feature on NC wines, they put together a panel of tasters to try NC wines in a blind taste testing. The results were also published in a story this week.

Lucky me, I got selected to be part of this panel as the non-expert but somewhat informed taster , e.g. I don't work in the wine industry, and I represented the "wine consumer." I was honored to be asked to participate, and after a hard slog at the office, a wine tasting mid-week was right up my alley.

I arrived at the Indy's new offices, which are gorgeous by the way, and headed to the conference room where the tasting convened. Peg, from Weaver Street Market, seemed really lovely and she is committed to finding good NC wines.

The other wine professionals worked in a variety of capacities: wine buyers, wine shop owner, wine writer, and sommelier. Interacting with them was the most interesting part of this experience, way more interesting than the NC wines, unfortunately.

You can read my comments on the NC wines so I won't rehash that here. In summary, most of them were not even good. I don't know about you, but if I'm paying $12 for a bottle of wine, I expect it to be tasty and drinkable. Now, granted, $12 is not a lot of money and I'm not exactly short on cash at the moment, but it's a matter of VALUE. I'm not paying $12 to drink something that tastes like manure. I'm also not drinking unfiltered wine. It's just not my aesthetic though I appreciate that it is someone's. My comments were rather unfiltered, if you like, but that's fine by me.

What I found interesting about the wine professionals is that they seemed to think it is acceptable to ask people to pay $10 or $12 for a bottle of mediocre to below-average wine. Comments like, "Someone might drink this for $10" really got under my skin after a while. It seemed to assume that $10 wines are below par, and that is just not accurate.

Additionally the wine professionals were very careful not to "bash" wineries. Ok I get this is their profession and that burning bridges is a bad idea and all that. But be truthful. Don't try to put lipstick on a bulldog. I am not sure if it was sycophancy or arrogance, but something like that came through among some of the wine professionals. I was also reminded more than once that I was the "consumer," which probably means I don't know anything.

So here's my NC wine theory in a nutshell: Buy local if you want to support local enterprises, but make sure your expectations are level set regarding quality of taste and value.

And my overall wine theory is: Really enjoyable wines do not have to be expensive. I've had good ones for $10. Additionally, food and atmosphere do enhance the wine drinking experience, but a good wine can also stand on it's own. A good wine doesn't need a porterhouse steak to give it legs.

As for wine professionals, if you ever get condescension from any of them, stick to your guns. You know what you like. I like minerally, bone dry whites. Some people like floral whites. Drink what you gives you pleasure and make Bacchus proud.

Gone fishin'

2008-07-30T20:56:00.002-04:00

Not really. But I am unplugging myself for a couple of weeks in order to focus on writing for one book and researching for another. Unplugging the wi-fi and turning off the cell phone may seem drastic, but it can be hard to focus otherwise. I hope I don't break out in hives, a cold sweat and tremors as I withdraw.

Talk to you again soon. In the meantime, happy eating!

La Vaquita burritos

2008-07-28T22:13:00.003-04:00

Hankering for some Mexican food, I decide to try a chicken burrito from La Vaquita. It is a little shed, formerly a dairy, on Chapel Hill Road that turns out amazing Mexican food. There is no seating. It's a walk-up kind of place and not exactly fast.

I've not had anything there that didn't knock my socks off. The burrito proved no exception. The place is so good that I have to resist stopping, because when I do stop I eat like a glutton. It's embarrassing and unhealthy!

The burrito was huge. The chicken had chipotle seasoning but it wasn't overpowering or too spicy until I dumped hot salsa over it. The burrito also had rice, corn, green pepper, onion and red beans in it. La Vaquita served a couple of different salsas with it. One was a chunky, mild tomatillo salsa. The other was a smooth, fiery chipotle salsa. Both were delicious. I burned off a few taste buds with the chipotle salsa, but it was worth it.

Very Weird FOOD

2008-07-24T22:41:00.002-04:00

I dare someone to buy this: lobster ice cream!

Let me know how it tastes.

Chocolate chip cookie heaven

2008-07-20T21:00:00.007-04:00

I delight in other people's culinary successes. A new friend of mind in Greensboro recently tried a chocolate chip cookie recipe from the NYT food section and shared it with several of us. I had read the article and accompanying recipe when they were published a couple of weeks ago.

The article recommends two things the my friend and I agreed were key to the cookies' success: 1. the dough chills for 36 hours, and 2. just before baking the cookies get a sprinkle of sea salt. Now I don't know about you, but 36 hours is a LONG time for me to wait on chocolate chip cookie. Left to my own devices, I would not be able to do this. Therefore I'm happy that I tried the fruits of my friend's labor.

The 36 hour chill results in cookies with a deep, rich flavor. The eggs and butter have a chance to work some cookie magic: the baked cookies are crisp on the edge, goey in the middle, and the in between layer is somewhere in between. The sprinkle of salt makes perfect since because salt is a flavor enhancer. On top of the cookies, it brings out the flavor of the chocolate.

Here is the divine recipe for chocolate chip cookie heaven:

Time: 45 minutes (for 1 6-cookie batch), plus at least 24 hours’ chilling

2 cups minus 2 tablespoons (8 1/2 ounces) cake flour

1 2/3 cups (8 1/2 ounces) bread flour

1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 1/2 teaspoons coarse salt

2 1/2 sticks (1 1/4 cups) unsalted butter

1 1/4 cups (10 ounces) light brown sugar

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (8 ounces) granulated sugar

2 large eggs

2 teaspoons natural vanilla extract

1 1/4 pounds bittersweet chocolate disks or fèves, at least 60 percent cacao content (see note)

Sea salt.

1. Sift flours, baking soda, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Set aside.

2. Using a mixer fitted with paddle attachment, cream butter and sugars together until very light, about 5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Stir in the vanilla. Reduce speed to low, add dry ingredients and mix until just combined, 5 to 10 seconds. Drop chocolate pieces in and incorporate them without breaking them. Press plastic wrap against dough and refrigerate for 24 to 36 hours. Dough may be used in batches, and can be refrigerated for up to 72 hours.

3. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a nonstick baking mat. Set aside.

4. Scoop 6 3 1/2-ounce mounds of dough (the size of generous golf balls) onto baking sheet, making sure to turn horizontally any chocolate pieces that are poking up; it will make for a more attractive cookie. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt and bake until golden brown but still soft, 18 to 20 minutes. Transfer sheet to a wire rack for 10 minutes, then slip cookies onto another rack to cool a bit more. Repeat with remaining dough, or reserve dough, refrigerated, for baking remaining batches the next day. Eat warm, with a big napkin.

Yield: 1 1/2 dozen 5-inch cookies.

Note: Disks are sold at Jacques Torres Chocolate; Valrhona fèves, oval-shaped chocolate pieces, are at Whole Foods.

Rockwood Filling Station: Pizza

2008-07-17T10:11:00.002-04:00

The new Rockwood Filling Station Neapolitain Pizzeria opened Wednesday evening on University Dr. sandwiched neatly between Q Shack and Nana's. Yes, Scott Howell is behind it. So is the former Nana's bartender John. I love Scott Howell. He can cook. John is really great too. He was my favorite bartender in town. Now he is my favorite pizza guy. I'm sure the front of house will be excellent in John's capable hands.

Opening night for a restaurant is crazy for everyone involved, and I had a front row seat at the bar. They don't have a liquor license yet so everyone was drinking water or tea or BYOB wine. The old filling station that was also a dry cleaners has been transformed into a darling place. The floors and bar are poured concrete. The walls are a warm yellow beige with bright things on the walls. A large glass wall separates the kitchen from the bar, so it's easy to see the pizzas being made and put into the giant pizza oven. The oven, according to the menu, is over 700 degrees hot, and I was worried someone might get burned! Scott was there making pizzas. He looked focused and happy from my vantage point.

The vibe was good. While I'm sure it was stressful, all of the staff seemed happy and enthusiastic.

I was not really hungry but I felt I must try a starter as well as a pizza. I had the baked meatballs for my starter. Now the menu doesn't say this but the meatballs are made with pork, beef, and duck. DUCK. Duck meatballs! Yum. The meatballs were perfect in every way and served in a simple but flavorful tomato sauce. Run to get some.

I ordered the white pizza for my dinner. It was topped with ricotta, fontina, caramelized onions, and spinach. It needed salt and some garlic. John told me they were working on getting the seasonings just right and the need for more salt was common feedback opening night. The pizza crust was fairly thin, which is how I like it, and ever so slightly burnt around the edges. I look forward to trying the other combinations like the veggie pizza, the pizza margherita and the eggplant pizza.

I kept an eye on everything that came out of the kitchen. The salads looks delicious and I cannot wait to try the antipasti platter. It featured what looked like roasted peppers, proscuitto, cheese, olives, and a deviled egg. I saw milkshakes, ice cream and cannoli go by. Every plate that went back into the kitchen looked licked clean. I took home leftovers, but I would have eaten every bite had it not been for stuffing myself with meatballs. Meatballs with duck!

I must try the cannoli. Not only is cannoli one of my favorite desserts, but also cannoli is a good indicator of a restaurant's attention to detail. Yes, it all hangs on the cannoli, but that's another story.

Give the place a few weeks before you go. Once the staff settles into a routine, the liquor license shows up, the salt and pepper shakers arrive, the cash register software becomes familiar to all, and the flavors and seasonings get adjusted, this place will be great.

Metro 8 Steakhouse

2008-07-16T20:47:00.003-04:00

Wednesday night a friend and I went to Metro 8 Steakhouse on 9th Street. The restaurant has been opened a couple of years but I'd not been. The space where it is located has been home to numerous unsuccessful businesses so I'm glad Metro 8 has managed to do well there. It's a great location. I have heard that the rent there is outrageous, hence the high turnover in businesses in the past. Or it could be that the place had strange feng shui. Who knows. The space itself is a little awkward in shape but the owner has fixed it up nicely.

My friend and I shared a starter of provolone topped with sliced tomato and dried herbs (maybe thyme, basil, and oregano) and baked under a broiler until it was a hot, oozing, cheesy mess. I love melted cheese, but it was kind of messy. Don't share this with anyone you don't know really well!

Since Metro 8 is a steakhouse it was only fitting that one of us ordered steak. My friend ordered the churrasco which is a thinly cut skirt steak. It was delicious and I would order the 8oz steak the next time I go. The skirt steaks are the least expensive cuts on the steak menu. The filet mignon is $28. I am curious to try it, but if I am going to eat an expensive steak, I will either cook it myself or go somewhere like Nana's or Magnolia Grill where I would get excellent service (usually) and a knowledgeable recommendation on the wine list (always). I'm sure that is entirely unfair on my part, but that's my preference. If I had an unlimited budget and a zero cholesterol in my arteries, I'd love to try filet mignon at all the top restaurants and steakhouses. Wouldn't that be fun? I can hear my arteries clog just thinking about it.

I ordered the herb encrusted, sushi-grade tuna. The herbs included a very healthy dose of rosemary, and it was topped with a balsamic reduction. I enjoyed it but the rosemary and balsamic reduction perhaps overpowered the tuna. Tuna doesn't need much to be fabulous.

For dessert we shared what was called a chocolate soufflé, but it wasn't really a soufflé. Soufflés are light and puffy and look like this picture. What we had was what I would call a chocolate lava cake, and it looks like this picture. Gooey, molten, chocolate lava cakes are really easy to make and taste better than just about anything. Chocolate soufflé is wonderful too but it's difficult to do correctly. So I'm not complaining here because it was yummy. It was, however, not what I was expecting based on the menu.

The service was decent and charming though not top-notch.

Other things on the menu looked interesting like the pork chop, the crab-stuffed shrimp, and the lobster ravioli. I will definitely go back to try those items.

Smoked salmon heaven!

2008-07-14T08:38:00.002-04:00

I'm just back from a three day weekend in Seattle. It's a bit far for only three days, but I wanted to go see my aunt for her 60th birthday.

The famous Pike Place Market is a sight to behold. It's a huge, I mean HUGE, market downtown by the water. There are a lot of tourists milling around and I'm sure the prices are high, but it's so much fun to wander around. I could spend days looking at all of the fish and seafood, flowers, cheeses, veggies, and other things.

I especially liked fish market stalls with all kinds of beautiful fish, especially salmon. I'd love to buy a whole on someday and poach it for a party. Wouldn't that be fun? The Alaskan crab were the size of dinner plates and the lobster tails were a foot long.

My aunt took me to a local fish market Tacoma, where she lives, so I could buy some smoked salmon. I also picked up a smoked salmon dip that I plan to recreate somehow. I much prefer that Pacific smoked salmon to the Atlantic smoked salmon which seems to me slimy more often than not. My favorite way to serve any smokes salmon is to put it in a plate, sprinkle with lemon juice, season w/ pepper and salt, and possibly garnish with chopped capers. I like it served with crackers and butter. Cream cheese is good too.

Donuts

2008-07-07T21:08:00.002-04:00

We need good donuts badly in Durham. I was excited when Dunkin Donuts opened but sadly their donuts are not worth the calories. If I'm going to clog my arteries and fatten myself up with fried dough, it had better be GOOD. Some people like their coffee. It's adequate in a pinch but I'm not driving out of my way for it.

I have been known to embark on the 20 mile drive down to Raleigh for Krispy Kreme however. I wish we had a Krispy Kreme closer because not much can beat the KK plain glazed donuts hot off the donut press. KK plain glazed donuts cold are a let down by comparison.

The donut chain that I like much better than KK or DD is Daylight Donuts. Someone brought these into work last week after I harangued him into not bringing bagels or Dunkin Donuts. The old-fashioned glazed donut and the glazed chocolate cake donut are really yummy. I also like the Daylight Donut web site.

Are there any other donut places out there that I've missed? Why aren't donuts more popular in the South? Are we too busy eating biscuits? Seriously, we fry anything and have no compunction about eating grease three times a day. Would someone please open up a donut shop in downtown Durham?

I live vicariously through a new blog I found devoted entirely to the pursuit of donuts in New York City. What a dream to have so many options for fried dough!

More fun with eggs: Crème brûlée

2008-07-06T21:09:00.005-04:00

After going crazy last week with the meringues and custard experimentation, I ended up with 5 bright yellow, free range, happy chicken, egg yolks in the fridge. I also had some heavy cream left over from the custard. Not wanting to waste the pretty (and expensive) egg yolks, I ponder for awhile what to do with them. Crème brûlée fit the bill exactly.

Well almost. The recipe called for 6 egg yolks. I really did not want to break another egg because then I'd have one left over white. And, I don't know about you, but I think egg white omelets are gross. I decided to live on the edge and attempt it with the 5 yolks and 2 cups of cream instead of 2 1/2 cups.

Crème brûlée is a perfect recipe: uncomplicated yet totally sophisticated. The earliest known printed recipe for it is in a French cookbook from 1691 by Francois Massialot, chef to the Duc d'Orleans who was the brother of the Sun King.

I used a recipe from Mark Bittmann. Something went slightly wrong in my execution because the cream and egg yolks didn't set up as firm as they were supposed to. I wonder if this had something to do with me only using 5 yolks. I would have bet on that, except I noticed that I had different results depending on which ramekins I used. My old Fire King ramekins didn't do as well as the newer ceramic ones.

My other issue was when I put the ramekins under the broiler to "burn" the sugar. I recall that the crème brûlées I've eaten in restaurants were a nice combination of cold, creamy custard and warm, browned, hardened sugar. It's a nice contrast of flavors, temperatures and textures. Well, putting the ramekins under the broiler to brown the sugar made the entire dish hot. Next time I will definitely use the kitchen blow torch that my brother and his wife gave me years ago. The little blow torch is the key to browning the top without heating the entire dessert.

I wounldn't have called this attempt in the kitchen a success except my friends did eat every last morsel and nearly licked the ramekins clean. What's not to love about vanilla flavored, sweetened cream enriched with egg yolk?

I plan to try this recipe again. If I get it right, I'll post the recipe.

Separating eggs

2008-07-01T19:27:00.004-04:00

Separating eggs gives me fits. Invariably I get hasty and accidentally end up w/ yolk in my whites. That spells R U I N. Egg whites will not form peaks if even of trace of yolk or shell remains.

Here is how to do it with minimal risk. First wash your hands and put next to you a damp cloth or paper towels for your hands.

Set out three bowls: 1 to hold the whites, 1 to hold the yolks, and a smaller one into which you will separate the whites . Crack egg gently. Then open the egg into one of your hands. Gently spread apart your fingers and let the egg white spill into the small bowl. Once most of the white is in the bowl, put the yolk in the larger bowl reserved for yolks. Scrutinize the egg white for shells or drops of yolk. When satisfied that your egg white is perfect, pour it into the larger bowl reserved for egg whites. Do this to each egg. Now the beauty of this method is that you can screw up one egg white without ruining the previous 5 you've separated successfully.

If you want, use an egg separator. I find those slow. You can also separate the egg by juggling the yolk back and forth between the halves while the white drips down. I can't do this. Shells are sharp and easily break the yolk. Fingers generally do not have sharp edges, and while it is a mess, it works.

Meringue: Îles flottants (floating islands)

2008-07-01T19:09:00.003-04:00

After rescuing custard from the jaws of defeat, I used it to make a traditional French dessert called Îles flottants which comprises poached meringues floating in the chilled custard.

To make the dessert, first make the custard (see below) and chill. Then toast some sliced almonds for garnish. I am always forgetting garnishes but I did not forget the tasty toasted almonds. MMMM! Then take 6 egg whites (left over from separating the yolks for the custard) and beat until creamy in a standing mixer. Next add a cup of sugar. Beat in mixer until stiff, shiny peaks form.

Divide custard among 8 bowls. The recipe serves 8 easily.

Put 5 cups of whole milk in a saucepan and bring to a simmer. Drop meringue by 3 tablespoonfuls into the milk. Poach for 30 seconds on each side. Remove to bowls putting 2 poached meringues in each bowl. Sprinkle almonds around the custard. Serve.

For extra fun, make some spun sugar by bringing to boil 1 c. sugar and 1 c. water, stirring ocassionally. While it is boiling, oil a large sheet of waxed paper with butter. Boil the sugar until it turns caramel. This happens magically all of a sudden when the sugar reaches the right temperature. The sugar is actually burning but don't worry about that. Take it off the heat stirring constantly. When you pull up the sugar w/ a spoon, a ribbon should form. Once that happens, dip a fork into the sugar and drizzle all over the waxed paper until you've used all the sugar. It will look like a caramel Jackson Pollock painting.

When Jackson Pollock cools, you'll be able to peel it from the waxed paper and break it into pieces. A nice piece of Jackson Pollock looks pretty with the floating custard.

This recipe is easy and inexpensive except for the vanilla bean and the cream in the custard. I wonder if it is possible to use whole milk only in the custard. I think it would work since the egg yolks are the thickening agent. And by all means, use vanilla extract. If you do buy a vanilla bean, don't forget to save the pod to put in a jar of sugar to flavor it.

Custard: From the jaws of defeat

2008-06-28T10:08:00.002-04:00

Cooking with eggs, beyond the average breakfast preparation, scares me. Eggs require a gentle touch and gentle heat. If you master that, you can make fantastic souffles, meringues, custards, butter creams, hollandaise, and mayonnaise, among other things. I've got meringues and mayonnaise figured out but the others are tough. I have made butter cream successfully only once. Hollandaise? Forget it. My trouble is that I get too hasty. These sauces with egg require patience that I struggle to summon. Pouring hot liquid drop by drop into beaten egg yolk is boring.

Anyway, I decided to try a custard (the runny type not the set type) because it is a necessary requirement for the iles flottants (floating islands) I'm making for a dinner party chez moi tonight. Floating islands are light puffs of poached, sweetened egg white, aka meringue, swimming in a pool of custard with toasted almonds and spun caramel for garnish.

Custard is also great on just about any fruit or cake or pie. I'd even eat it w/ cereal for breakfast.

Here is the recipe for runny custard:

8 large egg yolks (save the white for a meringue or souffle)
2 c. plus 3 T. whole milk
2 c. heavy cream
6 T sugar
1 vanilla bean scored lengthwise and seeds removed

Put the egg yolks and 2T sugar in a standing mixer and whisk until the eggs are pale yellow and creamy. I just let the Kitchen Aid run while I do other things.

Meanwhile put the milk, cream, sugar and vanilla seeds in a saucepan. Bring almost to the point of simmer and then turn off. Slowly ladle small spoonfuls into the eggs. I keep the mixer running. Go SLOW or the eggs will scramble. Once it has been incorporated, put the entire mixture back into the sauce pan and heat gently over low heat for a couple of minutes until the mixture thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon. Whisk often, using a wire whisk. Once finished, put the saucepan into a cold water bath with ice to stop the custard from cooking. Keep whisking.

I ran into trouble when I put the custard back on the stove top. The gas was too high so I could not get the custard cooled down quickly enough to stop the cooking. I was aghast to see little curds begin to appear in my beautiful custard. Quickly I strained the custard through a fine mesh sieve a couple of times into a bowl. Then I whisked like mad with the bowl surrounded by ice. Thankfully my custard was saved, and it taught me the lesson I already knew: be patient and do not rush. It is a valuable lesson for life in general, and I do need reminding.

The best greasy burger

2008-06-27T10:06:00.004-04:00

In a hurry and craving a greasy burger, I stopped at the drive-thru chain Cookout in Graham, NC, off of I-85. My hairdresser recommended Cookout for a burger and shake fix. I'd never been so I figured I'd give it a try since it had to be better than Burger King or Mickey D's, the only other options I could see off of the highway. There is one in Durham on Roxboro Road.

I ordered a bacon, cheddar burger with grilled onions and a peach shake. The burger actually looked like real hamburger. It was slightly pink. Grilled onions and bacon make everything better! It was great for a fast food burger! I cannot wait to go back to try the burger with chili.

Cookout also features milkshakes in many flavors. I opted for the peach shake. What a great thing to do with frozen peaches! YUM!

Next time I will try the fries with cajun seasoning.

Peach crisp

2008-06-22T20:40:00.003-04:00

The peaches I picked up from a fruit stand by the BP where University Dr. turns into Lakewood were small, soft, sweet, and almost too good to cook. My idea of heaven is to eat a peach so perfect that I don't even notice or mind the juice running down my arm and dripping off my elbows.

I ate two for lunch, then peeled and cut the rest for a peach crisp. I like fruit crisps better than cobblers. Something about the crunchy topping and the soft, sweet fruit makes me happy.

Basically this crisp recipe works w/ any fruit. I made it w/ apples too. When I was doing some apple experiments, this was my favorite recipe. I thought I would see how it worked with peaches. Success! The only difference is that I like toasted almonds as the nut in the topping for peaches. With apples, I like toasted pecans. Walnuts are good too, but this is the South. We eat pecans.

Peach (or any fruit) crisp:

Preheat oven to 375F.

2lbs peaches, peeled and sliced
1/4 c. sugar
1 1/2 T lemon juice

Combine the fruit, sugar, and lemon in a bowl. Set aside.

In a food processor combine the following until it looks like sand:

6 T white, all purpose flour
1/4 c. white sugar
1/4 c. light brown sugar
1/4 t. cinnamon
1/4 t. nutmeg
1/4 t. salt

Add 5 T cold butter cut into 1/2 pieces. Pulse in the food processor until it resembles coarse corn meal.

Add 3/4 c. chopped almonds (or other nuts, toasted or not) and pulse five or six times. Don't let the mixture stick together. It should still look like crumbs. Chill for 15 minutes.

Put the fruit in a deep dish pie plate. Add the crumbs on top. Cook for 40 minutes. Then turn up the heat to 400F and cook another 10 or 15 minutes until the crisp is browned.

Serve w/ ice cream.

Cherries jubilee

2008-06-21T18:20:00.003-04:00

The array of summers fruits in season makes me so happy! I have been having a lot of fun experimenting with cherries. They cook so well. The only downside to cherries is the need for a cherry pitter. It can also be used for olives. I like kitchen gadgets so I don't mind having a utensil that I pull out for only a short time every summer. I have learned to put it to good use on olives too.

I've tried two variations of cherries jubilee, a sauce of cooked, sweetened cherries set alight with brandy and poured over ice cream. The recipe couldn't be simpler. For the variation, I substituted red wine for the water. It makes the sauce even richer and more elegant. I also used some vanilla sugar that I had on hand. Whenever I use vanilla beans, I save the pods and put in a glass jar with sugar. It imparts a delicate vanilla flavor to the sugar. Given how expensive vanilla beans are, I like to get the most out of them.

2lb sweet cherries, pitted ans stems removed
1 c. water or red wine for the variation
1/2 sugar or more according to your taste
1/4 c. brandy

Cook the cherries in the water over medium low heat for 20 minutes. Stir in the sugar. Allow to cool to warm. Put ice cream in the bowls. Pour brandy over cherries and set alight with a match or a grill lighter. Once the alcohol burns off, pour the sauce over the ice cream.

A picnic and my Ethiopian food fix

2008-06-16T20:46:00.002-04:00

I spent the past weekend hanging out with my family in Kansas City. That's in Missouri, if you recall from an earlier post. There is one in Kansas too, but it's a smaller town.

On Saturday, we went to my dad's farm where we had a huge feast with several family friends. We ate fried fish, fried frog legs, potatoes, and numerous salads and desserts. The fish was white bass from a lake in Missouri. It was great! The frog legs suffered from being battered and fried. They were too tough. Frog legs require gentle treatment like a sauté.

After waxing loudly and repeatedly about how much I miss Ethiopian food since the closure of the Queen of Sheba in Chapel Hill last year, my family finally relented and agreed for dinner on Father's Day at the Blue Nile in the market district. Happily my dad really likes Ethiopian food. We ordered a ton of stuff. Everyone adored the beef and vegetable sambusas, savory, pastry turnovers. I ate and ate wanting to taste and savor everything several times. I am still not hungry. The beef tibbs and beef watt were simply fantastic. My favorite dishes though are the vegetables.

If I ever feel hungry again, I am going to figure out something new to do with a package of shrimp from the coast that my friend brought me.

Catfish at Federal

2008-06-11T20:49:00.004-04:00

Catfish can be fantastic or it can taste like mud. Fortunately, the fried catfish special currently on the menu at Federal is very tasty. It is lightly battered, served over creamy grits with smoked cheddar and topped with a tasso gravy. Tasso is smoked, Cajun seasoned pork. The smoked cheddar in the grits was an inspired idea. I am going to try that at home the next time I fix cheese grits.

I heard the tuna special was fantastic but it was off the menu before I could get there, so keep your eyes peeled for that too.

Run to Federal before they take the catfish off the menu!

Three ways with peas

2008-06-08T10:50:00.003-04:00

Cook with Jamie, my current cookbook reading, has a section dedicated to peas. It took me until my adulthood to appreciate the humble pea. Now that fresh peas are in season, these recipes are perfect. I've not tried the one with mint yet, but it looks very tasty. I've tried the other two with frozen peas. These recipes are for Matt who loves peas.

I. Braised peas with spring onion and lettuce
This one is a traditional French recipe.

Slowly heat a knob a butter and glug of olive oil in a pan. Add 1t flour and stir around. Slowly pour in 1c. vegetable or chicken stock. Turn up heat and add 6 spring onions that have been trimmed and finely sliced. Add 14oz fresh or frozen peas. Add 2 little butter lettuces that have been sliced. Season with salt and pepper. Simmer, covered, for 5 minutes or so. Squeeze juice from 1 lemon over peas. Serve drizzled with a splash of olive oil.

II. Buttered peas with bacon
Everything is better with bacon!

Cook 4 handfuls of fresh or frozen peas in boiling water for 3 or 4 minutes. Drain, reserving some cooking liquid. Fry 5 slices of bacon, remove from pan and crumble into small pieces. Reserve 1-2T bacon fat in the pan. Add the peas to the pan but turn off the heat. Add a knob of butter, juice of a lemon, salt and pepper to the peas. Add a splash of the reserved cooking water. Sprinkle crumbled bacon over the peas and serve.

III. Minty peas
In Italy this recipe is generally served cold or at room temperature.

Put 4 to 6 handfuls of fresh or frozen peas and a small bunch of mint leaves into a cold pan. Bring water to boil in a kettle. Pour just enough of the boil water over the peas and mint to cover them. Put the pan on high heat and bring back to boil for 3 to 4 minutes until peas are tender. Drain in a colander. Put the peas and mint in a bowl. Season with salt and pepper and juice of a lemon or a dash of red or white wine vinegar. Cover the peas and mint with 1c olive oil and mix. Put aside for half an hour or longer for the flavors to blend.

Garlicky scallops and squid ink pasta

2008-06-07T09:08:00.005-04:00

I love the dramatic contrast between black pasta and white scallops. My pantry is full of squid ink pasta that I picked up at Target, of all places. When my friend brought me some fresh scallops from the coast, I knew they were destined to marry with the black pasta. A while ago I tried these ingredients in a saffron sauce. This time I was looking for something with a good dose of garlic.

Jamie Oliver's cookbook Cook with Jamie provided exactly what I needed. He includes a recipe for making homemade squid ink pasta. Sounds delicious, but being a messy cook (one time my brother and I got chocolate on the ceiling of my mother's kitchen) did I really want to deal with squid sacks filled with blue-black ink? No.

So here it is:

1/2 lb or so of squid ink pasta
olive oil
8 or 10 large scallops, cut in half lengthwise and scored, seasoned w/ salt and pepper
1-2 red chili peppers, seeded and chopped
3-4 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
a bunch of fresh, flat-leaf parsley
glass of white wine
2 T butter
juice from 1/2 lemon

Put the water on to boil for the pasta. While waiting for the water to boil, get all of the ingredients ready. Put the pasta in the boiling water and cook according the the package directions. When the pasta has 5 minutes left to cook, put two or three glugs of olive oil into a pan. When the oil is hot, add the scallops in one layer. Add the garlic and chili pepper. Turn the scallops over when they begin to brown after a couple of minutes. Add the white wine and reduce a little. Add the butter and reduce a minute or two longer. Remove from heat and stir in the lemon juice. Serve over the squid ink pasta. Garnish w/ chopped parsley

This dish is super quick, very tasty, and great when it's too hot to turn on the oven.

A sort of beef daube

2008-06-04T19:38:00.004-04:00

I picked up a couple of beef shanks at the farmers' market: nice, free-range, happy cows locally and humanely raised, fed, and butchered.

Beef shanks have to be cooked for a long while so they are falling-off-the-bone tender. I decided the lovely beef shanks needed to be prepared in the fashion that is a cross between a beef daube, usually chunks of beef, and osso bucco, the classic Italian preparation for bone-in veal shanks. Daube is a French beef stew made with wine, garlic, herbs and various other things.

I browned the shanks in a tablespoon or so of butter and removed them to a plate. Then I sauted in more butter (you could us olive oil) chopped onions, chopped carrots, and 4 or 5 cloves of chopped garlic until golden. I put the shanks back in the pan and added half a glass or so of red wine and I let it boil for a minute. Next I added enough water (you could use beef stock or something similar) for the liquid to come right up to the top of the shanks. I threw in a couple of sprigs of rosemary for good measure. Once it came to a boil, I turned down the heat to very low, covered the pot, and let it simmer gently for 2 1/2 hours.

I served the daube with some fingerling potatoes, also from the market, that I cut in half lenthwise and fried in olive oil. MMMM! Both were tasty.

Slow-cooked beef is my favorite way to eat beef. A long, slow braise can render the least expensive cuts of beef absolutely delicious!

Cherry frangipane tart

2008-06-01T17:25:00.003-04:00

I spent a lot of time cooking this weekend. After spending a small fortune on almond flour (finely ground almonds) for the opera cake, I decided that I could absolutely not let the remaining flour go to waste. Being rather expensive and very delicious, it deserved a wonderful recipe that would highlight the delicate almond flavor. I found almost what I was looking for in this cherry frangipane tart recipe.

Frangipane is an almond paste made of almond flour, sugar, and eggs. It is commonly used in pastries with apples and pears in France. Since cherries are in season, I thought I'd give it a whirl with fresh cherries. I flavored the frangipane with 1T brandy and 1T vanilla. It was GREAT, if I do say so myself!

The recipe happens to be in metric so it allowed me to use my new scale that I bought to use w/ my French cookbooks. The scale turned out to be a cheap piece of work so I have to get something more robust. The recipe turned out well and looked gorgeous. Fresh, sweet cherries and the frangipane complimented each other well.

I did not like the pastry in this recipe. The crust turned out way too tough, almost like concrete. I really think pastry needs a bit of lard or shortening...and a bit of vodka...to stay light and tender, so I will be using my favorite Cooks' Illustrated pie crust recipe next time. There really is no need to try other pie crust recipes!

I am going to experiment with finding a frangipane recipe in our imperial measurements. I am also looking for one where the texture is silky. I think that may mean using powdered sugar.

Peanut sauce

2008-05-30T09:11:00.002-04:00

A while ago, some friends brought this peanut sauce to my house to pour over stewed collards. It is really tasty on greens. I like to put it on cooked soba noodles with sliced, blanched carrots for a simple meal. It would also be good served as a satay sauce with grilled chicken that's been marinated with soy, some oil, and garlic.

1/3 C peanut butter
2 T *toasted* sesame oil
2 T tamari
3 T rice vinegar OR Chinese black vinegar
1/4 t of cayenne pepper or to taste
1 t sugar or to taste
1 large clove of garlic or to taste
Juice of one lime

Put everything in the blender and process until smooth and there you have it!

Daring Bakers: White chocolate opera cake

2008-05-28T18:58:00.010-04:00

After the questionable cheesecake-on-a-stick recipe, I was was very pleased to find out that the May challenge recipe for the Daring Bakers was a delightful French confection known as an opera cake. Generally an opera cake is made with dark chocolate. Our version specified that we had to use white chocolate and other flavorings light in color in honor of springtime. It's a beautiful, elegant recipe that tastes fantastic! Homemade real buttercream is well worth the trouble.

This recipe and this posting are dedicated to Barbara of Winos and Foodies in appreciation for her courage and activism in the face of cancer. Good job, Barbara! Keep up the good fight!

Several components comprise an opera cake: layers of almond cake called a joconde, flavored simple syrup, buttercream, mousse, and a ganache topping. I knew this recipe would be time consuming. I decided to flavor it with Chambord, a raspberry liquor, and fresh raspberries.

This recipe is based on recipes in Dorie Greenspan’s Paris Sweets and Tish Boyle and Timothy Moriarty’s Chocolate Passion.

For the joconde:

What you’ll need:

•2 12½ x 15½-inch (31 x 39-cm) jelly-roll pans (Note: If you do not have jelly-roll pans this size, do not fear! You can use different-sized jelly-roll pans like 10 x 15-inches.)
•a few tablespoons of melted butter (in addition to what’s called for in the ingredients’ list) and a brush (to grease the pans)
•parchment paper
•a whisk and a paddle attachment for a stand mixer or for a handheld mixer
•two mixing bowls (you can make do with one but it’s preferable to have two)

Ingredients:

6 large egg whites, at room temperature
2 tbsp. (30 grams) granulated sugar
2 cups (225 grams) ground blanched almonds (Note: If you do not want to use almond meal, you can use another nut meal like hazelnut. You can buy almond meal in bulk food stores or health food stores, or you can make it at home by grinding almonds in the food processor with a tablespoon or two of the flour that you would use in the cake. The reason you need the flour is to prevent the almonds from turning oily or pasty in the processor. You will need about 2 cups of blanched almonds to create enough almond meal for this cake.)
2 cups icing sugar, sifted
6 large eggs
½ cup (70 grams) all-purpose flour
3 tbsp. (1½ ounces; 45 grams) unsalted butter, melted and cooled

1.Divide the oven into thirds by positioning a rack in the upper third of the oven and the lower third of the oven.

2.Preheat the oven to 425◦F. (220◦C).

3.Line two 12½ x 15½- inch (31 x 39-cm) jelly-roll pans with parchment paper and brush with melted butter.

4.In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment (or using a handheld mixer), beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks. Add the granulated sugar and beat until the peaks are stiff and glossy. If you do not have another mixer bowl, gently scrape the meringue into another bowl and set aside.

5.If you only have one bowl, wash it after removing the egg whites or if you have a second bowl, use that one. Attach the paddle attachment to the stand mixer (or using a handheld mixer again) and beat the almonds, icing sugar and eggs on medium speed until light and voluminous, about 3 minutes.

6.Add the flour and beat on low speed until the flour is just combined (be very careful not to overmix here!!!).

7.Using a rubber spatula, gently fold the meringue into the almond mixture and then fold in the melted butter. Divide the batter between the pans and spread it evenly to cover the entire surface of each pan.

8.Bake the cake layers until they are lightly browned and just springy to the touch. This could take anywhere from 5 to 9 minutes depending on your oven. Place one jelly-roll pan in the middle of the oven and the second jelly-roll pan in the bottom third of the oven.

9.Put the pans on a heatproof counter and run a sharp knife along the edges of the cake to loosen it from the pan. Cover each with a sheet of parchment or wax paper, turn the pans over, and unmold.

10.Carefully peel away the parchment, then turn the parchment over and use it to cover the cakes. Let the cakes cool to room temperature.

For the syrup:

What you’ll need:

•a small saucepan

Ingredients:

½ cup (125 grams) water
⅓ cup (65 grams) granulated sugar
1 to 2 tbsp. of the flavouring of your choice (i.e., vanilla extract, raspberry liquor, almond extract, cognac, limoncello, coconut cream, honey etc.)

1.Stir all the syrup ingredients together in the saucepan and bring to a boil.

2.Remove from the heat and let cool to room temperature.

For the buttercream:

What you’ll need:

•a small saucepan
•a candy or instant-read thermometer
•a stand mixer or handheld mixer
•a bowl and a whisk attachment
•rubber spatula

Ingredients:
2 cups sugar
½ cup water and
1¾ cups butter
1 tbsp. pure vanilla extract
1 large egg
1 large egg yolk

flavouring of your choice (a tablespoon of an extract, a few tablespoons of melted white chocolate, citrus zest, etc.)

1.Combine the sugar, water and vanilla bean seeds or extract in a small saucepan and warm over medium heat just until the sugar dissolves.

2.Continue to cook, without stirring, until the syrup reaches 225◦F (107◦C) .

3.While the syrup is heating, begin whisking the egg and egg yolk at high speed in the bowl of your mixer using the whisk attachment. Whisk them until they are pale and foamy.

4.When the sugar syrup reaches the correct temperature and you remove it from the heat, reduce the mixer speed to low speed and begin slowly (very slowly) pouring the syrup down the side of the bowl being very careful not to splatter the syrup into the path of the whisk attachment. Some of the syrup will spin onto the sides of the bowl but don’t worry about this and don’t try to stir it into the mixture as it will harden!

5.Raise the speed to medium-high and continue beating until the eggs are thick and satiny and the mixture is cool to the touch (about 5 minutes or so).

6.While the egg mixture is beating, place the softened butter in a bowl and mash it with a spatula until you have a soft creamy mass.

7.With the mixer on medium speed, begin adding in two-tablespoon chunks. When all the butter has been incorporated, raise the mixer speed to high and beat until the buttercream is thick and shiny.

8.At this point add in your flavouring and beat for an additional minute or so.

9.Refrigerate the buttercream, stirring it often, until it’s set enough (firm enough) to spread when topped with a layer of cake (about 20 minutes).

For the white chocolate mousse:

What you’ll need:

•a small saucepan
•a mixer or handheld mixer

Ingredients:

7 ounces white chocolate
1 cup plus 3 tbsp. heavy cream (35% cream)
1 tbsp. liquer of your choice (Bailey’s, Amaretto, etc.)

1.Melt the white chocolate and the 3 tbsp. of heavy cream in a small saucepan.
2.Stir to ensure that it’s smooth and that the chocolate is melted. Add the tablespoon of liqueur to the chocolate and stir. Set aside to cool completely.
3.In the bowl of a stand mixer, whip the remaining 1 cup of heavy cream until soft peaks form.
4.Gently fold the whipped cream into the cooled chocolate to form a mousse.
5.If it’s too thin, refrigerate it for a bit until it’s spreadable.
6.If you’re not going to use it right away, refrigerate until you’re ready to use.

For the glaze

What you’ll need:

•a small saucepan or double boiler

Ingredients:

14 ounces white chocolate, coarsely chopped
½ cup heavy cream (35% cream)

1.Melt the white chocolate with the heavy cream. Whisk the mixture gently until smooth.
2.Let cool for 10 minutes and then pour over the chilled cake. Using a long metal cake spatula, smooth out into an even layer.
3.Place the cake into the refrigerator for 30 minutes to set.

Assembling the Opéra Cake

(Note: The finished cake should be served slightly chilled. It can be kept in the refrigerator for up to 1 day).

Line a baking sheet with parchment or wax paper.

Working with one sheet of cake at a time, cut and trim each sheet so that you have two pieces (from each cake so you’ll have four pieces in total): one 10-inch (25-cm) square and one 10 x 5-inch (25 x 12½-cm) rectangle.

Place one square of cake on the baking sheet and moisten it gently with the flavoured syrup. Spread about three-quarters of the buttercream over this layer.

Top with the two rectangular pieces of cake, placing them side by side to form a square. Moisten these pieces with the flavoured syrup.

Spread the remaining buttercream on the cake and then top with the third square of joconde. Use the remaining syrup to wet the joconde and then refrigerate until very firm (at least half an hour).

Prepare the ganache/mousse (if you haven’t already) and then spread it on the top of the last layer of the joconde. Refrigerate for at least two to three hours to give the ganache/mousse the opportunity to firm up.

Make the glaze and after it has cooled, pour/spread it over the top of the chilled cake. Refrigerate the cake again to set the glaze.

Serve the cake slightly chilled. This recipe will yield approximately 20 servings.

Nana's for dinner

2008-05-17T23:46:00.003-04:00

Friday night I went to Nana's with two friends. For dinner we shared three very delicious starters: duck pate, crab and asparagus with a butter sauce, and wagyu beef meatballs with pasta and ricotta salata cheese. We drank a Gruener Vetliner that was dry, minerally, and chalky.

The mild and creamy pate is always delicious at Nana's. It is served with a variety of pickles, coarse grain mustard, raspberry preserves and crostini.

I enjoyed the crab the most on Friday. It's hard to beat the delicate crab and asparagus flavors enhanced by a butter sauce. The chef at Nana's really outdid himself. Run to Nana's to get the crab and asparagus!

One of my friends enjoyed the meatballs the most. The tiny meatballs were made of wagyu beef. Wagyu is a type of cattle that is typically fed a diet of beer resulting in intensely marbled meat. It's also known as Kobe-style beef which is generally priced outside of what I'm willing to pay for food. I am not sure that I can tell the difference between Kobe and regular beef, but the meatballs were certainly flavorful and tender. The pasta and meatballs starter would be fine for a light dinner.

For dessert we shared a coconut pound cake with creme caramel sauce and blackberries. I could have polished it off singlehandedly with no problem!

Bloody Mary with a twist

2008-05-15T17:02:00.006-04:00

My fabulously stylish friend in Pinehurst, who has a real savoir de vivre, gave me this recipe that he devised one morning with friend when, blessedly, they discovered no celery in the fridge.

Stir in a tall glass:
Ice
vodka - you say when
V8 Juice - to top off the vodka
splash of Worcestershire sauce

Garnish:
1 green onion stalk in each glass
1 full Arugula leaf
1 sprig of rosemary
sprinkle one shake of fennel seed for flavor

Look how pretty:

Give me fennel, arugula, green onion, and rosemary over celery any day!

Crabbing

2008-05-12T17:40:00.004-04:00

At least once this year, I plan to capture and prepare my own food. I already have taken a hunter's safety class, bought a fishing and hunting license, and been given as gifts various tools like fishing pools and shotguns.

This weekend I was at the coast so I decided try crabbing. Blue crab are in season. I love fresh crab meat and sitting on a dock or pier in the sun waiting for crab to bite sounds like a luxury to me. Additionally, crabbing is low tech, inexpensive and fun. No, I didn't set out a crab pot.

We tied a chicken leg to some fishing line, tossed it in, and waited. Some of us waited longer than others. I realized that I need to work on patience! After a while, we'd pull up the lines very slowly to see if a crab was hanging on. Sometimes we could feel them wrestling the chicken leg but sometimes we couldn't. When we saw a crab claw hanging on the the chicken as we pulled up the lines, we tried to scoop the crab into a net. It sounds easier than it actually is, surprisingly!

One of my companions caught a gorgeous female blue crab. She was fierce...and I don't mean fierce as it is currently being bandied about in fashion circles. I mean cut-your-finger-in-half fierce. She was angry and ready to fight. We might have lost some digits trying to get her into a pot even with tongs and gloves. Every time we opened the cooler to admire her, she'd jump into the air with claws ablazin'.

After a couple of hours we still only had the one crab. They were biting but we were too hasty in pulling them up or too clumsy with the nets. I decided that it wasn't right to eat only one, especially a mature female that would be better served making crab babies than in a crab Louie. We let her go.

I definitely want to go crabbing again. Although I am very humbled to learn that if relied on my own prowess to keep myself fed, I'd probably die of hunger.

Daring Bakers: Chocolate cheesecake on a stick

2008-05-07T16:34:00.005-04:00

I joined a group of online bakers some months ago. Each month we are given a recipe that everyone tries and then on the same day we post about our results.

In March I was too traumatized about my Tibet trip to cook an elaborate cake. Then in April I made the recipe and forgot to post it! Oops! So now, two weeks late, here is my version of the Daring Bakers' chocolate cheesecake on a stick:

I am not going to share the recipe with you because, frankly, I did not like this recipe. When I first read the recipe I was sorely disappointed. I love chocolate and I love cheesecake but not together. I don't know why. I also believe that neither dark, luscious, French chocolate nor unctuous, creamy cheesecake should ever suffer the ignominy of being put on a stick.

Should you be compelled to try this, all you have to do is make any cheesecake according to the recipe but without the crust. Then you chill it and roll it into balls and put sticks you've bought from Michael's craft store in them. Then you put the balls in the freezer to harden for several hours. Melt some chocolate an dip the balls in it. If you really want to go for broke then roll them in rainbow sprinkles.

These might be fun for a party. The downside is that the cheesecake balls fall off of the sticks as soon as they get to room temp.

So, on second thought, just make a nice cheesecake and forget the sticks.

Trip to Florida's Gulf coast

2008-05-06T21:55:00.009-04:00

My second cousin got married at Long Boat Key in Florida over the weekend. I met my mother down in Tampa and we drove to the key for the wedding. I now know that the food scene down there is quite exciting. We ate well the entire long weekend!

We started out by splurging at Wright's Gourmet in Tampa. We had the best Cuban sandwiches there. Cuban sandwiches are ham and pork on baguette style of bread with mustard sauce, cheese and pickles. It is pressed like panini in a sandwich machine. We shared a piece of fantastic chocolate cake and also a piece of rum cake. The chocolate cake at Wright's is moist and fluffy. It is loaded with frosting. YUM! The rum cake is a rich butter cake lightly soaked in rum so it isn't at all stodgy. It is also topped with pecans. We bought cream cheese brownies and a seven layer bar to go. They were good but the cakes were the best.

The next day we had stone crab claws, currently in season, for lunch at a place in St. Armand's Circle in Sarasota. The stone crab claws are large and fat. They are loaded with crab meat. That night we went to the wedding. It was really fun and the food was good. The cake truly rocked though. The tiers were different flavors. I had chocolate with cherry filling and white icing.

On Sunday my mother and I ate dinner at a darling place called Euphemia Haye. My mother ordered fried green tomatoes coated in bread crumbs served with a pecan pesto, feta cheese, and a roasted red pepper reduction. We both thought it was one of the tastiest dishes we've had in a while. If you've never had fried green tomatoes then you are missing out! I ordered a specialty pizza topped with roasted, barbecued duck and shitake mushrooms. Love some duck!

Euphemia Haye offers desserts that are truly a sight to behold. The meringues defy gravity. My mom and I shared a coconut cream pie. The coconut cream filling was unctuous and rich. It was topped with fresh whipped cream. The pie crust disappointed us somewhat. It was tough in texture and dull in taste. It needed some butter to give it more flavor.

Just when I thought we couldn't eat any better, we had lunch on Monday at Spanish/Cuban place called Columbia Restaurant in St. Armand's Circle. My mother had the lunch special, a stuffed chicken breast. I cannot recall what was in it but it was gorgeous and delicious. I ate shrimp salteado which had chorizo, peppers, onions, and potato cooked with the shrimp.

Needless to say, after all of the wonderful food, I am feeling rather Rubenesque and will be eating plain, fresh veggies for a few days.

Morels on toast

2008-05-01T16:55:00.003-04:00

Morel mushrooms are in season now. These wonderful morsels are outrageously expensive at $35/lb if you can find them. They are not widely farmed so we pay for the fact that someone is out hunting for them. My lucky brother is currently in possession of a whole pound of morels. He requested this recipe.

Apparently morels proliferate in northwest Missouri where my father has a farm. One day I will go hunt for morels. That sounds more fun to me than hunting for deer which also happens on my dad's farm.

Anyway, if you happen to find or buy some morels, then try this recipe that I printed from the NYT on May 16, 2007. I made the dish a few days ago with some morels I picked up at WholeFoods. It is equally good with chanterelles or any other mushroom.

1/2 lb or so of morel mushrooms, trimmed ends
2 T unsalted butter, plus more for toast
1 large shallot, chopped
2 T white wine or vermouth
1/4 c. heavy cream
salt and pepper to taste
4 slices of brioche or sourdough or any gorgeous bakery bread
1 T chopped chives
Fleur de sel or other salt

Clean the mushrooms by brushing them with a soft bristled pastry brush. Do not put them in water. Slice in half (longways) and brush again. The brushing is a pain but the mushrooms are gritty since they come out of dirt (funny how that happens). I didn't quite get all of the grit out of mine. Chop mushrooms into rough pieces.

Melt butter in a pan over medium-high. Add shallots and cook until soft, about 3 min. Add mushrooms and cook for 5 minutes, stirring often. Add wine. Reduce heat to medium, cover and cook for 5 minutes more. Uncover and cook until most of the liquid has evaporated. Stir in cream, simmer for 2 minutes or until slighly thickened. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Toast bread slices and spread with butter. Sprinkle with chives. Top with mushrooms. Sprinkle with more chives and sea salt.

Be happy.

Chocolate pudding

2008-04-30T10:38:00.002-04:00

Last week's New York Times Food section had several variations on the theme of chocolate pudding. I love chocolate pudding! It reminds me of being a kid. My brother and I would beg my mom to make us pudding as a special treat. It usually came out of a box, but we didn't care. When I saw the recipe for chocolate pudding with bananas, I decided to try it for a small dinner party on Sunday. Everyone loved it. I decided that it was more like chocolate pudding with bananas rather than a chocolate banana pudding. In fact, it would probably be delicious with strawberries instead of bananas. My next recipe in the pudding family will be pots de creme. I have found several good recipes including one from the NYT so I need to study them to see which one I should try.

Chocolate and banana pudding:

5 ounces milk chocolate, finely chopped
3 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
2 tablespoons cornstarch
Pinch salt
2 egg yolks
1 1/2 cups whole milk
1/2 cup heavy cream, plus 1 cup whipped
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large bananas, thinly sliced
14 whole chocolate wafer cookies, plus 4 crushed, for garnish (I like Pepperidge Farm chocolate chessmen).

1. Place chocolate in a bowl. In a separate large bowl, sift together sugar, cocoa, cornstarch and salt; whisk in egg yolks and 1/2 cup milk until smooth.

2. In a large saucepan over high heat, bring remaining 1 cup milk and 1/2 cup cream to a simmer. Pour over chopped chocolate and whisk until smooth. Whisking constantly, slowly pour hot chocolate mixture into egg mixture until completely incorporated and cocoa is dissolved.

3. Return custard to saucepan. Cook, stirring constantly, over medium heat, until thickened, about 10 minutes. Do not let mixture reach a simmer. If custard begins to steam heavily, stir it, off the heat, a moment before returning it to stove top. Strain through a fine-mesh sieve. Stir in vanilla.

4. Spread several tablespoons pudding evenly into an 8-inch square pan (or a glass bowl). Top with an even layer of bananas; arrange whole cookies on top of bananas. Cover with remaining pudding. Top with whipped cream and sprinkle with crushed cookies. Chill at least 3 hours or overnight before serving.

Yield: 6 to 8 servings.

Arugula pesto

2008-04-26T17:13:00.004-04:00

When I lived in Cambridge, UK, back in the mid-nineties I used to frequent a wonderful cheese shop that also sold fresh pasta and homemade rocket, aka arugula, pesto. I was flat broke in those days, but I'd carefully plan my budget so I could spend my pennies on the delights at the cheese shop. I fell in love with the rocket pesto. It was so good that I would eat it from a spoon. I am very pleased that the Cambridge Cheese Company is still in business. I had no idea until I googled it.

Every spring when arugula is bountifully available at the farmers' market I buy some. It's good in salads but I am still partial to the pesto. Here is the recipe I've been using for years. I think I found it on the FoodTV Web site. I've never tried it with toasted walnuts but I'm sure it is equally tasty.

Recipe: Arugula (rocket) pesto:

4 cups packed fresh arugula
1/2 head of minced garlic
Salt and freshly ground pepper
1 cup pure olive oil
3 tablespoon pine nuts, toasted
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan

Prepare an ice water bath in a large bowl, and bring a large pot of water to a boil. Put the arugula in a large sieve and plunge it into the boiling water. Immediately immerse all the arugula and stir so that it blanches evenly. Blanch for about 15 seconds. Remove, shake off the excess water, then plunge the arugula into the ice water bath and stir again so it cools as fast as possible. Drain well.

Squeeze the water out of the arugula with your hands until very dry. Roughly chop the arugula and put in a blender. Add the garlic, salt and pepper to taste, olive oil, pine nuts. Blend for at least 30 seconds. In this way the green of the arugula will thoroughly color the oil. Add the cheese and pulse to combine. The pesto will keep several days in a tightly sealed container in the refrigerator. Serve w/ pasta or in any dish requiring pesto.

Magnolia Grill

2008-04-24T21:26:00.004-04:00

Tuesday night my friend and I had dinner at Magnolia Grill. We nabbed a table in the bar. No reservations required for the bar. Our table was the one farthest from the door and closest to the kitchen. Frankly, I think it is the best table in the house because we watched all the food come and go and we could see bustling activity in the kitchen. For two gourmandes that was a treat to see all of the gorgeous creations coming out of the kitchen.

Every time I've been to Magnolia Grill I've enjoyed the starters and desserts the most. Don't get me wrong: the main courses are generally lovely too, but the chef/owners excel at the first course and the last. One day I intend to sit at the bar and order each of the starters so I can try all of them. I might need someone to share in this task because that would be a lot of rich food.

Anyway, I am partial to starters because the flavors are richer, more concentrated than main courses usually are. Tuesday was no exception. My friend and I shared a pork terrine seasoned perfectly with thyme. Butter lettuce leaves garnished the plate and there may have been some pale beets too. The terrine, a glorified pork meatloaf, was thinly sliced and arranged on the plate. If you are partial to pork and to terrines like I am, then you need to run to Magnolia Grill while it is still on the menu. I'd be quite happy with a plate of terrine and the glass of white Burgundy for my dinner.

Our main courses were also delicious. We agreed that we'd each eat half of the plate and then trade. That's really fun if you can find a willing party to share his or her dinner. I generally order the fish because Magnolia Grill's fish has always been perfectly done and a delicate balance of flavors. I ordered the trout. It came with potatoes and a sauce that featured chorizo. I liked the unexpected surprise of the spicy chorizo. My fish was cooked medium rare. My companion ordered the grouper served on spaetzle. She enjoyed it very much. It was tasty, but I thought the grouper might have been a hair overcooked. As for the spaetzle, well, how can you go wrong w/ any homemade egg pasta? It is the Swabian contribution to the culinary arts!

We were too full to have dessert, alas.

Chocolate cupcakes

2008-04-19T10:47:00.005-04:00

Cupcakes have been very trendy for the past couple of years. Some friends of mine got married and had cupcakes arranged on a large multi-tiered plate instead of wedding cake. Bakeries all around town have begun selling pretty, decorated cupcakes. In NYC there are entire bakeries dedicated to taking the humble cupcake to new heights of elegance and sophistication. Cupcakes have a lot going for them: they are single portions, they don't require a fork, and they can support a generous amount of frosting.

My favorite cupcake recipe comes from the March 2005 Cooks' Illustrated. Currently the recipe is available for free on their subscription Web site, but I've also copied it below.

It makes twelve cupcakes and cannot be doubled. The cupcakes come out with a tender, moist crumb and a rich, chocolate taste. I have topped them with coffee flavored frosting, peanut butter frosting, and chocolate frosting. The coffee frosting is great but I doubt children would like it so keep that recipe for adults! I know that I would have been woefully disappointed as a child if I bit into a delicious homemade cupcake only to discover it had coffee frosting!

Dark chocolate cupcakes:

8	tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 4 pieces
2	ounces bittersweet chocolate , chopped
1/2	cup Dutch-processed cocao (1 1/2 ounces)
3/4	cup unbleached, all-purpose flour (3 3/4 ounces)
1/2	teaspoon baking soda
3/4	teaspoon baking powder
2	large eggs
3/4	cup sugar (5 1/4 ounces)
1	teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2	teaspoon table salt
1/2	cup sour cream (4 ounces)

1. Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position; heat oven to 350 degrees. Line standard-sized muffin pan (cups have 1/2-cup capacity) with baking-cup liners.

2. Combine butter, chocolate, and cocoa in medium heatproof bowl. Set bowl over saucepan containing barely simmering water; heat mixture until butter and chocolate are melted and whisk until smooth and combined. Set aside to cool until just warm to the touch.

3. Whisk flour, baking soda, and baking powder in small bowl to combine.

4. Whisk eggs in second medium bowl to combine; add sugar, vanilla, and salt and whisk until fully incorporated. Add cooled chocolate mixture and whisk until combined. Sift about one-third of flour mixture over chocolate mixture and whisk until combined; whisk in sour cream until combined, then sift remaining flour mixture over and whisk until batter is homogenous and thick.

5. Divide batter evenly among muffin pan cups. Bake until skewer inserted into center of cupcakes comes out clean, 18 to 20 minutes.

6. Cool cupcakes in muffin pan on wire rack until cool enough to handle, about 15 minutes. Carefully lift each cupcake from muffin pan and set on wire rack. Cool to room temperature before icing, about 30 minutes. (To frost: Mound about 2 tablespoons icing on center of each cupcake. Using small icing spatula or butter knife, spread icing to edge of cupcake, leaving slight mound in center.)

Easy coffee buttercream:

10	tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1 1/4	cups confectioners' sugar (5 ounces)
	Pinch table salt
1 1/2	teaspoons instant espresso powder
1/2	teaspoon vanilla extract
1	tablespoon heavy cream

In standing mixer fitted with whisk attachment, beat butter at medium-high speed until smooth, about 20 seconds. Add confectioners' sugar and salt; beat at medium-low speed until most of the sugar is moistened, about 45 seconds. Scrape down bowl and beat at medium speed until mixture is fully combined, about 15 seconds; scrape bowl. Dissolve instant espresso in vanilla and cream, and beat at medium speed until incorporated, about 10 seconds, then increase speed to medium-high and beat until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes, scraping down bowl once or twice. The frosting may be made ahead and refrigerated but bring it to room temperature before using. The recipe may be doubled to make enough for a two layer cake.

Chocolate malts

2008-04-17T21:42:00.002-04:00

I love chocolate malts! Vanilla ice cream, malt, and chocolate syrup. I think some people call this a black and white because the malt or shake isn't made with chocolate ice cream.

Elmo's in Durham makes the best chocolate malt I've had so far. It is just as I like it with lots of malt flavor, chocolate syrup and vanilla ice cream. The drug store on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill makes tasty malts too but they call it a black and white. I heard the that old MacDonald's drug store on 9th St. might reopen as a soda shop and ice cream shop. That would be great!

Cafe Driade on Franklin Street deserves special mention for their chocolate mocha shake. It has vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup and a shot of espresso! MMMM! I don't even miss the malt.

So I decided to try making malts at home. I started with 2 scoops of plain old Ede's vanilla ice cream becauce chocolate ice cream isn't all that, in my view. I'd much rather eat (or drink) vanilla ice cream with a lovely chocolate sauce. The beauty of shakes and malts is that the fewer high brow the ingredients, the better. I added 2 T of chocolate sauce, 2 T Ovaltine malt and 1/2 c of milk. It was a disaster! Ok maybe not quite a disaster because it was drinkable and very good, but it had too much milk and I didn't like the Ovaltine. It might have even had too much chocolate sauce, if that is possible. So I am still on a mission to find the right ingredients and the right quantities. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

Hainanese chicken and rice

2008-04-14T21:08:00.005-04:00

Two friends and I made this lovely dish at the weekend. One friend is from Singapore so we decided to try making what is basically the national dish of Singapore. Never mind that it comes from Hainan province in China. The dish is served room temperature with hot rice and hot soup. It is surprisingly easy to make although it did take us nearly three hours because we got sidetracked talking. For some of us, it is hard to stir and talk!

We made sauteed bok choy with garlic and fish sauce as a side dish.

Here is the recipe for the chicken and rice from recipe czar. When you make it, start with the chicken. While it is boiling and resting, make the sauces and the rice. We didn't make the chili sauce. Rather we bought the red colored garlic chili sauce available in supermarkets.

For the chicken:
1 whole chicken cut into pieces
1 large thumb size piece of ginger crushed
4-5 cloves of garlic peeled and crushed
1t salt
enough water to cover chicken for boiling
1 cucumber peeled and sliced
3 Roma tomatos sliced

Bring water to boil. Add garlic, salt, and ginger. Add chicken. Cook uncovered for 20 minutes on a slow simmer. Turn off heat and cover pot with lid. Let chicken sit for another 20 minutes. Then remove chicken and immerse in cold water. Slice chicken off the bone then cut into narrow slices. Slice the tomatoes and cucumber and arrange on a plate. Arrange the chicken on top of the vegetables.

For the chicken sauce:

1	tablespoon garlic oil (make this by sauteeing 2 cloves minced garlic in canola oil a minute or two until fragrant)
2	teaspoons sesame oil
5	tablespoons light soy sauce
1 1/2	tablespoons sugar (to taste)
3	tablespoons chicken broth (from boiled chicken)

Combine all ingredients. Pour over chicken. Garnish with chopped cilantro and sliced green onions.

For the rice:
3 c. jasmine rice
2 T fat (from chicken or canola oil)

2-3	cm ginger, grated
3-4	garlic cloves, grated
1-2	teaspoon salt (to taste)
3	cups chicken stock, according to rice package instructions (or more, reserved from chicken that you will boil)

Heat the fat in a saucepan. Add the ginger and garlic. Stir for a minute or until fragrant. Add the rice and stir for a minute until it is coated. Add salt. Add chicken stock and cook according to package instructions.

For the dipping sauces:
Buy the garlic chili sauce at the supermarket and put in a small bowl.

Ginger sauce:
5 T peeled and cut up ginger
6 cloves of garlic
1/2 t salt
1T lime juice
3T chicken stock

In a blender or food processor blend the ingredients until it is the consistency of a coarse pesto. Put it in a small bowl and serve with the chili sauce.

To serve:
Serve rice mounded on dinner plates. Pass around the chicken. Serve the chicken stock in bowls with a garnish of cilantro and sliced green onions. Serve with dipping sauces.

White bean, goat cheese and rosemary pizza

2008-04-11T21:17:00.002-04:00

Sometimes I wish food would just magically appear so I wouldn't have to cook. Don't get me wrong, I like cooking but by Friday evening I am ready to go out to eat or to have someone else cook for me.

Tonight I didn't feel like dining out, and no one was around to cook for me, so I either had to cook for myself or eat cereal. Not wanting to eat cereal for dinner, I whipped up my favorite wholewheat pizza dough (it's so easy to make and I always have the ingredients on hand), pureed 1 cup of of white beans with a few cloves of garlic, 1 T of chicken broth, and 1 t of olive oil and spread it over the pizza dough. Then I topped it with some thinly sliced onion (maybe half of a small onion), some thinly sliced tomato (a whole tomato), crumbled 4 oz of goat cheese on top, and sprinkled with some chopped, fresh rosemary. I seasoned it with salt and ground pepper.

It went into an oven preheated to 450 F and baked for 18 minutes.

I mixed some baby greens in olive oil and ate with some pizza.

Easy. It would be even easier if a person bought the pizza dough. Any canned white bean will do. I've made this recipe before w/ cannellinis, great northerns, and garbanzos. They all taste good. I've never met a legume I didn't love.

Ragin' Cajun: Papa Mojo's Roadhouse

2008-04-08T21:08:00.003-04:00

I believe one should celebrate his or her birthday for a week, at least, especially for milestones like the 9th year of being 29! So to prolong the merriment my dive buddy took me to dinner. We decided to try Papa Mojo's Roadhouse on highway 55 near RTP (It is in the same strip mall as Sarah's Empanadas, if you know where that is. I recommend Sarah's corn and raisin empanadas for lunch if you work in the Park).

Papa Mojo's Roadhouse, conceived by Mel Melton the "Papa" of the Wicked Mojos band, features down home Cajun cuisine. Mel Melton and the Wicked Mojos play there from time to time. Every Thursday night features a band, and there seems to be a schedule of blues and zydeco music on certain nights of the weekend throughout the month.

Besides his musical talents, Mel knows how to cook. Every year around Mardi Gras he teaches a cooking class at A Southern Season. A friend invited me to the class in 2007, and we learned some great recipes like shrimp and tasso beignets with Jezebel sauce, red bean bisque with cornbread croutons, redfish Rockefeller with Creole mustard cream sauce, and bananas foster bread pudding with caramel sauce.

The menu at Papa Mojo's Roadhouse is a lot simpler. It features Cajun staples like gumbo, crawfish etouffee, and jambalaya. I had the Cajun sampler: etouffee, jambalaya, and red beans with rice. My friend had a big bowl of the jambalaya. I have to say that, of the three on my sample plate, I liked the jambalaya best. It is made with "yard bird" (chicken to you and me), andouille, and "cochon" (pork to the rest of us). I usually like some shrimp in my jambalaya but this was so tasty that I didn't miss it. It needed a little salt and to be doctored up with some of the Louisiana hot sauce sitting on the table, but that's why it's there, right?

The best part of the meal was dessert, of course. My friend was too full on jambalaya to eat dessert so I had to eat a whole piece of buttermilk pie with chantilly cream (sweetened whipped cream w/ a dash of vanilla) and blackberry sauce. I'd not ever had buttermilk pie. I'm not even sure I've seen it on a menu until Papa Mojo's menu. What have I been missing? It's delicious! The textures is kind of like a custard pie but not as eggy tasting thanks to the tartness of the buttermilk. The sweet berry sauce and whipped cream accompanied it very well. Here is the recipe from the restaurant's Web site (I've not yet tried it myself so if you attempt it, let me know how it goes):

Buttermilk Pie with Blackberries

Ingredients:
1 ½ cups sugar
1 Tbsp lemon zest
1 Tbsp flour
4 large eggs
1 cup buttermilk
1 stick melted butter
1 10-inch pie crust

1 cup blackberries
1 cup sugar
2 Tbsp pomegranate juice
1 tsp cornstarch

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a mixing bowl combine sugar flour and zest. Whisk eggs in one at a time. Stir in buttermilk and melted butter. Cook ingredients over low heat until syrupy. Add cornstarch to thicken. Pour into pie shell and bake for approx. thirty minutes.

A treat for girls: The Cafe at Nordstrom

2008-04-07T17:14:00.002-04:00

Shockingly enough I'd never been to the Café restaurant on the second floor at Nordstrom although I frequent the store's shoe department and makeup counter often enough.

A friend took my for my birthday. I'm 29 again. We did some restrained shopping, and then headed to the restaurant for lunch. I had a chicken, artichoke, roast red pepper and goat cheese salad with a vinaigrette. The roasted red peppers gave the dish a surprising sweetness. They were perfect little morsels. Sometimes roasted red peppers are just slimy and hardly worth eating. Goat cheese is my favorite food in the world followed by artichokes so I was very happy.

My friend had the Asian chicken salad which had a delicious ginger dressing.

Next time I will try the crab bisque and the pear and Gorgonzola salad or the club sandwich.

So if you ever need a break from strenuous shoe shopping at Nordstrom, head to the Café. It's a lot better than the food court inside the mall!

Sichuan chili sauce

2008-04-02T22:29:00.002-04:00

When I was in China and not working or being booted out of Tibet, I was eating. The food there is fantastic! Granted some of it is kind of weird. There is an old Chinese saying, "The Chinese will eat anything with four legs but the table" and it's kind of true! The menus were fascinating. In Beijing and other touristy places where we Westerners might go the menus are usually offered in English. If the translations are somewhat lacking in descriptive value then there are always pictures.

The variety of fungi alone is astonishing. I enjoyed perusing menu items that I would never in a million and one years eat: shark fin soup, turtle, dog and "sinew of beef soup" to name a few. I have a hard time ascertaining what sinew of beef soup might be but it sure sounds gristly.

My colleague and I both especially loved the Sichuan food. I noticed a delicious, hot peppery flavor in several dishes. Finally I figured out that this peppery flavor came from what looked like a peppercorn. I believe these are sold in Asian markets in the US as Sichuan peppercorns. I bought some in the airport at Chongqing (fomerly referred to as Chungking in English) after the Tibet debacle. The label calls them Chinese prickly ash.

I scoured my cookbooks for Sichuan recipes and came up with this sauce that goes great on stir fry. I made it with fish, but perhaps fish is too delicate to stand up to the intensity of the prickly ash peppercorns. Use the peppercorns sparingly otherwise your tongue will go numb!

Here is the recipe from The Quick Recipe, p, 342:

3 T dry sherry
2 T low sodium chicken broth
1 1/2 T soy sauce
1 T Asian sesame oil
1 T Asian chili paste
1 t cornstarch (I suggest omitting it unless you like the thick sauciness it imparts)
1/4 t sugar
1/4 t toasted and ground (in a pepper mill) Sichuan peppercorns (Chinese prickly ash)

Combine all ingredients in a small bowl.

Use this sauce with stir fry: Once you have fried up the meat or veggies, add the sauce. Turn the heat off. Stir the food until it is well-coated with the sauce.

Asian fusion in Cary: An

2008-04-01T15:27:00.004-04:00

Last night a colleague and I ventured to Cary for dinner at the restaurant An. The menu features sushi, sashimi, a variety of small plates that lean towards Asian and a dinner menu with main courses like chicken with peanuts, black vinegar, and spicy honey. Their specialty is Kobe beef and the menu describes it as being served with deconstruction ratatouille, cassava cake, miso and ginger sauce. I am not sure what that means and I am too cheap to pay for Kobe beef so I went for the prawns with candied walnuts, heart of palm slaw, and honey cream sauce. The flavors went together very well. I really enjoyed the honey cream sauce. What's not to love about honey and cream?

My friend had the miso sea bass with maple syrup, white miso, shiitake, and ginger soy meunière sauce. It looked good, and she cleaned her plate. I don't yet know her well enough to say, "Excuse me, may I have a bite?" so I didn't get a taste.

The drinks menu and wine list are lengthy. I had a nice full, smooth Burgundy before my dinner because yesterday was too cold for white wine. I needed something to warm my blood and it hit the spot.

I like the atmosphere at An. The tables are decorated with orchids which happen to be my favorite flower. For those of us in RTP it is fairly convenient for dinner or cocktails after work. I plan to go back soon to try their sushi. We have a lot of mediocre sushi in the Triangle. Maybe An will be a pleasant surprise.

Side note: I'm still closely following the crisis in Tibet and the surrounding provinces. I'm worried about the latest round of what is undoubtedly a silly Chinese yarn.

Recipes from Z Kitchen

2008-03-26T08:47:00.002-04:00

A fellow local blogger has scored a couple of recipes from her experience at Z Kitchen: heirloom tomato salad with sottocenere al tartufo panino and sunchoke and chorizo puree. I cannot wait to try the panino in particular! Can't beat melted truffle cheese, fresh tomatoes and bread!

Thanks, Prospero's Kitchen, for sharing!

Comfort food: spaghetti and meat sauce

2008-03-24T22:04:00.004-04:00

I fixed spaghetti and meat sauce and garlic bread for dinner over the weekend. I was in need of comfort food. I made a yummy meat sauce that is very easy. You could use 1/2 lb of ground veal and 1/2 lb of ground sirloin or maybe pork or a combination of the three. It might be good with some dried basil in the sauce too.

Meat sauce:

olive oil
1 1lb ground sirloin
1/4 lb pancetta chopped
1/2lb sweet Italian sausage
1/2lb hot Italian sausage
8 cloves of garlic
1/2t or so of dried oregano
1 can of crushed tomatoes
2 chopped onions
2 carrots peeled and chopped
1 c. red wine
1 to 2 c. beef stock
1/2c. flat leaf parsley chopped
Parmesan cheese
salt and pepper

Brown meats in a large skillet. Add garlic, onion, carrot to skillet. If there is not enough fat to cook the veggies, add a bit of olive oil. Cook until the veggies are softened. Add wine to deglaze pan and cook until alcohol burns off (a few minutes). Add tomatoes. Add 1 c. stock. Cook for 15 minutes and add more stock if it needed. Remove from heat. Add parsley and season to taste. Serve over pasta and with Parmesan cheese.

Not hungry

2008-03-22T07:54:00.002-04:00

I am too depressed about Tibet to eat or cook. It is the worst uprising since 1959. The Chinese govt will make Tibet pay dearly.

Hopefully I will get my cooking/eating mojo back this weekend. I am planning to try recipes for cinnamon rolls, Sichuan fish, and pasta w/ meat sauce if I can get motivated.

"Rescued" from Tibet

2008-03-20T05:38:00.004-04:00

According to the Chinese English language newspaper China Daily, I was along with almost 600 other tourists "rescued" from Tibet on Saturday. Forced out is more accurate description. We were given one option: leave Tibet.

By the time we woke on Saturday AM, the Chinese military was well on its way to imposing martial law. The roads were blocked. Our Tibetan guide and our driver were unable to reach us at our hotel. We were told not to leave the hotel under any circumstances because it was unsafe. I didn't feel unsafe. I could see out the window of my hotel some military and local Chinese people standing around smoking cigarettes.

Mid-morning a Chinese woman called to say we had to leave Tibet and she asked us where we wanted to go. I didn't want to answer so I told her I'd call back when I had decided what to do. Well, by that point all phone services in our hotel had been cut off. My internet connection was also cut off. I found one working phone at the hotel reception desk so I called my cousin in Beijing. He gave me good advice and agreed to call my family to let them know I was safe.

Around lunch time a woman came up to our rooms and said we had to be at a meeting in the lobby in 5 minutes and to bring all of our luggage. There were 7 Americans and Canadians and 3 Lithuanians they were trying to get out of our hotel to go to the airport. Since the roads were blocked, we had to carry our luggage a few blocks to go meet the vehicles that were going to take us to the airport. We saw that most of the shops were closed. People, all Chinese, were hanging around on the streets talking and smoking. It didn't seem particularly tense, but we were in a Chinese area with few if any Tibetans.

We could also see lines of military police in riot gear guarding the streets. We saw the military personnel carriers too. I took some pictures.

Even though we were not in any immediate danger, the whole experience was traumatic! Being in a place while martial law is imposed is not fun. Plus I am deeply worried for the future of Tibet and broken-hearted that people will suffer. It is disappointing that I didn't get to see the places I've dreamt of seeing for years. Finally, I am still in need of a vacation!!

I'm glad to be home, but I intend to go back to Tibet one day.

Back in Durham

2008-03-18T06:37:00.002-04:00

So, I am back in Durham after a harrowing experience of being forced to leave Tibet. I'm tired, unhappy and jet-lagged. As soon as I recover, I'll write about what happened.

Let's just say that a very bad breakfast of gelatinous rice porridge (aka congee), hard boiled egg, hard white bread slices, and hot tang foreshadowed a VERY BAD DAY.

The Rooftop of the World

2008-03-14T06:58:00.003-04:00

Quite shockingly, my work buddy and I have made it to Tibet. Given the fact that Lhasa is in the middle of an uprising, I figured our flights would be cancelled. Train service into Lhasa has stopped apparently. What we have seen so far is beautiful. We are surrounded by mountains.

We were going to be in Lhasa for three days but I plan to change that itinerary tomorrow. If we can see the Potala and Norbulingka tomorrow then I'm hoping to get out of Lhasa ASAP. I don't feel worried about my safety particularly. There are really two issues: 1. The other cool sites like the monasteries and the main temple the Jokhang are closed. The entire Tibetan quarter and its shops and hotels (where we were going to stay) and restaurants are closed. 2. We are going to be closely watched and kept in the Chinese district. We've done Chinese all week in Beijing with work and going out at night. It's been fun but I am ready to experience a new culture. The few Tibetans we've seen so far are monks and nuns dressed in red and yellow or women dressed in traditional Tibetan wool skirts and jackets. The architecture is very different and so is the food.

Unfortunately all of the interesting non-Chinese food is in the Barkhor, the Tibetan neighborhood closed because of riots. Besides Tibetan food, the offerings include Nepali, Indian, and Muslim Tibetan. I was looking forward to trying these.

Instead we ate Sichuan food. It was excellent. Early in the trip we started ordering several plates and sharing them. This is how the Chinese eat meals together. I like it because I get to try many things. Tonight I was too hungry so I ordered a dish of sliced mushrooms fried in garlic, chili pepper and what looked suspiciously like fat back. It was spicy with a smokey, woody taste. My colleague ordered beef that had been dredged in flour and fried w/ red peppers and other spices that I could not quite identify. The peppers were fried until they were completely crisp. The dish had a spicy lemon flavor that I think might have been lemongrass.

I'm glad to be on vacation finally. Work in Beijing went better than I had expected but it's so tiring to get up early in order to sit in traffic for an hour! I'm not a morning girl. Tomorrow breakfast is at 9AM!

While I am sad about not being able to see much of Lhasa including the great monasteries, I am always one to support the underdog. I am not a fan of authoritarian regimes that control information, send people to work camps without fair trials, and do not allow people the freedom to practice or not to practice religion as they choose.

Two Dinners in Beijing

2008-03-12T22:00:00.003-04:00

Beijing has great food. I haven't had a bad meal here! Two nights ago we had dinner at a place called LAN Club, a fairly new restaurant design by Philippe Starck. The atmosphere can only be described as upscale tongue-in-check whimsical. A huge print of a Dutch old master (I think Dutch) has been cut into pieces, put into large , oversized gilted frames and hung on the ceiling over the grey, industrial vents and ducts. The light fixtures are various and asundry mismatched Venetian glass.

The food was good but not great. This is the kind of place to go to watch people and to be seen and maybe to drink a cocktail or three. Nevertheless we ate dinner there. We had some good dumplings and some spicy shrimp marinated in tea. The big mistake was to order a cold dish of wasabi spinach. I love both, but I didn't quite bargain for the mountains of wasabi the chef must've put in this dish. It was hot enough to make my eyebrows stand up straight. It was hot enough to clear out every last nook or cranny of sinus. I could feel it right up my ear, through the Eustatian tube and into my brains! Two bites and I was done. A shame really. It tasted good.

Last night we went to a Japanese restaurant called Hatsune that has a reputation for being the best in town. We had delicious sashimi, sushi rolls, tempura, grilled beef, and chicken. The beer was excellent and so was the sake.

I have enjoyed my stay in Beijing. Work has gone great. I got some sightseeing in last weekend. And the food is truly outstanding.

The pollution and traffic are horrific and unpleasant. Today the sky is blue, one day out of the six I've been here. The wind must've blown out the pollution last night. Years ago expats visiting Beijing remarked on the beauty of the blue skies. I can only imagine. The city is surrounded by mountains, and today we can see them. Many of the hills have beautiful old towers on them.

Clear air is a basic human right. So is clean water. Speaking of human rights, tomorrow I am off to Tibet for a week of vacation. That should be interesting!

Lunch in Beijing

2008-03-11T05:41:00.003-04:00

We had a great lunch at a place specializing in food from the Guzhou province. I couldn't really tell you what the characteristic features are of this cuisine, but it is less oily than Beijing's native cuisine, not as spicy as Sichuan food, and not dim sum. I know that doesn't narrow it down too much, but that's the best I've got.

We had rabbit, whole fish with fresh herbs, pork with finely chopped veggies, spicy beef, braised celery, steamed, crunchy green beans, cucumber and spinach soup, scrambled eggs, garlic stuffed squash with rice thread noodles, fried rice, rice cakes with radish, mashed corn that looked like tamales, and some thin, slightly caramelized rice cakes.

Guess how one can scramble eggs with chopsticks? Put some clean smooth stones in a shallow, cast iron casserole. Heat until the dish and the stones are raging hot. Pour eggs over stones. Stir the eggs among the stones with the chopsticks. The stones simultaneously cook and scramble the eggs. It was fascinating though I don't think I will try this at home.

Censorship

2008-03-10T08:15:00.002-04:00

The whole censorship thing really gets under my skin. Besides Google blogger, China censors the BBC Web site, parts of CNN web, and various other news outlets that do not reflect their party line. I was watching CCN on the TV this evening and there was a piece on about the alleged terrorist plot that China thwarted. About 2 minutes into the broadcast the TV went dead. A few minutes later it went live in the middle of another broadcast.

Nothing to report on food. I worked all day and am too tired to eat.

Beijing

2008-03-09T09:13:00.002-04:00

I'm in Beijing for work this week. The jet lag is kind of rough the first few days, and I haven't felt hungry until dinner this evening. Nevertheless, the food is great. All of it. It's hard to have a bad meal here. Even weird food is good, although I've not eaten anything weird this time.

The Chinese say that they will eat anything with four legs but the table. It is true. The menus are astonishing. I've been eating tasty dishes like fried eggplant in garlic, chili sauce and chicken with lemon, and Peking duck, and pan roasted green beans. I've eaten pork buns, shrimp dumplings with pumpkin, and mushroom soup with bok choy. The best cup of tea I've had in ages was lemon and lavender tea that turned a gorgeous shade of pale pink. I've had Chinese dishes and Halal dishes for breakfast. Now I'm on to museli because the others are too oily to eat at the crack of dawn.

There are some downsides to China like the huge airport sign that said beware of cholera. Uhhh, yeah, don't drink the water or ice cubes or eat any fruit you didn't peel yourself, or use tap for brushing teeth etc.

The air polution is nothing short of scandalous.

The government also censors blogs. I can post, but I cannot actually read my own blog. Go figure!

Scallops with saffron and squid ink linguine

2008-03-07T18:47:00.003-05:00

I bought some black, squid ink linguine at Target, of all places, several weeks ago. I found a recipe online and tried it last weekend. I was intrigued by this recipe because of the saffron. I love it and it works well with seafood, as I found out when I ate the delicious bouillabaise at Vin Rouge not too long ago. It's a delicate balance though. Too much saffron overpowers the subtlety of the scallops. Not enough saffron just makes the sauce yellow, so start conservatively and add a few threads until you get the taste you like. I usually crumble the saffron between my fingers when I add it to a sauce.

The recipe turned out very well even though I substituted frozen peas for fresh snow peas which are not really in season yet. Be very generous with the butter in the sauce. I used a dry white Burgundy in the sauce. It was YUMMY. My beau was highly impressed (though, happily, he is not hard to please). The scallops should cook as little as possible because they very quickly turn into hockey pucks!

1/2 pound sea scallops
1/2 pound squid ink linguine
1/2 pound snow peas
For the Saffron sauce:
1/2 cup finely minced shallots
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 to 2 tablespoons heavy cream
1 to 2 sticks cold butter, cut into pieces
1 pinch saffron threads
Fresh lemon juice
Salt and white pepper to tasteBring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the linguine and cook until tender but still firm to the bite, about 10 minutes.

Make the saffron sauce. In a heavy saucepan combine shallots and white wine. Reduce to 2 tablespoons and then add saffron threads and 1 to 2 tablespoons of cream. Place pan over high heat and whisk in butter a piece at a time, adding the next piece before the last one has completely melted, stirring constantly. Do not allow mixture to boil. Add fresh lemon juice and salt and white pepper to taste.

Place scallops in a steamer over simmering water and steam for 2 to 3 minutes. Then add snow peas and steam 1 minute more. Transfer linguine to a plate, top with scallops and snow peas and top with sauce.

Daring Bakers: French Bread

2008-03-04T09:21:00.002-05:00

The February challenge for Daring Bakers, an online baking community, was Julia Child's recipe for French bread from vol. 2 of The Art of French Cooking.

One reason I like the Daring Bakers community is that the monthly recipe challenge really does force me out of my 30 minutes or less cooking mindset. At this point in my life, I am too busy for long, slow cooking or baking except on special occasions or once a month when I get the recipe challenge.

Ms. Childs' recipe for French bread has few ingredients: flour, water, salt, yeast. Deceptively simple. How hard could this be, I thought. Well technique is everything, and after reading Julia's 30 page description of the technique, I really wondered if I could pull it off. The dough had to rise three times, but even that didn't seem like a big deal.

Well, twelve hours later the dough was finally ready. I suspect the dough would raise faster if it had been warmer in the house. A nice warm, low humidity day would be much better for this recipe.

The hardest part of the recipe follows after shaping the dough: scoring the top of the shaped dough and then after the third raise transferring the dough to a baking sheet without deflating it. It sounds so easy! Uh no, apparently not easy. One loaf I deflated when I moved it. It is infuriating to have 12 hours of success only to screw it up at the last minute. I was not happy. The other loaf did not deflate but it didn't turn out so pretty because I kind of mangled the top when I tried to score it.

The one successful loaf had the qualities you might expect in French bread, all obtained by the technique of course: hard crust, soft inside with big airy holes, nice salty bite. It was tasty but I think I'll buy my French bread half boule from La Ferme Bakery instead.

Anyway, I am not going to share the 30 page recipe because it was not a tremendous success. If you are interested in the recipe, head to the library or bookstore for the book.

Easy elegance: veal marsala

2008-02-28T07:15:00.003-05:00

Some friends came over for dinner one night not too long ago, and I arrived home from work only 20 minutes prior to their arrival.

In that 20 minutes, I set the table, put out cheese and olives, made a quick salad of baby greens and a simple vinaigrette, put some fingerling potatoes on to boil, and dredged three veal escalopes in flour.

After my friends arrived I prepared the veal marsala. It is so easy. It would be good with chicken too if you can find escalopes or if you want to make them yourself by pounding out chicken breasts.

Here is the recipe:

2 or 3 veal escalopes
1/2 or so of flour seasoned with salt and pepper
4T butter, divided in half
8oz mushrooms thinly sliced
1c. marsala
handful of parsley finely chopped

Melt 2T butter in a large pan over medium heat. Add sliced mushrooms and cook about 10 minutes until the mushrooms begin to brown. Remove mushrooms from pan and set aside. Rinse and pat dry the veal. Dredge the veal in the flour. Melt the other 2T of butter over medium heat. Place the veal in the pan and cook until browned on each side. It shouldn't take much longer than a couple of minutes per side if the pieces are thin. Remove the veal to a dish. Add the marsala to deglaze the pan and turn up the heat. Reduce the wine for a couple of minutes. Add the mushrooms to the pan and warm. Pour over the veal, sprinkle with parsley and serve.

I really liked the fingerling potatoes with this dish. I boiled them and then stirred in some butter, roasted garlic and chopped parsley.

Dinner at Z Kitchen

2008-02-24T17:30:00.013-05:00

Last nights some girlfriends and I were the dinner guests of Bryon Zupon, the Duke undergraduate who has earned a reputation of late as an inventive and talented chef. His unconventional set up and techniques have been lauded on NPR and the New York Times Magazine.

We had a wonderful meal! All of us love food and it was a treat to experience the surprising and creative combinations of flavors. Bryan executes flawlessly. He presents the food beautifully with an attention to detail. I especially liked when he pulled out an eye dropper to place small, graduated dots of concord grape syrup on the plates with our fish. I have an eye dropper in the medicine cabinet but it really hadn't occurred to me to keep on in the kitchen!

For such a young person, Bryan is a confident and gracious host. He is way cooler than I or any of my friends were in college! We were glad to spend time with a young man who is talented and very clearly passionate about food. He approaches food with imagination and curiosity that leads to surprising pairings like chocolate and sesame powder or miso and butterscotch. His talent lies not only in his imaginative dishes but, perhaps more importantly, in creating dishes that are a perfect and very precise harmony of flavors. That's hard to do, especially when the flavors are as seemingly dissonant as miso and butterscotch.

Bryan has had some critics in the Durham food circle. Personally, I find that mean-spirited and probably motivated by jealousy and cynicism. I don't get that approach (and don't bother posting a comment to explain it to me because I'm not interested).

Here is our menu:

Starter: Scallop, pimenton-parsnip puree, avocado, blood orange oil, grapefruit, espelette pepper, tomato-cumin chutney, mustard, Sichuan peppercorn

Soup: Chestnut and sunchoke veloute, steamed wild mushrooms

Fish course: Red snapper, fennel, raisins, candied olive, concord grape syrup

Main course: Bacon-Wrapped-Bacon Buns
Pork belly, Nueske’s bacon, miso-butterscotch, snow peas, pickles, kim chee

Cheese: Beet, chevre, pistachio, orange blossom honey, carbonated grapes, Manni olive oil, Maldon salt, grated chocolate

Dessert: Blackberry and goat’s milk ice creams, sesame chocolate, pickled Fuji apples, roasted pineapple

My friends and I unanimously agreed that the soup and the bacon wrapped buns were our favorite. The cream soup was made of Jerusalem artichokes (aka sunchokes) and garnishes of wild mushroom were shitake and hen of the woods. The soup with silky smooth with the mellow earthiness of the mushrooms. We all wanted to lick the bowls. Bryan admits that this dish is not particularly inventive but it is so GOOD that who cares! It was probably the best soup I've eaten.

The bacon buns were made of pork belly cooked sous vide for 24 hours at 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Pieces of pork belly were then wrapped in bacon and put in soft, doughy Chinese styles buns and served with miso butterscotch sauce. They were perfect. I could have eaten twenty of them. Bacon wrapped in bacon. Hello? What's not to adore about that? I'm so glad I'm not a vegetarian!

The dessert also deserves a mention. The tart, crisp apples, the sweet, soft roasted pineapple and the chocolate with a faint whiff of sesame were very strange but delicious combinations with the goat milk ice cream. It was bold and exciting. We agreed that the meal was the best any of us have had in a long while.

We paired each course with wines recommended by Seth and Craig at the Wine Authorities. I was especially pleased with a very lovely white Burgundy and a cabernet franc, also French. Those two guys are geniuses at wine pairings.

Toast Paninoteca

2008-02-20T08:52:00.004-05:00

Toast Paninoteca is a new place on Main Street that opened a few weeks ago. I headed over there for lunch to try it out. As the name suggests, the restaurant features paninis and other wonderful concoctions on bread. The paninis are hot, grilled sandwiches, the tramezzini are cold sandwiches, the bruschetta and crostini are grilled and toasted respectively and topped with various things.

With bread as the main ingredient, high quality bread is essential. Toast's bread comes from the Rue Cler bakery and Guglhupf, so it doesn't get much better than that in Durham. Plus they are supporting local Durham businesses.

I am partial to any bread that is hot and contains melted cheese so Toast makes me very happy. I intend to try all of the panini. For my lunch I had a panini with rapini, Italian sausage and cheese, I think asiago but I cannot quite recall. The rapini, aka broccoli rabe (though it has no relation to broccoli), was seasoned with roasted garlic and a hint of red pepper flake. It reminded me of a pasta recipe from the Puglia region of Italy that I like to make.

In the next week or so, Toast will be getting it's liquor license to serve beer and wine. I am looking forward to going after work with my girlfriends for a glass of wine and some roasted mushroom, thyme and gorgonzola crostini and maybe some bacalao crostini.

Hunting for food

2008-02-18T21:10:00.011-05:00

A few years ago I considered becoming a vegetarian. Obviously I decided against it. I like meat, fish and fowl (except turkey), especially bacon, steak and pâté. At one point I wanted to be a butcher but that is another story.

I decided that I could only eat meat in good faith if I was willing to kill it, clean it and fix it myself. I do not really have the option for regularly fishing or hunting or even raising (can't keep a cow in the city limits) my own meat, but theoretically I am mentally and emotionally capable of doing this should the occasion arise. Anyone who does not have the stomach for killing another creature to eat it should be a vegetarian. It's not right to be capable of eating meat only if it comes in the sanitized form of neat little cuts in tidy plastic containers, is it?

Reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma pushed me over the edge. I signed up for a hunting education and safety class.

My goal is to go pheasant, quail and/or duck hunting. I only want to hunt what I will eat so no turkey or deer hunting. I'm not a huge fan of venison, and I don't really want to deal with an animal that I cannot carry out of the woods. My general rule of thumb: if it is big enough to trample on me then don't aggravate it by shooting at it.

There are two exceptions: I would love to hunt boar and alligator. Boar are apparently mean and scary. I just want one to eat not for trophy. YUM. Boar is tasty! Same with alligator. They have big teeth but they sure taste good stewed or on the grill, and they make lovely handbags!

In all likelihood, most creatures will be safe. I'm not a very good shot.

Taco shack: La Vaquita

2008-02-17T17:40:00.004-05:00

Recently Gourmet magazine featured a story about Durham's taquerias. La Vaquita on Chapel Hill Street is mentioned in the article. It's a tiny take out place with a large cow standing on the roof (not a real cow), hence the name La Vaquita. The place used to be a dairy but that was well before my time in Durham.

Nowadays it is a great taqueria run by a guy from Veracruz, Mexico. I've been a few times. The food is fresh and delicious. I've tried almost every variety of meat fillings for the tacos, sincronizada (basically a quesadilla), and huaraches (thick, corn tortilla). My favorite is the carne asada which is simply grilled beef. My next favorite is the barbacoa which is beef in a mildly spicy sauce. My third favorite is the ground chorizo sausage. But then the carnitas is great too...OK I like it all. Don't make me choose a favorite! The tacos are served on a soft corn tortilla with a wedge of lime and some radishes. I adore the sincronizada with carne asada. It is served with lettuce, tomato, crema (kind of like sour cream) and cheese.

One day I will branch out and try the shrimp with garlic and maybe the mole.

The food takes awhile to appear because everything is freshly made, so don't go if you expect fast food.

The place is located between my gym and my house. If I have a good work out, I treat myself!

Brunch at Rue Cler

2008-02-14T07:15:00.003-05:00

Weekend brunch at Rue Cler features not only great, strong coffee and the possibility of beignets for a starter but also savory crepes, steak frites, and their version of eggs Benedict.

I've been to Rue Cler several times for dinner but I only tried out their brunch last week with a friend. I love the space. It's small and a little noisy, but that gives it a warm, lively feel.

I resisted having fried dough as a starter, but if you are in need of a sugar and fat fix order the beignets. The coffee is dark and strong and perfect with some cream. It's strong enough to make a mule run backwards, so if that is not how you like your coffee, then you might order hot tea instead.

I order a crepe filled with Boursin cheese and roasted bell peppers. It was served with a side salad. The dish was delicate and subtle but substantial enough to fill me up. My friend ate ever morsel of the eggs Benedict, so it must've been good although I didn't taste it.

If you are looking for a place to go with a dash of elegance for brunch, then head to Rue Cler. If you are looking for a hearty meal of eggs, bacon, grits and biscuits then head to Elmo's or Honey's.

Seafood risotto

2008-02-10T08:51:00.000-05:00

I got my cooking mojo back this weekend after a bit of rest and relaxation. I cooked dinner on Saturday for a friend before we went to the ballet. Last year she and I fixed lobster together in what turned out to be quite an adventure involving garden tools. I was determined not to let any of our pricey crustaceans go to waste so I took the carcases home to join some crab leg shells and shrimp shells in a pot for some homemade seafood stock.

It has been sitting in my freezer for ages. I decided seafood risotto was the perfect dish for it. The risotto turned out great! Excellent stock really is the ticket for fantastic risotto. And seafood stock is a real treat! Next time you fix crab or shrimp at home, save the shells and make a stock.

Seafood risotto:

1 1/2 c. aborio rice
2 shallots minced
2 T butter
1/2 c. white wine
4 to 6 c. seafood stock
A small pinch of saffron
1lb shrimp peeled, or shrimp and scallops combination
2 T butter softened to room temp
1/4 c. or more of freshly grated Parmesan cheese
salt and pepper

Warm the stock over low heat in a saucepan, sprinkle a pinch of saffron into the stock and stir. Don't overdo the saffron. It should be enough just to suggest saffron and not to overpower the seafood. Melt the 2 T butter over medium heat in another saucepan or dutch oven. Add shallots and cook until softened about 3 minutes. Add the rice and stir until it is coated in butter. Add the wine and let it cook off.

Slowly add the stock one or two cups at a time allowing the liquid to absorb before adding more. Stir often. It should take about 30 to 40 minutes to add the stock. The aborio should be tender and the consistency creamy. After adding the last cup of stock, add the shrimp or other seafood. Cook for another 3 minutes or until the shrimp is pink and the scallops are done.

Sprinkle with fresh grated Parmesan cheese. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Too lazy to cook

2008-02-08T14:04:00.000-05:00

I don't know what I've been doing but I'm too tired, busy, and lazy to cook this week. I've been eating peanut butter sandwiches for dinner alternating between my homemade strawberry jam that I made last May and locally made honey from some guy out in the county. When I really want to mix it up, I'll make a grilled cheese sandwich.

At least I've not succumbed yet to eating cereal for dinner. Though I confess it has to be done some nights.

This weekend I am going to make French onion soup and maybe one night grill some steak to eat with sauteed rapini.

Valentine's feast

2008-02-05T21:03:00.001-05:00

Valentine's Day is kind of silly and if you don't have someone it can be downright annoying. Have you ever wanted to wear black and drive over a tacky box of cheap chocolates in protest? All I have to say is GO FOR IT, if that is where you are at.

If you do feel inclined to cook something special for a friend or loved one, then I suggest some of my favorite special occasion recipes that are surprisingly easy. Go to Wine Authorities and ask Craig or Seth to suggest wine pairings according to your taste and budget.

Appetizer:
Cheese and crackers

First course:
Belgian endive, leaves separated and sprinkled with crumbled roquefort cheese and a white wine vinegar and olive oil vinaigrette (1 part vinegar, 3 parts oil)
or
Smoked trout served on top of granny smith apple slices garnished with watercress (sprinkle with lemon juice)

Main course:
Individual beef wellingtons
Roasted brussels sprouts
Mashed potatoes
or
Asparagus risotto (extravagant in February, I know, but it's a good vegetarian option)

Dessert:
Chocolate molten cakes
or
Vanilla ice cream with homemade chocolate sauce

If you are male, you might consider some lovely flower other than red roses: orchids, birds of paradise, and lilies are nice options. You might choose a color to coordinate with her living room or bedroom colors. Also, do not hand a lady a bunch of flowers wrapped in plastic. Remove the plastic, dry the stems, and tie a ribbon around them (wrap ribbon around the bunch several times then tie into a bow...if you can tie shoes, you can do this). The florist should be able to give you some ribbon. Don't forget to tell your sweetie that you are the luckiest man alive.

Lantern for dinner

2008-02-03T10:01:00.000-05:00

Some friends and I went to dinner on Friday night at the Lantern in Chapel Hill. Parking in Chapel Hill is a stressful endeavor and not a great way to start the evening. However, once we finally got settled at our table, we had a wonderful evening.

The atmosphere is great: modern, attractive and flattering lighting, a giant vase of forsythia stems in bloom. Our server was attentive but not fawning. He gave us excellent recommendations on the food and wine.

For starters, we shared some pork and chive dumplings. They were delicious. Sometimes dumplings taste like mystery meat and mystery seasoning, but these definitely has the taste of pork and chives. The waiter told us that the pork and crab dumplings are also delicious so I am looking forward to trying those someday soon.

For the main course, I had a pork shank braised in coconut milk with galangal. The meat was falling off the bone tender. The coconut milk was rich but not sweet. A papaya side dish was refreshing and a nice contrast to the rich, heavy pork.

One friend ordered the whole fried flounder. It was spicy and seasoned with garlic and chilis. She ate every last morsel (except the tail fin and the eyeball). The fish was tender and perfectly cooked.

My other friend ordered chicken smoked in tea served in a cognac sauce. The tea gave the smoked chicken a unique flavor. I liked it very much. While every dish was delicious, I could not get enough of the tea smoked chicken. I will order it next time.

A regular feature of the Lantern's dinner menu is the black cod. I usually order that but I am glad I branched out during this visit.

The desserts looked fabulous but we were too stuffed. Instead we ordered tea. After dinner we retired to the bar behind the dining room. It's a cool space: dimly lit with black and red decor.

I highly recommend the Lantern for a great night out.

Mac 'n' cheese

2008-01-30T22:52:00.000-05:00

Everyone LOVED this macaroni and cheese when I took it to a luncheon on Sunday. I put it in a casserole and put bread crumbs on top, then popped it under the broiler. I have to say though that I like it best right out of the pan minus the breadcrumbs (which seem a bit fussy to me).

My favorite comfort food meal is mac 'n' cheese with meatloaf. I have a great turkey meatloaf with bacon recipe (the bacon defeats the lowfat purpose of the turkey, but OH WELL!).

This recipe works out well because the the sharp cheddar lends flavor and the monterrey jack lends creaminess. I think it has more moisture in it or something.

Macaroni and cheese:
1 lb macaroni
1 T salt
5 T unsalted butter
6 T flour
1 1/2 t dry mustard (powder)
1/4 t cayenne pepper
5 c milk
8 0z monterrey jack, shredded
8 oz extra sharp cheddar, shredded
1 t salt

Bring 4 quarts of water to boil. Add macaroni and 1T salt. Cook until al dente. Drain.

Meanwhile, heat butter over medium heat in a pot until it melts and turns bubbly. Add flour, mustard, cayenne and whisk to combine. Whisk for about 1 minute. The mixture will darken some.

Gradually whisk in milk. Bring to boil, stirring continuously (so the milk doesn't burn on the bottom of the pan). Reduce heat to a simmer and stir occasionally cooking for 5 minutes. The mixture (aka roux) will be thick like heavy cream.

Slowly add the shredded cheeses, whisking until combined. Season with 1t salt and pepper to taste.

After serving, take a spoon and get out any melted cheesy yumminess remaining in the pot. Lick the spoon, but be sure no one is watching!

Vodka...in pie crust?

2008-01-26T17:52:00.000-05:00

When apples were in season in the fall, I tried several recipes for apple desserts. I tried numerous combinations of apples and just as many toppings and pie crusts. I liked them all but I discovered that a combination of Granny Smith and Mackintosh apples work well together: Grannies are tart and keep their shape while Mackintoshes breakdown into an applesauce-like texture and retain sweetness. As far as pie crusts go, my favorite turned out to be a pie crust from the Cooks' Illustrated geniuses made with vodka. Yes, vodka. Substituting half of the water in the pie crust with vodka allows the dough to be very pliable and totally easy to roll out. Yet the vodka evaporates leaving much less actually liquid in the crust. The result is a delicious, flaky crust that is simple to handle.

I'll never be able to make a pie crust as good as my grandmother's but this one as close to success that I've gotten so far!

Foolproof pie crust from Cooks' Illustrated, November 2007:

2 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (12 1/2 ounces)
1 teaspoon table salt
2 tablespoons sugar
12 tablespoons cold unsalted butter (1 1/2 sticks), cut into 1/4-inch slices
1/2 cup chilled solid vegetable shortening , cut into 4 pieces
1/4 cup vodka , cold
1/4 cup cold water

1. Process 1 1/2 cups flour, salt, and sugar in food processor until combined, about 2 one-second pulses. Add butter and shortening and process until homogenous dough just starts to collect in uneven clumps, about 15 seconds (dough will resemble cottage cheese curds and there should be no flour uncoated ). Scrape bowl with rubber spatula and redistribute dough evenly around processor blade. Add remaining cup flour and pulse until mixture is evenly distributed around bowl and mass of dough has been broken up, 4 to 6 quick pulses. Empty mixture into medium bowl.

2. Sprinkle vodka and water over mixture. With rubber spatula, use folding motion to mix, pressing down on dough until dough is slightly tacky and sticks together. Divide dough into two even balls and flatten each into 4-inch disk. Wrap each in plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 45 minutes or up to 2 days.

Italian American in Raleigh

2008-01-25T08:41:00.000-05:00

I grew up in a city with a large Italian American community and their delicious restaurants heavy on rich red sauces and great cannoli where the maitre'd packed a handgun. Pasta loaded w/ tomato sauce and cheese is such comfort food!

I noticed a dearth of such places when I moved to the south ten years ago. Even now, I've not found a place in Durham that quite fits the bill.

Last night I joined some girlfriends for dinner at an Italian restaurant in a strip mall in Raleigh called Casa Carbone. The place is nothing to look at and the menu was standard fare, so I was not expecting much, but OMG the eggplant parmesan was GREAT. I finally found my red-sauce-Italian-American-starch-with-cheese- comfort-food fix! I also liked the grouper puttanesca and the tiramisu. The bread wasn't very good and the house salad was basic iceberg with some romaine and cucumber. I can overlook these things for the fried eggplant cooked to sweet perfection and loaded up with tomato sauce and cheese. My friends tell me the pizza is good too.

I will certainly go back next time I need a red sauce on carb fix. If you are looking for upscale or avant garde, don't go. If you require beautiful table cloths and impeccable service, don't go. If you are offended by pats of butter wrapped in foil and "warm" bread that seems suspiciously microwaved, stay home for sure. But if you want to eat delicious eggplant parmesan, then go!

Raleigh certainly has plenty of restaurants worth checking out. I do not understand the parochial mindset that keeps Durham people in Durham, Raleigh people in Raleigh, and Chapel Hill people in Chapel Hill. Get in your car and drive, especially if you want to try something new.

Oxtail soup

2008-01-21T19:36:00.000-05:00

The 1975 edition of The Joy of Cooking is a lot more fun to read than the 1997 revision. Granted it has recipes for things that would never darken the door of the contemporary cook's kitchen, like sea turtle, bear, opossum and raccoon, but that's what makes it exciting reading!

In case you ever need to fix a bear, be sure you remove all of the fat promptly because it turns rancid very quickly. Then you can marinade it for 24 hours and prepare as you would a beef pot roast. Who knew?

Well, I've not been bear hunting recently but I did decide to consult the 1975 hardback of Joy for an oxtail soup recipe after spying some oxtail in the butcher counter at Compare Supermarket. Oxtail, by the way, is a lovely and impressive description for cow's tail that's been sectioned at the joints with a surprising amount of meat attached.

Next time I will double this recipe because it made only about 3 large bowls of soup that I've had as main course for the past three meals.

Here is the recipe from 1975 ed. Joy of Cooking, page 154 (I don't know what page in the 1997 ed.):

2lbs of oxtail
1/2 c sliced onions
2 T butter
8 c water
1 1/2 t salt
4 peppercorns

Brown the oxtail and onions in the butter. Then add the water, peppercorns and salt. Simmer for 4 1/2 hours.

Add to the oxtail broth:

1/4 c. diced carrots
1/2 c. diced celery
1 bay leaf
1/4 c. chopped parsley
1/2 c. canned diced tomatoes
1/4 c. barley
1 t. dried thyme, basil or marjoram (I like thyme)

Cook for 30 minutes. Chill overnight and degrease. When ready to serve, warm the soup up and slowly add a brown roux of 1 T flour cooked with 2 T butter until dark golden in color. Correct the seasonings of salt and pepper.

If desired, add 1/4 c. sherry to soup before serving.

How NOT to melt chocolate

2008-01-20T12:51:00.000-05:00

Tonight I need to take something sweet to a party. I decided to make some chocolate peanut butter bars which are basically a peanut butter and brown sugar base covered in melted milk and dark chocolate and butter. How hard could this be? The recipe, from Nigella Lawson, doesn't require any cooking except for melting the chocolates and butter. The recipe suggested microwaving the chocolate for a couple of minutes to melt it. I was a little skeptical because chocolate burns very easily in the microwave but I thought I'd give it a try. What an unmitigated disaster that was!

I must confess to having a love / hate (well mostly hate) relationship with the microwave. I see it as an overpriced, large, leftover warmer that is frankly rather scary.

Melting chocolate, especially expensive dark choc that I don't want to ruin, requires a gentle touch. The temperature must be controlled or the chocolate will move past the melted stage to a glop of burnt, inedible goo. I do not have much luck in controlling the temp of food in the microwave. Maybe more experienced people do. Who knows. I prefer the old-fashioned bain-marie technique for melting chocolate. I improvise a bain-marie with the pans in my cupboard by putting some water in the bottom of a pan, letting it come to a rolling boil, and then putting another pan on top of it to melt the chocolate. If you do this, be sure not to let the boiling water touch the bottom of the pan on top.

Since the peanut butter bars didn't turn out so well, I may try some macadamia nut cookies.