The Omnivorous Fish

We survived. We’ve eaten more since Friday than we have in the last year, but we survived. Every pan, every bowl, every dish¹ and every appliance except the ice cream maker- all of which has been in boxes for over a year- has been used. Looking at the overflowing dish drainer last night, and the nut bowls littering the butcher block with little bits of this and that, it was like a battlefield; silent after the carnage.

I’ll start with the last meal first. I tried to balance my love of Autumn with the schizophrenic weather we’ve been having, and, therefore, came up with- climactically speaking- a more or less schizophrenic menu. Here it is:

1. Toasted Almonds, Pomegranates
2. Autumn Sorrel Soup (Vegetarian)
3. Gemelli with Pesto
4. Poached Chicken with Vegetables
5. Mixed Salad with Boucheron and Frostberries
6. Apple Raisin Pie

The toasted almonds came out of an article from Food and Wine from 1997. In the same article, there were other great do-ahead hors d’oeuvres like garlic shrimp and green olive tapenade; it was actually a fantastic piece. Anyway, I hadn’t made them for a long time, and they’re kind of a tradition with one of the guests we had, so they made the list, and it’s the time of year for pomegranates, and The Agent loves them. I only had one fruit, so I seeded it completely, but a cool way to get people involved in their aperitif is to put out wedges of pomegranates with glasses of ice-cold dry vermouth. They pick them apart and sip the aromatic vermouth; it’s a fun way to kill time until the soup is hot.

The sorrel soup was kind of an experiment. The Agent lives for sorrel, and most nights in the spring we have it either by itself or with arugula in a salad. I had never seen Autumn sorrel before but they had it at Gorzynski’s stand on Saturday, and Mrs G explained that it grows again when the weather gets milder. I imagine they might have it again next Saturday, since it’s hardly been cold. Regardless, we were left with several cups of sorrel on the brink of being less than perfect (it goes quickly) but since I have been trying to accommodate The Agent’s vegetarian brother as much as possible, my standard recipe was out. This led to a vegetarian “broth” being made with an onion pique² and a thick slice of ginger, then adding the sorrel (which wilts and browns instantly) and pureeing. While hot it had a bizarre taste, almost reminiscent of saffron, but with cream and chilling it mellowed to a sorrel-esque soup. I have to say, in retrospect, I feel that the vegetable, when cooked, benefits enormously from the richness of stock. Not a triumph, but it was fine, and we drank it out of cups which I feel is the ultimate whimsy in potagerie.

Sorrel, in case you live in a cave, is a wonderful green available in the spring and fall that is bright green, shaped like a cross between arugula and spinach and it tastes of lemon and sour strawberries. It’s very perishable and turns brown when heated, although the green comes back with a white background, like milk or cream. It is fantastic in salads, especially with arugula where they work together with a sort of lemon-pepper counterpoint.

I’ve been eating a lot of pasta lately, and last night was no exception. We had gemelli, twins, interlocking corkscrews of hollow pasta, dressed with old-school pesto, from Lidia Bastianich’s Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen, an excellent book that both notes the difference of and celebrates the food that evolved in this country from the traditional foods of Italians in Italy. And by the way, don’t let me hear any of that shit about pesto only being made in a mortar and pestle. If you rough-cut your basil to a uniform size, you avoid the telltale came-from-a-cuisinart look of big leaves floating in your pesto. Next thing you’ll tell me is that fish mousseline can only be made with a drum sifter.

The poached chicken I’ve been through already, and we served it with traditional appointments, that is to say freshly grated horseradish, mustard, coarse salt, cornichons and the good-tasting but untraditional peperoncini in vinegar. In addition to what’s in the recipe linked above, we had turnips, since Bob is allergic to onions. Sounds boring until you have it with a chicken from Dine’s Farms.

The salad was just mixed fancy lettuces from Fairway with crumbled boucheron, a lightly aged goat cheese, a strong mustard vinaigrette and frostberries. Frostberries? What the hell is a frostberry, you ask? It’s also called an Autumn Olive, Elaeagnus umbellate, a plant native to East Asia and Japan, which produced tiny red berries with an edible seed. They’re very astringent, but- according to Greg Swartz from Gorzynski’s Ornery Farm- don’t have as much flavor until after the first frost, thus the name. I use them almost like capers, except sour instead of salty. They’re great sprinkled on a salad, cheese platter or rich pasta dishes like gnocchi, and we haven’t gotten to it yet, but there’s a fantastic cocktail in there somewhere, maybe with pisco.

Dessert was basic, apple pie with raisins. The only distinctive things about it were my secret ingredient with apples (orange-blossom water, BUT JUST A DROP) and Shuna’s fantastic pie dough recipe, which can be rolled right away. I will leave you to follow the link to get the recipe and excellently detailed instruction (with photos), but I will say that I use fine salt in pie dough where Shuna uses kosher, because I find the stray crystal that survives in the dough to be unpleasant to bite into. Also, I bake by weight, because I have an electronic scale with a tare that allows me to measure everything into the same bowl. I don’t recommend that for novice bakers, but when you can make an educated guess on volumes³, it is infinitely faster, easier and cleaner to weigh. All of my cookbooks have weights written in the margin. The reason I don’t recommend it at first is because if you put too much in, it is mixed with whatever is already in the bowl, so until you’re comfortable with your ingredients, weigh or measure separately. When I want to convert a recipe to weights, I follow the chart in Rose Levy Beranbaum’s seminal volume, The Cake Bible.
These are the dry weights for the recipe in the above link:

10 oz flour
1-3/4 oz sugar

Shuna also doesn’t list the quantity of water, because that is a dangerous thing to do, but in the three pies I made this week, about ¼ cup was used, however, I cannot warn you enough: YOU SHOULD NEVER ADD ALL THE WATER IN A PIE DOUGH RECIPE AT ONCE. It should be sprinkled in as the dough comes together. It can vary depending on the flour and the time of the year by as much as 200%.

The filling was a mixture of Empire and Macoun apples, both hybrids grown locally, the Empire has big apple flavor and doesn’t give up much water, and the Macoun has what I call “built in spice,” giving a little aromatic hint without the obviousness of adding cinnamon. I added only a tiny amount of sugar- which helps to “juice” the pie- but too much sugar masks the fruit you went all the way to the farmers’ market to get, some flour (maybe 2 or 3 tablespoons, judge by which apples you’re using and how wet they are when you take a bite), a handful of golden raisins plumped in hot water and- literally- a DROP of orange-blossom water. Rosewater is nice, also, and slightly more mellow. I also add a pinch of salt to my apples, since I put salt in everything.

We drank several excellent wines that night, not all of which made it onto the menu. Among them were a Carneros Creek pinot noir and with dessert we had Doc’s Draft Hard Apple Cider, which is made by Warwick Winery, and in addition to being the perfect accompaniment to the pie, is a steal at $5.99 for 650mL (at Vintage, those scumbags at Whole Foods get another dollar). Go out and get some to drink with your local apples today!

Listening: NPR, sorry I’m boring.

¹ An exaggeration. We have a lot of dishes.
² An onion, peeled, studded with cloves and a bay leaf. I make mine look like this.
Onion Pique

³ For example, I don’t measure or weigh anymore when making pasta, because so much is variable, like the humidity and the age of the eggs. It’s a