We Survived

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]( http://foodandwine.com/recipes/skillet-toasted-almonds). 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 pique*² 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]( http://omnivorousfish.com/node/61), 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]( http://www.dinesfarms.net/).

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]( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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]( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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]( http://eggbeater.typepad.com/shuna/2005/06/pie.html), 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]( http://www.wvwinery.com/), and in addition to being the perfect accompaniment to the pie, is a steal at $5.99 for 650mL (at [Vintage]( http://www.vintagenewyork.com/homepage.html), 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

Extreme Entertaining

This week might be called extreme entertaining. We have had 11 people for dinner in the last three days and 5 more tonight. It was all scheduled by accident, and since I never look at my calender, we didn’t even remember we were having people over last night until Sunday night, and didn’t remember we were having people over tonight until last night. Thus, instead of shopping for everything at the Saturday greenmarket, I have shopped every day since Friday, but since there’s no convenient greenmarket for me on Tuesdays (and I had to go uptown to pick up a piece of furniture for the Agent’s brother) I went to Fairway for the first time in a while.

It was awesome.

If you’ve never been to the UWS Fairway, I recommend it highly. It’s like “It’s a Mad Mad Mad World” meets crash-up derby meets the best supermarket in the country. Full contact shopping. A lot of the produce is sourced locally, even though they don’t advertise it necessarily and since their volume is so high, the prices are great. A few years ago, the Times did a price comparison on staples like milk, eggs and bread, and Fairway won far and away for quality and price. A nice combo.

When you get in the store, it’s a madhouse of crashing carts and strollers pushed by everybody from tiny UWS old ladies to uber-fashionable stroller moms to middle aged men staring at nutritonal information with an almost numb intensity. The first half of the store is more or less gourmet and includes all the refrigerated items except meat. The probably have the best cheese selection in the city in a supermarket, and among the best with cheesemongers included. The staff are curt, efficient, knowledgeable and don’t have any time for your shit. A sign over the deli counter advises you to fret less about the specific fat content of what you’re eating and ‘push yourself away from the table and go for a walk for cryin’ out loud’ (close, but not necessarily directly quoted).

Anyway, there will be four meals to catalogue for you, and I will get right on it as soon as the fourth has been cooked. I will leave you with a quick recommendation: Eve’s Cidery, West side of Union Square greenmarket Fridays and Saturdays. Their Autmn’s Gold cidery rocks, not too dry, but not really sweet, I can’t say enough good things about it. The Agent said he wanted to be sweeter, but it was just right for me.

Meanwhile, go to your local [greenmarket](http://cenyc.org/site/) or [farmers' market](http://www.localharvest.org/) and vote with your dollars!

Listening: [NPR](http://www.npr.org/)

A chocolate cow?

I went to elementary school with a girl named Jamie Moran. I can’t remember what year it is or anyone’s birthday, but I remember her vividly, because she was absolutely convinced- and endeavored to convince me- that eggs were made of milk. This was not an attempt at irony, or some confusion with a Cadbury product, she believed, and may still, that eggs are made of milk.

For real.

Thinking back on it now, it doesn’t really come as a surprise to me. Americans have no idea where the food they eat comes from. I’m not talking about farm kids here; I’m talking about the majority of people in this country who live in the suburbs and are walking type-two-diabetes-time-bombs. This is not by accident, agribusiness has added this element of opacity to food production for a reason. I’m quite certain that they don’t believe people want their animals treated inhumanely, want their meat stuffed full of rBGH and antibiotics, want their food supply endangered by biologically modified plants or want every independent farmer in America driven off of their land. There is a chance that some of these things might bother people.

I can’t help but wonder if this distance from something so elemental to us as humans hasn’t contributed to the distance that’s between us and one another. Stay with me here. I don’t think people respect cooking as a social institution anymore. I’m not talking about going out to dinner in a restaurant, that’s not- by definition- cooking. That’s not making something for the people in your life. I once said to a friend that I was only capable of two emotions: rage and cooking. Perhaps that’s slightly overstated, but in a sense, cooking is, or at least was, a mode of affection. I can understand why people may have lost interest in cooking. As our attention to celebrity chefs and food porn has grown, the ingredients this mania espouses have become more expensive and largely lowered in quality. Maybe you can find heirloom tomatoes on supermarket shelves, but if they’re hard as rocks and it’s February, who cares? Moreover, if all you do is watch or read about David Burke making foie-gras-beluga-truffle-platinum dumplings, you may rightly wonder why anyone would want to come to your house for spaghetti.

I’m sure this is the beginning of a lifelong rant, but I will leave it here for now. Food for thought.