Restaurant Reviews in the guise of an essay

It might surprise my readers to hear that I don’t like restaurants very much, as a general rule. They’re often expensive and pretentious, or bad, or crowded, or too trendy. In most cases, I can make a version of whatever they’re serving that’s better than theirs, or at least more suited to my tastes and for far less money. And yet, I do occasionally eat out, and it’s not always a mistake.

I’ll happily eat out, for example, when I think that the chef has a special expertise with ingredients I’m not familiar with cooking– this tends to happen with pricier French style restaurants. In this vein, I recently visited Bistro 123 in Vienna, Virginia, a decent little Parisian type restaurant that tastes much better than its strip mall location suggests at first glance. And though most of the meats are probably best avoided, the grilled boar being saved only by generous slatherings of a juniper tinged butter sauce, the kitchen does a commendable number on its sweetbreads cooked a la meuniere – that is to say, dipped in flour and fried in flavorful butter until crispy, and served simply with a lemon sauce and capers. Even if the bread I greedily mopped up the dish with wasn’t the best, and the restaurant desperately needs a more classical baker (key lime pie after a menu of escargots and sweetbreads?), this is the kind of meal I don’t mind heading out for. It’s very unlikely I’ll find sweetbreads I can trust in a supermarket, or anywhere else, and once I find them I’m not entirely sure how to clean them – hiring a chef to do the work for me seems like the best plan.

I’ll also eat authentic ethnic foods out with little guilt. To be sure, I’ve grown a little tired of normal Americanized Chinese food, which also has a tendency to be exceedingly greasy for some reason, but I still love the spectrum of flavors that cuisine relies on. A neat solution in the Virginia suburbs can be found at a real hidden gem – A&J’s restaurant in Annandale, which serves cooked to order dim sum all day. As far as I could tell, A&J make few compromises for the American palate, given the menu full of pig’s ears and beef tendon, and their cooking is better for it. And while those items are exotic, as far as Americans go, their best dishes are actually quite accessible – a stingingly spicy cucumber salad, laced with hot peppers and half cloves of garlic, was delicious for example, as were their scallion pancakes, handmade vegetable dumplings, and pan fried vegetable rolls, all of which needed just the tiniest enlivening drops of soy sauce for full effect. A&J also caters to those interested in soups – I found both the pork and radish broth and the cabbage and bean curd soup to be unexpected and diverting surprises, especially when eaten with one of the aforementioned fried doughs, or with their pungent smoked chicken and a few seasoned peanuts. With prices per plate averaging something around 3 dollars, you’re hardly likely to go broke trying everything out ; none of my visits broke 20 dollars for two.

Similar inexpensive pleasures await the hungry luncher at Amma’s Vegetarian Kitchen, also in Vienna, Virginia. Though the affable host’s English seems to only extend to the words “lentil” and “spicy”, his tiny kitchen in the back turns out really quite amazing meatless Indian food, including the absolute jewel of his menu, a giant crepe like dosa stuffed with spiced potatoes for just $4.99. In fact, the dosa is so good that it fulfills both reasons to eat out I’ve mentioned so far – none of my efforts to recreate the lentil and flour crunchiness of the Indian speciality have been very successful, and with the cooking lesson so inexpensive, I think it’s folly to turn it aside. But if you’re not up for dosa, the restaurant prepares a wide range of pulses and beans in a variety of pungent stews, pastes, and patties, all characterized by real, substantial, heat. Of those, though, my favorite was definitely the chick peas, especially when accompanied by a large round of freshly baked bread and a cup of salty yogurt lassi. Simple, yes, but also well under $10, honestly made, and delicious.

Finally, I’ll eat out when I have to. Most often, this happens at airports – I get incredibly hungry while waiting for things to happen, and with airport quality trending dramatically upwards in the past decade, these hunger pangs no longer have to be assuaged with furtively crunched bars of inferior chocolate. Ronald Reagan Airport in DC is a great example of this dramatic recent improvement. Once the province of institutional style cooking, the airport now boasts a series of quite decent restaurants at locally acceptable prices. By far the best I’ve seen so far, though, is the Legal Seafoods tucked next to the entrance to gates 35 (or so) to 45. Sure, it’s important to be skeptical of chain restaurants, , but when a chain can produce the first oyster po’boy I’ve ever had that was more about the powerful taste of shellfish then about the comforting savor of batter, I can have no objection. And when that sublimity is accompanied by some entirely respectable French fries, so rarely found in restaurants, my potential objections turn necessarily to praise. Barring a duty free shop, money and caviar, or a few boxes of European chocolate and perhaps a cognac at a Continental airport, I’m not sure you can eat much better before flying - and after all, is there anything more amusing then smiling benevolently at your fellow passengers while they desperately gnaw at their gummy meals in the plane, stuffed to the brim with quality vittles?

Of course, I’ll sometimes eat out from laziness. I’ll be tired or unimaginative. I’ll get a pizza from Pinocchio’s, just outside my front door. I’ll go fetch some sushi late at night, or perhaps a putatively Mexican style wrap filled with beans and inexpensive cheese. But usually I keep my dining out to the occasions I mention above. There’s been a certain banalization of dining out, I think, that makes home meals less exciting and restaurants less memorable, and I think it’s bad for both sides. If I can work on reversing the trend, at least in my life, that’ll be a victory for food – and it’s rules like the above that might make it happen.

Would I walk ten thousand miles?
Waddling Thunder at 05:04 PM
The test for me that separates good food and great food is that of memory. Can you feel, remember, and reminisce about a meal or ingredient or sip months and years later? Or did the food immediately slip beyond your reach, remembered only as an event rather than as a taste? My sense is that the more actually memorable meals we eat, the less often, and the less extremely, we have to indulge. And that’s why I pose a single question this Saturday; what’s the furthest you’ve ever gone for a single ingredient or food?

I personally remember fondly a multi-mile jaunt across Paris for a single slice of the famous cake called opera. The steady tread of my feet on the lively Parisian pavement, the gentle rustling of the paper all French bakeries wrap their cakes in, the noisy smoky bustle of the small café I stopped in on the way back for an espresso to accompany the cake – these are the kinds of things that make that particular 12 francs, as it was then, and countless calories, worth so much more than just 12 francs and a number of calories. That cake is something I still I remember and taste – even today, I think I can describe the delicate crispness of the syrup doused almond biscuits that formed its base, or the strikingly chocolate butter cream that made that particular patissier’s effort so famous.

I’m not going to take the time now to describe too many of those memories. The story of my family’s epic quest for a warm knefe b’jbni in Damascus, culminating in a wonderful moment of shared gluttony as we tore apart a warm pound of shredded dough, walnuts, sheep’s milk cheese from a local farm, and honeyed syrup, standing under the canopy of an isolated shop in the countryside, is too long to relate here. And I covered my first taste of real cheese in two years on my own food blog a few months ago, which I almost ran back to my London hotel almost three miles away. But I did want to mention my trip today to the Butcher Shop of Boston, a lovely little butcher and wine bar (a new combination to me, to be sure) on Tremont Street in our still cold city. As soon as I walked in there, I realized that the glistening pork on the bottom rack of the meat refrigerator would have to be taken home. And rubbed simply with lemon, and then singed brutally on my cast iron skillet at the highest possible heat, black smoke billowing into the rest of my microscopic overpriced apartment, windows fully open onto the street, the meat was worth every cent I paid for it. Despite appearances from what I write, I don’t actually eat very much meat. But when I do, I want it to be gamey rather than bland –I want it to taste of something in of itself. And this pork fit the bill in a way I haven’t tasted in months – the fact that I walked four miles to get it only makes the memory that much more vivid.

So if anyone has a story about going a long way specifically for a meal or an ingredient or a food, I’d love to hear it, whether it’s a pizza, or a truffle, or a basket of particularly tasty French fries. I don’t think this is pointless gluttony – I think it’s real appreciation, the very antidote to the impotent face stuffing that was at least my own curse for such a long time.

Power Breakfast? I'll give you a power breakfast*

The Financial Times tells us that the power breakfast is on its way back, though participation has been slimmed down from the teams that indulged during the profligate 1990’s to a few key players today. This certainly is good news for the embryonic corporate lawyer – more power breakfasts mean more deals, which means more business for all the various parasites that buzz around the pulsing body of American capitalism. But the news, good though it is, leaves a question in the mind of the discerning food obsessive – what exactly is a power breakfast, and can the dedicated home chef do better?

The first part of that question benefits from an examination of one of the most famous venues for that important sounding meal. Michael’s Restaurant in New York offers a selection of typical foods for the spendthrift wheeler dealer – a fruit salad for $13.00, topped with yogurt for $19.00. Eggs Benedict, the traditional poached egg dish, goes for a mere $16.00: for the same price you can get the cured rather than smoked salmon delicacy gravlax, accompanied by what one hopes is a good bagel. As for baked goods, the best Michael’s does is either brioche toast or fresh baked muffins – for $4.50 and $5.50 respectively.

These options all sound perfectly pleasant, of course. One could hardly expect otherwise for so much money, and a very superior gravlax may indeed be worth it. But in case you haven’t closed a deal recently, or can’t envision spending that much money to pretend that you have, I’ve got a few suggestions.

I hardly can imagine a really good breakfast without baked goods and sweets. These, to me, are the cornerstone of the morning indulgence, even more so than the ever-present panoply of egg dishes. Certainly, an elegant rolled omelet is wonderful if you’re careful about the quality of the butter and the egg– but even it bows in my mind before the shapely blonde twins Challah and Brioche. The latter is sweet, rich, deeply indulgent, and in its most extreme forms veritably groans under the weight of some 200 grams of good butter and three pure eggs per bread. Its Jewish sibling is rather more austere, and yet no less delicious for all that, sweetened at its best with honey rather than sugar, devoid of the butter that gives the brioche its pillowy softness and yet endowed with a more formidable texture in return. Either one of these alone, with a steaming bowl of coffee or cup of tea, would serve as a perfectly excellent breakfast for me. And when I say either one of these, I do mean the whole thing – I’ve rarely succeeded in stopping after a few slices, though once in a blue moon I will remember how nice stale brioche French toast tastes the next morning, or that toasted brioche goes particularly well with a rough country pate and pickles.

I admit, though, that some eaters of good taste might prefer a more varied beginning, even if they prefer to stay within the bounds imposed by flour, eggs, butter, and sugar. In the fall, you wouldn’t go wrong with thinking about pumpkins in the form of this densely sweet pumpkin and orange syrup, though I doubt that ice cream or what we seem to call yogurt really has any business accompanying an already satisfying cake. Moderation is the acme of cooking, it seems to me – if adding more butter or sugar or cream made a better dish, then our greatest cooks would need to learn nothing more. That’s why some people might prefer a hearty date bread for breakfast, served warm and perhaps spread with the thinnest drizzle of your favorite topping, just to add the faintest hint of flavor.

But baked goods alone do not a power breakfast make. I can already hear the winged perpetrators of Atkins’s folly complaining, with some justification. These are all carbs, they say. And certainly, we shouldn’t stop with merely the items I’ve listed. Many people have bad memories of scrambled eggs as a lumpy disaster of institutional cooking, but this hardly needs to be the case. Either cooked three per person for a few moments in a hot pan with singing fat, or slowly nursed to gentle curds in a double boiler, and finished luxuriously with rich cream, scrambled eggs served with sturdy oatcakes and perhaps a naturally smoked kipper simmered gently in milk for a few minutes are one of the best breakfasts. As the great food writer Richard Olney has written, “correctly prepared, . . . scrambled eggs number among the very great delicacies of the table”.

Nor do I automatically discount the stranger entrants to the world of morning eating. My favorite among this motley band, however, is the imperial Kedgeree, a fragrant, delicious rice of eggs, smoked fish, and threads of vibrant saffron (or powdered turmeric, if your aesthetic sense demands yellow but your wallet dare not), all turned enthusiastically in either bought or home made ghee. As for Michael’s “Benedict”, I frankly prefer my poached eggs perched atop day old French bread toasted lightly with a little oil, and anointed first with mushroom puree flavored with sherry or vermouth, light cream, thyme, and lemon, and then finished if you’re feeling particularly indulgent or successful with a hollandaise of more butter whisked into three whipped eggs over a light fire.

Obviously, this rather long post hardly exhausts the possibilities for the dealmaker or the serious eater. It’s with some trepidation that I leave out beignets, a recipe for how to make gravlax, a stab at bagels and bialys, some suggestions about cream cheese, and recipes for waffles and pancakes. I shudder to think that some deprived soul might forget about cinnamon rolls because I’ve forgotten to mention them, and if I had more time I would delve into the vexed questions of the precise type of butter, brand of coffee, or leaf of tea. But for the moment I’ll leave the topic content, for it’s night again – and well, I’m hungry.

On Error

I make a lot of mistakes while cooking. Sometimes, I admit I get frustrated. It’s incredibly annoying to spend a lot of money (relatively, given my negative $50,000 in annual income) on ingredients I’m really looking forward to eating, and then have them fall apart (usually figuratively, though at least once literally), in my hands. As annoying as mistakes are, however, I always learn from them. Of course, I often learn specific lessons about specific dishes. For example, after some particularly disastrous blueberry muffins, I discovered that replacing butter with half as much oil in baked goods because you’re too lazy to go out and buy butter is definitely a bad idea. Just as often, however, I learn more universal lessons.

1. Ingredients matter : The carrot bread looked especially delectable from outside. Golden brown, obviously crunchy, and especially fragrant. Nor was this a surprise; I had worked really hard on the damned thing, and it deserved to be tasty – I don’t know if any of my readers have tried hand-grating a pound of carrots, but it isn’t the most pleasant of tasks. Because I’m an unrepentant glutton, I wasn’t able to wait for the cake to cool down, but rather took my serrated bread knife to its thick exterior immediately, at which point a flood of cinnamon and nutmeg laced carroty liquid gushed out the side, burned my hand, and incidentally collapsed the entire loaf. You’d think, then, that the lesson I learned from this apparent disaster was patience, both in baking and cutting.

But the reason I remember the great carrot bread debacle of 2004 is that I still enjoyed that loaf. Sure, I wasn’t going to be able to slice and freeze it for snacking throughout the week. Indeed, I ended up with a box of the most appalling Quaker Oat cereal bars, about which I’m still annoyed. But I saved as much of the molten cake as I could, found some relatively convincing vanilla ice cream, and proceeded to make what turned out to be a really delicious sort of bread a la mode. The reason it was still good after all those disastrous mistakes on my part, though, was that I had used only ingredients that taste good on their own. Wholesome butter, fresh carrots, nice eggs, whole rather than ready ground spices, King Arthur’s quality flour – all these things can’t help tasting good. Every time I’m tempted to use low fat cheese or fake sour cream or chemical margarine, experiences like that pumpkin bread waft into my mind. Good ingredients are an insurance policy for the second rate cook.

2. Kitchen Equipment isn’t always a Crock : I used to be rather skeptical about the difference good kitchen equipment made. “Eh”, I said, dismissively of the kitchen weekend warriors flashing their fancy pants All-Clad steel and copper pans, “my collection of standard department store steel and aluminum can take them all on”. Still, I bought a decent sauté pan, made with a particularly thick base and a metal handle – it was a sort of housewarming gift for my arrival in Boston.

I learned to make spaghetti carbonara near the beginning of 1L, with the nice pan. Being one of my favorite dishes, I thought I would make it at home for my family over that Christmas, and whipped out my mom’s old cookware confident it would all work perfectly. I slowly fried the scant cubes of pancetta, releasing their eminently flavorful fat, poured in a little vermouth to deglaze, and then tossed in the pasta, all at high heat with a little knob of butter. Once the pasta was well coated with all these delicious accoutrements, I turned off the heat and added the eggs and imported parmesan that form the base of any carbonara - the idea, of course, is that the steady latent heat in the pan ought to turn the eggs creamy as you frantically turn the noodles in the fatty mixture. It certainly had always worked before.

This time, however, I was left looking at a pan full of badly scrambled eggs, pasta, and bacon. The thin carapace of my mom’s pan had got too hot, which I hadn’t noticed, so the moment I added the eggs to the pan they had given up the ghost entirely. In accordance with the first lesson I mention above, the dish still tasted good – the ingredients were all tasty on their own, and there isn’t anything wrong with scrambled eggs and bacon. But it definitely wasn’t carbonara. Since then, when making that particular dish divorced of my pan, I’ve plumped for the Italian way with it by adding the egg raw after tipping the pasta into a wide and shallow bowl. But until I become a better cook, I’ll leave my usual method here in Boston – for some recipes, I rely on equipment for help.

3. Ignore seasons at your peril: I love strong tastes, whether it be spices, or meats, or butters or drinks. Bland rarely does anything for me. That’s why I’m a big fan of the Italian radicchio, a sort of red tinged chicory relative. At its best, radicchio has an astringent bitter taste, strong enough to be interesting but not overwhelming. Tossed into a soup with broad beans, a chili, parsley, garlic, and the juice of a generous lemon, the leaf makes for a hearty winter meal. Conveniently enough, its season runs from mid-winter to the beginning of spring – just the thing to get an often overwhelmed law student through the worst of a long, dark, couple of months.

But modern supermarkets have made it available year round. Thinking myself clever last summer, I decided to take advantage of this fact to make the soup in the middle of August. Sure, the radicchio might not be at its absolute best, I figured, but it would still be ok, and surely boiling it in the soup would soften its harder edges in any case. It’s not a time consuming or complicated meal to prepare, so in twenty minutes I had settled down at the table with a snowy white slab of my favorite goat’s cheese, which I think goes well with anything involving broad beans, and a large bowl of the steaming, delicious smelling soup. This, I thought, would be a pleasant noontime.

Alas, what I had neglected to notice was that radicchio outside its season is incredibly bitter, unless you get especially lucky. In fact, even to a mouth used to strong flavors, it was almost inedible – just sour and bitter, almost beyond belief. Nor could any of the soup and beans be saved by removing the leaf – summer had so ill treated the European delicacy that it had destroyed everything else in the soup save the chili, which I rescued and ate with the eagerly waiting cheese. I certainly didn’t go hungry, and I’ll still happily eat radicchio in the right season. What I wonder about, though, is all those people who might only have eaten radicchio at the wrong time, and now think they don’t like it. It’s possible that they like radicchio, but the grey, limply flavored shadow of it they ate in ignorance. And often enough, there’s no one to tell people otherwise. No, I don’t envision a return to a pre-industrial world where we eat everything exactly in season, for lack of alternatives. I’m an avowed capitalist, and our present range of choice is what the market has delivered and people demand. But I would like people to promise me that before they exclude a food from their diet, they’ll try the best version of it they can find. Giving something another try has changed my mind more than once, and I hope others think the same.

What is the difference betwixt a soup and a stew?

I’ve found that much of the hard doctrinal work of the law student is in learning to draw lines. What makes something obscene? Is a professorial corporate director whose university depends on donations from his company independent? What, exactly, does the word substantial mean?

I don’t do well with these questions. By the end of even my first year, though, I certainly could recite the various un-resolvable arguments in my sleep – bright lines and factors, the crystal and the mud, the functionalist and the formalist.

But law students aren’t alone in these thankless games of mental gymnastics. Rather, food enthusiasts too can sometimes be left staring at categories without answers. And though the controversies of the food world rarely disturb the august ponderings of the Supreme Court, the questions remain interesting. Late last night, in the company of nothing but a quick soda loaf combining a pound of flour, a few tablespoons of butter, a little sugar and enough buttermilk to make a dry dough, all overspeckled with dark chocolate and baked till it sounds hollow on the bottom, that realization led me directly to the topic for the last food post of my exceedingly pleasant stay here at Crescat Sententia. The great American food pioneer, Richard Olney, once tellingly wrote that “the line dividing a soup from a stew is often infirm”. Infirm though it sometimes is, I’d prefer if we now made an effort to find it – and perhaps enjoyed ourselves in the process.

One Supreme Court justice said of obscenity that he knew it when he saw it. Some stews and soups are the same way – no devious lines or clever tests are necessary to understand that if you boldly sautee chunks of tough beef in butter and oil, and then simmer them gently for a few hours in a strong red wine, and thyme, pearl onion and garlic, with perhaps the faintest tinge of rich double cream at the end, you have a stew. Nor does it need to be said that a light chicken broth, skimmed of fat and made from nothing but a free range bird, a few robust herbs, and a lot of time, is a soup – either eaten just as it is, or perhaps with a few squares of pasta (or if you’re feeling inauthentic, easily available wonton wrappers) stuffed with a mixture of pork, beef, lemon peel and parsley to make tortellini in brodo,

But not all cases fall so obviously into one camp or the other, and “I know it when I see it” is hardly a satisfying test in any case. What of bouillabaisse, the emblematic dish of seafood simmered in flavorful stock and garlic that exists in one form or another across France, whether with potatoes and mussels as in Toulon, or with cuttlefish in Martigues, or most appropriately for someone stuck in New England, with butter, hake, sole, and cod, as along the hardy Atlantic coast? In many ways, the heady, aromatic dish is quite exactly a stew, especially if you’re smart and have a generous hand with the fish, cheap or otherwise. It is, after all, merely the maritime cousin of the beef stew above, and the brother of a white wine chicken stew, one of my favorite weekly meals. But for me, bouillabaisse is a soup – not because it’s insubstantial, but because it demands nothing but crusty bread spread thickly with honest butter as an accompaniment. One reason that stew is stew is because you enjoy both the rich sauce on its own, which incidentally only gets better the next day, but also its slow impregnation of a healthy puddle of some delightful starch– whether butter rich mashed potatoes, or fluffy shards of basmati rice, or any one of the other dozens of possibilities. A stew’s gravy is there both to flavor the meat and to flavor a base- and the unthickened broth of France’s culinary pride does much, but not that.

Stew doesn’t always need to be eaten with starch, though. There must be some other line, and the versatile champion of Eastern Europe, Borscht, straddles it completely. Made meagerly, with more water than beets, with onions and a few carrots all boiled till tender, borsht is clearly a soup- and an excellent soup at that. But made with a few chunks of the cheapest beef, perhaps, or some spicy sausage meatballs, and with substantial servings of fresh beets just scrubbed and halved and then finished with any good sour cream, borscht really is a stew, even without any carb-rich base. The line isn’t the starch in this case – it’s the emphasis of the dish. In the former case, the soup’s taste is in the purple depth of the liquid’s flavor – but the latter relies on its more substantial ingredients. The former, I think, I’d serve to begin a meal – the latter might be the whole meal itself on some incredibly cold night when I have to work, but would rather eat.

Having seen my grandmother fend off appalled accusations from people who would have been entirely sated by one dish served as a stew, but claimed starvation when she called it a soup, I think people would be surprised at how important these lines are sometimes. But even if you’re not convinced, I hope most people would agree with me that pondering these kinds of lines is much more fun than wondering what the Court might be doing. After all, I don’t know what the sordid films the Supreme Court used to watch in its obscenity cases were like, but I do know that the recipes above are delicious – given the choice, I’d say pass me the spoon and the fork. Potter Stewart, wherever he is now, can keep his films, and with my blessing.

Brioche

Make a dough starter as below,but with 2 tablespoons of water, 1 of sugar, and only 1 egg and 1/2 cup of flour. Let this sit for a day and a night.

Add 1 cup of flour, 2 TB of sugar, some more yeast, 2 large eggs, cold, and 8 tablespoons (113 grams) of very soft butter. (you can go up to 200 grams of butter with no problem, though I think this is overkill). Combine it all at once by hand, making sure everything is well incorporated, and beat with a spoon until smooth. You're not going to be able to knead this dough, because it will be very soft, so you'll have to just beat it until the glutens are developed. Let rise for two hours, deflate, and put in the fridge for another hour. Deflate again, and bag it in an oiled bag, and age for 6 hours to 2 days, to develop more flavor. Deflate again, shape into whatever form you like (I like braids on these things) and bake in an oven at 350 for as long as the challah. Make sure the brioche is glazed with egg beforehand.

(both challah and brioche recipes are from Beranbaum's "The Bread Bible"

Challah

Make a dough starter with 1 cup of flour, 1 teaspoon of yeast, water, 2 tablespoons of honey, and three large eggs. Mix all these together leave for a day and night in the fridge. It should look like very thick batter - not dough.

The next day, combine 4 2/3 cups of flour, more instant yeast, salt, 2 large eggs, 1/3 cup corn oil, 6 tablespoons honey, an 1 tablespoon cider vinegar, as well as the dough starter. Knead for about five minutes, and let rest for 20 minutes, so that it becomes easier to handle. Knead for five more minutes until the dough is almost rubber like.

Let the dough rise once. Deflate, and let it rise again. Deflate again, and shape into three long ropes. Braid the ropes, and glaze the whole thing with lightly beaten egg. Let rise this way for an hour, preheat the oven to 350, and bake the challah for about 50 minutes, with the last half hour protected by a tent of foil to keep it from burning. Make sure to glaze again before putting in the oven.

Date and Walnut Bread

2 cups whole wheat flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground cloves
pinch of salt
6 tbs butter
1/2 cup dark brown sugar (again, the raw cane variety that's still full
of molasses)
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup milk
1 cup chopped dates
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
2 tsp orange zest

Sift together the flour, baking powder and spices. Beat the butter with
the sugar, then add the eggs. Gradually add flour and milk. Mix in nuts
and orange zest. Pour into a buttered and floured cake tin and bake at
160 Celsius for 60-75 minutes (depends on your oven). You can eat it
plain or with butter (or peanut butter), and you can even toast it if
you have any left over that's getting stale.

Pumpkin and Orange Breakfast Cake with a Fresh Orange Syrup
Recipe courtesy of Regan Daley's In the Sweet Kitchen (Artisan, 2001)

Cake:
1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons finely grated orange zest
3 large eggs, 2 of them separated, all at room temperature
1 cup pumpkin puree, homemade or pure canned solid-pack pumpkin (not
"pumpkin pie filling")
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup cake flour (not self-rising)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt

Syrup:
Juice of 1 large juice orange, such as Seville
1/2 cup granulated sugar

Additional unsalted butter, at room temperature, for greasing the
pan
Thick vanilla yogurt or vanilla ice cream, to serve

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter a 9-inch fluted tube pan
and set it aside. Cream the butter, sugar, and orange
zest together until light and fluffy. Add the whole egg and the two
egg yolks, one at a time, beating well and scraping
down the sides of the bowl between each addition. Beat in the
pumpkin puree.

Sift together the flours, baking powder, and salt. Add to the
pumpkin batter in three or four stages, blending gently but
thoroughly after each. Stir in the final addition of dry ingredients
by hand if you have been using a mixer, so as not to
overwork the batter. In a clean small bowl, whip the egg whites
until they hold soft peaks. Fold into the batter, then
scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the surface. Bake
in the center of the oven for 50 to 60 minutes, or
until the top of the cake is springy when lightly touched, the sides
are beginning to pull away from the sides of the pan
and a wooden skewer inserted in the center of the cake comes out
clean. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then invert
onto a wire rack and cool completely. This cake keeps very well for
several days, well wrapped, and it freezes
beautifully for up to 2 months.

For the syrup, combine the orange juice and sugar in a small
saucepan over low heat and stir until the sugar has
dissolved. Increase the heat, bringing the syrup to a boil. Boil
without stirring for 2 minutes, then use immediately, or
allow to cool and refrigerate for up to 3 days (reheat gently).

To serve, place one slice of the pumpkin orange cake on each plate.
Spoon a few tablespoons of the warm syrup over
each piece, and accompany with a scoop of thick vanilla yogurt (for
breakfast) or ice cream (for dessert).

Yield: Makes 10 servings

Kedgeree

2 hard boiled eggs eggs
680 undyed smoked haddock
2 fresh bay leaves
170 g long grain or basmati rice
110 g butter or ghee
ginger
1 medium onion
1 clove garlic
2 tablespoons curry powder, or a tiny bit of saffron, or turmeric
1 tablespoon mustard seeds
2 tomatoes, deseeded and chopped
juice of 2 lemons
coriander
1 red chili.


The fish should be boiled for a few minutes with the bay leaves in a little water - when it cools, just pull the meat off the fish and flake into chunks. Cook the rice however you like, though I prefer to boil quickly in salted water, and then let steam in a closed pot for twenty minutes. If you're using the saffron or the turmeric, throw it in with the rice. Then melt the butter or ghee in a pan, sofften the ginger, onion, and harlic, and add the mustard seeds and curry powder. For for a few more minutes, and add the tomatoes and lemon juice. Add the quarter eggs, fish meat, and rice to the pan, toss, and eat with the chopped coriander.

Professor Bainbridge has this intriguing recipe for lamb in puff pastry. I should note that replacing the lamb with beef would yield the much maligned Beef Wellington, which I actually enjoy very much. Maybe this is the Professor's sneaky attempt to rehabilitate the old stalwart.

Cooking for one is a real challenge. More accurately, it's a challenge if you care at all about being efficient. If cooking 5 separate meals per work week doesn't bother you, then cooking for one is theoretically simple - you find five meals you're interested in eating, and cook them in turn. However, it's clear that cooking in this kind of ad hoc way presents several problems. You end up buying too much food, it's hard to think of five discrete meals every single week, and it takes a lot of time. Unless you happen to be home all day, and few people who are cooking for one can afford to do that, there has to be a better answer. Otherwise, it's all to easy to stumble out of your front door in the direction of the nearest pizza joint, which for me happens to be exactly 5 yards due west of my apartment.

I organize my cooking around a theme dish or ingredient every week. Quite often, it's a recipe I've just learned, or a recipe I've recently read something interesting about. Other times, I chose an old favorite, a food I know backwards and forwards. In keeping with a few recent posts, a common "week centerpiece" for me is a roast chicken. Indeed, a chicken is one of the most versatile of core ingredients. Well stuffed with thyme, and rubbed with olive oil, salt, pepper, and lemon, a chicken yields not only a hot, crisp, delicous skin, to be stuffed unceremoniously in my mouth just as the unfortunate bird emerges from the oven, but also a fragrant and considerable flesh, which can be used in sandwiches, pot pies, risotto, rice, pasta, and even pizzas. The roasting juices are almost unholy when used to dress pasta along with pine nuts and raisins in the jewish fashion, or tipped into a pan to roast crispy deeply flavorful fingerling potatoes. The carcass, now stripped clean, should be boiled for a couple of hours along with a carrot, onion, and bouqet of strong herbs, which yields a wonderful stock with which to make your risotto, or provides a particularly tasty base for an invigorating vietnamese style soup, spiked with roughly chopped chilis, ginger, and coriander. Since there ought to be some thyme left over, and since there is probably an extra mushroom or two post risotto, weeks like this usually end for me with a large portabello stuffed generously with thyme butter, roasted for ten minutes, and then jammed into a soft roll lined with spicy mustard and sopped in the buttery mushroom juices left in the oven pan. Of course, the fact that there are some potatoes likely around means that a sort of omlette with diced oil-softened tubers is a back-up possibility on Friday night, if I've run out of other things to eat. The goal, in other words, is to be left with an utterly empty refrigerator by the end of the week, except for a few condiments and other staples.

My menu for this week is not quite so complex, but I think it happens to be equally good. As previous posts have shown, I rather enjoy bread. But man can't live by bread alone, it's been said, and actually I agree that even the best crispy hand made fugasse or baguette can become tiresome if you eat nothing else all week. But a good bread, accompanied by a soup, perhaps, can really be a treat. Of course ,it's even better if the bread is a substantial player itself, especially if you're unable to make a really first class loaf in your home kitchen (I certainy can't). A prosciutto ring, I think (which I much prefer called "lard bread"), is the perfect answer - forgiving, easy, and bold. In a large bowl, just combine 2 cups plus 3 tablespoons of flour, 1 tablespoon of honey, some instant yeast, coarsely ground black pepper to taste, 3/4 teaspoon of salt, and 3/4 cup of prosciutto, the Italian ham. Add about a cup of water and knead the dough aggressively for about ten minutes, until quite elastic. Roll into a long rope, about 18 inches, and shape into a ring (my cookbook says that the ring will be about 7 inches in diameter with a 3 inch hole in the centre, but I never take such measurements seriously). All the bread to rise for an hour, and glaze with four teaspoons of bacon fat, which you've acquired by frying two rashers of thick bacon in a pan for a few minutes. Put in a preheated oven, and bake for about about 30 minutes, monitoring the heat to make sure it isn't burning. Once you pull the beautiful ring out of the oven, glaze it again with fat, and leave to cool entirely.

The main part of the week's food made, it's now important to pair this with the right things. Of course, you should make a BLT with the bacon you rendered: no one else in your workplace or school will have such a nice lunch, and you're saved from wasting perfectly good food. To go with the ring, however, I'd think you need to think hard about the prosciutto and the bacon - you need soups that work with those ingredients. Thankfully, there are dozens. My favorite, though, is a shocking bright green pea soup, best made with frozen petit pois, chicken stock, a head of garlic roasted in the oven for an hour with oil, and maybe half a pint of cream or half and half, all cooked together for about ten minutes and then processed in either a machine or by one of those wonderful hand held puree-ers. While you're at it, of course, the remaining cream can be salvaged by using it to replace the sour cream in the blueberry muffins I've posted just below, for which you should have enough flour from bread leftovers, or simply as a delicious replacement for milk in the morning oatmeal, which of course should be made even better by directing the remaining few berries into the service of a coulis. In case the pea soup isn't enough, though, I've had great success throwing a handful of lentils in a pot with some water, spinach, and lemon juice - as even the French know, the earthiness of lentil is a perfect match for smoked pork, though if lentils aren't your thing a simple tomato soup or gazpacho would work perfectly, especially if you've been clever enough to remember a little basil in your soup.

The really astonishing thing with all this is that it won't cost me more than $40 for the week, and I can make all the food I need in a couple hours on Sunday, supplemented with a few minutes of effort during the week. Sure, I could eat out all the time - but that would be expensive and time consuming, and certainly not healthy. I could also buy ready to eat foods, but I hate spending money on food I can make better myself, if I even could be sure what was in that stuff to begin with. So yes, part of all is comes from the fact that I'm both poor and cheap - but it's also a good idea, I think, especially since the effort required isn't all that much.

A Leavened Life

I really hate the Atkins diet. In all honesty, I dislike all diets that rely on a gimmick. To me, there’s just something terribly myopic about cutting entire swathes of food out of your life because you blame them for your own fatness. Of course, when your health has got so bad that the cabbage soup diet represents a choice between life and death, you might be forced to comply, but in the general case I much prefer moderation to abstention. The Atkins Diet, however, is one of my particular enemies. I don’t have any problem with eating lots of meat – I do it myself, occasionally. But how far have we sunk that the supposed path to health is to cut out breads, pastas, grains and rice, and honeys and sugars from our lives? These are not just good foods – they’re the universal foods. They are the foods upon which human society has been painstakingly built for thousands of years, which are eaten in every part of the world, which represent, to my mind, the very foundations of civilization. Bread especially is how we know we’re civilized, I think – as others have noted, there’s just something special about the very idea of mixing some wheat with water and getting bread.

Having said all that, I think it’s all our duty to fight the Atkins craze until it’s gone the way of all the other crazes of times past. One way to do this is to really understand the astonishing versatility of a loaf. Many people just see bread as something you use in a sandwich, or, sometimes even more depressingly, as merely a way to convey meat and cheese to their mouths (Subway corporation, I’m looking at you!). But a good loaf – a loaf made with real yeast, and good flour, and a little salt, and clean water and nothing else, is something special in of itself. It has a lifespan. It changes over the days. And its uses change too.

So next time you get your hands on a decent loaf of bread (and they’re getting easier and easier to get hold of these days), don’t worry about it slowly going stale. There are uses for it still. On the first day, when it’s still fresh and soft, use it for whatever you want. Recently, I’ve been on a kick of roast chicken sandwiches, though, and made properly, I’m not sure there is a lot that’s better. Usually, after roasting the chicken, of course, I make some mayonnaise by slowly drizzling a mixture of olive and vegetable oil into a beaten egg, whisking all the while with a little salt. It take a lot of oil, but the taste is definitely worth it, especially if you’ve been wise and purchased a fresh ( as possible) free range egg. Then I’ll layer the chicken between two enthusiastic slices of bread (and any kind of good bread will do here, whether it’s a crusty French pain de compagne or an American loaf), slather on giant helpings of the homemade mayonnaise, and top with a sliced tomato and small cornichon pickles. A couple of sandwiches later, there’s often not enough bread for the rest of the week.

If there’s any left, though, the inevitable next step is a Welsh rarebit. By the second day, the bread is drying out a bit. It’s not as fresh, and won’t make as good a sandwich. That’s why it needs some help, and the Welsh version of grilled cheese provides plenty. Unfortunately, there are thousands of recipes for rarebit. Most involve making a roux thickened cheese sauce, with beer, locally made cheddar cheese, butter, milk, and hot English mustard, all of which gets piled on the bread and grilled till charred and sizzling. If you’ve not got the time to mess about with rouxs and sauces, though, I’ve found that just mixing the ingredients, with our without the milk, and pouring over the bread before grilling provides almost as good an experience, and many times faster. Sure, the beer might make the bread too soggy, but I’ve found that some moderation with the beer solves that problem neatly.

If it was a particularly big loaf, you’ll have reached the third day. But now, surely there’s no use for the bread, right? It’s dry. Inedible, surely even too stale for rarebit, and thus for life? Nope. Today is when you whip out your milk, cinnamon, eggs, and maple syrup for some French toast, like I had this morning. Again, there are a lot of recipes for French toast, or what the French (minus the maple syrup), call “lost bread” (pain perdu), but I tend towards the simple by combining the milk and egg, dipping the bread in the mixture, frying it in a good bit of oil or butter, followed by a generous slathering with sugar, spices, and syrup. Sure, there’s all sorts of complications you can go through, but in my life French toast is the quick and easy substitute for pancakes, so I hardly want to muck around with ingredients longer than I have to.

By day four, however, we really are getting desperate. I’m not even sure French toast can revive the bread now. Thankfully, though, God invented breadcrumbs and fish. Just whiz some of the bread in a food processor until it becomes a pile of course crumbs. Tip the bread into a bowl, add freshly grated parmesan, a little cheddar, and a tablespoon of oil. If you’re feeling slightly adventuresome, add a few flakes of red chili. Make sure all the crumbs are damp with the oil, and then spread over the flesh side of a fish filet (I would recommend a thinner kind of white fish, like flounder) before tossing in a warmed oven for about ten minutes, or until the crumbs are golden and crispy. Serve with potatoes of some kind – I like to cut a baking potato into thirds and just roast it in about a tablespoon of oil for an hour, in an desperate and increasingly successful effort to get something close to a French fry without all the accompanying fat.

Finally, you’ve probably got just a little nub of bread left. It’s hard and unappetizing. Even the dog might look at it with considerable suspicion. But it’s still bread. If it was honestly made, it’s still healthy and filling. But what can be done with it? Of course, some might recommend a bread and butter pudding. It certainly would work, but I find that you need to layer on a little too much butter and cream to make it really tasty. No, I’ve recently discovered a simple, fitting end to a loaf of bread, drawn inevitably from the countryside of France. The answer is soup; any soup, in fact. Obviously, the most famous is the French onion, made in my book by frying loads of onions in butter slowly for an hour until caramelized, then tipping into a casserole with filled halfway with water. This then simmers for half an hour before being baked for twice as long in a pan layered with very stale bread, gruyere cheese, and the onion soup mixture. But you can also make something much simpler, which takes about five minutes: just boil a little water, throw in chopped spinach, cook for two minutes until the spinach is well wilted, and pour over a large bowl lined with the bread and garlic. Not only is it healthy, but you’ll be reaching back into the very depths of the 19th century for your meal, and for a solution to your bread’s final day.

This clearly is not the only progression possible for bread. Even in this short essay, I’ve noted alternatives, diverging little paths on the road to taste. The point remains, despite these different roads. Don’t give up on bread because a diet book says so. Don’t give up on bread because it looks to have gone stale. And definitely don’t give up on bread if you’ve spent the extra fifty cents and gotten good honorable bread. Bread, to mock the prison bound Ms. Stewart, is a good thing, and it shouldn’t be jettisoned for the sake of a week’s worth of weight loss.

quick goat cheese tart

Nigel Slater's Real Food is one of my favorite cookbooks. I'm not sure this speaks more to the shabby state of modern binding or to my obsession with his high fat and higher flavor recipes, but my hard copy is beginning to fall apart. Anyway, this is as simple as things get - find yourself a goat cheese crottin, or failing that, a log, sliced into thirds. Place on a square of puff pastry, pull the sides up and pinch together in pleats up the side of the cheese, but not covering the top. Sprinkle a healthy sprigs worth of fresh thyme on top. Give the pastry an egg wash, and put in the oven for about 20 minutes, or until the puff pastry is golden brown. I like to eat this, warm, with either quite an astringent salad, or, alternatively, grapes and nice, fresh, green apple.

Bean Sausage

The potato waffle is a particular scourge of the university age Briton. I think we've got them in one sort of another here - maybe tater tots are the same kind of thing? In any case, the particular attraction of the waffle seemed to be it's crispy once frozen exterior, which surrounded a soft, creamy filling of potatoes. It was that contrast, I think, that hooked people, and I've got to admit that a plateful of potato waffles laced with generous drippings of cold ketchup was an occasional late night snack.

The bean sausage I describe here provides the same contrasting sensations. I think it's great.

Anyway, if you want to use dried beans, just soak them overnight and cook them until quite soft the next morning. Otherwise, open a tin of cannelinis - it'll do perfectly well for for a quick snack. Once the beans are ready, mash them with some chopped garlic in either a food processor or by hand. Add enough egg until you have a stiffish paste that can be formed into a sausage, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, and some good parmesan cheese if you have it. Form into the aforementioned sausage, dip in flour, then egg, then roll in breadcrumbs. Deep fry in oil until golden brown, drain, and then eat quickly with lemon and giant generous gobs of mayo.

Blueberry Muffins

This is my second recipe from Rose Levy Berenbaum's "The Bread Bible". Her challah was quite excellent, and the blueberry muffins are very good as well. I worry a bit about her obsession with soft buttery breads to the detriment of real thick crusted breads, but it's still a great cookbook. I recommend it heartily.

To make the muffins, cream 4 tablespoons of butter, 100g of sugar, and 2 teaspoons of lemon zest in a large bowl. Beat in one large egg and just a little bit of (hopefully natural) vanilla. Actually, I found that one egg wasn't enough - if you tend to buy smaller eggs, go with two. Finally, add 1 cup of flour, about half a teaspoon of baking soda, and a 1/3 cup of sour cream. The batter should be like pancake batter almost: quite thick. Just add 3/4 of a cup of blueberries*, fold gently, and pour into six muffin cups. Bake for about 30 minutes until golden brown.

I've found that if you dip the blueberries into flour before folding into the batter, the blueberries won't sink to the bottom of the muffin. It really works a lot better.

Batter Noodles

Mix 1 1/3 cups of flour, salt, 1 tablespoon of olive oil, and 4 eggs. Pour into a zip-loc bag, and boil some salted water. Turn down the heat until it's barely at a simmer, and cut one of the corners of the bag to leave a tiny whole of about a quarter inch. Use the bag to pipe batter into the simmering water, and let poach for about 30 seconds.

After that, you're entirely at liberty to make whatever you want with the noodles. My cookbook recommends a gratin with cream and cheese, or chopped fine herbs, or even with truffles (yeah, right). Tomorrow I'm making it with chicken roasting drippings and small quickly boiled peas, though, and then slathered with parmesan. If you haven't tried this after roasting a chicken, I fully recommend it, especially when the peas replaced with raisins and pine nuts.

Moby Dick of Boston

Many a kebab has met its maker gripped tightly in my meaty paws, or torn apart and gobbled uncouthly in my usual gluttonous haste. And they haven't just been American kebabs either -I've tasted kebabs from the street markets of Damascus to the sunny climes of Palo Alto (just once!), stuffed in so many types of breads I can hardly name them all. The point, in other words, is that I know my kebabs. As a result, I was really looking forward to my Kebab at Moby Dick of Boston, just around the corner from the Boston Symphony where I was about to hear Handel's wonderful Apollo e Dafne. A kebab, I thought, would be the perfect appetizer for some nice music.

Before delving into the heart clogging sandwich in question, though, a note about the name of the restaurant. Moby Dick isn't exactly a chain - or rather, the Boston branch isn't exactly a chain. Rather, for some reason I haven't yet been able to identify, Iranian kebab restaurants in the US always call themselves Moby Dick, even if they have nothing to do with each other. The generally quite excellent, cheap, and generous mini-chain of Moby Dicks in DC, for example, are high on my recommended list for people in the Washington area. Other Moby Dicks are not.

Moby Dick of Boston, at least during my one visit there, is unfortunately in the latter category. It's not that the lamb kebab I had was bad, particularly. The lamb was tender, tasty, and reasonably well marinated. The yogurt sauce was strong with garlic, the sandwich wrapped in the requisite paper and foil. But kebabs, to my mind, are dependent on two things. First, they really need to be generous, stuffed healthily with meat and sauce, and salad. You can't make kebabs with a stingy hand, especially when you charge $7.50 for a single sandwich like Moby Dick of Boston. This alone is a fatal flaw. Second, kebabs have to be wrapped in really good bread to be worth their while. It doesn't always have to be hand made in a sort of tandoor, though I've found the best Iranian kebaberies (is that a word?) always oblige, but it does need to be decent, and definitely something other then Moby Dick of Boston's weak supermarket pita.

I thought for a moment of giving them a pass because I went early on a Sunday - but then it occurred to me that if you're open, you should be ready to serve, Sunday or not. And I doubt the prices dropped at all during the week or in the evening either, so unless they made the sandwiches twice as big for everyone except me, I don't think they're out of the dog house. To be honest, I've had much worse kebabs, but not for so much money. What I had at Moby Dick of Boston should probably have cost about three dollars - and for that, they're getting a thumbs down from me.

Court Bouillon for poached fish

Poaching, boiling, and braising become important tools when your oven isn't working. That said, I think these methods produce a lot of taste, too, and a texture we're unused to in our age of sauteeing at very high heat. Here, then, is a court bouillon for poaching fish - that is to say, a flavored poaching liquid. When you do slip your cut of fish in here (for about five minutes per half inch of thickness), do remember that poaching isn't boiling. With the thinner fish, you can even heat the bouillon almost to a boil, slip in the fish and turn off the heat, remembering to cover, before retrieving your dinner five minutes later cooked just au point (perfectly done).

Put all the following ingredients except the wine in a pot, and simmer for 15 minutes. Add the wine, and simmer for another 20 minutes. It's now ready to use as described above.

water
salt
3 or 4 cloves garlic, crushed
4 ounces of carrots, thinly sliced
4 ounces onions, thinly slices
herbs (parsley, bay, thyme, fennel, oregano. Whatever you can find).
Leek, thinly sliced
peppercorns
2 cups white wine

nb - don't take the quantities too seriously. They're rough guides.

Gardiana la Camarge

Take a few pounds of beef and cut into formidable cubes. Pour a bottle of somewhat robust wine (not Beaujolais, in other words) over the beef, add an onion and garlic, and marinade for 24 hours. Drain the marinade into another bowl, and sautee the beef in extremely hot oil until brown and crusty. Add one cup of olives, some sprigs of thyme, bay leaf, and then the onions and garlic from the marinade. Boil gently for one and a half hours or so, at extremely low heat. One bottle of wine isn't that much liquid, and if you boil it too quickly you'll have too little liquid to cook the meat until it's soft enough.

Serve with rice or mashed potatoes, or crusty bread. Wonderful...

Lesso Misto with Salsa Verde

Yeah, so it's boiled beef. But as the article I cribbed this recipe from notes, boiled beef has got a bad rap over the years. In a world where rare and raw are bywords of quality, cooking things for three hours until they're soft enough to eat with a spoon isn't exactly avante garde. But it tastes good, and since I value taste rather more then fashion, I'm all for Lesso Misto.

It's easy enough, though the recip takes a little time. Just put a piece of beef in a pot with water, chilli, thyme, bay leaf, parsley, a carrot, and onion. Boil it for three hours, at a low simmer. Serve with potatoes and the salsa verde below.

Salsa Verde

I love salsa verde. Sure, I have a really unfortunate obsession with ketchup as well, but salsa verde comes in a close second place (along with mustard, mayo, etc, etc, etc). It's simple to make as well. Chop some parsley and celery tops (if you can find them) together by hand. Grind 4 cloves of garlic in a mortar (or under the blade of your knife) with coarse salt, and grind to a reasonably smooth paste before adding 4 anchovy fillets. Pound this combination as well, and then add small cornichons or pickle, capers, the juice of one lemon, pepper, and all the parsley. Slowly incorporate good olive oil until you've got a viscous, sludgy sort of sauce, and drizzle liberally over the beef (or fish)

Note that you can change this recipe as per taste- I haven't seen a single salsa verde recipe that was identical to another one. Also, I've heard that when you make the sauce for meat, it's more traditional to use some sort of white vinegar, while the lemon version noted here is for fish. But I don't like vinegar as much as lemon, so I'll use lemon for the time being.

Clam Chowder

This is a really simple clam chowder, and delicious.

Sautee some chopped onions in a little oil. If you're being unhealthy, actually, what you really ought to do is render some bacon fat, take out the bacon, and fry the onions in that until soft. Add diced potatoes (peeled and raw- they'll boil to a perfect consistency in the time allotted), clams (this can be either tinned or fresh, the latter being preferable, of course) and enough milk to cover everything comfortable. Simmer gently for 20 minutes, salting periodically. Finish with some freshly ground black pepper, and serve with bread or crackers.

Spinach & Ricotta Roll

Everyone likes lasagna, right? But you can't have lasagna all the time. It gets samey, I think, and I actually think there's a big temptation to put too much cheese and sauce on lasagna. But, as I say, you want something that's kind of like it. That's where the Spinach & Ricotta roll come in.

You first need a big sheet of pasta. Of course, it's a lot easier to go buy fresh pasta from an Italian deli, if

1) you happen to have an Italian deli around
2) it happens to sell big sheets of freshly made pasta

Barring both of these, though, you'll need to make your own. No, no. No running away. It's worth the effort, if you can just do it right.

Pasta is actually an amazingly easy thing to make. There are a lot of recipes, but for now I use this one:

Pasta Sheet

Combine 500g/1 lb of strong flour (hopefully the finely ground Italian Type 00, but if not either semolina flour or plain flour will be fine) with five of the freshest eggs you can find. Splurge on the eggs. I don't really care about chickens on a humanitarian basis, but it's a simple fact that more or less happy chickens produce delicious eggs. Dump most of the flour on a surface, poke a considerable well in the centre, and break all the eggs into that well. Break up the yolks with your hands, and slowly incorporate the flour into the eggs. Knead the mixture quite a bit- egg being what it is, it takes a while for the ingredients to really mix. Don't add any more liquid! If it seems too dry, keep mixing. It'll eventually moisterize. When it's smooth and silky, wrap the pasta in cling film and put in the fridge for about an hour. At the end of that time, take out, and either put it through a pasta machine to the thinnest setting, or roll it out by hand as thin as you can get it. Put some cling film on it to avoid drying out, and put aside for a moment.

The filling

The filing is so simple I hardly know what to say. Pour boiling water over half a pound (250g) of spinach. Dry. Dump in a bowl with the same weight of full fat ricotta, if you can find it (otherwise semi skim will do). Mix with salt and pepper, and maybe nutmeg if you like it (I don't understand nutmeg and spinach. I know people like it, but I just don't see the point). There you are. Done.

Construction

Empty contents of bowl onto pasta sheet. Roll up into a long sausage. Roll it all into foil very tightly. I actually used several layers to make sure it was watertight, but if you're less incompetent then me, feel free to use just one.

The cooking

Put the foil sausage into a pot of boiling water for about twenty minutes. Turn off the heat, and let it all cool in the water. Once it's reached a decent temperature, take the foil off, cut the pasta roll into slices, and put into a casserole with some pasta sauce (either stuff you've made or [gack] bought). Cook for about ten minutes until the sauce is bubbling, remove from oven, and serve with liberal doses of good parmesan. It's really quite delightful.

A Tip for the Doofus Chef

Erm. Remember to make the pasta roll small enough so that it fits into your pot. Ahem. I can't imagine who would have made such a mistake.

Grifone (New York, Midtown East)

Grifone is proof, if any was needed, that spending a lot of money doesn’t mean you’re going to get a good meal. I’ve got to say; I’ve never gotten so little for a $60 lunch before in my life.

Having said that, lovers of stodgy un-inventiveness will be richly rewarded by Grifone. Most of the menu is packed with old style veal parmesan like dishes; I think I counted at least 8 breaded veal chops, another 8 breaded chicken, and a whole host of lamb cutlets, all differentiated only by their overenthusiastic smothering in different poorly executed sauces. The pasta dishes were no more enlightening. I don’t think I’ve ever been told that a $25 entrée was “pasta with meat sauce” before, but the vagueness of the mumbling quasi-Italian waiter’s description was almost Scottish in its incomprehensibility. I wish I could say that the appetizers or desserts saved the show, because I’ve bought better stuff from one of those German discount supermarkets where they don’t have scanners and make you buy your own plastic bags. Still, the opening and ending of the meal (parma ham & figs, and a vaguely interesting pistachio/hazelnut cake) were at least presentable, in marked contrast to the 1950’s era debacle that was the main course.

I suppose there are some people who like this kind of place, what with its mahogany paneling and “grazie-ing” waiters. It’s not for me, though. Nor for anyone who’s eaten Italian food elsewhere in the last three decades. And don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to say that all traditional Italian-American food is bad. It’s not. I like breaded veal cutlets as much as the next food obsessive. But that point of food particularly needs to be done well, and this just was not. Ah, well, though. It makes for a good story.

White’s (London, The City)

In marked contrast to Grifone, White’s is actually quite a good restaurant. The brainchild of oft-berated super-chef Marco Pierre White, it lives up to its promise of pricey French sophistication. It really isn’t hard to see the differences in quality between this place and some of the other places I visited on my trip, honestly. Makes you wonder how hard the professional reviewer’s job actually is.

For example, I’m a complete sucker for amuses bouches, those little snacks you get before you order at more enterprising restaurants. They remind me of the tasting menus I can’t afford in both scale and surprise. What better way to eat then to be left in the hands of the kitchen? Anyway, White’s amuse bouche was perfect for the restaurant and the season, as exemplified by the mild chill outside. Served in a small expresso glass, I’ve seldom had a pumpkin soup of that depth or interest. Of course, I’ve rarely had a pumpkin soup made predominantly of cream and butter either, but that’s besides the point. You can’t just dump butter into a pan with pumpkin puree and expect it to taste good automatically. Cooking is about balance and artistry, and you can see it most clearly in the simplest dishes.

This isn’t to say that the other dishes lacked skill. Far from it. The starter I chose, a tarte tatin layered with delicate slices of sea scallop, was simply brilliant, featuring delicately charred pastry and yet still quivering mollusk lying over a mound of thinly sliced and sautéed leek. Nor did my main course disappoint, despite ample opportunity. You see, one of my other obsessions is coq au vin, that is to say, chicken stew with wine. I like both the red and the white kind, with cream and without. Actually, my only requirement is that the chicken be good and the stew include interesting (preferably wild) mushrooms. White’s poulet noir stew with freshly picked wild morels in a white wine and cream sauce, then, really had a head start with me, but even so, I doubt it would have disappointed anyone. The only negative I can imagine, actually, is that every bite was a reminder of the kind of chicken you can’t get over here in the US, except by occasionally paying some extortionate price for a top of the line free range monstrosity.

If left to my own devices, I would probably say that dessert was the weakest part of White’s efforts on my visit. Lemon tart is certainly a favorite dessert of mine, and this one was quite good, but I actually expected the traditional kind of lemon tart (that is to say, a circular sweet shortcrust filled with uncreamed lemon filling) rather then the slice of a larger tart filled with creamy curd that I did get. I’m not complaining, though. It was still excellent, and finishing off my slice the rapt gazes of my co-diners probably changed my mind about the tart.

In any case, White’s is a definite go in my book. I’d even pay for it myself.

Wagamama (London, Canary Wharf and elsewhere)

Not quite in the august category, either in price or quality, of the restaurants above, Wagamama is actually a chain operating throughout London, purporting to serve noodles in a relaxed and efficient atmosphere suitable for the lunchtime business diner. This commitment is well demonstrated by the super modern service, which included the relaying of your order back to the kitchen via palm pilot.

Just as an interlude, I’m still a little baffled why I was taken to this restaurant during a job interview, for one rather obvious reason. Asian noodles bars are not the best places for an incompetent eater wearing a suit. I mean, no kind of noodle is great for the clumsy suit wearer, but the multicoloured efforts of the East make it particularly embarrassing, especially when the final interview happens to be the hiring partner of the entire firm.

Anyway, giant splotches of yellow on my shirt aside, Wagamama is actually a great example of what it purports to be. My dumpling like gyoza (or in fact, my gyoza dumplings) were hot, fresh and each stuffed with a formidable prawn, while the aforementioned noodles, floating in a sharply flavoured curry amid grilled chicken managed to be both original and tasty at the same time. I wouldn’t particularly recommend Wagamama for a formal business meeting then, especially given the slightly brusqye service and almost shared benches/tables, but I rather appreciated the complete lack of pretension displayed by both the restaurant and the firm taking me there. This place is a go for me too, and paying my own way wouldn’t even be that painful.

Angelo’s (New York, Midtown East)

I don’t think it’s right to leave New York without having pizza at least once, so I stopped at the Barnes & Noble closest my hotel to leaf through the the restaurant guides for a pizza place in proximity. What I found was Angelo’s, not at all an outrageous hoof from my place over on Second Avenue.

There isn’t much to say about pizza, is there? Especially when you insist, as I tend to do, on the most basic of pizzas, topped with only tomato sauce, basil, and cheese. (don’t you hate people who call pizzas “pies”? Drives me nuts for some reason). But Angelo’s is good. Really good. Aside from what I thought was a slight oversweetness in the sauce , in fact, I thought it was almost perfect. A crunchy and chewy thin crust, that doesn’t get soggy after fifteen seconds? Check. Judiciously spread sweet globs of delicious mozzarella? Check. Large blatantly fresh leaves of basil? Check also. All in all, a great place to eat. I’ve got envy New York that one, at least.


Buttercup Bakery & Ess-a-Bagel (New York, Mid-town East)

I’m dealing with these two together because they demonstrate precisely the problems and glories of American baking. First, as I keep saying, no one in this country can bake cakes of any real sophistication. Sure, the brownies at Buttercup tasted good. So what? I can bake perfectly nice brownies at home. What I want at a bakery is something beyond what I can do at home, something that only training and skill (neither of which I have) can produce. So by all means, eat their 7 dollars lime pies or equally banal chocolate frosted cupcakes. I’ll save my money from now on.

But Ess-a-bagel presents exactly the opposite impression. Bagels, obviously, are something Americans can do very well, with years of tradition and authenticity behind them. Nor can I really make them at home. I mean, sure I could make my usual bread dough, converted to whatever dough it is that bagels need, and then I could boil the yeasty rings and then throw them in an oven to firm up, but it’s really a bother I don’t have much time for. This is especially true when you can get such astonishing bagels for just $.75 over at Ess-a-bagel: crunchy outside, and in fact almost recalcitrant in their toughness, but moist and airy within. I’ve now had multiple bagels from the famed H+H (at their Upper West Side location) and from Ess-a-bagel. I’m hard pressed to say which is better, other then to note that they certainly are different in both texture and taste.

La Fromagerie

I can't say enough about this little shop in Highbury/Islington, just north of city centre london. I went in today and just put myself in what I assume was the owner's hands. I'm a student, I said. I live in America. We don't have decent cheese, and I've had nothing but over expensive Roquefort and refrigerated cream cheese impersonating brie for almost two years. Help me.

Help me he did, with a completely astonishing round of St. Felicia, a cheese whose origin I haven't yet worked out, but was so runny, so perfectly ripe, so exceptional, that he had to tip the whole thing into a small plate for me to take home. Balanced delicately on a crunchy, crusty slab of bread (made by the newly arrived in Britain Poulaine bakery of Paris), I ran it to my hotel through three changes of the underground before devouring it completely. Yeah, I'm greedy, but when the cheese is this good, what else can you do?

Funnily enough, La Fromgerie supplies the cheese for the restaurant of the hotel I'm staying at. More funnily, a small piece of the same cheese I bought for 4.10 pounds sells for 11 as a dessert. I'll take the shop, thank you.

On my other blog I’ve recently written about the brewing litigation over Fresh Del Monte’s mythical “Gold” pineapple. To those who missed it, the Del Monte Gold is supposed to be the very epitome of all pineappleness; extra sweet, extra gold, and extra expensive. All these attributes have made its genetic makeup a closely guarded and extremely valuable secret for the fruit giant, but now it seems that other companies are very close to replication. In any case, I’m not interested in the legal aspects just now- nope, I’m more interested in how it tastes. Is it worth $5-6 to buy in the store, or millions to litigate?

So I picked one up in the local Star market, for a relatively svelte $4.99. Its colour is striking, as promised by Del Monte. It’s not yellow, like most pineapples, or that yellowish green you see so often, but a deep almost burnished gold, with slivers of green nestled in between neat diamonds of proud metallic. The aroma is almost as surprising. Even in the cold supermarket, stacked among great mounds of antiseptic “fruit”, the pile of Golds gave off a terrific penetrating tang. As I took it home, stuffed unceremoniously among my other shopping in my well worn book bag, I really was looking forward to indulging.

I have to say that I was somewhat disappointed, if predictably so. I can’t say it didn’t taste good. It was the best pineapple I’ve had in a long time. But the impression I got, and perhaps this was because of its long trip to my pathetic little supermarket here in Cambridge, is that the Del Monte Gold is essentially an urban Scot’s impression of what a good pineapple might taste like. It didn’t have any of the subtlety I assume a good pineapple has- just an overpowering impression of dense sugar. Note that I don’t mind sugar. In fact, I’ve got an appalling sweet tooth, along with a fat tooth, starch tooth, and anything else you can think of. But this was almost like eating a fat cylindrical sugar cane. I also thought, though I could be wrong, that the pineapple’s texture suffered just a little bit from whatever mutation caused its colour, aroma, and sweetness.

But, one has to admire Del Monte for getting such an apparently consistently sweet pineapple from wherever it was farmed to the east coast. The Gold is certainly an improvement over what we usually have. Is it the spiny messiah of the pineapple world? No. But is it worth a gigantic law suit with huge attorneys fees? The bottom line and the Wall Street journal say yes. I, and the Waddling Kitchen in its corporate persona, will be looking forward to its competitors.

Elephant Walk

Elephant Walk is an odd sort of creature – a Cambodian restaurant in the middle of Boston, and now, it seems, in Cambridge. I’d never had Cambodian before, actually. Indian, certainly. One can hardly survive more than a month or so in Britain without becoming acquainted with the multitudinous pleasure that is the bog standard British curry. The usual kinds of Chinese I know well enough. Thai and Vietnamese, furthermore, have thankfully become more popular in the last few years, and I’ve been merrily plowing that particular furrow of culinary innovation. I’ve even had a good go at Ethiopian, folding the sponge like flat bread messily around the spicy African conglomeration. But Cambodian I’ve never done, so Elephant Walk represented an interested culinary diversion for me.

I don’t really know how to describe the cuisine, having tested it once now. The best I can do, I think, is to command the reader to imagine a mix of Thai, Indian, and Vietnamese, all lightened with French sophistication, rather like you lighten a cake mix with egg whites or tomato sauce with cream. Or perhaps the cuisine is actually French, exotified by Asian influences? You can’t really tell at Elephant Walk, a fact which adds to the restaurant’s considerable charm. This sophisticated conundrum was made particularly evident by the dessert JCA and I shared, which turned out to be a crème caramel made exceptional by its completely unexpected (and equally unfamiliar) pandan leaf flavouring, which managed to be both sweet and yet slightly radicchio bitter in the end.

The starters and main courses were perhaps more exotic in their conception, but still retained a subtlety sometimes missing from their East Asian counterparts. JCA had an interesting looking chicken curry, for example, which I was able moderately pilfer. What made it different, I thought, since the Indians do a good job with tomato based curries as well, was the sharp tang of lime and lively spice softened by rather unexpected shards of pineapple. It’s that kind of light touch that differentiates EW from Vietnamese cuisine, under which Fodor’s Boston had erroneously listed the restaurant. As for my dish, I think a lot can be said for a restaurant on the basis of its basic meat dishes, and my evocatively named Loc Lac, seared “lightly” in a soy and black pepper mixture, did the restaurant proud.

Oh, and a final note- get Naiting , the ground pork stew simmered with garlic and coconut milk, as a starter, and save the quite good French bread they bring you to sop the last dregs of it up with. There just isn’t enough of the accompanying crispy jasmine rice, and in any case, why feel any compulsion to use a tiny bit of rice to mop up mounds of stew, or even to leave some of the sweet concoction in the bowl? Spare yourself the heartache- hoard the bread.

Tanjore

Harvard Square

Tanjore doesn't really look like much from outside, tucked underneath the advertisement for an unfindable Thai restaurant and not far from the culinary Mecca that is Dunkin' Donuts. Yet, I had been eyeing it speculatively for a while. It just sort of looked like it might be good.

Having now visited it, I can certainly vouch for at least their curries. I wasn't hungry enough to get a naan as well, so I only nosed suspiciously at my companion's competent looking loaf, but the chicken saagwalla was excellent, a creamy combination of spinach and fenugreek that tingled with a suggestion of spice. But what I thought was distinctive about the dish was the use of juicy and tender chicken thighs instead of the usual chunks of dry and uninteresting chicken breast I see so often. Sure sure, breast is more expensive- using the thighs helps the restaurant's bottom line. But thighs are also much tastier, having a deep chickeny flavour of their own instead of relying desultorily on the seasonings in the curry. If I wanted bits of syrofoamy chunks in sauce I would get tofu, or just skip the whole going to restaurant business and buy some styrofoam to swathe in a-1 sauce at home. What I want at a restaurant is flavour from every ingredient, and it just seemed to me that Tanjore understood that too.

Red Sage

Red Sage is a popular restaurant in DC, both much praised and maligned, the latter by people who think it overexposed and overhyped. I was excited to give it a whirl though. It's no fair for everyone else to get a chance to pontificate while I stay on the sidelines.

I can't say I was blown away by the cuisine. I equally can't say I was entirely dissapointed, though. Buffalo style shrimp was an unexpected sort of appetizer, exactly the sort of nosh I like; I wonder though about the bed of aioli they were sitting on, since all that seemed to do was turn the once crispy shrimp throughly soggy. One of my dining partners was right, though - the mussels we shared as an appetizer weren't only cooked in an entirely insipid sauce (and in any case, mussels are an inappropriate appetizer to share, given the need for bread sopping) but the shellfish themselves were less fresh then they could have been. Nor was the air of insipidity entirely dispelled by the main courses. My tuna was throughly fresh, and quivering red as I like it, but I was surprised to hear the waiter steer one of my friends away from the daily swordfish special and towards pecan crusted chicken breast, which not only sounded and tasted banal but was apparently cut from a chicken of truly monstrous proportions. Surely swordfish would have been better?

The dessert did manage to redeem the kitchen quite a bit. Indeed, I've been building up quite a library of sticky toffee puddings, and Red Sage's offering, topped with a quality caramel ice cream and chocolate shavings wouldn't be out of place in the upper reaches of my internal league table. On the whole, I see Red Sage as a perfectly acceptable place for a business lunch that's unlikely to go wrong- but not much more.

Butter beans, leeks, and parmesan bake

I made this in hurry last night, and it turned out really nice, except for the fact that I spilled quite a lot of it when I got a phone call.

Just take some butter beans, and if dried, soak them in water overnight and boil them for an hour or two. i don't really see any problem with tinned beans in this case- in my opinion, butter beans do reasonably well in the tin.

Take the cooked beans and throw them in a shallow dish. Bathe them in some cream; just enough, I should think,so that they're almost sumurged, but not entirely so. Throw in garlic, which you can sautee beforehand if you want a little more subtlety, some (preferably baby) leeks sliced delicately in diagonals, and the inevitable salt and pepper. Mix this all up perfunctorily, and then layer with some freshly grated parmesan. Throw into the hottest oven you can manage for 10-15 minutes, and serve with some white rice. Delicious.

Ribs

I had always been entirely terrified of Ribs. Not of eating the ribs, of course. I'm not terrified of eating any food, bar perhaps brains. (I just don't get brains. The Texture- oh, the Texture). The problem with ribs is that I simply didn't know how to properly cook them. It all seemed so arcane. Mop rags, boiling or not, indirect heat, basting, removing membranes. It was one of these terrible morasses I had no desire to go, however much I liked to slather the rib and thereby myself in sweet musky sauce.

But in honor of my friend Lewis, I decided to try ribs. So I cleaned out my barbecue, put some bricks over one side so as to coral the fire, and then let it go. I had previously, of course, made a rub for the formidable strip of meat, though I rather suspect in retrospect it had too much sugar in it and too little spice (and it definitely needed a little of the acridness donated by a dose of cumin.)

I also decided to try to simplify the whole thing by not basting the ribs during cooking except with sauce right at the end. Yes, I'm sure this makes me terribly gauche, but I just didn't want to get into the whole basting liquid debate.

So anyway, I put the rubbed rib right on the grill, fired by an indirect heat. I shut the cover of the ribs, ran upstairs to continue watching TV, and grabbed the chair I was sitting on furiously to avoid checking on the smoldering delicacies. About forty five minutes later, I went outside to take a look; and lo! They were cooking!

So I let them finish, basted them all with sauce, and munched. They were actually good. How amazing is that.

So I've got over my rib problems. Now just to "ameliorate" the style, so to speak.

Banana Pecan Strudel

Take some filo dough, and lay out half a sheet. Sprinkle it with confectioner's (powdered) sugar, and then sprinkle ground pecans on top of that. Put a quarter of a banana in one end of the dough, and roll up. Seal this all with a little honey, and what you end up with is a fat cigar looking thing. Brush with butter, and bake in an oven until golden brown.

Poached salmon in oil

This looks good, stolen from today's Washington Post. You throw some top quality olive oil in a saucepan- quite a lot of it, say two cups for two fillets. Heat the oil very slowly to about 120 degrees- the recipe notes that if you don't have a thermometer (as I don't) what you're looking for is an occasional bubble and bread that doesn't darken when you throw it in. Once the fish gets up to this level, slip the fish in gently, after salting and peppering it generously. Cook for about 9 minutes. Of course, you want a slightly rare finish on the thicker side.

I've been mildly depressed ever since Ben & Jerry's got rid of their low fat chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. I know I normally spend enormous amounts of time complaining about the use of law fat when a smaller quantity of the proper stuff would do ten times better, but in this case I think 90% of the appeal from this ice cream is texture- the chewiness of the cookie dough playing against the cold vanilla of the ice cream.

But I've discovered a substitute! The cookie dough in the fridge section of the supermarket combined with no fat frozen yogurt works almost perfectly together. Yes, it's not completely low fat, of course- the dough is heavy duty. But you can eat a large quantity of it for a lot less damage then one might incur from a pint of the real stuff, and I don't think the taste difference in the real ice cream is enough to go for it.

But hey, do what you want. I'm going with this solution.

Toasted Ravioli?

Food blog Butterpig has a recipe for something called Toasted Ravioli. Have to say, I've never seen that before.

Hi Rent Grocery Stores

I'm completely of two minds about the kind of upscale grocery stores that have popped up all over suburbia in the last five or ten years. On one hand, they're a great leap forward in terms of food. Sure, the stuff is way too expensive, but when no one else stocks puy lentils, it's off to Fresh Fields or Whole Foods you go. So they're certainly a good thing.

But some of the people who inhabit these places are just too much for me. They're people who mistake shopping at this supermarket for social worth, or intelligence. Take, for example, my visit to my local Fresh fields supermarket this weekend.

This place, to their credit, invites local merchants on the weekends to sell their product in store. Sometimes there will be some homemade tapenade (priced at a completely ludicrous 8 dollars a pound), perhaps some bread, or maybe an organic lemonade. This weekend there was a guy outside manning a grill. I watched a woman with two children walk up to him, say hello, and then ask if her children (pronounced in much the same tone as "The Imperial Majesties of the Universe", or "God Himself") could have ribs without sauce. "They don't eat sauce", she explained. The look on her face when she was refused was one of complete incredulity- as if someone has just offered to trade her a hyundai for one of her children.

Now, let me explain the set up. The guy behind the grill was surrounded by a bevy of signs advertising his super special rib sauce. He was wearing a hat that said "sauce" in big fiery letters. He was surrounded by multiple bottles of sauce, his t-shirt encouraged people to have some of his sauce, and even his nearby truck proclaimed the excellence of his rib sucking sauce. As if all this wasn't enough, his entire picnic table was full of bits of rib slathered in a bright red (and deliciously tangy, I later discovered) barbecue sauce. There was no way anyway with even an ounce of brain in his head could even begin to imagine that this guy was there to sell anything but sauce.

So why did this idiot and her two miniature cretins still think they could get ribs without sauce? Entitlement, maybe? Did they expect the sauce master to hand lick a rib clean of sauce for them? I just don't get it. The man sells SAUCE you idiots! You either get a rib with sauce, or you don't ask for a rib from him. How bloody hard is this to understand?!

The second episode occurred shortly thereafter, inside. An older lady with a prominantly displayed "Dean for President" button on her shirt was holding a very odd shaped tomato, full of bumps and discolorations. She found a clerk, or whatever one calls the folks at a supermarket, and began to berate him in bitter tones- "why do you have stuff like this here? Can't you see what the republicans and corporations have done to this, with all their genetic engineering? I can't believe it".

I have no problem with getting very angry about food. I do it all the time. But she was holding a damned heirloom tomato- it's supposed to look like that. It's looked like that for hundreds of years. It's the most unmucked around with tomato anyone can get hold of, resurrected from carefully horded seeds, saved from the machine of modern farming by a few conscientous holdouts. It's the very example of what we want more of in supermarkets. Does this kind of person walk around looking for ways to attack private industry? Is the supermarket itself not safe?

Anyway, I know I sound sanctimonious. Heh.

Italianish Pork Cutlets

I wanted something fried this weekend, and was about to end up at Popeye's for some chicken. But then I remembered that I hadn't had any cutlet sort of things recently, so I made these. I think they're better with lamb, but I couldn't find any appropriate cutlets.

So, get some pork cutlets or quick fry steaks, and pound them relatively thin. Meanwhile, make some fresh bread crumbs from either stale bread or some pita bread, which will dry out sufficiently if left out for just a few minutes. Just whiz them up in a food processor, add salt, pepper, and parmesan. If you like, some hot pepper might be good too.

Dip the pork or lamb in some beaten egg, throughly immersing. Then coat both sides of the meat in bread crumbs.

Fill a pan about half an inch up with oil, possibly non extra virgin olive, unless you live somewhere where good olive oil is cheap. Fry in moderate heat until crunchy, about three minutes on each side. I didn't know what to accompany this with, but I ended up with a little "reverse tabouleh" - that is, lots of bulghur wheat with specks of powerful cilantra, lemon, and olive oil. Yum.

Croissants

The important thing to understand about croissants is that they're fundamentally breads, not pastries. They're made with yeast or some other natural leaven, like breads. The dough is a fermented one, like a baguette. They're kneaded, not beaten. They're the work of a boulanger, a baker, and not a patissier, a pastry chef.

What all this means is that a good croissant tastes like bread as well. Of course, it's buttery (and the taste of the butter is so important). But it is also chewy, substantial. It is bread with butter, not filo dough in crescent shape.

Having said all that, I'm writing to praise DC baker Breadline's pain au chocolat. I had always thought they were the only baker anywhere in this area to capture something of the essence of french bread. Their potent chocolatey croissant, however, is a very close imposter indeed, resplendent with both all the bready qualities I mentioned above as well as with the taste of a rich french butter. I think it's the best $1.97 purchase in the entire city.

Man, I feel better after having eaten something like that. Wow.

The Washington Post is reporting that restaurants are finally beginning to scale back their ridiculous portions. This is undoubtedly good news. I like to eat as much as possible, like most people. This doe snot mean, however, that my steak has to be two pounds, my burder almost half that, or my salad approximately the size of a punch bowl.

The beauty of eating, the beauty of food, is to be found in the excellence of what you cook or what gets placed in front of you at restaurants. The people who say they need all this food to feel full are wrong; the reason they think they need these giant quantities of food is because the food tastes of nothing, and so they are compelled to compensate with way too much of it.

That, at least, is what I think. I know others disagree.

I'm going to try to move this blog forward very soon. Links, more posting, etc. It should move beyond being a personal journal.

M & S Grill

Almost everything I have to say about this restaurant can be summed up in my general comments about Americans and Sandwiches below. Apart from that, let me just say that M & S does a great job of what it tries, despite some sluggish service. Incidentally, this also applies to Pot Belly Sandwich Works, the franchise spreading throughout DC.

Rules of Sandwich Making, to be adopted by all American restaurants trying to make a sandwich.

1. Frying seventy second rate bread in butter does not fix the seventy second rate bread.

2. Piling three pounds of meat on a sandwich does not make uninteresting meat interesting.

3. Trying to disguise bad bread or uninteresting meat with powerful sauces, inhuman mounds of cheese, giant hot peppers, oil, vinegar, mustards, mayo, or any other condiment is not the answer.

Fancy Pants Chips and Dip

In honour of the football season restarting, I decided that I wanted something manly. However, buffalo wings were out of the question given my focus on veggies this week, so I decided to eat some chips. Luckily, Emeril (I can't believe I'm using an Emeril recipe) had this to say to say on the subject just a few days ago.

Get some white russet potatoes. Peel (obviously) and then slice very thinly (again obviously, slicing them with a mandolin is best. But if you have no money, like me, then just get a sharp knife and have at it.) Toss the potato slices in olive oil, sprinkle with salt and black pepper, and then layer them on an oiled sheet of parchment paper, which you've put in a baking tray. Then oil another sheet, put it on top of the potatoes, and crush the chips with another tray on top. (of course, this works best if you've got two identical trays.).

Bake in the oven for 15-30 minutes, until crisp and as brown as you might like. While that's happened, throw some goat cheese in a food processsor with some sour cream, salt, pepper, basil, and lemon juice. Pulse until smooth.

Serve, dipping chips in cheese like substance. Very simple and excellent.

Salad Nicoise


There are as many ways to make salad nicoise as to get into trouble with the federal government, but the follwoing is what I made last week end. Like other summery recipes, this is definitely meant to be eaten outside, preferably on a french beach with cheap beach french fries, but otherwise, outside at least.

Lettuce, hopefully an interesting mix
green beans
1 egg
tomato
tuna (tinned, though real tuna works as well, fiercely seared)
small nicoise olives (available, these days, at most supermarkets)
mustard, oil, vinegar, salt, pepper
perhaps a red onion, though this isn't necessary.


Simmer the egg until done (you're looking hard boiled, of course). Get an ice bath ready, and then throw the green beans in some more boiling water for just a minute or two. You're looking basically to blanch them. Then put them in the ice bath to maintain color and crispness as soon as possible.

Put the lettuce on the place. Then layer other ingredients on. I usually stick the green beans on one corner, some slices of tomato on another quarter, slices of eggs in the two remaining corners, then tuna on top, olives on top of them, and a few slices of red onion on top of that.

Then make a sauce with a little mustard, olive oil, and vinegar. Remember to dissolve the salt in the mustard and vinegar, then add the oil. Douse the dry salad with this sauce, heavily. You need some left over for bread mopping, if you're looking for actual authenticity.

Enjoy.

The trials and tribulations of the suburban virginia sushi muncher never end, it seems. Is this place good? Usually, the answer is no.

But I'm glad to report an exception to the rule, in Blue Ocean Sushi Restaurant. No, it's not quite Kaz Sushi, having neither the elegance nor the quality of the DC hot spot. But it is good, it is pretty authentically Japanese, and the fish is fresh.

Additionally, unlikely so many other Sushi restaurants I've been too, the fellow behind the bar at Blue Ocean is suprisingly generous. Indeed, the sushi deluxe was almost too much for me. Do you understand? Too much. For me. It's like Saddam saying he had murdered too many innocents.