Hashbrowns

What I've learned thus far from Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc is that the man responsible for Per Se and the French Laundry is obsessed with, and uniquely thoughtful about, little details that make big differences. So, for example, his prime rib is torched briefly with propane to ensure caramelization even at 275 degrees. And his potato pancakes (which I think of as hashbrowns) are grated, washed, dried, and then tossed with cornstarch to get the proper internal texture. I loved this technique, and the results, even if I became inpatient and pulled them off before the thick crust I initially wanted.

A better weekend: pumpkin bread

Breakfast sunday morning was pumpkin bread, as below. The recipe is the recipe for pumpkin bread found in the King Arthur cookbook, which I recommend extremely highly. The only thing to note is that it is very forgiving (I could not find my scale, and just sort of winged the 13.5 ounces of flour) and really needs the entire hour to bake at the proscribed 375. Also, I omitted the chocolate chips as irrelevant.

A better weekend: butter poached radishes and brussels

I've been having a better weekend in terms of work, and as anyone who knows me might expect, I've filled it with food. First up is a side dish I cribbed from Keller's (excellent) Ad Hoc cookbook, radishes simmered in a mixture of butter and stock to glaze, along with brussel sprouts first shocked to preserve their color and then added to the radishes. This was really a surprisingly delicious dish, helped by the fact that we picked up the radishes at a farmer's market outside Lincoln Center yesterday afternoon. They were sweet and mild, with only a slight tang to remind us of what happens to radishes gone bad.

The wine you can see in the background I picked to go with our main dish, prime rib. I might write about this a little more, but I wonder why prime rib has fallen out of favor (or so I perceive) in favor of steak. Good prime rib (and the prime rib we bought was very good - Citarella does an excellent job here in New York with meat) tastes like marrow rubbed on protein - even more tender than the usually insipid filet mignon, but tasting of nothing but beef. In any case, the wine is a grand bordeaux, but of the second rank of grand bordeauxs. We detected what we called "citrus" (apparently, this is called "acidity" in wine speak) and various fruits. But what struck us both as more interesting was the extent to which the bordeaux reacted to beef, becoming milder, sweeter, and somehow more fragrant.

Fried Chicken

I have been brutally busy since my wedding three weeks ago, and have hardly cooked a lick. But this weekend I had a day to myself, and following Thomas Keller's advice in the excellent Ad Hoc cookbook, I've been concentrating on perfecting my range of chicken dishes.


The chicken below was brined in Keller's herb-lemon brine (brining appears to be one of those things restaurants do often, but home cooks neglect) for 8 hours, then dripped in flour, buttermilk and then flour again before being dropped into canola oil at 325 degrees. I had a mild temperature disaster when I realized my pan was too small, and had to transfer frying chicken into a larger pot (it's like transporting a living organ) but a quick adjustment of heat saved the day. The resulting chicken was crunchy and extremely flavorful - just a delight.


Still, I think I need an instant read thermometer for frying, candy, etc. Flying by the seat of my pants leaves too much to chance.

EDIT: As delightful as it was, I'm reminded by looking at the picture that the fleur de sel I added on top was overkill, given my generous salting of the batter. As I've heard before, if you can taste salt rather than the enhanced flavor of the food, you've gone too far.

Wedding food

My occasional wanders elsewhere notwithstanding, this is a food blog, and I can hardly imagine having blogged for so long and not blogging my own wedding feast. Below was our menu:

Amuses Bouches (during cocktails)

Crispy Parmesan Basket with Soft Goat Cheese and Fresh Herbs
Smoked Trout in a Cucumber Cup
Crab Cakes with Apricot and Ginger Chutney
Chicken and Fig Brochette
Lamb and Yogurt Salad in Baby Iceberg Cup
Lamb Tajine Cigar with Vadouvan Yogurt
Miniature Sausages in a Puff Pastry with Mustard (for the Children) (ed: children. Yeah, right. I'm still clearing puff pastry off my mouth).

Appetizer

Louisiana Shrimp with Légumes Confits au Basilic Shaved Fennel and an Heirloom Tomato Vinaigrette

Main Course

Baked Red Snapper Tajine
Potato, Tomato and Green Pepper
Chickpea Panisse

or

Roasted Rib Eye
Potato, Tomato and Green Pepper
Chickpea Panisse

Pre-Dessert

Sake Glazed Plums, Almond Biscuit, Orange Mousse, Mirabelle Sorbet

Wedding Cake

Opera Wedding Cake

Married!

Yes, I got married this past weekend!

On one hand, I can't say I feel much different. My wife and I were pretty inseperable already, and I don't know what the legal sanction of marriage does for us on a day-to-day level. On the other hand, I think the solemnity of the Armenian Apostolic ceremony (though during the ceremony I couldn't help think about the thin, wavy, line between solemnity and farce) does impress upon one that something of significance is happening.

Also, I get to wear this neat-o ring!

Iman bayadi

I made the well known near-eastern dish iman bayadi last night - it is one of my favorite dishes, and I pull it out of the bag when I am feeling ill or down or particularly tired (I feel both, currently). The rhythms and aromas of making iman bayadi remind me of being at home, when life was simpler and both less and more happy.

Slice firm eggplants, and roast in hot oven for about 20 minutes (of course, you can also fry, but I hate how much oil eggplants drink up). Add to a can of san marzano tomatoes, onions and lots of garlic, peeled but not sliced (the point is to get delicious pieces of garlic that can be used as a topping for the iman bayadi in your pita bread scoop). Bake, covered, for 45 minutes, and eat with fresh pita.

NB: Made with lamb, this is not a mezze but a main dish, and should be eaten with pilaf.

Salsa Verde and Steak

I think people have a tendency to forget that herb sauces make a great accompaniment for steaks, assuming one likes piquant flavors. Last weekend, I made a pseudo-salsa verde to liven up a fairly poor supermarket porterhouse, combining capers, parsley, lemon, garlic and olive oil into a thick paste.

Along with taboule, incidentally, salsa verde is a great way to use up parsley, if you are the sort of person who buys parsley in the full bloom of hope, and then glumly watches it wilt.

Brandeis

I am reading the new biography of Brandeis in the brief moments of time I can snatch when I am not preparing for trial. It is quite good, though a little lumbering. Certainly, though, Brandeis had a way with words. My favorite quip so far:

"The man who does not know intimately human affairs is apt to make of the law a bed of Procustes".

Polanski II

This is a truly depraved defense of Polanski by Robert Harris. The worst of it: "Mr. Polanski’s own young children, to whom he is a doting father, want him home . . .". As if we ought to care what his children want, when he showed such spectacular disregard for what someone else's child wanted.

Polanski

Without getting into details, I am extremely puzzled to hear that the arrest of Roman Polanski is a matter of controversy. It is, in fact, a positive thing that the law does not tire or flag in its pursuit of the wicked. And it is a matter beyond rational debate that what Polanski admitted to doing was wicked. As others have noted, the raped girl was a child, could not consent due to the drugs she was given, and in any case did not consent despite the fact that she was drugged.

If criminal law is even somewhat about retribution, then this arrest is just.

Striped Bass with Meyer Lemon aroncini

I'm posting this dish from our meal tonight at Restaurant Daniel not because the striped bass or the fava beans with barigoule sauce were so good (though, in fact, they were quite good) but because the meyer lemon aroncini were revelatory. What a good idea - to flavor risotto with meyer lemon, and pair it with fish. Wow.

I'm posting

this

In praise of (one) bureaucracy

We visited the City Clerk of New York City this morning to secure our marriage license. It was an extraordinarily smooth and well run affair, and we were out of there, despite a queue of about 25 couples ahead of us, in a mere half hour. Well done!

Beet tartare

I love beet tartare, and last night when I found ready steamed beets in a vacuum pack at the grocery store, I pounced. This is simply diced beets dressed with mustard, smoked paprika (which gave the dish a surprisingly deep and beefy flavor) olive oil, lemon, and salt, topped with a very ripe avocado.

Apple tart

Here's a somewhat failed apple tart from dinner last night. The topping is simply sliced apples with sugar and fleur de sel. It is failed for the crust, which was meant to be a puff pastry, that didn't puff.

Still delicious.

EDIT: Also, this is proof to me that you can make a pretty good tart in a toaster oven, issues with uneven heating aside.

Legislators reading bills

There's a fascinating debate happening at the Volokh conspiracy about whether or not legislators should read the bills they are voting on. (Here, for example, is Orin Kerr poking a little fun at those who say Congresspeople should read every word of their bills).

My tentative view is that reading each word isn't the point - it's understanding what the bill does. So long as the legislator is doing his or her due diligence on what they are voting for, I don't care whether they literally read every word.

Corton

To celebrate the momentous events of the last few days, which I am not to discuss, we visited the new restaurant Corton on Saturday night. I have some thoughts, but I am still sorting through them and will post later.

UPDATE: here are my thoughts:

The overwhelming impression I had upon leaving Corton was that the food looked better than it tasted. Aesthetically, the food turned out by the Corton kitchen is a striking achievement- a sort of series of alien landscapes, bright green slimes,'transluscent gels, things enrobed with other things. An evening at corton reminded me of nothing more than an evening at the Taco Bell depicted in the cult classic movie Demolution Man, a vision from a future I'm not sure I want to visit. Liebrandt would make a very good chef for the kind of people who dress in futuristic silver tights, I reckon.

But I'm not a futuristic person in silver tights, so the question is whether Corton's food is delicious for me, today. That's a close question. Certainly, everthing is tasty, some of it spectacular, and it is made abundantly clear that the tall, dominating chef one can glimpse through the window into the kitchen is capable, if he so chose, of producing new French cuisine of the highest possible caliber. Slot this guy into Per Se's kitchen, and nothing would skip the slightest beat.

But the food I experiencxed at Corton was not entirely of that quality. I think, for example, of my Dorade with chanterelles, which, cooked sous vide and presented with a limpid grey silver skin, tasted unaccountably fishy. Nor could I entirely understand why it was accompanied by what I took to be Cherry tomatoes enrobed like malt balls by mozzarella. Yes, the accompanying slick of tomato sorrell sauce was magnificent, but why could I not have fish that tasted subtler and skin that was a greater pleasure to eat? It was not a matter of execution, to be sure - one of two side dishes to the Dorade was (oddly) yet more Dorade, this crispy and covered in a thin seaweed gelatin. So Liebrandt knows precisely how to do what I was craving. He just chose not to, and I couldn't quite understand why.

Or let's consider the hamachi starter, tiny rolls of fish interspersed somewhat randomly amid a veritable hurricane of additional bits and bobs - kombu, avocado, flowers salsify, and who knows what else. Striking? Yes. Delicious? Well, not as much, and definitely not as delicious as the piece of unadorned hamachi we recently had during an omakase feast at Sushi of Gari. I'd rather a little less fuss and more flavor.

I suppose it is entirely possible that I did not understand what Liebrandt is doing, or that I am understating the quality of the food. There is no doubt, for example, that our lobster (blessed with a somewhat inexplicable $8 supplement) was glorious: a kellerian tail of sumptuous Maine lobster barely cooked, barely wet with a butter sauce that seemed almost superfluous and yet still welcome.

Nor can I do anything but give the highest praise for the starter of foie gras covered in corton's much ballyhooed cherry hibiscus gelee. Without doubt, this is one of the best foie gras's in the city. His chocolates are good, the service is almost seamless, the space a pleasant environment to eat a great meal.

In the end, though, based on only one visit, Corton feels a little empty to me. I looked for a while, during dinner, at the thin leaf of kombu on the hamachi plate. It was beautiful- intricate beeige and black patterns that seemed to change somewhat in the sort lights of the restaurant. When I put this miraculous piece of natural art in my mouth, though, the magic flitted away as I slowly chewed the dried seaweed, thinking of bygone days waiting for communion wafers to dissolve in my mouth in elementary school. That is my lasting impression of Corton, until I visit again. Feyly beautiful, and yet lacking just a little bit.

Movin' in ragu

Our apartment is slowly beginning to look like a home, but yesterday was another day full of boxes, screws, wooden planks, and the like, In the evening I finally curled up with this simple ragu of extremely poor italian wine (chateau bubble-yum, to steal Jacques Pepin's joke) san marzano tomatoes, and chicken thighs. I also added red pepper flakes and cracked black pepper along with the requisite onions and garlic, and then stewed everything for about twenty minutes.

If I had been doing this properly, there would have been carrots and herbs and maybe a simple green salad with it. But sometimes, all you need is dinner. So it was conchigle and ragu instead, buried under sharp pecorino romano.

Days

I have had an extraordinary few days, which have left me both exhausted and, unexpectedly*, extremely proud of my country. Those who know what I've been doing will, I suppose, be able to work out what I mean.

Back to cooking this weekend. It's time to celebrate!

* obviously, I mean unexpectedly proud in the sense that what I was doing isn't usually connected to feelings of spontaneous patriotism - not that I am surprised that I am proud of my country, which I always am.

Leadership personalities

In my other life as a fanatical (American) football fan, I've spent the last 15 years moping about the condition of my beloved Washington football team. They don't really look any better this year, and part of the reason might be their cool as ice head coach, Jim Zorn.

I'm not in the NFL, but I do work in highest pressure end of a high pressure industry. Though we're mostly flabby, white and balding, lawyers at my firm have some similarities in terms of competitiveness and drive to professional athletes, and the dynamics of a litigation team or deal team are not so different than a sports team. I can tell you that all my colleagues much prefer to work for straightforward people who will tell you what you did wrong and what they preferred rather than passive aggressive people who give half hearted praise. Yeah, the former are usually enormous jerks on a personal level, but this is business, and at least you know where you stand and how to improve.


I wonder if that's one of the problems in Washington.