Death:Expound.

This New York Times article on the examination system at All Soul's college, Oxford cheered me up rather a lot by reminding of some very happy times back at St. Andrews. My Scottish alma mater is not nearly as august as All Soul's, but the emphasis there was similarly on rooting out a students with a certain fluidity and originality of thought and writing rather than more American forms of academic rigor. Thus, the questions I see on the examinations mentioned in the article are quite familiar.

I spend some time thinking about whether my undergraduate education served me well. On one, overwhelming hand, the answer is "yes". Practically, I was able to get into the graduate and law schools I hoped to study at. More broadly, I feel like a well-educated person with a life-long interest in my undergraduate subject - history. Like many college graduate, some of my oldest and dearest friends are from the funny little town on the scottish coastline. And I love whiskey.

What's funny is that St. Andrew's failures are similar to my own. Am I as detail oriented as I ought to be, given where I work and what I do? Nope. Should I have been driven harder in college, rather than allowed to discover the wonders of discussing varieties of gingerbread with my friends? Probably so. But then I wouldn't have liked the experience so much.

Minor setback

I had a bit of a disaster with Jim Lahey's no-knead pizza dough recipe last night. The issue, I think, is that if you're going to "not knead", then you must commit to a full 12-24 hours of rising to let the glutens knit together. In the end, I simply kneaded post-rising, and that worked out fine.

What didn't work out fine is when I decided that I was too lazy to fetch the pizza stone from the oven, and tried a baking sheet instead. I owe my wife for the resulting white, flabby, pizza - except, having settled for a husband of similar coloring and rigidity, it's possible she didn't mind.

Femivores

I hadn't seen this article concerning so-called "femivores" when it came out in March, but it describes a number of women who have eschewed more traditional careers for raising chickens and other hobby farming. I'll leave actual feminists to explain how it is that this activity "has provided an unexpected out from the feminist predicament" (I do not think earlier generations of women would see it as such, but again, this isn't my bailiwick). As for this sentence: "After all, who is better equipped to weather this economy, the high-earning woman who loses her job or the frugal homemaker who can count her chickens?", let's just say that the answer is not what the author implies it is.

Am I sympathetic to the idea of working the land, of wresting from its embrace my daily sustenance? Of course. I have all kinds of goofy fantasies of a hobby vineyard, goats from which to make cheese, an olive grove, the dry air of a vinous region playing over my then-leathery skin. But it turns out that in a market economy, what actually makes sense is to ply my trade, which God or nature or genetic accident or whatever has given me some small talent, and then hand over my earnings to people whose talent it is to raise goats and age cheeses and make wines for the fruits of their labor. This is the most obvious insight of traditional economics. By choosing appropriate recipients of my money, I can encourage those who do this work properly, with respect for the land and the earth. Perhaps I might still do some of those activities for fun, to connect myself with the land. But all that is nothing more than fun - a choice I make that invariably costs more than an equally good product from a real artisan.

Crisped Rice Cakes

At a recent lunch at Momofuku SSam bar, I finally was able to try crisped rice cakes, a sort of cylindrical rice pasta(?) first boiled and then pan fried until crunchy outside and soft inside. Why had I never heard of these things before? They're utterly fantastic, especially in David Chang's oily, spicy, Korean style bolognese.

EDIT: Someone else's picture of the dish I mean is here. Just absurdly good - to my mind, the kind of dish that makes a career.

Chicken tenders with pan sauce

I'm utterly beating a dead horse, but last night I had yet another meal inspired by Thomas Keller's ad hoc - pan fried curry chicken breasts with pan sauce. Honestly, though, the curry and the paprika and the white wine and even the chicken broth are optional. If you just fried up some chicken breasts and poured butter over them, preferably with an herb sauteed in it, that would be a tasty meal too.

Simply slice chicken breasts in half length wise, and season with plenty of yellow curry powder and paprika (I used smoked, Keller says sweet). Refrigerate. Sautee on both sides until well browned in canola oil, put the cooked breasts in a pan in the oven to keep warm and wipe the pan clean. Add butter and shallots, and once the latter are cooked, add white wine, chicken broth and butter. Swirl around to make a sauce. Serve.

A freezer clear-out

Ever since my mother delivered a giant pile of the most perfect middle eastern pita to us from a bakery in DC, our freezer has been a little short on space. At least, for anything other than pita. So I surveyed the contents on Saturday morning to think about what I could do to clear out other things that were stealing space from my prized loaves. Initially, things weren't promising:

1/3 pound lean ground turkey

small tub of cream infused with button mushrooms

6 chicken thighs that I had already used for kebabs

After a bit of pacing around between my kitchen (this is really all I have? ) and the cooking section of my bookshelves, I thought I would make a chicken pot pie a la keller in the Ad Hoc cookbook. Broadly speaking, the method was as follows:

1. cook carrots, pearl onions and potatoes in stock for 8 minutes until tender.

2. make pie crust (I used, yurp, fake non-trans fat stuff, because that is all I had). The recipe would have also been fine as a cobbler, I guess, with no bottom crust and just biscuits on top. Put lower crust into a pan.

3. Make bechamel (a cheat, in my case, as I already had the flavored cream - I just added roux to thicken).

4. Strew stuff inside pie crust and season. Add bechamel.

5. Add top crust and give an extremely generous egg wash.

6. Bake at 375 for 50 minutes.

7. Profit.

Pulinio's Bar and Pizzeria

I've been sort of infatuated with San Francisco since my visit a little more than a year ago, and so when I heard that the city's famed young farm to table "rock star" Nate Appleman was opening a restaurant here in New York, I was excited to visit.  And Pulino's is good - we had a truly marvelous shoulder pork chop with some of the most flavorful salsa verde I've ever had, and an excellent (though far below a Motorino) pizza with pungent chili oil on the side.  Like the New York Times, I loved the $18 carafes of decent wine - if the seats weren't so uncomfortable, one could get very happy here on a couple orders of the pork and 3 or 4 carafes of the soft, fruity, primitivo. 

On the other hand, the appetizers were disappointing - the nduja (supposedly a soft, spreadable, sicilian sausage) was a little bland and (somehow) not fatty enough, while my own preparation of white beans with tomato sauce is actually better than the one I had there.  Most annoying, though, is the fact that Pulino's is still the kind of place where people come to flaunt their new body augmentations (like our neighbors) rather than eat - I'm confident all will be better once those people filter out and a few more less chiseled specimens belly into the cramped but refreshing restaurant.  

Fake curry

I desperately wanted some Indian flavors the other night, but the gaping hole in the Astoria, Queens restaurant scene is precisely the cuisine of the great subcontinent. So I decided to wing it, picking up some yogurt, ginger, scotch bonnet pepper, plum tomatoes, onion and garlic*, and processed them in my new $20 "Ninja" in roughly the following proportions

6 tomatoes

2 cloves garlic

cumin seeds (1 second of pouring)

1/2 scotch bonnet, no seeds

thumb sized knob of ginger

1 small onion

1 tablespoon of curry powder

It occurred to me that this fake masala needed to be cooked out a little, so I fried it in a little oil until it became fairly aromatic, and then added tomato sauce and big chunks of cod. I simmered for 15 minutes until the cod was cooked and served it with rice. I added the yogurt to calm the fairly fierce heat after it came off the fire.

The result was not Indian, as such, but it was good, and I'd make it again. All hail experimentation, I guess.

*I chose these ingredients on the highly scientific basis of my last two indian meals, a pathetic tikka masala and a rather more decent vindaloo curry.

I've taken to using condiments like this Muscatel must rather than more childish things like ketchup (which, obviously, I still love).  They impart a most subtle viney sweetness to things like, say, veal chops and cabbage, eggs in the morning, and even, as the label suggests, good vanilla ice cream.  

Plus (and this perhaps is a more esoteric point) its slow, sticky, drip lets me imagine I'm using 100  year old balsamic vinegar when I can't afford it. 

Veal chops with cabbage

We were in an eastern European mood last night with these veal chops (locally grown here in New York) and braised savoy cabbage.  I love the cabbage treated this way - blanched for 2  minutes, then iced to preserve color, then caramelized in canola oil and then cooked in a butter and water emulsion. 

The chops were cooked in the way of all meat chops - seared then ovened. 

We drank an excellent italian wine - a "Pra" soave.  Giant minerality, and smelled like lemon oil but without the citrus.  Is that even possible?  Great stuff. 

Roast chickens debate

There's a bit of debate over on the Guardian website about the proper roast chicken recipe. (ht/Marginal Revolution). As I say in the comments over in MT, the only trick that actually works is to use a tiny bird : 2-3 pounds, maybe 4 at the most. At that size, you can roast at a very high Keller-ian temperature, get fantastically crisp skin, and moist meat. I also use air through a straw to separate the skin from the breast, but that's just extraneous "faf".

Stumptown

I think I've written before about my slow conversion to Stumptown coffee as the place for espresso indulgence. I've now been there about 10 times, and whatever it is that they're doing* is the right way to make coffee.

* I mean, I know roughly what they're doing. The right amount of tamping of the beans, good machines, good grinders, lots of practice pulling shots. But the consistency is remarkable.

Weekend cookery

A few notes from my weekend cookery.

I tried the ginger scallion sauce from the Momofuku cookbook, a deceptively simple combination of oil, ginger, scallion, and other flavorings. Although it was good, and probably would have been very good with enough ginger (I used about 2 tablespoons instead of half a cup, as suggested), I think the interesting contrast here is with Mark Bittman's pad thai recipe, published this weekend in the Times. The dishes are cousins - both served as a default with noodles, both a combination of sweet and sour, both involving a liberal amount of scallions. But Bittman's is less oily and yet, to my mind, much more satisfying -the sweetness of the tamarind set off by the veritable shower of lime juice I loosed on the noodles I made on Sunday. What's more, Bittman's recipe is just as adaptable as Chang's - I made my pad thai with shrimp and egg and bean sprouts, but it could just as easily have been seitan or tofu or chicken breast or dried squid or pressed thai shrimps or anything else.

The pineapple upside down cake in the ad hoc cookbook (picture to come) is extremely forgiving and good. It's even good with fake oil-based "butter" - a real mark of distinction.

Chilean sea bass (bad banquet hall - the poor fish is near extinct) is completely impossible to overcook.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that the pad thai recipe - without noodles - would be great as a sort of "larb" (aka, protein salad), piled in small lettuce leaves. I'll try this and report back.

The Double Down

I see that I've been beaten to the observation, but the fact is that there's nothing actually all that awful about the much execrated "Double Down" sandwich from KFC (other than, perhaps, the taste).   If KFC had wrapped it in a lettuce leaf instead of pretending the meat patties were the "bread", everyone would have recognized it as a low carb meal circa 2003 (well, maybe the unbattered grilled version, at least).  It's just a double chicken burger without a bun, no more or less disgusting than anything else KFC or McDonald's or Burger King put out routinely.  What's the fuss?

The momofuku eggs

A commenter urges me to report on the eggs, below. I found it easy to keep the temperature near 140 for the 45 minutes, by periodically adding cold water from the fridge to my pot. When I cracked the eggs, mostly because I hadn't read the entire recipe carefully - and especially not the part where Chang says that the egg white will be thin and not set - I saw a thin, see-through ablumen and panicked, tossing the eggs into a hot pan with oil for a couple of seconds. Which I then discovered Chang had already thought of via his note about fried slow poached eggs directly following the recipe.

In any case, the effect when you crack the egg and a poached eggs plops out is remarkable, and I do think that the result is a more custardy texture than a traditional poached egg. I'm going to continue to work on the technique in preparation for a brunch I plan on throwing in the next couple of weeks, and will document with pictures.

Momofuku cook book

I'm a recent purchaser of David Chang's Momofuku cookbook.  My initial impression is an odd one, given that Chang is known, externally at least, for simple "delicious" (i.e., high fat, high salt) food - the book is really inaccessible to the home cook.  That's because so many of the recipes either rely on somewhat obscure ingredients, but more often, on sous vide cookery, which is a fine thing but difficult to replicate "ghetto" style at home, as Chang puts it.  

Nonetheless, two Changian-slow poached eggs are currently in a hot water bath on my stove, not even simmering at 140 degrees F for 45 minutes.  Let's see if this works. 

Pure Bred Lamb

I'll have more on this later, but a quick rave here for the lamb produced by Pure Bred Farms, of which I purchased half a leg for easter dinner. It's wonderful - unafraid of being lamby, but gentle too. Plus, I'm not sure there is a better cut of meat than leg of lamb, at least for a large group.

EDIT: Here's the more.  The cooking method here is simple.  I made incisions in the 

leg and added sharpened slivers of garlic.  Per Thomas Keller (ad hoc) I m

ade a couple of larger incisions and slipped in full branches of rosemary, and then sprinkled the entire leg with yet more of the herb.  The entire leg was rubbed with oil, and then heavily salted and peppered before being roasted at 350 for about an hour, and rested for almost as long (yes, really - it makes a big difference).   It could easily have been roasted for an

other 25 minutes to a nice, even, medium. 

The Nose v. Partenope

I suppose if one wants to know what kind of person I am, one might judge me by the fact that I found "The Nose" utterly repulsive, and thought the ultra-formal Partenope a work of the most lavish genius imaginable.

Of course the judgment you might make is that whichever of those I liked, I'm a pompous jerk anyway, but if that's true then I've no hope with you.

The feeling in my fingers is returning

The remarkable thing about the last few weeks for me has been the palpable sense that I'm remembering how to cook. I don't mean that I had forgotten taste or flavor or how to make a tomato sauce in the years now where regular cooking has been a thing of memory. Rather, there's a certain economy of movement, a sense of being attuned to small things (Ah, I hear that the chicken in the pan is sizzling differently, better turn it down now), even the routine of washing the dishes after cooking, that one loses when out of the kitchen. It is reassuring to feel it coming back, to realize that as I move towards my next great life transition at the beginning of the summer I'll be able to nestle down again amid my pots with some familiarity. Above all, the feeling is one of comfort, and I am delighted to be returning to it.