Chicken Again?

We had fallen into a bit of a rut with chicken preparation lately: smoking a half chicken on the grill using applewood chips.  During some of the wetter spring days recently, we experimented with a few of the thousand other ways one can prepare the bird.  With some tomato seconds from the farmers market (thanks to our neighbor, Chef Steve, for those), Dr. B made some chicken pieces braised with fresh red and yellow tomatoes.  This works mostly as you would expect: brown chicken pieces in olive oil and remove them from the pan; sauté some onions and garlic; add back the chicken with the tomatoes and some white wine (white rather than red made the whole effect more springlike) and braise until the chicken is cooked through; garnish with black olives and basil.

Another springlike dish is the old standby, Chicken Piccata.  This is even easier (no blanching, peeling, and dicing tomatoes) and can be made with everyday pantry items.  The chicken breasts are browned in oil (you can use boneless/skinless, but we cut ours off the bone and left the skin on.  We also didn't bother to pound them flat, as many recipes suggest.) and removed from the pan.  A chopped shallot goes into the pan and is briefly sautéed.  A cup or so of chicken stock is added along with some sliced lemon and the liquid is simmered together.  When the sauce reaches a saucy consistency, add back the chicken to heat through, and finish with lemon juice to taste, some capers (drained), and a bit of butter to make it glossy.  We had some parsley on hand, and so that went over the top.

Chick Cook Memoirs

The Manhattan chef Gabrielle Hamilton's memoir Blood, Bones and Butter uses food to sketch the outline of her life--from her childhood as the daughter of bohemian parents in rural Pennsylvania (her mother is a French, former ballerina with a set of well-used Le Creuset pots), to an early job as a waitress, to her marriage to an Italian, eating well while spending summers with his family in Italy.  And for the most part, the narrative works just fine.  The tale of how she came to own her first restaurant involves harrowing and graphic descriptions of what happens to when an owner just walks away, leaving all the food to rot, and leaving Hamilton to clean up the mess (described in stomach-churning detail).  But really, food is not the point--the emphasis is more on the personal stories.  Anyone looking for more general insights about the food business or cooking in a restaurant will be disappointed.

A memoir should have its confessional moments, but there are a lot of gaps that belie the sense of brutal honesty that reigns in other parts of the book.  At one point, Hamilton tells the reader that she hasn't spoken to her mother in twenty years.  It's not clear why, or how she feels about it.  She marries an older, Italian man, despite the fact that she's a lesbian, and they have children, despite the fact that she doesn't live with him or really seem to like him.  (It's implied that they marry so that he can get a green card, but what's her motivation?)  And they stay married until they break up, although the reason why is, again, unclear.  Cooking memoirs tend to be masculine affairs, lingering over the chef's scars, burns, and hard drinking, and there's some of that here, but the book is really about Hamilton's (ultimately opaque) relationships.

Julie Powell's memoir Cleaving is her follow up to her book Julie and Julia, which was spun off from her blog, the Julie/Julia Project, and was made into a movie (also called Julie and Julia) which paired her book with Julia Child's My Life in France (written with her great-nephew).  Child's memoir is charming, as is the movie.  Julie and Julia struck me as a somewhat watered-down version of her blog, which first appeared on Salon.com (it now seems to be available at http://juliepowellbooks.com/blog.html).  The Julie/Julia Project (which began in 2002) was the first blog I ever read, and it detailed Powell's attempt to cook all of the recipes from Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year.  Part of the fun of the blog was watching Powell try to cook elaborate recipes in a cramped Queens apartment, located near a grocery store (Western Beef) vastly inadequate to the ingredient lists.  When Cleaving came out, the reviews were not great, but as a Julie/Julia fan, I picked it up.  The book is a train-wreck, quite frankly.  A prose style that works for a blog, informal, unrevised, just doesn't work as well for a book.  And the subject matter reminds me of the second albums of too many bands that unexpectedly make it big.  It's all about the aftermath of sudden success.  In Powell's case, her marriage begins to fall apart as she has an affair with a guy she's completely infatuated with, but who comes across as a total jerk (as well as sex with random strangers she meets on Craigslist).  If Hamilton has confessional moments, but suffers from a general allergy to candor, then Powell shares way too much about her romantic life, and not nearly enough about learning to be a butcher, which is this book's ostensible hook.

Stretching Spinach

While most of what has been available in the produce section of the grocery store recently is limp and underwhelming, the spinach has been pretty good, so I've been buying it a lot.  And here in Columbia, the farmers market is open for the season, and good spinach is now even easier to come by.  Of course, spinach sauteed in garlic and olive oil is a classic application.  However, you need to start with a lot of raw spinach in order to yield a reasonable amount of cooked.  I've been exploring ways to stretch a bunch a little further.

Spinach makes a good pizza topping, as long as you control the moisture level: sautee in garlic and olive oil, drain in a strainer (press on the spinach to get the water out), and roughly chop.  I put a layer of caramelized onions down first, then the spinach, and finally cubed blue cheese.  Finish with parmesan and red pepper flakes.

I also tried this recipe for pasta with spinach and mascarpone cheese:

http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/vegetarian-recipes/tagliatelle-with-spinach-mascarpone-and

I was trying to find a recipe that would help me use up part of a tub of leftover mascarpone, and I was drawn in by Jamie Oliver's use of the word "claggy" to describe the overly thick texture one should try to avoid with this dish.

 I followed the instructions, for the most part, but I used rigatoni, omitted the cream, and added a little lemon zest at the end.  The result (between the cheese and the lemon) was pretty tangy and good, although I might try some cream next time, just to make the sauce a little thicker.

What's Wrong with Top Chef?

Top Chef (Texas) wrapped up its most recent season last week, and I have ambivalent feelings about it.  Psychologists talk about the "peak-end" model of memory: we judge our experiences as positive if there is a positive peak experience, and if the experience as a whole ends well.  Paul, rather than the hated Sarah, won, so the ending was strong, and the show had at least one peak for me: the "gothic" dinner, where the chefs had to make a dark and disturbing dish in honor of the new Snow White movie (which was promoted both tirelessly and tiresomely).

However, the rest of the season tended to wallow in reality show clichés.

There were too many challenges where the point seemed to be to tax the chefs beyond physical endurance.  For example, the BBQ challenge, where they had to hover over fire pits in 100 degree heat for the better part of a day and night, causing the hated Sarah to collapse from heat exhaustion.  On another occasion they were tasked with cooking a meal for Pee Wee Herman, and they had to bicycle around San Antonio trying to find food and a restaurant to cook it in, and then bring their completed dish (again via bicycle) to the Alamo.  Because apparently Pee Wee's Big Adventure has the Alamo in it?  And this is some kind of cultural touchstone we are all supposed to remember?  Of course, the one thing we all do remember about Pee Wee was never actually mentioned in this episode (although you may now amuse yourselves by thinking up an appropriately-themed cooking challenge).

Once they made it to Vancouver for the final episodes, they escaped the intense heat, but had to chisel their ingredients out of ice blocks for one challenge, and then perform some kind of twisted biathlon, skiing to the food targets, and shooting them to determine which ingredients they would use.  People were falling.  A lot.  It was not gripping entertainment.  Dr. B would have won that challenge easily (at least the skiing part).

When the chefs weren't cooking in gondolas traveling high over ski resorts, the women chefs were engaging in the kind of petty, reflexive backbiting that may be the ur-trope of reality TV.  On one hand, there were more women than usual in the final group of chefs (3 of 4).  In each of the previous two regular seasons, the ratio was reversed, with one woman and three men in the final four.  I remember very little being said about this during the show, which strikes me as odd.  However, there were lots of clips of the hated Sarah and Lindsay ganging up on Beverly, complaining about Beverly, and so on.  Did the producers just assume that people wouldn't be interested in watching women cook (especially since they were wearing chef coats, rather than the tight sweaters and cleavage-revealing camisoles sported by most of the Food Network talent), so they didn't really bother to do much more than splice together clips of mean girl sniping?  Was there any more of that going on than on previous seasons, or was the footage just selected to create that impression?

Let's hope that next season, they can get back to showing talented people cooking.

Ebelskivers

Jam-filled Ebelskivers

 

 

 

 

Chocolate Ebelskivers with Strawberry Sauce

The Williams-Sonoma catalog is filled with cooking supplies that you never knew that you wanted until you saw them in those glossy pages, surrounded by high-end linens and twenty-dollar bottles of dish soap.  My brother must feel the same way, as I received an Ebelskiver set (pan, wooden turners, cookbook, etc.) for Christmas.  These are round pancakes, often filled, that are popular in Denmark.  As we happened to have an actual Danish person living a few doors down from us, she was able to confirm that, indeed, these are very popular in Denmark during the holidays.  However, she claims that rather than making them at home, Danes are much more likely to buy them by the bag at the store. 

Ebelskiver means "sliced apples," in reference to the traditional filling, and according to my cookbook, should be pronounced (able-skeevers), although when you hear an actual Danish person pronounce the word, it sounds more like someone saying able-skewers while swallowing a marble: this is not a sound that I am able to make myself.  I call them "little round pancakes."

We made two batches: one was of the chocolate variety, with a strawberry sauce, for a dessert.  You use about two tablespoons of batter in each of the pan's wells (which have been lubricated with some melted butter).  Much like a flat pancake, they are ready to turn when the edges firm up and large bubbles appear on the top.

Ready to Turn

I used my wooden turning sticks to flip them over, but I imagine a pair of spoons would also work well.  Flipping is a little tricky, since you need the top to be wet enough to fill the rounded pan once it becomes the bottom, otherwise the pancakes will not be spherical.   

For breakfast, I made the jam-filled version.  The recipe calls for a tablespoon of batter, then a teaspoon of jam, followed by a tablespoon of batter.  I found that this was a little too much batter to allow for easy turning, when combined with the jam filling.  Next time, I will use slightly less than a tablespoon for each layer.  We filled them with some "Fruits of the Forest" berry jam from the Iowa City Farmers Market, and it was excellent.  Those Iowans know from jam.

Meatless in the Midwest: No Swine, Just Whine

Recently, A. G. Sulzberger, scion of The New York Times Sulzbergers, wrote an article about being a vegetarian in Kansas City, MO, where he is the paper's bureau chief.  It was titled, without (intentional) hyperbole, "Meatless in the Midwest: A Tale of Survival":

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/dining/a-vegetarians-struggle-for-sustenance-in-the-midwest.html

As you might imagine, his musings on dining in fly-over country have not been rapturously received by those of us who haven't been sent here as part of an apprenticeship to run an internationally prominent media outlet.

Sulzberger starts with a straw man argument as he describes his tour of some well-known KC locations:

"There was the meal at the Golden Ox Steakhouse (baked potato), Stroud's fried chicken (rolls) and Arthur Bryant's barbecue, where, searching for vegetarian options on the menu, skipping over the lard-bathed French fries, pausing to consider the coleslaw, I ordered the safest option (a mug of Budweiser)."

No one should expect Arthur Bryant's to be anything but what it is.  It's not a white tablecloth restaurant where you might go with a large mixed party for a business dinner.  You don't go there for the ambiance, the cocktails, or to linger over your meal.  There's no earthly reason to go there except to eat meat.  Expecting Arthur Bryant's to offer you barbequed tofu is about as obnoxious as a carnivore going to a vegetarian restaurant and complaining about not being able to order a steak. 

While this argument implies a contrast between the Midwest and the rest of the country, the real contrast is between the Midwest and New York City.  If you have grown up in New York City, and then you move to almost any other place in the US, you are going to have less variety and diversity of food.  To expect Kansas City to compete on those terms doesn't make any sense.  And, as the article makes clear, the writer's experience of the "Midwest" has been shaped by reporting road trips to small towns:

"most difficulty comes on the road during reporting trips in an area that stretches from Oklahoma to North Dakota.  And though many meals, particularly in small towns, are of the bread-and-water variety, I have stumbled upon some decent restaurants as well."

Small towns are small towns, whether they're outside Kansas City or New York City.  Their restaurants don't have a large, rapidly changing clientele.  The people who live there are the people who eat there.  To expect them to offer a large selection of vegetarian dishes, just in case a vegetarian happens to swing by once every few months seems odd.

Finally, the article seems fairly outdated in its portrait of vegetarianism.  It is no longer the exotic and unfamiliar phenomenon that the writer makes it out to be.  In fact, we even (gasp) have a fast food chain headquartered in Missouri (Panera Bread aka St. Louis Bread Co.) that has vegetarian options on its menu.  While working through some of my back issues of Gourmet and Bon Appetit from the turn of the century, I found lots of vegetarian recipes, and even a survey that claimed that 65% of us were cooking vegetarian at least once a week (back then, we were also inordinately enthusiastic about goat cheese and Emeril Lagasse was skinny--have you seen him on Top Chef recently?).

However, the writer seems to imagine that this remains an edgy lifestyle choice, rather than an increasingly mainstream one.  Speaking of "heartland" vegetarians, he reports:

"Some say they have learned to cook for themselves more, to avoid the inevitable barrage of questions, if not outright mockery, that comes with eating in public."

If everyone around you is giving you that vibe, then maybe you should stop spending so much time with the elderly.

You, sir, are not a persecuted minority.

Leftover Leftovers

If you happen to make gnocchi from leftover mashed potatoes, and you form and boil more than you want to eat at one meal, take the leftovers and toss them in some olive oil.  In a day or two, you can cook them in a skillet until they are browned on each side.  Serve with some parmesan cheese, more olive oil, and a sprinkle of lemon juice.