Wednesday, November 19, 2014

And I'm not even very strong



Owen: We’re out of goat food.

Jennifer: There’s a whole bag in the driveway.

Owen: You know I can’t carry that down.

Jennifer: If I can carry it, you can definitely carry it. 

Owen: Not everyone does CrossFit, Mom.

Jennifer: Owen, you’re 7 inches taller than me and 34 years younger. If I can carry the goat food, you can carry the goat food.  If you can’t, that’s pathetic.

Owen, in his loud, aggrieved voice: Mom, that is SO sexist. Just because I’m a guy doesn’t mean I’m all strong and everything. You never tell Isabel that she’s pathetic when she’s not being all strong and stuff.

Claiming physical weakness and crying sexism to foist chores on his middle-aged mother?

This can not stand.

****

Here I go, as promised, eating my words on PruneSome of them, anyway. 

Monday night, I made Gabrielle Hamilton’s braised lamb shoulder with lemons, tomatoes, and cinnamon. I’ve never worked from a recipe that was so oddly written, bossy, affected, minimalist, sensual, and vivid. I have to admit, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

You start by browning lamb shoulder in a “rondeau” (I used a Dutch oven) in “blended oil” (I used vegetable). Snotty of her not to explain these and other terms, but it wasn’t hard to muddle through. Remove the meat to a plate, add cinnamon sticks and 3/4 cup garlic cloves and “stir around in the pan, kind of toasting and picking up the fond in a way.” 

Weird prose, no? And yet I could totally see it as I rarely can when working from a conventionally- written recipe.

After this, add a cup of lemon wedges and deglaze the pan, “loosening and scraping up the fond with the juice of the lemon wedges as you crush them with your wooden spoon.”

I’ve never deglazed a pan by crushing lemon wedges with the back of a spoon and I’ve deglazed a lot of pans. So that was interesting and fun. 

Once the pan is deglazed, pour in some wine and canned tomatoes (“crushing each one briefly in your fist”), add back the meat, put the “rondeau” in the oven, and four hours later you’re ready to eat. Hamilton: “On the pickup, make sure each portion gets a nice soft, cooked lemon, if you can. And take a good look to see that you haven’t given anyone an all-fat portion.”

I dislike “on the pickup” and other lines where Hamilton's pretends she’s writing for her restaurant crew. Silly. But the rest of the recipe was intuitive and visual and fresh and I found myself wondering why recipes are generally so gray and voiceless. Seriously, why?

The meat was dark, meltingly tender, intense, superrich, and delicious. Easy. Six ingredients. A week ago I made a 17-ingredient lamb shank recipe from the New York Times that wasn’t half as good. I served the lamb shoulder with bread and salad. Big hit with the family, though I felt stuffed and sluggish the next day because: lamb shoulder.

I'd barely recovered from the lamb shoulder when dinner rolled around again. Last night, I roasted a chicken and made Hamilton’s fennel baked in cream. You cut up fennel, put it in a “hotel pan” (so tediously annoying, those restaurant terms), then mix a pint of heavy cream and some Parmesan and pour over the fennel, “drenching” the vegetables. Dot with butter, cover tightly, bake for an hour, top with additional cheese, bake for thirty minutes more, eat, marvel at how delicious it is, listen to your husband opine that it would be better if you replaced the fennel with potatoes, feel puffy, stuffed, and sick for the next 24 hours because: pint of cream, butter, Parmesan.

Will all the Prune recipes be this fun to cook? Will they all yield more such superb dishes? Will they all be so rich and stuffing? 

This is spot-on and funny. And this is the only reason I came to a cafe this afternoon to write a blog post rather than lying down on the sofa to sleep off the fennel.

Monday, November 17, 2014

Under the wire



sludge with a generous dollop of kashk
In about twenty minutes a Prune lamb shoulder comes out of the oven and I really want to say a few concluding word about Plenty More before galloping off with Gabrielle Hamilton.

I’ll get straight to the point: I have no idea why Yotam Ottolenghi is so phenomenally popular. He comes across as urbane and amiable. His dishes feature intriguing, seductive combinations of ingredients. The photographs are gorgeous. But the food I’ve cooked from Plenty More fails to live up to any of that. It's possible I picked the wrong Ottolenghi book to cook from, so help me out here, Ottolenghi fans. Which is his best book? What are the classic Ottolenghi dishes? I will happily cook them. I want to understand. 

Unfortunately, I have to end the Plenty More chapter with a downbeat round-up of recipe reports.  I don’t like writing these. I feel like a prig, picking apart dishes that didn’t please her majesty. But since they're integral to my critique of the book, here goes:

-The Iranian vegetable stew with dried limes was a tart, frumpy melange of butternut squash, spinach, potatoes and barberries. I made a pot of this for my lunches and by the middle of of the week it was a struggle not to jump in the car and drive over to the frozen custard shop instead of heating up another bowl of nutritious sludge. It was a struggle I eventually lost. 

-You’ve made dozens of tastier pasta dishes than the misleadingly-named grilled ziti with feta, a tomato sauced pasta that you top with three kinds of cheese and run under the broiler so the cheese gets leathery and the noodles crunchy. Needlessly fussy. Not great.

-The sweet potatoes with orange bitters required too many ingredients and too much work (fresh-squeezed oj boiled down to a syrup, bitters, two heads of garlic, sage, thyme, goat cheese), given the pedestrian dish I eventually put on the table.

-Ok, the halvah ice cream with chocolate sauce and roasted peanuts was delicious, although halvah ice cream isn’t as exciting as it sounds. I wouldn’t make it again. You could achieve much the same effect by crumbling halvah on store-bought vanilla ice cream. 

Here’s the breakdown from the thirteen Plenty More dishes I tried:

worth price of book -- 0
good -- 8
so-so -- 4 
bad -- 0

Shelf essential? No. 


Monday, November 10, 2014

Sleep apnea is a new low for us



Last night, we celebrated my father's birthday and I took the opportunity to delve deeper into Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty More than the tastes of my nuclear family will generally allow. 

The menu: 

yogurt and kaffir lime leaf spread with pita toasts (Plenty More)  
--
spiced lamb shanks (last week’s New York Times
roasted red onions with walnut salsa and goat cheese (Plenty More
saffron, date, and almond rice (Plenty More)
---
pear and chocolate pudding (Laurie Colwin)

Fairly good meal. 

Thoughts: 

The yogurt and kaffir lime leaf spread was essentially tzatziki, the bland yogurt-cucumber dip you’ve probably eaten before in Greek restaurants, but jazzed up here with minced kaffir lime leaf. Tasted only mildly exotic. The recipe calls for a tiny amount of melted butter to enrich and mellow the yogurt, but knowing what I do about Ottolenghi’s palate, I added more butter than called for. You should too. We liked this, though there was a suspicious amount left over. Recipe here

The superrich spiced lamb shanks used up all the saffron in the house. Expensive. That was strike one. Strike two: 24 hours later I'm still full. Not entirely fair, given the other heavy dishes on the menu, but I blame the lamb.

The roasted red onions were dressed while still hot with a salsa of olive oil, vinegar and walnuts, then served on arugula with chunks of goat cheese. About that salsa: punishingly sour. Three tablespoons vinegar to one tablespoon oil? I sloshed in extra oil until the salsa didn’t make me pucker. Doctored with additional fat, we liked these onions immensely. Recipe here. (But remember about the extra oil.) 

The saffron, date and almond rice was, as the name suggests, a pot of rice (basmati) studded with crunchy fried almonds and chopped dates. As the name doesn't suggest, you can make this without the saffron. I'd used all our saffron in the lamb and was resentful. I resent saffron! It wasn't worth $8 or $15 or $20 to me to render some already delicious rice marginally more fragrant and delicious. You may feel differently. 

I first made chocolate pear pudding in March 1996, according to my note in the margin of Laurie Colwin's More Home Cooking. Isabel wasn't even born yet. Last night I mindlessly stuck little candles in the pudding while it was still warm and they were almost all melted by the time my father blew them out. Not the ideal birthday cake, but a truly wonderful dessert. You should try it. Recipe here

Anyway, a sweet family party. We discussed Isabel’s college applications, the catcall video, sleep apnea, my sister’s smashing new GAP cords, and whether anyone at the table could do a handstand push-up. That last sentence sounds like a grim joke and I've tried to remember some zany or profound topic we covered to make this dinner sound less boring, but I can’t. Nothing.

In truth, it wasn't boring. In truth, it was lovely.

Friday, November 07, 2014

She can infuse a recipe for banana bread with hostility


I was all wrong about the Prune cookbook, which I bought yesterday. I don’t have a problem with the recipes, it’s the writing I hate. Hate. It's likely my feelings will change and change again, but we’re capturing the moment, here.

In case you don't follow cookbook news, Gabrielle Hamilton owns a tiny, celebrated Manhattan restaurant called Prune and Prune is her long-awaited cookbook. A few years ago she published a stunningly well-written memoir, Blood, Bones, and Butterwhich I adored. She was clearly an imperious, thorny, stormy, difficult woman, but I didn't care. We weren’t going to be friends. I just loved her writing.

But the relationship you have with a cookbook is, in fact, a bit like the relationship you have with a friend. The author is speaking directly to you and offering advice and instructions. And I really don’t like the way Hamilton talks to me. 

In case you haven’t seen Prune yet, which 99% of you haven’t, the book is supposed to resemble the fat binder of recipes in the kitchen of a successful restaurant, a compendium that has been spilled on (there are fake stains on the pages) and endlessly amended. No friendly headnotes telling you how a dish is going to taste or where you might start looking for, say, caul fat. Just commands and notes scribbled in the margins in black marker. Scolding notes. Needling notes. 
one of the stains and another snotty note
It's definitely original. And you could argue that Hamilton is just showing how it’s done in a restaurant, nothing more, and we should admire her wit, vision, and chutzpah. I'm open to this argument. Please, someone, make it! I want to discuss.
I can't believe how annoying I find this.
Personally, though, I think there’s more to it. She strikes me as a bully to core. The choice to write her cookbook in this way was a choice to talk to the world -- to you and me -- exactly the way she talks to her disappointing underlings at the restaurant. But with deniability.
I think you are a nightmare and it shows.

Thursday, November 06, 2014

A winner, a loser, Lena Dunham


The squash with chile yogurt and cilantro sauce is the best dish I've made from Plenty More so far, by far. Toss sliced squash with olive oil and cinnamon, roast, top with Sriracha-spiked yogurt and a paste of cilantro, garlic, and oil. Sprinkle with some toasted pumpkin seeds for crunch.  Recipe here. The only thing I would change, and I can’t say this loudly enough: PEEL THE SQUASH. Other than that, perfection.

Not even close to perfect: the taleggio and spinach roulade, which is like a too-sharp, too-salty, loaf-shaped pizza full of leathery sun-dried tomatoes. Avoid. 

I’m going to persist with Plenty More, but it will be hard when I get my hands on a copy of Gabrielle Hamilton’s Prune, reviewed yesterday in the New York Times. I first fell for Hamilton's writing when she explained everything that was wrong and right about Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty in a notorious I Piglet essay. She nailed the problems (too tart, “not quite careful”) that I’ve been finding with Ottolenghi's recipes, but also captured why his books are so seductive. Prune is 576 pages long and while I'm not sure I'm going to love the recipes (broiled grapefruit) I can't wait to curl up on the sofa and read it.

Finally -- and this relates to cooking only thanks to the puerile food diary in which she records the calories in single bites of tofu and lemon tart* --  I read Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl over the weekend. FTR, I didn’t pick up on any sexual abuse of her sister. None. I had other problems with the book, however. I’ll just name one: I wanted to hear more about Dunham's ambition and accomplishments, less about her degrading hookups. All the youthful bad sex with unappealing man-boys started to depress me, mostly because I couldn't figure out why she was doing it. I detected no sexual desire, not a glimmer of real longing, in this book crammed to bursting with sex. Zero. It sometimes read like she was throwing herself into situations for research purposes, gathering up mortifying erotic experiences for her art. Or maybe she thought sexual adventures were expected of groovy 21st century girls? 

I was perplexed. If you’re in your twenties or thirties and shaking your head because you loved and related to Not That Kind of Girl and think I’m dead wrong, please remember that while it would have been a (barely) teen pregnancy, I’m old enough to be Lena Dunham’s mother. Isabel thinks the book is great and hilarious. I can not fathom why she and I have not yet discussed it at length.

Which reminds me: I love how tenderly Dunham writes about her parents.

**Isabel appears to have taken the book to school, so I can’t fact check whether tofu or lemon tart appear in the food diary. I think they did, but the diary was so boring I skimmed and can't remember.

Monday, November 03, 2014

Kashk


You want this.
One of the first dishes that caught my eye in Plenty More was the Iranian-style pasta, but it called for a Persian dairy product called kashk -- and where was I going to find kashk? I kept flipping past that recipe. Wasn't going to happen.Then I started to feel like a lazy bum and decided to see how hard it would be to track down some kashk. Why bother with a book like Plenty More if you're not going to really go for it?

Seek and ye shall find. Acquiring kashk took nothing more than a quick internet search and a fifteen minute drive to the Jasmine Market in San Rafael where I found not just kashk, but kishk, dried limes, halvah, yogurt sodas, vast sheets of flatbread, labneh, Turkish delight, candied bergamot, baklava, reshteh, and much, much more. I’ve been back to the market twice since I “discovered” it last Tuesday.  I'm a fool for ethnic grocery stores.
an acquired taste
So what exactly is kashk

According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food, kashk is "dried buttermilk."

According to Yotam Ottolenghi: “Kashk, kash, and kishk signify different things throughout the Middle East, Turkey and Greece, but they are often used to name foodstuffs produced by the process of fermentation and then drying of yogurt or curdled milk and turning them into a powder that can later be reconstituted.”

Clear as mud.

I found a recipe for homemade kashk in The New Food of Life and it goes like this: Leave some yogurt out at room temperature for a few days until it gets sour, then mix it with water and salt, boil it, drain it, roll it into balls, and dry them on a cookie sheet.

Whatever. Here's all you need to know: the jar of kashk I bought at the Jasmine Market contains a thin paste that resembles horseradish sauce, but tastes like a creamy, cool, tangy, nutty, ultra-delicious cheese. It's one of those flavors you want back as soon as it’s gone from your mouth. I have no idea how you get this intense umami from balls of dried yogurt, but trust me, the stuff is great. If you live near a Persian market, go buy some kashk, taste it, and send me a note telling me how much you love it. 

Other than eat it with a spoon, though, I’m not sure what you should do with your kashk. One thing you shouldn't do is use it to make the Plenty More Iranian-style pasta. 

The pasta was a flop. First of all: fussy and time-consuming. Roast eggplant for an hour, cool, peel, drain for 30 minutes. Cook onions and cumin in oil, add eggplant, garlic and lime juice. Marinate dried mint in oil. Make saffron water. Cook some kashk gently for a while, cool, then cook it again with yogurt. Boil noodles. Bring everything together on plates and top with fresh mint. The resulting dish was ugly, gray, heavy, rich, tart, and gloppy.

There were many little glitches. For instance, if you put two teaspoons of dried mint in a bowl and add a tablespoon of olive oil, per Ottolenghi’s instructions, you’re not going to have “mint oil” that you can “drizzle" over the pasta. You’re going to have slightly oily mint leaves that you might be able to “scatter” if they weren’t all clumped together. But why would you want to? They're bitter. The eggplant needed more aggressive seasoning and could have done without the lime juice, given that the dish already contained plenty of acid from the yogurt and kashk. And I don’t know how 1/2 teaspoon of saffron was supposed to lend any fragrance whatsoever to a pound of pasta and almost three pounds of eggplant. It was lost and, given the price of saffron, sadly wasted.

Maybe if I hadn’t been rushing to get dinner on the table I would have troubleshot the recipe, finessed the details, plated it all with flair, and written a very different blog post. But I didn’t. I merely followed the recipe to the letter.

No hard feelings, though. If not for this troubled recipe, I would never have tasted kashk.


Saturday, November 01, 2014

There are worse things than being spoiled



If you serve marinated skirt steak and a cauliflower, grape, and cheddar salad for dinner and your 6-foot-tall son pokes at his meal with a fork, mutters that he doesn’t like cauliflower or “sweet” steak, then returns to his room to watch YouTube videos rather than dine with his father and mother, do you later make him scrambled eggs and toast so he won’t go to bed hungry?

I don't. I'm against it on principle. Mark, who is a soft touch, does. We argued about this for years, Mark and I. I'd cook dinner, Owen wouldn't eat it, an hour later Mark would be making him spaghetti. I'd want to tear my hair out. When I saw Mark in the kitchen scrambling those eggs the other night I started to say, "You're spoiling him! I made a perfectly good meal. How do you expect him to ever. . . " 

Wait. The kid is fourteen and won't eat steak because there's brown sugar in the marinade? He's officially spoiled. Game over. I lost.

Here's my question: Does it even matter that he's spoiled? I used to think so, but now I can't see how, except insofar as it drives me nuts. Owen will go out into the world and he'll either continue to eat like a 4-year-old or he won't. No one will care. I shouldn't care. I'm not going to care. 

Problem solved.

Getting back to that meal he wouldn't eat, the cauliflower salad came from Plenty More and consisted of roasted cauliflower, toasted hazelnuts, halved red grapes, raisins, cheddar cheese, and a tart dressing. There’s a lot going in this melange -- crunch, juice, creaminess, sugar, acid -- and I liked it a lot. The adjustments I’d make are two: 

1. The oil-to-vinegar ratio in a vinaigrette is typically 3:1. The ratio in this vinaigrette was 3:2. It was very, very sharp. If I made this again, which I would, I'd add another splash of oil to bring everything together. Also, I'd switch from canola oil to olive.

2. The recipe (as printed in the book) calls for "creamy, mature cheddar,” but when I requested this at the cheese counter, the guy gave me a look and said: “Mature cheddar is never creamy, it’s crumbly.” I said, ok, fine, just give me a good cheddar then. The one I brought home was creamy and delicious, so you’d think it would have been perfect. No. The recipe instructs you to "coarsely crumble" the cheese and it was impossible to crumble this creamy cheese so I chopped and shredded it and it never really melded with the salad. If you try this recipe, go for a crumbly, mature cheddar. 

With those tweaks, I think this would be an excellent dish.

I did a really fun interview that you can read here