It took a village

I have a talented friend.

A couple of months ago my friend Hilary (an artist, see pretty montage above) and I preserved some lemons using the recipe from Mourad,  the large, handsome and daunting book by Mourad Lalou, owner of Aziza, a Moroccan restaurant in San Francisco. It is the kind of book in which every recipe seems to include a seasoning mix that incorporates 15 spices, including one obscure, essential peppercorn that you need to mail order. To finish the recipe, you might require a tablespoon of chicken jus which starts with a chicken and ten pounds of onion and involves cooking them down all night under a parchment lid. Or something like that.

We decided to do a Mourad dinner and divide up the dishes. I don't want to speak for her, but I had my doubts, especially late Thursday afternoon when the dishes were stacked three feet high in the sink. I came around to thinking the book is well worth struggling with. If you have any interest at all in the book after reading this post, go to the library and check it out. I'm not copying any recipes because they are all very long and, as I said, many of the fold in equally long sub-recipes. Also, I've only made these recipes once.

I'll go dish by dish.

French 75s. Not from the book, but essential. Made by Hilary's husband's John using my cheap brandy rather than cognac. Even so, excellent.

fresh cheese. Made with goat's milk, but you could use storebought cow's milk. This requires no special starters or cultures, just acid, time, and biscuit cutters to shape the cheese into cute hockey pucks. They were bright and fresh and delicious. Excellent.

tomato jam. Served with the cheese. Made a lot. You cook down cherry tomatoes with sugar, spices, champagne vinegar, lemons, and butter, then puree. Excellent.

The cherry tomatoes really do look like cherries.

grilled flatbreads. Make dough, let rise, shape into balls, let rise again, flatten a bit, top with sumac, sesame seeds, oregano, and salt, grill. Topping: essential. The ones you don't burn will be excellent.

squid salad with Thai-style harissa sauce. Hilary made this refreshing starter of calamari and Napa cabbage and it was definitely more Thai than Moroccan. But not quite 100% Thai. I loved this. Excellent.

short rib tangia with aged butter and preserved lemons. Unlike anything I've ever cooked before. You brine bone-in short ribs then braise for four hours. The meat fell off the bone, which I don't think it was supposed to given the way the dish looks in Mourad's picture (mahogany beef on beautiful frenched bones), but who cares. You boil down the sauce and rub the meat with "aged butter" which is actually just ordinary butter beaten with some blue cheese. I thought this dish was incredible, like pot roast but with the texture of pulled pork and the zesty spice of pastrami. It was a bit salty and next time I'd only brine for 6 hours, not overnight. I will definitely make this again, with adjustments. Excellent. Possibly worth the price of the book.

chard with preserved lemons. What it sounds like, but much prettier because of the finely chopped colorful stems. Jewel-like. Hilary's contribution. Excellent.

orange-and-olive salad. Hilary's contribution from Arabesque by Claudia Roden. Super-refreshing. Excellent and necessary with the rich meat.

That meat does not look pretty.

fig leaf ice cream. While I have never harvested figs from the five trees I planted over the last decade, I have now proudly harvested leaves. Stupid fig trees. You grind the leaves with sugar and use them to flavor a very sumptuous, velvety ice cream, pale celadon green and with the flavor of coconut. Excellent.

almond cookies. Like amaretto cookies you buy wrapped in tissuey paper at Italian delis. Excellent.

chocolate-ginger cookies. Dark, chocolatey, intense, spicy. Confused. Not excellent.

Our one lingering question was why very little of this tasted Moroccan. Maybe if we'd made the basteeya? It will be a while until I'm ready to tackle Mourad's basteeya, but I want to revisit this book sooner rather than later. I probably need a week or two more of Clotilde's Dusoulier's salads, though.  Yesterday morning I couldn't get my rings off. Today I stepped on the scale. Fortunately, I will be spending the day at an oven-building workshop, far, far away from leftover fig leaf ice cream.

Own too many cookbooks, watch too much TV

I predicted Food52's annual Tournament of Cookbooks would end in a showdown between some combination of Tender, Super Natural Every Day, and Mozza. I was so wrong. 

I basically just picked the books I knew. That was feeble. I am now educating myself on the three titles left standing. They are:  

1. Joe Beef. Bought it. Tremendous book.  Love everything about it from the writing to the bison taxidermy to the absinthe glasses. I love everything about it except . . . the food. The photograph of the trussed fish with milky eyeballs on page 33 turns my stomach, as do shots of the marrowbones stuffed with vegetables and the whelks with escargot butter. Here is a short list of the recipes in the book that trigger nausea: horsemeat topped with a fried egg, Velveeta eclairs, chicken skin jus, chicken skin tacos, mackerel benedict, squid stuffed with lobster, cornflake eel nuggets, pork fish sticks, Jerusalem artichokes with ketchup. 

And yet I can absolutely see why this big, engrossing book has fared so well in the Tournament and think it probably deserves to win. It just doesn't make me hungry.

2. Milk Bar. We're having a long-planned party tonight for which my friend Lisa and I are making David Chang's famous pork dish. (The meat has been in the oven for 5 hours now and hopes are high.) This seemed the right occasion to try a dessert from Milk Bar, so Isabel baked a batch of the compost cookies (choped pretzels, ground coffee, potato chips, chocolate chips, butterscotch chips) last night. I am predicting they will be great. I completely endorse Kim Severson's decision to advance this book, however wacky, unhealthy, and impractical, over Nigel Slater as I am less enamored of Tender than the indignant commenters at Food52.

3. Mourad. By coincidence, Owen and I ate at Mourad Lahlou's restaurant, Aziza, the other night. (We are trying to eat at every restaurant on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco, in order, and Aziza was next.) The meal was delicious, but really expensive. I was going to buy the book for $40 from the restaurant, but after paying $28 for a single exquisite short rib, decided to wait until I got home and order it for $20.11 from amazon. I find the book cold, forbidding, and cheffy and sort of regret the purchase.

Which of the three will take the gold? I predict Joe Beef, but my record is not good.

And now, veering off from cookbooks: After our Aziza dinner, Owen and I went to see Albert Nobbs. You should see this sweet movie; don't let the hideous previews turn you off. It was mildly inappropriate for Owen, especially a startling bedroom scene involving Mrs. Bates, who seems to have gone AWOL from Downton Abbey. But I guess you have to learn about oral sex somewhere and there are worse places than at an art house movie with your mom. I sure hope so.

And speaking of Mrs. Bates, I am sadly afflicted with Downton Abbey fever. It's going around and it's pathetic, but also harmless so I'm letting it rage. I daydream about the clothes, the clinking tea cups, the thwarted romances. Especially the thwarted romances. For a while, I had a mad crush on Bates. Mad in several senses of the word, as Bates is a paunchy, limping fiftyish valet, not the obvious choice for a crush, but, with all due respect to Cynthia Nixon, who chooses? Lately, however, the odd Bates crush has been replaced by unswerving devotion to Matthew. Which requires no explanation. I am now ready to tape his photograph to the inside of my locker. But I don't want him for me! Selflessly, I want him for Mary the same way I wanted Jim for Pam, Tim Riggins for Lyla, Jordan Catalano for Angela, Sawyer for Kate, the Sheriff for the Widow. And on and on.

Think of all the books I could have read.

Downton Abbey is a ridiculous show. Highly recommend it.

Must go baste the pork and set the table. Full report tomorrow.