Mandy Eats the Bay

The Case of the Missing Duck Bones

2011-09-12T14:03:00.000-07:00

The biggest scandal in the neighborhood of my youth concerned a duck carcass. My sister Anna, then a teenager, had prepared canard a l’orange for a potluck held at the home of a neighbor: the dish was exquisite, and with it she cemented her reputation as the finest cook on the block.

Once the party was over and we began gathering our serving dishes, our family discovered the duck carcass missing. We had anticipated a rich stock from the meat and bones, knowing it would add complexity to cassoulet or soften the bite of asparagus soup. But the serving dish on which my dad had carved Anna's culinary masterpiece was empty. Puzzled and disappointed, we carried it home.

The Berkeley, California, neighborhood where we grew up lies a few blocks from Chez Panisse and the specialty food shops surrounding Alice Waters' restaurant. Over the years, the influence of the Gourmet Ghetto permeated the surrounding neighborhood, and many of us became fanatical about food.

In our family of six, with two working parents, my siblings and I each cooked one night a week. We four kids were unabashed disciples of the culinary craze and attempted, with varying success, such dishes as bacon-wrapped grilled sweetbreads, handmade pasta, and squid and leeks in red wine. During dinner, the chef would face a critique from siblings and parents on how better to cut up a chicken or when to add garlic to a stir-fry. Learning to cook a sumptuous dish was nearly as valued as bringing home a good report card.

While our household carried the gastronomical torch (prompting one visitor to remark, the morning before a party, "The Ericksons are cooking, and all is well with the world"), our neighbors vied for runner-up, and dinner parties were a competitive business. Every Sunday morning, up and down the street, aspiring chefs were poring over the food sections of The New York Times and The San Francisco Chronicle and stashing recipes for future parties. At block parties we dined on coq au vin, wild mushroom ragout, and home-baked sourdough bread.

Naturally, much of the neighborhood gossip concerned cooking and food, and soon after the duck party, the grapevine told us where the carcass had gone. Another neighbor at the potluck had bagged it while the rest of us were finishing a chocolate hazelnut torte. He spirited it home and prepared the stock, which now filled his freezer.

My father confronted him. Our neighbor admitted taking the carcass but asserted that, as a leftover, the spent duck was as much his as anyone's. The two of them, both lawyers, argued about it for months. The stock, alas, is long gone.

* * *

Duck a l'orange is a surprisingly simple dish. It consists of a duck, roasted, and a sugary orange sauce. The fatty, gamy meat balances the sweetness of the sauce, and the entire dish is a guilty pleasure.

The most difficult part of the dish is handling the duck -- both roasting and carving it. While roast duck is the most tempting meat I have encountered, I rarely cook it. The bird is so fatty, and cooked at such high heat, that the duck fat liquefies and ascends to coat the walls and ceiling of the kitchen. If you don't have a well-ventilated stove (which I don't), make sure to crank up a fan and open all the windows. It also helps to trim as much fat as possible from the duck before consigning it to the oven.

When it comes time to carve the bird, you'll find that although it has already given its life, the duck doesn't easily give in to the cook. The joints stick together stubbornly, and tendons pull the meat tight against the bone. Use patience, a very sharp carving knife, and lots of red wine for your guests.

Duck a l'Orange

Adapted from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking

-4 oranges

-1 5-pound duck

-3 tablespoons sugar

-1/4 cup red wine vinegar

-2 cups duck stock

-2 tablespoons arrowroot blended with 3 tablespoons port

-1/2 cup port

-2 or 3 tablespoons orange liqueur

-lemon juice

-2 tablespoons softened butter

Remove the peel from the oranges and julienne; simmer the orange peels in a quart of water for 15 minutes.

Wash the duck inside and out and season with salt and pepper. Place 1/3 of the orange peels in the cavity of the duck and truss it.

Set the duck on a rack and in an oven preheated to 425 degrees. Roast for 15 minutes, then lower the heat to 350. The duck should take about 1-1/2 hours; you'll know it's done when you prick the thigh and the juices that run out are faintly pink.

While the duck is roasting, boil the sugar and vinegar until they form a dark brown syrup -- this will take several minutes. Remove the syrup from the heat and add 1/2 cup of duck stock. Place it back on the heat, on simmer, stirring while adding the rest of the stock. Whisk in the arrowroot mixture and stir in the remaining orange peels. Simmer 3 to 4 minutes.

Cut the peeled oranges into segments.

When the duck is finished, remove it from the rack and set it on a platter. Return it to the oven (but leave the heat off).

Drain nearly all the fat from the roasting pan; add the port and boil the liquid down until it is 2 to 3 tablespoons. Strain port into the simmering stock mixture. Stir in the liqueur and add lemon juice if needed to cut the sweetness. Whisk in the butter.

Place the orange sections around the duck, pour the sauce over all, and serve.

This piece first appeared in the Daily Gullet on May 14, 2004 http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?act=home

Green Tea Everything

2011-07-19T10:36:00.000-07:00

When Alex and I were walking around Tokyo and Kyoto, we were almost always within sight of a vending machine. These machines were quite welcome, because it's humid and warm there, and we were usually in need of a drink. I soon latched on to my favorite thirst quencher: iced green tea, unsweetened. I found it the ideal refresher, with just enough stimulant to perk up a caffeine wuss like me.

But green tea wasn't just hanging out in the ubiquitous vending machines. Green tea flavoring was everywhere, especially in desserts. In the Kyoto train station, Alex ordered a green tea parfait that contained green tea–flavored ice cream, pound cake cubes, mousse, gelatin bits, wafer cookies, and more items I can't remember. It was a tall sundae glass filled with various hues of forest green.

The Japanese employ green tea the way we do chocolate here: Soft serve ice cream comes in vanilla, green tea, and swirl. While I often found green tea treats overly bitter, it succeeds brilliantly in that glorious East-West union: green tea ice cream. The tea's bitterness meets the cloying sweetness of ice cream in a refreshing, perfectly balanced dessert. I like it far better than chocolate ice cream, which I've always felt doesn't do chocolate justice.

The day we left, I picked up some matcha, powdered green tea, and tea leaves. Thanks to the Japanese genius for illustration, I was able to understand the package directions for iced green tea (2 teaspoons of leaves in 1 quart of water; let sit 40 minutes and drain; chill). It's great fuel for working in the summer garden. The matcha I'm saving for ice cream.

Sushi Central

2011-07-05T15:53:00.000-07:00

There was no way two sushi lovers, while vacationing in Tokyo, weren't going to visit the locus of raw fish. While visiting friends and touring Japan, Alex and I made sure to visit the Tsukiji market, where fishermen auction off tuna and every other edible, or not so edible, fish that swims off the coast of Japan.

The market has become a draw for tourists, who must line up at 4 a.m. if they want to witness the auction. But we weren't interested in the selling of fish. We were looking to eat it. We found our way to the market one morning around 11, after all the fish had been sold, the floors hosed down, and the stalls closed up.

In one corner of the market stand a few hole-in-the-wall restaurants, which open early in the morning to serve sushi breakfasts and lunch. By virtue of their location, they serve the freshest fish in Tokyo. We waited outside one of the restaurants, in front of a sign that featured photographs of sushi selections labeled "A" through "G."

When space became available at the counter, we were handed a menu with the same photographs. We pointed to our choices and thus commenced the best meal of the trip: buttery salmon, silky tuna, metallic sea urchin, oily mackerel, smoky eel — all served at room temperature to bring out the most flavor. It was definitely worth getting lost on Tokyo's train system, and almost worth the 11-hour flight.

A Gutsy Guy, a Pile of Pork, and Lots of Salt

2011-06-07T12:04:00.000-07:00

My guest blogger, Gene Heller, describes how he made his own guanciale and pancetta. We tasted his pancetta, in a lovely dish of linguine carbonara, and it was sublime.

This past Christmas a friend of mine gave me a copy of Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie. For a few weeks after she gave me the book I spent some happy hours reading about pancetta and thinking up reasons not to try making it: What if the Big One hits while I’m aging the pancetta? What if the hanging pork attracts rats? What if I poison my friends?

In late January I decided that earthquakes, vermin, and lost friendships were no reasons to be frightened of making pancetta, and I ordered a piece of pork belly and a piece of jowl from Avedano’s on Cortland Street in San Francisco. (The jowl was for making guanciale. The thinking here is, first, that once you’ve decided to go to the effort to cure some pork, you might as well go whole hog. And second, guanciale is cool.)

You need three things to cure pork: enough time, the right weather, and the right ingredients. You can block out the time, you can pray for good weather, and for ingredients, you can easily rationalize spending money on high-end materials, like this: if you’re going to do a ton of work on a project, you don’t want to risk failure due to poor materials. The danger with this argument is that it can lead you down a slippery slope, into $200 running shoes, or marrow bones from Wagyu beef — I didn’t make that up, you can find Wagyu bones on Ruth Reichl’s new commercial Web site — but I convinced myself that the end product would be worth the extra money. Hence Avedano’s for their Manteca pork, and Rainbow Grocery for the seasonings. Rainbow offers, among the tattoos and piercings, one of the best selections of spices in town.

Back home with my raw materials, the final step in confronting the unknown now sat on my counter, in the form of a layer of very tough pig skin, which I had to remove from a hog jowl and belly. A straightforward task to be sure, but one that reminded me that I was working a bit closer to the animal than if I were opening a package of bacon. While examining the skin on the belly, I saw several evenly spaced bumps that I think, although in my beginner-ness I can’t be certain, were nipples.

Curing the Pork (“Crushing for the Cure”)

The idea is to cover the meat in salt and seasonings. The salt will pull moisture out of the meat and create an environment that’s unfriendly to some, but unfortunately not all, bad bacteria. (Botulism is still a risk.) The seasonings flavor the meat. Most of the salt is common table salt — sodium chloride. A tiny bit is curing salt – sodium nitrite. (For exact proportions and curing instructions, refer to Ruhlman’s Charcuterie or any of the other curing guides available.)

The funnest part of prepping the seasonings was crushing the juniper berries. I found top quality berries at Rainbow, and I know they were top quality, because when the back of my frying pan first crashed down on the berries to crush them for the cure, the aroma that floated up to my happy nose implanted a single word in my brain: MARTINI! I believe that nothing can go wrong when you’re making something that smells like a martini, even if it’s not a martini.

The success of this stage of the process doesn’t depend on the weather, because it takes place in the refrigerator, but it does call for a week or so of patience, and a willingness to be shocked by the amount of liquid in a seemingly solid piece of fatty meat. My five-pound piece of pork belly exuded at least a cup and a half of liquid, but it turns out that it’s okay for the meat to sit in this brine; you don’t have to drain it or mess with it in any way. The only intervention you have to perform during the curing period is to ensure that the cure is evenly distributed by massaging the meat occasionally, a phrase I enjoyed sharing with those among my friends unlucky enough to have asked me during that week how the project was going. Curing is complete when the meat is no longer squishy when pressed.

Aging (“Rolling for the Cure”)

Now I had to roll for the cure, because pancetta traditionally is rolled up, and traditional was what I wanted to be, as much as possible. The key here, the thing you really want to get right, is to roll the belly very, very tightly, to avoid trapping any air inside. Trapped air can create an environment in which dangerous bacteria can move in and set up housekeeping, and they don’t take out their trash. (In case you didn’t hear me the first time, botulism is a small, but scary risk.) One friend of mine described the process as rolling the meat as tight as an unsmokeable joint — an analogy you won’t find in Charcuterie.

This is when the weather has to cooperate, assuming you’re drying the meat in the fresh air, rather than inside a climate-controlled container. (I’d like to pretend that the bracing breezes of Bernal Heights were crucial to the taste of the final product, much like effect the air in Parma is supposed to have on prosciutto, but the truth is I would have been very happy to use something like a refrigerated wine cooler unit if I had had one.) What you need is two weeks of 60/60: a more or less constant temperature of 60°F, and a more or less constant humidity level of 60 percent. I wish you good luck planning for that during San Francisco’s rainy season. But fortune favors the brave — during the two weeks in question, there was only one 36-hour period of rain and high humidity.

I controlled for temperature by carefully selecting where to hang the meat. “Carefully selecting” in this context meant choosing between the laundry room and the garage, and to hedge my bets I did both, the guanciale in the laundry room and the pancetta in the garage. All sorts of “what if” thoughts began to intrude: what if mice or rats or raccoons figure out how to climb down the string to the meat? What if mold starts to form on the surface of the meat? What if I can’t tell when it’s done? Here are the answers I came up with. Local animals nibble the meat? Throw it out. Mold starts to form? Slice away the moldy sections. When is it done? After it’s firmed up, before it gets dry and crusty, and most important, it’s done when I can no longer tolerate the anxiety of waiting.

Sharing Home-Cured Pork with the Braver of Your Friends

Having an entire roll of pancetta sitting on your kitchen counter inspires awe. When it’s sitting next to an entire cured hog jowl, you risk feeling the kind of pride the Bible warns against. This is the stuff you usually buy in quarter-pound quantities for a lot of money, and carefully add to your pasta, and now you’ve got maybe 8 or 10 pounds of it, and you know it’s made from the best raw materials, and provided it doesn’t kill you, you’ve accomplished something good.

However, on the off chance that you’ve screwed up in some horrible way and have created poison rather than artisanally crafted locally sourced cured meat, I believe it’s good manners to eat some yourself, before you start handing out samples. I did spot a couple of very tiny spots of mold — less than a centimeter in diameter. These I trimmed off, after confirming in several references that mold is a cosmetic problem but is harmless to your health.

Contamination with Clostridium botulinum, which causes botulism, is the danger. From what I’ve read, there’s no way to spot C. botulinum contamination by inspecting the meat. The good news is that if you’ve done it right, used the right curing salts in the right amounts, and left no little pockets of trapped air when you roll it up, contamination is highly unlikely. And pancetta is meant to be cooked, and cooking destroys the toxin, if there is toxin, which there isn’t if you’ve done it right.

And I can tell you this: that first taste of home-cured pancetta is an awful lot like a first kiss, if the person you’re kissing has very warm lips and is wearing lots of lip balm.

After sampling the pancetta and guanciale myself — sautéed and eaten plain — I waited two days. No signs of paralysis or blurred vision showed up, and I determined that I could, with a clear conscience, offer some to friends.

Interestingly, their reaction ranged from genuine delight to no response at all. I may need some new friends. But I’m sticking with the friend who admitted to me that she couldn’t really taste the pancetta all that well because she had added it to a homemade pizza with pineapple. She’s still my friend; a few days ago she brought me some cherries that she picked herself in Brentwood.

Note: This article is not intended to be instructions on curing meat. Botulism is dangerous. If you’re curing meat, follow a guide like Ruhlman’s Charcuterie.

A Carrot of Any Color

2011-05-31T16:51:00.000-07:00

I planted carrots in February, in a bed containing a few rocks. Rocks matter in carrot cultivation, because if the root hits one as it's growing downward, it'll break into two or three parts rather than remain one solid carrot whole. So when I started pulling them up this weekend, I expected to find such shattered roots, some of them twisting around each other like carrot yoga.

What I didn't expect to find was one yellow carrot. The seeds I had planted (using seed tape, the only way to go with carrots), were standard orange, not a fancy multi-colored variety. Had a stray yellow seed found its way into the tape, or was this a genetic mutation, evolution in action in my planting bed?

The yellow carrot tasted a little milder than its orange brethren. But adding it to a shredded-carrot salad, I realized, would make a fine-looking dish. Marcella Hazan features such a salad in her book The Classic Italian Cookbook. It's so easy, I never bother to open the book and follow the recipe.

Peel and shred a couple of carrots. Add enough salt to bring out the flavor, some lemon juice, and more olive oil than lemon juice. Toss, taste, adjust, and serve.

Roman Easter Eats

2011-04-19T14:45:00.000-07:00

I spent Easter week more than three decades ago in Rome, when my family was visiting Berkeley friends fortunate enough to have to spend a year in that ancient city. We visited the usual sites — the Colosseum, the Sistine Chapel, and the sundry ruins and churches that litter the area.

But, naturally, most of my memories about that trip are the food. We had been told that Italians eat breakfast in cafes, so we dutifully followed the old adage and did as the Romans. Our hosts lived in an apartment near Piazza Navona, where we frequented a cafe that sold soft, sweet rolls and cafe latte, a breakfast that struck me at the time as near-perfection.

It rained a great deal during that trip, but on the few sunny days afforded us, we were determined to eat outside. This endeavor involved a complicated process of passing furniture through windows, across fire escapes and patios, and up a flight of stairs to the roof. There we ate classic Italian meals of fresh pasta and lettuce salads.

We ventured out one night to a restaurant, where I'm sure I had a full meal, but the part I remember was the pizza bianca, a new-to-me delight that was known as focaccia bread when it arrived in Berkeley years later. Like the Italian breakfasts, which seemed to me whittled down to their essence, this dish was ideal in its total lack of obfuscating tastes: it was merely bread, olive oil, and salt.

Once we discovered gelato, we feasted on it regularly. I tried several varieties, finally settling on bacio — hazelnut and chocolate — enriched, like every little cup passed across the gelato counter, with a swipe of whipped cream. Where the whipped cream met the ice cream, it froze into a solid, fluffy crust that I slowly savored as I ate my way around and underneath.

Not too long afterward, gelato arrived in Berkeley, with Vivoli's, a place run solely by women. I believe their gelato was pretty good, but my teenaged self could only be disappointed that I wasn't being served by young Italian men with adorable accents. Besides, Vivoli's never included that little dap of whipped cream.

The Miracle That Is Bacon

2011-03-08T13:36:00.000-08:00

Occasionally I make a white bean and sausage soup, mostly because the ingredients are on hand and it's a relatively easy and healthful dinner. My version originated with a recipe in a soup cookbook, though I've long since stopped referencing the recipe. The soup was never great, but I kept making it because I couldn't figure out why it wasn't better. It always seemed to taste flat, though I've improved it by sweating the vegetables and cutting down on the tomatoes.

One day last week I decided to throw in a strip of bacon, only because there was some left over in the fridge. Lo and behold, that was the ingredient the soup had been missing. It went from dull to umami-full. Bacon is surely a cook's godsend. Here's the recipe:

White Bean and Sausage Soup

1 cup white beans, soaked for several hours or overnight
1 bay leaf
1 teaspoon dried thyme
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 strip bacon
1 stalk celery
1/2 carrot
1/2 medium onion
1/2 pound sweet Italian sausage
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 large tomato, peeled and chopped, or 1/2 can chopped tomatoes

Drain the beans and add 4 cups water along with the bay leaf and thyme. Bring to low boil and cook until soft (1 to 2 hours).

While the beans are cooking, chop the bacon, celery, carrot, and onion. Heat a Dutch oven or other heavy pot and add the bacon and vegetables. Cover, lower the heat to a simmer, and stew for 20 minutes.

Add the sausage, breaking it up into small pieces, and stir in the garlic. When the meat is cooked through, add the tomatoes.

Add the beans, season with salt and pepper, and simmer for half an hour.

Leaves with Attitude

2011-02-22T11:56:00.000-08:00

One Saturday morning in late February, several years ago, I was cruising the farmers market, looking for an interesting fruit or vegetable. I wanted a treat, but I wasn’t finding much. Late winter is not a good time for vendors of produce.

An elderly woman had occupied one of the stalls. She was selling only one vegetable, a green with sawtooth leaves that sprouted small broccoli-like flowerets. I asked what it was and she answered, “Chinese broccoli.”

“Chinese broccoli,” I’ve noticed, is a catch-all name for any green that takes well to stir-frying, but as it was only 50 cents a bunch, I bought one. At home I searched through my cookbooks and found a drawing in the Chez Panisse Vegetables that matched my Chinese broccoli exactly. It was broccoli raab; a recipe with penne, garlic, and Romano cheese was included.

I took one bite of the concoction and fell under the spell of broccoli raab. It’s bitter, spicy, pungent, and powerful. Nothing like its tame namesake, broccoli raab lets you know you’re alive.

Since that day, whenever I find broccoli raab at the market, I make the pasta dish. And whenever I see it on a restaurant menu—nearly always as a side to smoked pork or sausage—I order the entrée that includes it. I’ve grown it, too, with limited success. It’s very picky about timing, and the bugs love it as much as I do.

It’s probably not surprising that Italians, with their unabashed zest for eating, introduced broccoli raab to the United States. Brothers Stephen and Andrew D’Arrigo (of the Andy Boy dynasty) started cultivating it in the early 20th century. It now grows in California, Arizona, New Jersey, Ontario, and Quebec and is sold around the country under a host of names: rapini, cima di rapa, Italian turnip (broccoli raab is a distant cousin of the turnip).

Broccoli raab is sometimes available in a regular supermarket; if you can’t find it, try specialty markets or Italian grocers. It’s available year-round, but it’s best in late fall, winter, and early spring. The flowers should not have opened, and the cut end of the stalks should be green and smooth. If you like your vegetables to bite back, go for bunches with big leaves.

Like most people with a strong personality, broccoli raab won’t get along with just any other food. If it’s not the star, it must be accompanied by other brisk ingredients. Spicy Italian sausages and smoked meats will stand up to its assertiveness, as will potent seasonings such as extra-virgin olive oil, vinegar, pungent cheese, and hot pepper flakes.

It won’t take just any treatment, either. Boiling it is the culinary equivalent of a lobotomy—it loses all its punch, becoming insipid and gray. Broccoli raab is best when sautéed in oil.

My desire for other vegetables has waxed and waned over the seasons, but broccoli raab remains a delicacy. That day in the market I had hoped to find an agreeable fruit to toss into a gallette. Instead, I found a vegetable with a big attitude. Perhaps it was the serendipity of it all, but I fell in love.

Broccoli Raab with Penne

1 large onion

8 cloves garlic

2 bunches broccoli raab (1-1/2 pounds)

extra-virgin olive oil

red pepper flakes to taste

salt to taste

3/4 pound penne

red wine vinegar

Romano cheese

Put a large pot of water on to boil. Add the pasta and stir, drain when it’s done, then set aside.

Meanwhile, thinly slice the onion and garlic. Wash the broccoli raab, cut away the stems, and chop the leaves and sprouts coarsely.

Cover the bottom of a large sauté pan with the olive oil and sauté the onion over high heat. When the onion has begun to brown a little, add the garlic, pepper flakes, and salt. Toss, then add the broccoli raab and a splash of water. Lower the heat and cook until tender, stirring or tossing frequently.

Taste the broccoli raab and add seasoning as needed. Splash on additional extra-virgin olive oil and red wine vinegar. Add the freshly cooked pasta to the pan and toss. Serve with grated cheese.

American Cheez

2011-02-08T15:08:00.000-08:00

There is one day a year when you get to eat — are required to eat — the most low-brow of low-brow cuisine. While the Superbowl Sunday menu includes some strong suggestions (Buffalo wings, chips and dip), what it essentially calls for is cheesy, all-American food.

So this year I constructed a baking dish of that all-time winner, layered Mexican dip. Unable to find a recipe that worked for me, I devised my own, and for the first time ever, bought a jar of cheese.

In developing the recipe, the only real questions were what the layers should consist of, and in which order they should lie in the baking dish. Sour cream was out, as I find it obliterates all the other flavors. Refried beans, cheese, guacamole, and salsa were the obvious participants. As for order, I went with specific gravity, figuring the beans were the heaviest, followed by the Cheez Whiz, Cuisinart guacamole, then Safeway's fresh salsa.

It was a great hit. Be sure to serve it with hearty chips (Casa Sanchez thick and crispy worked great) as it's dense.

Layered Mexican Superbowl Dip

Two cans refried beans
I jar Cheez Whiz
About 2 cups guacamole
2 cups salsa

Shmush the beans into the bottom of a 9-by-13-inch baking dish. Microwave the Cheez Whiz until it's melted and spread over the beans. Let it cool a little, then spread the guacamole over the Cheez Whiz. Pour salsa on top.

Turnip Gratin Soup

2011-01-25T10:32:00.000-08:00

The Chez Panisse Vegetables cookbook failed me last night. I had turned to it when faced with a plethora of turnips, planted more because I had an available half-barrel and the timing was right than because I wanted a pile of turnips.

The cookbook includes a simple recipe of sliced turnips and potatoes baked in cream and chicken stock. I thought the dish would complete my dinner of grilled pork chops and a simple green salad, at the same time exhausting the turnip supply.

The problem is one of geometry. The recipe calls for slicing the roots a quarter-inch thick, then layering them in a baking dish. But because potatoes and turnips don't fit together like Tetris pieces, big gaps lie between them, so I had to double the amount of liquid to fill those gaps and cover the slices, which led to a soupy mess.

If I were to do it again, I'd slice the roots thinly so they'd form a nearly solid layer. But I'm not about to go out and buy more turnips.

Tools of Dessert

2011-01-11T11:01:00.000-08:00

For Christmas Alex received a crème brûlée kit: a butane torch and six ramekins. So on Boxing Day, when family members dropped by for the third day of present opening, he decided to put his tools to use. Unfortunately, the traditional method of making crème brûlée — stirring cream and eggs over a double boiler while it slowly thickens — required too much patience for a 14-year-old, and the result was sugary soup.

Last weekend he wanted to re-try, and I found a better recipe on the inner tubes. This one requires baking the custard in a slow oven: no stirring required. (Thanks to Walter S. Burton's aunt Carol for the recipe.) However, the butane torch also requires some restraint: to get a golden, crisp sugar crust, you need to hold it at a distance and slowly move the flame over the sugar. Our crème brûlée was set on fire and well blackened. But I've always liked my marshmallows well burnt, so I was happy with it.

No-Stir Crème Brûlée

2 cups cream
5 egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla
Light brown sugar for topping

Heat oven to 275°. Whisk together the first four ingredients and pour into four 7-ounce ramekins. Place in a baking pan in the oven and pour hot water in the pan until it reaches halfway up the sides of the ramekins. Cook for about an hour — it's done when a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

Let cool, and refrigerate for several hours or overnight. Sieve an even, 1/4-inch layer of brown sugar over the top of the custard and torch until it forms a crust.

Season of Spices

2011-01-04T14:34:00.000-08:00

During the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, we joined friends for lunch in Menlo Park, and afterward, because we all had the time, they suggested visiting Penzeys to check out their larder.

Penzeys, a longtime mail-order spice purveyor, opened the shop on Santa Cruz Avenue two years ago, and I’ve been meaning to visit all this time. Had I made the trip sooner, I would have known years ago about black cardamom, no relation to real cardamom, which adds a smoky element to slow-cooked meats and curries across Asia.

I also would have known about ajwain or ajowan, a seed with a scent reminiscent of celery that’s used on Afghan bread. And I would have realized that bratwurst’s distinctive flavor comes from a mixture of nutmeg and mustard.

I learned these things because at the shop, unlike with the catalog, everything Penzeys sells is available for smelling. It was thus that I chose my favorite black peppercorns — Tellicherry — which have covered nearly everything on my plate since our visit.

Photo: Michelle Meiklejohn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Seven Kinds of Cookies

2010-12-28T11:37:00.000-08:00

In the 1800s, when cookie baking reached its peak in Scandinavia, there ensued a competition among households in which the host of a gathering would try to produce more types of cookies than that served at the previous party. The competition grew so extreme that eventually everyone tired of it and settled on a reasonable number: seven.

To this day, a coffee table must include seven kinds of cookies or small cakes. And so, my contribution to the Christmas smörgåsbord this year were those seven batches of cookies. Running clockwise, starting with the hazelnut biscotti, are jam cookies (made with ground almonds, egg whites and cloudberry jam), pepparkakor (gingersnaps), spritz (almond-flavored butter cookies), sesame cookies (made with tahini and whole-wheat flour), flourless chocolate cookies, and pretzel-shaped cardamom butter cookies.

Lunch with the Computer

2010-12-14T14:15:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite fall-back-on lunches is Asian-American noodle salad. I almost always have the ingredients, and it’s a great repository for leftovers, especially roast chicken and crudite.

It’s based on a classic Chinese noodle salad with peanut butter dressing, though I use spaghetti instead of egg noodles, an idea I took from my Taiwanese sister-in-law, who’s had to make do with American ingredients.

It’s perfect for rainy days, when lunch means taking a break in front of the computer, watching YouTube or Hulu.

Noodle Salad

1/4 pound spaghetti

cucumbers, celery, bell peppers, bean sprouts, or other crunchy veggies

sliced green onion

chicken, pork, or tofu

Dressing:

2 tablespoons water

1 and 1/2 tablespoon peanut butter

1 and 1/2 tablespoon oil

1 and 1/2 tablespoon rice vinegar

1 and 1/2 tablespoon soy sauce

1/2 teaspoon sugar

1 and 1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

Boil the spaghetti until it’s done. In the meantime, slice the veggies into strips and the meat or tofu into cubes. Combine the dressing in a small container.

Rinse the spaghetti in cold water and place it in a big container with the veggies and protein. When you’re ready to eat, pour the dressing over the noodle salad, cover the container and shake it well.

Unhappy Breakup, Joyous Reunion

2010-12-07T10:42:00.000-08:00

After many years as my faithful companion, chocolate betrayed me. I first suspected it while visiting friends in Ashland, Oregon. I had eaten a large slice of fudge pie soon before bedtime and remained awake for hours. Camped in their son’s room, I spent the night reading novels written for prepubescent boys, nodding off only after sunrise.

I had been suffering from intermittent insomnia for about a year and had finally hit on the cause. In college I had given up coffee and tea after too many restless nights. Now, apparently, my system had grown so sensitive that the minute amounts of caffeine in chocolate kept me awake. Letting go of coffee and tea had been easy—good herbal blends satisfied the need for a hot drink. But chocolate? What substitute could there possibly be for hot fudge, truffles, and Droste?

I tested my theory. For two weeks, I ate no chocolate—and slept soundly every night. I then ate a brownie at lunchtime and stayed awake until 3 a.m. After a month of blissful sleep I tried again, this time with a package of M&Ms. Up until 3 again, watching Twilight Zone reruns.

I had to face the facts: I could no longer eat chocolate. I avoided its bittersweet embrace the way an alcoholic shuns liquor, fearing that one taste would send me into a downward spiral of insomnia and eventual insanity.

It’s not easy, living chocolate-free. I once asked a waiter to recommend a non-chocolate dessert and was served a chocolate-banana pudding drizzled with fudge sauce and decorated with chocolate curls. Another time, I futilely chewed out a stony-faced teenager behind an ice cream counter, frustrated that the only choice available to me was vanilla.

I tried carob, but I wouldn’t recommend it. One bar cookie recipe with a fudge topping was passable when I substituted carob chips for the real stuff, but carob brownies were dreadful. And, save for hard, stale cookies and bars in health food stores, carob was scarce outside my own kitchen. As I had suspected, there is no substitute for chocolate. I accepted my fate and moved on to other desserts.

Then, seven years after our unhappy breakup, chocolate returned to me. I discovered this after making a pot of herbal tea in a hotel coffee maker by running water through the maker and onto tea bags in the pot. The next morning my husband asked, “How did you sleep?” “Great,” I said, reflecting on nine hours of uninterrupted, dreamless slumber. He then told me that he had forgotten to remove the coffee grounds from the maker before I brewed my tea.

I had drunk coffee—albeit weak coffee, but containing at least as much caffeine as chocolate—and slept as if I were drugged. Could this mean that I could eat chocolate again? I purchased a Snickers bar from the hotel snack machine and downed it after lunch. That night, I slipped into a sound sleep and woke late. The next day, I raised the bar and went for a fudge brownie with chocolate chips. Once again sleep was my friend.

The famine was over, and it was time to feast. I devoured the remainder of my son’s Halloween candy, finished off my husband’s Swedish Christmas chocolates (a gift from me), and purchased a bag of organic chocolate chips, which I ate by the handful. The Girl Scouts were selling their cookies, and I bought four boxes of thin mints, hoarding them in my office so I wouldn’t have to share them with my son.

My senses have since returned, and I now eat chocolate like a normal person—that is, almost daily. I still sleep well. So, what happened? I asked Dr. Allyson Tevrizian, an allergist at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. She noted that caffeine intolerance is not an allergy but said that “There are a number of cellular receptors that caffeine works on, and it is possible that over time, either the number of these receptors or their activity may have diminished.”

Then she referred me to Dr. Robert Simon at the Scripps Clinic in San Diego. She noted that Dr. Simon has researched food additive intolerance, so he might better understand what had happened. Simon was not impressed by my story. Side effects from drugs are inconsistent, he said simply, and can vary, especially over a span of several years.

In other words, bodies change over time. And once in a great while, it’s for the better.

This piece first appeared in the Daily Gullet on November 3, 2003.

Photo by Simon Howden, FreeDigitalPhoto.net

The Leftover Challenge

2010-11-30T12:24:00.000-08:00

Articles about Thanksgiving leftovers usually talk about turkey. But their focus is misguided, because cooked bird is easy to find uses for. The mild meat takes on almost any seasoning, and it can be repurposed into all kinds of dishes: enchiladas, salad, soup, mole, casserole (if you’re so inclined), hash, and pasta. And hardly anyone’s going to thumb their nose at a turkey sandwich.

Here’s the real challenge: cranberry relish (from Joy of Cooking: grind 1 pound of cranberries with 1 orange, add 2 cups of sugar and let it sit in the fridge for two days). Every year I make the cranberry relish, and for that reason, it always comes home with me. Because no one takes more than a tablespoon, I leave with nearly as much as I arrived with.

So this year, on that nothing-to-do Friday after Thanksgiving, I got to baking and created this recipe. It’s a sweet bread whose slices are dotted pink and orange. I’m guessing it will work with any leftover cranberry dish as long as it’s well sugared and has a texture of thick tomato sauce.

Mandy’s cranberry relish bread

2½ cups flour
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ cup salad oil
1½ cups cranberry relish
2 eggs

Preheat the oven to 350°. Grease and flour a regular-sized loaf pan.

Sift the dry ingredients together. In a separate bowl combine the oil, relish, and eggs until well blended. Add the relish mixture to the flour and stir until just combined.

Pour the batter into the pan and bake for 50 minutes. Let it sit until it’s completely cool before cutting.

Mystery Menu

2010-11-23T11:10:00.000-08:00

Several years ago, I took a UC Extension class with food writer Jeannette Ferrary. Our assignment for the Tuesday before Thanksgiving was to describe a typical Thanksgiving meal at our childhood home. The class would then try to figure out where each of us had grown up.

The class performed fairly well, accurately pinpointing one member from the South (Knoxville, Tennessee), whose family always served cornbread dressing and biscuits; and another from Hawaii (Honolulu), who never served a Thanksgiving meal without a bowl of white rice.

They were pretty stumped by my family’s menu, however. My childhood Thanksgiving dinners weren’t the same every year, but my best approximation was the following: barbecued turkey, Paul Prudhomme’s sausage and cornbread stuffing, homemade rolls, homemade cranberry sauce, baked Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie made from the recipe on the can. The only thing they could figure out was that I grew up somewhere warm enough to barbecue a turkey.

Their confusion makes sense. My parents were raised in Portland, Oregon, which lacks a distinct cooking tradition. After moving to Berkeley, they were swept up in the cooking revolution of the Gourmet Ghetto, which erased their 1950s sensibilities. So we created our own Thanksgiving traditions—a combination of haute cuisine and kid pleasers.

Photo by Tom Curtis

The Trooper

2010-11-16T10:06:00.000-08:00

During a summer of disappointing crops — mealy, tasteless tomatoes; sullen basil; green pomegranates; and squirrel-ravaged beans — there was one bright spot in my garden. My butternut plants yielded 11 lovely, large fruit. The vines spread all over the patio and invaded their neighboring planter boxes, but I let them misbehave as long as they produced.

For about a month now, I’ve been trying to use up the squash: roasting cubes along with a chicken, adding mashed squash to cornmeal mush, and giving one to our housecleaner, Francisca, who praised my calabazas bonitas and described the cinnamon-enhanced turnovers she makes from them.

But my favorite use for them is a squash cake found in The Victory Garden Cookbook, a lifesaver for gardener-cooks. The only difficult part of the recipe is peeling a squash, steaming and mashing it. If you used canned pumpkin, it’s the easiest cake on the planet.

Butternut Squash Cake

1 & 2/3 cup sugar

1 cup vegetable oil

4 eggs

1 & 3/4 cup mashed squash or one can pumpkin

2 cups flour (or whole-wheat pastry flour)

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons cinnamon

a good grating of nutmeg

Preheat oven to 350° and grease a 13x8x2-inch pan. Mix the sugar and oil together; beat in eggs one at a time. Beat in squash until well mixed. Stir together the dry ingredients and add to the wet mixture. Pour into the pan and bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out dry.

Rainy Day Cookware

2010-11-09T19:16:00.000-08:00

Sunday night is steak night: T-bones, New York, porterhouse, grilled on the Weber. But the Weber doesn’t work in the rain.

So this Sunday’s steaks were grilled in the kitchen on the Farberware, a lovely piece of culinary nostalgia, circa 1966. We bought it at an estate sidewalk sale in Precita Valley, San Francisco, for $20. It came with a quilted vinyl cozy and an instruction booklet, complete with such recipes as leg of lamb piquant and limed fillets. It also has a spit attachment, which roasted a duck quite successfully one rainy Christmas Eve.

For whatever reason, bone-in steaks cook better on the Farberware than boneless steaks, which quickly become tough. Though the smoky taste was lacking, the teenage chef easily produced tender T-bones, saving a weekly tradition.

Tasty Trailers

2010-11-02T11:28:00.000-07:00

Austin, Texas, is riddled with food trailers: Every vacant lot near a sidewalk seems to be home to a food mobile. They serve dogs and tacos, of course, but so much more: barbecue, sandwiches, coffee and pastries, cupcakes, burgers, fried chicken, sushi, pizza, crepes, kebabs, ice cream, pad thai, etc.

Most of them dish up quick takeout; many have a few tables and chairs set out in front. But one we visited, G’Raj Mahal, was a full-service restaurant with a hostess, waiters, menus, and the whole bit. We sat under a roof that had been rigged with lights, and enjoyed some excellent Indian food.

The trailers are popular among both food entrepreneurs and diners, as they’re so much cheaper to operate than a regular restaurant. Running a kitchen in a trailer sure doesn’t seem to hurt quality.

The Bay Area could stand to see a few more of these besides taco trucks and carts at UC Berkeley. But we lack vacant lots, and the lenient codes that allow so many of Austin’s trailers to thrive.

Texas Barbecue, Naturally

2010-10-26T18:02:00.000-07:00

On my second day in Austin, my friend Maryrose drove us to Spicewood, Texas, to take a dip in Krause Springs, one of the many swimming holes Austin is famous for and possibly the most beautiful of the bunch. Fed by a waterfall and surrounded by sloping granite, it looks like a postcard from a tropical vacation.

The land is owned by the Krause family, who have set up a kiosk at the entrance, asking visitors to pay a few dollars and sign a waiver. While we were checking in, someone from an adjacent building called out to one of the very large Texans manning the kiosk: “Hey Tiny, want to get some barbecue?”

“Tiny” drawled in return that he’d been eating barbecue for days: “…and last night Mama got barbecue from the firehouse, so I’m barbecued out!”

I wasn’t in Texas long enough to reach the saturation point; in fact, I had only a few meals to spend on barbecue, what with the Tex-Mex, hippie joints, and trailer food I needed to try while in Austin. So I had to choose the right barbecue joint, and that was House Park Bar•B•Que. House Park has been operating since 1943, and the shack where the smoking and ordering takes place looks at least that old. The joint is open only for lunch on weekdays, so we had to scramble a little to fit it in.

Inside the restaurant, the air is thick with smoke, the photos and signs hanging on the walls yellowed beyond reason. We ordered mixed meat sandwiches, with two sides, from the guys behind the counter, one of whom was so edgy I feared he’d pull a shotgun if I didn’t make up my mind quickly.

Fortunately, there’s seating outside, so we were able to enjoy our meat, potato salad and coleslaw in relative safety. If you find yourself in Austin, I recommend the brisket platter with potato salad and whatever other side suits your tastes.

On Vacation in Texas

2010-10-19T11:00:00.000-07:00

I’m on vacation in the lone star state, visiting a friend who now lives in Austin. I’ll report back next week on Texas eats.

Temptation on a Cactus

2010-10-12T15:00:00.000-07:00

I’ve often wanted to pluck off the fruit that grow on my neighbors’ cacti. There they are, right at arm’s length, just on the other side of the fence, looking so temptingly pink and plump. But those spines — and the fact that it would, of course, be theft — hold me back.

So when I found a basketfull at the Redwood City Farmers Market, I snatched one up. This one was pale green, about four inches long, and it managed to lodge several spines in my fingers despite my care in avoiding them.

I cut it in half, according to the seller’s instructions, and scooped out the flesh like an avocado. The fruit is dotted with seeds like grape pips, which were too many to spit out but went down easily enough.

The fruit was mild and lacking acid, much like a honeydew melon. Next time, I’ll buy more than one and make them into an agua fresca, adding water, ice, lime juice, and a little sugar: a thirst-quenching drink, just what you hope a cactus would yield.

Impossibly Delicious

2010-10-05T17:33:00.000-07:00

A favorite dinner of my adolescence was squid and leeks in red wine, a recipe my dad found in Simple French Food by Richard Olney. It strikes me as a feat of creative genius, realizing that those three ingredients would make a succulent stew. Who would ever think?

So, when it came time to harvest my barrel of leeks, naturally I cooked them with squid and red wine. The dish, which simmers for hours, is a meltingly soft stew topped with buttery croutons. The baguette that didn’t become croutons will mop up the broth; the leftover red wine makes for perfect pairing.

The trick is to keep the dish at a bare simmer: you want to preserve enough liquid so the croutons have something to soak up, but cook it at a high enough temperature that the squid and leeks will soften to the butter stage. I’ve had trouble with this, despite the fact that I have two stoves to work with. One day I’ll hit upon the correct stove, the right setting, and the perfect pot; then squid and leeks will be a breeze.

Squid and Leeks in Red Wine

2 pounds squid, cleaned and sliced into rings

2 pounds leeks, the white and pale green parts cut into 2-inch lengths

1/4 cup olive oil

salt

2 tablespoons flour

1/8 teaspoon cayenne

1/2 teaspoon thyme

1/2 teaspoon marjoram

1 bay leaf

8 garlic cloves, cut into thin slices

2 cups red wine

1 cup water

croutons fried in butter until crisp

chopped parsley

In a heavy, low-sided earthenware or copper pot, simmer the leeks with salt until they are lightly browned. Turn them carefully to avoid breaking them. Set aside.

In the same pan, sauté the squid at a higher temperature until their liquid is nearly evaporated. Add flour and sauté for a minute, then add herbs, cayenne, and garlic. While stirring, slowly pour in the wine, then the water. Let come to a boil, and gently add the leeks back to the pot. Simmer, covered, for 2 hours.

Cover the surface of the stew with croutons, sprinkle on the parsley, and serve in the pot.

Breakfast de Reyes

2010-09-28T11:23:00.000-07:00

I was about 11 years old when my parents decided our family would celebrate Christmas in Loreto, Baja California. We drove down from Berkeley in a VW bus, spending our days traveling first along crowded, fast-moving California highways, then, south of the border, along desolate roads filled with potholes.

One morning after sleeping on the soft sand of the Baja desert, we drove to a breakfast spot that someone had read about in a guidebook. We ordered huevos rancheros from a shack that stood by itself among the cacti and rocks, and ate them at a table in the crystalline sunlight.

It was on that morning in the Baja desert that I first tasted white corn tortillas and grapefruit soda, and since then a meal of huevos rancheros has always felt like a celebration.

I have eaten many variations of huevos rancheros: eggs poached in salsa or fried; with beans, without; with cheese or not; tortillas made of corn or flour, fried or heated. The only essential ingredients are tortillas, eggs, and salsa.

But the tortillas and eggs are merely the medium; like many Mexican dishes, the salsa makes the dish, so it must be muy sabrosa. I served huevos rancheros this morning because I had leftover corn tortillas, black beans, and queso fresco. The salsa was Casa Sanchez’s mildly spicy roasted tomato — an excellent, locally made salsa worthy of huevos rancheros.

Eggettes

2010-09-21T09:37:00.000-07:00

A visit to Millbrae a few weeks ago introduced me to a new food: eggettes. The dish is a waffle cooked on an iron that forms the batter into little egg shapes. The trend comes from Hong Kong, so its appearance in the dim sum haven of Millbrae makes perfect sense.

The batter for eggettes is a simple egg, flour, sugar, and milk mixture and tastes appropriately eggy. Out of the iron, eggettes form a curled sheet; you tear off the egg shapes one by one and eat them plain.

Queue Up for Chocolate

2010-09-14T12:54:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we headed to the city for the annual Ghirardelli Square chocolate festival, a two-day tasting event that takes place on Beach Street next to Aquatic Park. It’s a benefit for Project Open Hand, but also a chance for local chocolate vendors to promote their products.

Here’s how it works: You buy a large ticket for $20 that has numbers 1 through 15 on it. Then you find a line and stand in it.

If you’re lucky, at the end of the line you’ll receive a mini chocolate tart topped with whipped cream and a blueberry. If not, you get frosting. Or six bits of chocolate with nothing to put them in. Each taste costs you a number, which the vendors cross off your card. If you arrive toward the end of the event, like we did, you have the added fun of trying to get all your numbers crossed off by the 5:00 p.m. deadline.

Some of the better tastes included a cup of Ghirardelli’s intense chocolate drink and the Tea Room’s chai-infused chocolate bar. Those tarts were good, too, but I don’t know who sold them because I was too busy grabbing and moving on to the next line.

It was a lovely, sunny day on the water after an arctic summer, so I was happy to be at the square. But if I want a square of Ghirardelli chocolate, I’d rather just buy it at the checkout line.

Cooking Peachy

2010-09-07T10:53:00.001-07:00

Peach pie is one of those foods I just don’t get. Cooking peaches destroys their delicious, fruity essence, so why ruin a batch of the fresh fruit by turning it into a pie?

Still, I have found one recipe that will lead me to sacrifice a peach to the oven: Lee Bailey’s peach cake. While the heat eliminates the peaches’ perfume, the peach-batter interface that results is so good it’s a worthwhile trade. The recipe produces something closer to a pudding than a cake, and its crisp, peach juice–enhanced top is to die for.

I have found good peaches at many markets, but the most reliably excellent ones are sold at the Alemany Farmers Market. I will drive up to city and fight the traffic early Saturday morning just to buy peaches from Regier Farms of Dinuba. I often buy a flat — enough that I’m willing to donate a few to the cake.

Incidentally, this recipe comes from Lee Bailey’s Soup Meals, whose soup recipes are ho-hum while its dessert recipes are fantastic.

Peach Pudding Cake

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/8 teaspoon salt

1 cup plus 3 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 cup softened butter

2 eggs

3 or 4 peaches, peeled and quartered

1 - 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice

Heat the oven to 350°. Butter an 8- or 9-inch springform pan. Combine the flour, baking powder and salt. Mix the 3 tablespoons of sugar and the cinnamon and set aside.

Cream the butter and the rest of the sugar well, and add eggs one at a time. Slowly add the flour mixture until well mixed, and spread the batter in the pan. Top with the peaches and sprinkle with the lemon juice, then coat with the sugar-cinnamon mixture.

Bake about an hour, until the cake is a dark golden color. Serve warm.

In Defense of Root Beer

2010-08-31T11:29:00.000-07:00

I took a rafting trip on the American River during the summer when wildfires raged over Northern California and smoke hung like a fog over half the state. We choked on the smoke all that 90-degree day down the river, with only warm, plastic-tasting water to quench our thirst.

So at the end of the trip, when one of the river guides produced a cooler filled with sodas on ice, I nearly cried with joy. I fished out a ginger ale to soothe my throat.

A group of Spaniards who had shared my raft were poring over the cooler. One picked out a root beer and brought it over to me. “Excuse me, is beer?” he asked. “Root beer,” I said, switching to Spanglish, “No es cerveza. Es soda — refresco.”

He opened it, took a sip, and made a face. His friends tried it and grimaced. “I think is for children, no?” he asked. “Of course not,” I said, starting to feel a little defensive. It was more soda than I wanted, but I grabbed a root beer just to show them. “Everyone drinks root beer.”

I then told them about root beer floats, trying to describe the glory of the classic American dessert-drink: the foam spilling over the top of the glass, the icy crunch that forms on the ball of vanilla ice cream, the creamy drink that remains once the ice cream is gone.

My adulations were lost on them. They looked at me blankly, then one blond Spaniard said that root beer tasted like “medicina del estómago” — stomach medicine — and the rest nodded.

But I had whetted my own appetite for root beer float. The last one I’d had was at a county fair, and it was a huge disappointment. The root beer had been warm, which caused the soft serve ice cream to melt immediately into a sickeningly sweet puddle.

So when I got home, I made up for it. I bought Dad’s root beer and Dreyer’s vanilla, chilling both well before joining them in float heaven. The root beer crust that formed on the vanilla ice cream ball had never been crunchier, the foam never so high. I showed those Spaniards.

Too Cute

2010-08-24T13:33:00.000-07:00

At the Redwood City farmers market last weekend I came across a bin full of tiny little purple-black eggplants, the variety that must have given the vegetable its name. I had no plans for cooking eggplant, but they were so adorable I couldn’t resist buying a bagful.

They sat around looking cute until the hot weather threatened to deflate them and I was forced to act. I found a promising recipe in Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian cookbook, a veritable encyclopedia of vegetable and bean recipes. The recipe was pickled eggplant in Sri Lankan style, and it specifically called for baby eggplant.

I was forced to change a few ingredients, as my local Asian supermarket was bizarrely bereft of lemongrass and I couldn’t bear to buy holy basil when I have five Italian basil plants going to seed in my backyard.

With these alterations it still made a fine accompaniment to a lunch of curried lentil stew. The cinnamon, according to my Sri Lankan brother-in-law, is an essential ingredient of Sri Lankan curries.

Pickled Eggplant in Sri Lankan Style

1 pound baby eggplants

salt

pepper

turmeric

oil for frying

1 cinnamon stick

small handful of basil leaves

half an onion, chopped fine

2 jalapeños, sliced

1 tablespoon ground brown mustard seeds

1 teaspoon cayenne pepper

2 teaspoons sugar

2 garlic cloves, peeled and pressed

2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh ginger

2 tablespoons vinegar

Slice the baby eggplants cross-wise and sprinkle with salt, pepper, and turmeric. Let them sit for half an hour, then pat them dry. Chop each slice into quarters.

Heat 2 tablespoons oil in a large frying pan and sauté the eggplant until it’s reddish-brown. Remove from the pan and drain.

Add more oil if needed; sauté the cinnamon stick for a minute, then add onion, jalapeños, and basil leaves. Fry until the onion is translucent. Let cool.

Mix the rest of the ingredients in a bowl and add the eggplant and onion mix. Let it sit overnight in the refrigerator. Serve cold or at room temperature.

Fishy Standards

2010-08-17T16:24:00.000-07:00

As I was wandering around Monterey’s Cannery Row this past weekend, I thought I’d pick up the most recent Seafood Watch pocket guide from the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

This little number, which outlines the best and worst seafood to eat (sustainability-wise, not taste-wise) is bound to catch you doing something wrong. Just when you thought wild-caught salmon was ecologically correct, you learn that’s true only if it was caught north of Cape Falcon, Oregon. And tuna is great choice, as long as it was fished off the coast of British Columbia with a pole.

When you’re at the market or in a restaurant, how are you to know if the mahi mahi is local, or if the salmon was truly caught wild in Alaska? You don’t, even if you ask and receive an answer: plenty of farmed salmon is being sold as wild, as The New York Times discovered.

The good news is that Dungeness crab, squid, sardines, sand dabs, tilapia, and rainbow trout—seafood that’s relatively cheap and available in the Bay Area—are all good choices. Plus, with these guys, you know what you’re getting.

Foraging

2010-08-10T11:54:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we headed up to Cazadero, near Guerneville, to pick up Alex from music camp. We didn’t know when he’d be performing, so we arrived what turned out to be 90 minutes early. I was prepared, though, because I know what can be found all over the coast range in August.

The highway leading to the camp is lined with blackberry bushes, and the berries were ripe. While waiting for the concert, I filled a container and a Ziploc bag. The next day I folded part of the berries into cake batter for a blackberry buckle (a cake with a crisp topping, like coffee cake).

I’ve found that blackberries don’t freeze well, but maybe I feel that way only because I know what a blackberry eaten warm off the vine tastes like. Perhaps if I had the opportunity to taste a freshly picked blueberry I’d cop the same attitude about the frozen variety.

At any rate, I can’t pick enough that I need to freeze them. After only an hour in the blackberry vines I look like I lost a wrestling match with a cat. Fortunately, an hour’s worth of picking produced enough berries for a cake and a pie.

North Coast Apple Country

2010-08-03T09:37:00.000-07:00

This past weekend found us in Gravenstein apple country, near Sebastopol, where farmers cultivate small orchards and sell apples out of their driveways. We turned on the advice of a sign and drove along a back road until we found a truck full of apples next to a hand-lettered sign.

Unlike many apple varieties, Gravensteins don’t require freezing during the winter, so they grow happily in our climate, and they do fine in the cooler coastal areas. They’re cute apples, too, with a vivid green background and red dashes running along the longitude.

We bought a 15-pound box of organic from the grower for $1 a pound. He had suffered a disappointing crop, but he was selling what he could. A fungus had invaded the orchard in the fall and thrived all through the rainy winter. The fungus left marks on the apples, which he called “scab,” which is easily cut off, but makes the fruit harder to sell.

I hardly cared about the scab; the tart Gravensteins are cooking apples. They turn to mush almost immediately unless they’re refrigerated, which means that they melt into smooth, delicious applesauce and rich pie filling. I have a busy week ahead of me.

Win Some, Lose Some

2010-07-27T21:59:00.000-07:00

I planted zucchini this year — just one plant, but of course it’s producing pounds each week. I don’t even like zucchini, but the teenager makes a couple of recipes that include it, so I thought I’d be a supportive mom and provide him with a supply of squash.

I’m finding, though, that if I harvest the zucchini early, when they’re 4 to 6 inches long, they’re less bitter and watery than their larger cousins. Chopped, they make a nice veggie saute along with corn kernels and tomatoes. Sliced, they’re great in a frittata. And when I miss a day of harvesting and they grow too large, I make zucchini bread.

I made four mini loaves for my first match in my tennis league. I lost the match, but my bread won, receiving praise and multiple requests for the recipe. It’s modified from The Victory Garden Cookbook, a lifesaver for gardeners.

The difference between this and other zucchini bread recipes is that the squash is salted and squeezed of its moisture, making it more like bread and less like pudding.

1 pound zucchini

1-3/4 cups flour

1 cup whole-wheat flour

1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

3 eggs

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup canola oil

rind of 1 lemon, grated

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup chopped walnuts

Grate the zucchini, salt it well, toss it in a colander, and let it drain for about 30 minutes.

Combine the flours, baking powder, soda, and cinnamon. In another bowl, beat the eggs, then add the sugar, oil, lemon, and vanilla.

When the zucchini is ready, combine the wet and dry ingredients. Squeeze out all the moisture you can from the zucchini and add it to the batter along with the walnuts.

Bake in a greased bread pan (or four mini loaf pans) at 350 degrees for about an hour (about 40 minutes for the mini loaves). When the bread is done, it will have a golden brown top, and a toothpick inserted into the center will come out clean. Let the bread cool before you slice it.

Ugly but Delish

2010-07-20T20:50:00.000-07:00

During a family trip to the mountains with a pile of teenagers, we were faced with two challenges: 1) bringing enough food and 2) finding protein that would keep well. With only coolers and block ice providing refrigeration, and the closest store a harrowing 45-minute drive away, we needed to plan ahead.

Ham and cheese are obvious choices, but my folks came up with something better: Grandma Jennie’s pickled beef tongue. The vinegar helps preserve the tongue, and it’s a sizable piece of meat that feeds a crowd, even when five are teens who’ve spent their morning hauling wood.

The pickled tongue made excellent sandwiches, with nothing more than mayo on sourdough.

Grandma Jennie’s Pickled Tongue

Cover one beef tongue with water and boil until barely tender. Remove from the liquid and immerse in cold water. Save boiling liquid. When the tongue is cool enough to handle, skin it and cut out fat.

To the liquid add 3/4 cup red wine vinegar, 1 tablespoon pickling spices, and a handful of fresh oregano. Simmer for 15 minutes. Let the liquid cool and pour it over the tongue. Set it in a covered bowl in the refrigerator. It’ll be ready in about a week.

Taking a Break

2010-07-13T11:41:00.000-07:00

I am on vacation this week. I uploaded the photo below because I can't imagine using it for any other post.

A Slice of America

2010-07-06T16:04:00.000-07:00

Every year, the owners of Black Butte River Ranch, deep in the mountains of eastern Mendocino County, hold a bluegrass concert and pig roast for the Fourth of July. The owners, former Oakland denizens, invite their Bay Area friends to camp on the land and host the ’cue. But many of the guests are locals: backwoods hippies who reek of pot — growing marijuana is the local industry — and dance stoned in front of the bands.

My parents have a cabin on the mountain above the store, so I and seven other members of the Erickson clan were up there for the long weekend. On Saturday, after a swim in the Eel River, we headed to the party. While kegs of beer (pay what you can afford) offered other mind-altering avenues, the focus of the gathering was the pig. It was certainly our reason, besides people watching, for attending.

The pig was rotating above a fuel-fed wood fire on a makeshift spit: a metal garbage can cut in half housed the logs while a bicycle wheel provided the turning mechanism. A clamp kept the animal fastened to the spit. By the time we arrived, Porky was sporting a lovely golden-brown hue and was unloading streams of grease into the fire.

As other guests wandered by to view the turning beast, I approached the head cook to ask about his techniques. Normally, I can’t get chefs to stop talking about their craft, but this guy wasn’t giving me anything. I finally realized why: this is barbecue, and I’m not a dude. So I sent my dad over, and he got the 411. The 80-pound pig, purchased in Oakland from J&M Meat Company, was stuffed with onions and garlic, salted and peppered, and placed on the spit at 10 that morning.

A little after 8 p.m., the cooking crew decided Porky was done and pulled it off the fire. While they sliced the pig until it was a pile of glistening white meat, we lined up along with the campers, hippies, and other locals. We loaded our plates ($10 suggested donation) with tri-tip, chicken, beans, green salad, and, of course, pork, which was as succulent as we hoped. Stuffed, we headed back up the mountain and crawled into our sleeping bags.

When Fruit Falls off the Tree, Make a Tart

2010-06-29T16:44:00.000-07:00

Last night, while minding my own business in my own living room, a neighbor knocked on the door and handed me a shopping bag filled with Santa Rosa plums. I believe these plums, a consequence of his backyard tree, were in retaliation for all the cucumbers I foisted on him last summer.

But they were gorgeous, deep-purple plums, their skins almost bursting with juice. I set them on the kitchen counter, where the warmth of the evening lifted their fragrance, begging me to eat them or turn them into pastry.

So pastry they became. I have a list of pies and cakes that I must make every year when the appropriate fruit is ripe, and plums demand that I make plomukaka, or purple plum tart. This recipe, from Beatrice Ojakangas’s The Great Scandinavian Baking Book, is too easy. The butter for both the crust and the filling need not be hard-cold, but it should not be soft.

Dough

1/3 cup sugar

1/2 cup butter

1-1/2 cups flour

2 tablespoons ice water

Filling

1 pound fresh plums, cut into quarters and pitted

1/4 cup butter

1/2 cup flour

1/3 cup brown sugar

Preheat oven to 425°. For the dough, combine the flour and sugar, then cut in the butter into the flour mixture until it resembles cornmeal. Quickly stir in the water and form into a ball. Roll out into a 12-inch circle and place the pastry inside a 10-inch tart pan with a removable bottom. Turn the edges over so the rim is double thickness.

Arrange the plum quarters, skin side up, over the dough. Combine the remaining ingredients until well blended, but still crumb-like, and sprinkle over the plums. Bake for 20 or 25 minutes, until the crust is golden brown. Cool slightly; serve while it’s still warm.

Visual Appeal

2010-06-22T21:32:00.000-07:00

Ever since I wrote an article about the baking competition at the San Mateo County Fair, I’ve been meaning to enter a cake, a loaf of bread, or a plate of cookies. I tasted the goodies along with the judges, and I think I could give the winners a run for their money. But here’s what holds me back: I can’t make anything look pretty. While taste is the most important factor, cuteness counts, too.

My pies are always dripping juice, my cakes break apart when I try to ease them out of the pan, and my breads come out lopsided. They look appetizing in a rustic, homemade sort of way, but they’re not for show.

The cookies sitting inside the glass cabinets at this year’s fair were adorable, and way beyond my capabilities. I’m thinking I’ll start next year with a quick bread — if there’s no frosting or cutting involved I might do okay.

King of Wraps

2010-06-15T16:26:00.000-07:00

When I’m buying plants for my garden, I always seem to forget a rather obvious fact: plants grow. And so during the summer I am in a constant battle to keep my grapevine from taking over the neighbor’s tree. It didn’t take me long, however, to realize that I can eat the detritus of this particular conflict.

The last few summers I’ve used the leaves as wrappers for dolmas. Once boiled, the fresh leaves become the perfect wrapping material: pliable but firm, they encase the filling and stay in neat little packages with no need for toothpicks or string. They have a lovely sour, almost lemony, edge that’s lost in the pickled leaves you'll find in a jar.

This year I wanted to use them in something besides dolmas, so I conducted a search on grape leaf recipes. I couldn’t find anything that used the leaves in a stew or a sauté. I could think of two reasons for this: 1) no one in the history of grape farming has ever thought to cook the leaves in that way or 2) people have thought of it but realized it was a bad idea.

I figured the latter was more likely, so I went with a recipe for grape leaf–wrapped rock cod. I wrapped chunks of cod in two layers of leaves and broiled them for a few minutes. The leaves charred, but the fish inside was tender and had taken on a smoky, woodsy flavor.

So maybe grape leaves’ use is limited to wrapping, but it’s a trick they do very well.

Junk in All Its Glory

2010-06-08T11:53:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we decided to celebrate the warm weather’s late arrival with a trip to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. I’ve been going to the boardwalk for 30-plus years, and the thing I love best about it is that it hasn’t gentrified one iota.

This fact is most obvious in the boardwalk’s menu. While the Bay Area and Santa Cruz have gone organic, wholesome, or at least tasteful, boardwalk food remains steadfastly junk. About the most healthful item you can buy are garlic fries (just look at all that parsley!). Most of the food is appallingly fat-ridden, calorie-rich, and lacking nutrients: slushes, corn dogs, fish and chips, deep-fried artichokes, cotton candy. Even the latest additions—deep-fried cheesecake and Dippin’ Dots—respect the genre.

Not that I’m complaining. A good chocolate-dipped soft-serve cone is a thing of beauty. And a funnel cake with the works will actually sate a teenage boy—definitely worth the hour’s drive on a twisty road.

Diving for Pearls

2010-06-01T21:10:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I stepped inside a grocery store in Santa Rosa’s Southern Asian neighborhood. Prowling around for something fun to take home, I spied a package of black tapioca pearls and purchased them.

These chewy little balls of tapioca (themselves made of cassava flour) are, of course, the essence of pearl tea. I like pearl tea, especially milk tea—iced black tea with milk—but it’s always served so sweet I don’t order it often. Now that I had access to the pearls, I figured I’d make my own pearl milk tea and sweeten it as I like.

I boiled the pearls according to the oddly translated directions on the package (“stir softly”) and concocted a glass of Earl Grey pearl milk tea. It tasted great, but after chasing the pearls around with a spoon, I realized the drink was missing a crucial ingredient. The fat straw that allows you to suck up the pearls — creating that thrilling POP when the pearl lands in your mouth — is what makes the drink so fun. Scooping them out with a spoon just didn’t cut it. Now on the shopping list: fat straws. I have a whole bag of pearls to use up.

Homecoming

2010-05-25T11:50:00.000-07:00

For decades, Nordic House, purveyor of many things Scandinavian, operated out of a crowded store on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. It stood in an impossible location adjacent to a freeway overpass but nowhere near an exit, and I invariably became lost trying to find the place.

So I was pleased to learn that the store was moving to San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. It’s much easier to find, and it’s closer to my folks’ house, which means I’m nearby more often. Then I received a coupon giving me 10 percent off my first purchase at the new store.

Nordic House makes much of its own goods, such as curry, sour cream, and regular pickled herring; rullepølse, a sort of pastrami made with lamb, pork, or beef; meatballs; cucumber salad; and potato sausage. It also carries blueberry soup mix, which I make double-strength and use as a syrup for waffles; Swedish brown beans; canned reindeer meat; lutefisk; fish paste in toothpaste tubes (though lately they’ve had a hard time importing the best of the bunch, smoked herring); all varieties of Scandinavian cheeses; lefse (Norwegian soft bread made with potatoes); flatbreads; lingonberries; cookies; and mjölkchoklad, fantastic milk chocolate from Sweden.

For us Scandinavians, even third-generation, it’s all to die for. I filled up my basket and forked over $70, even with the discount. Then I went out to my car to find I’d received a $40 parking ticket. The pickled herring (plain) was worth it.

Spiny Dining

2010-05-18T14:42:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I traveled to Stockton via the delta, wetlands that years ago were fashioned into a maze of sloughs and islands. These islands, rich with peat from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, provide some of the most fertile farmland in California, producing huge quantities of asparagus, strawberries, and other crops.

Naturally, we had to stop at a roadside farm stand, where we purchased some of that asparagus and strawberries, as well as pads of the prickly pear cactus, or nopales. These fall into the “whatever made people try to eat this vegetable?” category, along with thistle and fungi.

But as Mexican cooks well know, nopales, once rid of their spines, are hardly famine-only fare. They have a slightly tart flavor reminiscent of green beans and a pleasantly firm texture.

I’ve eaten nopales before, but had never prepared them. Scraping off the needles seemed easy enough, except that I didn’t think to wear gloves, and the spines have a way of leaping off the pads and stabbing you in the finger. Once they were tamed, julienned, and boiled, I tossed the nopales strips into a salad with roasted red pepper, tomatoes, avocado, pickled jalapeños, and feta, loving their firm-but-squishy texture.

Alex, who woke up to find nopales in the kitchen and ask, “Cactus for breakfast?” had me thinking they’d make a fine omelet.

Chocolate Science

2010-05-11T14:28:00.000-07:00

For several years now I’ve been cultivating a hypothesis that baking soda corrupts chocolate. I’ve noticed that brownies, cakes, and cookies made with baking soda or powder (which contains baking soda) have a bitter edge and less chocolate taste than those without. I’ve never liked chocolate layer cake (which uses baking soda to make it rise), though I adore chocolate torts (whose rising agent is egg whites), and in my mind Oreos are an abomination—chocolate in color only.

In keeping with the principles I learned in Mr. Freeman’s seventh-grade science class, I conducted an experiment. I made a batch of brownies from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Chocolate Desserts—her West Coast Brownies, as I am on the West Coast and it was the only brownie recipe that included baking soda.

To avoid variances in ingredients, mixing, and baking times, I made a single batch of brownies up to the point of adding the flour. I divided the batter in two using a scale, and added flour, baking soda, and salt to one batch; flour and salt only to the other. I baked them in a single jelly roll pan, divided in the middle with aluminum foil. A green sticky note, which went from the mixing bowl to the pan to one side of the oven, noted which was the baking soda side.

When I pulled the pan out of the oven, I saw that the baking soda batch was darker and riddled with pockmarks—which had me panicked that I had gotten the sides mixed up, as I figured the soda side would look nicer. But after I cut the cakes into individual brownies, it was obvious I hadn’t, as the soda brownies had risen higher. They also held together better than the soda-free brownies.

The taste test, conducted by family members present at baking time, determined that the baking soda brownies were more bitter and had an unpleasant baking soda aftertaste. The soda-free brownies were yummier, with a more prominent chocolate flavor.

My hypothesis about soda was correct: It does interfere with chocolate. But I think the amount of flour may play a larger role. My favorite chocolate brownies, which contain a third of the flour, are much better than either of the experiment batch.

One thing is certain: More research is needed.

Garden Limits

2010-05-04T21:30:00.000-07:00

In May my gardening smugness changes to wistfulness. It’s planting month for summer crops — tomatoes, squash, corn, beans, melons, peppers, and eggplant. These vegetables start taking root now, if they haven’t received a head start on sunny windowsills. But our temperate climate, which allows me to grow crops all through the winter, is a tad too cool for some of summer’s best.

In San Mateo I can grow tomatoes, which won’t produce in many neighborhoods of San Francisco. Beans perform well, as do zucchini (where don’t they?), pumpkins, and jalapeño peppers. Not so for corn, melons, bell peppers, and eggplant. As much as I’d like to pick my entire ingredient list for ratatouille from my garden, or bite into corn boiled less than a minute after it was picked, I can’t.

I also can’t grow those lovely green, yellow, and striped heirloom tomatoes that crowd the farmers market tables in August. My garden harbors a fungus causing any tomato plant that isn’t disease-resistant to whither and die. But plain-vanilla tomatoes, ripened on the vine, are still really, really good.

Backyard Caldo

2010-04-27T15:45:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago, my housecleaner, Francisca, stopped me as I was clearing out of the house. It was 7:45 a.m., and my Spanish isn’t what it used to be, but I tried hard to concentrate, listening for words I recognized such as “sábanas (sheets),” “vacuum,” or “Comet.” I heard none of these, but I did catch the phrase “sopa de pollo.” Chicken soup?

Francisca led me into the backyard, to my sugar pea plot. Fingering the delicate, new shoots, my Guatemala-born housecleaner explained that the leaves make a tasty chicken soup. I’ve had pea shoots stir-fried, but for the first time I sampled the young pea shoots raw. They’re tender and sweet, tasting mildly of sugar peas. It’s no surprise that birds will eat the plants down to their stems if I don’t cover them. As the plant matures, the older leaves grow tough and bitter, and I no longer have to worry about protecting them.

I hesitated to take Francisca’s suggestion, as I so love sugar peas, I was loath to steal any shoots and curb the plants’ production. But now the peas are nearly spent, so there was no harm last night in plucking leaves from the few remaining shoots of new growth.

I made a classic caldo—a popular Central American soup of chunks of vegetables and meat in a simple broth—and tossed the pea leaves in at the last minute. Barely cooked, they remained sweet, fragrant, and pleasantly chewy. We improved the broth with Meyer lemons, as that’s what’s in the backyard, and Iguana golden habañero pepper sauce, which has been sitting in the pantry since it appeared in a stocking Christmas morning. Both were great additions.

Caldo de Francisca

1-1/2 quarts chicken stock
6 chicken thighs
1 chopped onion
6 small potatoes, cut in half
1 zucchini, cut into large chunks
1 large carrot, peel and sliced into large coins
2 ears corn, broken into sections
a handful of young sugar pea leaves

Bring the stock to a boil and add chicken thighs. Simmer 10 minutes, skimming off any foam. Add vegetables and simmer another 10 minutes. Add pea leaves and simmer another minute. Serve in large bowls with warmed tortillas, lime or lemon wedges, and hot sauce.

Green Chile Covers the Southwest

2010-04-20T15:33:00.000-07:00

While traveling with my friend Laury in Colorado and New Mexico last week, I kept encountering “green chile” on menus. The references confused me: Steaks, enchiladas, burritos, and hamburgers were all said to be served with green chile (always mentioned in the singular), frequently “smothered” in this green chile. How can a single green chile smother a steak? And why would it want to?

I finally realized that “green chile” is a sauce, not a vegetable. Rather, it’s a sauce prepared from the vegetable. New Mexican chiles, close relations to Anaheims, are charred, steamed, peeled, and chopped, then stewed with onions, spices, and bits of pork to make a thin sauce. Red chile, sometimes offered as an alternative to green chile, is made from the same variety: Allowed to ripen, the chiles are dried, ground, and formed into a sauce. The heat level of either color can vary, as it does with chiles, depending on the climate, the individual plant, its ripeness, and whether seeds and membranes are removed.

I’m told that in the Mountain West, burritos are never served wrapped in foil—they are always prone, sauced with red or green chile. A green chile cheeseburger can wear a bun or a sauce-soaked flour tortilla. Green chile stew is simply green chile with chopped potatoes. Chile tops French fries, grilled chicken, vegetables, and eggs. If you order something and the server asks “Red or green?” he or she is talking about the sauce. If you answer “Christmas,” you’ll get both.

Laury’s green chile recipe

8 fresh chiles (Anaheim, if you can’t find New Mexican)

2 tablespoons veggie oil

1 chopped onion

2 pounds trimmed boneless pork shoulder, cut into 1/2-inch pieces

1 tablespoon flour

1 tsp ground cumin

3 garlic cloves, finely chopped

4 cups chicken stock

Char the chiles over a gas flame, grill, or broiler until blacked. Steam them in paper bag 10 minutes, then peel, seed, and chop. Heat a saucepan over medium heat; add oil and onion and sauté until soft. Add pork and cook until the juices evaporate and the pork browns, stirring, about 20 minutes. Sprinkle with flour and stir until incorporated. Add chopped chiles, cumin, and garlic, sauté 5 minutes. Add stock and simmer one hour, stirring occasionally. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Your Fig Bar Is So Stale...

2010-04-12T19:49:00.000-07:00

My sister Anna recently turned me on to the Facebook group Your Mom Is So Berkeley. It includes a multitude of hilarious posts about the singular experience of growing up in Berkeley during the 1960s and 1970s. Reading it I learned that my family wasn’t the only one that tossed out its television, bought used clothes at Value Village, and spent summer vacations camping in a VW bus.

A surprising number of the posts are about food. My fellow citizens complain about brownies made with carob (considered more healthful than chocolate), powdered milk (it was cheap, because you can’t really be a hippie if you have money), and a ban on grapes (in support of the United Farm Workers boycott).

The food posts are notable, because long before the Gourmet Ghetto sprang up on its north side, Berkeley had a thing about food. This first food revolution wasn’t about taste, though. We ate as we did for spiritual, political, and health reasons: Eating flesh resulted in bad karma. Raising cattle for meat contributed to world hunger. White bread made you sluggish.

The Berkeley Co-op—a worker- and shopper-owned grocery store that opened in 1939 and lasted until 1988—became a center of this movement. The cooperative wasn’t just a politically correct concept, it also stocked politically correct food. The grocery chain lowered itself to carry such items as sugary cereals, but it marked them with a red tag noting their high sugar, salt, or fat content. The Co-op offered bulk food, of course; my dad never failed to stop at the bin filled with whole-wheat fig bars, the only store-bought cookies readily available in our house. We always shopped at the Co-op, and always gave our member number (21821), but never in my memory received a dividend.

The early food revolution spawned a couple of highly successful cookbooks, Laurel’s Kitchen and Diet for a Small Planet. Both books, born in Berkeley in the 1970s, offered a full suite of vegetarian recipes. But they were also, or even more so, about the authors’ political and spiritual journeys. Each book dedicates as least as much ink to personal growth and preaching as it does to cooking.

We have moved past those hippie days, but the 1970s food revolution never quite died. It simply acquired a sense of taste. Chez Panisse, the pre-eminent Berkeley restaurant that arguably launched the Gourmet Ghetto, features organic, locally produced foods not only because they taste better, but because it’s good for the environment. My hometown is still eating its way to a better world.

The Good Friday Baking Curse

2010-04-06T11:22:00.000-07:00

On Good Friday, following a centuries-old European tradition, I make hot cross buns. They’re simple sweet rolls dotted with currants, scented with cinnamon, and topped with an X of vanilla icing. The recipe is really a no-brainer, but almost every year something goes wrong.

Frequently the buns mysteriously fail to rise; other years I can’t get the consistency of the icing right — either it adheres to the buns in globs or it melts into a shiny coating. I’ve overproofed the dough so it exhausts itself in the first rising and has nothing left for the second; I’ve undercooked them so they’re still raw inside.

This year, I left them in the oven too long, and they produced a hard, chewy crust — great for sourdough bread, not for a sweet roll.

The curse of Good Friday haunts my baking, yet still I try for a decent batch of hot cross buns. It’s a tradition, after all.

Radish Fail

2010-03-30T07:33:00.000-07:00

Last October I sowed radish seeds in a half-barrel, and, being radishes, they sprouted immediately and grew quickly. Through December and January I plucked a few here and there. They came in a rainbow of colors — magenta, purple, pink, and white — and added a crisp bite to my navel orange and mixed lettuce salad.

But things changed in February. I set out to pull a couple for crudités and found that the radishes still standing in the barrel had turned into a mini-forest: They had grown over a foot tall, with wooden stems like little tree trunks — too hard even to cut with a knife. The colorful roots were bulging out of the soil, overgrown and misshapen, some of them split open.

I had left them too long. But I had a flash of brilliance. Remembering an article in Saveur about a cooking class featuring roasted radishes, I decided to bake the little devils. They may be woody and overgrown, but 45 minutes in the oven would render them tender and delicious — like beets, I reasoned.

I sawed off their stems, cleaned them up and baked them along with potatoes and chicken for dinner. Only upon sitting down to eat did I find that woody raw radishes, when cooked, become woody cooked radishes. There was no saving them.

But now I was curious about roasted radishes, so I purchased a few bunches and baked them. Sweet, juicy, and mild, with a texture not unlike baked beets, they were a great addition to a table of finger foods. Next year I’ll be sure to harvest them more aggressively.

Cherimoya: Animal or Vegetable?

2010-03-23T11:32:00.000-07:00

I indulged myself in California smugness recently when I bought a cherimoya at the farmers market. Only in our geographically diverse state do we enjoy such a vast selection of fruit, from tropical cherimoyas to mountain-loving pears.

The farmer had brought them up from Santa Barbara, where it’s warm enough to cultivate the fruit. Cherimoyas originated in the mid-elevation Andes; they can’t handle temperatures much below freezing, but they don’t like sultry weather either. They prefer the climate in Southern California, like so many humans.

With its round shape and markings reminiscent of scales, the cherimoya looks like a pangolin, a mammal related to the anteater, especially when it’s curled into a defensive position or taking a nap. The pangolin wouldn’t eat a cherimoya if it found one, and not because it might think the fruit was Uncle Frank: The pangolin eats insects.

California cherimoyas are in season in the spring. You’ll likely find them when they’re firm: Two or three days at room temperature softens them to their delicious, most edible state, when the fruit feels like a ripe avocado. If you want to keep them longer, store them in the fridge while they’re still hard.

Choose cherimoyas that are green rather than brown, have no cracks and are not overly soft. Cut the cherimoya in half and scoop out the flesh, avoiding the seeds, which release a poison when they’re crushed. I ate my first cherimoya with a spoon, right out of its own skin-bowl. It tasted a little like a pear with a tropical perfume.

A subsequent cherimoya became an agua fresca:

Flesh from 1 cherimoya

Juice from half a lime

2 teaspoons sugar

1/2 cup crushed ice

1/2 cup water

Blend until smooth.

Mission District Bakery Secret Revealed

2010-03-16T14:42:00.000-07:00

Years ago, when we first moved to the north slope of Bernal Heights, near San Francisco’s Mission District, I started frequenting the panaderías on 24th Street. I tried a couple different bakeries and a variety of pastries, but as enticing as they looked in the window, invariably I found them stale, some to the point of needing a chisel.

I gave up on the panaderías, but one day after I had promised toddler Alex a treat, we passed a window showcasing rainbow sprinkle–covered cupcakes, and he had to have one. As I knew he wouldn’t much care about freshness—he would declare his cupcake delicious as long as it was brightly colored and sugary—inside we went. But this time, I realized the mistake I had made on previous visits.

Other customers were grabbing trays and tongs at the checkout counter and heading into the back of the store. We followed them and found ourselves in the bakery kitchen. There, workers were loading baking sheets directly from the oven onto carts, and customers were filling their trays with these freshly baked goodies. Fortunately, sprinkled cupcakes were on the day’s menu, so we grabbed one, plus a few sweet rolls, and brought our tray back to the checkout counter.

They were delicate and delicious, as to be expected from pastries that had just left the oven. The window pastries are for display only. Now I know.

The Sissy Drinker's Drink

2010-03-09T13:20:00.000-08:00

White wine has turned on me. I used to drink it, like normal people, with poached fish and roast chicken. But lately every white wine of my acquaintance has become vinegar. I find it undrinkably acidic with a harsh aftertaste. My poor husband has tried everything—cheap bottles, expensive labels, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin Blanc. Alas, the only whites I can tolerate now are sweet dessert wines.

I have been reduced to mixing white wine with fizzy water—yes, it’s called a spritzer—which renders it potable. A spritzer is embarrassingly passé, so I can’t bring myself to order it in a bar or at a party. And, honestly, I don’t love it. But it’s more interesting than plain water, easier to swallow than fizzy water, and it contains about the right level of alcohol for a lightweight like me. I drink it in the privacy of my own home.

Once I resigned myself to spritzer drinking, I realized I didn’t have to limit it to white wine. Red wine and fizzy water is an interesting drink: it’s like a very dry soda—or a very dry, plain sangria. So I decided that if I’m going to water down my wine, I’ll do it in style. Sangria is my ideal drink: it appeals to my sweet tooth, I can drink two whole glasses without falling asleep, and my palate loves the tannins supplied by the red wine.

For a quick sangria, I’ll mix roughly equal parts red wine, fizzy water, and orange juice. Fresh-squeezed is obviously much better than the supermarket carton variety. The type of wine will change the nature of the drink, but as long as it’s a decent one, it’ll work. For a more sophisticated sangria, one un-muddied by juice, use sugar (a quarter cup–plus per bottle of wine) for sweetener; a quarter cup of brandy will round out the flavor.

Adding slices of lemon or orange, especially if you let them soak, will add a bitter edge as well as visual appeal. Apple slices are also cute, and delicious once they’ve absorbed the drink.

Once the Goose Is Cooked

2010-03-02T11:11:00.000-08:00

In Christmases past, my dad has sent me home with a jar of goose fat, which I invariably neglect to use up. It gets lost behind the milk and the beer, and when I find it again, it’s starting to smell rancid. This time, we hosted Christmas, so for the last two months a large container of fat—one goose will drip off more than a quart—has been taking up space in our fridge.

Because it’s is in my face every time I open the refrigerator, and because we paid for the goose (more than $70 for organic, free-range, etc.), I have been much better about adding the fat to my cooking repertoire.

Goose fat is fairly soft, even at 40 degrees Fahrenheit. My tub of fat, which I poured directly out of the roasting pan and didn’t strain, has a meaty, goosey smell. It melts immediately when I throw a spoonful into a pan and, unlike butter, can take high temperatures. I experimented with using it in a variety of dishes, substituting it for butter, olive oil and lard.

Bean stew After sweating the vegetables in the fat, then adding meat, spices, tomato and stock, I couldn’t taste the difference between olive oil and goose fat, but the stew did have a pleasant, silky texture a little like that of gumbo.

Buttermilk biscuits I cut the fat into whole-wheat pastry flour, then stirred in the buttermilk. The result were fluffy biscuits with a hint of meatiness—excellent.

Fried eggs Eggs cooked in goose fat are fairly bland. Salted butter really is the way to go with eggs.

Sauteed kale I like kale better with olive oil, as the olive gives it a slightly bitter edge.

Hash browns Goose fat and olive oil are both good with potatoes, but the best was a combination—a hint of meat, a dab of bitterness.

Pie crust I mixed goose fat with chilled palm-kernel oil (which is solid at room temperature) to make crust for a pumpkin pie. The flavor was great—like a crust made from leaf lard—but it was crumbly and tender rather than flaky.

Heaven in a Can

2010-02-23T10:59:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, my dad had a kind of mental block about cat food. He could never remember to check whether he needed to buy it, so he always bought more just in case. It got to the point where there were cans and cans of cat food spilling out of a cabinet.

Coconut milk is my cat food. For the past couple of years, whenever I’ve come across a can of coconut milk, I’ve bought it. I happen to love coconut, so while there may not have been anyone at home yowling for lack of it, I feel there must always be at least one can in the house. Because my use of coconut milk had been fairly limited—amounting to little more than coconut ice cream and Thai curries—these cans multiplied until nearly an entire pantry shelf was devoted to coconut milk.

Then, one morning while making muffins, I found I didn’t have enough milk. Searching the pantry for a can of the evaporated variety, I noticed the coconut milk and decided to add some to the batter. It was just a small portion of the recipe, so I didn’t detect any difference in flavor, but it gave me some ideas.

I made a batch of pancakes with coconut milk, which came out rich and tropical-tasting. I poured some over day-old pound cake to moisten it and discovered it’s even better for this purpose than whipped cream or ice cream. I stirred some into cooked rice to add an instant Caribbean touch to dinner. I drowned chocolate chips in the milk and ate the classic combo with a spoon.

But the best use of all was in coconut lattes. Equal parts strong coffee and gently heated coconut milk, plus a touch of sugar, was heaven in a mug.

As for those cans for cat food, eventually my dad remembered he had purchased too much and stopped buying it altogether. So, of course, we ran out of cat food and had to hear about it from the cats for days. My resolve is to keep buying coconut milk—and continue using it up.

All the Food of the World

2010-02-16T15:42:00.000-08:00

In the Gold Country town of Jackson stands one of the world’s great used bookstores. Hein & Co. possesses an appropriately dusty smell, two portly cats who curl up on the furniture, and more than 650,000 volumes (including 11 copies of Moby Dick).

The second story is a maze of bookshelves — the store posts maps to help you find the various subjects, and numbers hanging from the ceiling let you know if you’ve found them. But it’s really not that difficult: you know you’re in the romance section when you encounter a pink-hued wall of paperback spines, the classics when the books are mostly cloth-bound. Anyway, getting lost in a bookstore is never a bad thing.

Several years ago we stayed in Jackson during a ski trip. A walk along Main Street brought us to the bookstore, and a few hours later, not even realizing night had fallen, we stumbled out, having spent $150 on books — used books, mind you. A few of them were volumes in the Time-Life Foods of the World series, The Cooking of Italy and Middle Eastern Cooking. These were the start of my collection.

The series, published in the 1970s and now out of print, includes 18 volumes on international cuisines, nine on regional American cooking, and one on wines and liquor. When they were new, the books came in a boxed set: a hard-bound volume filled with photographs, recipes, and text on the nature and history of the cuisine, and a spiral-bound notebook containing only recipes.

The quality of the recipes varies, from well-tuned (gravlax, The Cooking of Scandinavia) to problematic (deep-fried shrimp, sweet potato and squash cakes, Pacific and Southeast Asian Cooking). But I didn’t buy them for the recipes, and I didn’t bother with the notebooks. The books provide a treasure of food history, which I use to inform my restaurant reviews.

After purchasing that first pair, I started noticing them in used bookstores around the Bay Area and began collecting. I carried a list with me and crossed them off as I found them. When I had gathered about half the set, I thought about ordering the rest online, but it felt like cheating; besides, scouring used bookstores was so much more fun. Some friends found a few of the series for me and in return received a meal made from the recipes.

Finally, I lacked only The Cooking of the British Isles and The Cooking of Vienna’s Empire of the international series, and these proved difficult to find. (For some reason I can’t possibly fathom, Scandinavia always seemed to be on sale.) My collection did not grow at all for a few years.

We returned to Jackson last weekend, ostensibly to ski, though we spent more time at Hein & Co. than in the snow. And there, at last, I found the final two volumes. Though I wasn’t focusing on the American series, I picked up nearly all of them, too. I now lack only the New England volume. But there’s no hurry: clambake season is several months away.

The Bunny Butcher

2010-02-09T11:27:00.000-08:00

A few years ago my husband got on a paella kick. In my Time-Life book The Cooking of Spain and Portugal, he read up on traditional paella, which is cooked over a fire. He start grilling it in an open Weber, and the result was an excellent dish enhanced by mesquite smoke and the cachet of outdoor cooking.

But grilling wasn’t enough. Mark decided if he was to make truly traditional paella, it would need to include rabbit. It was late summer and the San Mateo County Fair, whose grounds lie less than a mile from our house, was in full swing. As we wandered through the animal cages, we spotted some bunnies — “meat rabbits” their cages said. Raised by kids in the 4-H club, the rabbits were to be auctioned off at the end of the fair.

Aha! We would bid on some rabbits, have our traditional paella, and help out the 4-H Club all at once. We peered at the bunnies and picked out the tastiest-looking. Perhaps it should have surprised me that I could both appreciate their cuteness and imagine how good they’d be in a paella pan, but it didn’t.

I set out on the Saturday morning scheduled for the auction and signed in for a card with a number. After dozens of pigs (the auction was running late), it was time for rabbits. A pre-teen girl in the white pants and shirt and green necktie uniform of 4-H herded her three white bunnies on a bale of hay while the bidding started. The price quickly rose to $375 for the trio. Then a curly-haired boy of about 8 sold one rabbit for $300. These prices were more than I could afford, but the bunnies were grand champions, so I thought maybe I’d get a better deal with some of the lesser rabbits.

I looked around at the audience. The bunny bidders looked like grandparents, mostly, as well as local business owners looking for write-offs and some press. I started to doubt that any of these rabbits ever came close to a knife. I flipped through the auction program and read that while pigs, cows, chickens, and turkeys are sent to a butcher, the rabbits are “processed” by the kid who raised them. So if I bid on a rabbit for paella, that cute curly-haired boy would have to kill and skin his own bunny? This was starting to seem like a really bad idea.

The prices did drop, though the cheapest rabbit still went for $100. I was willing to pay a good price for the meat to help support 4-H, but there was no way I was going to ask a kid to kill a bunny he’d raised. Needless to say, I left the auction rabbit-less. Later we learned that meat rabbits are usually donated back to the youth exhibitor — that is, pardoned and kept as pets.

Non-kid-raised supermarket rabbits cost about $12 a pound, or $30 a carcass, which now strikes me as a great bargain.

In the Land of Artichokes

2010-02-02T13:54:00.000-08:00

On our way back from a memorial service in Monterey this weekend, we drove north along the bay, first by seaside towns and sand dunes, then through fields of artichokes shrubs, their silver-green, thorny leaves extending in every direction. We were in Castroville, the self-proclaimed artichoke capital of the world.

Until 1922, Castroville farmers were scraping a living off sugar beets and other sundry vegetables. Then landowner Andrew Molera decided to try artichokes. The giant flower bud, prized by ancient Greeks and Romans and savored throughout southern Europe today, had arrived in California decades or even centuries earlier, but it had just begun to attract attention—and fetch good prices.

Molera found that the ’chokes thrived in the climate, similar to that of southern Europe where they evolved, and in the rich soil fed by the Pajaro and Salinas rivers. By 1929, the vegetable ruled the region, and the area now supplies the United States with the vast majority of its artichokes.

Castroville, naturally, hosts an annual artichoke festival (Marilyn Monroe was crowned the first artichoke queen in 1947) in spring, a time when ’chokes are abundant, though the plants produce year-round. Because artichokes are a favorite in our family, we picked up a bag of minis at a roadside stand and steamed them for dinner. The few left over became part of a potato and artichoke salad the next night: the potatoes were almost sugary, a reaction to artichokes’ aftertaste, which makes everything taste sweeter.

We also stopped in Moss Landing to buy live Dungeness off a boat. They weren’t as tasty as the ones we bought in Half Moon Bay. Was it the long drive home? Or are Half Moon Bay crabs simply better?

Contemplating Navels

2010-01-26T17:28:00.000-08:00

We were fortunate to inherit a mini-orchard along with the house we bought in San Mateo several years ago. When we moved in during the summer, the dwarf Gravenstein apple tree was wrapping up its season, a load of Meyers dotted the lemon bush, pomegranates were just beginning to form, and another citrus tree was covered in little green globes.

I didn’t know what sort of citrus until December, when the deep-orange fruit with a big belly button clearly indicated navel orange. But it’s a different fruit from anything I’ve purchased at a store or farmers market. Though it smells and looks like a navel, the flesh is tart—halfway to a lemon.

Some friends say the fruit is sour because it’s out of its element, that the Bay Area is too cold for oranges to develop their sugar. Others say the fruit is cross-breeding with the lemons. I think the tree just has an attitude.

I’ve found that, while my navels make for a rather bracing breakfast drink, they are ideal for other uses. As with Meyers, which are too sweet for many recipes, using these oranges requires a little rethinking.

The rind is excellent, perhaps because it’s so fresh. I scent cookies and salad dressing with its zest. I turned some of the juice into a lovely agua fresca by adding sugar and water. Also, slices of the fruit are more than edible—perhaps the pulp tempers the tartness. They toss into a green salad without adding too much sweetness and provide a less-sweet element to a fruit salad.

Lost in Show

2010-01-19T14:51:00.000-08:00

I always feel like an imposter at the Fancy Food Show. I made my third annual trip Sunday to the event, held every January at Moscone Center, and once again felt like I was sneaking in, though I had registered, paid the fee, and was wearing the badge. I attend under a pseudonym; perhaps that’s the reason. Or maybe it’s that the vendors eagerly handing me a piece of cheese on a cracker ask me, “Are you a retailer or distributor?” When I answer that I’m a writer, a scowl passes over their faces and they look to the next visitor.

The Fancy Food Show doesn’t really feature fancy food — not that I’m sure what fancy food is. It features food that keeps, food that can be shipped halfway around the world: cured meat, candy, olives, chips, beverages, ice cream. Some of it is excellent, some insipid, most unremarkable. Producers of these food products stand behind their booths, offering samples and pitching their selling points: organic, all-natural, anti-oxidants, a new taste, attractive packaging for your store. For some reason there’s always a ton of chocolate and cheese.

Each year presents a new trend. Last year it was aloe vera drinks; this year popcorn (caramel-, chocolate-, jalapeño-, and bacon-flavored) and iced tea (mint-, citrus-, and mango-flavored) seemed to share the spotlight. The cutest idea was ice cream cone bottoms — 2-inch-high sugar cones, like mini-Drumsticks. The most daring product name was Slow Cow, an “anti-stimulant” drink enhanced with valerian, chamomile, and hops.

In the international section, you hardly need the signs to tell you what country you’re in. Dark-eyed young men in expensive suits with thick accents — Italy; small groups huddled together speaking French — France; friendly vendors shouting out “Hallo!” — Australia.

Photography is not allowed at the show, and though attendees are prohibited from removing food from the floor, I snuck a few things out.

Winter Greens

2010-01-12T10:34:00.000-08:00

The beauty of winter is that it lets me be a negligent gardener. The rains take care of watering, I don’t need to fight bugs (the most destructive one apparently take the cold months off), and I’m not constantly picking beans or cucumbers to keep the plants producing.

I do little more than pick kale, pull radishes, or behead a cauliflower plant when I’m ready to cook. But my favorite is the lettuce patch (the background for the header, above), a mix of arugula, mizuna, oak leaf, Bibb, and romaine lettuces. I sprinkle the seeds in a planter in September, water until the rains start, then leave it alone. The lettuce patch grows slowly through the cold months, providing ready-to-go salad until May’s heat renders the leaves too bitter to eat. It never runs out, no matter how much of it we eat. And it makes an excellent salad, tossed with nothing but a bit of vinegar, good olive oil, and salt and pepper.

Fresh from the Sea

2010-01-04T21:36:00.000-08:00

I’d been stranded at home with an illness and holiday preparations, and the day after Christmas I was desperate to get out of the house, go somewhere that at least felt far away.

So my husband, son, and I headed to Half Moon Bay, where we had lunch and took a walk along the beach in the rain. At Princeton Harbor, a few fishermen were selling live Dungeness crabs off their boats, and we debated whether to buy a few for dinner. Though that would mean boiling and cleaning them ourselves, we figured we were at the crab source, so we might as well take advantage of it.

We picked a boat with a pelican perched on the bow and a sea dog complete with white beard. The crabs were crawling around the bottom of a tank with seawater running through it. Buying off the boat takes a while because the fisherman has to reach into the tank and grab a crab by the butt without getting pinched by its friends. We bought two crabs at $5 a pound, which is close to what local stores are selling them for already cooked, but the sea dog threw in an extra crab because it had lost its pincers.

They flailed around, poking holes in a trash bag as we headed back home over the hill. Then it was time for Alex, 13, to learn how to prepare the local crab: Bring one stockpot of water to boil, add crab, cook until red. Let cool, then dismantle. Crack and pick out the meat at the table.

The crab was so sweet and fresh, so much better than precooked crab, we realized we’d walked off that pier with a great deal. We ate it simply dipped in butter or mayonnaise that first night. Because it was so fresh, we still enjoyed it the next day, as crab sandwiches for lunch, then crab cocktail with dinner.

We resolved to head to the coast as often as possible during crab season.

Basic Mixology

2009-12-29T13:20:00.000-08:00

Occasionally I find myself in need of a cocktail, and it’s at these times that I open up the venerable Mr. Boston or the Trader Vic’s guide and try to find something that’ll hit the spot. The problem is that we never seem to have all the ingredients the recipe calls for.

So I experiment, and it’s invariably a disaster—too sweet, too watered-down, too strong, too boring. I finally called my friend Erick, a bartender-writer-personal trainer, and asked for some guidelines. He gave me some simple mixology tips and formulas, which seem appropriate to share on New Year’s Eve. If you keep it simple, these drinks work.

The ingredients

Alcohol Because they’re nearly flavorless, vodka and white rum will mix with just about anything. Tequila goes well with citrus juice. Whiskey, dark rum, and gin have more personality and are tricky to combine.

Mixers Try flavored water, soda, fruit juices, or iced tea—herbal or black.

Flavorings Citrus peels, bitters, herbs, jalapeño slices, or spices: a little goes a long way.

Liqueurs Made with sugar and fruit, herbs, or spices, these are the secret behind the ’tini drinks.

Three basic recipes

Highballs (gin and tonic, rum and coke, greyhound) all follow the same formula. Fill a tall glass with ice, add 1 jigger—1 and 1/2 ounce or 3 tablespoons—of alcohol, then fill the glass with a mixer and any flavorings. You can add an ounce of liqueur along with the alcohol.

The ’tini recipe is 2 ounces of vodka and 1 ounce any flavor liqueur, shaken with ice, then strained into a martini glass.

To make a margarita, you can shake 2 ounces of tequila, 1 ounce sour mix and 1 ounce liqueur with ice, then strain into a glass. You can also serve the mix over ice, or you can blend the whole thing into a slush, if you have a powerful blender.

Happy New Year!

Photograph by Suat Eman

Bûche de Noël

2009-12-22T14:47:00.001-08:00

The bûche de Noël, an edible Yule log, is France’s greatest contribution to the Christmas season. A sponge cake baked into a thin layer is topped with chocolate buttercream and rolled up—then decorated with more buttercream, meringue mushrooms, and perhaps a marzipan mouse—to resemble a log that happens to be lying on the forest floor.

My 15-year-old niece Isabel created this bûche de Noël as extra credit for French class. I remember when her mother, Anna, made a similar one at the same age. It reigned over the holiday sweets during a Christmas party until someone couldn’t stand it anymore and snuck a slice.

Fun Food Finds

2009-12-15T16:11:00.000-08:00

I first met Castelvetrano olives at a dinner party in Bernal Heights, and immediately fell in love. Grown in Sicily, where they are harvested young and cured in a light brine, they sport a beautiful, vivid green hue. But their greatest attribute is their complete lack of bitterness. Buttery, relatively salt free and bursting with oil, they’re the milk chocolate truffle of the olive tray.

Without the edge that other cured olives give to a sauce or stew, they’re best eaten plain, as part of an appetizer tray. They’ll appeal to people who don’t normally warm to olives.

In September, faced with a box of Bartlett pears that were fast turning into mush, I searched for a recipe that would use up a bunch of them. I found one by Maida Heatter: a pear crisp that called for candied ginger. I’d never used candied ginger before and wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I found it easily in the baking section—a tin of chopped young ginger preserved in sugar.

The ginger gave the pears (whose quiet personality all but disappears when cooked) a pleasantly spicy kick. And the little bits made a great snack: because they’re so potent, just one or two wake up the tastebuds. I’ve added them to ginger snaps for extra heat, and I’ve stewed them in milk for a soothing, sweet ginger chai.

I spent a cold Saturday morning in Berkeley sealing bag after bag of za’atar mix for the International Solidarity Movement. I messed up the first bag, so I had to buy it; because it was in my kitchen, I had to use it.

The complex, slightly bitter mixture of wild thyme, sumac and sesame seeds is used in the Middle East as a topping for labneh, or yogurt cheese; it’s also mixed with olive oil and spread on flatbread. I used it to coat squares of feta cheese and found it brought the mild cheese to life. I plan to use it as a dry rub for chicken breasts.

The Taste Buds You're Born With

2009-12-08T11:44:00.000-08:00

On a Christmas trip last year to southern Oregon, I picked up some cheese curds at Rogue Creamery. To me they tasted like a mild white cheese—somewhere on the spectrum between mozzarella and Monterey Jack. I thought they’d make a good ski snack and offered them to my son. He popped one in his mouth, chewed a bit, then promptly spit it out. “There’s something wrong with that cheese, Mom,” Alex said.

Shrugging it off as random kid food-squeamishness, I offered some to my husband, Mark, a serious cheese fan, who bit into one and made a face: “Ugh, that doesn’t taste right.”

To me, the curds’ only fault was that they were too mild. How could the two of them dislike them so much? How could Alex have learned from his dad what to like and not like in a cheese? After all, I’ve been the one who’s been feeding him, for the most part, since before he was born.

It turns out that taste is innate. Something in those curds was detected by taste transmitters in Alex’s and Mark’s mouths which told their brains the curds were yucky. Alex, apparently, inherited his dad’s full taste bud panel. They both love artichokes and Tabasco, and hate corned beef and cheese curds. The work I did exposing him to a variety of food when he was young would appear to have been a waste of time.

Surely, food preferences have a cultural bent. Salvadorians crave pupusas, Vietnamese pho, Swedes potatoes, because those are the foods they grew up with. And we can learn to like foods we initially reject. But sometimes taste extends beyond parents’ control, news that should be reassuring to moms and dads with picky eaters.

As for Rogue Creamery, it makes an excellent Oregonzola, which is sold at many cheese purveyors in the Bay Area.

Buyer Beware Beef

2009-12-01T09:36:00.000-08:00

Last night I made a classic beef stew of red wine, potato and carrots. It would have been a fine stew, a good stew, had the beef not been dreadful. This meat we’ve been choking down for about a year has the texture and flavor of cardboard—flat cardboard, not the corrugated kind, which might have been an improvement.

A few years ago, friends who live in the Central Valley knew a rancher who wanted to sell a steer. We bought a quarter of the carcass, negotiated among the other buyers which cuts we’d take, and brought it home. It wasn’t the meat you’d find in a steakhouse, but it made for decent steaks and good hamburgers. And the price was great.

Soon after we finished the freezer-full, the rancher asked if we’d be interested in buying another ungulate. We decided to go for a half steer this time. My husband, son and I set out for the valley with a car full of coolers, paid our $400 and returned home with a stand-alone freezer’s worth of steaks, ground beef, stew meat, roasts, ribs and soup bones.

Our first taste of the meat—T-bone steaks, grilled—left us woefully disappointed yet optimistic that other cuts would prove more satisfying. After all, the last animal had been edible. But after trying each cut, we gave up hope and dejectedly chewed our way through the rest of the sorry beast. Spices helped its lack of flavor, but nothing—not even long, slow stewing—improved the texture.

The steer was 19 months old, grass-fed and corn finished; the meat was aged two to three weeks. According to common wisdom of animal husbandry, the time of slaughter, feeding schedule and aging were correct. So what went wrong? When we asked the rancher, he wrote in a long, apologetic e-mail that perhaps the animal had been slaughtered too young, before the meat had a chance to become marbled with enough fat. He was aiming, he said, for meat that was lean (before it had marbled too much) yet still tender (because of its youth).

I asked Shannon Kelly of the California Beef Council what would render the meat of a young steer so unappetizing. She suggested that perhaps the animal could have benefited from more time on the corn lot. “The more corn they eat, the more intramuscular fat they have,” she explained, adding that more marbling makes the meat tender. In addition, poor packaging can cause freezing to draw out the moisture, she said.

We bought the half steer because we wanted to support a local rancher, and we loved the price. It was also great to have a freezer filled with months’ worth of dinners. For now though, we’re buying our beef at the store.

Canned-Pumpkin Pie

2009-11-24T12:12:00.000-08:00

Several Thanksgivings ago, I headed down a path of twisted logic that went something like this: Fresh berries make a better pie than frozen berries. Therefore, fresh pumpkin will make a better pie than canned pumpkin.

Because I had won the annual family fight over who brings pie to Thanksgiving dinner, I had an opportunity to showcase the best pumpkin pie ever. I announced to everyone that I’d be making a real pumpkin pie. This meant, of course, that I’d need to buy a pumpkin and process it myself.

I purchased a cooking pumpkin at the farmers market and went through the hell of hacking it up, scraping out the seeds, steaming the flesh, and mashing it to a pulp. I then added the usual ingredients—evaporated milk, eggs, sugar, and spices—as I’ve always been fond of the recipe from the pumpkin can label and didn’t see a need to monkey with it any further.

I proudly transported the pie, which came out a lovely burnt-orange, to my parents’ house. When the main course was finished and it came time for dessert, my sister produced another pumpkin pie. She diplomatically explained that her children, being kids, preferred the canned variety.

Alas, my pie was a bust. The pumpkin was stringy, and raw-tasting, and altogether too squashy. I set my slice down and fought for a sliver of my sister’s pie. My nieces and nephews knew the truth all along: Canned is the way to go. I haven’t veered from that path since.

I’d include the recipe for best-ever pumpkin pie here, but you can find it on the can label. If, that is, you can find one during the expected canned-pumpkin shortage. I’m going to stock up.

Can You Guess the Photo?

2009-11-17T08:53:00.000-08:00

On an impulse, I bought a bag of Kotashima multi-grain rice at my local Asian supermarket. It sat on my shelf for months, until one night I was seeking a meal that was full of cholesterol-lowering fiber. My physical was in a few days, and I wanted to see good numbers. And because I was on my own for the week, I had no need to cook up the animal protein my teenage son craves. I fished out the bag and cooked up the grains — a colorful mix that looked like brown rice, red rice, barley, oats, lentils, and split peas.

Once cooked, the mix turned into an unappetizing, dull brown, but when I coated it with extra virgin olive oil and added plenty of salt and pepper, the rice mix was surprisingly good. Although it had little flavor, it had a nice chewy texture — basically, it's a medium for good olive oil. I ate it for three nights in a row, accompanied by a salad or steamed mustard greens. My cholesterol was an admirable 160.

I found the best way to cook the grain mix is in a rice cooker, using the usual proportions of rice and water. The photo above is the lid of the cooker after it had finished preparing the rice mix.

It's Lutefisk Season

2009-11-10T13:03:00.000-08:00

Fish Jell-O. It’s the best way to describe lutefisk, the butt of many jokes, symbol of Scandinavian identity, and implement of childhood torture.

We Ericksons were dutifully downing it at the Sons of Norway Bjornson Hall in Oakland, which hosted its annual lutefisk and meatball fundraiser Saturday. Younger members of the family had their first taste and declared it “interesting.”

Eating lutefisk is a ritual that connects us Scandinavian Americans to the homeland (Swedes and Norwegians eat it less than their New World cousins). We like to serve it up during the holidays, mostly as a joke. Some cruel parents have been known to require their children to eat lutefisk before they are allowed to open gifts on Christmas Eve.

When it’s swimming in melted butter or cream sauce, lutefisk is usually palatable. I’ve had it fishy, when it’s truly disgusting, and merely tasteless, when it’s OK but I’d still rather be eating meatballs. There are people, however, who claim to enjoy its taste. Some even asked for seconds at Bjornson Hall.

It’s not clear how or why lutefisk got its start, but the Scandinavian countries have long produced and exported dried fish, so perhaps cooks were looking for ways to add variety to their monotonous winter diet.

Preparing lutefisk is a weeks-long process. Unsalted dried fish sits in a water bath for several days; then soaks in lye, which softens it; then spends several more days in water to rid it of the caustic lye. It’s boiled before eating. Properly prepared, lutefisk is off-white, translucent and gelatinous. It should wiggle as you carry your plate to the table.

450 Miles of Southern Tastes

2009-11-03T11:48:00.000-08:00

“Where you-all from?” asked the proprietor of Hill People BBQ. Gerald Stout, in a greasy baseball cap and charcoal-smeared jeans, is in business because of two possessions: a 7-foot-long smoker-trailer and a lifetime’s knowledge of how to barbecue pork.

When we answered California, he shouted, “You win!” Apparently, we hailed from farther away than any of his other customers during the annual Highway 127 sale that stretches 450 miles from Gadsden, Alabama, to Covington, Kentucky.

Our award was sausage biscuits, pork sausage patties placed in a split buttermilk biscuit, then wrapped in foil and left in the smoker to cure all day. The meat was spicy with black pepper, the biscuits greasy from the pork drippings--high-calorie, high-cholesterol goodness.

In August last year I traveled with a troupe of relatives to Tennessee. We started off our vacation at a resort in the southern part of the state, then piled into a van and headed north to my brother’s little farm in the Cumberland Plateau. Our route was Highway 127, and the sale was at its peak.

All along the highway, a back road along the western edge of the Appalachian Mountains, residents and small vendors piled their goods onto tables and blankets, some out in the sun, others under tarps, a few in old shacks, hoping for a sale. They offered just about anything: butter churners, puppies, cell phone accessories, hair cuts, costume jewelry, Hawaiian shirts, guns, exercise bikes, fake plants, bubble wrap, Confederate flags, Pez dispensers, cigarettes, guitars.

We pulled off the highway now and then to check out the quilts and a few antiques, but mostly we braked for food, especially the grub with local character. With a full day ahead of us, three teenagers, one rapidly growing kid, and three adventurous adults, there was plenty of eating to be done.

At our first stop, in a muddy field dotted with decrepit wood shacks, my mom found a vendor selling a cornbread, bean and buttermilk combo for $3. She ordered the dish and was asked, “Do you want your cornbread in the beans, or in the buttermilk?” It was a choice she’d never faced before, so she had to think about it, but she picked the beans. We were handed a bowl containing a square of white-corn cornbread soaking up the bacon-flavored pinto bean broth along with a cup of sweet, fresh buttermilk. We took a bite of broth-soaked cornbread, slurped down a few beans, then sipped the buttermilk: chewy and salty, silky and smoky, rich and tangy. The trio worked.

Farther down the road, a hand-lettered sign for fried apple pies, $1.25, stopped us short. A woman with the good fortune of living right on the highway was selling hand pies hot out of the fryer. We bought one and passed it around the group, each of us taking a bite. It was so freshly made, so sweet-tart good, we had to buy several more.

I asked the woman selling the pies how they were made, and she said, “My mom’s making them in the house right now. This is what you do: You peel the apples and dry them in the sun. When you’re getting ready to make the pies, you soak the apples in water and add sugar and spices. The dough is just flour and water; you roll it in a circle, add the apples, fold it over, and fry it up.”

A few miles down the highway, we found cherry pies made from canned cherry filling and topped with a nutmeg glaze. They were good, too, but the apple pies were better.

“Roasted corn” called us off the highway for our next stop. Roasted wasn’t really the right word--the vendor had boiled the corn, still wearing husks, in salt water for 20 minutes, then smoked it for 30. It seemed like a lot of fuel for just $1.50 an ear, but then there wasn’t any shucking involved.

We added our own squeezable margarine, honey-flavored spread, salt, and Tabasco after peeling off the husks. This was starchy, meaty corn, not the sweet kernels we’re used to in California, so it took the smoking and the aggressive toppings well. Canned jalapeños were for sale, too, as were porch rockers and gospel tapes.

By this point, we were nearing our turnoff and all pretty stuffed, but we still hadn’t tried barbecue. It was Gerald Stout’s massive smoker, spewing out a cloud of gray smoke, that caused us to stop at Hill People BBQ.

In his smoker, Stout was cooking pork tenderloin, which he smokes at 150 degrees for 7 hours over a hickory wood fire. We ordered a few sandwiches, and he pulled out a section of pork tenderloin, expertly sliced it on a cutting board, and served the pieces on a hamburger bun. Crispy on the edges, tender on the inside, full of the flavor of the hickory smoke, the tenderloin was superb. I liked it even without the peppery sweet barbecue sauce, but the sauce was good, too. Stout said he pulls his smoker, which he hitches to the back of his pickup, to events all over his corner of Tennessee.

At a little carnival-type stand nearby, I ordered a diet Coke from a kid, who yelled out back to a man tending a grill, “Dad, a diet Coke.” The man reached into a cooler, handed the can to the kid, who handed it to me.

It was then that Stout asked where we were from and we won the award, eight of the sausage biscuits. Already past full, we shared one and saved the rest for breakfast at my brother’s house. They were still good the next morning.

This piece first appeared in the Daily Gullet on August 12, 2004 http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?act=home