Happy Thanksgiving from the Bad Home Cook and family to you and yours!
We decided to order our Thanksgiving turkey and fixin's from Gelson's in Studio City. Thank God for that! Little chance of me fouling anything up.
Hope your Turkey Day was a fulfilling one.
Everyone needs to have at least one dish they can nail at a moment's notice, my mother-in-law used to tell me.
I took those words to heart. And in the years since she uttered them to me, I've tried hard to find that dish. I've tried to perfect Indian daal, roast chicken, Spanish tortilla, even lentil soup. Yet even when I memorize a recipe's ingredients and uncover the secrets to their best blending, I find I can't actually count on myself to make any dish at all on a moment's notice. I lack basic skills. I lack focus. I choke under pressure. Pick your reason..
Still, I embrace the ideal of the basics. Learn to do the basics well and the rest may well follow. Possibly. So naturally I was delighted to see that Adam, in his new book, The Amateur Gourmet, starts off with his favorite tomato sauce - the sauce that made him fall in love with cooking..."a simple assemblage of ingredients that within thirty minutes becomes something entirely new."
That's what I'm talking about! You can impress friends and family with a solid marinara. And this one is from a famous Crocs-shod celebrity chef. How could I go wrong? Here it is:
From Mario Batali's Babbo Cookbook:
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 Spanish onion, finely diced
4 garlic cloves, peeled and thinly sliced
3 tablespoons chopped fresh thyme, or 1 tablespoon dried
1/2 medium carrot, finely shredded
2 28-ounce cans peeled whole tomatoes
Kosher salt.
In a three-quart saucepan, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and saute a bit. Then add the garlic. Cook for about 8-10 minutes or until soft and light golden brown. Add the thyme and carrot and cook for 5 minutes more. Dump the contents of your cans into a medium bowl, and with your hand, crush the tomatoes and add them, with juices, to the contents of the saucepan. Adam recommends submerging the tomatoes before crushing them, to avoid a tomato juice bloodbath, and I heartily concur.
Bring to a boil, stirring often, then lower heat and simmer for 30 minutes, or until the sauce is as thick as hot cereal. (What kind of hot cereal he never says.) When your whole house smells like Italy, season with kosher salt to taste. Serve with attitude.
I have already made this sauce twice. That's twice in the fortnight I've owned the book. It's my own little practice space. I have assembled the sauce by the book (more or less...I only had baby carrots, for example, and a zester. Ouch!), but the recipe is forgiving, and the results have been greatly pleasing. So now I'm experimenting with it. Like a real chef!
My own 10-year-old daughter pronounced this sauce: "Delicious. But you overcooked the pasta."
Late last night I made it for the flamenco guitarist, who arrived after a huge show needing a warm meal. I used a different kind of canned tomato I wasn't happy with, and I didn't get to simmer it long enough to get the desired oatmeal thickness.
Didn't matter. The guitarist was overcome with the aroma of thyme and tomatoes the moment he walked in the door, and he never recovered. "Better watch it," he warned, between bites of fettuccine. "What are you going to write about if you're not the Bad Home Cook anymore?"
Well. Let's not overstate things. It's not like I was going to open a cookbook and find a tomato sauce to experiment with on my own. Like a pre-schooler at her first swimming lesson, I needed to be pushed. Adam pushed me, and I'm hugely grateful. Yeah, I was an editorial snoot when reviewing his book, but look what his book is doing for my culinary life! I hurt because I love, baby!
My mother-in-law's going to be so impressed!
When life hands you lemons, forget the lemonade. Make Lemon lentils! Lemon lentils are creamy and tangy at the same time. They are good for you. Spoon them over rice and they are a complete protein. Plus they give your kitchen that come-hither aroma.
Lemon Lentils will always make you happy.
When they turn out, of course.
Lemon lentils are not unusual. You can find dozens of recipes on the Internets. This one, however, was bestowed upon me by an unlikely source: A Mormon couple with four kids who lived in our student family housing compound at Berkeley. They were very smart...and very devout. They also had a thing for home-cooked Indian fare. For some reason this struck us funny, as if conservative folks can't have exotic tastes (which we know isn't true. Just look at Pastor Ted Haggard). Every time our courtyard had a potluck, this couple would trot out some delicious Indian fare or another. A favorite was the lemon lentils.
After much nagging on my part, they gave me their recipe. Here it is, adapted from The Best of Craig Clairborne cookbook. This recipe serves 12, I usually halve everything when I make it for dinner for my family.
Limbo dal (Lemon Lentils)
1/1/4 cups peanut, vegetable or corn oil (peanut oil gives this the best taste, I think)
2 onions, halved and thinly sliced (about 1 1/2 cups)
4 (2-inch pieces) cinnamon sticks
2 pounds red lentils (the kind you can find in bulk at Indian food stores). Rinse and pick over until water runs clear.
1 tablespoon chopped fresh ginger
5 cups fresh or canned chicken broth (Trader Joe's version is good here)
5 cups water
Salt to taste
1 teaspoon cayenne
juice of one lemon plus pulp and shell (I cut it in half and squeeze, and cook the two halves in the dal)
1/2 cup chopped onion (for topping)
1 garlic clove, finely minced
1 hot green chile, chopped, with seeds (I omit this usually)
4 bay leaves
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
Heat 3/4 cup of the oil in a large saucepan and add the sliced onions. Cook to wilt, and add the cinnamon pieces and the lentils. Add the ginger and cook, stirring often, for about 10 minutes. Add the broth, water, cayenne and salt to taste. Bring to a boil and simmer for about 10 minutes. Add the lemon juice, pulp and shell and cook for about 50 minutes longer, stirring often.
In a separate skillet, heat the remaining 1/2 cup oil and add the chopped onion, garlic, chile and bay leaves. Cook, stirring, until the onions are browned. Add this mixture, including the oil, to the lentils. Sprinkle with cilantro and serve hot.
This goes great over basmati rice, cooked with some butter or ghee.
Learn from my past mistakes: Make sure you use chicken broth. Vegetable broth will make it taste gross. And make sure you STIR often. Otherwise it starts to clump and it won't turn out creamy.
Quick: What's the most satisfying meal you've ever had? I bet you have several. The perfect meal is hard to pin down because they're all about context. Where are you? How hungry are you? Who are you with? Where did you just come from? What did you do just prior to this perfect meal?
Like you, I have several perfect meals. None of them are fancy. In fact, most are not even technically "meals." They're more memorable tastes. For example, whenever I go to Berkeley my first stop bar none is Gordo's Taqueria, where I sit and eat my black bean, cheese and rice burrito (with just a dollop of sour cream) in a state of complete and silent bliss.
In Santa Cruz there's a bistro called Gabriella's that serves fresh figs wrapped in prosciutto...the only possible response to which is delighted, astounded, laughter.
In North London there's a storefront restaurant with samosas that will render you mute, especially if you haven't had a bite of Indian food in eight, nine months but have spent every day of that time daydreaming about it.
The crawfish at Felix's in Orange. The blue fin tuna at Asenabo in Studio City. The egg bagel just out of the oven at 108th and Broadway in NYC. That salt cod and garlic dish a friend made on New Year's eve 1999. The meat and potato stew my neighbor brought over an hour after I gave birth to my son, at home. A bowl I finished in minutes and literally licked clean, while my neighbor, a big and radiant woman from Kenya, laughed all the way back to her apartment to retrieve the entire pot for me.
Here's a more recent perfect meal: A grilled cheese sandwich and a pickle. Washed down with a $14 glass of red wine. Tony and I discovered this one at Greenblatt's about a year or so ago.
Greenblatt's is a Jewish Deli on Sunset in LA. It's been there for at least 50 years. It's got much better food than the more famous Canter's Deli on Fairfax. As well as a vaunted wine collection. It's open late and we like to go after a show and slump in a booth and watch the Hollywood people come and go.
One night we were trying to decide what to eat. "Know what I really feel like?" Tony looked over his menu sheepishly.
"What?"
"A grilled cheese sandwich."
My last experience with grilled cheese had something to do with a slice of American cheese between two pieces of Wonder Bread. There is a lot to choose from on the Greenblatt's menu, all of it worthy. So eyebrows were raised. But not for long.
Imagine a place that serves grilled cheese sandwiches for adults...yeah, I know. Tart up a grilled cheese and call it a panini. It's still just a grilled cheese to me -- and that can be more than OK. Tony ordered jack cheese on rye bread. Creaminess with a bite. And then there's that pickle, which is like a satisfying, final exclamation point. I don't know how we came to order the $14 glass of wine. A cab out of Napa somewhere. Our waiter, the tall and improbably-named Gide, told us it would be good. And who the hell has a decent wine with a grilled cheese? Well, exactly.
And thus a classic perfect meal was born.
There's a lot more to be written about grilled cheese sandwiches. They're popping up all over. In the Williams Sonoma catalog, in the New York Times (which irritatingly cancels its free links within days), to the food blogosphere. There are contests. All sorts of grilled cheese chatter. They've also gotten the nod from the heavens. Seems God, some ten years ago, saw fit to affix an image of the Virgin Mary into a toasted cheese sandwich. True believers have been making pilgrimages to see this holiest of grilled cheese in Florida (where else?) until recently, when it was sold at auction on Ebay for $28,000.
I could write a lot more about grilled cheese sandwiches. Even detail my pseudo-successful attempts at making them at home. But not today.
I know you have a favorite meal or two. Let's hear them.
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