The fancy stuff

Long ago, back when I started this blog, I vowed never to start a blogpost by apologizing for a lack of activity.

But dang. It’s been a month. It’s like I’ve been distracted or something.

Let’s give this distraction a name. Let’s call him…Chef San Diego.

The other day we made some kind of fish with diced red and yellow peppers in a cardamom papaya beurre blanc sauce. “Just something simple.”

Well. He made it. I just drank wine and watched.

Beurre blanc, I said. That’s simple? Isn’t that, like, French?

Well, yes, but it’s really not that fancy, he said. Think of it as butter sauce. And you can flavor it with different things. Next time, he told me, you’ll make it.

I started laughing.

See, I’m not fancy. I love to eat of course, but I’m quite content with simple fare. And as for cooking, I don’t have any desire to go to culinary school or open a restaurant or test recipes or anything like that. Mostly I just want to be competent and be able to repeat good results over and over. As it stands now, I never know if something is going to turn out or not. There are techniques I’m supposed to learn and master.

Like this butter and wine sauce, for starters. Which sounds pretty dang fancy from where I sit.

Beurre blanc is an emulsified butter sauce without egg yolks or other binders. You make it with butter and white wine. Or you can make a beurre rouge with red wine. (using cream is cheating, apparently.)

Yeah. It’s scary and French and here’s how (I’m told) you make it:

News I can use

I’m not giving you five reasons for anything. That’s my virgin sacrifice to the SEO Gods.

Also there are more than five reasons why I’m so delighted with this book. Mostly because it validates what I’ve finally begun to figure out on my own.

Cooking. It’s not about recipes. It’s about techniques. Understand and gain mastery of the techniques, and you probably won’t have cooking disasters like this. Or this.

The chef and writer Michael Ruhlman breaks down what he calls the 20 basic techniques of cooking in his cool new book, Ruhlman’s Twenty, which I downloaded onto my smartphone for $3. (It’s listed at $40, sells on Amazon for $25…but there was this special Twitter promotion…)

Think. Salt. Egg. Butter. Dough. It goes on from there. All the basic basics I didn’t get at the knee of my mom or grandma.

The first and most important, also the most profound to me, is the exact reason I can even call myself the Bad Home Cook.

“Before you begin, stand still. Think.”

This is hard for me to do. Still.

And this: “Ninety-Five percent of kitchen failures can be traced back to a failure to organize and prepare at the outset.”

Pretty much sums it all up in that one sentence. This is where I go wrong time and time again. And the only reason I’m improving at all is because I’ve learned this. The hard way.  Over and over.

This is a small book, simply written, with basic recipes and photos. But it’s an important book because I think that given the Food Network age we live in, it’s taken for granted that people in general know basic cooking techniques.

When in fact I am living proof that they do not.

A good example. The chapter about salt was extremely informative and has already changed the way I cook for the better. Longtime readers of this blog (and I’m sure I’ve actually fed all five of you) know well my trouble with seasonings.

Ruhlman relates a story about how in cooking school he was taught to flavor the water he was boiling up for pasta. In other words, a pinch of salt ain’t gonna do it. Taste it to make sure it’s well-salted, like you would a soup. That flavor will imprint in your pasta.

Season fearlessly, early on in the cooking process, and throughout. You shouldn’t have to season at the table.

And use Diamond Crystal Kosher salt because it doesn’t have anything in it (no anti-caking agents, for example) that will leave chemical taste in your food.

Duh. Of course. Elementary. But nobody ever told me this! I only learned about that “pinch” of salt because that’s what my junior high school home economics teacher told me.

I like having the basics spelled out. That’s why my copy of Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything is in 17 pieces and held together with paper clips and rubber bands. It’s got all the basics and it’s very well-used.

Ruhlman’s Twenty will be similarly well-used…although digitally. Maybe it’s time for an iPad.

On St. Patrick’s Day, I traditionally toast my grandmother, Florence, with a quick shot of Bushmill’s whiskey. She died this day more than 20 years ago, and I still miss her, God rest her soul. She taught me how to wink and how to pour a beer, and to this day, both skills have served me well.

But tonight is the first time I’ve ever tried any sort of “Irish” cooking: Corned beef and cabbage, in honor of St. Paddy’s day.

They tell me it’s Irish cooking at its finest: Throw it in a pot, toss in some potatoes, and boil ’til dead. Not clear if I have to drink until I black out in the meantime, so I’ll hold off on that until further notice.

Sounds simple but still. I’m always one for making a mess of even the simplest of recipes. Plus, I don’t really know what to do with a huge chunk of meat.

And a brisket is a lot of MEAT!

I did a little trolling around the internets for basic background. I looked at this recipe, and this one, from New York Irish womenfolk who claim to know how to do it right. Then I asked around. Then I went out on my own.

Step one was to buy a corned beef. At, like Ralph’s. There’s a packet of peppercorns already included. The butcher gave me the option of the 5,000 calorie variety or the fattier 10,000 calorie variety. I chose the former. Because, while it’s true half my family is Irish, they settled in SoCal in the 1920s and so fatty cuts of anything have been long bred out of me.

Put it into a large stockpot. Cover with cold water. Salt and pepper and dump the packet of peppercorns right in there.

Bring to a boil and simmer for two hours.

Turn it.

Simmer it for another hour.

My friend Bruce Watson, writer and gastronome extraordinaire, impressed upon me that I could hardly overcook this thing. “Boil it until it’s falling apart,” he insisted. “I can’t stress that enough. Boil. Until. It’s. Falling. Apart.”

I can do that, I reasoned.

And still I questioned myself. I boiled this thing for nigh on five hours, until I could easily stick a prong through it, as advised.

What if I overcooked it?

I took it out with tongs and laid it on butcher block to “rest…” Then I threw in red potatoes and cabbage, per instructions.

Not terribly appetizing…

Bruce promised the fat and salt of the stock would flavor the potatoes and cabbage perfectly. What could I do but hope for the best?

Tip: Get a bigger stockpot

The largest stockpot I own – an 8 quart stainless steel beauty, was not enough for the meat AND all the veg. At some point I had to scoop out potatoes and carrots and cabbage and hold in a separate pot.

My biggest fear: I’d cooked a hot mess…

wash down with beer

It was a hit. Approved by all friends and family. Kept beautifully well for the Irish music concert/picnic the next day. And best of all, completely consumed.

Thank GOD. How bad do you have to be to mess up corned beef and cabbage?

Jesus, Mary and Joseph! (as Grandma Flo would say). Don’t ask such a thing.

Basta. Enough.

I never get sick. I have the immune system of an Irish peasant. And yet here is day 9 (!!) of this horrible, mother of all colds. I’m sleeping long hours. I’m pounding the orange juice. I even went and got the magic hot and sour soup at the Chinese Panda down the street.

And still my throat aches and my nose drips. Last weekend I lost my voice completely. Tonight my eyebrows hurt! Really? I’m done with feeling crap.

Time to pull out the stops. Bring out the big-ass guns. Execute the Hail Mary throw.

Come close and let me whisper to you…because that’s all the voice I got right now….

Spanish style garlic soup. With poached egg, lime and cilantro.

Boom! Baby….

Yeah, you say. You can never pull that off. You’re the Bad Home Cook.

To this I say, desperate times, baby, call for desperate measures. I made this soup. I had to. I’m sick of being sick.

And it was awesome.

True. It helped that I had farm fresh eggs from the Spring Street Farm Stand. And fresh, organic cilantro. Although I strangely didn’t have stale French bread, it didn’t seem to matter. I riffed on this recipe:

One medium head of garlic, broken into cloves, peeled and sliced thin
1 quart chicken broth
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
8 i1/2 inch slices of stale French bread
four large eggs
1/2 cup packed cilantro, chopped
4 lime wedges
(I added 1 or 2 pinches of saffron, because when did saffron ever hurt anyone?)

chop chop…into thin slices

Saute in the olive oil for about eight minutes, stirring occasionally, until the garlic is soft. Transfer to a bowl or plate with a slotted spoon.

Fry the French bread slices until lightly browned, about four minutes. Put two into each of four dishes.

Farm eggs are life..

Now add the quart of chicken broth. That’s one box of Trader Joe’s chicken broth. Stir, and add the garlic back in plus the red pepper flakes and saffron.

Chop this as well…

When this is gently simmering, crack an egg into a small dish, and add it into the broth, letting it poach for between 3 to 4 minutes. I basted it with some broth for good measure. Do this with the other three as well.

Remove with a slotted spoon, and drop each gently onto the crostini in the dish…

season “expertly”

Add a few ladles of broth, and top with cilantro and a squeeze of fresh lime.

Eat.

Get over your cold.

Boom.

I’m starting to feel better. Aren’t you?

Remember this?

I left my heart in San Francisco…with Crashed Eggs at La Lola on Mason

I’m trying this recipe again for three reasons:

1. I’m having an affair with eggs at the moment. All eggs, all the time. But most of all with poached eggs.

2. I was telling a friend about the insane “crashed egg” tapas at the now closed La Lola’s in SF, and oh the visions, they were swirling in my head. Maybe I could try this one again…

3. I had some potatoes and thought I might as well roast them since I needed to feed the boy, and he shares my love of eggs and potatoes.

And once again I thought, how hard can this be? It’s eggs over potatoes, for God’s sake. Proof once again that the simplest recipes are often the ones that are the trickiest.

This time I did it differently. Firstly, I fried the potatoes.

Blurry fry! Very advanced…

There are several tricks to this:

The oil should be hot when you dump your potatoes in. Your pan should be big enough so that they’re all in one layer. You don’t want to touch them for a while. Let them fry. Flip them once or twice, and don’t overdo…

Season them “expertly” and let them drain on a paper towel. No touchee.

Then, with the egg, never mind what I tried last time. This time, I poached.

Preparing to poach

Crash these over your potatoes, yo.

That’s more like it…

And did the boy like it? He did. Two thumbs up.

Stay tuned. I’m gonna try and coddle an egg next week. It’ll be a hoot.

See, people like bananas in my house. But sometimes I miscalculate consumption trends and overbuy.  Which results in scenes like this:

Banana apocalypse

And when this happens, there is only one remedy. Well, two remedies, of course. You can chuck them all into the compost bin or trash.  But if you’re on top of things when bananas go bad, and you have sugar, eggs and cinnamon, you can pursue the one true remedy.

Which is banana bread. Duh.

1 cup sugar, 1 1/3 cup flour, two eggs, 1 tsp. baking soda, 2 tsp. cinnamon, 1 tsp. vanilla. Three dead bananas

It really couldn’t be easier. First you have to mush the bananas and the eggs together.

I’m sorry you have to see this.

Then you add everything else. Mix it all together. Pour into a buttered bread loaf pan. Sprinkle a mixture of cinnamon and sugar on top. Put it into the oven and bake for about 40-45 minutes at 375.

Everybody’s favorite banana bread.

Let cool for ten minutes, then remove from pan and let cool on a rack.

Beat back the children, who will be clamoring. This is excellent warm, at room temperature, and very much so frozen, believe it or not (this is my favorite way to eat it, because it makes it chewy…)

Now you no longer have alarming dead bananas on your table attracting fruit flies. Now you have banana bread and best of all, a home that smells like freshly-baked banana bread.

You’re welcome. Anytime.

My mom taught me a great many things, but not how to cook. Because she didn’t learn from her mother, although her mother taught her a great many things. My grandmother didn’t learn how to cook because presumably her mother didn’t cook either, although I have to wonder who then fed those 12 kids if not her.  Maybe that’s the reason they all left the old country in the first place.

It’s been established that whole cultures are passed down in the food our mothers and grandmothers feed us as we grow up. It’s that simple, and that powerful. That’s why, any chance I get, I invite friends with favorite childhood recipes to come over and cook while I watch and learn.

Because while I can conjure up some warm recollections of favorite childhood meals, there’s only so much culture you can squeeze out of a strawberry frosted Pop Tart.

So here’s my girlfriend Letty. From a big, warm, Mexican family. Mother very traditional. Always a pot of sopita bubbling on the stove. Letty grew up loving her mom’s food but not thinking too much about it until, surprise surprise, she grew up and had a family of her own. Now she pays a lot more attention to the ways of the womenfolk in the kitchen.

On birthdays, her mother cooks her and her sisters their favorite meal. It’s always the enchiladas.

Simple potato enchiladas. Not fancy at all, but it’s the taste they remember from home. And it starts with the onions.

Sibs came to fisticuffs over the pickled onions…

Slice one large onion into a bowl and squeeze the juice of one lemon over it, crumble oregano and season with salt. Set aside to marinate. This is the best part of the whole dish, remembers Letty. There were often leftovers…but never any onions.

Make well-seasoned mashed potatoes -

potato stuffing

Make your salsa – tomatoes and onions

Part of the goodness

Wrap corn tortillas in a dish rag and microwave to warm them up. Make the decision whether you’re going to use red sauce or green sauce. (We used red sauce this night)

The conundrum

Of course her mother could make her own red or green sauce when she wanted to take a little extra time. But the weeknight enchiladas? Sauce in a can was fine. Who am I to argue?

Set out your fillings and sauces and prepare to wrap the enchiladas.

The trifecta of sauces

Fill your tortillas with the potato and wrap. Heat your vegetable or canola oil in a large skillet.

rolled and ready

Now dip your rolled enchilada in sauce and lay it in the skillet to fry for a bit. Turn and fry the other side.

Cover in salsa, shredded cheese, chopped iceberg lettuce and a dollop of crema.

Consume con mucho gusto.

The delicious home

I’ve decided that the whole not cooking thing stops with me. My kids have a mom who cooks for them. Well, tonight Letty cooked for them. But you get my point.

I’ve come to realize that I drag myself out of bed on Sundays to make pancakes from scratch because I want my kids to tell their kids that their mom used to make the best pancakes, every Sunday, and from scratch. I want my kids to make their kids pancakes on Sunday. I want them to make my lentil soup, too. I want one of them to one day be in Spain, sitting at a tapas bar, and sigh. “Yeah, these are good, but they’re just not like my mom’s tortilla…”

The enchiladas? No matter how she tried, they were never quite as good as aunt Letty’s….

Get thee behind me, temptation.

Bad. Bad. Delicious badness..

I’d seen this is the store and promptly averted my eyes. Some things you just don’t need to know about, you know? I don’t need cookie dough butter in my house. But I kept running into it in the aisles. They made it really hard to avoid.

It’s like the proverbial bad boy. You know he’s trouble. You know his intentions aren’t honorable, and you know the whole thing is going to end in tears. And every time you look up, there he is.

So obviously you go there. And when they offered a taste at the sample kiosk, of course I agreed.

Sob.

Behold my ruin

YES it’s good. Obviously it’s good. It’s got that thick, doughy texture and it’s not too sweet and it’s got a little kick of cinnamon going on in there, damnit. Delicious. Dangerous. Absolutely not healthy for you in any way. Is there any reason to even have a jar of this sitting around, except to grab a spoon and start the inevitable process of eating it straight out of the jar?

It’s the grocery product equivalent of an AK-47. You’ve got butter and you’ve got jam, marmalade and Nutella. You don’t need cookie butter. Nobody needs cookie butter.

It’s not so much me I’m worried about. It’s the Drama Teen. She-who-eats-frosting-out-of-the-can and puts sugar on her Frosted Flakes.

It does no good to yell at her, or lecture her on the dangers of an all-sugar diet. It has no effect on her, my volume nor the corn syrup. She is slender and has flawless skin and simply waits for me to pause in my lecture before continuing on up the stairs to her room with said can of frosting.

And what can I say because I remember I did the exact same thing at her age. Only it was a brick of cream cheese mixed with a cup of sugar and dyed blue. Or green. Or red, depending on my mood at the time.

And I grew out of it. I can only stand one little teaspoon of cookie butter before I start feeling pre-diabetic.

This is Drama Teen crack. Wait until she tastes this. I’m almost interested in watching the revelation cross her face so I can describe it as a writing exercise. I’m a terrible mother for even bringing this home.

The boy tasted the cookie butter this morning and nodded grimly. He knows his sister. “Yeah, maybe you’d better get two jars; one for her and one we can hide, for us.”

Well, I accept my fate. Stay tuned.

And damn you, Trader Joe’s!

Damned if I was going to Trader Joe’s AGAIN this night.

I’d been twice the day before and once already this morning. It’s not like I can’t make a list of items I need. I do. But for some reason it’s never the right list. I’ve gone on a big Sunday evening shop for the upcoming week only to arrive home and realize we’re practically out of milk. And milk was the one thing I didn’t buy because I thought we were stocked up.

And now it’s dinner time. AGAIN.  I could play the “I could make that, if only I had this” game, but now I’m just annoyed with myself. No more. I would make due with what I had.

Which was a bagful of red potatoes from the farm stand, some celery, some red onion, and, miraculously, an unopened bag of panko bread crumbs.

A quick Google search led me to potato croquettes. One in particular stood out, which included Panko, which are Japanese-style bread crumbs. Why I can run out of milk but have a stash of Panko is just, I guess, part of my quirky charm.

I riffed on this recipe, adding finely diced red onion and celery:

2 cups chilled mashed potatoes
2 eggs, slightly beaten
2 tablespoons chopped onion
1/2 cup flour for dredging
1 cup panko
3 tablespoons veggie or canola oil for frying
salt and pepper to taste

In a bowl combine the mashies, one egg, onions and celery, salt and pepper. Lightly beat the second egg and place in a shallow dish for dredging. Likewise put the flour into a separate dish for dredging. Divide these into eight or so portions and make into balls or discs, or shapes, like this gal did. Dredge these puppies in flour, then in the egg, then cover them in panko.

Fry ‘em up, until golden brown. A couple of minutes on each side.

I added a bit of shredded Mexican cheese to the top, because I had it. Nom!

Yes, we are talking about simple potato croquettes here. Anyone with any experience in the kitchen can make these. They’re the kind of thing you make to use with something else, an element of a larger, more impressive meal.

But again here I must point out that the very knowledge that there were potato croquettes in the world did not make itself known to me until deep, deep into my adulthood. Croquettes? How do you spell that? Croquettes.  With mashed potatoes? Huh. Wow.

Let us also focus on these two benevolent facts: I used only what I had in my kitchen, and I improvised — successfully and to the upside. You need to give me at least 10 points for that. Really. Because when does my improvising ever lead to anything good?

Finally, and come close and let me whisper this in your ear: I made mashed potatoes from scratch. And they were awesome.

Gryffindor: 10 points.

Tart up your croquettes with red onion and celery

The boy, now a tween and 4-inches taller than me already and consuming ever more amounts of food, eagerly sampled some, then jumped up to high five me.

“Put that on the list!” he said. He ate three of them.  The Drama teen ate hers as well.

I made a little tomato and cucumber salad too (and this time I had the sumac), which they happily ate.

Obviously not a food photographer. But do kids care?

Best of all – BOTH kids requested this the next day. Unprecedented. And since I had leftover mashies it was easy-peasy.

House of BHC: 50 points!!

Let me say that it all started with a cookbook I didn’t get for Christmas.

To be fair, I didn’t even know I wanted this cookbook myself until I stumbled upon it in a Barnes & Noble recently while killing time waiting for the next showing of Les Miserables.

But dang. Such a cookbook like I never knew existed. Such a cookbook, I will probably just have to pop for myself, and why not? This cookbook of my desire, Flavors of Jerusalem, is by an Israeli chef (Yotam Ottolenghi) and a Palestinian chef (Sami Tamimi) who both grew up in Jerusalem, eating the kinds of foods that make me sigh. It waxes passionate about pretty much all my most favorite flavors and recipes, including a salad that, in my mind, anyway, is the taste of the Levant.

The humble tomato and cucumber salad. You’ll find it from Iran to Israel to Cyprus. Tomato and cucumber salad, which is very straightforward and simple and involves chopping up a few vegetables, juicing half a lemon…and adding some sumac.

For you, my friend…ancient spices you can’t use anymore…

Now, for someone who professes utter lack of skill in the kitchen, I do have a pretty kickin’ assortment of spices. Some of that is from my love of Indian, Middle Eastern and Japanese cuisine, which means I have plenty of cumin, coriander, tumeric and bonito flakes and sesame seeds in my pantry. Part of it is because when Bab’s died unexpectedly, I took home half of her kitchen, including all of her spices.

But the years have clicked by. Babs has been gone almost 10 years already. I don’t have little kids anymore I have teenagers who are both taller than I am.

…And I have a bin full of aging spices.

…And I don’t have any sumac.

The common wisdom is that ground spices have a shelf life of about 8 months (that’s if they’re kept optimally, in a cool pantry away from light or heat), while whole versions might last a bit longer. Longer than that, says the guy at Serious Eats, and what you’ve got is basically lightly flavored dust.

I realized this because I when I realized I didn’t actually have any sumac myself, I took to Facebook to find some. A neighbor generously offered her jar of sumac, but when I went to retrieve it today, I took one sniff and realized that it was way too past its use-by date to be of any use. I looked in vain for some at the Fresh & Easy, I briefly contemplated driving 20 miles to the Persian market in Torrance, (nah), looked feebly through my own spice bin for some Za’atar, another Middle Eastern spice I could use…

…my bag of za’atar from 2006…

So yeah. I have a bin full of dust.

The simplest of ingredients…

But I went ahead and made this salad anyway, and didn’t use any spice. Here’s the recipe, which I got off Smitten Kitchen (where else?), but is pretty universal, I’d imagine.

1 English cucumber, diced
2 Roma tomatoes, diced
half of one Spanish onion, diced
2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley
2-3 tablespoons olive oil
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 1/2 teaspoons sumac
salt and pepper to taste

Chop chop!

I’m also going to go through the old spice bin tomorrow and toss most of it, and make a list of replacement spices (how uncharacteristically organized of me…). And I will include sumac on that list.

Refreshing!

Here’s to a spicier new year for us all!