I took a nice long trip, and now I am back. It was great, and if this were a travel blog, boy you´d be in for a real treat. As it is, I try to stay on topic as much as possible, which is cooking. That means that I stay true to myself by not talking about eating in restaurants, which is what traveling people do a lot. Then, everything blends together. Returning from travel, Pride, 4th of July and here we are. In San Francisco, it is good stew weather-cold, foggy, windy.
I have been making some favorites for the season like Sumi salad, grilled salmon, mushroom risotto, and I actually got some good tasting strawberries yesterday. So, let´s get excited about life.
Can you tell I´m not too excited? Well, I´m not. I should say, the spirit is willing where the flesh is weak. Is that how it goes? Could it be because my oven isn´t working again? Could it be that I am just enjoying making ordinary meals for ordinary evenings that aren´t really events per se, and perhaps I´ve already written about them and don´t have much to comment on that is fresh, new, and witty? Hmm…I think I may be getting warmer.
Summer solstice in Northeast Ohio.
So, perhaps it´s ok to enjoy the summer, the surprise dinners. Friends sit around with a bottle of wine. Finally someone says, do you have anything to eat? I have lettuce in the fridge. I can make a dressing. Fresh chicken stock? Rice? Vegetables? a little Parm? Dinner!!
I guess it´s like the weather in the city. If I plan on making pot roast with mashed potatoes and hot apple pie, it will suddenly be 95 degrees outside. Sometimes, it´s better not to plan. We can surprise ourselves. Look at these kids:
Oh the excitement of a trifle, waiting to be destroyed. That´s my nephew on the left, and grandma´s trifle in the center. More to come.
If you live in San Francisco, you´re familiar with that phenomena known as Gray May. It immediately precedes June Gloom, two months basically of chilly, foggy days where we may see the sun occasionally. It is a great time for soups, stews, baking, that kinda thing. It started last week, when he had a brief warm spell. Great, I thought, I just decided to make split pea soup, and it´s getting hot and sunny and summer is coming and etc. Well, no sooner had the soup cooked then the fog blew in from the coast and all was well. The soup lasted until this morning, ten meals. It never got old.
Split pea soup could not be easier, and is so heavenly, and it improves with age. With my time and budget, I´ve settled into a nice cooking routine. I make a large pot of soup, sandwich stuff, salad fixings, and there is lunch everyday and maybe a third of my dinners. Done. Make a chicken, or something a little more fancy.
Smoked ham shank is best because it is very strange to try to eat without simmering it, but there is a lot of beautiful meat on it at strange angles with a little gristly fat and tendons or whatever. It all disintegrates into the soup, making it thick, and smoky, salty. The dried, sweet peas melt into the ham and hot water, finely diced carrot, celery, onion, and garlic. Cook and cook and cook and cook. Add water as necessary and stir so the peas don´t cake and burn at the bottom.
Between the soup and the rhubarb strawberry cake, that took care of a lot of meals. Eating well, but not cooking much. It´s OK. It´s better than that. Now, I have a little project.
For a party of musicians, I´ve been tasked with appetizers. I thought I would include the favorite foods of musicians, but couldn´t find enough material. So, I pulled out a little book of Appetizers, called creatively, A Book of Appetizers, and sought recipes that include the favorite ingredients of musicians of the past. I´ve come up with a creative list of fun sounding things. I´ll make a little quiz to help the guests figure whose favorite ingredient we are eating. So, here it is. I´ll give you a few hints when necessary. I don´t know that I will make all of them, mind you, but I´ll do as many as I can. Some of them are exactly the dish that our tune smiths loved, some are a bit of a stretch. I´ll indicate the favored ingredient by using a pair of parentheses on either side of the ingredient. Clever, huh?
Josefinas! Where have these been all this time? This book is from 1958, and a quick Googlerama of Josefinas led to a few identical recipes and really not very much else. It should be more popular, I think. Baguette slice, buttered, mayonnaised, heap a tablespoon of finely minced roasted chile pepper and garlic on top, top with shredded jack cheese, broil till it swells, bubbles, browned. It has roots in early 20th Century Kansas. (Cheese).
Cut now, two days later, and I´ve kinda given up on the whole thing. I mean, of course I´m going to make some things. Part of the reason for this is I have decided to make Sumi Salad. What musician´s favorite food is Sumi Salad? Nobody, that´s who. So, how can I say all the recipes are inspired by musicians favorite foods if that is not true? You don´t just throw in another dish in there for no reason, especially something strange like a cabbage salad.
What is Sumi Salad? Thinly shaved napa cabbage, toasted almond slivers and sesame seeds, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, sesame oil. Yumbo jumbo. I found a recipe for it in one of those old spiral-bound books I got down in Santa Barbara. Remember that? More to come.
Strawberry rhubarb pudding cake. It wasn’t really any of those things, but it was nice. Nice. The rhubarb had been dully spayed and neutered, the strawberries had nothing to offer in the first place, the pudding got too hard, and the cake was too soft. However, it was/is yummy. It is particularly good heated. It is a breakfast slightly wet coffee cake.
It has been a quiet week. Like, flavorless strawberries was the nadir. For lunch today, tuna melt. It’s hard, because it is not very interesting but perfecting a sandwich is important to a man. I do have ideas. Why not butter the pan? Some people, not mentioning Jacques Pepin, butter the bread before putting it in the pan. Silly. Melt the butter gently in the pan, then add the bread and swirl it round and round until all the butter is absorbed. Add a little shredded cheddar on each piece of bread and toast for about three minutes, keep it gentle. After three minutes, dollop three tablespoons of celery rich tuna salad onto the center, the center, of one of the toasts. Sing one chorus of Amazing Grace at 89 to the quarter note then flip the toast that does not have tuna salad onto the one that does.
The next step is crucial, that’s why I started another paragraph. You should have in the pan one slice of buttered toasted with melted cheese and a plop of tuna salad topped by another slice of melted cheese toast. Do not, repeat, do not flatten the sandwich with a spatula causing the tuna salad to burst out the side and cook and turn gray and rubbery and taste like cooked tuna fish. Take the spatula, and carefully, carefully, flip the sandwich over without smashing it down. Turn off the heat, and allow the cheese on the higher end of the sandwich to drape over the tuna salad. It is finished.
The celery is crisp, the tuna, robed in mayonnaise and Dijon mustard, is soft and piquant. The toast is crisp, the cheese is weeping. The pepper is vivacious and persnickety, the pickle downright wanton. I don’t have pictures, it was too good, too fleeting.
You may know that because of the heavy rainy season we´ve had in California, the receding waters have left a new exposure of gold. That´s right, partner, there´s still gold in them hills, I intend to get me some. According to someone, gold is currently valued at $2400 oz. That means if I find a big rock, which I intend, I will get a lot of money!!
In the meantime, I will have to settle, though settle is a disgraceful word, for Dough Gods. Dough Gods is a term apparently meant to refer to giant piles of mule-stool, more disgrace. In food terms, this means large drop biscuits with golden flecks of cheddar cheese. These are so heavenly delicious and so easy to make, that you´d be a fool not to whip up a batch right now.
I made them mid-meal. Roast chicken with garlic, lemon, and spring onion. Roasted potatoes and carrots. Spinach au gratin. I was gonna make a nice dessert, but suddenly felt that these savory biscuits would be a better ending to the meal. I thought they would be nice with honey, but they were gone before I got to the pantry. I can´t give the recipe in full because it isn´t my own. I found this recipe, and there are many, in a book by Sally Schmitt, who started the French Laundry in St. Helena. Her family are many generations of Californians all of whom were what we´d call foodies today. Flour, half and half, salt, baking powder, butter, cheddar cheese. Go figure!
Cut to 1 May. Since the last time we ¨talked¨ I made a wonderful, splendid risotto with lemon and asparagus. Also, I have managed to perfect grilled salmon. The key is tons of olive oil, soak the salmon in it for an hour. And salt. And pepper. Put it in the hot grill pan, skin side down. Look at both of these dishes cooking!!
Well, now here we are again, 2 May. It poured rain here in San Francisco, quite unusual this late in the spring. I came home from work and thought about a glass of warm water with lemon for dinner. Don´t want to cook, don´t want to go out. Someone said something about soup today, and boy, did that sound good. Then, my trusty brain came through. I raked through the refrigerator in my mind. Broccoli, Carrot, and Cheddar soup with freshly made chicken stock. Here are a couple snappy snapshots, one with Saltines and one without if you don´t like your soup with crackers
OK enough. I saved my day yet again. Soup is yummy, and I have a feeling I am gonna hit the feathers early. Here´s something to wet the palate coming up this weekend- Arancini and Oatmeal Raisin Cookies, together again!!
After an intense week of work followed by an intense week of play, I have returned. Where was I? Hawaii. It was lovely, not much to write about regarding food, because I was mostly eating out, and as you know this isn´t about restaurants and foods I eat, it´s the whole cooking thing you know that. I did actually cook on the worst range I have ever worked on. It was a rip-off of a high end range Wolf, but it didn´t have the logo on it. It just said Wolf. It couldn´t have been that one right? It was an induction range. After ¨unlocking¨ it so that I could push the buttons and adjust the heat, I put the pan with the uncooked bacon on medium. It didn´t glow red, the bacon didn´t sizzle even after ten minutes of sitting there. So I put it on full blast. After five minutes I saw the bacon weeping fat, but not because it was cooking. It was just coming to room temperature. Indeed, I was able to press my hand at the bottom of the pan and it was barely warm. The next day, I made Poor Knights of Windsor for breakfast. Also known as Lost Bread,(Pan Perdu), or French Toast. Basically the same thing happened, except this time it suddenly got very hot all the sudden, out of nowhere. Maybe it was saving up from the day before. It left one half of several pieces of the toast with a savage, black scar on them.
The loaf of bread was procured from Foodland, the Hawaii version of a Safeway minus ten hell hole. Imagine ice-chipped packages of purple, freezer-burned, chicken drumsticks, which looked like they´d been ripped off violently while the bird while was still alive. BTW, maybe you know this (who are you?), but Hawaii is awash in chickens, live, wild ones. They are beautiful.
It´s artichoke time at Rancho Canipto. I don´t know what I mean by that, but artichokes are in. It´s time, I´m in my forties, I can handle a whole raw artichoke now. I like the steamed leaves, dipped in a spicy sauce. Sure I like artichoke dip with spinach and cheese, or dazzling on a sausage pizza. Of course I love them fritto misto, and who doesn´t love eating them right out of the jar, swaddled in olive oil maybe dripping off a crisp Saltine? But what about stuffing them with stuffing? Setting a poached egg gently on a steamed bottom with a little Roasted Red Pepper Rouille? Tossing them recklessly with fettuccine, walnuts and mint?
I recently read an interesting Greek recipe for a braised beef stew of sorts with artichoke hearts and pine nuts. Sounds good. Have you ever had it? (who are you?) OK, a few more. Artichoke salad with prosciutto, broad beans, arugula, and lemon vinaigrette. Artichokes chopped into creamy mashed potatoes. I once made a salad of artichokes, grapefruit, and thinly sliced purple onion.
OK, that´s enough on the artichoke. Enough.
I´m going to the Farmer´s Market tomorrow after work, I´ll see what´s going on.
I think it´s safe to say at this point that pizza is a popular food. Generally, flatbread with toppings is eaten all over the world and is one of the more ancient prepared foods. The pizza Margherita was named for the Queen and meant to celebrate the Unification of Italy in the 1880s and was delivered to her on a cart, I am told, making the first modern pizza and the first pizza delivery service happening at the same time. Go figure. It´s also interesting to note that Giuseppe Verdi was the most famous opera composer at the time, meaning you could catch a show and grab a pie as kind of a fun date, the way the kids do nowadays.
After a successful musical performance this morning, I came home, took a shower while it was pouring hail and rain outside, plopped on the couch, turned on Judge Judy, and started thinking about dinner. I am a bit tired of eating things with bowls, spoons, sauces, and whatever. The point is, between the corned beef and bouillabaisse, I needed something lighter, more fun. I have plenty of fresh spinach, mushrooms, and cheese, so pizza seemed to be a good choice for all of these things. Making pizza is actually really easy and doesn´t take very much time. It is ironic to me that this should be the ideal food to be made remotely by a teenager and delivered to your door as though you´ve really saved a lot of time and money. You haven´t, by either account. And there´s accountin´ for taste. What you should have delivered is freshly roasted turkey with stuffing, or slow-cooked spare ribs with a thick, velvety complicated sauce. That´s what you have delivered on a Wednesday, not pizza. You can make pizza.
First, the crust. Warm water, yeast, flour, salt, olive oil. Knead it, let it rise. In order, 2 cups, 2 tsps, 4.5 cups (half AP, half bread, this is actually important I forgot to mention), 1 tsp, 2 tbsps.
Second, the sauce. If you´re doing tomato, as I am, it is simply not enough to make your favorite spaghetti sauce and call it a day, it just isn´t. Because you use less sauce on a pizza than on a pile of noodles, the pizza sauce should much more sharply flavored, and of course, thicker. I used a can of whole tomatoes, a tab of butter, garlic, red pepper flake, oregano. It should be spicy. Some people add a little sugar. I don´t.
Now, my options are as follows- First, I could heat the oven and slide the pizzas onto the pizza stone from the paddle and make them individually. Or, I could oil one baking sheet, spread the pizza dough in it, top it, and bake. This pizza will be thicker, and more ¨American style¨, in fact, it will be close to Detroit style. That´s what I think I´m gonna do, it´s less risky. Sliding the pizzas off the paddle and onto the stone requires a level of care and precision I´m unable to handle right now or don´t care. It doesn´t matter. Third degree cheese burn on a pizza stone is a real pain to clean up.
Now that I´ve decided to make a pan pizza, We come to the next important discussion. How far do you take your toppings? The answer-all the way to the edge, and perhaps beyond. If you take the sauce and cheese all the way to the very edge, the crust will pull away slightly from the edge and allow the sauce and cheese to singe and crisp, a wonderful thing to have happen to something.
Now, pizza can be made satisfactorily many different ways. We could let the dough rest overnight, we can make a dough in an hour, the flavor will be different, but a successful pizza can be made either way. I´m obviously going for the one hour to ninety minute method; it´s for tonight.
Pizza´s in the oven. I did everything as intended. I minced the mushrooms almost to a paste, cooked down the spinach and did the same. I finely diced some black olives which made it on top. Then, a torrent of Mozzarella lightning and Parmesan hail. Now, it cooks away in the hot oven. Unlike the flat crust pizzas, which take five minutes, this will need fifteen. I took the sauce to the edge, I took the cheese to the edge. I pulled some basil leaves from my fresh plant which I will ribbon and scatter on the finished dish.
A pizza peek just occurred. We are headed in the right direction. I opened the oven at the very moment a tiny drop of sizzling oil spilled over the side of the pan and onto the pizza stone, making a satisfying sound indeed. Then, the fire alarm went off!! Always a good sign. A good pizza is always almost over-cooked, so you never want to pull it out the oven too early. You should smell a little burn.
Olive oil, onion, leek, fennel, tomato, fennel seed, marjoram, thyme, parsley, garlic, orange zest, salt, pepper. Crab stock, orange juice, tabasco. Stew and simmer, yes, simmer away. Add cod, scallops, shrimp. Crusts of toasted bread, rouille (homemade mayo with red pepper and garlic added), soup, and fresh herbs, parsley and basil.
I made a nifty video showing the complex complexity of composition and composure concisely created for this cornucopia of compostable crustaceans. Unfortunately, it doesn´t support the file type. Instead, a link.
I love silent films.
Tonight, leftover bouillabaisse enthusiastic, enriched and enrobed in an ebullient ellipse of egg elbows. Actually, it was fettuccine, but I couldn´t let go of the alliteration. Soon as I start, I´m stumped for stoppin.
It happened again last night. I opened the fridge, pulled the last soldiers of various leftovers, put them together and what have you got? A great new dish. I had one fatty slice of corned beef left. It look as though it had been attacked by a dog and was salvaged at the last minute, but not without a fight. A half head of Napa cabbage. Some homemade frozen pierogi. I minced the beef into a paste tossed it into a hot pan. When it was browned, I tossed the chopped cabbage and let it cook. Then, I boiled the pierogi and a few minutes later, tossed them into the cabbage along with a little of the pasta water. Black pepper. Heaven. It´s a nice variation on Haluski. These impromptu meals have been going well. My refrigerator just keeps on giving.
Another first. Caramel corn. Why? I have a block of solid caramel that I´ve come in to, and popcorn and toasted pecans. It tastes really good, and has one HUGE flaw. I tossed the caramel into the bowl that the popcorn popped, not noticing that there were a lot of kernels at the bottom of the bowl. This means that everyone had to eat the corn, nuts, and caramel, and masticate the seeds into a bowl. Live and learn, I guess.
Which brings us to today. There is little doubt that I will make a bouillabaisse today. Of this we can be sure. I also have a number of apples, and wouldn´t mind a pie. Or what about a Tart Tatin? Hmmmm……I think that´s what we are going to do. A French day. Of course, I will make Rouille, that unusual mayonnaise that includes saffron and cayenne pepper. You plop some on top of a crostini, drop it in the soup bowl, and ladle the soup around it. The Bouillabaisse today will have shrimp, cod, scallops, and if they have, mussels or clams. Right now is not the best time to get shellfish, so it may be more fish based. Fennel, orange zest, thyme, parsley, garlic, vermouth, and my amazing shellfish stock.
I came back from the market, with one beautiful fillet of shiny white cod, and twelve beautiful fresh pearly white scallops. Trouble is, it´s getting late, I forgot to thaw the shrimp and calamari, and I will not make bouillabaisse for one. I will make the soup tomorrow afternoon, everything will be great. For a cold, windy night in the city, I will eat a hot dog and hit the hay.
We all love hot dogs, we all love pumpkin pie, we all love mac and cheese, and we know the reasons why. Oh, I feel a song coming on. Yes, we love these national foods, and why not, but there are other national foods that we eat all the time, but may not know it. All over our great nation there are lots and lots of breakfast, what do you call them? Stations. In San Francisco, I can immediately think of at least five on Polk St. alone. They have a few high-tops, a freezer case with orange juice and Martinelli´s Apple juice, a selection of glaze crusted donuts, several metal file bins filled with bagels and the American Bagel sandwich.
This type of breakfast sandwich is unique in some ways, and I managed to recreate it as best I could this week, though I should say right off the bat that I put it on two thick slices of Soda bread, no bagel was involved. All of these stations seem to have the same situation: one employee, an Asian woman in her late fifties, who makes the bagels and donuts, works the til, sets the mouse traps, takes out the trash, throws out the ne´er-do-wells, and prepares the sandwiches. She maintains order and efficiency by guiding the customer through the process in a series of tableaux, the first of which is standing behind the cash register and looking at it. This is the cue to order the sandwich. After the sandwich is ordered, the right index finger is extended, indicating the amount of money I am now cued to take from my wallet, cash only. Then the sandwich.
First, two strips of bacon are put on a portable griddle. Then the bagel is sliced and put in the toast conveyor. When the bagel falls the first time, the bacon is flipped and the bagel is put through a second time. When the bagel falls the second time, the bacon is take off the griddle and put on one half of the bagel, which is now resting comfortably in a paper lined basket. Then, two eggs are cracked onto the griddle where they are immediately whipped into a solid cone shape with a fork, as though she were Merlin himself, conjuring edible magic. There are two things that give this sandwich distinction. First, the eggs are cooked on the griddle right after the bacon has come out, leaving beautiful little bits of bacon in the egg. Second, the egg cooks so so fast that it is extremely light and airy. Finally, before being crowned with the second half of hot bagel, a newsboy cap of American cheese, the genuine article, made of real chemicals and individually plastic wrapped, is set on top of the egg where it immediately wilts. Top half of bagel, wrapped in sandwich paper THEN sliced in half.
Speaking of hidden treasures, I´m getting ready for spring and that means cleaning out the pantry and freezer. Winter is over. I took the large bag of Dungeness crab shells I´ve aquired this season and made a heavenly delicious stock, which will work perfectly in an early Spring Bouillabaisse this weekend. But what to do with the tons of mushrooms, carrots, and little peppers I´ve come into? There is also leftover Colcannon with which I have decided to make gnocchi. Maybe Gnocchi with Mushroom sauce. A tiny bit of leftover corned beef. OK, hidden treasures to come.
There it is, the full dinner. The corned beef was delicious, the colcannon was amazing, the soda bread was heavenly.
BTW, I use Marion Cunningham´s recipe for Soda bread, which is unusual because it is only flour, salt, baking soda, and buttermilk. It is not kneaded really at all, it is a shaggy ball when you put it in the dish. When it comes out of the over, and i don´t know how else to say this, it looks Irish, craggy and weather-beaten. The lack of kneading makes for a very moist sponge, the opposite of a lot of soda bread.
Colcannon, what a dish. After a series of accidents late in 2022, my food mill finally gave up the ghost, making the best mashed potatoes impossible. I had to get a new food mill. The new food mill, a Foley, instantly performed significantly better than the old food mill which I had for seventeen years. The mashed potatoes were so so smooth, and the leeks, scallions, and cream disappeared completely into the potatoes, which were the slightest tint of pale green.
Irish butter on the menu!!
The beef benefited from the few extra days in the fridge, the brine had gone all the way through.
Now, I´ve eaten a few leftovers, I´m ¨watching¨ March Madness sports contest on TV, and furiously planning my next culinary adventure.
BingoFest 