Brussels Sprouts and Chestnuts

by Don on April 9, 2011

Roast vegetable season, at least oven roasted, is nearing an end. Once I clean the grill and check the propane, grilled vegetables will begin with roast asparagus. (Gas, I know, but during the week it is incredibly convenient.) However good they are, I’m getting a little tired of roasted root vegetables, even Brussels sprouts.

We used to steam them but for me they were always overcooked and sulphurous. Sarah and I would have endless “discussions” about the topic. She likes her food generally more well done than I do and, well, it can be a trial. However, once I started roasting Brussels sprouts, that particular argument was over. There is no better way to cook them.

The technique is pretty simple: wash a pound of Brussels sprouts and let them drain well. You want them as dry as possible. I cut off of the root end and slice them lengthwise down the middle. Unlike roast potatoes, you don’t need a heavy pan for them, so I usually put some tinfoil on a baking sheet. Preheat the oven to 425.

Put the sprouts in the baking pan and mix them with a little olive oil—2 or 3 tablespoons. I try to keep them face down to start. Don’t worry about the leaves that fall off. Leave them in the pan. They will crisp up as the sprouts cook and become an incredible delicacy. Put the pan in the oven and cook for 30 minutes. Turn the sprouts after 15 minutes or so. If necessary, let them cook five minutes longer. If the rest of the dinner isn’t ready, you can turn off the oven and leave the pan inside for up to 15 minutes.

Serve sprinkled with a good fleur de sel. The leaves, which will look almost burnt, have a caramelized taste and crisp texture that is irresistible.

Chestnuts? Well, for this New York boy, the smell of roasting chestnuts is always Autumn in New York. Pretty much every Thanksgiving, I buy a pound, use my patented Lamsonsharp chestnut knife to cut a circle around each nut and bake them for 40 minutes or so alongside the turkey. If I am smoking a turkey, as I usually am, I sometimes put them on a tinfoil tray in the Weber and let them go there for a couple of hours.

Then, of course, you have to dragoon everyone who is hanging around the kitchen stealing scraps to help you peel them while they are hot. You have to get the brown membrane off as well and that is usually stuck in the brain-like folds of the chestnut. Pretty much everyone is exhausted by the third nut and I am left to do the rest. They don’t mind eating them, of course, but peeling, that’s another story.

I tried Italian dried chestnuts, but they are not quite the same thing. Ok in stuffing perhaps, but you never get that sweet cooked taste of a roasted chestnut. Marrons glaces? Well yes always, but they are a sweet snack. (However, if your girlfriend sends you for them in the middle of the opera, well, you know it’s over. )

So, when I recently got a box of Roland products for me to test, I made sure that it included a jar of chestnuts. Mostly, I knew Roland for its canned mini-shrimp and other Chinese style cans and jars of sauces. But they seem to be making a big push to expand into other areas and part of that includes giving me some free samples to play with.

So I did. Sarah insisted on keeping the chestnuts separate last Thanksgiving, just in case the jarred products tasted foul. I sautéed them in butter and let people add them to the Brussels sprouts. It wasn’t particularly successful, though I confirmed that the chestnuts themselves tasted fine. No off tastes, good texture, good flavor.

So when I got some more just recently, I had no qualms about adding them directly to the Brussels sprouts. I cut about half the jar, about 4 oz., into quarters and added them to the sprouts when I mixed them with the olive oil. Wow. Great roasted flavor without the peeling. Some of the pieces ended up pretty well done, so the next time, I’ll add them about 10 minutes in.

And I’ve got half a jar to play with. I’m thinking to put them on a tinfoil tray over indirect heat in the grill for about 20 minutes and adding the chopped chestnuts to a grilled asparagus primavera. Autumn and Spring. I’ll let you know.

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Jerked Pork and Snow Iris Shoots

by Don on March 14, 2011

I was going to talk about last’s week’s rain and floods but after the disaster in Japan they are quite beside the point.

So, I will simply note that it’s been warm and relatively dry. We have snow irises peeking up, the first sign that, yes, the earth has decided that summer will come again. For the first time in months, there are no basketball games, so I had the morning free enough to hit the local Farmer’s Market.

I picked up some hothouse greens, some maple syrup, and, helpless before the two freezers of meat, some shoulder lamb for some Indian food later in the week. I wanted to make some jerked pork wraps, with some arugula and tzatziki, but I had to settle for the greens. Sarah was taking young Oscar to a basketball game and I was thinking something spicy and easy. It turned out that Sarah, Oscar and his friend Noah all had dinner, but it’s a fluid situation, weekend planning.

Looking for a copper pan the other day, I found a cast iron frying pan in with the pans under the cooktop. I put the pan under the broiler to heat, then added some Pinchos Morenos (boneless pork ribs cut into cubes and marinated with curry, cumin, garlic and some other spices). It came out so well that I’ve been looking for other similar dishes for the other half of the package of ribs. Hence the jerked pork. It’s not grilling, but it’ll do for now.

Jerked Pork

1 lb boneless country ribs
4 scallions
1 knob of ginger
2 cloves garlic
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp thyme
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1 serrano pepper (or more, to taste)
Couple of dashes of Worcestershire
A couple of tablespoons of orange or lime juice.
Tzatziki (1/4 cup of yoghurt, half a seeded cucumber, diced small, and a clove of garlic, mashed to a paste)
6 wheat tortillas or other wraps

Roughly chop the scallions, green and white parts, into a small blender container. Grate the ginger into the container. Roughly chop the garlic and serranos and add to the container. Add the allspice, thyme, cinnamon, nutmeg, and Worcestershire sauce, and salt and pepper to taste and grind to a rough paste. If you need it, add a TBS or two of orange juice to keep the mixture moving. It’s a Martha Stewart move, but a good one.

Slice the ribs into long thin strips. Mix with the paste in a bowl or ziplock baggie. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap or put the ziplock on a plate and refrigerate for several hours or overnight. Heat a cast iron frying pan two inches from the broiler. When it is hot, add the marinated pork. Broil the strips, turning every couple of minutes until they are done to your liking. Heat the tortillas in the oven.

Serve as wraps, with arugula or salad mix and drizzled with tzatziki. I had some pineapple chutney, so I smeared that on the wraps for a touch of sweet.

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Free Will, the American Hero, and The Adjustment Bureau

by Don on March 5, 2011

OK. So the Chairman has a plan which involves controlling the lives of everyone on earth. There is a lot of rewriting of the Plan, which involves some leftover storylines getting in the way of the current edition, which is where The Adjustment Bureau comes in. They meddle in various lives, discounting any pain they may cause, in the furtherance of the Plan. It’s all very allegorical and, wait, very Phillip K. Dickian. (Dickensian?).

[Spoiler alert—if you haven’t seen it and are still capable of being surprised by a plot like this, be forewarned. Details will be revealed.]

Based on a story by Dick, which bears a passing resemblance to the movie, the movie has the standard layers of Dick’s reality, the “apparent” reality in which we live, the “real” reality which is under the surface, and the reality that our heroes create by penetrating the first two. With john Slattery running around in a Mad Man outfit and the very corporate hierarchy of the drones, uh angels, who make up the Bureau, it is a sad view of the meaning of life. The Chairman keeps revising the Plan. Humans can’t be trusted with the Plan (in 1910, after the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the American and French revolutions, humans were given control of their lives and look at the mess they, we, made). David Norris, the hero, played by Matt Damon, is an up and coming politician who is scheduled to become President, if he doesn’t fall in love with dancer Elise Sellas, played by Emily Blunt. If they get together, their love will be enough and Norris will lack the drive to become president and Sellas will end up teaching dance to six-graders instead of becoming the world-class choreographer she is destined to become.

But Norris and Sellas refuse to simply be part of the Plan. They seize control of their own destiny with the help of a friendly angel and ultimately cause the Chairman to revise the Plan yet again. At last view, the iPads on which the Plan is illustrated show their lifelines moving into blank territory, like the maps of 14th Century Europe. Norris proclaims that without Sellas nothing seems worthwhile, which pretty much destroys the Bureau’s view of humanity and pretty much invalidates their actions.

They run for it and, once again, American individualism triumphs, this time over God’s plan. By simply refusing to accede, our heroes demonstrate that free will belongs to the ubermench and uberfrau who can wrest it from the angels. This is, perhaps, even more disturbing. The American story is that the individual who goes off on his (mostly his) own, outside of society and usually the law, is the true hero.  Daniel Boone, Lethal Weapon, George Bush.

I don’t know what is worse—the lack of free will in favor of the plan of a diety who keeps revising the ending or the idea that the individual’s actions are not only above the law but apparently, above God’s law. Dirty Harry meets Ayn Rand with a little Christian fundamentalism thrown in for good measure.

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The Sharper the Knife, the Less You Cry

by Don on February 15, 2011

A review of a book published in 2007 hardly qualifies as a review. It’s just that I was so looking forward to reading the book. I met Kathleen Flinn at a conference last year and I was impressed by what she said and how she thought. I talked to her after her panel and, like I said, I was eager to read her book.

So eager, of course, that it took me a year to pick it up. It is the story of her diploma from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris (there are several these days). Around 2003, Flinn was fired from her middle management position in London and, with the encouragement of her then boyfriend, decided to fulfill a dream and attend Le Cordon Bleu. This book is her story.

It was hard for me not to compare it to Michael Ruhlman’s The Making of a Chef, about the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park. Ruhlman attended the school with the full permission of the CIA, intending to write about what it took to graduate with a two-year degree. In our conversation, Flinn said she decided to write about her experiences shortly after she began the school, but kept it to herself until after she graduated. Ruhlman’s book focuses on the transformation students go through in becoming professional chefs. He is fascinated by veal stock, by the characters of the instructors and by the education itself.

Flinn’s book intertwines her class work with her growing attachment to the man she will ultimately marry. Many chapters end with little life lessons drawn from her class work or her boyfriend that comment on each other. I do not know whether she intended it that way or her editor felt that the book would sell better that way, but it began to feel more about relationships than food. One episode will illustrate my point. Learning to make soufflés, she recalls Audrey Hepburn’s Sabrina’s fallen soufflés. A woman happy in love burns the soufflé, says a helpful baron. A woman unhappy in love forgets to turn on the oven. She turns her oven on the minute she gets to the kitchen. A talisman not an authentic act.

On the other hand, Flinn is a “real” student. She is committed to finishing the course and to getting the degree. Le Cordon Bleu is not the CIA. The CIA trains professionals. It is a college. The students at Le Cordon Bleu range from professionals in training to those who simply want to learn to cook for their own purposes. When Rulhman tells his instructor that because of a forecasted snowstorm, he won’t be at class the next day, the chef replies that it’s OK, he’s not a real chef anyway. Ruhlman, of course, makes sure to get there. When Flinn’s impending wedding means that she won’t graduate with her class, she chooses the wedding.

And returns to the school for the third section, Superior. Married, two-thirds through her education, and increasingly comfortable and competent in the kitchen, the third section sings. There is more kitchen, more cooking, more of the details that you want and need in a cooking memoir. The narrator focuses on her work. She has the time to look at her fellow students and see a little more deeply into who they are. Her relationships with her instructors have a quiet and studied bond. In short, it becomes the memoir I wanted.

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Escoffier’s Eggs

by Don on January 30, 2011

The essence of this recipe is to stir the eggs with a clove of garlic skewered on a fork. It imparts a hint of garlic that obviates the need for bacon or any other meat, although that never stops Sarah for whom crisp bacon is a brunch necessity. I read somewhere that Escoffier used to cook these eggs in with a silver fork in a silver chafing dish for Sarah Bernhardt. In the spirit of Amanda Hesser, I updated the recipe to use a stainless steel fork and a non-stick frying pan. I cook them for myself, for my wife and just lately, for some friends visiting from Belmont who slept over.

The recipe is pretty simple: break 2 eggs for each person into a bowl. If you want, dump one or more yolks into the compost before adding the whites. I use large eggs, most often from a local source, but those are easy to get for me. Peel a largish clove of garlic and cut a thin slice from one side. Skewer the opposite side of garlic with a fork, making sure not to go all the way through.

Warm a non-stick pan slightly over medium heat, then melt a tablespoon of butter in it. When the butter has stopped foaming, add the eggs. Wait until the bottom forms a slight skin, then push the curds around in the pan to let uncooked eggs flow onto the hot pan. Make sure the cut edge of the garlic slides along the bottom of the pan. Cook it as long as you like, stirring gently all the while. Add a sprinkle of fresh ground black pepper, and serve with a toasted English muffin, and plenty of good coffee.

It’s really good.

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Veal Roasts and Roasted Vegetables

by Don on January 23, 2011

 

Photo by Bill Ives. Used with permission.

So much for posting regularly. Work, snow, various ailments, you know, the usual excuses. I have been cooking, though, enough to have something to talk about.

For one thing, I’ve been roasting vegetables. Between carrots and turnips, Brussels sprouts, green beans, and, my favorite, sweet potatoes, they’ve been really successful. Roasting brings out the sugars, crisps things up (if you get it right), and walks that full flavored line between the overcooked, watery taste of steamed vegetables and the crunch of salads. I like salads, but not all the time.

The technique I’ve worked out is pretty straightforward. The key is to use a pyrex or ceramic baking dish. You can roast on a sheet pan, especially Brussels sprouts, but to get that layer of crunch, you need a thick, heat retentive cooking vessel. Cast iron would probably work as well, but I haven’t tried it.

Wash, peel, and cut the vegs in large bite-sized pieces. Include the leaves that fall off the Brussels sprouts after you cut off the bottoms and slice them in half. They crisp up nicely. Wash everything and drain it well to keep the pieces from steaming.

Preheat the oven to 425. When my mother last moved, she gave me about 5 variously shaped Pyrex dishes, so I have plenty and can put each vegetable in a separate dish. They cook at different rates and this lets me pull things out that are going too fast. Like shish kabob skewers—I do each vegetable separately and then pull everything off the skewers into a big pile. But I digress.

Put the pieces in the dish(es) and sprinkle with some olive oil. I usually free pour (my cooking oil has a liquor bottle spout) to what works out to 2 or 3 tablespoons. Every time I measure, I end up adding a splash or two more.

The vegetables take between 30 and 45 minutes. Do not turn them for the first 20, at least, or until the bottom crust is well formed. Turn them too soon and the crust sticks to the dish. If you think of it, shake the pans every five minutes or so when you first start to keep the pieces from sticking. I usually forget. You can add some springs of rosemary or thyme, cracked pepper, or a splash of pomegranate molasses, as Susan Russo once suggested. However, Sarah likes simple tastes, and some sea salt and fresh black pepper at the end is enough.

Last weekend, our friends Bill and Bobbie came out and, in addition to the roasted vegetables, I braised some veal. The cut was a boned veal breast, rolled into a neat roast. My mother used to slice a pocket in the bone-in breast and stuff it (typically with a matzo farfel based stuffing). My braising bible, All About Braising, by Molly Stevens, has a couple of veal shoulder recipes, figs and sherry or almonds, raisins, and Marsala, as well as a simple veal breast. The shoulders take about an hour and a half, the breast—bone-in in her case—takes two and half. Sarah picked the fig and sherry and since Bill spent a lot of time in Spain, it fell together nicely. I did the recipe using the tied breast, cooking it the extra hour or so until it felt right. Except for cutting the figs smaller next time, I’d do the recipe again in a heartbeat. The meat was tender, the sauce was unctuous, and there were complements all around. I added an orange-avocado-red onion-arugula-olive salad from a Spanish cookbook I have.

The meat was delicious and since the meat was grass fed, it was pretty flavorful. The braising was definitely the way to go with it. In fact, I wondered what someone who bought it as a roast might think and whether it would have been too tough. The boned breast was pretty thin, and when you cut it, it fell apart into chunks.

That’s a longer story, I think, about local butchering. When farmers bring the animals to a slaughterhouse, like Adams in Athol, Mass, they fill out a cut sheet and get back the meat already cut. Typically, it is frozen since for sale since that’s the best way to store it. It makes getting a double-thick steak, or specific cut nearly impossible, unless you can arrange for it in advance. At the North Amherst Winter Market, Batcheller Hill Farm had some rib eyes that were so amazing, I am still regretting I didn’t get any. Big, Fred Flintstone cuts, they would be perfect and if I didn’t have 30 lbs of various meats already in the freezer, with some more venison on the way, I’d have jumped.

Anyway, now that we’re able to get local and grass-fed meat from a lot of different sources, I think the next fronteir is getting some control over the butchering. Whole Foods and  River Valley Market has a good butcher selection, but I forgot to ask what they can do. In the mid-70′s, I was part of the Cambridge pre-order food co-ops and we went as far as buying big bags of nuts and grains and dividing them for pick-up. I don’t see that working for meat, but still, I’d love to find a way for my favorite meat suppliers to offer more cuts to order.

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Testing Recipes

by Don on January 13, 2011

I’ve been testing recipes for a friend of mine. I can’t say more about the recipes themselves—sworn to secrecy—but it was interesting to me to see how I approached the recipes.

Normally, you read a recipe and assume the writer knows what s/he’s talking about. Maybe you start to feel otherwise as you go through it, but you typically view it as finished. After a while, you get to know the author, know what you like and what you change about their recipes. Some authors you just avoid. There are some authors whose recipes never come out right. Others, who if you follow them exactly, surprise you with just how good they taste. Marcella Hazan has a recipe for zucchini and tomatos like that. I mean, how hard is it to cook zucchini and tomatos, right? I followed the recipe exactly and damn if the normally watery zucchini rounds were firm and toothsome (i.e., chewy in a good way).

When I was testing the recipes for my friend, I did not think that way. I’ve made her recipes before and liked them, so I had a generally good feeling about them. I followed the instructions exactly, since that is the job of a recipe developer. No improvisations, no substitutions. If I didn’t have something, I bought it. The upshot was the recipes came out well and everyone I served them to liked them. It was fun, though from what I gather from friends who test for pay, the pay rate is not great and you end up with a lot of food you just can’t finish. One of them, a young mother, has a phone list of young mothers she calls. Nice way to “dispose” of the culinary equivalent of waste.

However, when I was following the recipes, I tended to question everything about them. Too much salt? Does it sound like it will be tasty? Are these the right combinations? I’d look at techniques and think, I would do that differently. I thought about that since I did not want to revise it into my recipe.

It brought back the memory of a really bad adjunct instructor I had in college. He was teaching a science fiction class. I submitted an essay that was aimed at being an article for Locus. I got it back covered in red. “I’m approaching it like an editor would,” was his comment. As I looked at the piece, it became apparent that most of the comments were there to make it sound like he wrote it. Word choices and sentence structure were all different. Granted that I tend to have a personal style that isn’t to everyone’s taste, but still. No comments on concepts or structure, the kind of things a good editor would question. Only different word choices. Like he’d gone through it looking to change everything without really reading what was there.

In the end, I stepped back and asked did it work on its own terms? I judged whether I liked the taste of the finished product, since that was part the task. Fortunately, I did. And then I looked at what the directions said and decided whether they were clear and whether I had any questions about how to proceed. Those were the comments I gave my friend. The rest, adapting them to my particular tastes and styles I can do when I make them again for me.  Useful way to approach a lot things.

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