Cook it up right

There’s something I have to get off my chest, today. I hope you’ll bear with me. It’s small, and round, and edible, of course. It’s my favorite grain that’s not a grain at all. Yes, I’m talking about quinoa.

I’m not usually one to make demands about what one must or mustn’t do in the kitchen. At least not in your kitchen. Food is personal, and you’ve got to do with it what you want. You’re the decider! So go ahead and eat your steak as bloody or as burnt as you please. Douse it in ketchup, or mayo, or grape jelly, for all I care. Cook and let cook! Eat and let eat! Except for when it comes to quinoa. This, for the simple reason that I have been enjoying the heck out of quinoa lately, and I think you will, too, if you cook it up right.

For a long time, I made quinoa much like I make rice. (I also have some things to say about the way we’re all taught to cook rice, by the way, but that’s a story for another day.) Anyway, you know how it goes: some measure of quinoa and about twice as much water, simmered down until it has either evaporated or absorbed. There’s a reason I used to do it this way. The box told me to. And so did any number of reputable print and on-line sources. It seemed obvious enough, and depending on how I timed the cooking and calibrated the boil (what does a true “simmer” look like, anyway?), the result was more or less fine. But somewhere along the way, after at least half a dozen times of more-or-less-fine, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t the biggest fan of the stuff. The flavor was borderline nice, I suppose. There was something faintly nutty there, but it was muted, bogged down. And the texture. Was this how it was supposed to be? Mildly soggy at best, mushy at worst? I nearly typed the word “swampy” in that last sentence, which leads me to wonder just how “fine” my early days of quinoa really were.

Then, in the late summer of 2006, the August issue of Gourmet turned up in my mailbox with a recipe for quinoa with corn, scallions, and mint. I could stop right there, or maybe with the fact that the recipe also includes fresh lemon zest and juice, and a touch of honey, and you’d already know that this recipe had a lot going for it. But what really got me was the cooking method. You start the quinoa on the boil, as I’d come to expect, but carry on only until it’s just coming around to tender. Then, you drain it, and set it in a sieve over an inch of simmering water to steam the rest of the way through to done. The technique is brilliant, and so is the quinoa that comes out in the end. It’s soft without the sog, breaks between the teeth with the lightest pop, and when you fluff it with a fork, you actually fluff it with a fork. Fluff it, not smoosh it. Because the individual seeds remain individual seeds, clump-free, lump-free, and every bit as delicious as all the quinoa you’ve ever eaten has let on it might be, given the proper circumstances.

So there you go. Thanks. I feel much better now.

Lemon-Scented Quinoa with Scallions and Mint
Adapted from Gourmet

The original recipe includes four ears worth of fresh corn kernels, boiled on the cob for five minutes, then removed, or simply raw. It’s wonderful that way in the summer. This time of year, I make it without the corn, and it’s still excellent. Make the dressing with butter or, for a something different, olive oil. I like it both ways.

1 Tbsp. finely grated lemon zest
2 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice
½ stick (¼ c.) unsalted butter, or ¼ c. olive oil
1 Tbsp. mild honey
Salt and black pepper to taste
2 c. (about 10 oz.) quinoa
4 scallions, thinly sliced
½ c. chopped fresh mint

Rinse the quinoa in three changes of cold water to remove any bitter coating. Bring a 4- to 5- quart pot of salted water to a boil, add the quinoa, and cook for about 7-8 minutes, until just slightly tender. (Think al dente pasta.)

Drain the quinoa in a sieve, then set the sieve over an inch of simmering water in the same pot. (Make sure that the water doesn't touch the bottom of the sieve.) Cover the quinoa with a folded kitchen towel and cover the whole thing with a lid. Steam until the quinoa is tender, fluffy, and dry, about 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and let stand, still covered, for another 3-5 minutes.

Meanwhile, make the dressing: Whisk together the lemon zest and juice, butter or oil, honey, salt, and pepper. Gently fold the quinoa into the dressing with a rubber spatula, then fold in the scallions and mint. Taste, and add more salt and pepper, if you'd like. Serve at any temperature.

Makes enough for eight.

A flying leap

The newspaper told me to make corn bread yesterday. Yes, again. In my defense, this corn bread is really its own thing, so one might argue that it’s not “again” at all. Also in my defense, it’s hard to say no to a newspaper, especially when that newspaper is The New York Times, and especially, especially when it’s speaking in the voice of Sam Sifton. There’s talk of sopping, and stuffing and, (I love this part) “powerful croutons.” Then, the following statement: “There is really no reason not to make corn bread right away.” Including, I assumed, the alarming rate of corn bread production and consumption already underway in my kitchen. “No reason” means no reason, after all. So I got up, oiled a cast-iron skillet, and put it in the oven to warm.

And here we are, another corn bread before us. The funny part isn’t actually the two-corn-breads-in-as-many-posts thing. I mean, corn bread is good. Bring on the corn bread, right? It’s that the two corn breads in as many posts both hail from my very own Cambridge, Massachusetts: a yeasted sandwich-style loaf from Hi-Rise Bread Company and, today, a skillet quick-bread from a restaurant called the East Coast Grill. Now that, 180 miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line, is unexpected.

I’ve got a few things I’d like to say about today’s corn bread, but having just scrolled through the comments posted beneath the article on the New York Times site, I continue with trepidation. (Do not, I repeat, DO NOT mess with people’s corn bread.) Hopefully, with a loaf of corny sandwich bread as our starting point, it’s safe to say that today’s version is at least closer to what many of us imagine when we hear the words, “corn bread.” (Or the word, “cornbread,” depending on whom you ask.) It’s baked in a skillet, for one thing, and it’s leavened with baking powder, not yeast. Plus, it just plain looks like corn bread. It smells like corn bread, too, as it bakes and browns and crisps up around the edges, which is why I was surprised to discover that it didn’t quite taste like corn bread. At least not the corn bread I had in mind. Don’t get me wrong. Some people will tell you that with the presence of eggs, flour, yellow cornmeal, and sugar, this is no corn bread, but an abomination. I am not one of those people. I am a person, though, who once upon a time, circa 1989 in Cleveland, Ohio, slid squares of corn bread from the school lunch line onto my tray, and got something dense and crumbly, not unappealingly dry, and with a one-note, corn-only flavor. That I measure my corn bread by the yardstick of my grade school cafeteria should tell you that I have not a lick of authority in the corn bread department. All I’m trying to say is that I guess I was expecting something like that. And yet, despite what I thought today’s corn bread might be, and what it actually is, my message to you is that I like it very much.

This corn bread, as you can plainly see, is many energetic strides away from the upright loaf of Hi-Rise Bread Company fame. But as it approaches (what I consider to be) the land of classic corn bread, it takes a flying leap into full-blown cake territory. Here, like in the Hi-Rise recipe, the single cup of cornmeal never truly grabs you, mingling as it does with twice that amount of white flour. Even with the added corn kernels, what we have here is not the corniest of corn breads. Sifton does, by the way, suggest playing with the balance of corn meal and white flour to suit your taste, and I plan on changing things up the next time around, just to see what happens. Still, there’s no denying that cake territory is a lovely, lovely place. Things are sweet there, and if you’re lucky, light and moist, and we could all do worse than a corn bread that is all of these things.

The only trick is figuring out just what to do with this cake-like bread. First, there is the matter of temperature. I have always operated under the general rule that warm-from-the-oven bread, left to cool just long enough to finish pulling itself together, is always preferable to room temperature bread. Cakes, though, are best fully cooled. Breads, warm. Cakes, cool. Then along comes this cake-like bread... See the problem, here? The beauty of a skillet-baked corn bread is that you can bring it in the skillet from oven to table, and cut into it while it is still warm. That's what we did with this skillet-baked corn bread, only to discover that still warm, it's actually kind of weird. (A case of, ahem, cast iron-y, perhaps??) (Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week.) It tastes, for lack of a better word, rare. As in, not quite cooked. This, despite it being, by every measure, baked through. The flavor and feel are what I would imagine classic birthday cake might be if you were to eat it straight from the oven. Too sweet, very white, in need of salt, and a little, I don’t know… batter-y.

It was the strangest thing. So strange that I remained on the fence for a while about whether I would share the recipe with you at all. Then, a few hours later, when the bread was cool, I tried it again, and found that it had ripened into serious deliciousness. The white flour did its job, adding stature and spring, but had stepped back a bit behind the corn. What was once too sweet was now perfectly in balance, and upping the salt no longer felt necessary. It just needed some time to settle, I guess. As for how I’ve been eating it: with soft, salted butter, with raspberry jam, and, of course, with the killer hot pepper honey that the newspaper also, in its supreme and clear-eyed bossiness, insisted I make.

So. Another corn bread for you, friends. And now that I’m officially collecting them, it seems, I think I’d like to find one more. Something corn meal-heavy so that the corn really sings. Do you have a favorite recipe you’d be willing to share? I hope so. I’d really love to know.

East Coast Grill Corn Bread
(and Honey with Red Pepper flakes)
Adapted from The New York Times Magazine, where Sam Sifton adapted it from the East Coast Grill

If you managed to read all the way down to the end of this post, you already know that I advocate for the complete cooling of this bread before eating. Leave it uncovered in the skillet so that you don’t lose the crunchy bits on top and around the edges. One other quick note: I like my corn bread gritty, so I use medium-grind cornmeal.

2 c. all-purpose flour
1 c. stone-ground yellow cornmeal, medium grind
¾ c. white sugar
½ tsp. salt
1 Tbsp. baking powder
2 large eggs
1½ c. whole milk
1½ Tbsp. vegetable oil
¼ c. melted butter
2 c. fresh or frozen corn kernels

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly oil a 9-inch cast-iron skillet and put it in the oven to heat up.

In a large bowl, sift together the flour, cornmeal, sugar, salt, and baking powder. In another bowl, whisk together the eggs, milk, and oil. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients, add the melted butter and the corn, and stir until just mixed.

Take the hot cast-iron pan from the oven and pour in the batter. Use a spatula to even it out, if necessary. Put the pan back into the oven and bake for approximately 1 hour (start checking at 50 minutes), until the bread is browned on top and a tester inserted into the center comes out clean.

Serves 6-8.

::

Honey with Red Pepper Flakes

Spoon some honey, however much you’d like, into a bowl. Sprinkle with red-pepper flakes, to taste. Wonder why you’ve never thought of this before.

For your toasting pleasure

A few weeks ago, Mia had her First Sick. It was of the fever and tummy trouble variety. Through the worst of it one night, we set a timer and fed her milk with a dropper every twenty, then fifteen, then ten minutes, a few ccs at a time, only as much as she could keep down. When I finally felt her head plop against my shoulder and her body drop into sleep, I said to Eli, “I think we’ve been initiated.” We were real parents now.

By the time I sat down to write that last post, the one about celery, Mia was feeling quite well again. I was feeling well, too. It was Monday; the week was still mine! I was here with all of you, gearing up to talk celery! But as I typed, I began to wish a little bit that I were talking about something else, because celery, well, suddenly it didn’t sound so good. It wasn’t the celery, of course, but me. No sooner did I hit “Publish,” I was struck down. “Grown-ups can’t catch a bug like this from a baby,” Eli had (wishfully) surmised. Famous last words. He too was felled. Two healthy parents and a sick kid is one thing. Two sick parents – welcome to our real initiation.

When the fever lifted and standing in a fully upright position no longer seemed like a task for the mighty, I took myself on a tour of the apartment and surveyed the wreckage. There, on the coffee table, on the kitchen counter, on the floor by the sofa, on a plate in the bed, was forty-eight hours’ worth of evidence of my feeble attempts at solid food consumption: Toast. It was everywhere. At some point, I must have decided that getting bread to toaster, to plate, to bed, was victory enough, since one day-old specimen was not a crumb short of a fully formed slice. The remaining pieces were also whole to varying degrees, with just a corner, maybe two, missing from each one. From the looks of my apartment, this was no illness, but some kind of odd life experiment in which I had repeatedly tried, and failed, to eat toast.

Since we last spoke, I’ve been doing my best to make up for it.

It’s been a lot to get caught up on, all that toast. Loaf by loaf, though, I’ve been closing the gap.

That I have a thing for toast is no secret. Did you know that toast was the subject of the second post that I ever wrote on this site? That feels like a lifetime ago (technically, I guess it was, and then some), but what can I say? I will never get over toast. I must talk about it more than I even realize, because back at the end of January, when I mentioned on Twitter that “day-old corn bread from Hi-Rise Bread Company makes terrific cinnamon toast” (a public service announcement, really), my friend Nishta replied, “Jess, you think everything makes terrific cinnamon toast.” She has a point.

Between you and me, you can leave off the cinnamon, and her statement still holds.

I am proud to have delivered some prime toasting material to your computer screens over the life of this blog. You might recall this soda bread, the stuff of my friend Eitan’s “ideal toast” and, once upon a time, these buttermilk biscuits, which become different creatures completely when toasted. Today, I bring you something new for your toasting pleasure: a corn bread-cum-sandwich loaf from my neighborhood bakery.

I’ve been a fan of Hi-Rise corn bread for years, but these things go in cycles for me, which means that a favorite thing will often slip my mind for months, until one day, out of nowhere, hell-OOO, corn bread. It's not half bad, getting to rediscover my favorite things on a fairly regular basis. (Does this happen to you?)

Anyway, I rediscovered Hi-Rise corn bread just after the first of the year and started bringing home a loaf a week. Then, I found the recipe. It makes a couple of loaves at a time, so we’ve now been going through two loaves a week. (Closing the gap, I tell you, closing the gap.) What gets me about this corn bread is how unexpected it is. I don’t think I’ve ever used the words “corn bread” and “loaf” in the same sentence, but today, I get to. This is no skillet-baked, soda-leavened snacking cake, but an honest to goodness bread. It’s got yeast, and bread flour, and at first glance, looks like standard sandwich bread (if particularly golden-crusted). It is so far removed from what we typically think of when we hear the words “corn bread” that some might say it isn’t corn bread at all. It is, though, with a cup each of corn meal and whole corn kernels to prove it.

You can see here that the first time I baked this bread, it came out with a giant hump. I’m not sure what caused it – it hasn’t happened since – but in any case, it didn’t do any harm. I actually think it’s kind of cute. Here’s that hump from the other side, and a peek at the inside of the loaf to give you a better sense of the thing:

(If you click on that photo, you can see it big.)

This bread has a lot in common with other toast-worthy breads: the slightly moist crumb that’s somehow dense and airy at the same time, the crust that is already on its way to crisp just out of the oven and, once toasted, shatters and flakes when you bite into it. (One end piece for me, please. Two, if no one else wants.) These estimable qualities mean a piece of toast that is 100% toast on the surface – brown, stiff, crumbly; you know, typical toast stuff – but only about 75% toast within, where the bread is warm but still slightly springy to the touch. And that’s before we even get to the corn factor. If you’ve ever taken a corn muffin or a square of traditional corn bread, a corn scone or a glorious wedge of custard-filled corn bread, yes, if you’ve ever taken a corn anything at all, and stuck it in the toaster oven, you know that the corn factor is a very real, very wonderful thing. Cornmeal, toasted, is special. It’s its own flavor, really, and hard to describe. The words “buttery” and “round” come to mind. To me, toasted corn bread tastes sort of like how corn smells when it’s popping, if that makes any sense, only sweeter, in a way that makes me want to drop everything (except for the toast; I’ll finish eating first, thanks) and bake a full-on cornmeal cake. Toasting does nice things to the texture of cornmeal, too, making the grains feel more like crunchy seeds than crumbs.

I bet this bread would be great in a panade, or as the base of a stuffing or a summer bread salad. I'll let you know. If I ever get past the toast.

Hi-Rise Corn Bread
Adapted from Artisan Baking, by Maggie Glezer

If yeasted breads make you nervous, this corn bread is an excellent starting point. It’s rated as a “beginner” recipe in the cookbook where I found it, and I want to tell you a few things here to encourage you to give it a go:

:: This dough is one of the most agreeable I’ve ever worked with, in part because if you have a stand mixer, you barely have to work with it at all. It’s a fairly soft, wet dough, but not overly sticky. Just keep your surfaces floured, and when you dump it out on the counter and start rolling and folding it, you won’t have a problem.

:: Let’s talk about poolish. I feel like that word might scare some people off, but it’s really just a fancy word for a starter, and a very low-maintenance one, at that. You just stir together some flour, water, and instant yeast, and leave it alone for a couple of hours. Ta da! Poolish.

:: A word about timing. The original recipe has you make the bread from poolish, to dough, to fully-baked loaves on a single day. I prefer to break up the steps between two days with an overnight rise in the fridge. I feel it’s simpler this way, so that’s how I suggest you do it in my version of the recipe. If you want to make the bread all in one day, then instead of putting the dough in the fridge for the first rise, let it rise at room temperature until it triples in size (or comes close). That should take between 1½ and 3 hours, depending on how warm your room is. Watch the dough, not the clock.

:: It will be a while until corn season here, so I use (thawed) frozen corn, and it works just fine.

:: The recipe calls for stone-ground white corn meal, but I used Bob’s Red Mill stone-ground yellow corn meal, medium grind. My bread flour is King Arthur’s.

Finally: With so much fuss over toast, I want to be clear that even thoroughly untoasted, this bread is as nice as can be. And how about this for a happy medium: Pop the entire cooled loaf into a 300-degree oven for 7-10 minutes before serving. The crust doesn’t get quite toasted, but it does become something wonderful. Flakey, crunchy, delicious.

For the poolish:
1¼ c. (190 g) bread flour
1½ tsp. instant yeast
¾ c. (190 g) + 2/3 c. lukewarm water (160 g), divided

For the dough:
Fermented poolish
2½ c. (375 g) bread flour
1 c. plus 2 Tbsps. (140g) stone-ground cornmeal, medium grind
Fresh corn kernels from one large ear, or about ¾ c. (115 g) frozen corn kernels
2 large eggs
2 Tbsps. honey
1½ Tbsps. olive or vegetable oil
1 Tbsp. salt

For the glaze:
1 large egg, lightly beaten

Make the poolish:
The evening before you want to bake the bread, whisk together the flour and the yeast in a mixing bowl, then beat in the ¾ c. water. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and leave it alone until it’s quite bubbly, about 2 hours. I usually do this step in the early evening, before dinner.

Make the dough:
When the poolish is nice and bubbly, add the remaining 2/3 c. water, and stir to loosen it from the bowl.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, whisk together the flour, cornmeal, and corn. Add the poolish, and all of the remaining ingredients except for the salt, and stir with your hand or a wooden spoon to make a rough dough. Mix with a dough hook on medium speed until the dough is smooth, about 5 minutes. Add the salt, then continue mixing with the hook for another 1-2 minutes. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.*

The next morning (12-18 hours later), take the dough out of the fridge and leave it (in the bowl, still covered) on the counter for an hour or two.

Generously butter or oil two 9 x 5-inch loaf pans, and dust your counter with flour. Scoop out about a third of a cup of flour to keep by your work area in case your dough starts to stick.

When the dough is about three times larger than what you started out with the night before, dump it onto your floured surface and cut it in half with a pastry scraper. Dust the first half with flour, and roll it out into a square-ish sheet that’s about ¼-inch thick. Press out the air bubbles as you go. Fold the left and right sides of the dough into the center, letting them overlap by about an inch. I use a pastry scraper to coax the dough up from the counter, and I find it very helpful.

Roll out the dough again from folded edge to folded edge (that is, left to right, parallel to the edge of your counter) until you have a rectangle of dough that’s as long as your loaf pans. Then, starting with the long edge of dough that’s closest to you, roll it up like a carpet. Lay the cylinder seam-side down in one of the prepared pans. (It will look small in there; it will grow.)

Repeat with the second piece of dough.

Cover the loaves with plastic wrap, and let rise until the dough is about an inch above the pans, about 2-3 hours.

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Brush the loaves with the remaining egg and bake for 50-60 minutes. Remove the breads from the pans – they should be a deep, glowy brown, and sound hollow when you thump them on the bottom – and let them cool on a rack.

Yield: Two loaves.

*I’ve only made the dough in my stand mixer, but you can also knead it entirely by hand. It will just take longer. Try to use as little extra flour as possible. The original recipe suggests using your pastry scraper to help you crush the corn kernels as you knead. You can also make this dough in a food processor: combine the dry ingredients in the bowl and pulse a few times. Add the poolish, eggs, honey, and oil, and process the dough until the bowl fogs, about 30 seconds. Remove the dough from the bowl and hand knead it for a few turns to cool it down and redistribute the heat. Return the dough to the bowl, add the salt, and process it for 3 or 4 more 30-second intervals, hand kneading it between intervals, until it is tighter and very smooth.

:: :: ::

p.s.

A whole new celery

There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, but I haven’t been sure how to say it. I was worried for a while that you’d think it’s weird or, worse, boring. Then I remembered that you guys dig this kind of thing as much as I do (I love you, internet friends!), so really, what am I waiting for?

Friends, meet celery.

I know. You think you’ve met before. At that lunch, or that picnic, or that party, or most likely all of the above. You’ve been bumping into celery your whole life long. The celery I have for you today, though, is not that celery. It’s not the celery that’s chopped into egg salad or the mirepoix on its way to soup. It’s not the stalk sticking out of your Bloody Mary (though that doesn’t sound half bad on this Monday morning), and it is emphatically not the celery of ants on a log (which does sound bad on this and every morning). This celery is Jane Grigson’s celery with butter and salt. It’s a whole new celery.

I found this celery in a book that I picked up for $1.25 at a library sale last year. The book, by English cookery writer Jane Grigson, is called Good Things. (One of which, I might add, is the use of the word “cookery” throughout.) The library was overrun with some seriously aggressive book seekers that day. People swarmed the tables and snatched at books left and right. It was all very Supermarket Sweep, at once entirely uncivilized and entirely fun, and left no time for standing around flipping pages. I read only the first line of this promising title: “This is not a manual of cooking, but a book about enjoying food.” Sold.

In her introduction, Grigson warns against forgetting “the true worth of the past, the long labouring struggle to learn to survive as well and as gracefully as possible.” To help us with the remembering, she loads up her pages with all manner of good things, from “Kippers for breakfast,” to “Mrs. Beeton’s carrot jam to imitate apricot preserve,” to “How to make the most of asparagus.” Grigson is smart and succinct, warm and quietly funny, and has me utterly in her grips.

I’ve never felt particularly strongly one way or another about celery, but she describes so winningly the “fine pleasure of buying celery in earthy heads,” its “high and grateful taste” (she’s quoting the 17th-century diarist, John Evelyn, there), that I immediately felt the need to indulge in some “first-class celery.” I peeled away the outer ribs and set them aside for soup and went right for the hearts. I slipped some butter into the “channel” (as she calls it) of each rib, then added the salt flakes. The softened butter tasted positively warm against the celery, crisp, sweet, and cold. I eyed the new food in my hand. That's how it felt: new. So this is celery! Celery enthusiasts of the world, show yourselves! I walk among you, now.

More good things of late:

:: An artist who creates stuffed animals out of children’s drawings. (via Dad)

:: An interview with Joan Didion.

:: A photo by my friend Lecia from last summer. I keep coming back to it.

:: Brioches filled with apricot preserves at Hi-Rise Bakery.

:: An e-mail from my dad with something Wendell Berry once wrote: “It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.” (From his essay, Poetry and Marriage)

:: This.

:: Her.

Celery hearts with butter and salt
Adapted from Good Things by Jane Grigson

That I have anything further to say about this simple combination of celery, butter, and salt may seem ridiculous, but the details really do matter here.

About the celery: The outer ribs can be stringy, bitter, and tough. Peel them away and use only the hearts. That’s where you’ll find the sweetest, most tender ribs. You’ll want your celery cold, so use it straight from the fridge, or soak it in ice water for 10 minutes (then thoroughly dry) before serving.

About the butter and salt: “Care must be taken with butter and salt,” Jane Grigson writes in this recipe, and she’s right. You’re really going to taste the butter and salt here, so choose what tastes best to you. I like the flavor of Kerrygold butter and Maldon salt flakes, so that’s what I used. Let the butter warm to room temperature before spreading.

There you have it

On December 31st, 2011, I sent my friend Molly a text:  I’m having a salad vision.

It looked like this:

(Minus the feet.)

Butter lettuce, toasted walnuts, fresh ricotta, and sautéed dates for our New Year’s Eve dinner that night. The list of ingredients is more or less the recipe today, so there you have it, but I do want to talk to you for just a moment about the dates. I can’t stop thinking about them.

The dates are where my salad vision began. Specifically, with the sautéed dates and yogurt that I ate for breakfast at Sitka and Spruce in Seattle last May. I’d been meaning to recreate the dish, but I hadn’t yet gotten around to it, and it suddenly occurred to me that sautéed dates might be equally at home at dinner, maybe with cheese instead of yogurt, and some greens on the side. It would be a plated salad. We'd toss the lettuce with a vinegary dressing, sauté the dates in olive oil, and lay them over small heaps of ricotta. Molly was in, and in typical Molly fashion, she upped the ante. With butter. We should sauté the dates in butter. Sing it, Molly.

Sautéing dates is a beautiful, beautiful thing. You roll them in a pan of hot, foaming butter and, once coated, leave them alone. The skin against the pan starts to caramelize, and after about a minute or so, you flip them, and let the other side do the same.  Just out of the pan, they gleam.  They're deep mahogany where they’ve taken the most heat, more candy in places than fruit.  Like toffee-in-the-making at the hard-ball stage.

Dress the greens, top with walnuts; spoon the ricotta, top with dates. A vision. Yep.

Sautéed Dates with Ricotta and Butter Lettuce
Inspired by breakfast at Sitka and Spruce, with help from the one and only Molly B.

I’ve called out butter lettuce in the title of this recipe since that was my original plan, but in the end I used part butter lettuce and part red leaf lettuce. Get whatever looks good. Just steer clear of the boxed and bagged lettuces and you’ll be fine. You’re welcome to use your own favorite vinaigrette for the dressing. You want something with enough of a vinegary bite to balance the sweetness on the other side of the plate. Simple is best. I went with oil and vinegar with a squirt of Dijon mustard and a few grinds of black pepper – no herbs or spices.

2 c. fresh ricotta (store bought – go for the good stuff – or make your own)
2 Tbsp. unsalted butter
12 Medjool dates
Maldon salt (optional)
2 medium heads of butter lettuce (or butter lettuce and red leaf lettuce, one head each)
1 c. walnuts

For the vinaigrette:
6 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil (plus a little more if you decide to tone down the vinegar)
3 Tbsp. red wine vinegar
1 squirt (about ¼ tsp.) Dijon mustard (you can add more, if you want)
A few grinds of black pepper

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Spread the walnuts in a single layer on a baking sheet and toast them for about 7 minutes, until fragrant. Set aside.

Remove the lettuce leaves from the heads, gently wash them in cold water, spin dry, then lay them out on towels and leave them to finish drying. (If your kitchen is very hot, it’s best to lay them out somewhere else to prevent the leaves from wilting.)

Shake up the vinaigrette in an empty jar, or whisk it together in a bowl. Start with 6 tablespoons of olive oil, then taste it. If it’s too vinegary for you, add more oil, one teaspoon at a time, until you get something you like.

Spoon about a third of a cup of ricotta onto each plate. You’ll want to put it over to one side to leave room for the lettuce.

Slice the ends off of the dates and pull out their pits. Melt the butter in a heavy skillet over medium-high heat. When the butter foams, add the dates. Let them sit undisturbed for about a minute, until their bottoms begin to caramelize and turn deep brown. Flip them, and leave them for another minute to do the same. Remove the dates to a plate when they’re done.

Toss the lettuce with the vinaigrette (less is more; you will most likely have extra dressing), and place a pile of leaves next to each heap of ricotta. Top the lettuce with the toasted walnuts and the cheese with the sautéed dates, two per plate. If you think of it, sprinkle a few flakes of Maldon salt on the dates. I meant to, but I forgot. Next time.

Serves 6.

Three

Today is January 7th, 2012, which means that Sweet Amandine is three. It’s been kind of insane, hasn’t it? There was the brain thing, the baby thing, a summer in Berlin, a new apartment and construction projects galore, so(!) much(!) butter and sugar and flour. Whew. I’m so glad I’m here. I’m so glad you’re here. Thank you.

January feels like an honest to goodness starting line this year. I’ve got a couple of new projects on the drawing board, and while I’m not exactly sure what comes next, I’m excited. 2012 will be a year for working hard on things I care about. I’m really looking forward to that.

We had some friends over on New Year’s Eve to cook and to eat. That’s Steph up there grinding the pepper for the fennel and Molly working on the gnocchi. The blur all the way on the right is me. I’m making ricotta. We started the evening at 5pm, and instead of putting together the entire meal at once, we prepared one course at a time, gathering around the table to eat whenever the next round was up. It’s my new favorite way to do dinner.

Molly and I figured out the menu over e-mail and texts all week long. We decided to keep it simple, and I’m glad. The salad was butter lettuce in a mustardy vinaigrette, toasted walnuts, ricotta, and sautéed dates. Then, while Molly dropped her gnocchi into the pot and prepared a brown butter sage sauce, I caramelized the fennel and tossed it with the dill and garlic that Steph had chopped.

It was the best night.

We finished with bourbon balls, pear tarte Tatin, and a dance party in the living room.

(Champagne, too, of course.)

And then we found out that on New Year’s Eve, we can see fireworks from our living room. 2012, you're full of surprises already.

No shortage of recipes to share with you tonight, as you can see, but it’s late, so I’m going to sign off for now. I’ll be back soon with one or two from this meal.

Happy 2012.

2-0-1-1

Ahhh, 2011, you’ve treated us well. A new apartment! A new human! And for the first year since 2007, no one cut open my head! Yahooooo! 2-0-1-1, you thought of everything. Then, to top it all off, you squeezed in some fudgy bourbon balls just under the wire. That’s bourbon and chocolate together in one boozy confection.

It’s been a very good year.

The recipe comes from Melissa Clark’s In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite, the same cookbook that brought us that special snacking cake and rosemary-laced lemon bars, which practically makes these bourbon balls delicious by association. I added them to our Chanukah party spread last week, sent some off to my family in Ohio, then hurried right back into the kitchen to prepare a batch for New Year’s Eve. I thought you might want to make them for New Year’s Eve, too, though to be perfectly honest, I’m kicking myself for sharing the recipe with you only this afternoon. You can start these bourbon balls the night before, or even the day you plan to serve them if you can get the dough together with enough time to let it rest before rolling. The one- to two-day old balls will be very good. But I’ve found that they don’t really arrive until day four or five. That’s when their fudginess peaks. (The bourbon in these little buggers sneaks up on you, by the way, so watch out.)

A couple of things about this recipe surprised me. First, there’s the fact that you crunch up store-bought chocolate cookies in a food processor and use the crumbs as the base for the balls. In other words, you’re making what amounts to a cookie out of cookies. It's cookie cannibalism, people. Then comes the part where you have to leave the dough (can I even call it “dough?”) uncovered for hours to dry it out. That also felt strange, and especially so when I realized that the finished balls also do best when left out in the open. For days. But then you have yourself a plate of bourbon balls so dense and rich – almost chewy – that suddenly, the whole thing feels perfectly natural. Of course, that could be the bourbon talking.

I’m going to unplug next week to wrap up a work project and get some ducks in a row, but I’ll be back on January 7th with a recipe and some thoughts for 2012. Until then, Happy New Year, friends.

[Oh, and p.s. – When we moved last spring, we did so with the help of some good friends. No boxes, if you recall. We just picked up our stuff and carried it over to the apartment next door. Eli captured the whole apartment take-down on camera and stitched the shots together into a stop-action video. It’s a fun piece, and I thought you might like to see it… if only to see poor Eli trot across our empty living room with a 19-weeks-pregnant Jess on his back!]



Music: "Cripple Creek," Mike Seeger.

Fudgy Bourbon Balls
Adapted from In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite, by Melissa Clark

Melissa Clark recommends using Nabisco Famous wafers for the cookie crumbs, but any crisp chocolate cookie will do. Think Oreo cookie (minus the cream) or crisper. I used Mi-Del Chocolate Snaps. Deb over at Smitten Kitchen has a recipe for chocolate wafers that would work beautifully, if you’re into the whole bake a cookie to make a cookie routine.

2½ c. chocolate cookie crumbs
1¼ c. pecans
½ c. good bourbon or rum (I used Woodford Reserve)
1 c. confectioners’ sugar, plus additional for rolling
3 Tbsps. unsweetened cocoa powder, plus additional for rolling
1½ Tbsps. honey

In the bowl of a food processor, pulse together the cookie crumbs and the pecans until the nuts are finely ground.

In a separate bowl, stir together the bourbon and the rum, 1 cup confectioners’ sugar, 3 tablespoons cocoa powder, and honey. Add the mixture to the food processor and pulse until just combined. Transfer the dough to a bowl, preferably a wide, shallow one to maximize air exposure, and let it rest, uncovered, at room temperature for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight. You want the dough to try out a bit before rolling the balls.

Using one level teaspoonful of dough per ball, use your fingers to roll into balls. Roll some of the balls in confectioners’ sugar, and some of them in cocoa powder. The coatings will absorb into the balls over time, so if you want, you can sprinkle or re-roll in the sugar and cocoa just before serving.

Yield: A zillion bourbon balls, by which I mean about 100.

She made soup

The first few weeks after Mia was born were the soupiest weeks of my life. My mother made mushroom barley soup, my friends dropped by with lentil soup, more lentil soup, and minestrone, and when we ran out of all that, Eli defrosted a container of his mother’s chicken soup. We ate it with matzo balls, parsnips, carrots, and celery and then, when Mia was five and a half weeks old, my stepmother, Amy, came to town.

I wish I could remember more about that visit. According to my journal, that was the week when Mia started crying actual tears, and the week she first looked me straight in the eye and beamed, so that’s something. Amy did laundry – I remember that – and she hung out with Mia early one morning so that I could sleep for an hour or two. She cooked, of course: a pumpkin stuffed with everything good, some kind of chicken in wine, maybe a pasta dish. And because Amy knows what you want to eat most of all when you’ve just made a human, she made soup.

Soups, I should say. Four in the not even five days she was here. She started with pea soup, I think, then moved on to beef stew, which isn’t exactly soup, but I’m counting it anyway, then to kale and bean soup, which we’ll come back to in a second. On Amy’s last morning here, Eli, Mia, my father, and I drove up to the Newburyport Half Marathon (Eli ran, we cheered), and when we got back, she was gone. In her place, a tomato-based vegetable soup, still warm, sat waiting to be sealed and stowed. Poof! Amy knows how to make an exit.

I like soup, and this specific cluster of soups was especially good. I hate to play favorites, but -- as you've probably already guessed -- the kale and bean soup was a standout, for me. Amy sent me the recipe when she got home, and I’ve been making it on repeat ever since. Kale and bean soup is a homely soup with just a few simple ingredients: an onion, two garlic cloves, kale, a couple of cans of beans, and vegetable stock. You can toss in a Parmesan rind, too, if you have one. What got me excited about this soup is the way you lightly mash some of the beans when you add them to the pot so that they give their guts over to the broth. Now that I have an eye out for it, I realize that partial bean mashing is standard operating procedure for a lot of bean soups, but I had never done it before. One recipe that I came across last week says that mashing the beans “thickens” the soup, but I would describe the effect more as a “texturizing.” It reminds me a little of miso soup, the way the mashed beans cloud the broth.

I took a break from this soup over the last few days to focus my attention on latkes and all manner of sweets, but today, it’s making a comeback. I’m guessing that in these last days of 2011, we could all use a little soup. Enjoy.

Kale and Bean Soup
Adapted from The Columbus Dispatch

I’ve made a few changes to the recipe that Amy sent along. Instead of two cans of cannellini beans, I use one can of cannellini, and one can of chickpeas. I tried the chickpeas at Eli’s suggestion, and he was right. They make the soup feel richer. I’m not sure why. Are chickpea guts richer than cannellini guts? Maybe. At any rate, I think chickpeas have a more distinctive flavor than cannellini beans, so that might be it. I also added garlic into the mix. As for the kale, I usually prefer dinosaur kale (a.k.a. Lacinato kale, the kind with flat, dark leaves), but for this soup, I go with curly. It stands up better to the twenty-minute soak and steam in the pot. (Though if all you have is dinosaur, use it. It will be fine.)

1 lb. kale
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 yellow onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1 14.5 oz. can each cannellini beans and chickpeas, drained and rinsed
4 c. water
2 c. vegetable broth
A Parmesan rind, if you have one
Shaved Parmesan for serving (I use a vegetable peeler to shave nice, wide ribbons.)
Salt and pepper

Rinse the kale and tear the leaves away from the stems. The original recipe says to cut the leaves into ½-inch strips, but I just tear them into small-ish pieces with my hands.

Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a large heavy pot over medium-high heat. Add the chopped onion, and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the sliced garlic, and push it around a little with the onions. When the aroma rises, add half of the beans, and mash them lightly in the pot. I find that a potato masher works best, but a fork will also do. Either way, hold onto the side of the pot with one (oven-mitted) hand while you mash to make sure that the pot doesn’t slide.

Add the water, the broth, and the Parmesan rind, if using, and bring to a boil. Stir in the kale and the remaining beans, and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer, partially covered, until the kale is tender, about 20 minutes.

Ladle the soup into bowls, and drizzle with the remaining 1 tablespoon of oil. Top with the shaved Parmesan and plenty of black pepper.

Serves 4.

Hi

We're having kale and bean soup for dinner, and my favorite squash salad from Plenty. How about you?

The good stuff

My friend, Mathias, knows a thing or two about coffee. When I found out that he was coming to stay with us for a few days in August, I bought a Chemex coffee maker in the hope that he would teach me how to use it. He did, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.

I’m not much of a coffee drinker – probably why I never learned how to brew a proper cup – but I am a breakfast maker and eater, and when I have people over for pancakes or custard-filled corn bread, it’s nice to be able to offer them a cup of the good stuff. Much better than my previous modus operandi, which consisted of me apologetically nudging a French press and a bag of (cover your eyes, Mathias) pre-ground coffee in the direction of my guests, and having them make it themselves.

Earlier this week, Mathias published a coffee gear guide on his blog. It’s a great resource if, like me, you’re just starting out, so I wanted to share it with you.

Some other things to kick off the weekend:

:: Karrah Kwasnik’s photography. I met Karrah last night at a PechKucha Night in Portsmouth, where she presented her work. This woman does amazing things with film. Correction: Not film! She shoots in digital, prints the negatives on transparency paper, and makes the images using the Van Dyke Brown printing process. In other words, Karrah is even cooler than I thought.

:: Mr. W. Poor guy. (Thanks for this, Kasey.)

:: This beautiful essay by Marisa about her “imaginary mentor.” I think it’s important to have those.

See you next week.