A Finger in Every Pie

Achieving The Right Ratatouille

Yesterday's excursion to the Union Square Greenmarket was glorious for several reasons.  Foremost was my meeting with the remarkable Bakerina, a beauteous woman whose culinary acumen (as you undoubtedly know) is matched only by her wondrous writing.  After wicked conversation and no less wicked pastry and coffee at City Bakery, we attacked the market.  I have a tendency to be overwhelmed by the glories of all those white-robed tents of produce.  Since each plum and every ear of corn begs to be taken home, I wisely allowed Bakerina to direct me to her favorite stands, where I bought all the necessary ingredients for ratatouille, as well as  a few other irresistable items (corn, cantaloupe, plums, heavy Ronnybrook cream, a nice organic steak).  But I digress.  I toted it all home and went off with G on a bajillion Saturday errands. 

Today, however, I awoke early with ratatouille on my mind.  I have made many a ratatouille in my time, with wine, with various spices, with tinned tomatoes and paste, with oil and without, depending on dietary restrictions of the moment.  I've made long-stewed ratatouilles and roasted ratatouilles and "quick" ratatouilles.   This time I wanted something different.  I wanted only fresh produce, with each vegetable and herb tasting of itself while harmonizing to form a whole.  I wanted to use the fat bunch of leeks I hadn't been able to resist, even though they're not a classic ratatouille ingredient, and the huge and lovely yellow and red tomatoes that are just at their peak.  What I didn't want was to light the oven on such a beastly hot and humid day, so this is a stove-top version.  It all came together quite nicely, and upon the final tasting I declared it the best I've ever made -- at least for now.   We're looking forward to dinnertime.

Like all ratatouilles, you can eat this hot, warm, at room temperature, plain or gratineed with cheese.  It's good with pasta, in a gratin with potatoes,  and with almost any meat or fish.  I like it best with lamb; it's lovely served in the classical manner with rosy roast leg of lamb -- or not so clasically, with shish kebab or kofte kebab made of lean ground spiced lamb.  Any way you serve it or eat it, it reminds you that although summer may be singing its last sweet song, its flavors are still to be enjoyed. 

My Latest Ratatouille

4 - 6 tablespoons of a good, flavorful olive oil, divided (currently I'm using Sicilian Barbera)
1 large eggplant ( I used a fat round light purple globe eggplant), peeled and cut in 1" cubes
6 small green and yellow zucchini (approximately 1 1/2 pounds), sliced
3 peppers (1 yellow, 1 red, 1 green) sliced into thin half-strips
salt and pepper to taste
3 fat leeks, halved and chopped
6 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
4 large ripe tomatoes, blanched, skinned and chopped, retaining all the juice they exude
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves, stripped from their stems
a handful each of flat-leaf parsley and fresh basil, chopped

Heat 1 or 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large saute pan or skillet until almost smoking.  Add the eggplant chunks, and saute, turning occasionally, until they're quite tender and nicely browned, adding a bit of salt and freshly ground black pepper.  Remove to a bowl.  Add another tablespoon or so of oil to the pan, allow it to heat up again and saute the zucchini slices, again browning the sides and seasoning to taste.  When the zucchini is crisp-tender, remove it to the bowl with the eggplant.  Repeat with the peppers, and place in the bowl with the other vegetables.  Don't overcook any of the vegetables -- you're looking for that point when the outside has caramelized slightly, and they're beginning to soften, but haven't yet turned to mush (except maybe for the eggplant -- I have a horror of undercooked eggplant).   

Add the last tablespoon of oil to the skillet, and saute the leeks for a few minutes until tender and lightly browned.  Add the garlic, saute for a minute or two, and then add the tomatoes with all their juice.   There will be a lot of liquid.  Drain any accumulated liquid from the bowl of eggplant, zucchini and peppers, and add that to the saucepan as well.  Cook until the juices have thickened and become syrupy, adding the thyme in as it cooks down.  Toss the chopped parsley and basil with the bowl of cooled vegetables, and add them to the skillet.  Cook everything together for just a few minutes, then turn off the heat, cover the skillet, and leave it alone for half an hour or so -- as long as you need to go about some other business.  In a little while, come back to the kitchen, taste the mixture, and adjust the seasoning.   You can cook it down more at this point if you like; I prefer each element still somewhat separate.   Serve as you wish, and enjoy. 

Promises To Keep

Much earlier in the summer, when I had my dalliance with a fruit curd so luscious, so fragrant that I simply ate it by the spoonful, I promised to post the recipe.  I said I'd do it when I'd returned home from vacation.  Having been home for two solid weeks at this point, I suddenly feel that it is indeed time to get off my lazy duff and post this.  This is particularly necessary since apricot season is waning (although they're still in the farmers' markets).  A couple of folks have reminded me of my promise via email, so it is with great pleasure and no small measure of guilt for the delay that I finally give you Apricot Curd.

This recipe was adapted from a fun little British website called Jamworld, which is apparently aimed at folks who are competetive canners and preservers, unlike myself.  The curds are referred to as "Exhibition Curds"  (as far as I can tell they don't turn you into an exhibitionist -- at least the apricot curd doesn't, unless you consider dancing naked around your kitchen with a large spoonful of said curd "exhibitionism").  The main changes I made were to incorporate both fresh and dried apricots (although I also think you could use just one or the other, depending upon the season), and cutting the quantity of sugar called for in half.  Jamworld's recipe has lots of complex directions to follow so that you don't even get one little air bubble in any of your preserves.  Otherwise, the judges might mark you down.  As you might guess, I streamlined this process quite a bit, since I myself was the only judge/jury for this particular batch of curd -- and I can live with a bubble or two in my curd, so to speak.

Apricot Curd

(approximately 6-7 small jars, 8 oz. each)

1/2 lb. plump dried apricots
2 lbs. fresh apricots
juice of one lemon
8 oz. granulated sugar
3 large eggs
1/4 lb. unsalted butter

Soak dried apricots overnight in 1 cup of boiling water.  Cook the dried fruit until tender with their soaking water.  Add the fresh apricots, cut in half and pitted.  Cook until they too are tender.  Place pulp in a food processor and process until you have a smooth puree.  If it seems to need it, you can pass it through a sieve at this point -- or not.  Place in bowl with lemon juice, then add butter. The bowl now sits on top of/slightly inside a saucepan, which has been filled with boiling water so that the water level is below the bowl but not touching the bottom of the bowl. (If the water touches the bowl then too much heat will be transferred and cause the mixture to boil, spoiling the curd.) Add sugar to bowl. Stir over a low heat until the sugar is dissolved.   Remove the bowl from the saucepan, and let the mixture cool slightly.  In a separate bowl, beat the eggs well.  Add a tablespoon of the cooled apricot mixure, and beat that in slowly.  Keep adding spoonfuls of the fruit mix and beating lightly.  Then pour the whole egg mixture back into the bowl of apricot puree and mix well.  Place this improvised double boiler back on your saucepan ( you can, of course, always use a real double-boiler if you have one).   Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, unitl the mixture thickens and coats the back of a spoon.  Remove it from the heat, and fill sterilized 8 oz. jars.   At this point you can process them in a boiling water bath if you wish  (there's some debate about how safe it really is to try to keep homemade curds, with their egg and butter content, as a pantry-shelf food).   I didn't do this, preferring to keep the jars of curd in the refrigerator, where they stay quite well for at least a month or two.  You can also freeze this if your jars or containers are freezer-going.  Or just dump it all in a nice big jar or container that you can keep in the fridge, and each time you pass by get yourself a nice big spoonful.   It'll be gone before the month is up.

Baby Bites: Childhood Food Memories

“What keeps me motivated is not the food itself but all the bonds and memories the food represents.”
        - Michael Chiarello

When Clotilde tagged me for the Childhood Food Memories meme, I thought "Aha! This meme I can do!"  I've been tagged for other memes before, but never managed to complete any of them, due to all sorts of excuses, especially a tendency to over-agonize about such things. 

Memory in general is something of a Pandora's Box -- but even more so in the case of food memories.   Think of Nigel Slater and Toast.  Despite the tendency to mourn a bit for places and people that are no more,  this particular stroll has held more sweet for me than bitter. So although I've already written quite a lot about my food memories, and although I (and everyone else, I'm sure) could come up with dozens if not hundreds more, here are Five Childhood Food Memories. 

1) Penny Candy
In the town where I grew up, there was a wonderful ice-cream parlor called Daddy Michael's.  It had marble-topped counter and tables, wrought iron chairs with a sweetheart back, Tutti-Frutti ice-cream, and Daddy Michael himself, a charming, black-haired, mustachioed fellow who always wore a striped shirt and suspenders.  My brother and I were taken there after movies or when we'd given a speech or been in a play or a concert at school.  We might have had an ice-cream cone, or for a special occasion, a sundae or an ice-cream soda.  And if it were a very special occasion, we could choose some penny candy out of the big glass jars, each holding a different kind.  Mary Janes, Tootsie Rolls, chocolate kisses, peppermints, taffy....oh the joy of filling one's own little sack with goodies to hoard and dole out, one at a time, so as to make them last longer.  I hate to tip my hand here, but let's just say that I can almost remember when each of these tiny treats actually cost a penny.

2)  Homemade Applesauce
My mother made wonderful applesauce from scratch, and she made it throughout the year, since apples are more or less always available.  It was a staple food in our house, accompanying meals and much of the time serving as our dessert as well.  My mother believed in fruit for dessert, saving more opulent sweeets for special occasions (although we were sometimes served a cookie alongside our applesauce or fruitcup).  I have a vivid memory of a friend of mine at our house for a sleep-over, making her goodnight call to her mother:   "And mommy -- we made homemade applesauce!  Real applesauce -- and it was so good!"  I was struck by this because she was so thrilled to make and eat something that seemed fairly routine to me.  How lucky I was -- and am. 

My favorite of my mother's applesauce variations was a fall version.  When new apples were in but there were still plenty of fall plums, especially the little Italian prune plums, she would make a marvellous apple-plum sauce.  I won't go into more detail, since I plan to do a real post about this in the fall, when all the delicious apple varieties arrive in the farmers' markets. 

3) Schav, aka Cold Sorrel Soup
This was and probably still is my absolute favorite cold summer soup.  My mother made it often during hot weather, because it's one of the most refreshing things you can imagine.  In Russian-Jewish cuisine, this soup is called schav, but it's basically a cold sorrel soup served with sour cream, chopped cucumber and scallions.  You can add cold boiled potatoes, hard-boiled eggs or other vegetables, but I like it best in its simpler form.  It's easy to make if you have access to fresh sorrel or "sour grass" as it's also known.  The green is simply chopped and boiled in water; then a liaison of eggs or egg yolks is introduced.  It's chilled and garnishes are added later.  Or you can find a jar of schav in the Jewish food section of most supermarkets, which will also require the addition of at least scallion and sour cream or yogurt, and optimally cucumber.  The kosher bottle of Gold's Schav I picked up the other day has a subscript that says "Sorrel Soup -- A French Delicacy". 

Nowadays I make it just for my mean selfish self, since G hates it (how could anyone hate this?).  I prepare it with Greek yogurt instead of sour cream, and I'll sometimes do it as schav/cucumber-yogurt soup, whirling the cold cooked sorrel in its liquid in the blender along with a few trimmed scallions, some peeled cucumbers and yogurt.  It's wonderful with buttered rye or pumpernickel bread

4) Lisettes
We had a family friend who had something of a reputation in my parents' social circle for her cooking.  Her name was Liesel, and she was a very proper German lady.  Truthfully, I didn't much like her stollen or plum cake, which was a bit cardboardy.  But she made another confection which I craved.  Each Christmas she'd bake masses of her own version of Elisen Lebkuchen, a nutty, spicy little cake.   She called them Lisettes both in honor of her own name and because it sounded like "Elisen" too. Instead of flat thick biscuits, she baked them in upstanding little round hemispheres, each on its own tiny circle of edible wafer paper.  She glazed them in vanilla and coffee and chocolate, and they either had colored nonpareil sprinkles or half an almond on top.  I was wild for them, and to this day, I search for something that approximates the flavor, the chewy, melting texture thick with ground nuts and minced candied fruit and some inimitable spice blend.  True confession:  when I was an overweight teenager, I stole an entire pound box of these little cakes (Liesel's family Christmas gift to ALL of us) out of my mother's freezer and stashed them in my room, eating them a few at a time.  I couldn't help myself, and feigned ignorance when questioned about the missing Lisettes.  Long after, I asked my mother if she thought Liesel would give us the recipe for Lisettes.  "Oh no," she said.  "Liesel doesn't share recipes."  "Will anyone ever get the recipe, do you think?" I asked.  "I doubt it," replied my mother.  "Liesel has only sons, and she's the sort who'd never give something like that to a daughter-in-law. "  As far as I know, the recipe went with Liesel to her grave.

5)  Waffle-Iron Grilled Cheese
As a special treat, my mother would occasionally pull out the waffle iron and make grilled cheese sandwiches in it.  They might have had bacon and/or tomatoes as well, but they were almost always made with sturdy cheese, most likely cheddar, on a good white loaf bread.  We had the sort of rectangular iron with small holes, not the big Belgian-waffle indentations, so it worked beautifully for sandwiches.  The waffle texture made the sandwiches extra-crunchy, and the cheese ran out, dripping down the sides...note to self:  get out the waffle iron (I have almost exactly the same one as my mother's, which she found for me at a yard sale in Vermont) and make some grilled cheese...

And now it's my turn to pass the baton, so I send it to Melissa, Rowena, Zarah, Moira, and Santos to see what memories are connected with beloved (or even loathed) foods for them...

Here's my chain of links -- when it's your turn, simply move down the list, dropping number one from the top spot, moving the numbers down, and placing yourself in the number five spot:

                                1.  Station Gourmande
                                2.  Tasca de Elvira
                                3.  Cuisine et Compagnie
                                4.  Chocolate and Zucchini 
                                5.  A Finger in Every Pie

May all your food memories be ever-so-delicious!

 

Home Again, Home Again...

Coming home after a series of summer adventures can be a mixed blessing.   After your first jaunt, you may experience any of several rude awakenings.  The rudest might be that you can no longer meander just a couple of blocks from your hotel room to the Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans' French Quarter, at any hour of the day or night (yes, that is what I said: any hour, 24/7) for delicious coffee and fat, hot fried beignets.  Each one is heaped with a mountain of powdered sugar that invariably leaves its tell-tale traces of chalky white on whatever you're wearing -- unless you're smart, like G, or maybe just male, and can take off your shirt, and eat your after-drinking, after-clubbing, wee-hours beignets wearing only a white undergarment (which some less polite folk might refer to as a wife-beater.  Not to worry -- much stranger attire was seen at the Cafe du Monde, as well as at other French Quarter hang-outs). 

You can, however, come home with the ingredients for beignets and chicory coffee, and take them up to your elderly father's house, and call some other family members or friends and tell them to come over, because you're making New Orleans-style beignets and coffee.  You can't do that when you're down there; you can only make that happen once you're home.   Back home, you can take people the pralines that you bought them in the French Market, and watch them smile as they bite into brown sugar made creamy, studded with pecans.   You can bring home a huge jar of olive salad from Central Grocery, and divide it up into smaller jars to bring to all your friends, so that you and they can make something resembling a muffaletta, and remember the muffalettas you ate (as well as the gumbo and the crawfish, oyster and catfish po' boys, the jambalaya and the boudin and the red beans 'n' rice and the best fried chicken  ever...).  You can open your journal and remember Jackson Square and the Cathedral, Faulkner's house and Molly's At The Market, all the places you went during the French Quarter Writing Marathon.  You can revise your fiction piece and your memoir piece and send them into the anthology that your new friends and colleagues in Louisiana are going to publish. 

When you return from the second (or actually the third, if we count the June trip to Santa Fe) journey of your summer odyssey, you may be hit with the wistful realization that you can't go into your backyard and see a riot of nasturtiums and tiny Italian blue plums climbing over your fence, because you don't have nasturtiums or plum trees or a fence, or for that matter, a backyard. 

Then again, there's the joy of having brought a kilo or so of those very blue plums home from Berkeley (where your friend Pat does have those very nasturtiums, plums, fence and yard -- and in fact has just invited you to build a house there and move right in) and you can use them, along with a couple of Meyer lemons (nicked from the neighbor's yard while helping feed the dogs) to make jam  in your very own kitchen.   

It may then, however, occur to you that you're no longer at the spa in Calistoga, and that you and your heart's true love are actually not climbing into the double Jacuzzi that came with your room.  You may wander around your NYC apartment, hot and muggy as it never seems to be in the Bay Area, and say "Where is my Jacuzzi for two?  Where did I put that?  Did I forget to bring it home with me?"

At some point you're unpacking, separating out the laundry from the dry-cleaning, digging out the jars of June Taylor jam you bought for gifts, getting ready to refinish with oil and salt the cast iron pans you found at a thrift store and lugged home on the plane.  But then it hits you once again, and you realize that you're not driving up a heart-stopping hairpin-turn mountain road in Sonoma, to arrive at an old ranch on the mountain top,  the sight of which causes you to look at each other and immediately say "Drop City!"   It's owned by the last of the hippies, who raises kiwis in the old vineyard and takes them down to homeless shelters in Berkeley.  But as for you, you're no longer picking the extraordinarily sweet blackberries that grow wild all over the place, and later going for a swim in the bathing-suit-optional pool poised on the side of the mountain, where all you can see around you makes it seem as if you're swimming directly in the midst of more mountains and cliffsides and trees and sky, just as nature made you. You won't, a little bit later, be changing back into clothes in Jack London's old hunting lodge and looking out at a plateau where the Mayacamas held their healing ceremonies for millenia.  You can't go up to the splintery deck and grill halibut and sausages and steak, watching as the sun descends in glorious colorwash, bats start to fly overhead and a night hung with more stars than you've seen for at least a year spreads itself over Cloud Mountain. 

You're back in NY, which means that you are not in the kitchen of your friend, the brilliant, beautiful and erudite Betty, at her home in San Francisco's Mission, where she's making chiles rellenos for you along with fresh rice and beans, while heating tortillas on her comal.   Later you won't all go get the most luscious ice-cream at Mitchell's, as you've done every night that you've spent in the Mission, your newest, favoritest neighborhood anywhere.  The flavors at Mitchell's are unusual and vivid, and the ice-cream is not too sweet.  If you're there (which, sadly, you are not), you can taste the rich cream underneath the cantaloupe or black walnut or Mexican chocolate.  And they chocolate-dip hard ice-cream, something you've only seen on soft-ice-cream trucks.  (The chiles rellenos, by the way, will turn out to be one of G's favorite meals of the vacation, far outstripping his opinion of the glorious dinner at Chez Panisse Cafe, which ended in a sumptuous Frog Hollow nectarine tart with mascarpone ice-cream.)

Mournfully, you are not, at this moment, piling in the car with Betty and her kids, gorgeous Alma and adorable Martín, to go eat Salvadoran pupusas at La Santaneca, along with an amazing side of beans, sweet fried plaintains and crema -- an unbeatable combination.   Instead you're thinking about whether or not you can find a really good pupuseria in Washington Heights, one that will be as good as Santaneca.   And although there are lots of Mexican restaurants in your New York neighborhood, they don't really have the same kind of tacos and quesadillas and strawberry agua fresca that you found at  La Taqueria or El Farolito (G's other favorite meals of the trip).   You're not zipping over to Tartine for another of their fabulous gougères, or because you just have to try that coconut cream tart with chocolate and caramel, or because  hey! It's 4:00!  The bread is probably coming out of the oven! 

Nor are you walking in the Marin Headlands, marvelling at the fact that you can drive 20 minutes from the Mission and be hiking in the wilderness, surrounded by fog, climbing rock cliffs, the Bay crashing at your feet, no-one around -- and 10 minutes after that, you can be eating pizza and salad in the sunshine of Sausalito. 

You're not having lunch at downtown in Berkeley with your colleague/friend Elyse, devouring oysters and fried olives, cauliflower soup and duck-and-plum salad.  Nor are you eating your last delicious lunch of the trip at Ristorante Fabrizio in Larkspur, where, hosted by your pal Lea and her darling parents and extremely cute nephews, you shared amazing salmon-and-snow-pea risotto, fresh basil gnocchi lighter than little cloudlets, and berry and pear sorbets redolent of summer's perfume.

But you're home.  The pleasure of your own bed, with the fresh plump new pillows you got just before you went away, is not so easily dismissed.  Your books, your things, and your own true love are here at home with you.  Your friends are clamoring for chick-dates before the school year begins in earnest. And of course, there is your kitchen, the place where you turn Pat's plums into jam, the source of the good food you can make with summer produce.  You feel the joy of making meals instead of ordering them.  You can choose ingredients to combine, think about seasoning, decide what will be on your plates tonight and tomorrow morning.   The novelty of it is actually quite thrilling; shopping and cooking feel like luxuries after so many restaurant meals.  And although it's not as large or lavish as the indescribable Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market, it will be good to get back to the Greenmarket. 

It's true, you're dreaming a little every now and then of moving into Pat's backyard, since tomorrow she and her kids, Daniel and Laura, will probably eat lunch right around the corner at Vik's Chaat House.  Maybe she'll have one of those giant masala dosas, huge and crisp and stuffed with delectably spiced potatoes.  But you won't have one -- not tomorrow, anyway.   

At the very least, you're considering the idea of apartment/house swapping next summer.  Pat says she and the kids could do two weeks in New York, and so does Betty.  Let's see, that makes a solid month in the Bay Area.  I think you can handle it. 

With much love to Betty, Pat, Elyse, Lea, Fat Dog, Richard L., The Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project, and everyone else who hosted us in ways large and small this summer.  Special thanks to Sam, Molly and Derrick for recommendations.