The Wednesday Chef

Benne Wafers

December 2, 2010

I keep starting this post and deleting what I've written, because it just doesn't seem adequate. Or particularly verbal. But then I try to come up with something more…grown-up or legible, and fall short. Standards, you know? Sigh.

Do you want to see what I've deleted so far? Fine, here:

1. OMG.

2. Aaaaaah!

3. Best. Cookies. Ever.

4. Oh my goodness, you guys!

See what I mean? I think these cookies have possessed my brain or at least the parts of it that used to know how to write. But seriously, we need to talk about the cookies. Seriously. Pull up a chair!

A few weeks ago, I was sent a copy of the Gourmet Cookie Book. You know, the one that features the "single best [cookie] recipe" from 1941 to 2009, according to the editors at Gourmet (sigh). It's a funny little book, with very stark pictures of the cookies on black, white or red backgrounds, arranged almost architecturally. The most recent hyper-baroque style of Gourmet is nowhere to be found. So it's not the most sensual cookie cookbook ever designed or photographed, but it is…efficient. After all, each recipe gets a photo, which is rather nice. And the starkness of the photography means you get to really get in there and see the texture of a toasty almond or a spray of powdered sugar. Also, the editors did all the heavy lifting in culling out the very best recipes over the years, which, you know, is a big plus.

The headnotes, if you're into food history, and into Gourmet, which I am on both counts (double sigh), are lovely little reads. You go to the page about Norwegian Butter Cookies, also known as Spritz, and find out they were the favorites of a former food editor's pioneer mother. Or you turn to the Curled Wafer page and find out that there were only four cookie recipes published in Gourmet during all of 1963 – and none of them were American. Or you can go to the recipe for Scotch Oat Crunchies and read that those buttery discs sandwiching jam were cooked up during the war, when the staff at the magazine, along with housewives the nation over, I suppose, tried to come up with ways to make oatmeal palatable. Huh.

(My quibble with the book is that I wished the recipes had more consistent information about how long the cookies keep and how they should be stored. After all, most of us will be using this book around the holiday season, when shipping and storage times are crucial bits of information when planning what to include in a cookie tin.)

When I first leafed through the book, I made a list of the cookies that I wanted to make:

1. Speculaas
2. Bizcochitos
3. Glazed Pain D'Epice Cookies
4. Cottage Cheese Cookies
5. Basler Brunsli

Now this didn't seem like a very long list. After all, I was expecting to dogear half the book. That's disappointing, I thought. But that's how it goes with cookbooks sometimes. And besides, wasn't I the person saying just the other day that if you find one good recipe in a cookbook, it's worth the price of the book? So I went and made some cookies. First, the Cottage Cheese Cookies, which are tender, cakey little things with agreeably crispy edges and a fine, plain flavor. Max popped one in his mouth and commandeered the entire tray for the rest of the week. Then I made the Speculaas, which were a dream to make – the softest, most aromatic dough just needed to be rolled out into a rectangle and cut into little squares or rectangles before being topped with slivered almonds and baked. The cookies were fabulous. Buttery, crunchy, full of Christmassy flavor, just like those great little Biscoff cookies you get on airplanes, only better. (These would be great crushed into a pie crust, too, by the way.) This time, I was the one who hoarded them.

And then I started re-reading the book. I'd ignored some recipes on the first go-around, but now I couldn't them get out of my head. Like the Gianduia Brownies, which I'm thinking will be a hit at our Bavarian Christmas this year. Or the Walnut Acorn Cookies, just because they combine chopped walnuts and butter and melted chocolate to what looks like splendid effect. Or the Old-Fashioned Christmas Butter Cookies, which sound like such a snooze, but upon reading the headnote ("what you end up with are cookies that are incredibly crisp and so flaky they almost seem to float away") you realize you can't really live much more than a few hours longer without trying them.

People, I am up to my eyeballs in cookies this year. It's December 2nd and I've already made six, no, seven different ones. By any normal stretch of the imagination, one look at a cookie book should have me shrinking away in horror. And yet, I can't seem to keep away. They keep sucking me in, these Fig Cookies, Jan Hagels, and, oh, the mighty Benne Wafer.

Or, lo! The Mighty Benne Wafer!

So, now we're back where we started, with me apparently struck dumb or incapable of putting into lyrical type just how good these cookies are.

SO. GOOD. Is that better? I'm sorry.

Let me tell you a little bit about them, maybe that will help. First of all, you need hardly anything to make them. An egg, a pat of butter, two spoons of flour – do you see where this is going? If you're the kind of person who stocks sesame seeds in her house, you can make these cookies…whenever you want! (Every day, you'll want to do them every day, believe me.) You cream some brown sugar and that little nugget of butter together, though creaming is not exactly what happens, since there's so little butter to the amount of sugar. Beat until they're combined and no longer lumpy and the sugar is fluffy and a little lighter than before. Then beat in the egg, some vanilla, the flour and half a cup of sesame seeds. And a little pinch of salt! That is it. What you're left with is what looks like the measliest amount of cookie batter ever. It should be loose and a little drippy, but only barely.

You drop little rounds of the khaki-colored stuff onto a parchment-lined baking sheet and then, using a knife that you repeatedly dip in ice water, flatten them out a bit. Don't do what I did on the first round and make the dough drops too close – you'll end up with large rectangular Benne Wafers. These go into the oven for six minutes. Six! That's it. Any more and you'll have charred edges, any less and they'll still be a bit too chewy. I like to pull the parchment paper off the sheet pan directly onto the cooling rack. If you have just a little bit of patience, then, you'll be able to gently tug the cookies right off the paper. They set up into these caramelly, crispy wonders – pop one in your mouth and you'll wonder how you ever lived all these years without eating a single Benne Wafer before.

I was planning on including these in my cookie boxes for friends, but after I brought Max one to try and we stood there looking at each other, chewing dumbly in stupefaction, he begged me not to let them leave the house. "But, but, think of the Christmas spirit!" I protested weakly.

I think I'm making another batch.

In the end, did I actually manage to tell you just how insanely good these cookies are? They are delicate and taste like caramel. They have this alluring crunch both from their crispy edges and the toasted sesame seeds. You can make them when you have barely anything in the house. And you could eat, I don't know, ten of them in mere seconds. (Even though there are currently fresh drifts of ankle-deep snow on my balcony, right at this very moment, I keep having visions of them stuck into a scoop of ice cream at a summer dinner party, too.) They are so good they've sort of instantly become my favorite cookie. Superlatives can be so annoying, I know. But I just can't help it. The might Benne Wafer is here to stay!

Benne Wafers
Makes about 4 dozen
Note: Some people reported having issues with the texture of their cookies; please remember that the butter you use must not be warm or room temperature, but cool to the touch and still quite firm before you begin to cream it with the sugar. Here's an article on butter in baking for your reading pleasure.)

1 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter, cool but not cold
1 cup light brown sugar
1 egg
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup sesame seeds

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

2. Cream together the butter and sugar until light and well-combined. Add the egg and beat until combined. Add the flour, salt, vanilla extract and sesame seeds. Mix until all the ingredients are combined.

3. Drop small spoons of dough onto a parchment-lined baking sheet. Flatten the wafers with a knife dipped in ice water.

4. Bake for 6 minutes. The cookies should be a golden brown with deeper golden edges. Pull the parchment paper off the sheet pan onto a cooling rack. After about 5 to 8 minutes, gently pull the cooled cookies off the parchment. Reuse the parchment for the next batch.

5. Cool completely and store in a tin for up to 2 weeks.

Posted in Cakes Big & Small, Lamination-Worthy

101 comments on Benne Wafers
Of Pie Crusts and Roasted Shallots

November 29, 2010

In the past week, I have baked five different batches of cookies, two pies, and one panforte. I am going through bags of sugar like it's going out of style. I buy candied orange peel every time I see it in the store, because I can't seem to keep it in stock in my pantry. And not a day goes by without some sort of nut toasting in a pan. Christmas in Germany (or the Advent time leading up to Christmas, I should specify) is serious business.

But, oh, it's so lovely. I can sit in my kitchen working on yet another spice cookie thing and hear the four-person brass band playing Christmas music at the Weihnachtsmarkt across the street. We lit our first Advent candle last night and let it burn in its pine wreath almost down to the nub. I have stockpiled a tower of tins for cookie-sharing and gift-giving. The best part is that it's all just so cozy at the same time as it's busy and productive, which is a lovely feeling. I'd dare say it's the nicest thing about this time of year.

I have also been doing a lot of cooking, but being up to my eyeballs and elbows in molten hot honey or a panful of nuts just this side of toasted at the same time has made documenting my dinner properly a little difficult. So! I'm going to do a little recipe round-up today instead.

I finally got around to trying Judy Rodger's panade with Swiss chard and Gruyère, which is so toasty and silky and delicious that it is very difficult to stop eating. What is it about stale bread and hot liquid? It's amazing to me that something so rough and scratchy around the edges, something as mundane as old bread and hot broth, can be transformed into something so supple and elegant. There's also the alchemy between long-stewed onions, teetering just on the edge of being too sweet, and nutty Gruyère cheese, which undergoes some sort of Cinderella-pumpkin thing in the hot oven. All put together, it's wondrous stuff. I find myself wanting to hide old bits of bread in the bread box so that we have a reason to make this more often.

Speaking of bread, I made some of my own! Inspired by none other than the 100th issue of Goop. This seeded whole-wheat loaf, from Tartine's new bread book, was featured in the newsletter, along with instructions from the owner and resident bread baker at Tartine for making natural leaven for bread simply by using water and flour and the natural yeasts in the air, instead of commercial yeast. For those of us who can't dedicate three days to producing natural leaven, you're given the alternative to make a pre-ferment poolish, which is what I gratefully did, and a weekend later, I had two glorious loaves of whole-wheat bread, full of flavor and delicious seeds and a chewy, holey crumb.

Except, you know what? I live in Germany now, or the Land of Bread as it's alternatively known (well, not really, but it should be), and making my own bread doesn't hold the same allure it once did. Also, these loaves were a lot more work than Jim Lahey's No-Knead Bread. So, my verdict: for those of you living anywhere but in Germany, make this bread! It's so satisfying to watch bakery-style loaves emerge from your oven. And you'll never get tired of the chemical wondershow that is one measly gram of yeast turning a bunch of flour and water into bread. For those of us in Good Bread Land, eh, get thee to a bakery.

The other day, on the (fruitless) hunt for fresh cranberries at an organic grocery store in the south of Berlin, I came across a bin of lovely torpedo shallots from France. Isn't torpedo a good word? Torpedo, torpedo. The shallots are good, too. They have such good heft, such a nice shape. I like to just let slip around in my hands or skitter them around on the counter in an impromptu game of shuttlecock. When it came time to cook them, I took Molly's, or should I say Brandon's, lead, and roasted them with vinegar until the entire apartment smelled like a vinegar factory – and I mean that, quite literally, in the best possible way – and the shallots themselves had collapsed into the sweetest, slipperiest, most fragrant and wonderful version of themselves. I wish I had a photo for you, but they were gone so fast I could barely blink. I also had the distinct feeling that I could have made twice the batch and they would have gladly been eaten. We were all being rather polite at the table, I think. They're going to be a staple in our kitchen for a long time to come.

And finally, I was in charge of desserts at our friends' German-American Thanksgiving this year, so I made my usual squash pie (with Hokkaido squash instead of butternut), but with the very best crust I've ever made, if I do say so myself. I cobbled it together from Deb's recipe here, but with Melissa's brilliant "think lima beans!" instructions from here. Check out the flake on that thing! People at the dinner party thought I had used puff pastry, it was so flaky. And I did it all by hand, armed only with two dinner knives and some high-fat German butter. It's my new go-to crust recipe.

I'll tell you about the panforte (with candied quince!) in my next post, and then I have to divvy it up among the cookie tins, along with Spekulatius, some sort of nut brittle, snow-white Springerle and a few more things that have yet to be determined. Also, I have recently been bewitched by the sound of a hazelnut-prune tea cake that must be made mine, so stay tuned. And tell me, dear readers, what are you baking these weeks before Christmas? What's going in your cookie tin?

Posted in Uncategorized

32 comments on Of Pie Crusts and Roasted Shallots
Kitchen Covets – A Holiday Gift Guide

November 19, 2010

Are you, like me, thrilled every year when the time rolls around for the Internet to publish its Gift Guides, thereby lightening your load, getting your shopping done in one fell swoop, and making you feel creative, resourceful and thoughtful, even though you never left your desk? I find them to be such a relief (the ones from Design*Sponge, Cup of Jo, Oh Happy Day, and Mighty Goods are especially good).

This year, I thought I'd try my hand at a gift guide, specifically tailored to things one might covet for the kitchen or the dining table or the cookbook shelf, in other words, any area of the home that involves cooking or eating or reading about cooking and eating, since, you know, that's all any of us really want to be doing at any given time, right? Right?

Happy giving!

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1. Tell your little sister enough already with the paper napkins, even if IKEA does produce them in such adorable colors. These Skinny Laminx "Orla" napkins from South Africa will make her dinner table look grown up and smart.

2. Any of the wooden cake stands that Herriot Grace makes are gorgeous (not to mention everything else in their shop). But there is one little problem: if you're lucky enough to get your hands on one (they're sold out at the moment, I'm sorry), I'm not sure you'll be able to give it away. Still, it'd get you in good with your mother for years, if she's the cake-baking type.

3. Buy one of Amco's metal lemon squeezer for your dad, your father-in-law, your brother, heck, any of the men in your life. I don't know a single man who doesn't love this bright, clanky thing. I recently switched from a wooden reamer to this lemon squeezer and I do declare it to be my favorite kitchen utensil, hands down. It's so satisfying to use and the little inside-out lemons it leaves behind make everybody laugh.

4. Bee House's Kyoto teapot in day-brightening turquoise is just one of those artful objects that dress up any breakfast table or work spot, wherever your mother-in-law and her impeccable taste takes her spot of tea.

5. A chic wooden Mayfair candlestick or two, for your brother's first apartment. Maybe it'll get him to turn off his halogen tower left over from college.

6. Would your mother rather be reading than baking cakes? Get her Milk by Anne Mendelson. It's a fascinating and comprehensive history of our relationship with milk, along with mouthwatering recipes from all over the world. She'll never drink milk the same way again. Who knows, she might even find herself elbow-deep in homemade cheese one day. But no pressure.

7. This one's for the grandchildren. Be diligent about writing down your favorite recipes on these beautiful recipe cards from Rifle Paper Co. and one day you''ll have the best heirloom ever to pass on. (Here's the matching wooden box to store them in.)

8. I find scrubbing potatoes, squash and other vegetables to be rather mind-numbing work. But if you got to pull on a pair of fire-orange, rough-palmed, Cooper-Hewitt rubber gloves to do that work, or go even farther and peel those vegetables, wouldn't you feel like a million bucks? I thought so. A great gift for the reluctant cook in your life.

9. Much has been written about the glory of the Canal House Cooking series, from the beautiful photography and food styling to the deeply delicious recipes, and all of it is true. These books are total gems and not so precious that you can't get them spattered in the kitchen and dog-eared by the bedside table. For your best friend still mourning the demise of Gourmet.

10. The old Russian tea company, Kusmi, has been given a rather luxe makeover as of late. But their teas are still wonderful, either loose in pretty tins or packed into gorgeous little muslin tea bags. My favorite at the moment is Kusmi Boost, a spicy green tea blend packed with cardamom pods, ginger, and orange peel. For your boss or your favorite neighbor and, while you're at it, get a tin for yourself, too.

11. Do you have a smallish person in your life who likes to cook? Chances are they've spent their entire cooking lives looking for an apron that will fit. So get them this Fog Linen apron, because good aprons for smallish people can be terrifically hard to find.

Posted in Uncategorized

30 comments on Kitchen Covets – A Holiday Gift Guide
Berlin on a Platter

November 16, 2010

It's been almost a year now since I got back to Berlin. Or since I left New York, depending on how you see things. I've been through a long winter, a short, hot summer, a fall that went by too quickly and now we're narrowing in on Christmas. I found a place to live, I've made some friends, I've got a desk that's pretty good and a kitchen that's pretty great, and though I miss my people in New York every day, I like my life here so much. In fact, I love it. And finally, I'm starting to be able to see this city without the fog of newness and confusion that surrounds so much of settling in to a new place (even if it's new and old at once).

I've promised a few, or more, of you a post about my favorite restaurants in Berlin for a while now. But the more I thought about it, and the more I ran around Berlin trying to find good food to eat, the more I felt frustrated by packing everything I'd like to say about food in Berlin into a single post. And even though, when the tiny kernel of the urge to start another blog, devoted to my favorite (and not-so-favorite) things to eat in Berlin, appeared in my mind the first time, I knew intellectually that between the book and this blog and trying to have that life that I like, no love, there was no way I had room in my world for a second blog. But that kernel wouldn't budge. Instead, it took hold and grew and grew, kicked my intellectual self gently in the ribs, and found room where I thought there wasn't any, which is, dear readers, how Berlin on a Platter was born.

Berlin on a Platter is about the little discoveries I'm making in Berlin, about my favorite bakeries and snack stands, the hidden gems I might (or might not) find on my journeys around the city, gustatory wonders at the grocery store, a good restaurant in the East or a great one in the West. Consider it my personal culinary notebook for Berlin, a resource for those of you visiting this city or those of you who live here. I hope you like it.

Guten Appetit!

Posted in Uncategorized

28 comments on Berlin on a Platter
Gabrielle Hamilton’s Soft Zucchini with Harissa, Olives and Feta

October 31, 2010

When my beloved told me yesterday that we had to turn the clocks back this morning, it hit me like a small sack of lemons in the gut. But I haven't prepared!, I howled. I'm not ready for this to be the last time we still see daylight at 5:00 pm until next spring! But that's how it goes: one minute, you're tearing down a linden-perfumed street on a bicycle without a jacket, and the next thing you know, winter's knocking on your door. Don't worry, he said. November in Berlin is awesome. It's gray all the time.

He makes me laugh.

Now the time of panades and stews is upon us. We start making the Christmas cookie dough next week (it ripens on the balcony for a month), and Stollen isn't far behind. This year, I'd really like to make a proper English fruit cake and soak it in whiskey for at least a little while. There's apple butter to be made for presents and more yeast doughs to work on. Plus, I'm working on a potato dumpling recipe and goodness knows, you can't eat those on a regular basis as long as there are more than 6 hours of daylight available to you each day.

(I've grown soft, you see. 15 years of living on the East Coast of the United States has made me weak. Give me another couple years up here in this latitude and I'll be back to where I was when I was 12, giddy about the fact that I used to wake up in the dark and eat dinner in the dark. Who needs daylight, anyhow? Vitamin D is for suckers!)

I suppose at a certain point, then, we'll have moved on to sliced fennel salads or endive and blood oranges, staples of the winter table that somehow manage to balance all that heavy weight with some plain, sharp, bitter flavors. But until then, and as long as I'm still finding good, firm, fresh zucchini at the grocery store, I'll be making this salad which, in one soft green nudge, supplanted the carrot-harissa-feta salad of the summer (we seriously ate it all. Summer. Long).

This salad, well, it was love at first bite. Groan. What an idiotic expression, I know. But how else do I explain how hard and fast I fell for it with just one forkful? Imagine: zucchini steamed until soft and sweet as sweet can be, a spicy, garlicky dressing, the sharpness of olives and feta, the grassiness of olive oil and parsley. All in one bite, together.

It's Gabrielle Hamilton's recipe and was published in the first Canal House cookbook. With that kind of pedigree, it's no surprise, then, that it turned out to be so addictively delicious. We ate it for dinner one night with a few slices of bread, the kind of dinner that follows a rather biggish lunch, when you're not hungry for much, but you need something in your belly before bedtime. It was spectacularly simple; a riot of colors and textures in the bowl; a one-bowl salad that was far, far more than the sum of its parts.

You know when you start eating something and it sort of explodes in your mouth and your eyes widen and it's just so incredibly delicious and you try to put a figure on just what exactly is making the dish so darn perfect but you can't, so you take another bite and another and another and before you know it, in the blink of an eye, you are fighting rather unattractively to get another portion on your plate before someone else eats it and then you're wiping out the salad bowl with bread and eyeing your plate rather nervously – how did it empty so fast? – and scheming to make it again tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, too?

That is what this salad is like.

Soft Zucchini with Harissa, Olives and Feta
Serves 4 as a side dish or 2 as a light dinner with bread
Note: I've made a few small changes to the original recipe (using ground caraway, for example, as well as steaming the zucchini instead of boiling them, and using much less olive oil).

1/8 teaspoon ground caraway seeds
Juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons harissa paste
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 clove garlic, peeled
4 zucchini, sliced into thick rounds
Handful Kalamata olives, pitted
1/4 to 1/2 cup coarsely crumbled feta
Small handful parsley leaves, chopped

1. Put the ground caraway, lemon juice, harissa and olive oil in a serving bowl. Crush the garlic clove through a garlic press and add to the bowl. Whisk to combine.

2. Fit a vegetable steamer in a pot with an inch or two of water and bring to a boil. Steam the zucchini until tender, about 5 to 7 minutes. They should not be falling apart. Add the zucchini to the serving bowl and gently toss with the harissa vinaigrette while still warm.

3. Dress the zucchini with the olives, feta, and parsley. Serve immediately.

Posted in Gluten-Free, Salads, Vegetable Sides, Vegetarian Mains

63 comments on Gabrielle Hamilton’s Soft Zucchini with Harissa, Olives and Feta
Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Anchovy Sauce

October 11, 2010

The fridge is full to bursting right now with various pots of jam, a silly amount of mustards in tubes and jars, two or three cheeses and a bunch of homemade fruit syrups (raspberry! elderflower! apple-currant, too!), but, as I stood in front of it with a gnawingly empty stomach today, there was nothing in it for lunch. We had no bread to make impromptu grilled cheese sandwiches, and no vegetables to do a simple stove-top sauté. The last of the rice was used up last night and I thought if I even so much as looked at another potato I'd hurl it at a wall. (Potato pancakes, potato dumplings, potato cake, I think we need to talk.)

When this happens to you, do you usually throw in the towel and go out for lunch? Or do you scrounge around until you find something suitable to eat, even if that means canned sardines on top of instant polenta with toasted sesame oil for flair? If I had not still been wearing my pyjamas at lunchtime (uh, one of the benefits of working from home, yes), I would have thrown in that towel and made someone else make me lunch. But vanity and laziness made me resourceful. You see, we did have a small jar of anchovies in oil and a can of my very favorite pomodorini di collina and an obliging parsley plant on the balcony.

Suddenly, things were looking up.

I first read about this sauce on Rachel's mouthwatering blog earlier this year. It's Marcella Hazan's recipe and seems to be almost like the devastating Sofia Loren to her more Jayne Mansfield-like tomato-butter-onion cult. You melt a few anchovies in some olive oil, throw in a bit of garlic (I leave mine in chunks big enough to fish out, but you could mince it, too), and then simmer a can of tomatoes in that dark, funky base until the sauce is reduced and thick enough to coat a panful of spaghetti. I find it needs a bit of chopped parsley to make it feel like a proper lunch, but that's about it. You barely need any salt, you certainly don't need any grated cheese on top and the sauce's richness (not fishiness, don't worry) makes for a very satisfying meal.

With a square or two of chocolate for dessert, of course. One needs something special to book-end a scrounge-y meal like this, after all.

So, tell me, readers: what do you eat when there's "nothing" at home to eat?

Tomato and Anchovy Sauce
Serves 2 or 3

1 clove garlic, peeled and halved (or minced)
3 tablespoons olive oil
5 flat anchovy fillets
1 16-ounce can imported Italian cherry or plum tomatoes
2 tablespoons chopped parsley

1. Heat the oil in a skillet and gently brown the garlic over low heat. Add the anchovies and, stirring constantly, allow the anchovies to melt into the oil.

2. Add the tomatoes and bring the sauce to a low simmer. Let simmer, uncovered, for 20 to 25 minutes. Taste for seasoning. In the meantime, bring a pot of water to the boil and cook enough spaghetti for two or three people. Drain the spaghetti, toss with the sauce and sprinkle with parsley. Serve immediately.

Posted in Italian, Pasta Dinners, Seafood, Weeknight Dinners

76 comments on Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Anchovy Sauce
October 9, 2010

Frequently Asked Questions

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Q: Why is your blog called The Wednesday Chef?

A: It’s not because I only post on Wednesdays, or only cook on Wednesdays. Wednesdays were the day that newspapers used to publish their food sections. And since my blog task, as I defined it for myself when I first started, was to cook my way through all my recipe clippings, I wanted my blog name to reflect that in some way. A little secret: I actually think my blog name is kind of corny, but it’s way too late to fix it now and, in any case, other people seem to like it. Thank goodness!

Q: Do you have any advice on starting a food blog?

A: Sure! Post regularly and often. Learn how to shoot photos in natural light (never, ever use your flash). Be passionate about what you’re blogging about – whether it’s cheese-making or popcorn, you’ll find your audience if your passion has free reign. Make yourself part of the blog community – read other blogs, comment generously – and you’ll find readers and, more importantly even, friends. If you’re starting a blog to get rich and famous, I’d look into another line of work – do it because you love to write or take photos or connect with other people (or all of the above).

Q: How did you get into cookbook publishing? What advice do you have for people wanting to get into that line of work?

A: See this post for answers.

Q: What kind of camera do you use?

In the early years of the blog, I used a little point-and-shoot Panasonic Lumix, but since 2008 I’ve used a Nikon D80. I have a 50 mm fixed lens on it and although I keep talking about getting a wide-angle one next, the fixed lens serves me really well. It shoots beautifully in low light.

Q: Can I use one of your photos on my site? Can I use one of your blog posts on my site?

Everything on this site – photos and text – is protected by copyright. If you would like to publish one of my photos on your site, please have the courtesy to credit me and link back to my site. Please do not republish my writing on your site.

Q: I’m coming to Berlin. What restaurants do you recommend?

Head on over to my Berlin blog, Berlin on a Platter, for my latest restaurant recommendations. You can also check out these articles on my favorite cafés and bakeries and brunch spots that I wrote for the Guardian.

Q: I have a blog. Can we do a link exchange?

I don’t do link exchanges and, as my friend Deb says, neither should you. I only link to websites that I love to read and visit regularly. But if you’d like to email me or leave me a comment pointing me to your blog, please do so! I love discovering all the amazing blogs, writers, photographers, and general creative geniuses out there.

Q: Do you accept advertising on your blog?

A: After years of being in an ad network, I recently decided to handle my own advertising. I value my readership very highly and will only work with an advertiser if I already use your product or think it is a good fit with my blog and my readers. If you’d like to discuss a collaboration, please send me an email.

If I haven’t addressed your question here, feel free to email me at wednesdaychef[at]hotmail[dot]com.

Press

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“highly amusing…” – The Los Angeles Times, January 25, 2006

“Two of America’s most notable newspaper food sections get a proper licking in this clever culinary blog. …Whatever recipe Weiss takes on, she chronicles the outcome with an honest, no-holds-barred writing style. And in less than two years she’s gathered quite a loyal and vociferous readership. – Culinate.com, April 19, 2007

“The Wednesday Chef has such a unique angle. Weiss’ writing [is] is really enjoyable…[and] she is very honest. You can trust her. Weiss will be the first to tell you if something (gulp) does not impress.” – MSN City Guides, August 2007

“My favorite of the moment is The Wednesday Chef…a New York writer who chronicles her attempts at cooking recipes clipped over the years from The New York Times and the LA Times. I admire how regularly and ambitiously she cooks and posts, usually with plenty of yummy pictures. Reading it is almost enough to get me through until the weekend, when I might be able to cook again.” – Food & Wine, September 2007

Number 3 on the Times of London’s list of 50 of the world’s best food blogs – February 2009

“New York-based Luisa Weiss started this blog as a way of documenting her trawl through clippings of recipes from the New York and LA Times. A mix of recipes and humorous anecdotes…it’s a charming blog packed with information (indeed, a whole 700 words about coleslaw).” – The Times of London, February 2009

“I love thewednesdaychef.com, written by Luisa Weiss, a book editor living in Queens, New York. [Her blog] is very American, so full of a particular brand of warmth and honesty…There are also some great recipes ( Turkish-style pasta with beef and yogurt, or banana and crystallised ginger cake). This blog is about life and – as another blogger, Heidi Swanson of 101cookbooks.com, puts it – the recipes that ‘intersect’ it.” –Telegraph, July 2009

“Luisa Weiss [is the] mastermind of The Wednesday Chef. These women engage their readership with food-related narratives and storytelling techniques, garnering comment counts in the triple digits and cultivating a community of loyal fans.” –PBS.org’s Need to Know, July 2010

Number 8 of The Top 100 Culinary Blogs – July 2010. “The result [is] a blog charming not only for its recipes, but also for humorous anecdotes from Luisa’s personal life.

Number 6 of Olive‘s Top Ten Bloggers – October 2010. “Cooking with humor – Luisa Weiss’s trawl through a decade of recipes clipped painstakingly from American newspapers.”

Seen on:

Design*Sponge
Elizabeth Street
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momfilter
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Popmatters
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Slashfood.com
Studio Fifteen
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Slow Travel Berlin
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Featured in:

The Wall Street Journal
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delicious Magazine
Publisher’s Weekly
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Heard on:

Conversations on the Coast
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Seen on:

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Ragù di Pesce

September 26, 2010

I am sitting here in my office right now, the sky as dull as a washed-out t-shirt outside the window, rain leaking from above, feeling very far away indeed from the sultry colors in the photo above. In fact, it almost feels sort of cruel to post it; it's like a taunt from the last beautiful days of summer, strutting around all triumphant in fancy heels and a perfect summer dress, while you – autumn – have given up and retreated to the bedroom in saggy sweatpants and itchy woolen socks. Let's kick summer in the teeth, shall we? Now is the time of apple picking and pretty scarves, Sunday afternoons at the movies and hard work, after all. Nothing to be ashamed of!

Also, summer, this sauce doesn't belong to you.

Okay, so remember my friend Alessandro? His mother, Gabriella, is quite possibly the very best cook I know, and I happen to be blessed with a lot of good cooks in my life. She is from Bologna, the culinary heart of Italy, and she creates magic at her stove, from delicate breadcrumb soups to lusty pigeon sauces and briny octopus-potato salads. She's the woman who taught me how to make real ragù Bolognese and a mean lasagna.

Also, ragù di pesce. Fish sauce, if you're wondering. Though "fish sauce" sounds rather…fishy, and wan. Like something beige and sticky you'd see napped on boiled potatoes so old they've grown skin at a German university canteen. And the fish sauce, er, ragù di pesce (pronounced rah-GOO dee PESH-eh) I'm talking about is a spicy, briny, fantastical thing that you toss with spaghetti, grabbing your heart at first bite.

It is my not-so-secret hope that one day, I will be able to spend enough time in Gabriella's kitchen that she'll cook her way through her entire canon with me. In August, we started modestly: with grilled, stuffed tomatoes (I'm saving the recipe, my darlings, for the book) and this ragù. (Well, there were also a tray of gratinéed mussels and grilled fresh anchovies, tossed in herbed breadcrumbs, but those were more incidental lessons than anything else. Still, are you hungry yet? I just had breakfast and my stomach is growling.) And because sharing is giving, it is too good to keep to myself. May your September be rich in ragù di pesce!

You begin, appropriately, with the fish. At the fish market in the next town over from the village where my mother and our friends live, near the Adriatic coast of Italy, you can buy a little mixture specially made by the fishmongers for ragù. It's got bits of salmon and monkfish, tiny shucked clams, chopped squid, and some shrimp cut into it. You can make your own fish mix in places without such a lovely service by simply buying a couple of different fillets of fish, a few shrimp and octopus, and a handful of clams, and then chopping and shucking everything up at home. You'll want about a pound in total.

To make things a little special, you can also buy some fancy scampi to serve on top of the plate of spaghetti. But that's just if you have guests that you really want to impress. If it's just a regular old Tuesday night, skip this step. Gabriella also bought cannochie, a specialty of that part of the Adriatic. I'd never seen them anywhere else before, but the Internet says they're called mantis shrimp in English. Have you ever heard of them? Anyway, they look sort of goofy and they're spiny to no end, but once you get past their shell, the flesh is sweet and fresh and almost lobster-like in consistency. Except, there's a lot less of it.

Are you the kinds of people to do a proper mise en place before you start cooking? I always wish I would be, but I never am. New Year's resolutions and so on, let's make pretend we're doing a mise. Assemble an onion, some garlic cloves, a big pile of minced fresh parsley, two or three plum tomatoes, a bottle of white wine, a box of spaghetti, some hot red pepper, salt, and…the fish? I think that's it.

Now, feeling all virtuous with your organization skills, put on an apron and finely dice the onion and a garlic clove or two. In a wide, deep pan, sauté them togther gently in olive oil, along with several spoonfuls of the minced parsley. You want this mixture to get wonderfully fragrant, but without burning. So monitor the heat and keep moving everything around the pan.

When it's done, about 7 minutes later, add the chopped fish mixture and stir well to distribute the oil and onion and garlic and herbs. Let that cook for a few minutes, stirring almost constantly, until you see the very edges of the shrimp start to go gray.

Add the scampi and mantis shrimp, if using, and then add about a cup of dry white wine. Mix well and let it cook down for several minutes. In the meantime, seed and chop two plum tomatoes. Actually, three. Pour yourself a glass of that white wine.

Add the tomatoes to the pan and stir. If it's looking like it needs a little more color, add a few spoonfuls of pureed canned tomatoes. And salt. A good amount! More than you think. Gabriella says that's the trick about seafood, it needs a lot of salt. And a nice pinch of red pepper flakes, if you want a little heat. (I always do.)

Let the sauce come to a low boil and busy yourself with other things for a little while, like filling a pot with water for the spaghetti (the sauce as depicted here makes enough for a 454-gram box, which should be plenty for four to five people) and bringing it to a boil. Set the table, if you don't have small children to do it for you, or if your spouse is busy making the rest of dinner on the grill in the garden, teaching that girl with the camera his most precious secrets.

When the sauce is, well, saucy, meaning, when the sloshiest part of the liquid has reduced, and the sauce feels thickish, about 10 minutes later, turn off the heat, stir in the rest of the parsley, taste for seasoning and then deal with boiling the spaghetti. As a visual aide, the sauce should look about it how it does in the first photo of this post. When the spaghetti is nice and al dente, drain it and add it to the pan with the ragù, tossing to distribute the little bits of fish and sauce evenly. You want to work quickly so that the spaghetti doesn't turn gummy. It'll absorb a bit of the sauce's liquid in the hot pan, which makes for forkfuls that truly taste of the sea.

Command everyone to the table. In fact, if you got them well-trained, they'll know to be waiting, fork in hand, napkin in lap, raptly for you to dish steaming hot plates of spaghetti up in front of them.

The fish bits fall apart in the sauce, infusing the tomato sauce with briny flavor. The wine gives depth to the sauce, which is, as these things go, quite a contender for fancy fast food. The parsley adds freshness and a bit of color. But really, calling out the individual elements of the dish is sort of beside the point, because what makes this so delicious and special is how it all comes together on the plate.

And even though it's possible to make this ragù at any point during the year now, I think it tastes best when eaten with eyes closed, dreaming of the summer, remembering skin hot from the beach, hearing crickets chirping at night.

Posted in Italian, Lamination-Worthy, Pasta Dinners, Seafood

58 comments on Ragù di Pesce
Here, There and Back Again

September 7, 2010

I saw a shooting star the other night; I was standing in front of my grandfather's house, though I have to learn to call it my mother's house now that almost three years have passed since he's been gone. I was standing there, with my neck folded back so I could stare at the Milky Way glimmering above us, hearing the acacia leaves rustle all about when I saw that celestial rush and sparkle past the roof. That very spot is the only place I can still see the Milky Way and every time I stand there in the dark looking up at the heavens I snap right back to when I was a little girl, learning about the universe for the very first time. Decades evaporate before my eyes.

It's been a long time since I wished on shooting stars, or stray eyelashes or any other kind of talismans. I try to make my own luck, don't want to rely on the gods or astronomy for the twists and turns of my life. Lately, I've been trying to focus a little more on living in the moment, zeroing in very closely on how each individual day goes instead of constantly, frantically, looking to the future for the answers. So I remind myself that I am a lucky person: to be alive, to share in the human mystery that is love, to call many places in this world my home, to squirt lemon in my mouth and taste sharp sourness.

I am grateful for the little marinated anchovies my mother and I ate for lunch one day a few weeks ago, especially the ones topped with little cubes of parsleyed carrots. The anchovies were vinegary and sort of sweet, too, and they melted in our mouths.

I am grateful that my mother is happy.

I am grateful that for three to six days a year, I am allowed to lie slothfully on the beach and work on my tan lines and read magazines that proclaim The Return of Fur and revel in the Coolness of Camel Coats, and I'm grateful for borrowed white sandals that make me feel like a little kid again.

I think it's lovely, in this time of instant gratification and international overnight shipping, that I have to go to Italy to eat spaghetti dotted with tiny little clams, so sweet and tender and briny that even the spaghetti tastes infused with the sea. I'll never eat this anywhere else and I like that.

One day I saw a big, beautiful family eating a simple lunch by the beach. I used to be too shy to do anything but stare sort of secretively at this kind of family, hoping no one would notice me looking at them. Now I think life is too fleeting to keep things like that to myself, so I told them how lovely they were and they broke into delighted laughter, all of them. I wish you could have heard it. I wish I could hear it again.

Time goes by slower there than other places. It's good because it leaves lots of room for silly self-portraits, for picking figs, for yelling at the wild deer to scram from the garden, for lavender picking and for finding newborn kittens abandoned in the scrum of foliage across the street.

And then you get impatient and snap at your mother who yells at the cat who slinks away sadly and just like that, the harmony is broken like a guitar string and you feel sort of flushed and awful. Luckily, because that's what I am, lucky, we get over things pretty quickly – we're good at that, we've had to be – and before you know it, I'm back to scratching the cat's chin while I think about what we're having for dinner.

Dinner: melon so sweet it is almost syrup on the plate, and salty slices of prosciutto.
Dinner: arugula from the garden, folded into homemade piadine spread with sour stracchino cheese and eaten with our fingers, oily and hot.
Dinner: grilled tomatoes stuffed with wild fennel-flecked breadcrumbs, charred beneath, juicy and soft within.

I learned how to make ragù di pesce and I promise to teach you how to cook it yourselves very soon, because it is wonderful and you deserve it for being so patient and kind with me while I took August off. I wish I could make it and have you all over for dinner in our garden, with fairy lights strung above us, mosquitoes nipping at our ankles, the crickets keeping us company in the gloaming.

I miss my grandfather and his gnarled knuckles, his dirty t-shirts, his toothy smile. But the house is my mother's now and it is lovely, and her garden has a baby cherry tree growing in it, and this November we are harvesting the olives from the trees he planted so long ago, and she is brave enough to kill the leggy insects that get inside the house herself and I know he's with my grandmother whom he loved more than anything in the whole world, even if they are buried in two different cemeteries, separated by a country road.

My mother taught me to love figs fourteen years ago. We were sitting at the kitchen table in her apartment in Rome and she'd peeled a great big pile of them for me to try, green-skinned ones, and it was hot out and her heart had recently been broken by someone who I'd loved very much. It was a terribly confusing time, but I can still feel the cool fig flesh in my mouth, the surprise of those hundreds of crisp little seeds, the impossible depth of sweetness. She was back in her hometown and I was far away from mine and we were both sad, for the same and such different reasons.

But that was a long time ago and now, when I'm at her house at the right time in August, I can stand below the fig tree, eating fig after fig while looking out into the valley below, planning to teach my children to love figs, too, to eat them only when they're there and not anywhere else so that they stay special.

I hope your summers were corn-filled and sun-kissed, my darling readers. I thought about you a lot this past month, about the faces I know and the many, many more I don't, but whose presence I cherish all the same. I know it seems crazy to say this about thousands of people you've never meant, but you all mean so much to me, more than I can actually put in words and I'm deeply grateful to you, for being here and reading me, year after year.

The next five months are going to be tough ones for me, as I get to the nitty-gritty of writing this book and so I'm going to have to step away more than I would like to. The truth is that writing this blog and writing my book are two sides of the same coin and while I may have once thought, naïvely, that I could do both, the hard truth is that I cannot. I won't be entirely gone: after all, I have ragù di pesce to tell you about and my list of good things to eat in Berlin is almost done, but it will be a little quieter. I hope you understand. I know you will; you all are always far kinder to me than I am to myself.

May your Septembers be full of promise and sliced tomato salads and that special golden light that only comes when the summer ends.

Posted in Travel

130 comments on Here, There and Back Again
Toast and a Summer Break

July 29, 2010

It's finally cooled off in Berlin, which means that we can sleep under thin coverlets at night again, that big puffy clouds float past my little office under the eaves at a rather brisk clip, that I can enjoy hot tea in the mornings once more, and that I don't have to drink an icy glass of milk for dinner but can actually cook a pot of spaghetti, with sauce. Two burners, going at once! That's rather nice. Our tomato plants on the balcony are finally bursting with little red fruits. At first I could just pluck one or two off and rub them against my pant leg before popping them in my mouth, but now there are handfuls going in salad bowls. It's intoxicating – though I swear I'll never live in a house, I often find myself dreaming of vegetable gardens these days.

Another thing I'm obsessed with lately is the "Cooking From Every Angle" column on Food52. It is crammed with interesting little snippets and delicious ideas. I daresay it's my favorite thing about that site – every time I scroll through the column, I can hear my stomach growl. It makes me want to buy spices at a furious clip, replenish my cluttered utensil drawer with clever tools, stew fish in tomato sauce for a spaghetti dinner and freeze tiny berries in lemon-flavored ice cubes. But the thing it makes me want to do most is eat toast.

Not just any toast, mind you. But toast spread with mustard mayonnaise and topped with mashed avocado.
It is my new lunch. It is what I think about when I go grocery shopping
for boring things like plain yogurt and face cream. It is what I crave
when I open the refrigerator door. It is all I'd like to eat right now.

There's barely a recipe. You mix together equal parts smooth Dijon mustard and mayonnaise and spread this on a piece of hot toast. (I like to toast toast until it's quite well-done and crunchy. What's the point of flabby toast?) Then you take half an avocado, scoop it into a bowl, sprinkle it with Maldon salt and a few drops of lemon juice and mash it with a fork until it's tamed but not entirely creamy. I rather like those bite-sized pieces of avocado to remind you of what you're actually eating.

This gorgeous green-yellow mash then is gently spread to the edges of your mustard-mayo spread toast. You can plop this on a plate and sit down at your table to eat it, or you can lean yourself against the kitchen counter with a hand cupped under the toast to catch crumbs as you eat. Whatever you do, don't plan on sharing the other half of the avocado with anyone. Halfway through one toast, you'll already be on to toasting the second piece. Then the avocado will be gone and you'll be licking savory mayonnaise off the corners of your lips and plotting just how many avocados you can eat in one week. As it turns out, quite a few.

If you tire of this delicious meal, though I don't see how you could, or if you're allergic to avocados or just rather interested in eating something slightly different every once in a while, this is another open-faced sandwich lunch I've taken to like a house on fire lately: spicy salmon mash on toast. Is that what I'm calling it? I guess it is. There: Spicy Salmon Mash on Toast. You take a can of wild salmon – preferably printed with some kind of logo attesting to its sustainability or inclusion in the Marine Stewardship program – and drain it, then flake the fish into a small bowl. Into this small bowl go equal amounts of mayonnaise and Sriracha sauce – I use somewhere between half a teaspoon and a teaspoon of each. Mash everything gently together with a fork, taking care not to entirely liquefy the salmon; you want some integrity left in each bite. Then, once again on very crispy toast, you pile the pink flakes as high as you'd like to go.

Important here is something cooling to offset the spicy salmon – I find three very thin cucumber slices to do just the trick. They are like mini air-conditioners for your palate and crunch ever so agreeably along with the rather velvety fish. Then there's the rough rasp of the toast and you've got a symphony of textures enlivening what you thought was going to be a delicate, little luncheon-for-one.

I thought this was strictly girl food, to be honest, only something to be eaten at home during the day on a break from work. But then I made it for lunch the other weekend, when there was nothing else in the house and it was too hot to think straight, and it turns out that men like this, too.

I got greedy at the market this week and even though we're leaving for Italy tomorrow, I came home loaded down with bags of local zucchini and sour cherries, mini-Roma tomatoes, sweet and juicy, and soft-skinned local apricots. And, most precious, four ears of sweet corn, an unusual sight in Berlin. Alright, unheard-of, really. I boiled two ears for lunch and ate the first one sprinkled with lemon juice and cayenne pepper, like an Indian friend of my father's once taught me how to do. The other I ate more prosaically with sweet butter and great flakes of salt.

It made me miss the Union Square farmer's market and those shimmering hot New York afternoons. Florid Manhattan sunsets and my friends. My Berlin corn was less plump and juicy than my beloved New Jersey corn. Faintly bitter and a little bit tough. Sort of like Berlin itself, I guess.

Then I stewed a pot of apricots, inspired by Rachel, and it made me think of my aunt's apricot tree in Italy and how much I can't wait to be there, which is good because it is high time, I think, high time that I take a break and unwind. I've had a few too many nervous nights lately, a little too much fear and loathing surrounding the writing of this book of mine.

So, to that end, friends, I'm going to be taking a little break from here. I hope you don't mind, but I need to unplug, as overused as that term may be, and get out of my head for a little bit. Focus on the beach and weeding rapacious baby acacia seedlings out of my mother's property, pray to the mighty fig tree that its fruit might ripen a month early, drink a bitter Italian cocktail at sunset in town while munching on a salty piece of rosemary pizza, and take walks before dinner with friends, my feet crunching over dry soil and wild mint.

I'll be back soon: if I'm brave, in September, and if I cave, before then. Either way, I'll return with delicious things to share. Until then, have yourselves a bunch of wonderful Augusts. Hold on to these days. Soak them up. Eat as much corn as you can, and fresh berries, and great big slices of watermelon. Go to the beach and stay too long. Take walks in flip flops at dusk. Photograph the way summer light falls on your living room wall. And remember what Longfellow once wrote:

Then followed that beautiful
season,
Called by the pious Acadian peasants the Summer of All-Saints!
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the
landscape
Lay as if new-created in all the freshness of childhood.
Peace seemed to reign upon earth, and the restless heart of the
ocean
Was for a moment consoled. All sounds were in harmony blended.
Voices of children at play, the crowing of cocks in the
farm-yards,
Whir of wings in the drowsy air, and the cooing of pigeons,
All were subdued and low as the murmurs of love, and the great
sun
Looked with the eye of love through the golden vapors around him;
While arrayed in its robes of russet and scarlet and yellow,
Bright with the sheen of the dew, each glittering tree of the
forest
Flashed like the plane-tree the Persian adorned with mantles and
jewels.

See you soon, folks.

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100 comments on Toast and a Summer Break