The Wednesday Chef

  • Reality Check

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    I sometimes get the impression that people think I can do no wrong in the kitchen. That my pasta's always al dente, my cakes always risen, my eggs always fluffy. Folks, let me tell you: no one, but no one, is immune to the kitchen disaster.

    See this towering beauty of almond meringue, gooseberry-studded whipped cream and yellow cake? Baked in the wee small hours Sunday morning before a 50th wedding anniversary party for my dearest friends in the whole world attended by all their friends and family as well as a woman who regularly wins baking contests in her home state of Hessen? It was, in a word, raw on the inside. Raw. Raw. Raw.

    As in, uncooked batter. As in, inedible. As in, DISASTER.

    I almost melted into a puddle of shame. I almost let it ruin my day. I almost cried. And then my friend gave me a steadying hug, helped me saw off the top part of the meringue, scooped out the raw innards, and glued the good parts of the cake back together (after all, there was all that nice whipped cream and fresh gooseberries and meringue and toasted almonds). Then we put the surgically-enhanced cake back on the buffet table along with all the other home-baked marvels and you know what? It was the first cake gone.

    So next time you find yourself whisk in hand, lower lip trembling, in front of a kitchen disaster, just remember: you're not alone! And there's got to be a solution somewhere. Even if it means throwing it all in the bin and ordering pizza.

    Happy Monday!

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  • Barbara Kafka’s Moroccan Tomato Soup

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    Quick, quick! There's a break in sight. The temperature's 10 degrees cooler than it was yesterday. Now's your chance. Swing on your bike, get to the market. Buy a couple of pounds of tomatoes, the redder the better. Do you have parsley or cilantro? Good. Fennel or celery? Only if it's lying around in your crisper, don't bother buying more. Ooh, there's the Turkish bakery stand selling small loaves of its soft, chewy pide bread, the black nigella seeds on top the best part. Sure, get a round of that, too.

    Bike home again, bag swinging against your legs. A cool breeze might even form. Soak it all in, tomorrow you'll be hiding indoors again.

    At home, pull out your mother's food mill that you believe is older than you. Try to mill the first chopped tomatoes, turn the handle jankily, feel your temperature rise, give up. Your fuse is too short these days, forgive yourself. So the recipe says to peel and seed the tomatoes. Doesn't Barbara Kafka know that tomato seeds are sometimes the best part? Go about chopping the tomatoes by hand. Peel a few with a y-peeler, then stand around chewing on tomato peels for a bit. Lose interest in the peeling. That's alright. Some days, a recipe is just there for inspiration.

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    Put a bunch of spices to warm in a pan. Oh! There's that little frying pan you thought you'd lost in the move! Sitting right there…in the frying pan drawer. Oh well, sometimes you look for milk in the fridge for half an hour before realizing it's right in front of you. You're supposed to add garlic, but for some reason there's none in the house. This must be the heat, you figure, addling your mind. Who doesn't always have a few cloves of garlic lying around? Okay, so you use a shallot finely diced instead. This turns out to be more than fine, delicious even.

    Paprika, cayenne, cumin – hot colors fusing together into a muddled brown, the kitchen filling with fragrance. Even though the recipe says an immersion blender is too much, you use an immersion blender, just a few pulses, to chop the tomatoes a little more. You leave it chunky, though, just as Barbara says to, and stir in the spiced shallot. Forget about the celery, or the fennel, which was your inspired idea for a celery substitution. Who wants to chop anything more than a few tomatoes? Not you.

    In goes a little vinegar, a squeeze or two of lemon, chopped parsley because cilantro is too hard to find and did you already mention your short fuse? Be kind to yourself today. A few stirs with the spoon and soon you're sitting at the table, slurping spoonfuls of cold soup, dunking Turkish bread into the bowl. Who cares that you gave up with the tomatoes after about five and that the spice mixture is meant for over two pounds? This means the soup is humming, the spices vibrant in your mouth and throat. Maybe it's a little too strong, but it doesn't really matter. You eat in big spoonfuls anyway, grateful for the kick of flavor, the faint numbing of your lips. You feel your inner temperature, the knot of frustration and the sweat at your temples subside.

    Tomorrow will be hot again, there might only be salads and cold yogurt and more complaining on the horizon. But today you have cold Moroccan tomato soup, a faint breeze and that will have to do.

    Moroccan Tomato Soup
    Serves 1
    Note: The original recipe is here and is probably far more balanced and mild than what I ended up with. I practically licked my plate, though. Below will serve one person in need of something cool, spicy and calming for lunch in an irritatingly hot clime.

    1 shallot, minced fine
    2 1/2 teaspoons sweet paprika
    1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin
    Large pinch of cayenne pepper
    4 teaspoons olive oil
    1.5 pounds tomatoes, cored, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces
    1/4 cup packed chopped cilantro or parsley leaves
    1 teaspoon white-wine vinegar
    2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

    1. In a small saucepan, stir together the shallot, paprika, cumin, cayenne and olive oil. Place over medium-low heat and cook, stirring constantly, for 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and set aside.

    2. Put the chopped tomatoes with their juice in a large bowl. Pass an immersion blender through once or twice, leaving most of the tomatoes still chunky. Stir in the cooked spice mixture, the cilantro, vinegar, and lemon juice. Taste for salt. Eat immediately.

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  • Heat Wave

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    I remember one August in Berlin many years ago, my mother and I came back from visiting our family in Italy and had to turn the heater on. It was that cold. In August! Things have, uh, changed in northern Europe over the past 20 years. Currently, Berlin is in the grip of a heat wave – meaning we've got temperatures hovering around 100 degrees Fahrenheit and have had them stuck there for days now.

    I know, I know – New York and the whole Eastern Seaboard have humidity that we blessedly do not. But come hang out in my attic apartment and feel the hot air licking your legs like a Sicilian scirocco and tell me where you'd rather be: here or in a good old North American movie theater, where the air conditioner is cranked up to Wintry Storm and you're wrist-deep in popcorn.

    Or maybe that's just where I'd rather be.

    I've beaten a hasty retreat to my mother's apartment, taking a sharp knife and some tomatoes with me. That's about all I can stomach in this heat. But look what I found on the way! My very first transcribed recipe, for crostata. I'd learned how to make it from the teenaged daughter of our friend Maria one summer and after returning to Berlin, I'd written down the recipe for my mother's friend Joan. I must have been around seven or eight years old at the time. She's kept it all these years.

    "Later EAT!" I love that.

    So I have a few questions for you, friends. Can you cook in this heat? Or do you just survive on cereal and cold milk? If you can cook, what are you making?

    And also, what's the first recipe you remember learning? The first thing you were taught to make? For me, it was that crostata. I remember feeling the oily, smooth dough beneath my fingers, the cool roughness of the wooden countertop, the smell of my aunt's oven as it heated. What was it for you?

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  • Nancy Harmon Jenkins’ Pasta with Baked Tomato Sauce

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    Dear, sweet, gentle reader. It is taking all of my mental and most of my physical capacity to endure life until tomorrow night when Germany plays Spain in the semi-finals of the World Cup. If you've been following along, and I sure hope you have (the drama! the intrigue! the exhilaration!), you might have caught drift of the way the German team is playing and though I've been a devoted fan since the age of five, when a sticker of Rudi Völler in all his permed and mustachioed glory found a permanent home glued to the underside of a shelf positioned right above my bed so that I could see him before I went to sleep at night and first thing when I woke up, I have to say it's never been this much fun to watch them play. And how they have played!

    Anyway, since you come here for food and chat and not sports commentary, I will do my very best to keep my nerves to myself, but I'll just say it's hard, okay? It's hard! You should see my cuticles. My new gray hair. Me muttering to myself before I go to sleep at night. "They'll be okay without Müller, right?" "Maybe David Villa will get the stomach flu." "Four goals against Australia! Four goals against England! Four goals against Argentina!" "Please, psychic octopus, please be wrong just this one time."

    It's exhausting.

    Food and chat, woman! Focus. Okay.

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    So, the other day I was thinking about spaghetti. I think about spaghetti a lot, you know. Maybe because I'm half-Italian. Maybe because we eat it multiple times a week. Maybe just because it's good. Who knows. I was thinking about spaghetti and how I go through phases with spaghetti sauce. Like, there were a good two years where my favorite tomato sauce involved canned cherry tomatoes, a small can of tuna and a garlic clove. I made it over and over and over again until I could no longer look at tuna the same way again (good thing, too). Then I had a thing with Marcella Hazan's tomato-butter-and-onion sauce. Over and over and over again, until it started tasting like tomato soup to me and I had to take a break. Then there was the sauce made with sliced zucchini simmered in diced tomatoes (Muir Glen, I miss you!), particularly delicious with grated Parmigiano – I do believe that one lasted the longest. But my first love, the tomato sauce that started the obsessive sauce-making, well, I had managed to banish it from my memory so entirely that when it popped back into my head the other day, I almost jumped.

    That tomato sauce, made of little cherry tomatoes halved and baked in the oven with a cheese-breadcrumb topping, was one of the four pillars of my diet during my first years in New York. I made it All. The. Time. I found it in the Best American Recipes cookbook from the year 2000 and I committed it to memory. My roommates were obsessed, my faraway boyfriend smitten. It was fast, it was cheap, it didn't dirty many pots, and it was delicious. Best recipe, indeed.

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    But as these things go, I overdid it. I made it one too many times, relied on it too much for weekly nourishment. I started getting tired of halving those little tomatoes, making sure their perky little faces faced the right side up in the baking pan, getting the sprinkle of breadcrumbs and cheese just right. One day, I moved on. (What came next? Olives and capers with peeled plum tomatoes, I believe. Oh…that was a good run. Don't forget the parsley.) So on that I forgot all about my beloved baked tomato sauce, until I was lying around thinking about spaghetti sauce the other day, probably in an attempt to distract myself from the terrifying prospect that was the Argentina game, because why on earth else would I have needed distraction?

    [FOUR-NIL, SUCKERS!]

    Focus, woman. Fo-cus.

    I went through my old recipe binder and sure enough, there was the recipe, lying sweetly in wait to be welcomed back into the fold again. And really, it is so good. The tomatoes, roasting under their garlicky-cheesy cap, collapse and go all sweet and sticky. The breadcrumbs get toasty, the cheese melts and browns, the garlic infuses everything with this savory, mouthwatering scent. You mash everything together loosely, adding some olive oil for moisture and aroma, and torn basil leaves for flavor. Then in go the cooked pasta (penne are nicest, I find, but spaghetti works wonderfully, too). You can dish it up into plates, then, or, if you're eating alone just fork it up out of the serving dish (the little crusty bits in the corners are especially good). And that's it. Obsession-worthy, no?

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    Almost enough to distract me from the game taking place just a short 27 hours and 8 minutes from now. Almost. So now if you'll excuse me, I have some incantations to do.

    DEUTSCHLAND!!!!!!

    Pasta with Baked Tomato Sauce
    Serves 4

    1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
    1 pound very ripe cherry tomatoes, halved
    1/3 cup plain dry breadcrumbs
    1/4 cup freshly grated Parmigiano
    2 tablespoons freshly grated pecorino (or, if you don't have this, just more Parmigiano)
    2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
    Salt and freshly ground pepper
    1 pound dried penne or spaghetti
    1/4 cup loosely packed fresh basil leaves, torn

    1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease a 13-by-9-inch baking dish with one-third of the oil. Place the tomatoes cut side up in the dish.

    2. In a small bowl, combine the bread crumbs, cheeses, and garlic and toss with a fork to mix well. Sprinkle the bread-crumb mixture over the tomatoes, making sure that each cut side is well covered with the crumb mixture. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake until the tomatoes are cooked through and starting to brown on top, about 20 minutes.

    3. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook for 8 to 10 minutes, or until al dente. Time the pasta so it finishes cooking about the time the tomatoes are ready to come out of the oven.

    4. When the tomatoes are done, add the basil and stir vigorously to mix everything into a sauce. Drain the pasta and immediately transfer it to the baking dish. Add the remaining olive oil and mix well. Serve at once.

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  • Madeleine Kamman’s Chicken Legs Roasted with Mustard

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    We are a household rich in mustard. I believe at some point in the last month there were five tubes of mustard in our cupboards along with two jars in the fridge. Hot, horseradish-spiked, tarragon-flavored or rustic, we've got 'em all. I used to think mustard was about as interesting as math class, until I wised (wizened? wose?) up and starting using mustard in my cooking, and now I can't imagine life without it.

    Germany is a good place to live if you like mustard. Plain yellow mustard squirted on a Rostbratwurst is a classic; sweet Bavarian mustard dolloped next to a pair of Weisswürste is some people's idea of heaven. There are poached eggs in mustard sauce and mustard-roasted pork. And our neighbors to the south, the Austrians, have taken the art of mustard packaging and elevated it to an art form. You should hang out in the mustard aisle of an Austrian grocery store sometime. (And that Wiener Würstel mustard? Possibly worth the price of an airline ticket straight to Vienna. We practically ate it by the spoonful.)

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    I've mentioned before (a hundred times before?) that my pile of newspaper recipe clippings dates back to the early naughts. These days I bookmark the ones I want to try, but the binder of printed recipes is a thick one and well predates this blog. When I unpacked my book boxes back in winter, I shelved the binder and then, frankly, forgot about it. After all, my Bookmarks folder could keep us fed for, um, years. What reminded me was Molly visiting and telling me about Francis's pasta. I knew I had the recipe somewhere…but where? After rifling through the computer and a notebook on my bookshelf, I finally turned to the binder, that gloriously overstuffed binder. There it was. And, o ho, there was so much else.

    This, for example, stunning little number from Regina Schrambling in the Los Angeles Times way back in 2002. It's Madeleine Kamman's recipe and is henceforth going to be my Last-Minute Dinner Party Secret Weapon because it is so delicious and so easy and uses so much mustard you will scarcely believe your own measuring spoon.

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    The original recipe is for duck legs, but I used chicken legs instead. And instead of herbes de Provence (which I sort of loathe because though they might be traditional, I find the mixture to be so over-used that it just tastes like dusty old cupboards to me), I used a mixture of minced fresh herbs from my balcony (a mix of thyme, marjoram, and sage). And instead of Dijon mustard, I used the rest of a truly fabulous tube of Austrian tarragon-scented mustard. It sort of killed me to finish it, I loved it that much, but sometimes dinner party guests must be deferred to over personal greed and that is when being the bigger person really is key.

    So, after washing and drying your chicken legs and then rubbing them with chopped herbs and salt and pepper, you paint them lavishly with mustard. A full tablespoon per leg. Don't worry: it seems excessive right now but something happens in the oven heat where the mustard sort of dries up (in a nice way) and becomes part of the salty, savory crust and you might almost find yourself, at the dinner table, wanting to dip the chicken in more mustard as you go. Though maybe that's just me. Germany is in the quarter-finals of the World Cup, perhaps that explains my exuberance.

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    Panko crumbs were one of the weird things I discovered in my kitchen boxes after I started unpacking my things in Berlin, along with a half-used roll of aluminum foil and a few almost-empty jars of things like dried summer savory and mustard seed. I could have lived without the herbs and aluminum foil, but thank goodness I brought those panko crumbs. You need a handful of them to coat your mustard-swathed chicken legs and plain old breadcrumbs just wouldn't do here.

    And that's basically it! A drizzle of melted butter over the top before you slide the pan into a hot oven and before you know it, you've got crisp, herby, mustard chicken legs to grace your table and convince your dining companions that you are a truly fabulous cook. Like I said, Secret Weapon.

    Now, if you'll excuse me, I have more recipes to dig up for you. Oh! I'm totally re-inspired. It's going to be an exciting month.

    Chicken Legs Roasted with Mustard
    Serves 4

    4 chicken legs (thighs included, about 2 1/2 pounds)
    2 teaspoons fresh, minced herbs, such as a mixture of sage, thyme and tarragon or marjoram
    Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
    4 tablespoons Dijon mustard or tarragon mustard
    1/3 cup panko
    2 tablespoons melted butter

    1. Heat the oven to 325 degrees.

    2. Rinse the chicken legs and pat them dry. Rub them all over with the minced fresh herbs. Season well with salt and pepper. Brush the mustard over the skin side of each leg to coat thinly. Lay the legs in a shallow baking dish, leaving space between them. Sprinkle evenly with the panko or breadcrumbs and drizzle evenly with the melted butter.

    3. Roast about an hour or until the meat is very tender and the coating is crisp.

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  • Fearn Smith’s Kohlrabi Salad

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    With deepest apologies to William Carlos Williams:

    This is just to say
    I have eaten the kohlrabi
    that was in the icebox

    and which
    we were planning
    on saving
    to eat just like that
    [plain and peeled]

    Forgive the hyperbole but
    kohlrabi salad
    [so crisp so cool]
    is the only way I'll ever eat it again

    Now the truth is, I grew up eating kohlrabi and I love it, indeed, just peeled and sliced thickly, munched over the cutting board, cool slices feeling rough against my tongue. But this salad lets kohlrabi come in from running around naked in the sprinklers and dresses it up, gives it some clothes, a clean pair of shoes, a whiff of sophistication, subtle sweetness and spice. If you've never tried kohlrabi before, seek some out (your local farmer's market certainly has the pale green knobs lying around on a table somewhere) to make this. I promise it will become a summer staple at your table.

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    So much so that your children will grow up thinking of kohlrabi like they do of carrots, always around. You will forget the time that came before, when kohlrabi was just some strange and foreign root you didn't know how to pronounce. Those of you with gardens, maybe it will even prompt you to become kohlrabi farmers. This salad is capable of all that and more. (If your kohlrabi come with the greens attached, try this recipe. It sounds delicious.)

    The recipe comes from Ivy Manning's Farm to Table Cookbook and originally included pea shoots, which are one of those things I could rarely ever find in New York, let alone Berlin. So I left out the pea shoots and instead put in a couple of Thai bird chilis. There's something about the dressing and the sweet crunchy vegetable batons that needs that floral heat, just a little bit.

    I love how subtle the salad is, how refreshing and clean. The fennel seed and the sesame oil combine to mysterious effect: as you crunch your way through the salad, you keep asking yourself, "what's in this thing?" and then, "I need more." Before you know it, you're ripping off famous poets to declare your love for salad. It's okay. The kohlrabi made you do it.

    Kohlrabi Salad
    Serves 4

    2 medium red or green kohlrabi bulbs
    1 large carrot, peeled
    1 teaspoon fennel seed or 1/2 teaspoon ground fennel
    2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
    1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, or more to taste
    1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
    1 small garlic clove, pressed (optional)
    2 tablespoons olive oil
    1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil
    1 to 2 Thai bird chilis (optional), minced

    1. With a sharp chef’s knife, peel the tough outer skin and cut the stems from the kohlrabi. Julienne the kohlrabi with a mandoline or sharp knife (you will have about 4 cups), and then julienne the carrot.

    2. If using whole fennel seed, toast the fennel seeds in a small dry sauté pan over medium heat until they begin to brown slightly and smell toasty. Transfer them to a mortar and pestle or spice grinder, and grind them into a coarse powder.

    3. Combine the ground fennel seed, vinegar, salt, pepper, and garlic and chilis, if using. Slowly whisk in the two oils. Pour over the vegetables and toss to coat. Taste for salt. Serve.

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  • Christine Ferber’s Strawberry-Lemon Grass Jam

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    I don't know about you, but strawberry jam tastes like Band-Aids to me. It always has. How would I know what Band-Aids taste like, I'm sure you're wanting to know. I'm an absent-minded cuticle chewer, that's how. You'd be surprised how many inadvertent bites of Band-Aid I've had in my life.

    I like eating strawberries sliced and sugared and drizzled with balsamic vinegar. (Just the tiniest bit, people. You shouldn't be able to taste the vinegar, but it will bring out the very essence of strawberry-ness and your simple bowl of sliced, sugared strawberries will make even someone who (I swear) told me just the other week that he thinks strawberries are his least favorite fruit (can you even believe it??) sit up and ask for seconds.) I like eating them whole, dropped into a bowl of plain yogurt. I like eating them on my cereal or over a sink or at a picnic, where I am bound by my genetic code to get red strawberry juice on some article of clothing. In short, give me all the fresh strawberries of the world and I'll gobble them right up. Offer me some strawberry jam and I'll be honest, I'd almost rather just eat a boiled egg.

    Last week, though, I went strawberry picking with my friends in a field right outside of Potsdam (of Sans Souci and Conference fame). What is with that weird greed that bubbles up when you're out picking fruit and you've filled all your baskets and somehow you just can't stop from picking, because with every step you take you're confronted with more and more perfect berry specimens that simply cannot be allowed to remain on the plant? I came home with more than three kilos, people, three. For two people, one of whom would rather be eating a kiwi. So jam it would have to be.

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    A week before I went strawberry-picking, Molly came to visit for a week, bearing a jar of Christine Ferber jam as a present. I used to be sort of obsessed with Christine Ferber's jam recipes, but over the years moved away from her methods, which felt fussy to me, even if the results were often spectacular. But inspired by the pretty little jar sitting on my kitchen counter, I decided that if anyone was going to get me to eat strawberry jam again, it would probably be her, the jam fairy of Alsace.

    It was difficult to decide between two strawberry jam recipes of Christine's that I found online. One involved extracting juice from raspberries and mixing that with the strawberries along with balsamic vinegar. The other involved candying lemon slices and adding those along with spiky lemon grass leaves to the strawberries. How on earth would I choose? I suddenly found myself planning two batches of jam.

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    The lemon version has you put paper-thin slices of lemon in a water-lemon juice-sugar syrup and simmer gently until the slices are candied and looking shiny. You add the lemons and their syrup to the pot of sugared strawberries, along with those lemon grass leaves, which I pounded a little bit for extra fragrance. Christine's recipes use more sugar than the ones I'm used to (my mother usually aims for a three to one ratio of fruit and sugar), but I wanted to follow it just as it was written. I can be a little pedantic like that sometimes.

    Christine is also a professional, so she wants you to skim skim skim that jam, which I did (my mother usually skips that step). I got very, let's say, focused on the skimming. But let me tell you, I've never made a jam that was as jewel-like and clear as this one. It was worth the effort.

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    The best part of jam-making, for me, is picking which glass jars to fill. At the moment, I'm having a little love affair with Weck's tulip jars, inspired by an author of mine whose book on canning you should pre-order now (trust me on this one). Her recipe for Plum Jam with Cardamom, speaking of recipes worth the price of the cookbook they're printed in, should go in some kind of Cooking Hall of Fame, it is so good. And wait until you see this cookbook. Ooh! I am so excited for you – it is a total gem. Anyway. Weck jars. In the US, they're hard to find and a little expensive. (Try Lehman's or Heath Ceramics for online ordering.) Here in Germany, where Weck jars were born, they're cheap and easy to find.

    You have to process them in a water-bath, which is another step my mother always eschews as, to be honest, do I when using regular jam jars with screw-on lids, but the cuteness of the Weck jars is worth the extra effort of the water-bath. So! Here's how it goes:

    You wash those babies with lots of hot soapy water and soak the elastic bands for a few minutes in hot water. You let everything dry off and then you fill the jars with the piping hot jam. Wipe off the rims, fasten the elastic bands to the lids, pop them on top of the jars, clamp down the metal clips and, using tongs, put the filled jars into a pot of boiling water. Bring the water back up to the boil once the pot is filled and boil for 5 minutes. Then carefully remove the jars from the pot with those tongs and let them cool on a cloth towel, overnight. Remove the clips the next day – if you've processed your jam correctly, the lids will be on very tight and you can go store the jam jars in your pantry and feel smug. If you pull the clips off and discover that the lid isn't being held on by a vacuum seal, there was a problem with the processing. Either keep that jam in your fridge to be eaten by you sometime in the next few weeks, or re-process the jar (wash the lid and elastic band again, re-fasten, put everything back in place, but put the filled jam jar (cold this time) in a pot of cold water, which you bring to a boil and then process for five minutes.

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    Questions? Leave them in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them. Remember, jam-making is not the same as pickling: there's very little danger. The amount of sugar in most jams is enough to kill any bacteria and the cooking process (not to mention the optional water bath) finishes off the rest. Little old ladies in tiny European towns have been making jam without vacuum seals and water-baths and high sugar volumes for millennia, or at least centuries.

    Anyway, the jam. Clear and garnet-hued, it was certainly the prettiest jam I've ever made. The strawberries held their shape beautifully. The lemon slices snake their way through each jar. The jam is, for lack of a better word, the brightest, cleanest-tasting strawberry jam I've ever had. The lemon sort of elevates the usually more muddled-tasting strawberry onto a different plane, but because of the candying process, the lemon's bite is quite tame, muted even. The fragrance of the lemon grass wafts through each spoonful but if you didn't put "lemon grass" on the jam label, you wouldn't be able to identify its flavor. It's just this sort of faint, floral nudge here and there. In a word, fantastic. Boiled eggs? I'd rather have this stuff on toast, please. Giving it away is going to be kind of hard.

    As for that other recipe? My strawberries were gone before I could get to the second batch.

    Strawberry-Lemon Grass Jam
    Makes five ½-pint jars

    2¾ pounds strawberries
    4 cups granulated sugar, divided
    2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
    Scant ½ cup water
    10 paper-thin slices lemon
    10 fresh lemongrass leaves, cut in half crosswise

    1. Prepare your jars, whether by sterilizing in a hot oven or by washing in hot, soapy water. If processing in a water bath, put a large pot of water on to boil.

    2. Pick over the berries, discarding those that are green, white or mushy. Rinse briefly in a colander and shake off the excess water. Hull the berries and slice coarsely into a 6-quart pot. Stir in 3½ cups sugar and set aside.

    3. In a 2-quart pot, combine ½ cup sugar with the lemon juice and water. Bring to a simmer, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Add lemon slices and simmer gently until translucent, about 15 minutes. Pour over the strawberries and stir in the lemon grass. Bring to a simmer, stirring to dissolve sugar. Then bring to a boil. Stir gently and skim the foam from the top. Cook for about 15 minutes, or until the temperature reaches 220 degrees on a candy thermometer. The jam should sheet from a metal spoon and a spoonful placed on a cold plate should gel within a few minutes. Remove the pieces of lemongrass.

    4. Ladle hot jam into hot jars, leaving ¼-inch headspace. Wipe the rim of each jar with a clean, damp cloth. Place a hot lid on each jar and screw down firmly. Turn upside down and let cool completely, at least 12 hours. Or, as each jar is filled and capped, place in boiling-water bath with the water 1 to 2 inches over the jars. When canner is full place cover on pot, bring back to a steady boil and process 5 minutes.Remove jars with a lifter and set on a rack or towel 12 to 24 hours. Store in a cool, dark place.

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  • Ottolenghi’s Potato Salad with Yogurt and Horseradish

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    Potato salad. Two such innocent little words, so full of hope and promise on their own, but when put together, I don't know, they always seem to summon a vision of something gelatinous, yellow-tinged, rotting slowly in a glass vitrine somewhere. Potato salad makes me think of dingy midtown delis. Flies flying lazily over congealed mayonnaise. Potatoes, folding waxily under the pressure of a plastic fork, too-sweet mayonnaise glued stubbornly to the side of a styrofoam plate. In short, my friends, potato salad has never been my thing.

    A few weeks ago, I was poring through my cookbooks to come up with ideas for a dinner party. Nothing fancy, just good food. There would be that carrot salad, a pile of asparagus in vinaigrette and chicken marinated in herbs. But I needed one more dish to round out the meal and, with a copy of Ottolenghi's cookbook open on my lap, kindly sent to me by the publisher and immediately stained with cooking juices by me, I found just what I was looking for: a dish called, innocently, "Crushed New Potatoes with Horseradish and Sorrel".

    That was it, I thought. Who doesn't love a crushed potato? And horseradish is the bee's knees. I had almost everything I needed already in my kitchen. All I needed to do was boil potatoes, crush them with a fork and dress them with a yogurt-horseradish dress…Wait a minute! Potatoes. Dressing. Salad!?

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    Banishing all thoughts of rotting, fly-speckled, mayonnaise-bound potato salads to a faraway place (where I put thoughts of car accidents, Germany not winning the World Cup and dill), I boiled those potatoes, I whisked that dressing, I sliced those scallions and I snipped that cress. What resulted was what I will from now on call My Summer Potatoes. A gorgeously balanced, fresh-tasting, warm-and-cool potato salad that had an entire dinner table, six people, mind you, asking for the recipe. It was fantastic. The potatoes are sweet and tender, their fluff turning into the lightest mash. The horseradish adds bite and intensity, an unexpected sophistication. The scallions are very important – balanced by the cool, smooth yogurt, their fragrance feels essential.

    I made a few changes from the original recipe – Ottolenghi calls for crushed cloves of garlic, but I have this thing about raw garlic, in that I hate it and don't want it near the food I eat, so I added a few more scallions in its stead. I left out the sorrel, because the scallions and watercress sprouts called for seemed to be the perfect amount of greenery and crunch. And instead of Greek yogurt, I used plain old yogurt – the moisture and silkiness of which the salad really needs. (Readers in the US, you should use Liberté if you can find it. You want something smooth and creamy and full of flavor.)

    You can bring this salad to picnics, without fear that it will poison someone with salmonella. You can make this for dinner parties and sit back and garner compliments. You can make it after work, boiling potatoes in your underwear (I know how summer gets). It will be wonderful, over and over, and you will forget that potato salad once made your skin crawl. Potato salad!, you will think. Such lovely words, so full of hope and promise.

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    The cookbook is full of recipes like this – thoughtful variations on foods we already love, punched up with interesting flavor combinations from the Arab world and the Mediterranean pantry. Sumac, za'atar, sour cream, oregano, chilies and fresh lemons pepper the recipes. The soup chapter is already earmarked and worn, the salads are jewel-like, and I've cooked my first Palestinian recipe (chicken baked in a gorgeous slick of red-tinged marinade) from its pages. I kept the book by my bedside for a few weeks but had to stop – it kept making me hungry before bedtime.

    And as my father always likes to say, if you find one shining recipe in a cookbook, one that you'll make over and over again, that will become part of your pantheon, part of your dinner table landscape for years to come, well, it's worth the price of the cookbook. This book has that in spades.

    Potato Salad with Yogurt and Horseradish
    Serves 4

    1 kilo (2.2 pounds) new potatoes
    300 grams (10 ounces, plus more to taste) plain yogurt (not Greek)
    3 to 4 tablespoons olive oil
    1 tablespoon, or more, of prepared ground horseradish
    4 scallions, thinly sliced (white and pale green parts)
    Coarse sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
    A small box of garden cress

    1. Wash the potatoes, but don't peel them. Put them in a pan with salted water to cover, cover, bring to a boil and simmer for 25 to 30 minutes, until tender. Drain well, transfer to a large serving bowl and, while they are still hot, crush them roughly with a fork.

    2. In a small bowl, mix the yogurt, olive oil, horseradish, scallions, salt and pepper to taste. Pour this dressing over the hot potatoes and mix well. Adjust the seasoning, adding more horseradish or more salt. You want the dressing to be assertive – the potatoes will mellow it out. Just before serving, snip in the garden cress and mix once more.

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  • Francis Lam’s Let-My-Eggplant-Go-Free! Spaghetti

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    In the last week, I totaled my car*, almost gave myself a concussion by walking against a rather substantial tree branch and went all Lady Macbeth in my white silk nightgown this morning after slicing open my foot on a piece of glass in my kitchen (apparently, I must learn the hard way that you should never attempt to wipe down your counters before having your caffeinated morning beverage). Who knew a quarter-inch nick on a foot could bleed so much? I kind of wish I'd had the presence of mind to photograph the blood spatters on our white tile floor just now. They looked rather artful.

    Let's not even talk about how I managed to bust my iPhone on Monday or about the fact that I thought I'd lost all my identifying documents earlier this week. Not even kidding. Is Mercury in retrograde or something? Am I supposed to be thinking of something I'm not? Or am I just on the rather klutzier side of humanity?

    What I think is really going on is that the universe was balancing itself out in anticipation of my dinner last night. All this mayhem and in the midst of it, I had a stroke of very good fortune: discovering an eggplant sauce for my spaghetti that I loved so much I wanted to eat it with a spoon, out of the pan, with nary a taste for anyone else, spaghetti be damned. This is not to say that losing the car was worth the sauce, but it made the pain easier to bear. It really is something.

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    The sauce comes from the esteemed Mister Lam, rice whisperer and food writer extraordinaire (seriously, click over to his original recipe and feast on his words, would you?). Last year, when Gourmet folded and I, in a momentary sizzle of panic, printed out all the web-exclusive recipes from Gourmet.com, this recipe made it to the top of the stack, only to languish there as I packed up my life in New York and moved to Berlin. And truth be told, it would have languished there further if a certain visitor, sitting at my table last night and hungry for dinner, hadn't told me that it was one of her very favorite things to eat.

    It is, in the grand tradition of humble Italian peasant food, a very ugly sauce. Gray, slippery and rather limp. You cook cubed eggplant and some garlic in olive oil, with the addition of some stock or water, until it goes all melty and soft and the fibers just sort of collapse underneath gentle pressure. It takes just 20 minutes, long enough to get started on setting the table, eating all the olives in your fridge or just having a drink to unwind from all the stress of your week, whether it involved car crashes and bleeding feet or not. Then, using a fork or a spoon or whatever you have around, you mash up the eggplant until it's, well, saucy. And to brighten up each spoon-, er, forkful, in goes some sliced basil and good dollop of minced sun-dried tomatoes. And salt. Don't forget the salt.

    The noodles, chewy and slippery, curl around the pockets of sweet, savory eggplant, the basil snakes between each bite and a pop of tomato here and there makes the water run together in your mouth as you eat. You don't even need a grating of Parmigiano. You've got all you ever needed on your plate, right there.

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    Halfway through the cooking process, I realized that it was this very technique that kept me fed and happy years ago while living in Paris. Only instead of eggplants, I used zucchini – for a pea-green sauce as sweet as the day is long – or cauliflower. Both vegetables do stunningly well with long cooking times and a careful mashing, turning themselves into silky, toothsome sauces that you can brighten up with mint or parsley (for the zucchini) or a good grinding of hot red pepper flakes (for the cauliflower). Both do very well indeed with a judicious grating of Parmigiano on top.

    In any case, it's a technique for your kitchen as indispensable as boiling eggs or mastering a very good, plain tomato sauce. Armed with just one eggplant, just a few handfuls of cauliflower florets or a zucchini or two, you can stew your way to spaghetti nirvana in the blink of an eye.

    Did I mention the salt? Don't forget the salt. It's the difference between a sauce that makes you sit up and pay attention and a sauce that just hums quietly along instead of singing loud and clear.

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    One last thing: the recipe below says that a one-pound eggplant will be enough for a pound of spaghetti, but we ate far less spaghetti than that (190 grams for the two of us, actually) and while there was more sauce than any of my Italian family members would have deemed acceptable on our plates, you might want to adjust your sauce-to-noodle ratio as you see fit.

    *As a result, I missed the Food Blogger Connect conference, which really was the worst luck of all. I'm sorry to have missed any of you intrepid readers who made it there!

    Oh, and in completely unrelated news, The Wednesday Chef now has a Facebook page! Come on over, let's be friends.

    Spaghetti with Let-My-Eggplant-Go-Free! Sauce
    Serves 3 or 4

    1 pound eggplant, cut into ½ inch slices
    1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
    3 cloves garlic, lightly smashed
    2 springs thyme or oregano, chopped
    1 cup chicken stock or water
    2 tablespoons sun-dried or oven-dried tomatoes, minced
    6 leaves basil, sliced thinly
    Salt and pepper
    1 pound spaghetti

    1. Lightly salt the slices of eggplant, stack them back together and let sit for 20 minutes.

    2. Put the olive oil in a wide, heavy saucepan, add the garlic cloves, and set over low heat.

    3. Dry off the eggplant, cut it into chunks. When you start hearing the garlic sizzle a little and can smell it, drop in your eggplant and stir to coat it all with oil. Turn up the heat a little bit to medium high and add the thyme or oregano and stir. When the eggplant is turning translucent and softening, add the liquid, let it come to a boil, and turn it back down to medium-low. Let it bubble for a bit and cover it, leaving a crack for steam to escape. Stir once in a while so that the bottom doesn’t stick.

    4. After about 20 minutes or so, the liquid in the eggplant pan should be mostly evaporated and the eggplant should be soft and melting. Mash it with a fork or spoon, and adjust the seasoning to taste.

    5. Toss the eggplant purée with the spaghetti that you cooked al dente. Stir in the minced tomatoes and basil. You can gild the lily with drizzling on some more oil. Serve immediately.

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  • Corinne Trang’s Rice Porridge with Chicken and Lemon Grass (Chao xa ga)

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    I have been doing a lot of stock-cooking lately. Beef bones, chicken wings, bay leaves, peppercorns – these all have moved to the front of the burner lately as I adjust to a life without ready-made chicken or beef stock base in my fridge. Who would have thought that of all the goods stocked in an American grocery store, I'd come to miss Better Than Bouillon most of all? Not I.

    First of all, I underestimated my reliance on it. Second of all, I had no idea that it would be so hard to come by anything other than granulated bouillon (ick) or very, very expensive jars of chicken stock (we're talking 2-cup servings for, oh, 5, 6, 7 euros a pop) in Germany. So I make a lot of stock these days. Combine that with the fact that I have the most adorably tiny freezer (if by adorable you understand that I mean infuriating) and my new normal is coming up with weekly reasons to eat soup.

    Of course, as I'm sure many of you would love to yell at the screen right now, Better Than Bouillon, even if miles – many of them – better than granulated, does not hold a candle to homemade stock or broth. Still! I loved it so. It really was a cornerstone of my kitchen. Anyway.

    S. Irene Virbila wrote the loveliest article the other day about congee, Chinese rice porridge, a simple meal of rice cooked in water that you then get to gussy up with all kinds of delectable things: chile paste, roasted peanuts, drizzles of soy sauce, fried ground pork. In all my years in New York and during my long love affair with Chinese food, I'd actually never eaten congee before. I tried to go for dinner at Congee Village once and was thwarted by the masses waiting ahead of me for a table. And let's be honest, rice gruel or rice porridge always sounded a little disappointing. A little too medicinal for dinnertime. Like something you had to grow up eating to love.

    Silly, silly girl.

    Because I'd had a big pot of chicken stock hanging out in my fridge for a few days, I decided to make the Vietnamese version of congee, chao xa ga, which has a slightly more flavorful base (chicken broth boiled together with lemongrass and chili) than regular congee. You cook rice in that fragrant broth until it's soft and (almost) falling apart – the recipe said to cook the rice for more than an hour, while I stopped after 45 minutes. Cooked, shredded chicken meat bolsters the porridge a bit, turning it into a proper meal, while fresh lemon juice and chopped cilantro or saw leaves brighten up the final plate. A plate gobbled up so fast I'd almost rather not admit it.

    I initially meant to make this for dinner last night, for three men at our table. But I got a little spooked by the idea that rice porridge might be more of a lady's meal – after all, would I be able to sufficiently feed hungry dudes on something as delicate-sounding as lemon grass-scented rice gruel? After eating it for lunch, by myself, I decided I need to have those friends over again to make up for the error of my ways. Flavorful, filling, slightly spicy and – of course – delicious, I almost felt guilty enjoying chao xa ga all on my own.

    Best of all, while I sat here in my Berlin kitchen, waiting for my Vietnamese soup to cook, planning to make Hunanese chopped salted chiles (did the water just spontaneously burst forth in your mouth?) for when I make a proper Chinese congee, I was struck yet again by how much fun cooking can be, how deeply satisfying a venture it is – you have directions in front of you from someone you must trust, who got those directions from someone else herself and so on, you follow those directions, you stand back and suddenly you're in the middle of eating a meal that people on the very opposite side of the universe might be having for lunch right now. Pardon me if that sounds rather obvious or silly, but it made me very happy indeed.

    So next up, congee. And then my chicken broth/stock stockpile will be depleted once more, and it'll be back to the stove with chicken parts again. So, tell me, readers, what's your very favorite broth or stock recipe? What do you come back to again and again to stock your freezer with?

    Chao xa ga (Rice Porridge with Chicken and Lemon Grass)
     Servings: 4 to 6

    9 cups chicken broth
    2 stalks lemon grass, trimmed (outer leaves, tough green tops and root ends removed), cut into 1-inch pieces and lightly crushed
    2 to 3 red bird's eye or Thai chiles, stemmed
    2 tablespoons fish sauce
    1 cup jasmine rice (or similar rice)
    2 cooked chicken legs, boned, skinned and shredded
    Coarse sea salt
    1/2 cup julienned saw (ngo gai) or cilantro leaves
    Lemon wedges for serving

    1. Pour the chicken broth into a pot and bring to a gentle boil over medium heat. Reduce the heat to medium-low, add the lemon grass, chiles and fish sauce and simmer for 30 minutes. Add the rice and cook, uncovered, for 45 minutes to an 1 hour.

    2. Stir in the shredded chicken and season to taste with salt. Continue to cook until the chicken is heated through, about 15 minutes, or if the chicken is freshly cooked and still warm, just until combined. Divide the congee among 4 to 6 large soup bowls, garnish with the herb leaves and 1 wedge of lemon for each serving.

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