The Wednesday Chef

  • Amanda Hesser’s Red-Wine Risotto

    Risotto

    I walked home after work last night on a cloud of bliss. My blog was mentioned (blink and you'll miss it) on the The Leonard Lopate Show yesterday, as Ruth Reichl, Regina Schrambling, Josh Friedland and Jennifer Leuzzi discussed food blogs. I'm so proud. My little blog! The walk took 10 minutes, so I let myself bask in glory until I reached the front stoop. Then more important considerations took over: what on earth was I going to have for dinner?

    Thumbing through my well-worn scrapbook of clippings, I came across a risotto recipe that Amanda Hesser published when she was still writing the Pairings column that Florence Fabricant writes now. Amanda suggested cooking the risotto with good, but inexpensive red-wine. She was first served this dish in Tuscany. (Skeptic that I am, I wondered if it was perhaps cooked up by an American. I stand corrected by the wonder that is Google. Though, to be authentic, the risotto – served throughout northern Italy – should be only made with Barolo or Barbera wine, which, of course, then negates the frugality of Amanda's dish. Is all this punctuation making you dizzy?) Amanda says the rice will be tinged pink – well, if deep purple is your version of pink, then yes.

    It's an odd dish: you add the wine in two stages, letting it cook off before adding more so that the alcohol evaporates and you're left with flavor and color. Other than that, it's pretty straightforward: butter, onion, arborio rice, chicken stock. At the end, you stir in grated Parmigiano, and snipped chives, which looked awfully pretty contrasting with the aubergine background. But I could barely taste the herbs against all that wine. If I made this again, it would be with one glass of wine, not two. Just make up for the remaining liquid with broth. That might make the dish taste a little less, well, weird. I know, I'm just blowing myself away with eloquence today.

    Amanda Hesser's Red-Wine Risotto
    Serves 4

    2 1/2 cups chicken broth
    1 tablespoon olive oil
    2 tablespoons butter
    1 medium yellon onion, chopped
    2 cloves garlic, smashed with the side of a knife
    1 cup arborio rice
    2 cups red wine
    kosher salt
    1 cup freshly grated Parmigiano
    2 tablespoons thinly sliced chives
    1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves

    1. In small saucepan, bring broth to a simmer. In medium saucepan, melt 1 tablespoon butter in oil over medium-low heat. When it foams, add onion and garlic; cook until softened. Pour in rice and stir to coat. Cook, stirring slowly, until rice is lightly toasted, about 3 minutes.

    2. Pour in 1 cup wine, and reduce over medium-high heat until almost gone. Add second cup and reduce once more. When pan liquid is syrupy, begin ladling in hot broth, 1/2 cup at a time. Stir rice and adjust heat so that it is just bubbling on the edges. Continue stirring and adding broth as needed. Rice is done when it is tender but still firm to the bite in the center. If you run out of broth before rice is done, add hot water. Mixture should be creamy and loose, not soupy. Taste and adjust seasoning.

    3. Stir in 1/2 cup cheese and remaining butter. Fold in chives and thyme. Serve risotto, passing the remaining cheese at the table.

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  • Regina Schrambling’s Slow-rising Pumpkin-Thyme Dinner Rolls

    Roll

    This photograph looks like I went a little nuts with the "warmify" button on Picasa's effects board. But that florid hue really is the color of the roll. I like to call it the FD&C Yellow No.6 effect. On Friday morning, while my failed rice pudding bubbled away in the oven, I beat together the dough for these rolls. My two cents on this recipe is that you should ignore the instructions to prepare the dough at night so it can be baked up in the morning. These are not breakfast rolls. Also, they lose flavor and texture rapidly, so you will want to make them as soon before dinner as possible.

    I say, stir up the dough and let it rise once before going to work in the morning, then have it rest in the fridge all day before you bake the rolls in the evening. That way, no matter what is for dinner, your entire apartment building will be filled with the herby, spicy scent of these rolls and people walking through your front door will sink exhaustedly onto your couch, gaze at you with pleading eyes, and hold their hands out mutely for one of these little orange rolls to be placed therein. Grateful mumbles of pleasure through a mouthful of hot bread will ensue and you will know the true meaning of fulfillment.

    The rolls were odd little things: savory but sweet, tender but almost dry. They're the kind of rolls you'd find in an assorted bread basket at a homey restaurant, but the slow rise and the well-balanced mixture of salt, peppery heat and mellow sweetness give them a gentle sophistication. To be honest, I prefer simpler, crustier breads, made of just water, yeast and flour. But the people around me who ate the rolls had no such complaints. And they certainly would liven up a Thanksgiving table.

    With a wooden spoon beat together dissolved yeast, eggs, pumpkin, softened butter (this didn't really "beat" in well, so little lumps of butter remained throughout the dough, but it didn't seem to make a difference), spices and herbs, and flour. When you've got a soft but manageable dough, turn it into an oiled bowl and let it rise until doubled in bulk. Then punch it down and refrigerate the dough while you go to work. When you come home, punch down the dough again (this will be more difficult than in the morning, because the dough will be cold and firmer) and shape it into small roll-like shapes, which you put in a cake pan.
    Shaped_1
    Cover and let these rise until doubled.
    Risen_2
    Put the pans in a preheated oven and bake until browned (they'll rise further in the oven and stick to each other, but will shrink away from the sides of the pan).
    Baked_7
    Let them cool for a bit, then gently tear the rolls apart at the seams. We ate these plain, though you could certainly split and butter them.

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  • Julia Moskin’s Creamy Macaroni & Cheese

    Mac

    A pound of cheese. A pound of cheese. I still can’t get over it. That Ben and I made a dish using a pound of cheese last night, and we’re still alive to talk about it. Granted, we didn’t eat the whole thing (yet), but still. A pound of cheese! I have to say, I’m grateful to the blog for expanding my culinary horizons (and no jokes about my waistline, please. I unfroze my gym membership yesterday, Just In Time), and for single-handedly preventing my development of osteoporosis. After dinner, Ben pounded a glass of red wine, hoping to rinse out his arteries. I just lay on the couch in a lactic stupor.

    Growing up with an Italian mother and an American father who wanted nothing, but nothing, to do with the trappings of typical American childhoods (No television? check. No Cap’n Crunch? check. No must-have, to-die-for, orthopedically-unsound jellies? check), macaroni & cheese was something that was totally foreign to me until I went to college and tried a forkful of bright orange goo one night in a friend’s dorm room. I chewed, I swallowed, and I wondered. How did this soft slop become the comfort food of children all over the country? I was suddenly grateful for my parents’ insistence on healthy, homemade food. I had taken it for granted.

    This is not to say that mac & cheese has to be bad for you (or your children). I don’t believe in eating food from a box, but there’s nothing wrong with making it from scratch, especially a casserole as easy as this one. As Julia Moskin in last week’s NY Times points out, add a crisp salad and a glass of wine to the table, and you’ve got a pretty nice meal. There’s a lot of fat in it, it’s true. But there’s also a lot of protein and more than your fair share of calcium. And it was delicious. Rich and filling and utterly delicious. It’s not exactly the kind of meal I can eat every week, even with my unfrozen gym membership, but I’m keeping the recipe.

    First, puree together cottage cheese, mustard powder, cayenne, nutmeg, salt and pepper.
    Puree_4
    Add milk, a half pound of uncooked elbow pasta, and most of 1 pound of grated cheese (we used extra-sharp cheddar). See this for an idea of the absolutely obscene ratio of pasta to cheese.
    Raw_6
    Spread this mixture in a buttered pan and bake for half an hour, covered with foil.
    Halfway_1
    Uncover the pan, sprinkle the mixture with the remaining cheese, and put it back in the oven for 30 minutes, at which point it will be bubbling and crusty and your home will smell divine.

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  • Mark Bittman’s Rice Pudding

    Pudding

    I find it hard to believe that this is my first Mark Bittman recipe. But there you have it. Bittman, he of Minimalist, How to Cook Everything, and PBS fame, is not necessarily one of my favorite columnists. I like that he tries to demystify and simplify things in the kitchen, but clip and save as I might, his recipes don't usually tickle my cooking fancy. At 5:30 this morning, though, when I couldn't sleep and wanted nothing more to be standing in my kitchen doing something, I decided to try one out.

    A few winters ago, Bittman wrote a piece on the ease of rice pudding in his NY Times column, calling it both "rustic and elegant". I'm not sure I'd agree with the latter, but I do think rice pudding is among the best puddings in the world. Growing up in Berlin, the days we were served rice pudding for lunch (with the choice of a healthy dusting of cinnamon sugar on top, or a ladleful of sour cherry compote alongside) were stellar days indeed. That's when the lunch line seemed especially long. This morning I even contemplated eating it for breakfast.

    Sadly, this recipe resulted in something more akin to milk soup than rice pudding. I take partial responsibility, at least. First of all, not having clipped the article along with the recipe, I didn't know that Bittman cautioned against using anything but whole milk. I used a mixture of skim and 1%. I suppose I could have realized that nonfat milk has nothing left over with which to thicken itself, but isn't hindsight 20/20? Also, in the early morning fog of sleep, I used a wet measure for the sugar, which I think might have been the reason the pudding was cloyingly sweet.

    The flavorings were spot on: a pinch of saffron and a 2-inch cinnamon stick (taken out after the cooking was done) perfumed the pudding beautifully. The long oven time had begun to caramelize the milk, which added another layer of flavor. But the rice (plain California) was unpleasantly grainy. Bittman says any kind of rice can be used, and by all means not to shell out extra for Arborio rice. But Arborio's whole meaning in life is to become creamy with the addition of liquid, so why on earth wouldn't you use it for rice pudding?

    I didn't mind slurping up a bowl of it after lunch, but I wouldn't serve it to anyone else, and now I'm wondering what to do with the rest of the milk soup that's resting in the fridge…

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  • Maurice Coscuella’s Figs in Whiskey

    Figs

    A year ago, James Salter wrote a beautiful piece in the NY Times Magazine about his culinary experiences in France while he was stationed there in the 1950's. Accompanying the article was an alluringly simple recipe for whiskey-soaked figs, courtesy of the chef at La Ripa Alta in Plaisance. The recipe sounded glamorous yet easy. Who doesn't have a packet of dried figs lying around the house? And if you don't, they're easy to procure. As for whiskey, shouldn't everyone have some on hand? For hot toddys, grumpy boyfriends, and English fruitcakes.

    All you do is dissolve some sugar in a quart of water, and boil the figs in the syrup for 20 minutes. Then you dump out some of the hot liquid, let the rest cool, and stir in the whiskey. This boozy, amber bath then rests until room temperature before it is consumed. I trust it keeps for quite some time. The apartment was perfumed with the honeyed smell of softened figs and a hazy fug of alcohol. Not bad for a Wednesday night.

    It's the perfect dessert after a heavy winter meal because it does double-time as a dessert and a digestif. And it's definitely very grown-up. Depending on how much syrup you discard, you can make this as mellow or as sharp as you like. But now, with a very small voice, I must concede that the dessert's just a bit too adult for me. Something about all that liquor sort of turned me off – I like my figs plain, I realized. But that's my own shortcoming.

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  • Featured in the L.A. Times

    Article

    I’m thrilled to report that, in the article Have We Gone Blog Wild?, the LA Times has featured this little blog in its Food section today, along with several other newer food blogs and a few of the old stalwarts. In case anyone’s wondering, I’m doing cartwheels in my office.

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  • Depression Stew

    Oh, the glory of the humble bean. These rosy, Jacob's Cattle heirloom beans are from the last delivery of my CSA a few months ago. They came encased in papery, yellow shells which crumbled in my fingers as I tried to strip the dried beans from them. The beans were deep red with white flecks, and tiny. I covered them with water and let them soak for two days. I don't think that's the usual soaking length, but I, um, just forgot about them. Because I had other things to do! Like sleep late and eat banana-blueberry pancakes in SoHo, and be oddly moved by a giant gorilla – it was New Year's Day, after all.

    But on Monday, when Ben and I were spending the day reading and lazing about, we needed something simple to sustain us. The first thing that occurred to me was my father's Depression Stew. Possibly named so because in its most basic form, Depression Stew is made up of just the humblest ingredients: an onion, a carrot, a box of frozen lima beans, and a can of diced tomatoes. In other words, ingredients that can be found even when money is tight. But it's also an elementally warming meal that can make the bluest day a little bit better. So, depression in that sense, too. Whatever the semantics, it's a wonderful thing to have in your arsenal. If all goes well, the name should remain a mostly ironic moniker…

    And it's endlessly useful. As long as you keep the basic onion-carrot-tomato formula, you can add to and vary the stew as you'd like. Dump in frozen baby lima beans, or a can of pinto beans, or (if you live in France) those mini cans of flageolets that single-handedly kept me alive in Paris. Add dried oregano, or perhaps thyme, though I'm currently obsessed with sage, gathered fresh from my CSA, dried slowly in my kitchen. And isn't there a sage-bean connection? Cook until the mixture is stewy, and serve with crusty bread. You could add a handful of Arborio rice at some point (with some water, then, too). And, if you like, grate Parmigiano on top. Yesterday, our version included my CSA beans and two large leaves of Swiss chard, sliced finely.

    The base recipe: Saute a chopped onion in a bit of olive oil until translucent, then add a sliced carrot (amounts are to be changed as needed). When these have cooked together for another minute, add a can of diced tomatoes, and herbs. When the flavors have melded nicely and the stew has reduced a bit, about 15-20 minutes, add a box of frozen baby lima beans. Cook, covered, until heated through, and serve. Vary as you'd like, and enjoy.

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  • Russ Parsons’ Tart of Garlicky Greens and Black Olives

    Tart

    Happy New Year! 2006 is starting out well, with good food and even better company. Last night I had the pleasure of drinking a glass of rose cava (delicious! who knew?) with the lovely Miss Molly of Orangette, who was in town to visit her sweetheart. We went to Bar Carrera, and had some interesting little bits to eat (a poached egg on a pool of what tasted like pureed chorizo, some salty little bits of jamon iberico, and soft little brioche rolls spread with processed tomatoes, smoked paprika and powdered olive oil…). It was my first experience meeting an Internet friend, and I highly recommend it. It's funny, you sit across from a total stranger, but you know things about them! You know about their favorite foods, their annual adopted family picnics, their childhood memories. And if you think they sound like lovely people on their blog, they're exponentially better in real life. Molly, it was a pleasure. Come and visit again soon!

    Christmas in Berlin was lovely, replete with homemade Stollen (no picture of which to speak, so I'll have to make it again, photograph, and then tell you all about the hijinks that ensued when I first made it), candlelight galore, and the company of lots of my favorite people. Unfortunately, I also came down with a horrific case of strep throat, endured a night of debilitating stomach pain due to erythromycin, and spent five days in bed. Oh, it was a good time! My mother took care of me with delicious, homemade soups and banana-soy shakes. Is there any better place to be sick than at your mom's house? Probably not.

    I came back to celebrate New Year's Eve with Ben and some friends on the 43rd floor of an apartment in Battery Park City. It was a pot-luck affair, so we brought a vegetable tart courtesy of Russ Parsons (when in doubt…). It was delicious: salty and creamy and crumbly, with pungent notes from the olives and the mellow taste of cooked garlic. Next time, though, I'd add more greens (I think I eyeballed a low amount). You can tell I've taken a break from blogging by the not particularly in-focus shot of the tart, still clad in its metal frame.

    The crust was a quick little thing that came together in seconds, and tasted delicious (but I used an extra tablespoon of water to bind it). It was blind-baked before the filling of ricotta, chopped olives, wilted greens and garlic and a few eggs was added. On top of that, we shaved (I should say, Ben shaved. A Ben action shot! I'm so proud) some ricotta salata and let the whole thing go in the oven until browned and set. It was more creamy than vegetable-y. So to each his own: if you like greener tarts, add more vegetables. Russ, thanks for another stellar recipe.

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  • Merry Christmas

    Xmas

    I’m in Berlin to eat Weihnachtsgans and crack my teeth on Springerle and see this for the first time and drink tea with my mother and listen to little boys in sailor suits sing Christmas carols on the radio. It is dark and cold outside, and I am loving every minute of it.

    I won’t be posting much because a dial-up connection, when you’re used to high-speed Internet, is enough to make any normal person scratch their eyes out and that is NOT the spirit of the holiday season, IS IT? Besides, I’m embarrassed to admit that after years of getting used to the abomination that are PCs, I am woefully unskilled to use my mother’s Apple. I hang my head in shame.

    You still have a few days to donate to A Menu for Hope and enter the pot for some fabulous prizes. We’ve raised an amazing amount of money so far. Thank you! Have a safe and peaceful holiday.

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  • Martha Stewart’s Holiday Cookies

    Meringues

    Head over to the Paper Palate today – part of the newly launched Well-Fed Network – where I’ve blogged about testing some of the recipes in Martha Stewart’s special Holiday Cookies issue.

    Cocoa meringues were a blast to make (and eat). I love how a bowl of liquid egg whites combined with sugar and heat and force change into an entirely different substance. Twisted butter cookies were simple but tasty. A Martha-ized version of the Thin Mints of yore resulted in delicious results, and was surprisingly easy to execute.

    And on a different note, I’m actually in Berlin, on my mother’s computer, totally and utterly confused as to why Typepad seems so different and unnavigable here. Is there something in the drinking water? Is it my jetlag? Does Apple want to see me cry? Anyway, have patience and bear with me. I might figure it out, I might not. Here. Goes. Nothing.

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