The Wednesday Chef

This morning, I'm feeling dejected. Yet another L.A. Times recipe that kind of stank. It had so much promise! Delectable vegetables, freshly grated cheese, crispy breadcrumbs to bind it all together before a toasty roll in hot oil. What came out, though, were odd little balls that were too garlicky (I promise, there is such a thing) in places, and too bland in others. Regina Schrambling wrote her article about the triumvirate of vegetables that define a ratatouille and decided that while ratatouille was over the hill (seriously? I didn't get the memo), there was still a chance for the eggplant-pepper-zucchini trio to shine in other combinations. Well, I'm not convinced. Give me a good ratatouille anyday over the polpettine from last night.

First, I lay a halved zucchini and a halved eggplant over a vegetable steamer in a stock pot. The zucchini were done after a few minutes, while the eggplant continued on for another twenty. Then, I draped the steamed eggplant over a colander to drain. Meanwhile, I finely diced the zucchini, one red pepper, several garlic cloves, a bunch of fresh thyme and then diced the eggplant flesh (after peeling it). To this, I added pine nuts, grated Grana Padano, panko, and a dash of salt and freshly ground pepper.

This glorious combination was gently mixed together with one egg.

Then came the real mess. I was instructed to shape little balls with my hands, then roll them gently in flour, shaking off the excess, before laying them in a pan of hot oil. No matter how finely diced the vegetables would have been, the balls did not want to stay together. Little dice of red peppers fell all over the place and so I found myself squishing the balls into submission, flour everywhere.

I slipped the little fritters into the pan (only burning my fingertips once!) and fried them in three batches, a few minutes on each side.

I drained them on paper towels, and ate one right away, piping hot, and another after it had cooled off. The pepper and garlic were still raw and far too strong against the eggplant that seemed to have been drained of all its flavor in the steamer basket. The pine nuts and cheese and thyme tasted good, but didn't manage to save these little polpettine. If you'd like a similar recipe that is far more delicious and easier to make, try Marcella Hazan's eggplant patties in this book.

My mother was in Venice this past weekend. On her walks around the city, she came across this sign at a fish market. Most likely dating back to the 18th century, it stipulates the minimum length allowed for sale, in centimeters, for each type of fish. Then the sign lists the fish in Venetian dialect. It’s certainly more beautiful than this…

 

 

This upside-down cake, from Barefoot in Paris, was not a success, but I only partially blame the recipe. As some of you might know from The Food Network or her best-selling cookbooks, Ina Garten started a catering shop called Barefoot Contessa in the Hamptons 20 years ago. A few years back, she got her own television show and wrote several cookbooks. She mostly makes simple American food (and has only recently branched out to French) that tastes particularly good because of her emphasis on high-quality ingredients. She also has a strong reliance on terrifying amounts of butter and cream. Yes, some things taste better with extra fat, but it's not really the way I like to cook every day.

However, I did have a glut of Italian plums in my kitchen the other day and stumbled on this recipe to use them up. It's a riff on the classic tarte tatin, which is an upside-down apple tart that has become a ubiquitous dessert (and sadly, often ruined) in French bistros. Instead of sauteeing apple chunks with butter and sugar and then covering them with a short crust, Ina Garten drizzles fresh plums with caramel, then covers them with a sour cream-enriched batter, fragrant with lemon and vanilla.

First I halved the plums and laid them face down in a glass pie plate. Then I poured a simple caramel over them.

To make the caramel, I boiled sugar and water together, without stirring,

until the mixture turned a nice deep brown.

For the batter, I creamed together butter and sugar until light and fluffy, then beat in a few eggs, sour cream, a heaping pile of lemon zest and some vanilla. In another bowl, I sifted together some flour, salt and baking powder. SCREECHING HALT. I had no baking powder. WHAT? Impossible – my kitchen is usually so well-stocked with baking supplies that I've been known in the past to have not one but two containers of baking powder. And now, none? Before having a meltdown, I raced to the living room to pluck out Regan Daley's In The Sweet Kitchen from my bookshelf. I remembered that she had a substitution chart in her book for just these kind of kitchen emergencies. Sure enough, there was a chart for substituting baking powder.

I was supposed to use a combination of cream of tartar and baking soda. So, I carefully measured out and added them to the flour mixture, before combining the whole thing and pouring the batter over the plums.

I put the pan in the oven for close to an hour. When it emerged, the cake had risen slightly and browned. The smell of sour cream and lemon zest perfumed the room.

I let the cake cool on a rack for a while, then carefully turned the pan upside down and let the cake slide out onto a cardboard round. I cooled the cake to room temperature. When I cut in, though, it was clear something hadn't gone entirely right.

The cake had a strange rubbery consistency, and hadn't risen as I had expected it to. There were pockets of air here and there. The cake itself was blindingly sweet. The plums were only barely able to balance the sweetness out with their acidity. I blame the lack of proper baking powder on the cake's funny structure, but Ina Garten also needs to lay off the sugar. All in all, I wouldn't make this again. I will always prefer a real tarte tatin or a proper upside-down cake, perhaps from Ina's mentor?

After complaining a few posts ago about the complicated recipes involving blueberries in a recent L.A. Times article, I felt badly about dismissing the recipes. After all, isn't that what this blog is supposed to be about? Trying new things, scouting out ingredients, figuring out whether you should clip and save a recipe forever, or throw it down the drain? So, I rummaged through my print-outs and decided to make Dorte Lambert's blueberry tart.

Dorte Lambert is a pastry chef at Michael's, a restaurant in Santa Monica. I vaguely remember reading about this place in one of Ruth Reichl's memoirs. Blueberries are no longer available at greenmarkets in New York City, so I threw my cooking-with-the-seasons-and-preferably-local-ingredients sensibility to the wind and purchased the blueberries at D'Agostino's (at $3.99 a wee plastic container!). Not only were they expensive, but they looked a bit old and dull. And being mathematically-challenged, I bought too many. This is what I do for my blog! I buy expensive, sad-looking berries! I go broke! I sacrifice my values!

At home, I set about preparing the crust. First, I cut two sticks of butter into a bowl of flour and sugar. Using two knives, I mixed the ingredients together until the mixture looked like a bunch of large peas or clumpy cornmeal.

Then I added a sludge of beaten egg yolks and heavy cream to the bowl. This resulted in an oddly dry, yet simultaneously sticky dough. I somehow managed to squish the dough into equal-sized portions and wrap them in clingfilm for a rest in the refrigerator.

I hoped an hour of cold would discipline the discs into more cohesive blobs. This was wishful thinking. After unwrapping the discs and trying to roll them out, crumbly dough shot everywhere. So I took a deep breath, cast my pie crust skills to the wind, and pressed the dough into my tart pan with my fingers. This resulted in several pockets of soft butter and a not particularly professional-looking shell, but at least the pan was lined.

I set the pan back in the fridge while I prepared the filling. Eggs and sugar were beaten together with vanilla and a small amount of flour, while another stick and a half of butter were set to melt on the stove. Browned butter takes on an entirely different flavor from plain melted butter. It becomes nutty and deep. If not watched carefully on the stove, however, it can quickly burn, resulting in a bitter and dark-brown glop.

For a while, the butter bubbled away at a uniformly golden color. Then the solids separated from the liquids (this is also how you make ghee, Indian clarified butter), foam rose to the top, and the bottom browned, filling the kitchen with a toasty smell.

The recipe then instructed me to leave a whisk in the bowl of filling, so that adding the butter wouldn't spatter. An odd note, especially when there was no mention of cooling the butter so that you don't end up with scrambled-egg pie. I poured the butter into the bowl, then found I had to whisk quickly and thoroughly because the melted butter threatened to remain an oily stratum above the egg mixture. Luckily, the two eventually came together. I spread the washed blueberries onto the crust, then poured the filling over the blueberries.

I set the tart pan onto a baking sheet, then slid the whole thing carefully into the oven. An hour later, the top and crust were nicely browned. According to Dorte, this was what I was looking for. I cooled the tart in its pan on a rack before slicing. It looked so promising: a rich, sweet crust, sweet berries coaxed by the heat into jammy goodness, a vanilla-scented and butter-flecked filling.  The recipe instructs you to then blanch more blueberries in a simply syrup, mound those on top of the tart and cover the whole thing in a sprinkling of powdered sugar. I left this step out.

When I cut a slice, the crust crumbled into delicious little pieces. But the filling looked entirely raw!

I was grossed-out, annoyed and exhausted. So I went to bed, figuring my colleagues would be my unwitting guinea pigs. Today, the tart has sat out on a table for all of three hours and is almost gone. I tried a small sliver, and although totally overwhelmed by the amount of sugar, figure it doesn't taste terrible. The filling, as Ben pointed out, tastes like tapioca pudding (something I realize not everyone loves). The vanilla and the butter and the faint muskiness of the blueberries come together nicely. I just can't get over the raw-looking filling.  The crust is really wonderful – it melts in your mouth. I guess this is lucky for me, because I have another portion of dough in the refridgerator waiting to be "rolled" out. Any ideas for a filling?

Altogether, I'd say the L.A. Times so far has been a qualified disappointment. Maybe next time I'll try something other than a baking recipe.

Months ago, I bought a can of pinhead oatmeal. Pinhead oats are the Scottish name for steel-cut oats, which come from Ireland. I was going through a hot cereal phase during what seemed like an everlasting winter and had gotten sick of hot oat bran cereal (although with Wyman’s frozen wild blueberries and a splash of maple syrup, it can be the world’s fastest and most nutritious breakfast ever). My night-time reading during that time was Mollie Katzen’s Sunlight Cafe, and I found myself dreaming about the nutritious and complex breakfasts I’d whip up after rising each day. But in the cold, hard light of a winter morning, it was much easier to just pour myself a bowl of cold cereal with soymilk. Until I decided to work ahead. Cooking steel-cut oats is a lengthy process, but can be quickened by soaking the oats overnight. Even with this "short-cut" though, the can of oats languished in the back of my cupboard throughout the warm summer months.

Then, just a few weeks ago, while watching Good Eats on the Food Network, I saw Alton Brown prepare a bowl of steel-cut oats that looked so good I could have forfeited my dinner plans right then and there, and just had oatmeal for dinner. Instead, I waited for an appropriate morning, armed with buttermilk, cinnamon and a heavy saucepan. Though this takes a bit more time than opening a packet of instant oatmeal and nuking it with water, the results are so much more satisfying and good for you.

First, I toasted a cup of oats with a pat of butter in a saucepan. When the oats smelled nutty and almost like popcorn, I added several cups of boiling water and turned the heat down low.

Without stirring, I let it cook for 25 minutes, while I took a shower. When the time was up, I added a mixture of buttermilk and soymilk (Alton calls for whole milk) and cooked the oats for another 10 minutes.

After that, I topped the mixture off with a spoonful of brown sugar, a sprinkle of cinnamon and another splash of buttermilk. My bowl of oatmeal was tangy and creamy from the buttermilk, and the oats were both tender and toothy. It was an absolutely wonderful way to start the day.

This makes four servings, so my breakfast is now taken care of for the rest of the week. Talk about fast food!

The September 5th issue of The New Yorker is an absolute pleasure to read. Usually, I get through the magazine pretty quickly – I have no problem easily skipping over articles that don’t captivate me within the first page, and the articles that do catch my attention, well, I read through those quickly, too. Just because I’m enjoying them so much.

But this week’s issue really had me hooked. From a beautifully written article on the ancient art of making tofu to a profile of Esca’s David Pasternack, I was totally enthralled.  Calvin Trillin was as understatedly hysterical as always, with his search for the perfect Ecuadorian fish soup, fanesca. If you have not yet read his book, The Tummy Trilogy, take my advice and get it – from a store, from the library, wherever. I also loved reading Jane Kramer’s piece on our obsession (and her own) with cookbooks. My cookbook collection is nearing 80 (if it hasn’t already surpassed that), so it makes me feel better to know there are other similarly obsessed people out there. She wrote the article while summering in a house in Umbria – and found that cooking from Asian cookbooks in Italy proved pretty much impossible, surprise surprise (although why one would want to is another question entirely).

If the issue is still on newsstands today, grab it! I throw old issues out with impunity, but this one I’ll be holding on to.