Dinner, Conference Call Style

17 July 2007

Eight hours of conference calls today. Literally. And a bunch of vegetables from the farmer’s market threatening to go south. Solution, work at home and pray for changes in schedule. Today’s cooking adventure for me: an improvised gratin.

• two medium eggplants
• eight medium tomatoes
• four onions (two yellow, two purple), peeled and sliced
• bleu cheese (roughly 4 ounces)
• 1/2 cup panko breadcrumbs

1. Decide to stay home. Begin east-coast calls with team members one hour early since you saved time on your commute. Then go up to kitchen and gather vegetables into a neat little mise en place. Go back to home office, dial in for next call.
2. Slice eggplants into thick cuts. Lay on baking sheets and sprinkle lightly with kosher salt to draw out some of the bitter. Let sit. Go back to home office, dial in for next call.
3. Slice tomatoes in half and gently squeeze seeds and as much liquid as possible out of each. Cut into slices, lay on baking sheet, and sprinkle lightly with kosher salt to draw out additional moisture. Go back to home office, dial in for next call.
4. Call ended an hour earlier than anticipated, yay! Up to kitchen, saute onions with some olive oil until the onions have caramelized–in this 10-minute timespan, also have a cup of coffee and a makeshift lunch of a half of a bagel and some peanut butter. Take pan off heat and cover. Go back to home office, dial in for next call.
5. Come back to kitchen find that condensation from the covering of the pan has naturally de-glazed the bottom of the pan. Yay! Gather whatever spices make sense (today, herbes de provence). Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray rectangular casserole pan with non-stick coating. Using paper towels, brush salt and excess moisture from each eggplant slice and layer slightly in pan. Repeat with a layer of tomatoes. Do same with half of the caramelized onions. Sprinkle with spices. Repeat layers. Wash pans.
6. Go back to home office. Check email. Return phone calls, prep for next two meetings.
7. Client was a no-show. Go upstairs and gently press down the vegetables in the pan.
8. Go back to home office, dial in for next call. Finish up in an hour. Go upstairs and gently press down the vegetables in the pan again. Pick up dry-cleaning (20 minutes) for business trip. Check on gratin. Almost all liquid gone, yay! Crumble bleu cheese, mix with breadcrumbs, spread out evenly over vegetables.
9. Open a bottle of beer. Pull out two homemade hamburger patties and five crab cakes from the freezer. Go back to your beer. When cheese is brown, take gratin out. Go back to your beer. Dammit, empty! Start the grill, check email one more time.

Where’s my beer? Oh, yah …

This Little Piggy

28 April 2007

I’ve grown accustomed to specifics. Not that I need blow-by-blow and ounce-by-ounce instructions, but enough at least to know I’m heading in the right direction. Which is why I was both intrigued and annoyed by the recipe for Mario Batali’s porchettain the April 2007 issue of Esquire. After spending paragraphs extolling the virtues of bone-in pork shoulder cooked over low heat for hour upon hour, the editors published a recipe for boneless pork shoulder cooked at standard heat for only 120 minutes. Teases.

The impetus for my need, an upcoming dinner party. Some dear friends of ours recently resurrected their movable feast dinner party, in which each couple brings somehing exquisite to contribute to a lovely meal. I wanted to make a roast. Mario’s roast. The one that cooks overnight and fills the house with the scents of rosemary, garlic, and pork. But google as I might, I couldn’t find any guidance past the brief narrative in the magazine. So I adapted a prep treatment from Barbara Kafka’s Roasting. Then there was the question of cooling and storing the pork, which is meant to be cooked overnight, cooled through the day, and then reheated for dinner—placing it into the fridge would be a one-way ticket to congealed toughness. I placed pork consultation call to friend and business partner Michael, and we hatched a plan.

Judith proclaimed the pork a success (very high praise in my book). Here’s the recipe:

• One 8 lb. bone-in pork shoulder roast
• Two tablespoons of fennel seeds
• One tablespoon of salt
• Two tablespoons of freshly ground pepper
• Eight cloves of garlic
• Four sprigs of fresh rosemary
• One tablespoon of olive oil

1. Preheat oven to 250 degrees.
2. Place salt, pepper, fennel seeds, garlic, oil, and rosemary into food processor and blend into a paste.
3. Score the fat side of the pork, careful not to slice into the actual meat.
4. Rub pork with the paste.
5. Place in oven and cook for 8.5 hours.
6. Remove from oven and allow to cool. If you’ve made the pork overnight and are serving it for dinner, store the pork, tightly covered, in a cool place, until dinner (I used our garage).
7. Roughly 45 minutes before serving, reheat uncovered in a 250-degree oven to warm. The pork won’t be hot, but it will be succulently warm and delicious.

The rest of the meal was exquisite as well—a tian of vegetables that I’m going to try to replicate for Sunday dinner, a roasted beet and goat cheese salad with fried capers, fresh bread, homemade spumoni, and pistacchio cookies from a terrific new bakery in Andersonville, Pasticceria Natalina. Here’s to friends who are wonderful chefs and to friends with wine cellars.

Cumin, Coriander, and a Dash of Hope

4 March 2007

I will always associate the scents of cumin and coriander with singlehood.

I was in my 20s, renting my first apartment alone. It was a third-floor walk-up in a residential neighborhood. No central air, no granite countertops or new appliances, and in fact, no even floors (the building had long since settled in). But it had a big back deck where I kept a charcoal grill, and a pantry where I could store several cases of wine.

Back then, decorating was all about creativity—floor pillows and a plush rug until I could afford couches, a dining table that was once the men’s cloak room door from the South Shore Country Club, eight strategically mismatched antique school chairs for dinner guests, and a buffet that in a former life was an oak widesheet paper table from a design firm in the city.

Right, back to the coriander and cumin.

I’ve always believed that a guy should have two signature dishes—enough for the first and second dates. Mine: paella, and cumin-and-coriander encrusted steak. My hope was that, with some candlelight and cello music, a table for two set with lots of polished utensils and ironed cloth napkins, a well-prepared and decidedly homecooked dinner, a bottle of lush red wine, and a few insightful questions about hopes and dreams and last-best-book-read, I’d get lucky. Most times, I did.

That apartment and singlehood have long since been replaced by a honey, a mortgage, a mandate for more of the other white meat, and a Weber Genesis, but the scent of coriander and cumin always brings me back to the earlier days.

Tonight for Sunday dinner, grilled pork chops, baked onion rings, and roasted asparagus with cumin and coriander:

• 1 bunch asparagus
• Freshly ground coriander, to taste
• Freshly ground cumin, to taste
• Salt
• Pepper
• 2 tablespoons olive oil

1. Preheat oven to 500 degrees.
2. Snap the hard stems off of the asparagus. If you’re using thicker asparagus stalks, you may want to peel them.
3. Toss asparagus in olive oil, cumin, coriander, salt, and pepper.
4. Arrange in single layer in a roasting pan.
5. Cook until brown (roughly 20 minutes), turning asparagus halfway through.

I started in on the wine early, and I can’t help but think as we settle down for the night that I’m already luckier than I deserve. Happy Sunday, all!

Pancit Canton

25 February 2007

My mother is a wonderful cook. In fact, I learned the basics from her, and she taught me how to enjoy entertaining. My honey P. often jokes that anything that comes out of our kitchen is enough to fill 12. What can I say? Nothing says love like excess.

I haven’t spent much time cooking the traditional Filipino dishes that my mom makes, but lately I’ve missed them. Last week at a Chinese New Year’s Eve party thrown by our friends, I was asked about pancit, a noodle dish that my mother makes for special occasions. I emailed my mom for the recipe and I made it last night. The first bite brought back so many memories of childhood and sitting at my mother’s table that I’ve decided to recreate my mom’s best dishes, one by one. I may even be able to get her into my kitchen to help with some, so stay tuned. The recipe below contains some of my own changes (and measurements—mom doesn’t cook with measuring cups):

• 1 large onion, thinly sliced
• 4 cloves of garlic, minced
• 3 large carrots, peeled and sliced diagonally into thin rounds
• 2 stalks of celery, sliced diagonally into thin rounds
• 1/2 head of a small cabbage, shredded
• 1 pound shrimp, shelled and sliced into halves
• 8 ounces of Chinese sausage, sliced into thin rounds
• 1 16-ounce package of pancit noodles (either canton, which are thick and yellow, or bihon, which are white and thin)
• 3 cups of chicken broth
• Low-sodium soy sauce for seasoning
• Oil for sauteing (I prefer peanut or canola for their high smokepoints)
• sliced green onions and lemon for garnish

1. In a wok or large, nonstick pan, heat 1 to 2 tablespoons of oil over medium-high heat until the oil shimmers.
2. Add the onions, garlic, cabbage, onions, and carrots. Using two large utensils, toss the vegetables until they are soft and they begin to brown around the edges (roughly 10 minutes). Sprinkle with soy to taste. Remove the vegetables to a large bowl.
3. Add a teaspoon of oil to the pan and add sausage. Saute until the edges of the sausage begin to brown. Add shrimp and saute until shrimp is opaque. Remove sausage and shrimp to bowl with vegetables.
4. Add chicken stock to pan and bring to low boil. Add noodles (note, if you’re using the canton noodles, you can add them directly to the pan; if you’re using the white bihon noodles, you’ll need to soften them first in hot water) to pan. Toss until noodles have absorbed all of the stock and have become soft (roughly three minutes).
5. Add vegetables, shrimp, and sausage to pan and mix with noodles.
6. Plate and serve with slices of lemon, green onions, and pepper.

TOTAL PREP TIME: 1 hour
TOTAL COOKING TIME: 20-25 minutes
SERVES: six

See some step-by-step recipe images in my Flickr gallery
Read about the origins of pancit on Wikipedia

If shellfish be the food of love, peel on

11 February 2007

Valentine’s Day 2007 at Chez Miranayes, no jacket required. There was a time that we dressed up, cabbed into the city proper, and dined at an expensive restaurant to celebrate the manufactured holiday. Year by year, however, we earlied up our reservations to avoid the crowd (party of two for dinner, at 11:00 a.m.), and finally, the reservations stopped altogether. This year we’ll mark Valentine’s Day the same way we welcomed in the new year … at home, by the fire, with champagne and P.’s favorite meal, seafood.

On the menu, lobster tails, shrimp, and crab cakes. But, it’s Valentine’s Day, so some spice and twist. I turned to Rick Bayless’ Mexico, One Plate at a Time for inspiration.

I found Rick’s recipe for quick-fried shrimp with sweet toasty garlic online. The recipe for lobster with chipotle mayonnaise is only in the cookbook, sorry. Now for the crabcakes, I’m stealing shamelessly from the menu of The Stained Glass in Evanston, where they marry baby crab cakes with fresh guacamole and julienne-cut french fries. Epicurious has a nice recipe for deviled crab cakes. I made the mojo de ajo for the shrimp and lobster yesterday, and I’m cheating on the fries by using ready-made potates from Alexia Foods (our freezer is stocked with their stuff for weeknight meals in a hurry).

Add freshly laundered fuzzy robes, a toasty fire, and a British murder mystery, and the evening’s complete. Happy Valentine’s Day to you, whever you’ll be and whoever you’ll be cuddling with.

Wilted Rose Soup, Part II

10 February 2007

Eureka! I was able to recreate the wilted rose soup from Pasta Pasta:

• Four heads of roasted garlic, peeled (see Wilted Rose Soup, Part I, for instructions
• Four strips of thick-cut bacon, cut into quarter-inch cubes
• Four small shallots, diced
• Four small leaks (white and light green parts only), cleaned and chopped
• Six cups chicken stock
• 2 teaspoons cayenne chili flakes
• Four slices of rustic Italian bread
• 1/2 cup cream

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and toast slices of bread until brown and crispy.
2. In a Dutch oven, saute bacon until crisp and brown. Remove bacon with a slotted spoon.
3. Add shallots and leeks and saute until soft.
4. Add roasted garlic, chili flakes, and chicken stock and bring to simmer.
5. Crumble bread into soup.
6. With immersion blender, blend the soup until roughly the consistency of porridge (it sounds horrible, but it’s quite good, really).
7. Add cream and stir to blend.

I served this with extra slices of toasted Italian bread topped with Havarti cheese. A shot of lemon in the soup brightens the flavor, if necessary.