Hungry In Hogtown

Weekend Cookbook Challenge #2: Hot for coq

The weather is miserable -- all rain, and wind, and mindnumbing greyness.  What a perfect day for comfort food.

More precisely, this is the kind of weather that suits, nay, demands, a braise, and my wife and I are only too happy to oblige.  But what to braise?  Over the past couple of months we've enjoyed braises of all sorts, from boar to short ribs, but never chicken; we've also eaten a lot of Italian, but not a lot of French.  A braised, French chicken dish?  Sounds like as good a place as any to start, doesn't it?

Let's face it, if you're going to make such a dish, there really is a standard: coq au vin.  Throw a cookbook challenge into this mix, and the recipe for said coq au vin can come only from one source: the grande dame of French cuisine in North America, Julia Child, and perhaps the most important English-language cookbook of all time, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

IMBB #22: The power of pasta

I believe in the power of pasta.   Yes, that sounds pretty corny, but stop for just a moment and think about it.  At its simplest, a noodle can be nothing more than flour (whether wheat, rice, or, well, pretty much any grain) and water, yet from that simple combination humans have derived a product that can be adapted to satisfy the appetites of a person from almost any culture in the world.  Top a wheat noodle with olive oil, hot pepper, and parmesan -- a condiment almost as simple as the noodle it dresses -- and you have an Italian classic, aglio, olio, e peperoncino.  Now travel halfway round the world, and sauce a rice noodle with tamarind water, fish sauce, bean curd, and a number of other spices and flavours, and you have a noodle dish of amazing complexity and taste, pat thai.

No matter our family background, our culinary roots are Italian, so we have made two lovely pasta dishes for this event.  They are quite different from each other in terms of ingredients, but they share an honesty in their respect for the components and for the eaters.  We had help, though.  Just last week I got my hands on a copy of 100 Ways To Be Pasta: Perfect Pasta Recipes from Gangivecchio, by Wanda and Giovanna Tornabene, a mother and daughter who run a restaurant and inn in Sicily that is said to serve the best food on the island.  After a couple of days, much indecision, and a little analysis of the leftovers in our fridge, we chose the following two dishes:

Sugar High Friday #15: Im-peared

We first got a pear drunk a few months ago.  Poached it in lots of marsala, red wine, cinnamon and vanilla, let it soak up all the goodness, and delighted in the fragrance that perfumed our apartment and the richly coloured tender fruit that emerged.  We'd have it with ice cream, creme fraiche, creme fraiche flavoured with Calvados, mascarpone -- you get the picture.  Gorgeous, but always a little on the rich side. 

So when we saw the call for Sugar Low Friday, I thought maybe I'd shake up the poached pear a little.  Heck, we could all do with more fruit, it's fat and processed sugar free, and red wine is good for you, right?  But how to add texture to the dish without resorting to the beautiful wiles of creme fraiche?

Enter phyllo.  Something crispy and flaky, but still very simple.  I decided to prepare pear turnovers, folding my spicy sweet pears into a golden crisp triangle of phyllo dough, which is low-fat with lots of crunch.

They turned out well, and my wife and I ate them with a little bit of the poaching liquid reduced into an intensely aromatic sauce.  The dough picked up the flavour of the scant spoonful of butter, which mingled with the sweet fruit and the crunch of the crust.

Who needs Calvados creme fraiche after all?    Mind you, it wouldn't hurt...

The only recipe you'll ever need for vanilla mucus

Well, that went poorly.  Twice.

It started out as a good idea.  Make a delicious tart using leftover ingredients: eggs yolks from macaroons, and frozen pastry dough from a Meyer lemon tart.  I was going to make it irresistible by using my all-time, can't-live-without-it flavour, vanilla, and then burnishing the tart with a gorgeous bruléed sugar crust.  I thought of it as a creme brulée tart.

Sounds good, doesn't it?

So how did I end up with globs of black-specked, demon mucus?

It all started with the idea that I could adapt Thomas Keller's lemon sabayon tart filling to my needs simply by removing the lemon juice and replacing it with the contents of a scraped vanilla bean.  I'd made that sabayon filling so many times that I thought it was fairly foolproof.

So, I whisked together two egg yolks, two eggs, and 100 grams of vanilla sugar in my stand mixer.  I then continued whisking this mixture over a double boiler until it had thickened.  Then I added butter and poured the mixture into my pre-baked shell.  It was at this point -- while the beautiful vanilla-specked, cream-coloured ambrosia I'd literally whipped up was tumbling into the shell -- that I began to suspect my mixture was a little too thin and wouldn't set.  Since I was already running late, I had no choice but to put the tart in the fridge and hope for the best.

The best was not good enough, so I came home after midnight to a custard that was very, very thick and very delicious but still slid slowly when I tilted the tart.  To adapt a bit of profound Britney Spears wisdom, what I had was "not a curd, not yet a pus-coloured culinary disaster."

This is where the best chefs apply the perfect technique to save their tart, and where mere home cooks like me begin the surprisingly quick journey from "cream-coloured ambrosia" to "demon mucus."

Join me, won't you?

Is this post technically a Caesarian section?

One of the happy by-products of making so many macaroons is a surfeit of egg yolks, and I certainly wasn't about to let something with such rich potential go to waste.  I mulled over a number of possibilities before settling on two dishes: one, which ended up an unmitigated flop, I'll discuss in my next post (it wasn't pretty!), the other became today's triumphant salad celebration.  I am, of course, talking about my family's stupendously good Caesar salad dressing (as interpreted by moi).

This salad dressing is special to me.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I have very fond memories of devouring heaps of this salad at family get-togethers, where I could always count on a nice big bowl of it sitting near the corner of my grandmother's massive dining room table.  This Caesar had it all: creaminess, garlic, saltiness, an acidic bite, lots of crunchy croutons, and just the slightest hint of anchovy.

What macaroon isn't better with banana rum ice cream?

Challenge:  Coconut.  I don't really like coconut.  My wife, she loves the coconut, that's why we decided to participate in a macaroon event.

Why don't I like coconut?

Hard to say, but it's not so much the flavour as the fact that when I think coconut, I think Bounty (I guess that's the rough equivalent of an American Almond Joy), a "chocolate bar" composed of coconut enveloped in chocolate.  Macaroons usually aren't much better -- a coconut igloo topped with a radioactive cherry beacon.  What these treats -- what all treats -- made with shredded coconut have in common, and what I really object to, is mouthfeel: it's like I'm chewing on sweetened, stale hay.

Which leads us to Donna Hay, and today's Hay Hay It's Donna Day macaroon challenge sponsored by Pearl of the Orient.

"The Road to Hell is Paved with Leeks and Potatoes": Julia Child, meet Julie Powell

Crying, cursing, cooking, always the cooking, and wrestling with the knowledge that you are not only good at dismembering live lobsters but actually kind of enjoy the bloodbath:  I think I'm very, very happy that we decided to start a food blog before reading Julie Powell's new book, Julie & Julia:  365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen.  Did I mention the maggots?

During some "I'm just a secretary/government drone with no career in theatre as I dreamed of when I moved to New York from Texas" existential ennui, Powell turns to a copy of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking she finds in her mother's kitchen as a source of comfort.  Being an enterprising type, she decides to cook every recipe in the book.  Being a wee bit crazy, and seeking some structure in her life, she puts a time limit on it:  365 days.  And being a person who puts it all out there, she blogged about it all on The Julie/Julia Project, which became a big success, the topic of news stories and even academic studies.

The thing is, Julie Powell can write.  And she does so with incredible honesty and humour.  At first, I wasn't sure if I really liked her, as she describes her hysterical fits and obsession with vintage clothing, and her despised job doing some kind of support work in a government agency dealing with the effects of 9/11, holding widows' hands and making sarcastic wisecracks under her breath.  But you've got to respect someone who doesn't whitewash a single thing, and is willing to admit to the world that she discovered, just days after cooking for New York Times food critic Amanda Hesser in her own kitchen, a well-established maggot colony in her dishrack (!).  Hesser is a food guru and herself author of two good books on food, The Cook and the Gardener and Cooking for Mr Latte -- don't let the cutesy title and cartoons fool you, it's seriously good.  And maggots are just  seriously, seriously, wrong, especially in the kitchen (see my maggot objections already documented here).

Powell starts off not really knowing much about food, and I don't know that she learns much beyond Child's recipes by the end of the project.  She admits she'd never even eaten an egg before embarking on this project.  You're certainly not going to learn much from this book about how to execute Julia Child's recipes.  That's what Child's cookbooks are for, even though I personally don't find them easy to follow and would love a Coles Notes to them for our own tiny apartment kitchen.  Ahhh, I recall my attempt at Julia's Tarte Tatin (here's one version of her recipe).  We called it "applesauce pie" and I still damn the farmers' market vendor who assured me that Macintosh apples are great for baking.  You lied to make a sale, and I hope you rot.

But this book is also about rising to a challenge you set yourself, and about relationships:  with her husband, the patient Eric who does all the Mt. Everest-sized piles of dishes that result from complicated French recipes (I sympathize, Eric, I truly do!  We have no dishwasher either.  Then again, that means part of the blame for the maggoty mess falls on you); a colourful supporting cast of friends and relatives; the strangers who become friends through their comments on her blog; and Julia Child herself, as expressed in her recipes and her cooking. 

The best thing about this book is that it's funny, laugh-out-loud-on-the-subway funny.  Whether it's  how Martha Stewart makes the best stalker food, self-contained and perfectly presented, or the horrors of aspic, or how some cooking methods sound like interesting Asian sexual techniques, this is a very entertaining book.  And it's clear where Powell got her sense of humour and  forthrightness.  After a number of blog comments about the foulness of Powell's language from a person named Clarence among others, Julie's mom writes in to thank everyone for supporting her daughter and concludes, "PS - Clarence, who fucking cares what you think, anyway."  Indeed.

 

The Five D's: Duck, Dip, Date, Doc, Duck

Defining a menu based on the letter 'D' is no simple task, yet that was precisely the mandate for Slashfood's D Day event.  If daikon, deep-fried, and dulse aren't quite your thing, and they're not necessarily ours, then this task might seem a little daunting.  At some point, likely while I was pondering the feasibility of a deep-fried dill and dewberry danish topped with Devonshire cream, I finally had my eureka moment: DUCK!!!

Sweet.  Dinner was a somewhat done deal, but, as my wife quickly noted, that still left dessert.  Of course, my wife doesn't just raise questions, she answers them.  "Dates," she said, "we'll make something with dates."

I should have known she had an ulterior motive.  You see, I don't really like dates.  She, on the other hand, enjoys them so much we have a large box of them in our cupboard so she can partake of an occasional date snack.

Some Pig Blogging Weekend: The Boar Supremacy

Tough, stringy, and flavourless.  That was our first impression of boar.  We were in Siena on our honeymoon, and surrounded by the picturesque streets of that mediaeval Tuscan town, we had stumbled upon some of the worst food  Italy has to offer.  Never trust the recommendations of the tourist office, even when asking for typical fare (we soon learned to scout out good restaurants by asking the owners of food shops and students, and looking for lineups outside tiny places with their menu available only on chalkboard and only in one language -- the local one).

But we were intrigued enough by boar, a traditional Tuscan meat, to hunt down some recipes for boar ragu (aka: ragu di cinghiale) upon our return to Toronto.  The best ones seem to come from Mario Batali (like this one or this one), the patron saint of cooking in our household.  The following is an adaptation of one of his recipes.  It seemed only natural that we'd make it in honour of the Some Pig Blogging Weekend.

Hamthropology

A self-described “hamthropologist,” Peter Kaminsky takes us from Andalusia to ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day North Carolina hog farms as he shares his quest for delectable pork in the book Pig Perfect: Encounters with Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them (2005, Hyperion).

“Cooking” might not be strictly accurate, as it’s cured pork in all its forms that really fuels Kaminsky’s fire.  Although there are a few recipes, they’re not the point of the book.  I haven’t tried any; they look tasty, but some are not for everyday use, such as the recipe for cocido. It’s an incredibly hearty Spanish stew with an ingredient list almost 2 pages long.  We’ve had it in Madrid and it’s delicious, but it took me hours to eat, all day to digest, and from the looks of it, a mighty long time to prepare.

No, read this for the story of the pig.  Kaminsky delves into history, and produces fascinating economic reasons why pork is forbidden to the Jewish and Muslim faiths.  He discusses the role pigs and their ancestors may have played in shaping our landscape.  He travels to Spain, where the famed jamon iberico rules, and learns about black pigs and pasturing.  Rare in North America, where they’re a “heritage” type, these breeds are also very well suited to being farmed using time-tested methods.  Allowed to forage for a traditional diet of acorns, they are actually healthier to eat because their fat is monounsaturated.  They’re also tastier because pigs take on the flavours of their feed, and the meat is more thoroughly marbled with fat as the pig exercises as it forages.