Me and Dr. Scholls -- Gellin’ What’s cooking? Strawberry-Watermelon-Cucumber Salad

The thermometer here in Austin has been in the 90s almost every day for the longest, and all I could think of was... gelatin salad. I’ve been a molded salad snob for years, disdaining the green wobbly squares with floating bits of  pineapple and celery that would invariably appear on the menu at my mother-in-law’s house. She’s a wonderful woman and way too fond of Jello salad.

But in the midst of this summer heat wave, I was desperate for something cool that didn’t involve a lot of calories. I looked around my cupboard but had too little powdered gelatin for a salad, so – against all my better instincts – I made do with a package of sugar-free orange Jello. I mixed it with a heavy cup of grated carrots and an orange that I peeled, sliced and chopped into small segments, then added the juice of half a lemon to balance the sweetness of the Jello. Quite tasty – cool with crunch, and a dollop of creme fraiche took away even more of the sweetness.

Still, I yearned for the clarity of a plain gelatin base. So the next time I went to the store, I picked up a couple of boxes of Knox, and wandered the produce aisles for what to put with it. Strawberries are still in season, so I started with those. To add crispness or crunch, I chose an English cucumber – less bitter than the standard garden cuke, and with a thinner skin. And in a moment I can only describe as inspired, I discovered some seedless watermelon in the frig. I cubed everything – half-inch cubes for the fruit and quarter-inch cubes for the cucumber – to give it a more attractive presentation. For flavor and the hint of sweetness, I included minted simple syrup in lieu of some of the water. Wow. It tasted light and fresh, and it looked like jewels suspended in champagne.

I may be in my own little world, but it’s okay, they know me here... What’s cooking? Salad Monique

I spent four days last week at the beach, writing with another woman who is both a lifelong friend and a writer. We drove to the Texas coast, to a tiny fishing village named Port Aransas. Basking in relative obscurity, Port A lolls at the far north end of Mustang Island – a home to as many deep-sea sport fishing boats as crusty shrimpers. A place so laid back that dressing up mostly means a clean pair of flip-flops. And running south from the town, 18 miles of broad creamy beaches. The BP disaster hasn’t reached this part of the Gulf Coast, but early June is still seaweed season, so the crowds are minimal. For the past 10 years, my friend and I have been going there to write for a week, and we typically go in the spring, when the place is really deserted, so just seeing others on the beach was a bit of a shock. But what really hit us was the heat – the index was 105 one morning, and that was all it took for me to decide that a view of the ocean was all I really needed.

My family took a house on this part of Mustang Island every summer when I was growing up, and I guess when you are a kid and the bottom line is that you get to go to the beach, the heat becomes less of a factor. But when you’re an adult who has spent the past 30 years in New Jersey, I can tell you it makes a difference.

There’s something remarkable about how just watching the waves stirs up the creative juices in my head, and even though I’d been feeling completely blocked, it took less than a day for the ideas to start flowing. The Texas coast between the mainland and Mustang Island is an amoebic pattern of vast shallow bays – more green than blue – home to herons and whooping cranes and roseate spoonbills, and the flatness of the land begins to draw the tension out of me long before we can actually see the ocean.

By the time we got home, I’d had my quota of fresh seafood for about a month, so all I really wanted to eat was a salad. I remembered a recipe I’d found when I was reviewing the famous chefs’ cookbooks, an amazing concoction at the front of Eric Ripert’s Return to Cooking. It’s sort of a Kitchen Sink Recipe – it takes a good hour just to assemble the ingredients. But I promise it’s worth the trouble. And while this recipe says it serves 6, my husband and I shared it as our dinner and were fighting over the remains.

Disaster Dinner

I made a certifiable disaster for dinner a few nights ago – lovely artichokes that didn't get completely done, and some fish that stuck to the pan and tasted "bland" (my husband's word). To his credit, he was very cautious with this criticism, not wanting to have me stop cooking altogether; but in a preemptive strike, I had already said I didn’t think the fish was a success.

Winging it is always a bit dicey, and I had definitely been winging it with the fish. Having already been to the store that day, and neglected to get an entree (what was I thinking?), I looked for something I already had, that would go with the artichoke recipe (which I really wanted to make). I found a package of tilapia filets in the freezer, which seemed like a nice combo of textures.

I didn’t really have a plan, just figured if I threw it in the skillet with some herb butter left over from a garlic bread I made not long ago that it would work out. I will definitely plan better next time.

The artichokes were too big for the recipe, which called for medium artichokes cooked in butter and chicken broth. And the parts that actually got done were really tasty, so I will figure this one out at a later date.  But you know, you get what’s in the grocery store, and my store had only fairly large artichokes. So even though I nearly doubled the cooking time, they were undercooked. And at some point, with your husband pacing the area around the kitchen like a mountain lion, you say to yourself, “It’ll be fine by now.” Which of course it wasn’t.

Hey, these things happen. And I think the healthiest approach is to announce the awfulness and get on with your life. So we went for ice cream instead.

Tiptoeing through the Chefs’ Cookbooks – Part 2

For my next life, I want to come back as Michael Ruhlman. Among his dozen published books, you will find collaborations with Eric Ripert (of Le Barnardin), Anthony Bourdain (“No Reservations” on the travel channel), and at least three books with Thomas Keller, the self-taught wunderkind of The French Laundry in Napa, and Per Se in NYC. It’s the sort of stuff I dream about.

Cooking from these books is another issue altogether. Ripert’s A Return to Cooking is a sort of journal with recipes and art – the reader (if you ever actually take the time) follows him and a group of his friends on outings to Sag Harbor, Puerto Rico, Napa, and Vermont. One of the friends is an artist, so the text is interspersed with vibrant, full-page,Van Gogh-esque paintings of the food and the chef, which makes this tome an excellent coffee table book. But there’s virtually no organization to it – other than by geographic site – and Ripert seems to have uncanny access to foods that are either bizarrely specific (Vialone Nano rice and the Pebeyre brand of truffle juice – truffle juice, really...) or way too exotic for my kitchen, like pibales (baby eels – still alive when you buy them!). On the other hand, in perusing the book for this review, I came across an interesting salad that I made for dinner last night, and both my husband and I were wowed. Look for that in my next post.

Painstaking and fussy are two of the words that come to mind in describing the dishes in Thomas Keller’s first opus, The French Laundry Cookbook. Of course, the photography alone will make you pick up the phone for reservations – you just want the dining experience. Like the food, the book is elegant and spare, airy and precise. And impossible to reproduce. Yet there are discourses on basic processes – like Keller’s Big Pot Blanching method for cooking vegetables – that are simple enough for the least aggressive home kitchen and will produce amazing results. And if you actually want to reproduce the restaurant’s signature cornets of Salmon Tartare with Sweet Red Onion Crème Fraîche, Keller takes you step by excruciating step through the process. To his credit, Keller recognizes the impossibilities, and suggests being flexible – attempting a sauce, for instance, while simplifying the meat or fish that it goes on. There’s some highly instructive and helpful material here on tools and techniques that could make a real difference for normal cooks, as well as some encouraging advice about using common sense.

Common sense and basic techniques recur as themes of Keller’s newest work: ad hoc at home. (Did you think I’d forgotten? Oh, ye of little faith...) And it turns out that the man actually now has a restaurant called Ad Hoc. The focus here is on the uncomplicated – iconic American dishes like creamed corn and fried chicken and strawberry shortcake. A perfectly marvelous section toward the back gives simple recipes for a wide range of what Keller calls “Lifesavers” – tapenades, flavored oils, chutneys, pickled fruits, and preserved lemons – that, reading through the section, you feel will on their own elevate all sorts of preparations.

Tiptoeing through the Chefs’ Cookbooks – Part 1

Okay – I confess. When I started this post, I was going to review my latest find, Thomas Keller’s ad hoc at home. And then,...I decided any review should really pit this book against its truest competitors, i.e., the cookbooks of other great chefs. And since I have quite a few of those, it became another of those what-the-heck moments, and what my husband always refers to as a random strike, when my brain goes off at a full tilt. So of course this process has taken me quite a bit longer than I expected, but I’m getting there. Just as a show of faith, I’m going to give you the first half now. I’ll be back in a couple of days with the rest, which will – I promise – include ad hoc at home.

How do you know when you find a great cookbook? You can’t rely simply on the author being a great chef – I have cookbooks by Daniel Boulud (Daniel, db Bistro Moderne, and Café Boulud) and Georges Perrier (Le Bec-Fin in Philadelphia) and Eric Ripart (Le Bernardin), and while I enjoy reading them all, I don’t think of those books as great cookbooks. (I also have A Day at elBulli by Ferran Adrià, but his food is so far out there that I think of the book as more like science fiction, and don’t even shelve it with the others.) The photography in each is luscious enough that you can practically taste the dishes, and it’s fun to imagine what it must be like to inhabit the kitchens of these creative geniuses, to peek over their shoulders or be privy to their thoughts; but these are not where I turn to figure out what to cook for a cozy dinner party unless it’s a really special occasion.

I should add here that all of these chefs except perhaps Georges Perrier have multiple books to their names, so maybe the comparison isn’t fair. But my library is my library – my universe for this task is defined by it.

Boulud’s Cooking in New York City offers a sort of romp through the day at a top-tier NYC restaurant... There’s some fun stuff about the craziness of the kitchen and the shopping and the deliveries, but the recipes are presented in a jumbled mess of type that’s 11-point on some pages and shrinks to 9-point on others. And complex? Tomato Tarte Tatin (can you say that five times fast?) takes up a full page, in six separate procedures: for the pistou sauce, the puff pastry, the tomatoes (no simple peel and chop here), the caramelized onions, the herb goat cheese (which of course you must make yourself – and who is this guy Herb?), and the frisée salad. It’s a dish that promises to be an all-day affair in the making. And this would be for an appetizer. Needless to say, I haven’t found much that I’ll tackle in his book.

CORRECTION!!!

I've just become aware that the pasta recipe in my last post had 4 CUPS of parmesan. ACK!!!! No, that was supposed to be 1/4 cup. This must be what comes from writing in the wee hours. So sorry – hope I haven't ruined anyone's dinner.

For anyone just now reading that post, I've corrected the recipe. But here it is – again – with the appropriate quantity of Parmesan.

Pasta with Asparagus and Peas

1 Tbl butter
1½ Tbl shallots, minced
1 lb asparagus (I prefer the thinner stalks for this recipe), trimmed and cut into one-inch pieces
8 oz frozen peas, thawed
salt and pepper, to taste
¼ c heavy cream
8 oz dried pasta (I used ½ box of bowtie pasta)
¼ c grated Parmesan cheese
¼ c fresh basil, slivered

Cook pasta in salted water as directed. Meanwhile, in a large sauté pan, cook shallots on medium-low heat about 4 mins. Raise heat to medium, add asparagus and peas, salt and pepper. Cover and cook 7 mins, or until asparagus is firm-tender. Remove cover and add cream. Simmer vegetables in cream until the cream thickens (~2 mins). When pasta is ready, drain it and add it to the vegetables, along with the Parmesan cheese, stirring well. When the cheese is melted and well incorporated, add basil and stir well again. Adjust seasoning. Serves 2 with leftovers.

Another Year, Another Asparagus Recipe What’s cooking? Pasta with Asparagus and Peas

It was a great birthday. I slept late, ate breakfast out on our screened porch, then had my coffee with the cat out in the kitchen garden. Some days, you just have to let yourself do nothing, and if your birthday isn’t one of those days, then you are missing something.

One son sent me the cutest flower arrangement I think I’ve ever seen: a flower cupcake. It’s right here on my desk, where it looks like it’ll last for a while.

And the other son sent Thomas Keller’s new cookbook, ad hoc at home. This book, of family-style recipes, is rapidly becoming one of my favorites, even though I haven’t made anything from it yet. I’m a big fan of Keller – his gazpacho is a staple of my hostessing menus, and his instructions on cooking vegetables changed my life – but some of his concoctions get just a little too precious for a kitchen with a staff of one. I’m thinking in particular of a white truffle custard – and you know, I always keep a bit of white truffle in my pantry – served in a hollowed out egg shell. Oh, please. The dishes in this new book, however, are designed for serving to a group of friends who don’t care if you’re using liquid nitrogen or tweezers or an immersion circulator. (More on this book in my next post.)

So for my birthday, my husband wanted to take me to dinner at a nice local place, but we’d been out the previous couple of nights, and had plans for the next couple of nights after that. And sometimes, I just get a hankering to cook something. It was one of those nights.

A Great Gift Idea

You know, I started off my last post talking about the binder of family recipes my Aunt Marcy gave me when I left home for a career in NYC. The whole idea was to link that thought to the recipe book I put together just recently for my daughter-in-law-to-be. But my mind’s ability to wander off into the woods, following any random trail, seems to apply even when I’m writing. I apparently am in desperate need of some mental breadcrumbs.

Maybe it’s the siren call of Spider Solitaire. I’m something of a, ahem, professional at it. At least I would be if there was such a thing. The problem is that I replay the same game over and over until I win. Which can take much more time than I’m willing to admit. And so, I digress, again.

Back to the recipe collection I assembled for my DILTB. Let’s call her Sue. Some time ago, I discovered a website called Tastebook, which is somehow affiliated with epicurious. I played around with the site, but never really got cranked until Sue came into the picture, which gave me a real reason to put a book together.

The Tastebook people have a broad selection of attractive photos you can use for the cover, and they offer a dedication page that can even include your own photo. Then you choose recipes from some online sites, or enter your own recipes on a formatted page (with photos there, too, if you want). And you can add personal notes to any of the recipes. It’s pretty simple, and the book looks great. They even managed to get it to me in time for it to be a sort of reverse-Mother’s Day gift for Sue. Pretty cool. (And by the way, they didn't pay me to say all this.)

The only downside to this little (?) project was that I spent the entire weekend before typing in various family recipes, and cooking a number of them so that I could take photos of them for the pages. This is the sort of activity that drives my adorable spouse straight up the wall. (“Aren’t we going to eat this? Stop taking pictures. The food’s getting cold, and I’m hungry.”) Ah, what we sacrifice for art.

From My Mother’s Kitchen What’s cooking? Corn Pone Pie

When I left home in Texas for a job and apartment in New York, my Aunt Marcy gave me a binder with a starter handful of family recipes in it. Mostly, they were her recipes with a couple from my grandmother, who only cooked things with lots of sugar in them. My mother’s recipes were largely absent, I suspect because I don’t remember ever actually seeing her use a recipe.

She was an artist, and in a less culturally restrictive time, I doubt she’d have cooked much at all. (N.B., The photo above is one of her paintings. I have now decorated two kitchens around its colors.) But women in those days weren’t supposed to spend their time painting or building collages or working with mosaic tiles, so I suspect she was more than a little grateful for the advances in packaged food that made those activities possible. As a result, frozen TV dinners, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and instant mashed potatoes were regulars in our house. But when she decided to cook, she relied mostly on instinct; and her instincts, while not fancy, were good.

As with her art, my mother’s cooking was eclectic, and often involved mixing things up in a skillet until they tasted good. If the meal included shrimp, most of the time it became gumbo and was served over rice. Turkey morphed into tetrazzini, with mushrooms, cream sauce, and pasta; and chicken or pork evolved into chop suey served over those crunchy Chun King noodles.

But my favorite dish started with a pound of ground beef, which she turned into a simple chili that was topped with corn bread and went by the name of Corn Pone Pie. It is only as an adult that I’ve discovered that Corn Pone Pie appeared on other people’s tables, and in fact is about as common in the South as pimento cheese. Ok, maybe not that common, but pretty well known just the same.

I started early serving the dish to my little Yankee children, and they liked it as much as I ever did. Maybe it’s the name that makes it sound like such a friendly concoction, but I suspect the corn bread is what gets my sons.

The best thing about this recipe is that you only need to add a green salad for a complete meal.

Mumzy’s Corn Pone Pie

For the chili:
1 pound ground beef (can substitute turkey without loss of flavor)
1 medium onion, chopped
1-2 cloves garlic, mashed (This would be the Texas version; in NJ, we say crushed.)
1 green pepper, diced (optional)
1 16-ounce can diced tomatoes
1 teaspoon chili powder (more, if you like)
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 dash Tabasco
1 16-ounce can kidney beans or pinto beans
salt and pepper to taste

For the corn bread:
1¼ cups all-purpose flour
¾ cup yellow corn meal
3 tablespoons sugar
4½ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 egg
⅔ cup milk (at room temp)
⅓ cup melted butter

Preheat oven to 425º.

In a deep, oven-proof skillet, cook together on medium heat the ground beef, onion, garlic, and green pepper (if using), breaking up the meat with a spoon into bite-sized pieces, until the meat is fully cooked. Add the tomatoes, chili powder, cumin, Tabasco, beans, and salt and pepper to taste. [Kitchen Goddess note: As you may guess, there’s a lot of flexibility in this recipe, depending on how you like your chili. Feel free to experiment.] Simmer the mixture on top of the stove for 10-15 minutes, while you make the cornbread batter.

For the cornbread topping, sift together into a medium bowl the flour, corn meal, sugar, baking powder, and salt. In a separate, small bowl, beat the egg well with a fork, then stir in the milk and melted butter. Pour the liquid mixture all at once into the dry, stirring with a fork only until the flour is moistened. (It’s okay if the mixture is lumpy – the point is not to overstir.) Spoon the batter on top of the chili mixture. Bake 25-30 minutes until the corn bread is done.  Serves 4-5.

Spring in My Step

What a glorious month! The wildflowers are exploding all over Texas; and in New Jersey, where we just spent a long weekend, the tulips and daffodils had poked their heads up along all the city sidewalks, and redbud trees blazed everywhere. And while I haven’t exactly been hibernating, our big screened porch has me yearning to invite friends for dinner. Which may be why I volunteered our house for the neighborhood spring get-together.

Usually, this is the sort of madness I set myself up for and then, as what my husband describes as the “cumulative reality” of the event approaches, I spend a great deal of time muttering to myself, “I don’t know why I do these things. What was I thinking?” Ok, yes, I do know. I love entertaining. Bringing friends together for good food and lively conversation is part of it, but mostly I love the planning. Putting together a menu is my favorite activity, but then there’s the centerpiece and the napkins and the silver and the china or maybe stainless and pottery, or maybe even a mix and match. You have to have sort of a “What the heck” attitude, but if the colors work or there’s a nice mix of textures, ...well, what the heck. I particularly like mixing my own silver with my mother’s and my grandmother’s. I don’t have a full service of either, but my mother apparently never used her cream soup spoons, so I have lots of those, and my grandmother had a complete set of sherbet spoons – they have a small notch, presumably for digging into the icy dessert – and I can use their dinner forks if I alternate them with each place setting. Can you tell I really get into this?

In fact, I enjoy the planning so much that the dinner party itself is almost anticlimactic. And sometimes – just occasionally, mind you – I’m exhausted. But it’s a fun exhaustion, and I won’t give it up.

So the last dinner party I gave was a couple of weeks ago, when spring had finally arrived in Austin and my friend Anne was here for a visit. Anne and I have collaborated on many a dinner party, so even though she was the guest of honor, she dug in like a trouper. Strawberries are in season here, so we had big platters of them for dessert, along with some really yummy and light cookies from a Daniel Boulud recipe I found. Shelling the pistachios is the most tedious part, unless you can find them shelled in the grocery store, which I cannot. But other than that, these little sweets take almost no time.

Sacristan Cookies by Daniel Boulud

¼ c pistachios
2 Tbl sugar
1 sheet puff pastry, frozen
1 egg yolk
1 Tbl milk

Preheat the oven to 350°. Lay out the sheet of puff pastry, and GENTLY roll out the creases from being in its box. Whip together the yolk, milk, and ½ Tbl of sugar, and with a pastry brush, brush the mixture onto both sides of the sheet. Cut the pastry sheet in half, and cut each half into strips about ¾-inch wide. (Each pastry sheet is about a 9-inch square, so you should end up with two dozen strips that are 4½ inches by ¾-inch.) Pick up each strip by holding both ends and carefully twist it two or three times (making sure the pastry is thawed just enough to be malleable). Place the twists about 1½ inches apart on a baking sheet lined with parchment. Bake 10-15 mins or until golden. (DB says about 10 mins, but mine are never done in less than about 14 mins.)

While the pastry strips are baking, grind together the pistachios and the remaining 1 ½ Tbl of the sugar in a food processor until the mixture resembles finely ground bread crumbs. Pour it into a large shallow bowl or plate. When the strips are done and still warm, carefully roll them in the pistachio-sugar mix to coat. Set aside until ready to serve.