Category: Home Cooking

January 26, 2015

How to Read the Prune Cookbook (with downloadable index and bonus glossary!)

Already sporting a subtle grease stain, center left.

More than a decade ago, I worked at Prune. Not for long, and not very successfully.

So of course I would say Gabrielle Hamilton’s cookbook, Prune, is brilliant in nearly every way. Because I am the very person around which its conceit is built–I, the hapless line cook who might very well ruin everything if I’m left to my own devices.

But it’s also great because, contrary to appearance, it’s a solid book for a home cook. Prune, after all, is one of those rare restaurants that combines the specialness of dining out with the immediacy and simple satisfaction of eating at home. Even if you haven’t eaten there (or worked there), I think it’s possible to appreciate this book and learn from it.

First of all, YES, it sucks, there is no index. I almost didn’t buy the book, out of spite, and vain hope that a second printing would include an index. Then I decided I’d just make one myself. Or at least a master list of recipes, organized a little bit better. HERE IS MY INDEX FILE. Download away! Pass it around! Doctor it up the way that makes sense to you and print it out and tape it in the back of your book, like I did. (Also, here is an online index of sorts; the bonus is that it’s easily searchable. **And OH LOOK! Now there’s a PDF version of that online index, on the Prune website.**)

Print double-sided, and trim the edges of the paper. It fits in just right.

Aside from this, it’s a marvelously designed book. The “kitchen notebook” look may seem like a gimmick, but it’s not. That binder exists; I have worked from it. It is just as stained, scrawled on and taped up as the book looks. It’s also in drab old Times New Roman, just like that.

Also, the photos: Some are harsh or strange or blurry. But they’re real too, in a way that so many food photos aren’t today. Yes, the kitchen lights bounce off the stainless steel so much it strains the eyes. Yes, the range is greasy, and the steam from the roesti potatoes makes them look like some unfortunate shag carpeting. Yes, cardoons and beans look disgusting–but they taste great. That’s real life.

Which is funny, considering how cookbooks generally peddle in fantasy. Usually, they’re softer and fluffier fantasies: You host grand regional-Italian dinner parties, or you live at River Cottage and raise wholesome pigs and raspberry canes.

Prune presents a fantasy too, of course. But it’s a tougher one—you work in a restaurant. Not like in a reality show–but like in actual reality. You’re a lowly line cook, and you probably get paid $12 an hour, if you’re lucky (assuming wages have gone up in twelve years; I got $10). You don’t know half the words people are using, and you don’t know where to find the knife you need.

So, on first pass through this cookbook, give in to this fantasy. Don’t read thinking you’ll jump up and cook from it tonight. Read like you’ve just started a new job, and you are desperate to learn because you are in way over your head. (This book captures that feeling perfectly. By the time I got to the end, I was sweating and had a headache and wanted to throw the book down and run.) Read in fits and starts, grabbing what you can.

Close the book. Take a deep breath and be glad you don’t really have a job in a restaurant. That shit is hard work.

NOW you can go back and read it like a regular home cook, like you’re going to figure out what this book’s all about, and what you might cook from it.

But wait! Don’t start at the beginning. Read the “Family Meal” chapter, the last one. This is the actual introduction to the book, where Hamilton lays out the philosophy of her kitchen: thrift, creativity, clean presentation, the joy of feeding others. That’s what guides everything else in the book, and in the restaurant.

Next, give a quick skim through the “Prep Daily/Weekly” chapter. The sauces and spice mixes in here are the backbone of many of the recipes. Full recipes will cross-reference back here, and you want to have a passing familiarity with some of the more distinct combinations (Smoked Tomatoes, for instance, or Salsa Verde). This way, when you’re reading and deciding whether to cook a recipe that calls for one of these ingredients, you can imagine all the flavors in the dish.

Equally important, the “Prep Daily/Weekly” section gives you a little window into how a restaurant kitchen runs. Almost never is a dish cooked from scratch, but rather assembled from parts, many of which can be reconfigured.

I don’t normally think home cooks should mimic restaurant kitchens, because a lot of it is bullshit-fancy and inefficient. But Prune is not a bullshit-fancy restaurant–the first recipe in this book is canned sardines on Triscuits, after all, with strict instructions not to make them look too “restauranty.” And it is most definitely not inefficient. What the cookbook reveals is how a kitchen runs to keep cooking every day. You too, as a home cook, should aspire to have a system in place so you can cook every day without reinventing the wheel. Take the pan juices from one dish to spike another one; take the scraps from vegetables to bolster stock; heck, decorate with leek ends and hollow bones.

OK, NOW you can look at the recipes. It’s pretty much up to you from this point on. What you’re hungry for, what you feel up to tackling. Some dishes are easy; others are fiddly. Bite off what you can chew–and there’s plenty even for beginners to chew, especially the various stews and braises, and many of the vegetable preparations.

A lot of the reviews I’ve seen have wished this was a more user-friendly book. Really, it’s friendlier than it appears. It’s intense where it matters (Breton Butter Cake, my god). By contrast, where the instructions seem dangerously cavalier—those cases are almost always where if you wing it, you’ll probably be OK. Because in order to cook well, you, the home cook, need to do your own thing.

This isn’t the case in a restaurant, where consistency is what matters, and your job as a line cook is to perfectly reproduce the vision of the chef. But you don’t work in a restaurant, remember? Isn’t that a relief?

So this book is in fact nudging you, the non-professional, out into the world to cook better, gutsier food. Cooking is not a matter of quarter-teaspoons or simmering for precisely 12 minutes in precisely the right pan. Cooking is making do with what you have, and developing your own instinct for when vegetables will be just the right texture.

Rare for a restaurant cookbook, Prune is good at helping you develop that side of cooking. Discussing how long to cook eggs, GH warns that it can vary–are they cold from the fridge? In the roasted capon recipe, you get a great and thorough warning to keep an eye on the bird–sometimes your croutons can get too dry, or, if the bird is quite juicy, the crouton can get soggy. Paying attention to details like this and making adjustments as you go is how restaurant cooks make dishes consistently well, even with inconsistent ingredients. And this is how good home cooks succeed too. It is never due to setting a timer for exactly 48 minutes or whatever the book says.

Read the recipes for technique, and listen up when Hamilton hectors. Because what matters most of all is your attitude. Lazy, sloppy, making excuses–none of that is appreciated at Prune, or in any kitchen. “I understand the egregious lack of oven space here,” Hamilton writes in one recipe, “but let’s do things right anyway.” In that sentence is a pep talk for anyone with a too-small kitchen.

Thrift is critical too–and always key for a home cook. “Don’t throw your mistakes away” is a tip that comes along with a way to salvage cream past its sell-by date. It’s encouraging you not just to rethink your blunders, but to value ingredients. “This is how we show our respect for the people who made this,” Gabrielle once told me as she wiped a mustard jar clean with a spatula. The natural outgrowth of that attitude is the entire “Garbage” chapter, a beautiful testament to the nobility of scraps.

In this way–that is, in the way of putting you in the right mindset for running a good kitchen–the Prune cookbook is very helpful. You want the kind of rustic, tastes-like-the-home-you-never-had food that Prune serves? It’s all in here, and you can cook it.

GH’s only-in-this-restaurant-kitchen instructions actually strike me as a perverse reality check. This is how we do it, she’s saying, and you’ll never be able to do it quite this way. But that’s OK—we all know the restaurant thing is a conceit, a bit of fiction. The important, real thing is that you get in the kitchen and make it. What matters is that you care enough to make it good.

If you doubt this last part, go back and read the “Family Meal” section again.

Not required of you, the home cook: hunkering down to eat in the crotchlike hideout that is Prune’s pasta station.

Bonus glossary!

Here’s some lingo that caught my eye, and some of the more cryptic admonitions. Feel free to ask about others in the comments.

Balsamic = In the “Family Meal” section, GH says never to use this. That’s because the good stuff is insanely expensive and should not be tossed on a salad. (There’s also crappy balsamic vinegar, the cheap stuff you get at the supermarket. Presumably you could use this in a Prune family meal, but let’s be honest, there is something a bit cheesy about a balsamic vinaigrette. Salad should not be sweet. I wrote about the various grades of balsamic vinegar here.)

Blended oil/”our oil blend” = EVOO cut with vegetable oil, 70% EVOO/30% veg, for applications where EVOO would be overwhelming or a waste. (It’s explained on p463, but of course, without the index, you have no way of knowing this until you happen across it.)

Football = A plate shaped like a…football. Regular people would probably call it an oval. Of course, how you plate things in your own home is entirely up to you.

Half sheet = A full sheet pan is the right size to fit in one those rolling bakery racks; it is too big to fit in your home oven. A half sheet pan is, obviously, half that size and will fit in your home oven. (It is somewhat bigger than a cookie sheet you’d pick up in a grocery store, though.) A Silpat (nonstick mat) fits a half sheet pan perfectly.

Hotel pan = A deep rectangular stainless pan, the kind you see in hotel buffet lines, that slots into a counter with a steam bath underneath. Of course you won’t have one at home, and you won’t need one because you’re cooking smaller quantities. A flat-bottomed pot with straight, medium-heights sides will do. Also, there are third pans and half pans. See pics here. You don’t need any of them.

Quenelle = What’s wrong with a quenelle? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with a quenelle: It’s a bullshit high-toned unnatural shape for a scoop of ice cream. Would you make a quenelle at home? No, of course you would not. Plus, it requires the garde manger person to fiddle around with two damned spoons, when she could be doing something a lot more productive with her limited time and space.

Sacramento tomato juice = The internet swears this is the proper brand for Bloody Marys. (I personally have not developed my palate much in this respect; I have no idea.) The reason GH stresses this in the book is because she’s letting you know why her Bloody Marys taste so good. Should you not make a Bloody Mary from this book if you can’t find Sacramento tomato juice? Of course not!

Sally/salamander = When God makes open-face cheese sandwiches, he uses a sally and it’s all oozy and blistered brown in about six seconds. When you, mere mortal, want to broil something, you will have to use the thing in the top of your oven, or the broil setting in your toaster oven. It’s wimpy, but what’re you gonna do? (On the plus side, you will probably not inadvertently scorch your meal by turning your back for a second too long, nor will you singe all the hair off the back of your hand from reaching into your toaster oven, as you would in a sally.)

Wax = Jargon peculiar to Prune, I think, for a freebie given to a good or familiar guest. (I think it had something to do with bikini waxes, and zipping that charge right off the bill…maybe?)

May 12, 2014

Kitchen PSA: Cast Iron Care

We deviate slightly from this blog’s travel mission to deliver an essential message for home:

Cast-iron pans are cheap, sturdy, non-stick, and incredibly easy to care for.

I have to say it, because people seem to have the wrong idea about cast iron–that it’s somehow a finicky, fragile thing that needs special care. And this idea was broadcast nationwide last night in an episode of “Selected Shorts,” when someone read Marc Maron’s essay about his cast-iron pan.

In the essay, which was first published in Lucky Peach, Maron talks about buying a cast-iron pan at a yard sale and becoming obsessed with preserving the seasoning. He barely cooks in it (there’s your problem right there, bub), and instead spends all his time coating it with lard and so on. He eventually has a bit of a breakdown, strips the seasoning with oven cleaner, and starts fresh, and has more of a breakdown, and then I couldn’t really hear because I was shouting too much.

I know–the cast-iron pan is a metaphor for Maron’s psyche. It’s not really about how to care for a skillet; it’s about how to care for yourself. And it didn’t even bother me much when I first read it in Lucky Peach, because I figured LP readers knew the practicalities of cast-iron pan care already.

But now, here’s Marc Maron on a nationally syndicated radio show, essentially giving the whole country a quickie lesson in how to care for your cast-iron skillet.

Or HOW NOT TO. With all his fretting, he set back the cause of cast iron 20 years!

Dude, first: the whole thing about no soap? It’s no big deal. Cast iron that’s well seasoned–like the pan you bought from the hipster at the yard sale–can handle a little soap. The seasoning is not going to evaporate when touched with soap. (That’s why you needed to resort to oven cleaner–insanely toxic oven cleaner, on a thing you’ll eat out of?!–to strip it off.) When I’m doing the dishes, I usually wash our skillets last, with the regular kitchen sponge–sometimes it still has some soap in it, sometimes it doesn’t.

Actually, it’s water that’s not great for the skillet. Sometimes I let the skillet soak a little, if there is something crusty on it, but this, in the long run, will do in the seasoning and dull the pan. But once, for an hour, to loosen up some scrambled eggs, will not hurt the pan noticeably.

Post-washing: dry the pan immediately. Shake the excess water off, and then set the pan on a low burner to dry. (You could of course dry it with a towel, but then your towel would get a bit greasy.)

Next up, Marc Maron: the thing about coating the pan with oil and letting the oil bake on. Yes, that’s lovely, but you only have to season the pan when it’s messed up–like, when you get one from a yard sale, and it’s all dull and maybe a little rusty. Do the oil-coating treatment once or twice, cook a couple things, and then you’re good to go.

The best thing to do for your cast-iron skillet is to cook bacon in it. When you’re done cooking the bacon, wipe out the grease with a paper towel, with a little extra friction on the stuck-on bits, and your pan will look great. Next time you pre-heat it, the last bit of bacon fat will cook in to even more seasoning. If you don’t do bacon, do something else fatty. Eventually, the seasoning will naturally build up.

Peter and I own four cast-iron skillets and one Dutch oven. We have so many because they’re like puppies–you see a cute one at a store, and you just want to give it a loving home. Plus, hey, they’re useful–you can fry things, you can deep-fry things, and you can bake pies and biscuits in them. You can fry eggs in them. Truly they’re wondrous.

And I do love cast iron for the same reason Marc Maron says he does: this object has lasted potentially a hundred or more years. It’s a connection to tradition, the past, etc. The beauty of that is that these mothers are tough.

And, just as important, they can change. Sometimes your skillet looks beautiful and shiny, and your eggs practically flip themselves. Sometimes you cooked with too much wine (acid eats away at the seasoning), and your skillet gets dull. Sometimes you forget to turn the burner off after it’s dry, and your skillet gets smoking mad. But–and listen here, Marc Maron–the skillet is resilient. It can handle bad stuff, and eventually be fine again–even better. It doesn’t need babying–it just needs to keep going, to be cooked in, to be loved.

November 25, 2013

A Bad Idea for a Holiday Gift

You know all those seasonal stories in magazines are researched a year ahead of time. This is one of those. Here, as we launch into the season of frantic gift-buying, may we at Winslow Place tell you an inspirational story about the perils of late-night advertising?

One day in deep winter, we received a package. We weren’t expecting anything…

Peter loves packages.

Knives? Who packs knives in a foam cooler?

China’s finest knives, KuchenStolz.

Now the foam cooler is making more sense. Frozen steaks?

Oh! Another Chinese kitchen accessory!

Gourmet franks! What’s not to love?

Stuffed Sole Fillets. Weird.

OK, now…if you have a television, and you watch it late at night, you by now probably know what this box is. We don’t, so we were very, very puzzled about this assortment of foods and objects all in the same package. We also had no idea who had sent it to us. So we just kept unpacking.

Life insurance ads? With the steaks? How morbid can you get?

Conversation starter cards! Would you go back to life before cell phones?

FINALLY, in the bottom of the box, we found a card.

Our slightly demented friend Dan was responsible. His card said, roughly, “I’ve watched these ads so many times, I’ve always been curious about this. But I didn’t really want to try it myself.”

I think it must’ve been an ad along these lines, but more tailored for insomniacs. And Dan was probably imagining our unpacking it would go something like this.

We live in a kind of special little food bubble here. It was odd to read the brochures touting the “grain-fed beef,” and we spent a lot of time squinting at the ingredients on that stuffed sole. And the brochures were like the kind I haven’t seen since I was a kid, when we’d get them tucked in the Parade magazine. By moving to New York, I guess I thought bragging-about-grain-fed beef and life-insurance ads in fake old-computer font just stopped existing…but they’re out there, of course, and now they were in our kitchen.

We ate it all. The beef was delicious. Good little reminder about why people started feeding cows grain in the first place. The stuffed sole was just fine, and the stuffed baked potatoes were really good. The only thing that was gross were the “gourmet franks”–yes, the only thing I’d been excited to see in the box when we unpacked it. Apparently, “gourmet” means “squishy, with no snappy skin.” Shudder.

But, bottom line, even after we’d eaten everything, the best thing in the box was what we found in the very bottom.

DRY ICE! Also something I haven’t seen since I was a kid.

Sugar Duck was very impressed.

We can genuinely say thank you, Dan, for this strange and wondrous gift pack that provided such entertainment in the dreariest time of year. We just might not wholeheartedly recommend it to others.

June 3, 2013

Two Amazing Cookbooks from Gaza and Iraq

“Heh, that’s not a very thick book,” a visitor to my house wisecracked when he saw my copy of The Gaza Kitchen laying out.

Woe to he who utters the untutored statement in my house! The guy got an earful of all the amazing things I had learned from this truly wonderful book: Gazans cook with dill and hot chili. They pound everything in clay mortar-and-pestles. There’s a hot debate over whether Gaza should even strive for food independence. And any Gaza cook worth her (it’s usually her, in this book) salt gives meat a quick boil first before doing anything else.

I see why this guy made this off-the-cuff lame joke. We in America don’t get a lot of information about Gaza, and certainly not about something so trivial as, oh, you know, food. This cookbook is a beautiful document of real daily Gaza life, which you never see. It has great photos of women at home, in their kitchens; of markets and ingredients; of street scenes. It talks about traditions, regional biases and yes, some political issues, which are of course sometimes impossible to extricate from our daily meals.

Every cuisine should be documented this way–not just through recipes, but with these generous biographies of the cooks, photos of techniques and ingredients, and discussions of food supply and how dishes are adapted due to non-food-related issues.

For instance: Gazans traditionally favors so-called “red tahini,” from toasted sesame seeds. But due to the blockade, it’s too expensive to make–so regular imported white tahini is used. I like to think that, thanks to the careful documentation of Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt, a detail like this won’t be lost in a few generations’ time. This cookbook brings a whole food tradition to light for those who haven’t known it, and it helps record it for those who cook it every day, whatever the circumstances.

Lecture over. Phew. Buy the book. If you don’t believe me, please note: Anthony Bourdain blurbed it!

***

Two weeks ago, I got to meet Nawal Nasrallah, the author of Delights from the Garden of Eden, an Iraqi cookbook. It was just reissued this year, by a new press that invested in gorgeous color photos and more. Nasrallah was visiting NYC, and wound up cooking dinner at a friend’s house.

I was all breathless and told Nasrallah I’d had her cookbook for almost ten years, and loved it so much. “So, what have you cooked from it?” she asked me.

Er. Um. The thing is: every time I’ve decided to use the cookbook, I get distracted by the amazing historical details. The Akkadian etymology of seemingly every Iraqi food word. Odd factoids (Sumerian women called their husbands “honey man”!). An hour later, my head is full of fabulous stories, but I still haven’t decided what to cook. So I make a salad.

The dinner I had with Nasrallah was just the starting point I needed: red rice with chickpeas, lamb shank with raisins and almonds and onions, baklava filled with a delicate soft cheese. Oh, and the original “moussaka,” which has very little to do with the Greek stuff.

Nasrallah isn’t just a collector of recipes–she’s a scholar and a translator and has burrowed down into medieval cookbooks and back to ancient texts to really root Iraq’s food in place. The detail in this book is hilarious and enriching.

Buy it. Even if you never cook from it. Though I strongly suggest you do. That baklava with cheese is dreamy…

July 9, 2012

RG at Home: Pie Pie Pie Pie Pie Pie!

Never mind that it’s currently too hot to roll out a pie crust: I am here to tell you that Millicent Souris’s new book, How to Build a Better Pie, will save your life.

I first made Millicent’s acquaintance at the late, great Queen’s Hideaway. Dessert was pies of a couple sorts. I ordered with less than enthusiasm. Restaurant pies are uniformly bad. If it’s a fancy place, the pastry chef has always had too much French training and makes a dense and crumbly tart shell thing. If it’s a lower-end place, they rarely believe in paying for butter, and figure a prefab crust is fine.

The Hideaway was different, though, because Millicent was in charge. She understands the rustic, American charm of a pie crust, and how it should be both flavorful and flaky–not just some sturdy container for filling. A pie is really about the crust.

I myself used to make a pretty good pie crust. But this was years ago, at a higher elevation, in a drier climate. My skillz never translated to sea level, and over the years, my pie crust has been hit and miss. I tried various gimmicks (fo-pro, vodka, you name it), but posts like this and this great post by Christina always reminded me I was overthinking it. I mean, if Choire Sicha can make a freakin’ pie crust, so can I.

Millicent was the best reminder–if you knew her, it would be crystal-clear that she’s not pulling any BS, dreamed-up-in-America’s-Test-Kitchen tricks.

So to have all her collected wisdom in a book, with photos of her actually making the crust…well, it’s a dream come true. And what’s extra-great are two things:

1) Millicent taught herself to bake pies. She didn’t come into it with expectations or decades of subconscious knowledge absorbed in her upbringing. This is not a fussy book, and the photo of the empty pie shell on the back of the book is the perfect illustration: a little lumpy and irregular, and clear where bits have been patched. Anti-Martha, pro-everyman/woman.

2) Pie is many things, and Millicent covers it all. Sweet pies, traditional pies (Shaker lemon pie, apple pie), more creative pies (sweet potato with sesame praline), savory pies, white-trash pies, English fish pies, that chocolate pie with the salt that made me dizzy at the Hideaway…

And finally: jailhouse pie.*

The last recipe in the book, Jailhouse Cheesecake, seems like a throwaway gimmick, with its “whipped topping” and “‘gram’ crackers.” But in fact it’s a gesture that reflects Millicent’s whole approach: generous, proud of ingenuity and pretty realist: “They make their own pie crust in jail. For shame if you cannot muster the strength.”

Actually, that last line shows off the third thing that really makes this book. Pie seems like a slightly frivolous thing–a novelty, a special-occasion food. But we all have warm associations with it, and it’s actually not that hard. And because Millicent is a wonderful writer, with attitude and wit, she conveys all this in a way that makes you want to get up and roll out the crust (never mind the 90-degree heat).

Baking a pie represents so much about a certain kind of cooking that’s essential to survival–it requires ingenuity and making do, but it’s also a generous gesture.

We don’t have to have children or enough money to name a hospital after ourselves or find a cure for something. We can just make food, and pass it along. That might be enough.

Amen, sister.

Millicent modeling pie at a Sunday Night Dinner

Buy this book. You won’t regret it.

*The jailhouse pie reminds me of a truly wonderful story I read in Gastronomica a few years back. Here’s a rough summary, as the original article, with pics, is a pay-only PDF.

July 2, 2012

RG at Home: Greek Frappe for Coffee Snobs

I love me a Greek frappe. When I explain this drink to people, though, it often gives them pause. That’s because the secret ingredient is Nescafe.

Miss June in the 2012 Frappe-Hotties Calendar. Turn-ons: home movies, nude beaches; turn-offs: poorly preserved film, weak straws

In today’s militant-foodie climate, saying you drink Nescafe is like saying you eat Rainbo bread, and not in a guilty-pleasure-reminds-of-my-latchkey-kid-days way. Still, I take perverse joy in bending Nescafe to my will, and I thank the Greeks forever for thinking up this brilliant drink, which is nothing more than a spoonful of instant coffee furiously mixed up with a little cold water, plus optional sugar and milk; ice and straw mandatory.

But, fine, I understand some people are too good for Nescafe. Or they hear the word and can only think of the evils Nestle has perpetrated in the developing world, which is a fair point.

And it’s those people I thought of yesterday when I discovered an amazing thing: you can use regular, real, good coffee to make a frappe!

Let me first explain why this took so long. In this house, we came to coffee snobbery late. In winter, we drank Turkish coffee. In summer, we drank frappes. We were at one with our Astoria ecosystem.

Our standard frappe kit: Greek-made Nescafe, sugar and battery-operated "frappediser", available at Greek groceries everywhere

Then fancy-pants coffee crept in. Next thing you know, we’re sucking down the shade-grown-whatever, in vast quantities, making vintage thermoses full every day.

In anticipation of hot weather, I ordered the Toddy, on the recommendation of the hilarious and talented Hilah Cooking. We now had fancy-pants cold coffee concentrate in the fridge. Great iced coffee, but no foam. And where is the fun of drinking cold coffee, if there’s no reason to stick a straw in it?

Yesterday, Day 2 of Toddy Era (TE), I stirred my coffee extra vigorously, and noticed a bunch of bubbles formed. Not foam, but…bubbles. I was surprised. I’d always assumed the reason Nescafe foamed up when you shook it with cold water was due to the Nescafe itself, maybe the blood of malnourished African babies they put it in or something.

But here was very good and perfectly ethical coffee forming bubbles too. I quick pulled out our frappe whizzer and went to work.

Frappediser in action

Et voila. The foam appeared. I dropped in ice cubes, more cold water and milk…and then stuck in a straw, and all was good.

Mr. July in the 2012 Frappe-Hotties Calendar

The problem is, of course, it doesn’t taste like a frappe. It tastes like real coffee. Which to someone new to this whole frappe game is not a problem. But to someone weaned on the authentic Greek taste, it’s a little hard to adjust.

Today was Day 2 of the Toddy Frappe Era (TFE), and it’s getting easier. The new fancy-coffee overlords may have won.

...Or have they?!

(Don’t let me put you off real Greek frappe, with Nescafe. It’s fantastic. BUT you have to use made-in-Greece Nescafe, which tastes far better than ‘Merican recipe, or at least a Euro-brand instant espresso. It does foam up a little bit better and sturdier, so you can do it just by shaking Nescafe, sugar and cold water really hard in a jar with a lid on–no frappediser needed.)

October 31, 2011

Danish Dinner

Like I said, I was having a little trouble grasping what Denmark was all about. But then I met up with my friend S—, who helped it seem like a real, distinct place to me.

“Tonight we’re going to have a typical Danish dinner,” she said. “It’s what everyone eats for Christmas, and of course when very important guests come!”

S— knows me well. She’d held off on shopping so that I could go to the supermarket and gawk at everything. The first thing she pointed out to me were these little crumbly things you put on top of pate for a smorrebrod.

Fat in two forms.

“Next to that,” she said, “is pork fat. Also for bread.”

And then she pointed out the pork cracklings. “But these are the bad ones. We need the fresh ones.”

The fresh ones.

And then she bought the dinner: a giant pork loin-and-rib roast, with the skin still on and sliced thin–imagine a loaf of bread that has only been sliced down for the top inch.

So, it appeared that the No. 1 way in which Denmark distinguishes itself from its neighbors is through its love of pork. Right on.

After we got a bottle of wine from the very cheerful man running wine tastings–in the supermarket, in his handsome leather butcher’s apron…

The shopping cart is full of wine glasses.

…we headed back home. Side dishes for the pork roast were red cabbage (sweetened with red-currant syrup) and potatoes. For dessert, a kind of cake that S—‘s son described as something only old ladies–and he–made.

Now, I’m going to tell you about this roast in detail, so that I don’t forget. I swear I will coerce a butcher into getting me such a roast at home, but it’s tricky, as they typically have already cut the skin off.

The key thing, S— says, is to salt the skin and fat very well, and to rub the salt down in between the fat slices.

Then you stick it in the oven on high heat, and after about 15 minutes, you start giving it the eye. You don’t want the cracklings to burn.

Your hands might be shaking with the excitement of watching the cracklings, so that you might take a kind of bad photo.

As soon as the skin properly crackles–it’s hard and a little bubbly–you cover it in foil and let the roast finish cooking.

If the crackling hasn’t behaved properly and crackled, but you had to cover it anyway because it was getting too dark, you can stick it up under the broiler at the end. This is what we did. Last-ditch effort, S— says, is to slice the fat and skin off and do it in the broiler separately, but no one really wants that.

Then you whip up a little gravy–or, as S— is wise to do, a lot of gravy, using all the juices from the roasting pan. And you boil the potatoes. And you uncover the cabbage that’s been simmering there with its currant syrup, vinegar and a pinch of sugar that you maybe stole from the coffee joint earlier in the day.

And then you slice up the roast and eat it.

Swoon.

And then, after you’ve been coerced into eating more of the crackling than is rational, because, as S— warns, it’s no good the next day, and you will be very, very sad if you try to eat it the next day and know you should’ve just eaten it the night before when it was still hot and crispy…

After all that, you somehow manage to eat a slice of the kiksekage, the old-lady cake that’s just a genius kind of ice-box cake using crispy vanilla biscuits and chocolate ganache.

Danish old ladies--and well-behaved teenage sons--rock.

And then you roll into bed. And just as S— promises, you sweat quite a bit, due to your body working hard to digest all the fat. Presto–you wake up feeling Danish. And ready for a breakfast of chocolate slabs on poppyseed bread.

Again, the hands trembling with excitement. Or just pork-detox tremors.

September 12, 2011

How I Learned to Cook, long-lost Part 3—or, Time to make the doughnuts

I haven’t written about my home cooking in many months, and probably won’t again for a while (since I won’t be home till January, but that’s another story). But as you’ll see, this doughnut thing—I need to write about it for closure.

Years ago, I wrote a couple of posts about how I learned to cook (here and here), and had always meant to write a third one about Cook’s Illustrated.

Cook’s Illustrated is the world’s most boring magazine. But damn, its plodding, exhaustive articles have taught me so much. I first subscribed in 1996, when I was in grad school. And except for a couple years in the middle when I got disgusted by how low-brow the recipes had gotten (school-lunch-style tacos), the magazine has shown up at my door every two months since.

Turns out I could’ve quit early on, because the March/April 1997 issue has been the single handiest one ever. It covered Irish soda bread, corned beef, chicken and dumplings, crepes and quick-braised lamb shoulder chops. This last thing I lived on, with endless variations, for the first few years of freelancing in New York, and the general techniques behind all of these recipes have been essential.

So retro!

Oh, and it has a killer recipe for key lime pie. I use it to this day. As you can see from the nasty stickiness all over the pages.

Mmm, sticky.

The one thing in the issue I have never cooked is the buttermilk doughnuts. Every year or so I have occasion to pick up this issue, and I always pass the doughnut article with regret. Sure, I could whip up 15 doughnuts in 45 minutes—but when would I ever have occasion to do that? I’m not shy about deep-frying, but it has to be a special occasion, and there are pretty much never special occasions before noon in my life.

But then we got this weather. Hurricane Irene, hell-bent on the eastern seaboard, and Peter and I housebound for the whole weekend. Our friend Katie had just come back from Maine with two enormous tubs of wild blueberries she’d harvested. We froze one and devoured the other almost, and there were about two handfuls of berries that needed to be eaten, stat.

And our fridge happened to be full of lard that needed to be kicked before we left. Who leaves a housesitter with a quart of lard and nothing else?

I was going to try to avoid saying this, but what the hell: It was the perfect storm of downtime, odd special occasion and ingredients just begging to be used.

As promised, the recipe was indeed easy. I made half the quantity, because it wasn’t special occasion enough to make myself violently ill by eating 10 doughnuts or so by myself, which I just might, given the opportunity. We got a yield of about eight doughnuts, which was fine by us.

They fried up beautifully and popped to the surface of the fat, just like they’re supposed to. We fried in lard, despite Cook’s Illustrated‘s warnings: Its panel decided lard’s flavor was “too meaty”—killjoys! This article was from 1997, remember, so the Cook’s Ill crew unapologetically embraced Crisco as the optimal frying medium, while sneering at lard for its unhealthiness as well.

(Let the record show that I have been on the side of lard since 1972.)

In fact, lard worked wonderfully, and the abstractly meaty flavor made these the perfect brunch doughnut, solving that timeless dilemma of sweet or savory.

I also made up a little glaze—milk and cornstarch—and drizzled it over. The problem with this glaze is that

1) I have not seen the Krispy Kreme glaze waterfall with my own eyes in years, so I couldn’t remember what viscosity I was shooting for, and
2) to get the proper crunch with the glaze, you have to give it time to harden up.

But there was no time! These doughnuts had to be rushed to our mouths instantly! My god—how could that glaze not understand?

No, we don't own a doughnut cutter. Why do you ask?

I think all we ate that day until about 9pm, when the hurricane was pretty thoroughly gone and the sun had set in churning orange clouds, was blueberry doughnuts.

2 P.M.

3 P.M.

During the hurricane, our power didn’t go out, our basement didn’t flood, no trees fell down on our house. In fact, we slept right through the storm. Frankly, it was a tiny bit of a letdown—but these doughnuts made the day special.

Blueberry Buttermilk Doughnuts to Weather a Storm
Adapted from Cook’s Illustrated
Makes about 8 doughnuts

I used cake flour because that’s all we had, but I think this made the doughnuts actually a little too tender and cakey. If you’re not making a glaze, then add more sugar to the recipe–it’s not a very sweet doughnut.

1 3/4 cups flour (2 cups if you’re using cake flour)
Large handful wild (small) blueberries)
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp fresh grated nutmeg
Zest from one lemon
1/3 cup buttermilk*
2 T butter, melted
1 egg
Lard for frying

Topping:
Confectioners sugar
Milk
Or
Cinnamon
Sugar

Toss the blueberries with a couple of tablespoons of flour just to coat; set aside. Mix all the remaining dry ingredients together.

Mix egg, buttermilk and melted butter together, then pour this into the dry ingredients and mix well. You’ll end up with this very gloopy batter. You might have to add some more flour to get something you can cut into doughnut shapes.

Very heavily flour a cutting board or counter, then lay the batter/dough out. Scatter flour over the top. Gently nudge it into a round about half an inch thick. (Cook’s Ill says to use a rolling pin, but I can’t see how this wouldn’t end in tears, with all the dough stuck to it.) Use a glass with a floured rim to cut out rounds, then use something extra-small to cut out the holes.

Heat up your lard to about 375, and then carefully slide your little doughnuts into the hot fat. Flip once, after a bit less than a minute. They pop to the surface very nicely when cooked through. Fish them out and lay them on paper towels to dry.

For the glaze, combine confectioners sugar and milk till you have a reasonably thick but pourable mix. Drizzle this over the doughnuts, and wait for it to harden if you can. Or just go with cinnamon sugar–this would go nicely with the lemon zest and the blueberries.

*You know the fake buttermilk trick, right? Squeeze about a teaspoon of lemon juice in regular milk, and then let it sit for about 10 minutes, until the mixture thickens up.

December 31, 2010

Top 10 Reasons Not to Complain about 2010

A lot of people say, “Wow, Zora—you have so much going on! Food! Travel! Your job is so fabulous!”

It’s true–there’s a little fabulousness. But what’s really going on is the plight of all freelancers: Every week, I try 80 different things. If I’m lucky, one of them sticks maybe once a month. Because the success rate is so low, it’s hard to feel I accomplished anything. So please allow me a moment to consolidate the high points of this year—I found it surprisingly satisfying when I did it last winter.

1. I took a little time to enjoy the beach in Mexico. Tacking on just four more days than usual to my last research trip, in November, gave me a surprising amount of breathing room. Near the end, I actually spent the better part of a couple of days hanging out at the beach in Cozumel and snorkeling with my dad. Too bad those days were overcast and drizzly. But that in itself was educational—I’d forgotten what it was like to have a trip depend on weather, because I have to work no matter what. But sun is what 90 percent of the people who visit the Mexican Caribbean are counting on.

(1b. BTW, lowlight of the year: Totally failing to learn to scuba dive. My plan was to take my course in NYC, then do certification dives in Cozumel. But I got so panicked and agitated in NYC that I never even got my paperwork to move on. I spent two weeks gnashing my teeth at my impatient instructor, and I have a million reasons for thinking this sport is not for me: expensive, tons of gear, requires a buddy, other divers, why would I go down deep where all the color goes away, etc. But it’s entirely possible I’m just rationalizing.)

2. I really got to like Twitter. Not much of an accomplishment, but it has been fun to go from feeling baffled and overwhelmed by something to seeing it as a tool and really connecting with a few excellent people through it.

3. I finally wrote down why I like Cancun. Everyone thinks I’m nuts when I say I love Cancun. I finally wrote my defense of the place. I’m not necessarily saying that you, with your only-two-weeks-of-vacation per year, should choose it above all other options. But you shouldn’t slag it off either. And it’s cool to see other travel writers encouraging the “love the one you’re with” approach I took to Cancun. Matt Gross’s “Getting Lost” column in The New York Times (great article on Chongqing), and Afar’s “Spin the Globe” stories are especially inspiring.

4. I finally wrote down all the specific things I like in Cancun, in an iPhone app. After eight years of writing guidebooks according to extremely precise instructions, for as broad an audience as possible, I can’t tell you how fun it was to write Cool Cancun & Isla Mujeres. I got to choose the subject, I wrote in my exact style, for exactly the people I imagine will use it, and I didn’t have to worry about word count or other directives. And when something changes, I can update it immediately, instead of three years later. Totally gratifying. I’m not predicting the death of the printed guidebook anytime soon. But I’m pleased to see how well smartphone apps can share info, and I’m proud to have a little hand in it.

5. Blog posts here have gotten less frequent. Wait, there’s a positive spin! I’ve had a ton of real, paid writing work this year, so too busy to blog. But also, I go back and look at those old posts, and they’re freakin’ epic. I don’t know if I’d read them today. Shorter posts, more photos–I kinda like it. I hope you do too. (This coming month, I will have been blogging for six years. I feel ancient.)

6. Rick Bayless said he liked my cookbook! I met him in January in Bangkok. Thanks to the aforementioned Twitter, I was able to introduce myself as the person who’d commented on his tweet on why Americans aren’t willing to pay big bucks for Mexican food. And then Peter (thank god for Peter!) mentioned I’d co-written Forking Fantastic!, and El Rey de Manteca said, “Oh! I know your book! I loved it. I gave it to my publishers to show them that entertaining books don’t have to be all slick and glossy and have pictures of the chef everywhere.”

I can’t help but notice that Fiesta at Rick’s is pretty glossy after all (and happens to have a killer recipe for this stuff called salsa negra–check it!), while FF! is probably teetering at the edge of the remainder bin. I am proud not only that Bayless liked the book, but so did Anthony Bourdain and Jamie Oliver—and, more important, scores of people who’ve told me it has inspired them to cook. Which is what I hoped all along.

7. I have a place to hang a hammock. Not a personal accomplishment at all, but the process went so smoothly, it was actually life-affirming. We hired two men named Rocco, and they carried out our architect’s plan, and now we have a roof deck, a place to lounge and watch the train go by. There are some nice plants up there, and a fig tree that one Rocco gave to us. And the colors are “very Miami,” according to the green-roof dude. But hey, a little Miami in Queens almost makes sense, just like all the other aesthetic choices here.

Overall, though, I’d say we’re going for a retro junkyard vibe, against the better wishes of our architect. Yeah, that’s an ice chest on the right.

8. I got stuck in Amsterdam. Dude, hasn’t everyone? But really—this was the volcano talking. That thing blew near the end of my research trip, and I got held over for another week. (See how I’ve avoided mentioning the name of the volcano, just so I won’t have to go look up how to spell it?)

I seem to have a knack (so far, don’t jinx me, knock on wood, alhamdulillah, etc) for apparent travel disasters turning into non-events. In this case, “disaster” was even a godsend. I had extra time to research and write. And I met some nice guys who were also stuck there, and who were visiting Amsterdam for the first time, which reminded me of what that was like. Oh, and travel insurance paid for everything, including nights in some really nice hotels. A thousand thanks to whatever arranged all that.

From Amsterdam…the second installment

9. I bought a new camera. Overcame decision paralysis and bought myself a DSLR. Now I just have to figure out how to use it.

10. I made it to Asia. Now I just have to go back. Tickets are booked for January 5. In coach (no magical biz-class “mistake fare” this time). I’ll just focus on how happy I was at this food court in Bangkok. For 21 hours of limited recline.

Cheers to 2011, and best of luck with all your travels and new projects in the coming year! What were your greatest hits of 2010?

February 8, 2010

Thailand, Digested: Bonus Bug Round

There’s a lot of weird stuff to eat in Asia: dogs, snakes, sketchy-looking eggs. And bugs.

I like food. I’ll taste almost anything. But I refuse to play the macho “what’s the weirdest thing you ever ate” game, and if I’m just not hungry, well…I’m just not hungry.

That’s what happened to Peter and me the day we finally saw bugs for sale. We had just spent several hours grazing heavily at Chatuchak and Or Tor Kor markets. First, we had some strawberries:

Then we had some fried chicken:

Then we went to Or Tor Kor and ate all kinds of beautiful fruit. We didn’t have any durian, though, partially because they looked so menacing:

Straight out of a sci-fi film. Imagine the stinky but strangely custardy aliens that would burst forth!

Anyway, we were finally trudging back to the SkyTrain when we passed the cart selling bugs. They were all deep-fried and covered in salt, and you could mix and match about five different varieties. Peter stopped. “Bugs?” he asked, halfheartedly. “Enh,” I answered, weakly. It was 3pm–naptime–and 95 degrees. We kept walking.

“I thought you’d be the one to talk me into it!” Peter said, with a shade of disappointment in his voice.

“Sorry–I’m stuffed,” I sighed. I did feel a little regretful.

Not long after we got home to New York, we invited a few people over for a bonanza Thai dinner. Peter pedaled off to the Thai grocery in the next neighborhood over. He came back with durian chips, dried shrimp, lemongrass, perky little ‘mouse-shit’ chilis…and frozen bugs.

They were labeled “crickets,” but lord help me if I ever see a live cricket that big. These crickets had full-on biceps and quadriceps. Even through the plastic wrap, I could see the texture in their wings.

To make them extra unappealing, they were labeled “fish bait”–to convince the FDA that no nutritional labeling was required. I gulped.

“How do we cook them?” Peter asked.

I told Peter that was his department, and tried to put the whole thing out of my head.

Fast-forward to dinnertime. A crowd of hungry friends is in the living room, eating crispy spring rolls. The fat is still hot in the wok.

“I’m gonna go ahead and cook these,” Peter said to me, “but I honestly don’t think I’ll be able to eat them.”

They sizzled and popped in the frying oil, and came out looking even more creepy and glossy. Peter sprinkled them with salt and sugar and whisked the plate out to the coffee table.

There was a short pause, a collective moment of anxiety, and then our friend Katie shrugged and popped one in her mouth.

“Huh, they’re good,” she said, shrugging again.

Well played, Ms. Trainor. Well played. Now of course we all felt like idiots and had to dig in. I eyeballed mine. His glossy head and torso looked like they would explode with goo when I bit in. I closed my eyes and chomped off the back half of the cricket.

In a single instant, the cricket transformed from horrifying over-large bug to…tasty bar snack. It was crispy and salty and would go great with a beer. And it was nearly hollow–any inner goo had been cooked away in the deep fryer.

As I marveled at the capacity of the human brain to transform everything into food, I chewed. And chewed. And chewed. I started to gag–I could feel the cricket’s hairy little legs scraping around in my mouth. They refused to succumb to my teeth, the bastards. I finally had to spit a nasty wad of gray, gritty stuff out into the trash. I was glad I wasn’t doing this on a Bangkok street.

About this time, I heard Katie–who is known for her ability to eat a chicken leg clean down to the bone–say from the other room, “Oh, yeah–they’re a little better if you pull the legs off first.”

I didn’t try another. But a couple people, including Peter, ate two or three. They were a hit. And now I know: next time I’ll rip the legs off. Because I’m an omnivore with an incredible capacity for rationalizing what I’m eating…but my teeth are not that powerful.