It ain't easy

Every time Jeff and I have anyone over to our house, I say to myself:  This is the one.  This party is going to be logistically easy and stress-free, and I'm just going to lay back and enjoy it.  I will not wake up at 8 AM for this party.  I don't need to bake fresh chocolate chip cookies halfway through this party; I don't need to stock the pantry with five kinds of brown liquor for the hot toddies; I don't need to shop at four separate grocery stores.  I will pare this party down to its barest essentials.  I will slice things off this party until it's just a fun-loving skeleton.

Fast forward to noon on Memorial Day this year and Jeff is slowly smoking two dozen chicken thighs on our little inherited Weber grill, and I've been up for five hours cutting up fruit for the vanilla-nectarine sangria.  You know, it was easier than other recent events at our house have been.  Unlike Labor Day, I didn't make twelve square feet of corn bread.  Unlike Christmas, I didn't have three sheets of compost cookies hanging out in the freezer overnight.  And unlike Thanksgiving--well, unlike Thanksgiving.

This gathering was really almost impromptu, conceived over a pig roast just a week prior, so we kept the guest list down to a mere 20 people.  Of course, because my job is scaling up chemical processes, throwing a small-scale barbecue just seemed like an invitation to make things that don't scale up well, like grilled focaccia with morels and green garlic.  Grilling bread is totally my new thing--at least, until summer hits San Francisco and it's too cold to grill.  I know what you're thinking:  no, it doesn't fall through the grate.  And yes, it is great.

Among the too-many things we made, though, this potato salad was definitely the lifesaver.  A huge cold dish that's easy to prepare and ready to go directly from the fridge, as a party dish it's hard to think of anything better.  While I make do make quite a three-bean salad, it's this potato salad that's going to be making a repeat appearance at every future barbecue from now until the next potato blight.

Inspired by Heidi's incredibly complicated salt and vinegar potatoes, which we made on the grill just a week prior and inexplicably decided to forgo at this barbecue, this salad hits just the right notes of sharp tang and cooling herbaceousness to cut through any heavy barbecue dish that you might make.  It's just about perfect as a side dish, and hearty enough to fill up any vegans that stop by too.

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Vinegary potato salad

serves 15-20 as a side

5 pounds yukon gold potatoes

white vinegar (up to 1 quart)

kosher salt

white sugar

1 bunch (5-6) scallions

2 tbsp mustard seeds (yellow or brown; I used a 50:50 mix)

1/2 cup olive oil

1 bunch dill, picked or chopped into small fronds

Slice the potatoes lengthwise into 1/4 - 1/2-inch thick slices.  Place in a large pot and cover with a mixture of half white vinegar and half water (depending on the shape of your pot and potatoes, you may need quite a bit of vinegar).  Add a few very heavy pinches of salt to the water.  Bring the water to a simmer and cook the potatoes in barely simmering water until just tender.  Be careful not to let the water boil too heavily, or the potatoes could disintegrate.  Drain the potatoes in a colander and set them aside.

Meanwhile, slice the scallions very fine and toss with a mix of kosher salt (1 tbsp) and sugar (1 tsp) to taste.  Set aside and let marinate.

Toast the mustard seeds in a skillet with no oil over high heat until they just begin to pop (about 10-20 seconds), then remove the skillet from the heat and add the olive oil to the skillet.  Set aside and let infuse.

Once the potatoes have cooled completely, finish making the salad.  If the scallions have exuded any liquid, mix it in with the mustard-seed-infused olive oil.  Toss the scallions in with the potatoes, then pour the olive oil over the salad and toss to combine.  Top with dill to taste, then toss again.

Nowadays

It's really amazing to me that in one of the first entries I wrote on this blog, I quoted the song When You Smile, an ode to coalescence written by The Flaming Lips: "all of the subatomic pieces come together and unfold themselves in a second; every single molecule is right." Because, really, when I started this food blog three years ago, my life was a goddamn mess, and I was only writing about food in order to prove to myself that I could exert control over at least some small aspect of it (are there other pretexts under which food blogs are started?).

Everything has been going really well lately. Everything actually is coalescing. Everything actually is coming together--in my career and in my apartment and in the knitting of my bones.  Of course, I've been hit by enough cars in the past three months to know that I shouldn't take anything for granted. I work at a startup that's situated on landfill, so I could theoretically wake up tomorrow and find that my employer has sunk either into bankruptcy or into the San Francisco Bay. So I just wake up early, and I work hard, and I hope that things will keep going well, and I keep emergency rations in my closet, and I watch for illegal right turns. It's impossible to tell how long I'll be able to keep this up--but, oh, it's heaven nowadays.



Cooking has also felt different lately. I actually can't remember the last time I cooked something that didn't turn out well. Even better, I'm starting to feel a new sort of fluency in the kitchen. I used to really make a plan before I started in on a new recipe. Now I just sort of go by instinct and muscle memory, relying on a sense of how ingredients work and how to put them together.  I'm not sure exactly what happened--maybe I leveled up in a few cooking techniques during my months of gainful unemployment, or maybe an absence of other distractions in my life has freed up some mental bandwidth for working in the kitchen. Regardless, I've got a new sense of freedom when I'm cooking, and it's kind of playing well into the general mood that I've got going on in my life.



I made this morel pot pie for a casual dinner party that Jeff and I hosted on the last Monday of May as an excuse to invite over a pun-loving friend for Me-morel Day (are there other pretexts under which dinner parties are hosted?). I wrote down the recipe over a month ago, and I've spent the past few weeks stuck trying to think of something else to say about it. Now it's July, it's a new great American holiday, and we're in the middle of a heat wave all across the country, so morels aren't really thriving anymore. How did it get to be summer? How am I seeing cherry tomatoes and cucumbers already? I had been looking forward to posting about spring and fava beans and rebirth, poached eggs and corpse revivers. I watched for the longest day of the year and then missed it.

So I got behind. So what? There will be more asparagus next year, more bean salads to describe in excruciating detail, more grapefruits and fresh peas in April, more artichokes to contemplate. For today, nothing says America like pot pie. And maybe nothing describes my life better than this recipe for one.

--

Morel pot pie

serves 4-6, with a salad

for the pie crust

2 1/2 sticks of butter (10 oz, 20 tbsp)

2 1/2 cups flour (18 oz)

1 tbsp salt

about 1 cup ice water

for the pie

5 tbsp butter

3 tbsp flour

3 cups milk

1 cup fresh peas, shelled (from about 2 pounds of English pea pods)

1 1/2 pounds fingerling potatoes, cut into 1-inch chunks

1/4 pound morel mushrooms, washed well

1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves, plus a few extra sprigs

2 tbsp dry vermouth

1 bay leaf

1 egg, beaten

peanut oil

kosher salt

black pepper

Make the pie crust. Cut the butter into small pieces (40 or so) and chill it in the freezer for 5-10 minutes while you measure out the flour and salt into the bowl of a food processor fitted with the blade attachment. Add the butter to the food processor and pulse 5-10 times, until the mixture resembles sand with a few larger pebbles in it.  Sprinkle 10 tbsp (about 2/3 cup) ice water over the mixture and pulse 3-4 times, until the mixture starts to pull away from the sides of the bowl in small chunks. If it's not pulling away after a few pulses, drizzle a little more water in, 1 tbsp at a time, and pulse again.

If you don't have a food processor, you can accomplish these initial steps by hand. Chill everything--including the flour and the mixing bowl it's in. Then add the butter to the flour mixture, and mix by rubbing chunks of butter together with the flour between your hands, letting them fall back into the bowl, until you get the sandy-pebbly texture described above. Drizzle in the water and mix with a spatula.

When the mixture is just starting to hold together, turn it out onto a floured cutting board and gather it together into a single mass of dough. Cut the dough into 6 pieces, then gently flatten each piece on the cutting board. Stack the flattened pieces together, then wrap tightly in plastic wrap and chill for at least 30 minutes, or overnight.

Blanch the peas. Bring a medium pot of water to a rolling boil, add a few tablespoons of salt, and add the peas. Cook for 30-90 seconds, until bright green and tender. Pour through a strainer and run cold water over the peas until completely cool. Store in the refrigerator.

Boil the potatoes. Add the potatoes to a pot filled with cold water. Add a few tablespoons of salt, a few black peppercorns, the bay leaf, and the thyme sprigs. Bring to a gentle boil over medium-high heat and then reduce the heat to low. Cook over low heat for 10-20 minutes, until the potatoes are tender. Strain the potatoes and run cold water over them until cool. Store in the refrigerator.

About 2 hours before you're ready to eat, remove the pie crust from the refrigerator.  

Make the bechamel. Warm 3 cups of milk over low heat on the stove. Melt 3 tbsp butter over low heat in a pot with a heavy bottom. Add 3 tbsp flour and stir gently, cooking over low heat for about a minute just until a paste forms. To this roux, add the warm milk, one cup at a time, whisking until completely incorporated after each addition.  Season with salt, black pepper and half a tablespoon of thyme.

Cook the morels. Heat 2 tbsp peanut oil in a heavy skillet over high heat until fluid but not smoking. Add the mushrooms. Let the mushrooms sit without stirring until browned on one side, about 2 minutes, then stir to dislodge the morels and cook another 2 minutes until the second side is browned. Reduce the heat to low and add 2 tbsp butter and the dry vermouth. Stir gently, until the morels are lightly glazed with butter. Season with half a tablespoon of thyme, several pinches of salt, and black pepper.

Finish the pie. Preheat the oven to 375. Divide the dough into two balls of equal size.  Roll out each ball of dough on a floured surface until it's slightly larger than your pie plate. Place one of these crusts in the bottom of the pie place. Add half of the peas, potatoes, and morels, and distribute evenly in the pie plate. Spread half of the bechamel sauce over the vegetables. Repeat with the remaining vegetables and bechamel. Add the top crust and seal the pie by pressing the crusts together, moistening the bottom crust with a little water if necessary. Trim off any excess crust. Brush beaten egg all over the top of the pie and cut a small hole in the center. Bake the pie until the crust is completely browned, about 45-60 min.

Thanks again!

So Thanksgiving has come and gone.  I think I might scale back on the menu next year.  The cooking actually went off without a hitch.  Jeff and I started on Sunday afternoon with the chicken liver mousse, and continued working on weekday evenings, leading up to a marathon starting at 9 AM on Thursday.  With all the work we did in advance, there really weren't any flying drumsticks or burning casseroles at dinner, and we had it served within 15 minutes of schedule.  It was probably my proudest achievement of the year 2012.  I might put it on my resume.

Still, there were a couple moments, like when I was saving a PDF copy of the menu to print on cardstock, or churning the second of a trio of ice creams, or playing Tetris with a cascade of jars and tupperware on the top shelf of our refrigerator, when I thought--OK, this might be a little gratuitous.  Twenty-four separate recipes.  Maybe we'll cut that down to eighteen next year.  Or thirteen for '13.  Who knows?  Anyway, my recipe post from last year was actually quite a help in planning, so I thought I'd do another one.  Regardless of how many dishes come out of the kitchen, I'm sure that I'll be glad to have this around.  Maybe you will too.

--

Crudites included lightly cooked broccolini, watermelon radishes, colorful carrots, and celery, served with french onion dip (2/3 cup mayo, 1/3 cup sour cream, 4 deeply caramelized onions) and bleu cheese dip (1/3 cup mayo, 2/3 cup sour cream, crumbled bleu cheese, chives, and black pepper).

Chicken liver mousse, recipe from Frances, was served with apple butter from last year (don't tell anyone--apparently 17 pounds lasts longer than I thought) and some of Heidi's oatmeal crackers rolled out to thickness 6.  Making crackers is never, never as simple of an undertaking as you think it's going to be when you get started.  Don't let anybody ever tell you that it's easy.

Beet-pickled eggs weren't originally going to be on the menu, but after a request from my friend Greg, who tweets about #color every other day, I decided to bring them out again.  And it's fine, because hard-boiling eggs is something that I could stand to be better at doing, anyway.  I had to sacrifice a few to test doneness, but the lucky survivors weren't too hard to peel or pickle (2/3 red beet cooking liquid, 1/3 white vinegar, salt and sugar to taste).

Somehow I got attached to the idea of serving guests cocktails as soon as they walked in the door, and boulevardiers are my new favorite cocktail.  It's 2 parts rye whiskey, 1 part Campari, and 1 part sweet vermouth.  I learned from Serious Eats that to make a cocktail for a crowd, you can make up 1/4 of the total volume with water, then stick it in the freezer to chill (don't forget to remove it before serving, to prevent ice chips).  So I came up with 24 oz rye, 12 oz Campari, 12 oz vermouth, and 16 oz water.  I can do math!

Roast duck was roasted according to this method, and was a big hit, although I thought the breast meat came out a little overcooked.  If I did it again, I might remove one of the breast-side-up roastings, or try an even lower temperature.  There's a dozen ways to roast a duck on the internet, but I was too lazy to stage a dip into boiling water.  This method did seem to cut down on splattering fat, and crisped up the skin nicely.

Cranberry sauce was a 12-ounce bag of cranberries, a cup of sugar, the zest and juice of an orange, a one-inch piece of ginger, two cinnamon sticks, and five pods of star anise.  Remember how many whole spices you put in, so you can fish them out later.

I think everyone who knows me knows that I have a special fondness for mashed potatoes, which grew even fonder this year thanks to the food mill that Sam's Mom bought me after reading the linked blog entry.  Unlike last year, I didn't have to spend 90 minutes pushing them through a strainer--more like 90 seconds cranking them through the grating.  So that was about 60 times more pleasant.  To reheat, Jeff and I tag-teamed them in the microwave, which worked really well.  I probably didn't even need to add the last cup of cream.  I probably did need to make more than five pounds, because there weren't any left over.

Leek bread pudding, just like last year, was from Ad Hoc At Home, as adapted here.  We made it two days in advance, covered it in duck drippings, and baked again at 350 to heat through before serving.  Marvelous.

Cauliflower gratin is Jeff's thing, from Martha's recipe, with three different colors of cauliflower, parmesan cheese, and chestnuts.  Also, six cups of cream.  Shockingly, it is delicious.

Last year I went to the extra trouble of blanching my brussels sprouts before tossing them in a hot oven to finish, but the water trapped between the leaves gave a kind of mushy result with a broken sauce.  This year, I just made a miso brown butter (8 tbsp butter, browned, and 2 tbsp miso).  As soon as the ducks came out of the oven, I tossed about 2 1/2 pounds of halved brussels sprouts with this melted butter in a cast-iron skillet and stuck it under the broiler.  I gave it a shake every few minutes, and after 6-10 minutes, the sprouts had just a bit of char, and were glazed perfectly with the butter.  This is it.

A few pounds of multicolored carrots were tossed with duck fat, salt, and a sprinkle of powdered cumin, then roasted until tender.  I toasted about a cup of uncooked wild rice in a little extra duck fat and then boiled it, with a sprig of thyme.  Then I mixed the rice and carrots together with some chopped dates and cumin seeds.  To serve, I warmed it through in a 350-degree oven.  It's based on a dish from the Eleven Madison Park cookbook.  It didn't come with a meyer lemon puree or a complimentary clambake, but it was quite good, and I was proud of the adaptation.

I love the recipe for glazed romano beans with mint from Ad Hoc At Home, especially with a handful of roasted pumpkin seeds tossed in, but the timing is just a little bit tricky as part of a large meal.  The buttery glaze doesn't keep well at all, so you have to whip it up five minutes before you serve.  If you heat the romano beans in it too long, they won't be green.  If you don't heat them enough, the butter will congeal on them.  This might not make the cut again.

Fennel is one of my favorite flavors in the world, and I wanted a raw vegetable to cut the richness of the rest of the meal, so I sliced two bulbs very thin and tossed them with the zest of juice and a lemon and a little salt.  Just before serving, I minced a handful of parsley leaves and tossed those in too.

Jeff had gotten dozens upon dozens of beets in his most recent farmbag, and I already had to make up a red pickling liquid, so I decided to also make a beet salad.  I boiled some red, yellow, and pink chiogga beets in separate pots of water, cubed them, and kept them separate until dinner.  Then Jeff tossed them with some apple cider vinegar, minced horseradish, and a few handfuls of arugula.  Though kind of an afterthought in my dinner plan, it came out just right, and it was another refreshing dish amidst the (literal) quarts of cream on the table.

I made some cornbread from Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa at Home, and holy crap is that a good recipe.  The recipe calls for hot peppers and scallions, and just because I knew Jeffrey would approve,  I chopped up 8 oz of cream cheese and added that to the batter too.  Luckily, it was sitting in a weird place, so nobody took seconds, and I had it for breakfast through Tuesday.

This roasted fruit crostata is one of my favorites and makes an appearance every holiday.  I double the quantity of fruit, just so it's not too crusty.

I did make up an extra half-batch of crust from the crostata and use it as the base for Paula Deen's sweet potato pie.  It was good, but to my palate it was eclipsed by a butternut squash pie that my friend Chelsea brought, which was even more packed with deep vegetable flavor.  Anyway, they were both better than pumpkin pie.

I made some fruit salad from six persimmons, a red and a yellow grapefruit, and a big pomegranate.  Just before serving, I tossed a few spoonfuls of vanilla sugar over the top and mixed it up.  The best part was that all the fruit could be cut up in advance, with no danger of oxidizing and turning brown.  The last thing you want to do is take a knife to pare a pear after a few glasses of pinot noir.

And that brings us to ice creams, three different ones, all inspired by The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz.  I made peanut butter rosemary by steeping three big sprigs of rosemary in cream before making his peanut butter ice cream recipe.  Cinnamon was by-the-book, but I found it a bit lacking in spice up-front, so I added in a few teaspoons of powdered cinnamon to the base.  And celery vanilla was his recipe for green pea ice cream, with celery instead of peas, and some vanilla steeped into the cream.  I blanched and pureed all the green parts from a bunch of celery so the final ice cream was green, and I steeped the rest of the bunch in the cream to enhance the celery flavor.  I think about three bites were eaten in total, but I still love her.

Powers of two

It's funny, because I'm a huge gossip, and I don't think anyone would say that I have a poker face, but somehow I've gotten pretty good at throwing surprise parties.  It's fun.  There are little tricks, like making sure that the e-mails you send out have innocuous titles.  It's like a puzzle you have to fit together.  With whom do you conspire?  Where do you hold the party?  How do you keep the guest of honor out of there until the awaited hour?  When do you bake the cake?  Where do you store everything?  How do you decorate?  It's like the game of Clue, except you're the murderer.

Jeff has the easiest birthday to remember, at least from the perspective of an MIT alumnus, so it seems to me almost criminal not to celebrate it (despite his many protests every year).  And apparently, he's also one of the easiest people to target with a surprise party, because he has so many friends who immediately climbed on board with my ridiculous-sounding idea of a Surprise Macaroni-and-Cheese Bakeoff.  That's right.  OK friends, all you need to do to celebrate Jeff's birthday is spend your entire weekend baking mac 'n' cheese, then show up at my house between 3 PM and 5 PM on Sunday afternoon.  To be honest, I laid out some pretty specific instructions.  But Jeff's friendship is so valuable that no fewer than 20 people were convinced to take part!  Maybe they knew that if they didn't comply, I'd be waiting in the conservatory with a lead pipe.

With the rest of the plans underway, and a spare set of keys surreptitiously handed off to Chelsea, all that was necessary was to get Jeff out of the house for a few hours. That was probably the easiest part--hey, on Sunday afternoon let's go get cocktails at 15 Romolo.  Even this excursion went much better than I could have imagined, with the bartender comping us a pair of Remember the Maine cocktails, and a like-new game of Taboo turning up at a thrift store for only $3.50 ("Hey, some people are late, can you stall Jeff for another 30 minutes?")

We returned to an apartment full of streamers, balloons, noisemakers, party hats, and a mind-boggling assortment of macaronis and cheeses from around the world.  Honestly, even I was pretty surprised by the extent to which Chelsea and company had decked the place out, as well as the complexity of their dishes (wrapped in prosciutto and daubed with truffle oil). So I can only imagine Jeff absorbing all of that at the same time as what the hell are these people doing in my house. 

Dishes were tasted, followed by judgment, a yodeling pickle was awarded, and then we brought out a chocolate cake with sprinkles.  If I had to make any adjustments for the next surprise party I throw, I'd just make sure that I don't get saddled with this much  delicious leftover mac 'n' cheese again, because now I weigh 486 pounds.

That's why I chose kale

Over exemplary croissants at Knead Patisserie on Saturday morning, I found out from Jeff that the party we were attending that evening was, in fact, a potluck.  I'm always impressed by people who throw potlucks, because I'm the kind of dinner party host that brandishes a citrus zester at his guests to drive them out of the out of the kitchen and over to the coffee table (where there's a bottle of sparkling wine and a spread of cocktail olives and salted melon).  To let other people into my apartment bearing food that I've never seen before, some of which might even need some space in my oven, or use a plate that I wasn't planning to get dirty--just the thought of it makes me want to go lay down.

But all the potlucks I attend seem to turn out well and make all of their guests happy, so maybe the rest of society is onto something here.  At this one, the hosts put together a delicious Persian-inspired spread, supplemented by a tortilla española and a paella courtesy of their Spanish roommate, as well as dozens of desserts and cured meats brought by friends from all over the city.  I'd been gifted a lovely bunch of Serendipity Farms tuscan kale by my friend Chelsea, art therapist and part-time pumpkin plucker, so I decided to make a autumn grain salad featuring a kale pesto, which turned into a dip when I inadvertently set it down next to a bowl full of kettle chips.  See, this is what happens at potlucks.  I can't control it!

I've never thought about dipping potato chips into rye berries before, but the starch-on-starch collision worked just great, a chew and a crunch in every bite, bound together by a kale pesto that was surprisingly bright in both color and flavor.  The pesto would be equally tasty clinging to tubular pasta, mixed into green eggs with ham, or spooned around a braised meat.  It's a brand-new recipe that's definitely going into my regular rotation, and one I never would have made if not for a bunch of greens and a last-minute potluck invitation.  You must change your life.

--

Rye berry salad with kale pesto

Serves 3-4

1 1/2 cups rye berries

scant 1 cup raw cashews

3 cloves of garlic / a shallot

a bunch of kale

a pomegranate

salt

olive oil

First, cook the rye berries.  Add about 2 tbsp olive oil to a pot and toss the rye berries in it.  Heat the pan over medium heat, stirring frequently, just until the rye berries are warm and toasty-fragrant but not scorched.  Add 4 cups of water and a few large pinches of salt to the pot, bring to a boil, cover, and simmer until the rye berries are chewy and cooked through, 60 - 90 min.  If there's any excess water in the pan after the berries have cooked, pour it off.

While the berries are cooking, seed the pomegranate.  Fill a large mixing bowl with water.  Cut the pomegranate in half and remove the seeds from the inner membranes and pith while holding it under water.  This will prevent the juice from splashing all over you, like you just performed a pomegranate autopsy.  The seeds will sink to the bottom, while the pith and membranes will float on top of the water.  Skim off anything floating on top of the water and discard, then drain the seeds.

Toast the cashews in the oven at 400 F.  Spread them out in a pan in a single layer, toast for 6 minutes, shake them, and then toast until they're fragrant and lightly brown, another 6-8 minutes.

Cut the kale leaves into rough chunks, discarding the tough lower stems.  Add the chunks to a large bowl full of water, swish around with your hands to remove any dirt, and then lift the kale out of the water into a strainer.  You don't need to dry it completely.

Remove the garlic skins and cut the cloves into medium-sized chunks.  Cook over medium heat in a pan with 2 - 3 tablespoons of olive oil just until the garlic is softened and golden but not at all toasted, 3 - 5 minutes.  Add the kale and continue cooking over medium heat, stirring gently as the kale near the bottom of the pan begins to wilt and lose volume.  As soon as all of the kale has softened and turned bright green, remove the pan from the heat--you don't want to overcook it.

Using a blender, blend together the kale, garlic, and cashews with a few big pinches of salt and an additional 1/4 cup olive oil to make a bright green pesto.  If the pesto looks a little thick, add some water, or a splash of olive oil.  Taste it to make sure that it's salty enough.

When ready to serve, mix together the rye berries and pesto, turn to coat, then fold in the pomegranate seeds.  The salad can be served warm or cold--or, apparently, as a dip.

What is the light?

Having a food blog on Thanksgiving worked both for me and against me. On one hand, I felt ten times as much pressure to get everything exactly right--after all, the food that Jeff and I were preparing was not just going to provide an evening's worth of nourishment to the eight people we'd invited over, but was also going to be enshrined permanently as nourishment for the minds of billions of internet users. By that logic, maybe I should have felt a billion times as much pressure. Maybe it increases logarithmically.

On the other hand, I felt that our guests were more understanding of my ridiculous idiosyncrasies and pretensions knowing that they were being featured on The Dinner Takes It All. Oh, here's a little menu that I typed up for you to go with your place setting. No, it's not printed on edible paper. Hold on, we will finish this conversation just as soon as I get five or six more pictures of my plate fully laden with the eleven savory dishes we prepared.

Ah, there we go. But, overall, I think having a food blog only enhanced the quality of our Thanksgiving meal. I wasn't taking a picture of every single casserole as it came out of the oven or anything, so we still got food on the table at a reasonable hour. And, perhaps because I was performing under pressure, the food turned out much better for this Thanksgiving then at any Thanksgiving I've had previously on the West Coast. Jeff and I made twenty different things. Twenty! And, to my taste, the only dish that was even a little bit of a dud was the brussels sprouts, which didn't pick up their brown-butter/miso glaze quite as well as when I did a practice run a few weeks ago, and then got a little overcooked as I was trying to fix them. Well, ninety-five percent isn't too bad. Just kidding--this will haunt me for an entire year.

As Jeff and I were figuring out the menu, I did add a few San Francisco foodie touches: the miso in the brussels sprouts, some celery root pureed into the mashed potatoes, a fennel ice cream with "numbing" sichuan peppercorns. Other than that, we tried to keep things pretty much along the classic lines of turkey, stuffing, and cranberries. In particular, I wanted to highlight a couple traditional Pennsylvania Dutch dishes that were mainstays of the Thanksgiving table growing up. Hard-boiled eggs pickled in beet juice. Curly endive with warm bacon dressing. Fruit salad. Raw carrot and celery sticks. Lemon sponge pie. That last one is still a little bit baffling to me. Is it a pie? Is it a cake? Is it a sponge? Even the internet can't agree. I'm not sure everyone else quite appreciated these on the same level as I did, but oh that hot bacon dressing took me back, thick with flour and eggs, fortified with enough sugar, bacon fat and vinegar that it was not pulling any punches. I don't think they make dressings like that anywhere else in the world.

Regardless of whether or not our guests tuned in to the Central PA Meets San Francisco Bay theme of our dinner, they seemed to have no problem tuning in to the food. Stephen was particularly effusive, leaning over with an knowing gaze in between bites of his stuffing to remark, "Mmm, this is really good." "Oh, I'm glad you like it!" I replied, in between pictures of my fruit salad. Even more important than the quality of the food was the fact that we served more than fifty pounds of it. Isn't that what Thanksgiving is really about? Not the meal. Not the friends. Not the thanks. It's about the abundance.

And, oh boy, did our guests ever create an abundance of beverages in return. Champagne, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay... Jesse even brought a home carbonating device to prepare some spiked homemade meyer-lemon-hibiscus soda in the comfort of our very own living room. At least, I think it was spiked... I swear my hangover on Friday morning was purely food-induced. Fifty pounds! Regardless of the alcohol content, the soda was delicious, as was the similar Thanksgiving cocktail he prepared: carbonated white wine with a dollop of his companion Zain's cranberry sauce dropped into it. Who could ask for more?

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention Greg, here hiding behind the flowers he brought, who set our table and prepared some quite artistic place settings. Well, his job is working at a museum planning events for the San Francisco community. Who better to provide us with community-building artwork on Thanksgiving Day?

It's kind of a funny holiday, isn't it? That sense of community, the feast, the tradition, the Americana: it's a gathering around a table that you get only once a year, no matter how many dinner parties you throw. And then the food itself: cream, celery, root vegetables, thyme, butter, sage, cooked flour, squash, roasting, parsley. These flavors come in and out of your cooking, but somehow you never put them together in quite the same way as you do on Thanksgiving.

Before we started our preparations for the dinner, last Sunday afternoon, I half-jokingly said to Jeff: Thanksgiving dinner is a contest to have the best Thanksgiving dinner out of everyone in the entire country. After all, everyone is rushing around their kitchens trying to get the same meal on the table on Thursday afternoon. How does yours stack up? But after Thursday, I think I've reconsidered. Thanksgiving is a feeling, a set of raw materials, both culinary and spiritual. It's an opportunity that makes its way around this country only once a year. So when it comes around, you'd better make it count.

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This is the first out of a couple Thanksgiving posts this year, because we ended up making a ton of great food. I'm going to do a recipe roundup for Thanksgiving in the next post... in the meantime, check out our menu!

More soup, more soup

So two weeks ago angel-headed hipster Sufjan Stevens came to town to perform at this little shindig just four doors down from our apartment. Using the internet, I discovered that a couple of my friends from around the Bay Area were going to be in attendance, so I offered to host a casual dinner for all of them before we headed the show. What to cook? At first, I was thinking about making a few dishes based on Sufjan Stevens songs, such as Casimir Pulaski Dayboat Scallops, The Age of Adzuki Beans, or Chicago Deep-Dish Pizza (Which toppings do you use? "All things go." What if you mess up? "I made a lot of mistakes.").

In the end I decided to favor expediency over thematic unity; after all, the show was sold out, so I figured that it wouldn't hurt for us to show up a little early to score some decent seats. Guests at 5:30, dinner at 5:45, dessert at 6:15, leave at 6:45, doors at 6:46, sitting down by 6:49. Those are also the lyrics to the bridge of Rebecca Black's new single. In this picture you can see how fast everybody is rushing to make this dinner party a success. Not surprisingly, we kept perfectly on schedule and scored six seats together near the front, stage left. Sufjan was stage right, but, you know, the theater was dark anyway.

Soup and salad is my go-to menu for a quick, painless dinner party. Consider: what kind of person have I become that I just identified a dinner party menu as "painless?" As opposed to painful? Anyway, soup and salad: comforting, unpretentious, and no problem to make ahead and then assemble in a few minutes when people start arriving. Once you've got everything set up and ready to go, you can focus on more important things, like making an indie rock dinner party playlist, cutting flowers, or matching your six different-colored bowls to your set of six non-matching plates. You can also spare a few minutes to make Magic Bread, which is bread drizzled with Magic Sauce and then placed under the broiler until doves start flying out of the oven.

The salad was one of the better ones I've made in recent memory: arugula and spinach tossed with some pickled nectarines, pickled red onions, pomegranate seeds, and toasted walnuts, then bound with a Lillet vinaigrette. Pickled salads are really good for Indian Summer, because they balance so carefully on the precipice between raw and cooked, between the sparkling produce of bright summer and the concentrated, preserved flavors of bleak midwinter. Pickled salads also good when you need to make room for Thanksgiving in your refrigerator and you have seven jars of pickles taking up space on the top shelf. Not that this happens very often.

I served the salad alongside a fantastic yellow eye bean soup, which I've made three or four times this year and even blogged about previously. I'll make it again and I'll blog about it again; it's that good. One of the tricks is to cut the vegetables so you get just the right array of textures in every bite: big crisp wings of fennel, tender carrots, crunchy little bits of celery, short noodly strands of leek, and creamy beans. Then, when you're ready to add the broth, add it cold so the vegetables stop cooking. Shut off the heat. Let the sit on the stove for a few hours so the flavors mingle and develop, and then bring it just to a simmer when the guests arrive. No fuss, no timing issues, everything is cooked just right but also suffused with the broth.

And then there's broth. Somehow assertive does not seem to be a strong enough word for this broth. This broth is bossy. This broth is not apologizing for it. This broth is ENTJ. Rosemary, chili, and two full heads of garlic. Not three flavors I would have put together off the top of my head, but after a few sips they make perfect sense, all three delivering the same sort of a kick, just to different parts of the brain. Yeah, that's right, this broth is like three kicks to the brain.

For dessert I just reached into the freezer and took out a few quarts of ice cream that Jeff and I had made earlier in the week (in other news, Jeff and I each weigh 475 pounds now). I was pretty proud of us for managing to serve four different ice cream flavors, none of which paired at all with any of the other three--coffee, ginger, pear-pecorino, and maple-rosemary. Just take my word for it; don't think about any particular combination too long or you might hurl. There had also been some cookies 'n' creme fraiche ice cream (pictured above, at left) hanging out in the freezer, but we finished that up earlier in the afternoon, mostly because it would have paired too well with the coffee. Yeah, that's the ticket.

I realized that I written very much about this dinner party but I have not identified any of the people in attendance--shout out to Elsa, Jeff, Jeff, Ian, and Peter. Thank you all for being a friend and making this evening with soup and Sufjan such a resounding success. Well, I never said this was a people blog.

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Recipe roundup...

Pickled red onions possibly based on this recipe? Honestly, I'm at a point where I just pour pickle brine over things and hope for the best.

Pickled nectarines from this recipe, which I think calls for a little too much star anise.

I always use this technique for getting the seeds out of pomegranates. It is unbeatable and you don't look like a serial killer.

To make the Lillet vinaigrette, I mixed two tablespoons of Lillet with a teaspoon of mustard and a pinch of salt, then added a quarter cup of canola oil and hit it with an immersion blender until it was smooth, about two seconds (you could also drizzle in the canola oil slowly while whisking, or shake it in a bottle). I then whisked in a tablespoon of extra-virgin olive oil, added black pepper, and adjusted the acidity with a few drops of rice vinegar.

Rustic Rancho Gordo Yellow Eye Bean Soup recipe from Ubuntu in Napa, as published in the New York Times. I followed the recipe pretty closely, but I added fennel to the mix of root vegetables, and instead of the floating garlic toast, I made garlic croutons.

I make garlic croutons by mixing together 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil with 1 tablespoon of garlic oil (to make garlic oil, slice open a head of garlic, place it in a saucepan, cover it in olive oil, and cook over low heat for about half an hour). I cut about half a loaf of ciabatta into one-inch cubes, toss them with the oil mixture, and toast in a 350-degree oven until golden, maybe 20 minutes.

Chocolate and cheese

Last Monday was Jeff's birthday and I decided that a good present for him would be giving all of his coworkers the flu, because then he would automatically become the happiest person at work for the entire week. It's the gift that keeps on giving. So on Monday night I volunteered to make dinner and we invited his whole legal secretary crew over to share in the fun. If the date had been a little closer to Halloween, I actually would have dressed as Typhoid Mary.

I had been pretty wiped out after my choir concert on Sunday afternoon, and also I wanted the whole menu to be a surprise, so I had only about three hours after work on Monday to shop for, transport, and prepare a suitably festive birthday dinner (Jeff had handbell practice, so we didn't sit down to eat until around 9:30 PM). I knew that I wanted to make a couple old standby recipes, and when I sat down to write up the menu, the first thing that popped into my head was butternut squash soup, the star of one of the first dinner parties I ever threw. I tried out a few new things, like adding some brown butter, celery, and fennel, but overall this was no sweat for me.

Jeff's favorite food in the entire world is every kind of cheese, so I knew that cheese had to play a starring role in his birthday dinner, even if it meant just serving a handful of cheddar cheese cubes on a plate next to a bowl of butternut squash soup. Luckily, it didn't come to that, because after I thought of butternut squash soup my next thought was dipping. And what is better for dipping than a grilled cheese sandwich?

So, here it is. I used my friend The Grilled Cheese Guy's recipe, and even though I didn't have a brick (which apparently is the trick) to smash the sandwiches down while cooking, they still turned out crispy and nicely caramelized. Since the posted recipe isn't too clear on exactly how much cheese to use in your sandwiches, I decided to err on the side of queso and stuff each one with over a quarter pound of cheddar and mozzarella. For my taste, that was a little too much cheese, not enough grilling, but Jeff's ideal grilled cheese sandwich is basically a six-inch square slab of melted cheese with a one-atom thick layer of bread on each side, so I think he liked this version a lot. And it was his birthday, after all.

I do have to say that this dinner just a little bit disappointed in myself. Each dish that I made could have been just a little bit better. The salad should have had a fruity pop to it, but I didn't quite have time to seed the pomegranate I had bought. The grilled cheese could have been more balanced. I forgot to buy candles, so Jeff had to blow out our grill lighter to make a wish. And the soup would have been much better if I had just had an extra twenty minutes to pass it through a sieve, giving it a dazzling perfectly smooth texture worthy of a birthday party. I even got out my sieve around 8:55 to start working on this final step, but when I got a text from Jeff at 8:57 letting me know that he was on his way home, I knew that I would have to choose between Jeff coming home to a lumpy soup or Jeff coming home to me screaming at a mesh strainer full of lumpy soup as I beat it into silky submission with a rubber spatula. It took a lot of emotional maturity for me to choose the former. It was his birthday, after all.

And this chocolate cake with peanut butter icing, well, let's just say that I'm not very good at making icing and it ended up being more of a chocolate cake with a peanut butter glaze (thanks to Stephen, who is very good at emergency dessert nomenclature). Luckily, Jeff's favorite dessert is any dessert that has chocolate in it, so I think it would have been hard to screw things up too badly when the base of the dessert was rich chocolaty goodness.

Overall and everyone seemed to have a good time, aided by a couple bottles of champagne gifted to Jeff both at the office and at home. Hey, he works with some fun people. Chocolate and cheese, and maybe champagne--I think that those are really the only critical elements at a birthday dinner for Jeff. And since his birthday seems to coincide with the onset of flu season every year, maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Oh, hi Javier.

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Recipe roundup...

Butternut squash soup heavily adapted from Ina Garten's recipe

Grilled cheese sandwich recipe from The Grilled Cheese Guy, as published on the Tillamook cheddar website

The salad was arugula, pluots, pears, and toasted walnuts in a mustard vinaigrette. Pomegranate seeds would have been the secret ingredient, and goat cheese would be great if you're not already serving it with a cheese sandwich.

Chocolate cake with peanut butter icing was inspired by my grandmother's recipe, but since I lost that one, I was in a hurry, and I knew that Carol Blymire is also from Central PA, I used her family recipe, substituting wheat flour for the gluten-free flour that she used. It turned out great. Maybe we have the same family recipe.

A house is nacho home

I didn't mean to let this blog get clogged for a week; in fact, I have a half-completed entry about heirloom tomatoes that is working its way through the pipeline. I've just been a little busy because Jeff and I just threw a housewarming this weekend and at no point in the last week did I find myself sitting around thinking, "There is nothing that I could be doing right now that is more important than blogging about heirloom tomatoes."

And that was a good thing, because our housewarming turned out fantastically well, even though we were still hanging pictures and vacuuming floors mere minutes before our first guests walked in the door. Sixty people showed up. Sixty! I didn't know we had sixty friends. Apparently a lot of people show up to your party when you send them an e-mail about the fifteen pounds of pork butt that you just bought in anticipation of their arrival. Luckily, these sixty friends, old and new ones, had all conferred earlier in the day and devised a schedule for coming to our party in waves, so that things always felt pretty happening, but never too crowded. The festivities went on from 4 PM until we kicked everyone out at midnight, and over those eight hours we accumulated only one broken picture frame, one wine spill on the carpet, and five bottles of champagne. Yet no sloppy drunks and no broken glasses. What more can you ask for?

So I kind of regret not getting any pictures from the housewarming or its preparations because Jeff and I made a lot--I mean, a lot--of food that would have been really excellent to foodblog about:

1. Carnitas tacos with pickled red onions and creme fraiche
2. Chicken liver mousse on crostini
3. Three-bean salad with a padron pepper vinaigrette
4. Melon and heirloom tomato salad
5. Smoky corn and jalapeno dip
6. Guacamole with roasted corn
7. Warm chocolate chip cookies

And it would be so great to describe in detail how I slightly overcooked the carnitas, but then saved them by reducing their drippings, emulsifying those back with the rendered pork fat and pouring it over the meat. Or how I brought out the real essence of celery in the three-bean salad by quick-pickling it in a little salt and sugar half an hour before the party. Or how Jeff made both homemade mayonnaise and homemade creme fraiche for his extraordinarily popular corn dip.

I have to confess that in all the hustle and bustle of setting up and hosting the party, I didn't have any time to take pictures. And it's always more fun when you can show, rather than tell. So maybe I can just show you a picture of the out-of-this-world nachos that we made with all the leftovers.

So, here we go: leftover tortilla chips. A few scoops of beans that never made it into the three bean dip. Giant purple-black tomatoes, hidden in the bedroom closet during the party lest a drunken tomato fight break out. A few hot and sweet peppers from Jeff's mystery box. Carnitas crisped up in the oven. Some extra shredded cheddar from the corn dip. We put that in a cast-iron skillet and baked it for a while, then piled carnitas on top and sprinkled with extra cheese. Broiled that until it was golden brown, then threw pickled red onions on top and drizzled some padron vinaigrette all over. The only thing that was maybe missing was some guacamole, which was regrettable but foreseeable, because if there is one thing I have learned from throwing parties, it's this: no matter what other food you are serving or how many people are coming, you have never, ever made enough guacamole.

I usually think of nachos as kind of a gestalt: you order nachos and you are eating nachos. Every bite tastes like nachos, regardless of whether it has a little more cheese or an extra black olive or whatever. Nachos can be good, but in the end they're always nachos.

With these nachos you could take any constituent element and eat it separately and you'd get to enjoy a really delicious incarnation of that particular food. The deep chestnut flavor of the christmas lima beans. The earthy sweet vegetable crunch of the peppers, concentrated in the heat of the oven. The carnitas redolent of cinnamon, bay, orange, and oregano (a combination I repeated ten times to curious party guests). The kick of the pickled red onions, the bitter, creamy padron vinaigrette.

But if you eat them all together? They're still nachos. Yes.

Der Burger ist des Maurers Lust

Jeff and I are heading off on a ten-day trip to Glacier National Park tomorrow night and we've pretty much taken care of all the most important preparations. That is, I wrote down directions to Grüner in Portland and called them specifically to make sure that they have somewhere to put our gigantic hiking backpacks while we enjoy this burger of my dreams. Seriously: a homemade potato bun.

We're taking the train! It's supposed to be the most beautiful train trip in the country, at least if you hit it at a time when flooding in North Dakota doesn't necessitate the running of a charter bus between Portland and Spokane (fingers crossed). When I was booking the tickets I decided that we should stop in Portland and couchsurf there for the night so that we could stop for fresh produce and so that we wouldn't be crashing two consecutive nights on the train--and, well, so that we could get a burger at Grüner. Not gonna lie.

I am so excited about this burger. It almost makes me regret ordering the exemplary burger at Marlowe last Friday on the somewhat dubious premise that doing so might have dulled my appetite for exceptional burgers. Or maybe it increased it by introducing little particles of beef and pickled onions running through my blood. Or maybe I have staged a Portland vs. SF burger walk-off without even realizing it! Oh, I don't even know.

Anyway, in between these two burgers, Jeff and I have done a lot of exciting things, mostly around the kitchen, which has felt fantastic. The first thing we did was invite Greg over for brunch, partially because we wanted to take the new kitchen for a test-drive, but mostly because we wanted to buy some sporting goods and Greg gets a 40% discount at the sporting goods store where he worked last year. I'm not sure that the quinoa salad with radishes and potato frittata we made were quite equal in monetary value to the goods that we bought for us, but perhaps the amount of love we put in makes up the discrepancy.

So I bought some hiking boots. Later that night I used them to hike over to my friend Nghi's house in Potrero Hill that evening for the inaugural dinner party in his kitchen. En route I discovered that I had--I mean, Greg had--picked out some boots that were half a size too large. Luckily, I was able to take them back the following morning and switch them out for the smaller pair without producing any receipts or anything. Maybe it all worked out for the better, as it might have looked even more suspicious to see Greg buying size 9.5 shoes for his 6'4" frame.

I didn't bring my camera to the Nghi Chalet, which is at the top of Mount Potrero Hill, but I wish I had if only to get a shot of the salad he prepared--just some simple mixed greens with parmesan shaved on top crowned with a perfectly peeled soft-boiled egg. And that egg? You cut it open and it keeps oozing, keeps keeps oozing yolk. I think soft-boiled might be my go-to egg for dinner parties now, since poaching is kind of hard to do on a large scale. I also felt pretty dumb because in the course of moving I just gave away my soft-boiled egg cups, which Nghi bought for me as a birthday present three years ago. It all comes full circle. Or full oval.

Jeff and I had another dinner party the following night, but we didn't soft-boil any eggs. Probably because we didn't have any lovely wire cups in which to serve them. I got home a little late and by the time I got back Jeff was already done preparing a lovely lentil soup, which was some bizarre Heidi recipe with coconut milk and curried brown butter. Somehow it all worked pretty well together, and Jeremy and Chelsea devoured it pretty quickly. As you can tell, I did not get any pictures of Jeremy, Chelsea, Jeff, or the soup, because I was too busy thinking about the way I had sliced a loaf of bread.

And last night? I pickled some cherries. Lentil soup and quinoa salad are all right, but I don't feel like I'm really at home cooking something until I start making pickles. I used the Ad Hoc At Home recipe for cherries preserved in tarragon and balsamic vinegar, which has served me well in the past and should be a nice element to add to some more elaborate dishes that I might want to try later this year. Plus, with all the stress of finding an apartment, moving, and getting ready for the Glacier trip, it seems like I just about missed all of cherry season this year, so I wanted to make sure that I got some pickles made while there were still fresh cheap cherries available. How did I have time to pickle cherries if I'm so busy with this trip? Well, I didn't pit them.

Anyhoo, that's it for today, Parappa. And that's it for a while, because I'm leaving on a slow train to Montana tomorrow night. I've packed up the sunflower seed butter and the smoked paprika, the water purifier and the gas cylinders, the eight-grain tortillas and the salami. This is it! I have waited five years for this vacation and seven months for this hamburger. Have a good week or so, and I'll tell you all about the mountain goats when I get back!

Golden years

This weekend Jeff was housesitting for his boss in lovely green bright Mill Valley, and after staying up until 3 AM finishing a paper on Thursday night, and then until 10 PM finishing a Mahler symphony on Friday night, I decided that I needed a little vacation. So I set out on my bike on Saturday morning, braving wind, pigeons, and girl scouts, riding over the bay and down the hill and through the rerouting of the Bay Trail, finally ending up on Jeff's front porch around 1 PM.

...and this is what was waiting for me when I got there. A lovely salad, some fava beans and radishes on toast, and--most importantly, after I was nearly picked up by the gale-force winds blowing across Crissy Field and thrown against the rocky shores of the bay--a bottle of rose wine. Eventually we discovered that this house was just full of fantastic plates, plates that were so much more fantastic than those available at either of our houses that it would be a shame not to make a fancy dinner and take a ton of pictures. Okay, maybe that second part was mine entirely.

Shiitake mushrooms and fava beans on toast with some Mt. Tam cheese, replacing the $6 cheese that we left behind at the Marin Farmer's Market--the third largest in the state of California.

A vegetable soup with some carrots, asparagus, and snap peas in a fava bean stock--or, you know, if you want, you could say consommé, although that's kind of cheating because making fava bean stock consommé doesn't require clarifying, and I think you only get to use accented French terms if you go to lots of fussy extra steps. Also, Jeff doesn't understand why the asparagus should be facing the other way in this photo, but maybe there's a lot he doesn't understand about how my brain works.

Lamb with a minty sauce gribiche, fava beans, and potatoes in a garlic scape pesto. That thing over on the left is a garlic blossom and it is beautifully pungent. Jeff and I originally had this conception of making a leg of lamb but after determining that those cost $73, we decided to go for the breast, which is more of a budget cut--and, hey, dipped into egg salad, how bad can that be?

I'm getting to be a big fan of having salad after the meat course, not just because it is more French but also just because it makes more sense than filling up on lame-o lettuce while you're really hungry and then still needing some sort of a palate cleanser before dessert. This lettuce is tossed with some radishes in an asparagus vinaigrette.

Finally, I made this dish I'd been wanting to try for a while: a deconstructed strawberry shortcase, with a rosemary olive oil polenta cake, cardamom whipped cream, and strawberries macerated in red wine. As pretty as it might look like this, there's no point in serving it like this, because it's really best when eaten together. It's even better just eating the strawberries in red wine out of a bowl with a spoon. Or out of a glass with your mouth. Either way!