Mow the lawn

In case you haven't heard, I am trying to get out of grad school this term--this time with a PhD instead of a bachelor's in chocolate--and, yo, I have a lot of work to do before that happens. It has come to my attention that I am always most productive on the hour-long bus ride to and from Berkeley every day. I've joked with my coworkers that I should ditch the idea of coming to lab in the morning and instead just ride the F bus around in a circle all day until my dissertation is magically completed. That might work, except I do have a couple experiments to finish up. Can anyone donate ninety-six thousand dollars to my lab for a bus-mounted quartz crystal microbalance? In return, I will give you a shoutout on my food blog.

Unfortunately, the F bus is also the place where I used to get all of these blog entries written, which is why the quantity of my prose has been declining steadily over the past few months. It's also a question of allocating time. It takes me two or three hours to write an entry, put all the pictures together, organize the recipes, make fun of Jeff... and somehow sitting down and committing two hours to writing about oatmeal with rye whiskey never seems to be a justifiable use of my time when I have pages and pages about the enzymatic deconstruction of cellulose hanging over my head unwritten. Not that I don't prefer deconstructing a pot of cellulosic grains on my stove over moderate heat. So, when I'm tired of working, instead of blogging, I typically sit down and read Final Jeopardy! clues for an hour and a half. Because it's less of time commitment--I could totally stop at any moment and get right back to disserting. In theory.

But I'm getting all these grad-schooly things done one by one, lifting these weights off of my shoulders, dissipating this braincloud little by little. So today seems like a pretty good day to reminisce about some of the better things that I've made in the past few weeks. Here's some pressure-cooked shortribs and horseradish cream, made by Jeff, on top of some homemade egg noodles with beet greens that I threw together. Stained so brilliantly red, it looks like something that would have been perfect for Valentine's Day, but I think it actually ended up on our table a week or two before. Instead, on the big day, we decided to go for mac 'n' cheese with champagne. Living the dream.

And here's a parsnip soup accented by a few toasted walnuts, a drizzle of maple syrup, and some leftover foie gras spread on toast. God I hate parsnips. I have to admit that adding pints of cream and four-day preparations of luxury ingredients to parsnips really does elevate them to "palatable". Maybe someday they will be my second-least-favorite vegetable, after bok choy.

And why don't I tell you about the souffle that Jeff and I made this morning? We were visited by a time-traveler from the future who warned us that Meryl Streep was going to win the Oscar tonight for playing Margaret Thatcher. So we decided that it would be appropriate to make a dish to honor Mme. Streep's greatest role from the past. Plus, making a souffle gave us a chance to get out of the house under a clear blue sky, head to the cheese shop, buy some mouthwash, etc etc. It was all a particularly welcome excursion before moistening rains blow into the Bay Area tomorrow afternoon, where they will hover through my next major deadline on Wednesday. And the souffle wasn't too bad either, spiked with a very piquant gruyere and served with a little arugula salad and some rosé on the side. This is what it must be like to live in France. Except I think PhD programs only take like three years there. And you can wear open-toed shoes into lab and squirt methylene chloride onto the floor instead of using a waste bottle. Ah, France, the city of lights.

One day at a time, one graph at a time, one paragraph at a time, one slide at a time. And in the meantime? One souffle at a time. Moving on.

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Recipe roundup...

Parsnip soup from this entry with foie gras au torchon from this entry. See how that works?

Souffle after Julia Child, recipe here, but to get the full effect you should go here to watch her impugn Jacques Pepin's taste in cheese.

Not sure where the pressure-cooked shortribs came from, but the pasta dough was from Michael Ruhlman's Ratio, cut into fettucine tossed with some sauteed shallots and beet greens.

Oatmeal... well, you know where that came from. Two tablespoons of butter, a tablespoon of honey, a shot of whiskey, a pitcher of cream. Good morning starshine.

Pound it vigorously

Last night I had over for dinner Hung and Adam, two old friends whom I don't see very often anymore. I wanted to make something warm and inviting, typical of my cooking but not too pretentious, tasty but not overpowering, reminiscent of old times. I also decided to forgo potatoes because Hung was just getting back from a couple weeks in Bolivia, where, as a vegetarian, he was constrained to eating potatoes, spring squash, and quinoa, unable to partake in the daily feasts of guinea pig that he was forced to cook as part of his tour.

In the process of figuring out what to make, I was on facebook flipping through an old album of pictures of food that I've made--which is something that I do every three days or so anyway--and I noticed that Hung had commented on this year-old picture of fettucine with morels and English peas: "looks delicious!" And, hey, it kind of does, doesn't it? It's one of the better food pictures I've taken, even if I forgot to add the garnish of blanched pea shoots. So for this dinner I decided to make an updated version for May 2011, this one with some nameko mushrooms (I haven't been able to find morels at Berkeley Bowl yet this season and I'm praying I didn't miss them) and fava beans in place of the peas. That's how my brain works.

Here's what I did, with some help from Jeff and Hung:

1. Cooked some shallots, fennel, and mushroom stems over low heat for a few hours in olive oil until they were caramelized, then pureed them with a little more oil.
2. Blanched the fava beans in hot salted water and peeled them.
3. Seared the mushrooms in peanut oil, then added a little olive oil and cooked over low heat until it was all absorbed.
4. Toasted some whole buckwheat groats over medium heat.
5. Made pasta dough with just flour, water, and oil, rolled it out to thickness 5 in a pasta maker, and cut it into fettucine.
6. Cooked the fettucine for a few minutes while heating up the fennel puree in a large pan.
7. Added the fettucine to the fennel puree and tossed to coat while adding pasta water until the consistency of the sauce was right.
8. Added 3/4 of the mushrooms and fava beans to the pasta and tossed everything around to get it evenly distributed.
9. Put some pasta on each plate, then garnished with reserved fava beans on one diagonal, mushrooms on the other diagonal, and then black pepper, buckwheat, and chervil leaves right on the middle.

You may think that step 9 was a little OCD for a casual dinner with friends, but I'm happy to report that not only did Hung and Adam not notice that I was taking pictures of my plates in the kitchen before bringing them out, but also, Adam was inspired to take another picture of his plate before digging in. I think that's the first time that has happened, and it made me really excited because it's like... oh my gosh I am not crazy taking pictures of my food all the time other people actually do think these things I make are objectively beautiful sometimes. I was pretty proud. Granted, most the beauty may have come from some of the lovely square Vietnamese plates that Hung bestowed upon me, which are five or ten steps above the usual level of dishware that I normally use. But I think step 9 helped too.

In addition to the pasta I made a little soup of spring vegetables and some vanilla bean cookies. The soup turned out pretty well because I used Ad Hoc's little trick of fortifying the stock with caramelized onions and carrots, which make pretty much anything taste good. The cookies were a bit of a disappointment, not because they weren't tasty but because I used $5 worth of vanilla beans to make them, and they didn't have the sort of screaming vanilla intensity that you'd expect from two whole beans. I mean, I like vanilla--gelato where you can feel the grit of the beans on your tongue, morning coffee with milk and vanilla--but baked into these cookies, well, it just got lost in the butter.

All in all, though, everything worked out pretty well, and I'm pretty happy that I can throw stuff like this together in a few hours now! Barefoot Contessa PARTIES!

More soup, more soup

Chicken noodle soup, or maybe chicken soupy noodles, which is a shame because the broth was outstanding--thick brown chicken stock redolent of ginger, lemon and cilantro. Still, it was homemade pasta, and how bad can that be?

Speaking of pasta, that pasta is finally over. Oh, wait, here's another soup.

This one is baked potato soup with a garlic toast and a poached egg. Did you know that we are in the middle of a toast craze? Apparently we are.

I've had this entry sitting around for over a week so I decided to finish it. Here you go. I am not going to finish the one about brown butter infused rum, but you can guess how that one goes. Executive summary: bacon is over, brown butter (or is it duck fat?) is the new bacon, it was raining, hot buttered rum.

As sure as eggs is eggs

I think it was Julia Child who said, "The grand part of cooking is that you can eat your mistakes." At least, that sounds like something Julia Child would say, because it is about cooking and uses the adjective "grand." I once read an article alleging that she also liked to exclaim "Balls!" whenever something didn't go her way. I guess maybe the quote above was preceded by, "Balls, Simca! My souffle has fallen again!"

Anyway, I made a lot of mistakes yesterday. Recently I have been obsessed with making ravioli with egg yolks inside. Ruhlman shows a picture of the production of such ravioli, and asserts that preparing them is "very easy," which is one of those phrases that rings a little bit similar to "intuitively obvious" or "left as an exercise for the reader." So yesterday I made a bunch of pasta dough in my KitchenAid and dug in. Pictured above is the best of my three attempts from last night: kind of funky looking all around, with a slightly liquid but mostly firm yolk. Halfway there. It worked with the bed of kale that I set it on but, well, as you can see, it wasn't pretty.

But I looked at my mistakes and I grew from them and I learned, so I ended up with a pretty decent ravioli today. Protips: make really thin pasta dough so the pasta cooks much faster than the yolk, use cold yolks, seal tightly, get all the air out of the filling. I was too lazy and too monomaniacally obsessed with the ravioli to bother making any kind of accompaniment. So that's what I had for dinner tonight. Two ravioli filled with egg yolks. Then two carrots and a pear to wash the cholesterol out of my gut (this is totally how health works--I'm a chemical engineer so I know these things).

The moral of the story is that it has not been entirely fun to eat my mistakes, because I have now eaten half a dozen straight egg yolks in the past two nights. For the last of them I thought it would be a good idea to just pop the whole ravioli into my mouth and let it explode in a burst of warm eggy goodness. Above is my reaction after executing this idea.

A gnocchi little Christmas

Because of an misunderstanding indirectly precipitated by my birth, I didn't meet my mother's extended family until 2005. Since meeting them, a Christmas without gnocchi has become like a Christmas without snow. This year, since I spent 98.6% of Christmas Day in San Francisco, I knew that a Christmas without snow was pretty much inevitable. However, I had a choice as to whether I would spend a Christmas without gnocchi, and you know what? I chose gnocchi.

I looked up a bunch of recipes on the internet to try to figure out how to make the best gnocchi I possibly could, but, stubborn Capricorn that I am, I pretty much already knew what I was going to do. Sam's Mom makes gnocchi with three ingredients: potatoes, flour and salt. So that's how I make gnocchi, and anything else is pretty much heresy. Ricotta cheese? That's not gnocchi, that's cheesy poofs or something. Eggs? Only if you're a wuss and you suck at rolling dough. Nutmeg? What the hell is nutmeg? Finally I found this recipe by Marcella Hazan, cited by a secondary source, which uses only potatoes and flour, not even salt. Obviously that is the correct one, because it conforms to my preconceived definition of gnocchi.

I did incorporate a few of the suggestions of other recipes into my method, though. Following Lidia Bastianich's lead, I took about three and a half pounds of russet potatoes, boiled them, skinned them one at a time, ate the skins, and then pressed them through a medium sieve while they were still almost too hot to handle. This apparently gets rid of lumps and makes for a lighter texture. I've never used a potato ricer but I don't know if it could possibly achieve a better texture than pressing through a sieve would--then again, it would probably only take 5 seconds per potato instead of 5 minutes.

I put the potatoes in a giant pile on the table and let them cool for an hour or two until they reached room temperature. While I was waiting for that to happen I emptied out my freezer. Luckily at this point I have sufficiently established myself as a crazy person to my roommate John, so when he saw all the counters in the kitchen covered in piles of yogurt containers and heard me say, "Hey roomie, I need THE ENTIRE FREEZER for the next six hours", I think he thought: "Okay, par for the course!"

I measured out four cups of flour, mixed in a little salt, sprinkled some of it over the potato pile, and got to work. Lidia's recipe says to basically mix it without touching it and try to incorporate all the flour in three minutes or less. Here it is after one minute. Then I sprinkled more on and kept going.

And here it is all incorporated. I think I took about five minutes, but, you know, I am not the Michael Phelps Johnson of gnocchi or anything. I took this big log, cut off about a tenth of it at a time, floured it, and rolled it into a log about a half-inch log. This little flouring really helps it stay together, and I think I could have gotten away with a dough that was a little stickier (making gnocchi that were a little lighter) had I realized that before I started.

I made a bunch of these logs, cut them into half-inch pieces, then took each piece and made a little sauce-catching indentation in it. I had a lot of gnocchi.

I had a lot of gnocchi.

Seriously, a lot.

No, a lot. 387 in total.

As a process-minded chemical engineer, I now realize that the rate-limiting step in gnocchi production not kneading, not shaping, not cutting, but this little dimpling process. I was only able to do one at a time, pressing down with my index finger while I squeezed the corners up with my middle finger and thumb. One of my relatives three generations back was apparently able to make eight dimples at a time, one with each of her fingers (the thumb is not a finger, right?), every time she pressed down. So she must have been able to make gnocchi about eight times faster than I can. Also she didn't have to blog about it when she was done.

Lidia wants you to do some complicated thing rolling each dumpling against your fork at a 45-degree angle or something, and girl, no way.

Then I lined all these gnocchi up on four different baking sheets, as close as possible without touching...

...and put them in the freezer. The entire freezer. When you freeze them on sheets like this, you make sure that they freeze really fast and without sticking together. Once the outside of each gnocco is frozen and not sticky, you can throw them all into a bag and store them for a couple months. I actually like freezing gnocchi before cooking anyway for two reasons. Well, three reasons: 1) that's how Sam's Mom does it; 2) they stay together a little better in the boiling water; 3) you don't have to go through the arduous hours-long process of making gnocchi on the same day that you're going to enjoy eating them.

Then they're actually really easy to cook--throw them in boiling water and then when they float to the top they're about done. If you're doing them in a butter sauce like this let them cook for a few more seconds after they float, but if you're doing them in a tomato sauce or other wet sauce you can just scoop them directly into there as they pop up. Here I'm sauteing some cooked gnocchi in brown butter, although you can't really tell that it's brown butter because the brown butter is in black pan.

Then I added some rosemary and ate them. This was just a test run to make sure that everything went smoothly on Christmas because, well, it was Christmas Day and everything needed to be PERFECT. On Christmas I made Marcella Hazan's buttery non-garlicky tomato sauce with some fresh tomatoes that Jeff canned earlier this year. It was great, although honestly not that much different than normal tomato sauce with olive oil.

But maybe you grew up thinking buttery tomato sauce is normal. Sorry, I'm being tomatonormative!

At my house (MY HOUSE)

I think somewhere along the way I have gotten the wrong idea about dinner parties. Here is how I plan a dinner party: I look up some recipes that I want to try, I buy all the ingredients for the recipes, I start cooking them, and then halfway through I decide to invite people over to try the food that I have already started to make. So as far as my planning goes, the food is the centerpiece and the company is really secondary. As David Bowie said: "I'd like to be a gallery, put you all inside my show".

So it went yesterday night, when I invited five people over as an excuse to test out a recipe for pasta with baby octopus and bone marrow, pictured unflatteringly above. Because, you know, it would seem a little excessive to be pulling the brains out of baby octopus and poking the marrow out of beef bones so I could make dinner just for myself. While I was sprinkling a mixture of breadcrumbs, fresh chilies, garlic, and parsley over the top, someone asked, "Did you make that yourself?" Well, yes, I did (actually Jeff did), but it didn't seem like that big of a deal compared to butchering octopus or rolling out fresh buckwheat pasta.


I also tried out a recipe for crispy delicata squash, which was so delicious when I ate it a few weeks ago at Frances that I e-mailed Frances herself to get the recipe (the e-mail response I got back was from a man named Patrick, but I think it's the right recipe). Jeff pointed out that I messed it up after mistakenly identifying the pickled black currants in Frances's version as pickled huckleberries, but, you know, close enough--they're little, black, and pickled. And underappreciated.


Rounding out the menu: mushroom soup from Ad Hoc at Home and brussels sprout pizza a la Motorino. I was also lucky enough to invite friends who brought three different kinds of dessert. Ian brought delicious homemade earl grey cream puffs and found pushing pastry creme through a sieve to be more difficult than rock climbing. Dan and Adam brought vegan cinnamon rolls from Cinnaholic in Berkeley, which were actually among the eggiest cinnamon rolls I've ever had (maybe it's time to e-mail Aloysius J. Cinnaholic for the recipe). And Jeff, in addition to double-straining mushroom stock for me, washing my dishes, and running back to San Francisco to procure a pasta maker last night, also brought a few of 500 truffles that his roommate Jen made this weekend. Look for them coming soon to a restaurant near you.

Desserts. Three different ones. And, of course, fascinating conversation over a few bottles of wine. Okay, maybe the people I invite to my dinner parties are not entirely secondary. As a great man--I am going to start the rumor that it was Mario Batali--once said: "Who cares what you eat? Six hours later it's poop."

When the stars make you drool

I had a surprisingly busy week that has left me kind of dazed and drooly. I quit grad school and took a job in a chocolate factory (I have signed a legal agreement forbidding me from divulging trade secrets or eating chocolate for six months). Then I decided that I had made a big mistake leaving school so abruptly, so I un-quit grad school, told the chocolate factory that I had messed up, apologized, and said that I hoped this awesome opportunity would go to another qualified applicant. As far as I can tell, no hard feelings.

So I quit my job twice this week. I feel like quoting Roxane at the end of Cyrano de Bergerac when she laments, "I have loved but one man and lost him twice". I guess if I were to follow through with this analogy, Roxane would have ended up with Zombie Christian at the end of Act V, but, well, you know what I mean.

Idonno. What can I say? I was frustrated with school after working on my big presentation last week, I applied for a real people job on a whim and I got it for no apparent reason. It was fun, being on my feet all day and watching toffee bubble and affixing labels and playing with an enrobing machine, seeing the purple sunrise over the cranes in West Oakland and biking past AT&T Park on my morning commute... but it wasn't a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and I have three years of work here in school that I need to finish up a little better before I think about enrobing anything else.

Actually, I just like saying enrobing.

So this would have been a crazy enough week, then I had to add on extra choir rehearsals and unfailingly polite lesbian couchsurfers from Tuscaloosa and dyeing my hair blonde, and then the bookends: an unbelievable meal in San Francisco at Frances two weekends ago and an equally unbelievable, equally in San Francisco Halloween party last weekend (which, of course, required color-coordinated dipping sauces). More on those later.

In the midst of all this I haven't had much time to cook except for a quick pasta fazool last week. Somehow I have arrived at this idea that the only thing you really need to make authentic pasta fazool is a parmesan rind, so anytime I've used up a wedge of parmesan cheese I wrap the rind in some plastic and place it front and center in my fridge to remind myself: PASTA FAZOOL TIME. This pasta fazool time the other ingredients I used were particularly inauthentic--whole wheat orzo instead of tubular pasta, garbanzo beans instead of cannellini because somehow I have managed to hoard six cans of Trader Joe's garbanzo beans in my bean cabinet over the past two years. This after making a new year's resolution never to buy canned beans again (I have been setting my goals pretty low as of late). Anyway, it turned out fine and gave me enough for three lunches--one in grad school last week, one at the chocolate factory later that week, and one in grad school this morning. I have measured out my life in soup spoons.

But other than that I've mostly been eating burritos and regaining my cooking mojo: I made some oven-roasted potatoes and pan-fried brussels sprouts this evening, stuff that I should be able to do in my sleep, and they turned out okay, not perfect, but enough for me to remember how food works. Coming later this week: pomegranate guacamole, beet and avocado salad, and possibly bone marrow. Be excited!

The starchy waters of comfort

It has been a crazy and busy weekend. On my way home (from lab, oy gevalt) tonight I regretted passing up a slice of greasy pizza earlier in the evening and wondered to myself if I could find anything on the bike ride home. I was kind of doubtful because I live in Rockridge and unless there is a Yoga for Expectant Mothers class just getting out, there's not really anybody out on the streets at 9 PM on a Sunday. Then I remembered that I had picked up some eggs on my last trip to Trader Joe's, and that meant that pasta alla carbonara could not be more than 15 minutes away.
Okay, angel hair instead of fettuccine or spaghetti because that's all I had at home. Duck fat. Leftover garlic oil from my garlic aioli last month. Toss the pasta into the oil, scramble in an egg off the heat. Two slices of cured lemon from my other lemon preservation project. Lots of parmesan or pecorino, I forget which. Even more black pepper.

Duck fat carbonara. Perfect. Shoot, now I have to clean up.