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.

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.

Don't be distracted

This was a particularly busy weekend for Jeff--he had two handbell concerts and a handbell dinner celebration, and he also had to work overtime on Sunday to help relocate his office. Each time he left the apartment I put forth some sort of vague proposition toward imagined productivity--"Okay, cool, I'll clean up around here while you're gone" or "Oh, yeah, maybe I'll do a little laundry this morning."

But, well, you know me.

So my original cooking project for the weekend was to prepare this chicken liver mousse from Frances. A duck liver mousse had been a highlight on a previous visit (and is the current teaser picture on their website, served with APPLE BUTTER), so I was overjoyed when the recipe showed up in the Chronicle a few weeks later. On Saturday afternoon I went out to buy some supplies for that. And, well, you know how things can just snowball? Oh, look, Mission Meat Market sells chicken backs--maybe I should buy some for stock. Hey, we still have some eggplant leftover from the farm box--how about some baba ghanouj? Four hours later Jeff was home from handbells, down on his hands and knees in the bathroom, scrubbing off all the dirt that I had spattered everywhere while unpacking my camping tarp, and I was in the kitchen pushing chicken livers through a sieve. I am awesome.

So maybe I didn't do so well with my chores on Saturday night. But that mousse I made? Sure was excellent. Probably one of the best things I've ever thrown together in the kitchen. I served it with some extra-crunchy baguette slices, tarragon balsamic cherries that I pickled last month, and a little arugula salad in a mustard vinaigrette. Having my hand in every element of the dish was pretty instructive as far as why this is such a classic pairing--eating the liver mousse alone (off of a spoon, off of the food processor blades, off of your fingers), you really do feel that for all its astoundingly smooth richness, it's missing something crunchy. Then you get that crunch and--oh, how about something sweet? How about for something sour? I learned something today.

As it became clear that my weekend would be consumed by some sort of weird obsessive-compulsive cooking ritual de lo habitual, I put out an APB for an impromptu dinner party Sunday night. I have to say that I felt a little awkward when our friend Nghi showed up in gorgeous Chanel flats--not because I was underdressed at my own dinner party, just because "sweep the kitchen floor" was another household task that never quite rose to the top of my to-do list, and I wasn't sure if it would be less gross for Nghi to get those flats dirty or to stomp around barefoot. Hopefully I made up for the mess by serving a bean soup based on a recipe from Ubuntu, a tremendously fancy "community-focused restaurant and yoga studio" in Napa. In fact, I think it is the only Michelin-starred combination restaurant and yoga studio in the world. Or, at least, it's the only one where a salad costs $16.

Speaking of pricing, I'm not quite sure which would cost more--replacing Nghi's Chanel shoes or dinner for three people at both Frances and Ubuntu--but I do know that the soup turned out really well. The bracing aroma of rosemary, chili, and two heads of garlic was so enticing that when I dove into a tupperware full of the soup for lunch this afternoon, my coworker Colin headed over to the fridge, deadpan: "Okay, I have to eat something now because that smells so good." Maybe slip an expletive in there too.

Another totally essential thing that I did this weekend: I took a tour of six grocery stores to see which of them the best place to buy produce near my apartment. No, really, this is how I spend my life. Conclusion: while I don't think that I'll be giving up the occasional evening-commute visit to Berkeley Bowl anytime soon, I really dig a lot of things about Rainbow Grocery on Folsom, particularly these adorable baby fava beans that I found this weekend. I did a little fritto misto with them, or perhaps a fritto solo, and tossed them with some most excellent sun gold tomatoes (my single favorite food in the entire world), also part of my haul from Rainbow. The baby favas weren't quite exploding with concentrated fava flavor as I had hoped, but dipped into a little fennel-spiked creme fraiche, well... how bad can that be?

This entry was brought to you by the colon.

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Recipe roundup...

Chicken liver mousse as served at Frances, recipe reported by the esteemed San Francisco Chronicle
Fritto misto batter and potted bing cherries with balsamic vinegar from Ad Hoc At Home
Rustic Rancho Gordo "Yellow Eye" bean soup as served at Ubuntu, the recipe reported by the New York Times

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!

Every single molecule is right

So, wouldn't you know it, the day that I wrote a blog entry about being all out of preserved lemons, I headed over to a potluck and my professor's house and discovered--well, rediscovered--that he has a lemon tree in his backyard, and that the tree was at that moment just bursting with ripe, fragrant low-hanging lemons. I asked Clay what he did with them and he said, "Oh, pick them up off the ground, mostly. If you want any, take some."


So I did, and then because I needed my backpack the next day to go shopping, I arranged them into some bowls in a way that is pretty reminiscent of Catalog Living:


And then later that night, right before seeing The Flaming Lips in concert at The Fox, I preserved them. Preserving lemons took a lot less time than I remembered--you just wash the lemons, cut an x in them, peel the flaps back a little and fill them with salt, and then put the lemons in a jar with some spices, pressing down every so often to release the juices and cover them completely. I think I had a massive jar done in less than an hour. I kind of wish it had taken more time, because the act that opened for the Flaming Lips was not very enjoyable. If I had to assign them a genre, it would be "drums and screaming". Okay, my next pre-concert project will be cassoulet.


You need a lot of salt. The amount of salt in the picture above was good for like one-third of the lemons. The salt does not all really dissolve at first, but then when you put the lemons in your cabinet and let them sit there and develop for a couple weeks, it will turn into kind of a lemony sludge eventually. I thought that this lemony sludge was inedible, because it is really salty, but I have since learned that you can strain it and add it to your food as a flavoring. Yes! Couscous, now with lemon sludge!


I also made sort of an ad hoc mint julep to go along with the whole lemon preservation deal, inspired by the fading light on my back porch, the sparse contents of my liquor cabinet, the ridiculous quantity of mint I got at Berkeley Bowl last week, and these awesome glasses that I picked up at a yard sale. I actually passed by the yard sale on my way to the thrift store to buy glasses. Yes. All of the subatomic pieces came together.