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.

Playing midwives to an egg

Those of you who know me personally know that grocery shopping is one of my great passions in life. Those of you who don't know me personally--maybe you figured this out last weekend when I admitted that I visited six grocery stores in the space of two days.

So going to the Ferry Building Farmer's Market on is simultaneously one of the most exciting and one of the most frightening experiences in my life. The apotheosis of stone fruit, the hordes, the hoarders, the three-hour line for a roast chicken, the elbows, the free samples, the sunchokes, the guilt, the shame, the million zucchini, the valuation exercise inherent in every bunch of grapes or Early Girl tomato. Is this cantaloupe a good deal at $3.99, or could I find a heavier melon across the breezeway? I think now I know what a day trader must feel like. Except they are making six or seven figures and I'm paying two dollars for a goddamn nectarine. Well, at least I didn't ruin the global economy.

Although maybe Jeff and I did get into a nigh-catastrophic argument later about which stone fruit purveyor has superior peaches (hint: it's Blossom Bluff).

You know how they say don't go grocery shopping hungry? Guess what? I wasn't going to! I was going to go to Liguria Bakery to grab some focaccia! In fact, I did go to Liguria Bakery: I rolled up at 9:30 AM on Saturday morning to beat the lines and to make sure that I got the focacciae of my choice. Well, I was halfway successful: I beat the lines. In fact, I was the only person waiting in line, because Liguria Bakery decided to go on vacation from August 1 - 21. Well, okay, they've been making only focaccia since 1911; I guess after 100 years of successful fermentation they can take three weeks to go hang out by Lake Como.

Anyway, no worries! There is a very well-reputed counter-service restaurant in the Ferry Building where they produce an olive oil fried egg sandwich. We braved the 20-minute baby-filled line at Il Cane Rosso (which, to be honest, doesn't require as much bravery as the 30-minute soiled-baby-filled line for the women's restroom) only to discover that just moments before our arrival they had run out of olive oil fried egg sandwich rolls--dozens of olive oil fried eggs were sitting there warm out of the olive oil fryer waiting for someone to run over to Acme and grab another bag of rolls. And let me just say that whoever was running over to Acme was more Wile E. Coyote than Roadrunner, because the wait time for this sandwich jumped up to 15 minutes.

So maybe I said something along the lines of--Jeff we can go home and make a damn fried egg sandwich ourselves and I bet it will cost less than $9. Let's go buy some supplies. Two hundred dollars' worth of heirloom tomatoes later (don't go grocery shopping hungry), here's what we came up with:

I loved it; it was almost like a super BLT, replacing the lettuce with three kinds of fat. Jeff won't tell me if it was better than Cane Rosso's olive oil fried egg sandwich or not. I think he's still mad because I dissed Frog Hollow Farms peaches and I am not apologizing for it. Anyway, here's where this sandwich came from.

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Recipe roundup...

Onion jam -- I just caramelized onions using a modified Kenji method. Cook onions over medium heat with a heavy pinch of salt and some peanut oil, maybe a pinch of baking powder (onions caramelize better at a slightly basic pH, which was tangentially the subject of three years of my undergrad research). When the onions start to sizzle and brown on the bottom of the pan, deglaze the pan with a little water and stir the deglazings back into the onions. Let the water boil off and repeat the deglazing every time the onions start to sizzle. Do this for about half an hour, always keeping the onion layer as thin as possible. When you've got them nice and brown, turn the heat down to low and let them sit for another 5-10 minutes to get all the moisture out; when you're satisfied with that, stir in a glug of olive oil. These last two steps are important--I think Kenji's recipe can come out a little watery otherwise. I also think that doing it over medium-high heat introduces too much possibility for burning the onions, and the added sugar at the beginning will make your caramelized onions too much caramel, not enough onions.

Bread -- Green onion slab from Acme, but focaccia would work too. Split in half, dip the split sides in olive oil, toast in a skillet over medium heat until brown.

Pancetta/bacon -- Put your pork in a pan and cover it with a thin layer of water. Cook it over medium heat until the water boils away--this will render out some of the pork fat, so now you're frying the pork in its own fat instead of cooking it dry against the pan. The result will be much crispier. Once the water has boiled off, cook over low heat. You don't want to burn the pork fat.

Olive oil fried egg -- Heat a good bit (at least 1/8 inch) of olive oil in a skillet over medium heat until the oil is shiny and very fluid, but not smoking (weird, metallic flavors start to form in olive oil when it gets too hot). Crack eggs one at a time into a small ramekin or teacup and slide them into the oil. Cook without flipping or moving them for about 2-3 minutes. As they're frying, baste the tops of the eggs with hot olive oil from the pan. The eggs should be starting to get brown and crispy on the bottom, but the yolk should be just barely filmed over. Sprinkle with (celery) salt and pepper.

Tomatoes -- Thinly slice some heirloom tomatoes, sprinkle with a good bit of salt and maybe a little pepper about 5 minutes before you're ready to eat.

Goat cheese -- The goat cheese guy was singing an Eastern European folk song about how he just milked his goats yesterday to make serrano pepper goat cheese, so you know it's quality.

Assembly -- For this photo, from bottom to top, we have: bread, onion jam, slices of tomato, olive oil fried egg, bacon, serrano pepper goat cheese, and another slice of bread.

Side dish -- We served this with a cucumber summer fruit salad, which automatically makes the entire meal healthy; I think I actually lost weight eating it. Totally.

Sing-along Grease

My college friend Tina--who is apparently an attorney; who knew? as you can tell I am a really loyal friend--was recently featured on Glamour Magazine's food blog for posting this very fashionable recipe for zucchini cakes on Thursday. Just seeing the word zucchini so many times in print really got me in the mood for zucchini later that evening. Luckily, I had a couple hanging out in the fridge, which I combined with the bounty of Jeff's CSA Farm Box to make a pretty exciting summer sandwich (not to be confused with Summer Sanders).


The best part of it was the little trendy peppers on top. Maybe they were padrons or shishitos, or friarellis, or, I don't know, some other name that is not of Spanish, Japanese, or Italian origin. Anyway, the deal with these peppers is that they were invented in 2009, they are tiny, they cost three dollars a pound, one in nine of them is hot so it's like you're playing Russian Pepper Roulette, and you are only allowed to eat them one way--blistered in a pan for one minute on each side with salt. Maybe add some lemon zest but anything else is pushing it. You can get a small bowl of them at any restaurant in San Francisco between the months of June and September. This dish is listed in the appetizer section and costs six dollars.

In all seriousness, these little things are pretty neat--you get kind of a funky, assertive concentrated hot pepper flavor without any actual heat (eight out of nine times). It's interesting; it's as if you're tasting the layer of flavor that you'd get chomping down on a jalapeno if your tongue were impervious to chili pepper. And since Jeff got about six pounds of trendini peppers in his farm box this week, I'm looking forward to finding a way to use them that does not involve blistering in a pan (don't tell the SF Food Police).

Maybe it would make this blog more exciting if I wrote down a recipe every once in a while. Okay. Let me tell you how I made it:

So first I took the mascarpone out of the fridge and mixed in some salt and the zest of half a Meyer lemon. I left that out on the counter to come to room temperature.

I sliced the zucchini on an extreme diagonal as thinly as I could--I could have used a mandoline, but I was lazy. I tossed the slices with some salt and the juice of half a lemon. I cored and quartered a couple San Marzano-ish tomatoes that Jeff got in his mystery box. I added salt to those and left them in a separate bowl.

I knew that I wanted the zucchini and tomatoes to marinate for about 20 minutes. In the meantime I cut up some romano beans and blanched them for maybe 4 minutes in heavily salted water, then chilled them in an ice water bath, and drained them.

Jeff is way better at blistering peppers than I am, so I had him do that--I think he heated some peanut oil in a skillet until it was shiny, tossed a few peppers into the pan (not too crowded) and then cooked them for about a minute on each side. I cut off the stems and sliced them in half.

To finish the beans, I diced a shallot and started cooking it in a pan with a little olive oil over low heat. After a minute or two I threw in the beans, tossed them in an oil, and let them start to heat up. While they were getting warm, I minced some parsley and did a chiffonade of a couple leaves of basil. I threw those in at the last minute.

Then we made the sandwiches! Spread mascarpone on two slices of bread. White pepper on one side, stack the other side with a few slices of zucchini, a few slices of tomato, some trendy peppers, and then shave on a little romano cheese.

Overall, the sandwich worked out pretty well and just spoke so clearly of a warm summer night--no actual cooking, lightly marinated vegetables, spreadable cheese, a loaf of crusty bread. Of course, I live in San Francisco so the night was actually like 51 degrees outside. Thanks, Mark Twain!!