The Dinner Files

SFgirlbybay is a fabulous design blog written by the hilarious Victoria Smith. Using her impeccable taste, she explores the whole wide world of do-able, affordable interior design–from her own flea market finds to gorgeous, interesting apartments she finds around San Francisco.

Today Victoria and I have launched a project we’ve discussed for awhile: Friday Food Files on sfgirlbybay. Every Friday I’ll post an entertaining tip, weekend menu ideas, or what to look for at the farmers market that week. Check it out. Let me know what you think.

Last night my mom cooked up some smoky chili.* The recipe was from Sunset and, although you can’t tell from the website because of the way copyright law works (Sunset, like many magazines, owns all rights to recipes it publishes and thus does not need to credit the author when that recipe is reprinted in special publications or when it is posted online), was written by a dear friend of mine, Juliet Glass. She doesn’t do a lot of recipe work, but that which she does is perfection itself. Her recipes are the best-tested, most thoughtful (every ingredient, every step has its place and reason), and crazy-delicious you’re likely to find. This easy chili recipe is no different: she makes basic ground-beef chili awesome by using smoked paprika, a bit of bacon, and “fire roasted” canned tomatoes.

She is such a nut that she has since further perfected the recipe (I learned in a text message when I let her know my mom was cooking up the recipe) by adding 1/8 tsp. ground cinnamon to the pot. We didn’t have cinnamon in our ski rental kitchen, but I’ll be trying that option at home.

* And, I must add, smokin’ chili. Both literally, in that we needed to open windows at one point, but that had more to do with some gunk on the stove than the chili itself (but I digress), and figuratively, in that it was, as mentioned above, crazy delicious. If you need proof beyond my say-so, check out the glowing reviews.

I’m in Colorado skiing with my family. My extended family. I suppose a week with parents and siblings and aunts and uncles may not sound so fun to many people, but my family… well, they’re pretty fun. Everyone makes an effort 1) not to hassle each other and 2) (and this is key) maintain a sense of humor about themselves.

I’m here with my dad’s side of the family. He is one of four boys, so the family ethic is definitely skewed towards activity-based (rather than relational or yackety-yack) bonding. Lots of exercise, fresh mountain air, and a carefully calibrated amount of Jamesons, Guiness, and mulled wine keep everyone cheery. The trip has become a bit of a tradition (5 years going and next year already set up). Last night my aunt made us a Lunar New Year dinner. Since it’s lucky to eat things cooked whole and there were seven of us at dinner, so she made two whole chickens. Can you say taste test? One was poached in a rich gingery broth and the other was roasted and covered with a ginger jam during the last bit of cooking so it developed sort of a sweet glaze and the skin became extra brown and crispy (that’s the one my uncle is mangling in the picture above). I begged not to have to chose a favorite, each succulent of flavorful in its own way. Are you forcing my hand? Really? Well, then I’m going with the roasted ginger jam-swathed bird.

Sadly for me she used the ginger jam when I wasn’t there, so I didn’t get to see it. Internets? Have you ever seen ginger jam? Anyone know how to make it? Or are you going to make me do experiments?

p.s. The night before my mom used the pork shoulder I packed in my luggage to make a green chile posole. It was quite delicious. I’m going to perfect the recipe and get back to you. I promise.

Yesterday I embarked on a week-long ski trip with my extended family. Good times will surely be had by all (knock on wood). I couldn’t help but snap a shot of my suitcase before I closed it. Along with the ski boots and ski helmet and long underwear and wimpy knee brace (it’s a psychological thing, I know) and toiletries and flip-flops for wearing to the hot tub and power cords for my laptop and camera were a pork shoulder roast, a top sirloin (thanks Clark Summit Farm!), chocolate samples from the fancy food show last week, a sample-size collection of flavored salts, a panne forte (essentially an Italian fruitcake) someone sent me in November, and a copy of King Corn I’ve been meaning to view and review (for Local Foods) for almost a year now. And what you’re not seeing are the pounds upon pounds of California citrus I had packed in my carry-on (I didn’t want it to get bruised!).

I know. I’m nuts.

And yet much less nuts than is years past, as my beloved sister-in-law reminded me once we arrived at our destination. A few years ago I packed my 7-quart Le Creuset pot, several pounds of duck confit, some garlic sausage from Fatted Calf, and containers of frozen broth, beans, and lamb stew in order to cook up some cassoulet for everyone. Sure, I’ve been teased mercilessly about it by my family ever since, but their eyes glaze over ever so slightly every time they talk about it.

Yeah, that was dinner. It was good, bad, and embarrassing.

Here’s what happened: My dashing husband is out of town. I had a meeting at my house that we scheduled for a late lunch so I could experiment on the other attendees (they were very nice about it) and make them taste/eat a recipe I was developing for a high-paying recipe contest* which I was going to enter because, as you may have noticed, the economy appears to be in the tank and freelance work is sparse and some people and even large corporations seem to think it is okay to not pay people for work done… but I digress. I wanted to post a “how to make homemade potato chips” over at Local Foods in time for the Superbowl because, I’ve been told, people are always looking for “fun” ways to entertain at their Superbowl parties (no, I don’t really understand any of that sentence either). So, I made potato chips for us to snack on, among other delicacies. And the meeting was going okay. Not great, but okay. One person couldn’t show because of injuries sustained while hiking, another showed despite being in the process of recovering from food poisoning and was thus unable to really, you know, help eat all the food. And then, just as we were getting down to the business at hand and making some progress on our joint projects, the phone rang (or rather the call waiting beeped through on the speaker phone on which we were talking to our injured participant) and it was Ernest’s school. “Hi Molly,” the friendly voice said, “this is [the school secretary]. Ernest threw up.”

I thanked her for calling, hung up, drove to school, picked up the saddest looking boy I’ve ever seen, got him home, put him in the bath, and gave the rest of the meeting the old college try but was, as you might imagine, pretty distracted.

So, after the meeting ended, and after I cleaned the kitchen, and after I wrote up my notes from the recipes I worked on, and after I got him into bed early with “no dinner, Mama, no dinner,” and I finally headed down to eat my own dinner… well, that bowl of potato chips looked really good. And so I ate them. All that were left. I put extra smoked salt on them and crunched my way through the whole bowl and the batches draining on the cooling rack too and didn’t have a salad or yogurt or anything to try and pretend that I didn’t just eat a bowl of potato chips for dinner.

And that, my dear internets, is why I don’t keep potato chips in the house. I am powerless before their salty crispness!

* Um, this in also embarrassing: When I went to enter the recipe in the contest I realized I am ineligible. Because, clever as I am I don’t think I could convince someone that I’m not a “professional food writer” what with getting paid every now and again to write about food and being so billed in more than one easily accessed internet site. Great. I guess I should just go buy lottery tickets and call it a day.

No, we don’t have a cat. My dashing husband is really quite remarkably allergic to cats. I’ve checked. Many moons ago I once neglected to tell him the house to which we had been invited to eat dinner was home to a cat. I had our hosts hide the cat, super-duper clean the house, and kept my fingers crossed. It’s the best he’s ever done – it took over an hour for his eyes to turn red and his nose to run and for him to start wondering aloud if he was coming down with something. Of course I felt horrible and have met the subsequent challenges of being paired with someone so allergic to cats* with the resolve of the British during the Blitz. Or perhaps I exaggerate.

The cat that is away, ironically enough, is my dashing husband. A quick business trip to the southland means I got to put cream in the pasta last night and boy oh boy did Ernest and I enjoy that! My dashing husband, as regular readers know, has certain dietary requirements and ideas and I try to humor him (especially since, it ends up, he really does seem to feel better when he follows them).

Instead of our regular pasta with greens that is such a standard around here I’ve stopped posting about it for fear of 1) boring you and 2) having a record of how often we eat it and being hauled away by the culinary police in case they exist, we had creamy pasta with greens – and I even baked it casserole-style for some crispy brownness on top.

It’s easy, fast, creates limited dirty dishes if you cook the “sauce” in the pot after you drain the pasta, and you can even make it ahead and then bake it if that’s how you roll (I’m talking to you, Mom!). Some people might want quite a bit more cheese in it that I used. Hell, I wanted quite a bit more cheese in it if there were no such thing as calories or saturated fat. Do as the spirit moves you, is all I can say. I can also say that this particular combination — with the cream to soften the rough edges — would be pretty darn tasty with a whole grain pasta for all of you out there with New Year’s Resolutions you’re still trying to follow.

* They are legion, now that you ask. We can’t stay with people who have a cat, which has proved most inconvenient more than once. Cannot dine at the homes of people with cats, which has put a damper on a many otherwise enticing invitations. And, of course, I cannot get a cat. I’m not sure I want one, but I can’t have one so I can flirt with the idea every now and again and feel deprived.

There has been a lot of fuss in the food world about the Obamas keeping the White House chef and not uprooting the Rose Garden to plant organic legumes, but I don’t care. I don’t.

I am entirely too consumed with one simple fact: I no longer cringe when the president speaks.

For those of you on the East Coast or in the Midwest, just skip the next sentence or two. The last few days have been that span that tends to happen in January at least once when it is so sunny and glorious that you wonder how anyone ever could ever live anywhere else. And those who know me can tell you I am no San Francisco Bay Area booster. I know there are many other perfectly lovely places to live *and* I have my complaints about this place. But yesterday? Yesterday there was one place to live: here.

And to top it off I got to drive my ass over the Golden Gate Bridge (on a clear day, I ask you, is there anything more spectacular?) to meet up with some other maniacs who, when asked how they’d like to spend a Sunday afternoon, also answered: make sausage. To our ranks was added a chef who works out of the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, so we got to use their beautiful mess hall kitchen with plenty of counter space. A friend of mine from college was supposed to join us but had to cancel to care for a sick wife and baby, making sausage club part 2 an all-female affair:

Since this was our second go-around, we were able to develop/perfect our techniques a bit: techniques for rinsing the casings, techniques for getting the casing on the stuffing funnel, techniques for stuffing and shaping the casings evenly. And let me tell you what I’ve learned about sausage making so far: the more hand-job like the better the technique. Gentle but firm, rhythmic, smooth — even wet hands — are all key to proper sausage making.

So we gathered, joked (you can imagine), and made sausage. We had the same approach as last time: each person bring ingredients to make 4-5 lbs of a type of sausage, we all help grind and stuff, and then divide the types at the end o everyone takes home 1-2 lbs of each type of sausage. Me? I brought an even garlickier version of the Toulouse-style sausage I made last time. Lisa made some small-batch Jimmy Dean (the secret, we discovered, is a bit of sugar and approximately 1 ton of black pepper). Hope created a crazy-delicious lamb sausage (saved from the dryness of most lamb sausage by the addition of some pork fat) seasoned with plenty of toasted cumin seeds and currants. Katie super-starred by making Italian seasoned elk sausage from elk she helped hunt. Snap!

I’ve been getting back in the swing of baking bread now and again. I used to do it all the time — there was even a stage there when I was in grad school when it was not uncommon to find me driving somewhere with a bowl of dough in the seat next to me, ready to get punched down as needed during the day. But a career shift, a kid, a job — it all got in the way of regular bread baking. So I’m starting small, starting easy. Fougasse. It’s part focaccia, part unadorned pizza dough. It’s easy, flexible, and fun to make. As you see here Ernie was impressed with his own handiwork at spreading it out on a pan. Surely if a five year old can do it you can too?

Fougasse

1 Tbsp. active dry yeast
4 1/2 cups flour (bread or all purpose, sometimes I even use up up to 1 cup whole wheat flour)
1/4 cup olive oil plus more for the pan
2 tsp. salt

Dissolve the yeast in 1 3/4 cups warm water. Mix in flour, oil, and salt. Stir until mixture holds together in a ball. Knead on a lightly floured surface until smooth and elastic feeling. (This is all even easier if you use a standing mixer and a dough hook.) You can clean the mixing bowl and oil it or just throw the dough back into the dirty bowl (I’ve never had any problem), cover with a clean towel or plastic wrap and let rise until doubled in bulk, about 1 1/2 hours (a lot less if you put it in a warm spot, a lot more if you throw it in the fridge, which you can do and let it rise overnight or keep it for a day to two).
Preheat oven to 425. Oil a large baking sheet. Punch down the dough, turn it out onto a clean surface, and cut it in half. Wrap half the dough in plastic and put it in the fridge for the next night, spread the other half as thinly as you care to on the baking sheet, pulling regular “slashes” into it if you like. Sprinkle with coarse salt if that appeals to you and bake until brown and crispy on the edges, about 25 minutes. Let cool a bit before serving. Let people rip off pieces to eat. It’s fun. Then bake another batch the next night.

Sometimes I cook some chopped garlic or herbs in the oil before using it to add a little something-something.

This weekend we had more people to dinner (not a dinner party, oh no). My Very Tall Cousin Sam and his Viking Goddess girlfriend stopped by. Very Tall Cousin Sam had volunteered his girlfriend to make “something Nordic” so the pressure was on. They arrived with a bag of groceries they lugged across town on their bikes, two giant smiles, some Norwegian chocolate for Ernest, and a cookbook for me. 

Next thing I knew we were downing luscious slices of gravlax draped over snofrisk-spread toasts and drizzled with a sweet mustard sauce. I was so busy snarfing slices down I forgot to get the recipe for the sauce. I’ll get on that. 

Then we sat down to a tasty Braised Beef With Paprika & Root Vegetables I’d been working on, served over a Norwegian-made celery root puree (celery root cubed, boiled until tender,then mashed with cream and butter), with a side of brussels sprouts (I left out the bacon from that recipe), which Ernest insisted on having. While he was picking them out at the store he expressed a desire to “grill” them. Then at dinner he was put out that I hadn’t “fried” them. Since I’ve never grilled or fried brussels sprouts, I was a bit confused.