The Dinner Files

Yesterday was a very gloomy gray by the Bay. It’s the last weekend in May, the farmers market is absolutely overflowing with cherries and peaches are coming in at a quick pace behind, but the produce couldn’t quite convince me that summer was anywhere in the air. It was a day for spring flavors and winter comfort, which happens a lot in San Francisco, where chilly winds pick up in time for dinner on even the most promising sunny spring days. So the morel mushrooms I bought were not simply sauteed in butter or tossed with asparagus spears in a spring-y / early summer way. I chopped them up and cooked them with rice and broth and a bit of cream and a generous handful of cheese for an easy, calming morel mushroom risotto. Since it is spring, though, I topped the whole thing with chiffonade of mint (that’s thin slices or “ribbons” of mint to you and me) and a few minced green onions (chives would have been even better). A bit of lightly steamed spinach topped with finishing salt and burnt caramel ice cream from an unidentified source completed our dinner. All were pleased with the dinner, but my dashing husband proclaimed the ice cream the best he’d ever had. Too bad it isn’t for sale. And too bad we don’t have any more in the freezer. Perhaps I’ll get to work on figuring out how to make my own….

I am supposed to be objective. Or at least not completely and totally biased. But a girl has her opinions, you know? And this girl is a huge fan of Michael Recchiuti and his awesome chocolates. There are several reasons for my devotion. First and foremost are the chocolates themselves. They are refined, they are clever without being gimmicky, they are a joy to look at and a treat to eat. The sesame nougat concoction alone is enough to make me walk across town and shell out a sort of large amount of cash for a very small chocolate. But I do so gladly. When we did a blind tasting for the best boxed chocolates at Sunset we unanimously hands-down agreed after the first round that the Recchiuti ones were the best and went on to spend hours trying to come to some semblance of a consensus on a second and a third. 

Second, there is Michael himself. I wrote a story about him and his chocolates in 2000 for a really bad “luxury lifestyle magazine for the Bay Area executive” I worked at for a short time. It was my first story with a person as the subject. I shudder to think of how I approached that interview – how little research I did ahead of time, how little I knew about chocolate – but Michael was extremely generous with his time, setting aside a whole morning to show me how they made different chocolates.

His generosity and desire to connect with people, I’m happy to report, is fully intact. I saw it in action last night when, instead of eating a wholesome meal, I participated in a preview of The Taste Project. Michael is teaming up with other foodtastic folks and has put together a series of tastings – they all involve chocolate, of course – exploring taste and pairing and food. At the preview last night various “members of the press” got to experience examples pulled from the entire series and it was one of those times when I really, truly love my job. (I go to a lot of tastings and similar events. Quite frankly, a great many of them make me hate my job, if but briefly. They can be boring, self-important, lack deliciousness, lack focus, be a waste of time, or even leave one feeling sick.)

This weekend will be the first in the series with Mark Bitterman, a self-styled selmelier who knows absolutely everything about salt. (Full disclosure: I have, on more than one occasion, eaten and drank – perhaps to excess – with Mark and/or his wife. Again, I am biased, but that doesn’t mean their salt isn’t awesome.) So we started the tasting with Recchiuti homemade graham crackers that we were invited to dredge through a slab of chocolate that was gently melting on one of the Himalayan salt slabs Mark sells at The Meadow in Portland, Oregon.

Then we tucked into stone fruit puff pastry “pizzas” that, to my eye, seemed pretty much like tarts, but that’s splitting hairs, with chocolate curls and Roasted Korean bamboo salt (yep, Roasted Korean bamboo salt – that’s the kind of crazy stuff Mark hocks). 

As we ate, Michael told us about the puff pastry, which he made and rolled himself according to a recipe and method he learned from a British chef while working in Vermont, and about the salt. At one of the real tastings, he explained, Mark the Salt Guy would give more explanation about the salt and how it worked with different foods and they would discuss how they came up with the dishes.

The Taste Project series also has a session (June 13) with Hangar One/St. George Spirits. Our preview of that was a cherry bomb – semi-sweet chocolate shells filled with St. George Spirit kirsch and topped with a chocolate-coated and cocoa-dusted Amarena cherry. And this is part of what is so cool about the whole series and about Michael – part of his motivation is to have an opportunity to make crazy labor-intensive creations that he could never put into production, but thinks of and wants to have other people experience. Michael Ruhlman wrote a book called The Soul of a Chef (great book by a great writer, by the way) and that phrase kept going through my mind as I listened to Michael Recchiuti talk about these amazing things we were tasting and how he came up with them and what excited him about the Taste Project. The desire to stretch, to explore, to create, to perfect, and, finally, to share.

Next up was the mushroom course (shout out here to the good people at Far West Fungi who are working with Recchiuti on this tasting (Sept 5) and have always been a great help to this writer, especially when she did a mushroom feature and needed lots of hard-to-find mushrooms for a fast-approaching photo shoot – visit them next time you’re at the Ferry Plaza in San Francisco). Yes, mushrooms and chocolate. More specifically, shitake-infused chocolate ice cream in a grilled brioche sandwich. Sounds insane and even nasty, I know, but I am telling you that it was amazing. If you didn’t know it was mushrooms in there you would just think, “wow, what is making this chocolate ice cream taste so amazingly awesomely delicious?”

Finally, we entered the world of bread and chocolate and… olive oil. With a Acme Bread (TBD) bread pudding and a flan and olive oil (July 11) and everything melded together into luscious bites with amazing “mouth feel” as we say in the biz. That means it feels good in your mouth. 

And while we ate, Michael talked about fermentation – something key to both bread and chocolate – and educating cocoa farmers and how the business of chocolate works and how he loves laminated doughs (that’s things like puff pastry and croissants). 

The tastings aren’t particularly cheap, but they pretty much just cover the costs – not including the creation labor – that go into the events. You get to taste things you’re not going to find anywhere else and talk about them with people who can explain just why your eyes are rolling back into your head with pleasure.

Plus, if you ask nicely, Michael will show you how they make the chocolates.

I’m not even kidding. I grilled cabbage. How drives a person do such a thing? Well, first, one reads a tempting post by Heidi Swanson over at 101 cookbooks about grilling fava beans and one thinks to oneself, “Heidi usually knows what she’s talking about and as nutty as it sounds to grill fava beans I bet they’re pretty good.”

Then, one attends a conference about sustainability at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and spends two days sequestered in a room with people who think a lot about a) how the planet is going to hell in a hand-basket, b) how to perhaps at least slow down if not stop the planet from going to hell in a hand-basket, or c) how to get people, at the very least, to eat more sardines and less imported farmed shrimp. As one learns that a 10 year-old has lived through the burning of a quarter of the carbon ever burned and a 22 year-old has seen one half of it used up, that breeding bluefin tuna will be gone from the Atlantic Ocean in about 3 years, and that 2020 is the new 2050 in terms of climate change and general horrific-ness* because things are moving faster than originally projected, one speaker makes an off-hand comment about pulling up a daikon radish from the field on his bio-dynamic farm and grilling it with a bit of olive oil. And, since one is, at this point, looking for something – anything – else to fixate on besides the fact that people might just be destined to keep using up resources like bacteria on a sugared petri dish, one wonders, “hmmmm, what does a grilled daikon radish taste like?”

So one asks the person next to them if they’ve ever grilled a daikon. The answer is no, but that person, it ends up, is also pretty intrigued by Heidi’s grilled fava beans.

And one goes home, and it’s hot in San Francisco, and using the stove or oven or any other heat-making device in the house seems like a bad idea, but, after three days of conference food and rich chefy offerings, cooking one’s own food seems like a good idea. So the grill gets fired up and the fact that a person can grill pretty much anything (i.e. fava beans, daikon radish) is right there, at the top of one’s mind fully and completely available for consideration. So one takes a cabbage, removes the outer leaves, cuts it into 8 wedges, puts them on skewers, brushes them with olive oil, sprinkles them with salt, and grills them until they have lovely charred edges, with some soft and tender leaves and some still somewhat crunchy salad-like leaves.

* Many thanks to Sam over at Chewswise for his post about the positive changes that are happening, the glimmers of hope that are shifts in consumer preferences that came out at the conference. Remembering that how we at and the food choices we make can all make a difference is part and parcel of how I sleep at night.

As I wrote “depression friendly dinners” I was thinking of the economic recession-depression, but I realize that I had also cooked up dishes that would be quite comforting in the face of emotional blues and might even be able to tempt someone sequestered in psychological depression to take a bite or two.

I was just out to make use of the food we had in the fridge – making room for the next CSA box and avoiding wasting food. There was a last bit of salad – that got tossed with a vinaigrette, natch. But a bag of new red potatoes and a bunch of bits of cheese were hanging out in there too. At first I thought: potato gratin! But new red potatoes aren’t really the best for baking, they’re better for boiling or steaming. Just the teeniest bit of brainstorming and I remembered the magic that is Welsh rarebit (a.k.a. Welsh rabbit) – an ale and cheese sauce that is usually poured over toast.

Welsh rarebit

Boil or steam potatoes or any other vegetable that would be good with cheese sauce poured over it (so that’s pretty much anything, right?) or toast some bread.

Melt 2 Tbsp. butter in a saucepan over medium heat. When the butter is fully melted and stops foaming but hasn’t started to brown at all, sprinkle in 3 Tbsp. whole wheat pastry flour (or just plain old flour if you like, but even this bit of whole wheat added a nice nuttiness to the final sauce) and whisk to combine the butter and flour. Cook and whisk until you smell cooked rather than raw flour – it smells like pie crust. No sense of smell or don’t know what I’m talking about here? Try 2 to 3 minutes and you should be fine. While still whisking, slowly pour in a 12-oz. bottle of beer or ale. When you get a smooth mixture, cook, whisking frequently, until the sauce starts to thicken slightly. Add about 8 oz. of cheese cut into small chunks or shredded – an aged cheddar would, of course, be lovely, as would an aged gouda. I just used assorted bits from the cheese drawer. Whisk until cheese is melted. Add about 1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce*, if you like, and 1/2 tsp. dry mustard. Add salt to taste and hot sauce to taste, if you like. If using potatoes, smash them a bit so their starchy insides can absorb the cheese sauce. Pour sauce over potatoes or vegetables or toast and garnish with freshly ground black pepper if you’re so inclined.

Maybe now you have some leftover boiled potatoes and some leftover cheese sauce. Sure, you could just reheat them both and have the rarebit all over again, which would be a perfectly fine thing to do. Or, maybe, like me, visions of potato cheese soup dance in your head. If you want to make those dreams a reality, first peel and mash the leftover potatoes – for a smooth soup run them through a food mill or ricer. Then bring a bottle of beer or ale to a boil in a medium saucepan. Whisk in the leftover (now very thickened) cheese sauce until everything is smooth. Stir in mashed potatoes and heat until hot. Add salt and pepper to taste. If you have some spring onions or green onions hanging around, slice them up for perfectly pungent and crunchy garnish. If you also have a chile you could slice that up and add it in with the onion for spicy delicious measure:

There, doesn’t that feel better? Or sort of virtuous? Whenever I don’t buy anything to make dinner I feel like I’m saving money. Sure, I realize we spent money buying the things I find in the fridge and cupboards in order to make the “free” meals, but it still feels good. It feels good to save the money, it feels good not to waste things, it feels good to come up with ways to use the things we have instead of mindlessly buying more more more.

* Full confession: I cannot say the word “Worcestershire.” I don’t know what it is. I add extra t’s and entire syllables. Every time I try to say it my dashing husband laughs his ass off.

The last time I picked strawberries I was… the same age as my son is now: 6. My mom drove my brother and me across the country – or at least the part between Minneapolis and Spokane, Washington, where lived (and still do live) my aunt and uncle – breaking speed limits and listening to Neil Diamond all the way. My dad met us in Spokane and the four of us continued to Sequim, Washington on the Olympic Peninsula to visit his friend from high school who had moved out there with his French wife, Marie-Claude.

Culinarily, it was a revelatory trip. In Sequim we picked mussels off the rocky shore and Marie-Claude steamed them in white wine and blew my mind right out of my head. We also grilled beer-basted salmon steaks. Everything about that was new and fascinating me: grilling fish, cooking with beer, salmon. The rich, flakey, tender dinner established a love of salmon that served me very well during the many times I spent months in France as a vegetarian and salmon would be the only main dish I could order.

But first, in Spokane, we picked strawberries in my aunt and uncle’s garden. I picked and picked and picked and then made strawberries and cream for everyone. And – I could be making this up, but the memory of it is clear – I came up with the idea of smashing a few strawberries into the cream before pouring it over the other strawberries. It may very well have been my first recipe. The irony is not lost on anyone who knows me, because to know me is to know this: I don’t like strawberries. No, I’m not allergic. I just really do not like them. No, really, I’ve had really good ones warm and ripe from the field. I’ve tasted the best strawberries humans can grow. It’s not them, it’s me.

The “recipe” stands though. Strawberry aficionados have reported back that it is lovely: smash the ripest strawberries (a bit over-ripe is just fine) into the cream before pouring it over the other berries. If the berries are good they shouldn’t need any sugar sprinkled on, but I have no idea how much of a sweet tooth you may have, so sprinkle away if need be.

So when our CSA farm sent out a notice that their strawberry fields were in hyper-production mode and scads of berries were going to waste every weekend when the pickers weren’t working and that all were invited to come and pick flats for $10 each (plus all you could eat in the field), I packed up my strawberry-loving son and called a strawberry-loving friend and we headed to Winters, California for a day of strawberry picking and picnicking.

We each picked a flat, broke for a picnic lunch of cheese, crackers, hard-boiled eggs, blanched fava beans from my friend’s garden, and homemade molasses cookies she had whipped up, and then headed back to the field for another flat.

I woke up the next morning to a strawberry-scented house and burnt shoulders.

What does someone who doesn’t like strawberries do with all those strawberries? Well, I hulled and froze half a flat for my dashing husband to use to make smoothies, brought a flat to Ernest’s class for show-and-tell-and-eat, and the other half-flat…. Since, in my experience, everyone else loves the things, we gave several pints away and Ernest and my dashing husband made pretty short work of the remaining pints. (We have a few berries left, so tonight I’m going to surprise the lads with a bit of strawberry fool for dessert.)

I have been amply rewarded for my seemingly generous strawberry behavior. When I gave a pint to our neighbor she returned the favor my bequeathing unto me a cabbage fresh from her garden.

Now that’s some produce I can get excited about. Now I just need to decide if I’m going to braise it in butter or sautee it with onions and seeds….

I’ve made this mistake before. In fact, I’ve made it three times now. We have people coming to dinner and I think, “I know, I’ll make those Vietnamese salad bowls we ran in Sunset last year. They’re simple and delicious and people can assemble them themselves and make them vegetarian if they want to.” And then I do the shopping and start the cooking and remember why so much time passes between my making of Vietnamese salad bowls: they are amazingly time consuming to prepare. I didn’t even make the beef this time, but it still took over two hours to get everything chopped and fried and ready. The guests were super-duper appreciative and endlessly entertaining, but I was quite happy to simplify the concoction the next night as my dashing husband, Ernest, and I each assembled our own:

Rice noodles, spring salad mix, spring onion (green onions would have been too), mint, shredded carrot, and a sliced chile.

We would have used leftover tofu from the night before, except Ernest bogarted the entire batch after it had been passed around the table but once. It was very bad form, and he was chided for his poor manners, but we all couldn’t help but find it somewhat hysterical that a 6-year-old would want to scarf down over 1/2 a pound of black pepper tofu. Since we had no leftovers, I made another batch to round out our salads. I highly recommend it – it took a grand total of 10 minutes to make.

Many of you avid readers can make these yourselves from the picture above. But if you’d like to include the black peppered and saucy tofu or want more instruction, I’ve posted this Vietnamese Spring Noodle Salad recipe over at Local Foods.

While there were no garnishes/toppings leftover, that whole new batch of tofu and new round of rice noodles meant there were plenty of both sitting in the fridge the next morning. Somewhere in there I also found a bit more mint and some escarole leaves that looked great even though I could not for the life of me remember when I bought them. Since I like to live on the edge and have failed – despite many bouts with the f***er – to develop a healthy fear of food poisoning over lo these many years of cooking, I chopped up the escarole, heated up the tofu and rice noodles, put it all in a bowl topped with mint and the drizzle of nuoc cham left, and called it lunch. Yum. It really was the meal that just kept giving.

It might be possible for me to care less about horse racing, but I’m not sure. It’s not even a lack of care, it’s more an utter and complete ignorance that quite naturally manifests as a lack of interest. Even the crown of crowns – the Kentucky Derby – leaves me shrugging my shoulders and thinking that I’d rather take a walk. But then I remember mint juleps. Yummy delectable refreshing intoxicating mint juleps.

I was once in West Virginia (for a food writing conference at the justly famed Greenbrier Resort) and ordered a mint julep. The bartender very kindly asked me if I was certain that I knew what that was. Yes, I assured him, I did indeed. “Miss,” he said gently, “it’s a strong drink.”

He had clearly had more than one Yankee girl order what sounded like a sweet and fluffy drink only to send it back after one powerful, boozy sip. And, in fairness to his assumptions about me, I am most definitely a Northerner and I was wearing a rather sweet and fluffy dress. The kind of creamy feminine concoction that might make a person think that I like my drinks sweet and fluffy.

Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. I like my drinks strong. Balanced, but boozy. Which was why I’d never had a mint julep before, precisely because I had thought they were sweet and fluffy. Word among the food writers at the conference, however, was that the bar was serving up some ass-kicking drinks, mint juleps in particular.

“It’s okay,” I told him, lying, “I’ve had them before.”

“You’ve had one here?” He asked.

“Yes,” I lied again, “they’re the best.” He nodded as he flashed me a smile and got to work. Out came the silver cup, in went the mint leaves and the muddling began. And then the muddling kept happening. And then he muddled that mint some more. I learned pretty much everything I know about muddling watching that man muddle, and the key is this: muddle way more than you think you need to. If you keep working at it those mint leaves will, eventually, give up all the minty-ness they have inside them to the drink.

Of course, some people prefer mint juleps made with sort of vaguely bruised mint leaves. And that’s cool. Whatever. To each their own, right? For that you just pour yourself a glass of bourbon on the rocks, scrunch up a mint leaf or two and throw them in. For a real cocktail, though, you’re going to need to work a bit. Don’t worry, I promise you’ll find it totally and completely worth the effort as soon as you take the first sip. And after a a few more sips you’ll quite happily forget all about the muddling because what happens after the muddling is this: you pour in a large amount of bourbon.

Then, if you’re a bartender at the Greenbrier, you add a large sprig of fresh mint and a faint dusting of powdered sugar and the whole thing which, remember, is served in a tall silver cup, looks about as sweet and fluffy and innocent as a drink could look. I’d never seen anything quite like it. He slid it across the bar and watched as I raised it to my lips and took a sip. Then I nodded as I flashed him a smile and got to work.

So whether you’re chomping at the bit to see who wins the Derby (sorry, but was I really supposed to resist?) or, like me, you would have to check, double-check, and triple-check when the race is because you can’t believe your luck that in randomly deciding to feature a State of the Week on your local foods website, Kentucky would fall during the week of the Kentucky Derby, I highly recommend you work a mint julep into your weekend. If you you are so fortunate to have silver or pewter cups, put them to good use. Can you see just that bit of frost that developed on the glass I used? Well, imagine what happens in a metal cup. That’s right: what happens is lots and lots of frost. It looks gorgeous and helps cool you down as the bourbon is heating you up. Specifics listed in this Mint Julep Recipe.