The Dinner Files

A neighbor asked for popover tips recently. I shared what I know and promptly made a batch of my own. The three of us ate the twelve of them in a snap.

They are good with roasts, good with stews, and a delight for breakfast. I suppose you could put jam or something on them, but it seems like a bit of gilding the lily to me.

Popovers

Here is what I know about making popovers pop. You want a very hot oven, a preheated muffin tin or popover pan, and room temperature ingredients. I’ve done the whole “fill only every other muffin cup” nonsense and never noticed it made a lick of difference.

3 eggs

1 cup milk

1 cup flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

4 tablespoons butter, melted

Heat the oven to 450. While the oven heats, put the eggs and milk in a blender or bowl and let sit to come to room temperature. Once the oven is hot, put an empty 12-cup muffin tin or popover pan (or 2 6-cup pans) in the oven and let it heat while you make the batter.

Whirl the eggs and milk or whisk them vigorously until completely combined. Add flour and salt and whirl or whisk until smooth. Add 2 tablespoons of the butter and whirl or whisk to combine.

Take pan(s) out of the oven and brush the cups with the remaining melted butter. Fill cups evenly with the batter. Twelve muffins tins will each be about half full.

Put filled pan(s) in the oven and reduce heat to 425. Bake 25 minutes without so much as thinking about opening the oven door. Reduce heat to 350 and bake until completely golden and mostly brown, about another 15 to 20 minutes.

Serve popovers hot, or at least warm. Time does them no favors.

I love the Winter Olympics. The Summer Olympics are fun to watch and all, but the Winter Olympics grab my heart. I read the coverage, I watch clips, I follow the way fans follow things. I even disconnect our internet connection and plug the cable cord into an old 9-inch TV tottering on a stack of books on my desk to watch the coverage.*

This love is clearly the fall-out of a Minnesotan childhood. As active as we were when the snow melted and the humidity and the mosquitoes set in, so many Summer Olympic events bear little resemblance to the things I ever did or do. I love to swim and always have, but as a kid I swam in lakes, not pools. The winter sports seemed more like expert versions of what we all did all winter long – skating for both speed and grace, hockey, skiing whether with our heels fixed or not, sledding down hills aiming for speed and hoping against crashes.

Every November we’d head to the sporting good store for new-to-us skates. Every garage had an arsenal of sleds and hockey sticks. Our neighbors flooded their backyard to skate on. If that was full we grabbed our skates and a shovel and cleared the creek near the house or headed to the park where acres of baseball and soccer fields were drenched and cleared and turned into so many skating rinks. I took figure skating lessons after school every week and on Saturdays our parents put my brother and me on a school bus that took us to the various ski hills within two hours of Minneapolis.

A DC friend recently tweeted, after six days home in Snowpocalypse, for advice from Minnesotans on what to do now that all the bread was baked and the movies watched.

I told him that snow is celebrated in Minnesota. It’s what makes the cold fun. No snow and you have a gray, leafless, and ultimately useless landscape. Snow means you can ski and snowshoe and snowmobile. Snow lets you build the banks for pond hockey.

As much as I identify with the sports, though, I know an even more important element of this love of mine stems from the memory of those two weeks when – in those late days of winter when it still got dark by 4 and the cold had set in deep and all that snow had lost the novel luster it had in December – my parents and my brother and I would gather and cheer. It probably helps that I was 9 (going on 10) when the Miracle on Ice happened at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980. Of that twenty-man team, twelve, plus the coach, were from Minnesota.

So, as an ode to the games and as a way to keep busy on a school holiday that caught me by a bit of surprise and as a way of apologizing for steering every conversation towards the end of the Russian reign in figure skating or the number of Olympic-grade luge tracks in the Western Hemisphere or the percentage of Canadians who shoot left in hockey for the next two weeks, last night I made my dashing husband’s favorite dessert: oeufs a la neige.

Oeufs a la neige

These delights are lightly poached meringues floating in a vanilla custard sauce. A fun food fact: this dessert is called floating islands in English. The seemingly direct translation of that back into French would seem to be the dessert known as île flottante, which is, in fact, a different dessert altogether that may be made of meringue or cake but in any case is one big island surrounded by the sauce, not lovely little poached “snow eggs.” Since they are delicious served cold, you can make them up to a day ahead of serving.

4 eggs

tiny pinch salt

3/4 cup sugar, divided

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract, divided

2 1/2 cups milk, plus up to 1 cup more

Separate the eggs and set the yolks aside for the moment.

Put egg whites into a copper bowl, if you have one, but any large bowl will do. Feel free to use a standing mixer with a whisk attachment, if you like, but I’ve timed myself and I can beat four egg whites by hand almost as quickly – and with much less hassle and much more control – as the machine. Beat eggs with a large balloon whisk, if you have one, but any whisk will work, or in the machine until foamy.

Add salt and keep beating as it turned fluffy.

Keep beating until firm peaks form – when you lift the whisk or beaters out of the egg whites the peak that forms should droop a bit, but then stay put.

Fold in 1/4 cup of the sugar, incorporating 1 tablespoon at a time. Then fold in 1/2 teaspoon of the vanilla.

Put 2 1/2 cups milk and 1/4 cup sugar in a wide pot or sauté pan. Heat the milk to a gentle simmer, stirring occasionally to help the sugar melt. Use two large spoons to form football-shaped dumplings of the egg whites, scooping the mixture with one spoon and shaping it in that spoon with the other spoon.

Then using the free spoon to help ease the meringue into the simmering milk. Do as many meringues as fit without crowding or touching too much in the pan.

Cook, turning over once, until meringues are firm, about 2 minutes each side. You may be tempted to go check your email while the meringues are poaching. I cannot recommend you do that since, in my experience, it leads to this:

When the meringues are cooked, lift them out of the milk with a slotted spoon and drain them on a clean kitchen towel.

Repeat with remaining egg white mixture.

When all meringues are cooked. Strain the poaching milk through a fine mesh sieve. Add enough more milk to equal 2 cups, if necessary.

In a small bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the remaining 1/4 cup sugar until lighter yellow and thick. Keep whisking as you pour the milk mixture, which will still be very warm, into the egg yolks. Constant whisking will keep the yolks from curdling. Transfer this mixture to a medium saucepan and cook over low heat, stirring pretty much constantly with a wooden spoon until the mixture thickens enough to coat the back of the spoon and show the path where your finger runs to have a taste.

Stir in remaining teaspoon vanilla. Strain custard sauce, if you like.

You can now cover everything with plastic wrap and chill it up to a day before you serve, or prepare the dishes, cover them and chill them until you serve them, or assemble the desserts and eat them warm. You could even make one and eat it right away and then put the rest away for dinner time. Put about a sixth of the sauce in a bowl and float three meringues on top. Make five more.

* That’s right, we have no TV. We have no place we want to put it where the cable runs and we’ve just never fixed that because we seem to be able to watch most of what we want to on our computers or DVD. Don’t worry, we’re not actual crazy “no TV” people. As I’ve stated here before, the very fact of Project Runway gets me out of bed in the morning. I look forward to 30 Rock as much as anyone.

I’ve been unplugged for about 24 hours now. Not completely unplugged, but off twitter and off facebook and not reading blogs because I just can’t read any more laments about the closing of Gourmet. I’m right there with others in the food world – particularly the food writing world – in my disappointment to see a fine food publication shuttered. I have some extra blah about it, too. Someone/someones were faced with the decision to close either Gourmet or Bon Appetit and they chose Gourmet. Nothing against Bon App, but Gourmet was one of those magazines that still had these things called words and stories in it, not just pictures and recipes, and I liked that. I’m sure it was a business decision – I know the Gourmet numbers were down even more than the horribly depressed Bon App numbers – but one way or another it’s a reminder that I’m not the target audience (a fact my dad once gently pointed out when I expressed dismay at some sports car ad when I was in my early and very outraged teens). People want pretty pictures and recipes in their food magazines, and not quite so much yackety-yack and crazy, interesting rather than purely pretty shots of the food. Where, I ask, does that leave the food writer? Or, rather, the writer who likes to write about food? What message can one take that isn’t a bit of a giant bummer? But, as I said, I’m tired of the laments, and so I will end my own.

Before the Monday Gourmet-closing blues hit, I spent the weekend going to parties. It was fabulous. Since I found myself in possession of a large number of pastured eggs (those from hens who spend their time actually running around a field scratching for bugs), I made crazy numbers of deviled eggs and brought plates of them all over town. Regular readers may notice that I don’t tend to get too excited about serving ware and styling – it’s never been my thing. But when it comes to deviled eggs I’m in possession of two particularly well-suited plates. That actual deviled egg plate with divots for the eggs pictured above, suitable for dinner parties (especially those thrown by a friend from Atlanta, a Southern girl who appreciates rarefied things like plates just for serving deviled eggs) and this bright plastic number better suited for toting deviled eggs to a raucous house-warming party at which I was offered a certain dessert (wink, wink) that had to be hidden from the children in attendance.

I’m sure you already have a fabulous recipe for deviled eggs (perhaps your mother cut it out of Gourmet at some point?), but, just in case, I make them by first, of course, hard-boiling however many eggs I’m going to need, usually at least six, so let’s say six – that’s easy to double to a dozen and keep doubling as the party requires.

So you start with six eggs. Put them in a medium saucepan and cover them with water. Bring to a boil. Cover and take off heat and let sit, covered mind you, for 14 minutes. Drain and rinse with cold water and peel.

Cut the eggs in half lengthwise and scoop out the yolks into a small bowl. You can push them through a sieve if you want to be super-fancy, but my lord is that a mess to clean so I never do it. Add a tablespoon each of softened butter and mayonnaise. You can also add a teaspoon of mustard, which I like and put into one batch but left out of another batch because one of the other people at the party really doesn’t like mustard and I didn’t miss it at all. Mash this all up with a fork and add salt and pepper to taste. Spoon the mixture back into the eggs (you can use a pastry bag to make this fancy but, again, what a mess to clean up). I like to garnish them with either minced chives or a bit of paprika. I played around with smoked paprika and hot paprika and, honestly, it made almost no difference at all because the aroma was lost by the time the eggs were served.

I added about a teaspoon of capers, minced within an inch of their lives, to one batch and that was delicious. Sweet pickle is another fine option, as are herbs of all sorts.

I try to make deviled eggs in a timely manner so they never go into the fridge after being cooked – the texture is a bit lovelier that way. They can, however, be covered and chilled for a day before serving.

“Do you have any secrets for making potato pancakes?” I innocently asked my friend.

“I have many, ” she said. “First, you need to be Jewish.”

Hmmm… my master plan for dinner was, I now saw, ill-considered. My dashing husband had requested fish for dinner. Ernest had expressed a perennial desire for dumplings or noodles. But both of those plans required a trip to the store and our kitchen was full of food. Potatoes and eggs, in particular, were in great quantity. My thoughts turned, as always, to a Spanish tortilla. But I sensed that both ignoring the dinner requests I had pointedly solicited the night before and serving yet another tortilla might be legitimately viewed as an aggressive act by my family.

So I did a quick brainstorming, including a brief stop to think about making Ernest’s dream meal: the bacon, eggs sunny-side-up, and patties of hash browns featured on the box of the electric griddle that we store in the basement for when I make pancakes. Alas, we had no bacon. I could hear his wails of protest and decided to move along to other potato-and-egg dinner ideas.

Potato pancakes! Latkes! Of course. Shredded potato and egg and a bit of flour. Perfect. We had some various dairy elements hanging around to top them with, as well as other random condiments that could possibly be put to use. Plus, they would be good with the red cabbage slaw I was planning to make in order to use one of the two heads of red cabbage camping out in the hydrator.

So I grated a pound of potatoes and put them in a large bowl of cold water so they wouldn’t turn brown. I went to grab an onion and… no onion. I could have sworn there was a spring onion hanging around the fridge, but it was gone. Hmmm… potato pancakes with no onion. Oh well. I noticed the two very small sweet potatoes that came in our CSA box last week sitting on the counter. I peeled them and grated them and threw them in with their not-sweet brethren.

At that point I realized I 1) had never made potato pancakes before and 2) was working without a recipe or guidance beyond that I gleaned from working at Sunset while a latke story was in development.

My friend’s derision of said story when it was published made me think I probably did not know what I was doing. So, despite the fact that it was probably the worst time of the day to call someone with two small children, I dialed her number.

That’s when I found out I was doomed before I began. I am not, you see, Jewish. Despite my love of the All-of-a-Kind Family series, reading them obsessively in grade school did not, no matter how much I wished it, magically transport my Norwegian-Scottish self into the teeming Lower East Side food markets that sounded like such fun – with their pickles and lox skin and pretzel women and hot chickpeas – in the books (although it did teach me a whole hell of a lot about Jewish holidays, a shocking amount of which I’ve retained).

After breaking my heart with her hard truth about latkes, my dear friend kindly moved onto her second point: the importance of wringing out the water from the shredded vegetables. “You cannot get them dry enough,” she proclaimed, “a man is very useful for this. Really, you cannot wring them enough.”

Strike two: I was home alone and very much not a man. One of the ways in which I am not like a man is my incredible lack of upper-body strength.

“I like to add some celery root,” she said. I explained that I didn’t have any and didn’t have time to run to the store.

“That’s too bad,” she said, “it really adds a nice flavor.”

“I did add some sweet potato,” I offered.

“I am not a fan,” she said.

And… strike three. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was out of onion. I thanked her and went on my now not-at-all merry way with my dinner plans.

I wrung out the shredded potatoes with two separate kitchen towels while Ernest cracked six small eggs into a huge bowl and whisked them smooth. We stirred in the pretty-darn dry shreds, added salt and pepper and a few tablespoons of flour.

Then I did something just horrible. I asked Ernest to get the griddle. I just couldn’t deal with frying. It would be messy and smelly and I already sensed that these were not going to be great, so damning them to a mediocre fate for my own convenience seemed like the reasonable thing to do.

So I cooked them into child-hand sized fritters on the griddle – using the peanut oil my friend recommended but not at all in the way she intended. If a person put the whole idea of latkes and their lacy crispy addictiveness out of their mind, the fritters were pretty good. They were tender and eggy and a delightful vehicle for horseradish cream.

But when my dashing husband had walked in the door and saw me making something and asked what it was, I knew they were not latkes. They did not even deserve the moniker of “potato pancake.”

“Potato fritters,” I said, a bit sad, a bit dejected, but hungry for dinner.

I managed to nab a half dozen of the goose eegs up for grabs from the meat csa to which I belong. They are the ones on the right. Chicken eggs are on the left. The goose eggs, you may notice, are quite a bit larger. By my measurement they are about 2 1/2 times larger than a large chicken egg. They also have about 2 1/2 times the flavor (this measurement is even less formal, not to say reliable, than the volume measurement for which at least I used standard measuring devices). The yolks are beyond golden, more than orange, I couldn’t even capture the glow with my camera. They sort of shimmered in the bowl.

When I picked the eggs up I asked our meat club czarina, I asked “What do I do with them?” “Why,” she wondered out loud, “did everyone who ordered them ask that?” She said she was going to make a creme brulee. Good idea. Me? I used three of them to make a tortilla espagnol last night, which I served with a simple green salad and a dollop of yogurt because we had no sour cream, an item I always find goes swimmingly with a nice Spanish tortilla.

The yogurt worked just fine. The tortilla was extra rich, extra eggy tasting, and just a bit more filling than usual. But not mean. If you have any experience with them you know that geese? They’re mean. But their eggs? They’re just big and rich and amazing. I have three left. I’m taking suggestions.

Yes, zucchini blossoms are better fried. But I can’t sit around frying things all day. And, I need more than “Fried Zucchini Blossoms” to populate the “Zucchini Blossoms” category on Local Foods. So zucchini blossom omelet it is. And you know what? It was pretty damn good, especially considering that it was so hot out that all I wanted was a nice big bowl of ice for dinner.

Plus, Ernie chopped the zucchini blossoms. He did not, however, care much for the omelet. What he liked were the Italian sausages I bought from Boccalone* and cooked up to put in his lunch. He liked those a lot. He actually sat on the kitchen floor near the stove to just be there and smell them cooking. And that is how he understood and described his own actions. “Mama,” he said, “I just want to sit here and smell this delicious smell.”

Fair enough.

*Boccalone has a salami CSA, which is pretty awesome. But you know what is really awesome? They sell “salumi cones” at Ferry Plaza–large slices of mortadella and pate formed into a cone and filled with slices of salami. Um, yeah. I thought so too: That’s genius.

Last night we BBQed it up at a friends’ house in Mill Valley (a town whose name still brings BJ Honeycut from M*A*S*H to mind for reasons that escape me). Ernie was pretty excited to go–party? check; kids will be there? check; drive across the Golden Gate Bridge? check. Any one of those things is a pretty big draw to the lad, so the hat-trick was as much as he could handle. Until, that is, until he saw the chickens.

Our friends keep six chickens in their yard and the first hour of the party was spent by them being chased, caught, held, and petted by a gang of kids. At first everyone seemed happy. Then we asked the kids to at least not pick up the chickens any more. Then the chickens were returned to their coop. The kids, eyes gleaming, turned to the cat. At least that fight was fair (one kid got a big scratch to show him just how fair), and the cat eventually just sequestered herself under the house.

Along with burgers and sausages and lamb chops (oh my!), as well as my award-winning potato salad (well, it should win awards) and recipe-demand-inducing spicy sautéed corn, we enjoyed some egg salad crostini from the host, made from eggs from the very birds our children were torturing with love and attention. Man, eggs that fresh are awesome.

So my interest in getting chickens was re-ignited, and it has now met and combined with Ernie’s new absolute adoration of the creatures. I’m don’t know how much longer my dashing husband’s entirely reasonable stance of “absolutely not” can hold back the masses.

Anyone out there have chickens? Thoughts? Advice?

While eating a weird combination of out-of-season dishes at our still-piled-with-all-our-possessions dining room table was super-duper fun the other night, it was a bit of a relief to escape the house (with paint drying on the walls) and eat some supremely edible ultra-seasonal fare at someone else’s house last night. Grilled steak with roasted peppers, blanched green beans, tomato and mozzarella and basil, chilled sliced potatoes with creme fraiche. It’s H.O.T. in San Francisco this week and this dinner was perfect. Made all the more so because while we were standing around our hosts’ kitchen they casually handed us “magic eggs”– lightly poached in-the-shell concoctions served with creme fraiche and chives and balsamic vinegar (also in the shell), handed to us with napkins and tiny spoons. We ate the eggs and sipped rosé and my day of just trying to cover all the god damn walls with paint in unbearable heat (and our upstairs gets sauna-like when that Western sun starts baring down through the windows) slipped away.

Then Ernie was introduced to the magical world of jumping off the top of bunk beds. In case you ever want to try it he recommends “a cushion, a bean bag, and a thousand pillows” to help break the fall. It’s only fun until someone breaks an arm!

After three days of eating every meal in restaurants, and having the majority of them be for professional assessment or a signature event at which I ate what was served me, I reveled in returning to home and farm box. My dashing husband officially “tolerates” zucchini, but noted that the summer squash we get from the farm “actually tastes good” and wondered aloud “how do they do that?” How indeed. I turned some into a zucchini frittata/Spanish tortilla/omelet situation (thanks for the suggestion Luisa!) and sauteed some corn with a stray jalapeno I found in the hydrator.

Someone got creative with the oil, that’s all I can say. Week after week of beets. I’ve roasted them, boiled them, souped them, saladed them. I’ve even grilled them (yes, it works quite nicely). So now I’ve fried them. As chips. Guess what? They were a big hit. Ernie snarfed down a ton and my dashing husband joined him.

And anyone who has deep-fat fried can tell you: once you have the oil going, you might as well keep frying. So the sweet potatoes–sitting so innocently, thinking they were going to be turned into a spicy gratin–were next. Cut into fries and fried. Delicious. Not as crispy as potato french fries, but really good. A bit of chile “lava salt” we got in Kauai was just the ticket to sprinkle on them.

You would think that after five days in New Orleans, I’d want a break from the fried.* And I thought I did. I do. So dinner began in earnest with this gloriously simple but labor-consuming fava bean and pecorino salad. Shell a shit-load of fava beans. Blanch them. Shell them again (seems like torture, I know). Toss with a bit of delicious olive oil and top with tiny cubes of fresh pecorino cheese and a sprinkle of salt. This is a dish best made if you have staff. Staff to do all the shelling and blanching and re-shelling. Today I had that staff in the shape of my lovely intern.

Isn’t it just lovely? Stay tuned next week when we develop a whole slew of fava bean recipes.

The main thrust of the meal was some simple grilled asparagus (brush with oil, grill until charred and tender–about 10 minutes total (covered) and some braised greens with a poached egg on top. Yes, you caught me, that’s a total fall-back meal for me. We all eat it, we all like it, my dashing husband can customize it with hot sauce. I highly recommend it.

* To be honest, I’ve been a bit obsessed with some sweet potato fries I saw at Parkway Bakery and Tavern while I was eating a giant po’ boy–a dining companion saw them too and made a bee line for the counter to order some for us. Alas, the line was long by then, and he gave up. It was for the best, but I’ve been thinking about them ever since.