Meat Vapor (or, I WANT AN EXHAUST FAN)

It’s almost the end of June, and I’ve kept my rules pretty well. I broke them when I went to San Francisco, once or twice when there was free food, once when I forgot my lunch at work, and once when I had a crappy day and ordered takeout because I realized that EVERYTHING would be instantly better if I had lo mein (this turned out to be true). Otherwise I was good.

I know this sounds like a lot of cheating, but actually it was pretty challenging. No running downstairs for lunch, which meant no failing to plan ahead. No throwing in pasta with vegetables when I hadn’t shopped. No getting hungry at work and stopping for a granola bar. Only when I was severely hypoglycemic did I permit myself to get a snack that I hadn’t made – and although I get hypoglycemic pretty often I only had to resort to this once. Plus, I learned a lot. By taking a step back from the things that I habitually cook, I started that much closer to the real origin of the ingredients.

There is one very important thing, though, that I haven’t attempted. My mother makes the best boeuf bourguignon ever, and I make it all the time. It is my comfort food. But it requires beef stock. I knew that if this was to be a real experiment in making everything that I usually make from scratch, I needed to make beef stock, and for this I needed bones. So on Tuesday I turned the opposite way down Massachusetts Avenue and headed to Eastern Market.

Here’s the thing about chickens and cows: cows are bigger. I made chicken stock out of a whole chicken, but the cow legs they had at Eastern Market were the size of clubs. The guy behind the counter was deaf and crabby but when I very timidly asked if he had any that might fit in a stock pot he cut one up for me with a very large whirring contraption that I didn’t really want to look at (still afraid of my mandoline). I headed home with some veggies and my soup bones.

The Joy of Cooking had a recipe for browned beef stock, where you first roasted the bones with some onions then boiled them. This sounded good, and it only needed to simmer for 30 minutes. I figured I would roast them, then go up to my sister’s for dinner, then come down and boil. I threw them in the oven and took a shower, then read the rest of the recipe. It said to boil for the 30 minutes, add lots of veggies, and boil for 6 to 8 hours.

I feel like I do this a lot.

I threw the roasted-ish bones in the fridge and decided to deal with them on Wednesday.

I figured it out when I got home today. The next recipe (for slackers' beef stock) said that you should boil the unroasted bones for about two hours with various vegetables. The vegetables included tomatoes, which surprised me a bit but then made sense when I thought about it more. I didn’t have tomatoes but I threw in whatever I did have and ignored the rest, which means I put the bones in a pot with an onion, herbs, salt and pepper, and water, set to simmer, and periodically skimmed off the foam forming on top. Things were going well. I did laundry.

About an hour and a half later I went downstairs to get my laundry out of the dryer. Now, I know I mentioned that I don’t like raw chicken, but I have absolutely no problem with raw beef. I love beef. I love steaks and I love the way beef smells when it’s cooking. However, making stock from giant cow leg bones does not smell like the beef cooking that I know. It smelled like boiled, dead, damp cow. Which, of course, it is. However, much like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water, I had not noticed the smell until I walked in after getting my laundry. When I entered the apartment it was like someone had hit me full in the face with a piece of boiled, dead, damp cow. It was steamy. Steamy with meat vapor, and it hit me right in the back of the throat.

It was late, and I had a very long day. “I HAVE TO MAKE THE MEAT GO AWAY,” I said very loudly to no one in particular.

I strained the beef through cheesecloth into a mixing bowl. This was unpleasant and intensified the dead damp cow smell. I threw away the bones. I put the mixing bowl in the fridge. I washed all the dishes, the counter, and the floor (don’t ask). I took out the trash. Then I opened the windows onto the damp, non-meaty DC night and positioned my fan in the living room facing outward so that it could pump the meat vapor outside.

Right now I’m just really hoping this goes away before I try to sell some of my furniture, or wear some of my clothing. 

Lazy Weekend Soup

Sometimes when I take on cooking projects they go nonstop until I'm tired and cranky and covered in flour or something. Sometimes they take shape slowly over the course of a weekend. This weekend was like that, and I will illustrate it here.

SATURDAY:

10:22: I am very, very deeply asleep and involved in a complicated dream with multiple plot lines when someone knocks loudly on my door to show my apartment. Oops. Moving on. Made eggs and bacon and a shopping list before starting the Quest for Local Tomatoes.

12:30: Arrived at 14th and U farmers' market. No tomatoes. Hopped on metro.

1:15: OMG it's the Eastern Market flea market day! I'll just wander for a few minutes.

2:30: Okay I'm back. Looking for tomatoes now. Found a monster one! Passed it by in favor of smaller ones that will roast in the same amount of time. Also got rosemary, basil, wine, radishes, blueberries, and some pottery. 

3:00: Back at apartment. Time to roast the tomatoes and do something about the fact that my apartment is filthy. Watch TV.

3:44 (sitcom episodes are 22 minutes only and therefore fit very well into the breaks you should always work in for yourself every weekend): Sliced tomatoes and crowded them into pan with unpeeled garlic, olive oil, and a sprinkle of salt. Put in oven. I also hung the herbs from my kitchen island so they could dry like they do in real people's kitchens. 

4:00: I should really clean my bathroom.

4:22: Actually cleaned bathroom.

4:45: Tomatoes are done! Left them out to cool. Took another break.

6:00: Sauteed herbs in olive oil to make herb oil.

6:15: My sister came down to visit! Had cocktails. Ate ALL the blueberries. The tomatoes were cool and the skins peeled off really easily. Squirting the roast garlic out of the skins is one of the best things ever and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

At this point, it's totally okay if you get distracted and leave the tomatoes in their pot overnight. 

SUNDAY

10:09: I should really get up. Omelet. 

11:30: Pureed tomatoes. The recipe I was using didn't tell me to puree them until they were smooth but I like smooth tomato soup so I did. The next step was adding cream, but I don't have room in my fridge for my big stock pot and I didn't want to leave something with cream in it out all day so I didn't do that yet. 

11:45: Cleaned kitchen. Left all kitchen contents on floor while counters dried.

12:45: Gym and grocery run. You see, normal-people activities can also fit into weekend cooking projects. 

3:00: Returned. Put kitchen back together. Made bread dough. I wasn't able to incorporate quite all the flour into this. The dough is supposed to be sticky, so every time I kneaded it to stickyness I added a bit more flour and worked it in. Then I left the dough to rise in the bathroom (warmest place in my apartment). Then I took another break.

3:30: Dusted, vacuumed, mopped, showered. This only took about an hour.

5:45: Reformed bread dough into loafish shape and set to rise again.

6:00: Brad came over for dinner! Bearing tonic water. Cocktails. We baked the bread into a nice little round that looked nothing like the picture. I brushed it with my herb oil from the day before. When it baked it just had a sort of dimple in the middle instead of a doughnut kind of hole, but that was okay. It wasn't nearly as fluffy as I thought it should be but Brad thought the fluffiness was acceptable. 

When the tomato soup was simmering I added the cream, salted to taste, and kept it warm until the bread was ready. This is what it looked like:

We still don't know what the Uzbeks eat with their bread. 

Bread: A Love Story

I think I mentioned earlier that the last time I tried to make bread it turned out fairly brick-like. I ate it toasted with lots and lots of butter but David told me it tasted like cardboard. I don't know about this because to me it tasted like butter. 


It was really pretty shitty bread, though, and I haven't tried again. Thus the last few weeks have been hard for me because bread is one of the best things in the world. I think I could give up rice and pasta if I had to, but I don't think I could ever give up bread. Every weekend lunch at my parents' house consists of country bread or baguettes and an array of cheeses, pate, fruit, and whatever leftovers we have around. When I was little my dad would pull over next to the French bakery near my house, hand me exact change, and instruct me to go inside and say, "One baguette, please," to the girl at the counter. For some reason I was incredibly afraid of getting it wrong so I would never say anything else but those exact words with the exact inflection. Every week I stood at the counter saying "One baguette, please" like some sort of weird French parrot.

I love pita bread and tortillas and those fun little breakfast pastries from all those different places in Europe and ohhh I loooove naan. You can add anything you want to bread. Olive bread and rosemary bread are the best kinds but really the possibilities are endless. You can make garlic bread or sweet bread or seed bread, and you can eat it warm with the little swirls of steam coming from it, and then you can make TOAST. 

I think it's really interesting that every culture has some sort of bread, mostly because the idea of bread is so unintuitive to me. Who was the first guy who said, "Hey, let's take this fungus and put it in our food and then the food will be all light and puffy"? Honestly, he kind of sounds like a dumbass. When I was a kid someone told me that yeast were little animals that made the bread rise. I was an almost absurdly logical child and I don't know if anything has ever confused me so much (except maybe the line in Elton John's 'Crocodile Rock' when he says he was "dreaming of my Chevy and my aubergines." THAT messed me up for a while.) I don't know if I would have been less confused if whoever it was had told me that yeast were fungi or if it was just a conceptual problem with the idea of making bread, but I do know that this was a significant flaw in the story. Yeast are not animals, and confusing animals with fungi is kind of disturbing in a creationist sort of way. Even at a young age I think I would have been skeptical if someone told me mushrooms were animals.

In any case, though, my bread-making history hadn't been great, and this weekend I was determined to try again. A coworker recommended Tartine Bread as a good book about how to make bread, so I googled it.* Martha Stewart had posted this recipe.** The key to good bread, it says, is getting your 'starter' going and then 'feeding' it (here we are back in the yeast-are-animals camp again) for three weeks. If you're REALLY impatient, you can start after five days.

What the fuck, Martha.

I had wanted to make my bread this weekend so I decided this afternoon that I would just run the starter for two days to see how it worked out. I invited my friend Brad over for dinner on Sunday and told him we could always order a pizza.

When I got home I re-read the recipe. Yeast -  the fungi or animal variety - wasn't even an ingredient! Then I remembered that I have read about these starters. You let them sit for weeks while the flour pulls yeast and other things from the air to make the bread rise. Each region can have a specific taste. It's actually pretty cool, and why San Francisco is known for its sourdough. Apparently the air in the Bay Area has a particular concentration of sourdough flavors. 

But I realized that I live in a hermetically sealed (at least in the summer) apartment and, even if I didn't, the starter definitely takes longer than forty-eight hours. I needed a new recipe. Still shy from my cardboard bread experience, I googled 'fluffy whole wheat loaf' and came up with a lot of recipe sites I don't trust. I added 'Food52' (which I trust) to the search and found this recipe for Tashkent Non, an doughnut shaped Uzbek bread.

Nice whole grains? Check.

Fluffy looking? Check.

Randomly ethnic? CHECK.

Problem: 9:00 on Friday night (yeah, I'm too tired to go out) and I wanted the Uzbek bread NOW. 

I know how this story ends. I decide I'll make whatever it is even though I don't have time, and then it will be 1 AM and I'll be all GODDAMNIT MARK BITTMAN with granola all over my kitchen. 

This is why this is only a planning post and not an actual cooking post: personal growth. Stay tuned for Uzbek bread and tomato soup this weekend. 

P.S. I'm nervous about doing it in my apartment in the middle of a city, but I am going to try the starter thing this summer, probably at my parents' house (surprise, Mum and Dad!). Make me do it if I forget. 

* I don't post recipes directly from the books I own because I don't think it's fair, but if I don't have a book I will search to see if anyone else has posted something from it before I buy it. Often people publish things with permission, or it's on google books, or I can't afford new cookbooks. 
** She says she has permission but we all know Martha's a little shaky on the ethics. 

Thinking about Food

When I cook I rarely measure and I almost always modify, but I usually do, in the basic sense, follow recipes. I pretend I'm at a point where I can just throw ingredients together into something amazing, but I'm not quite. Food52 messes with me a little because I desperately want to win one of their recipe contests but the recipes have to be original. This is harder for me. The things that I 'make up' are usually pretty similar to the recipes that I've read in a book or a blog or something by my BFFs forever at The New York Times dining section. The contests are a good reason to get out of my comfort zone.

The rare times that I do completely make things up usually start with a craving for a region or an ingredient. Sometimes it takes me a long time to place what it is I'm in the mood for. Sometimes I just walk around the supermarket or farmers' market and think about what tastes good and looks good and reminds me of what I want to eat, or where I would like to be. Walking to or from work, when I'm not wondering what trashy TV I'm going to watch that night, thinking something like, "Wow, it's easy to get to work when I actually leave my house on time," or pondering how great life will be when I have my own band, I'm contemplating how this cheese will go with those vegetables, what herbs I would use if I were in Provence, or whether I have enough cumin at home for chicken masala (I never have enough cumin at home).

This week Food52's contest was to make a picnic food. I wanted to make a tart, sort of based on my recent experiences with Gruyere and tomato tarts and the big kale and sausage one. I wanted a French vibe, but I liked the creaminess that ricotta added to the kale tart, and I had some left over. I was also thinking about pesto and how happy basil and tomatoes are together. I thought about these combinations all through my bus ride back from the airport on Monday and in my cubicle on Tuesday, and by the time I went to the store after work I had formed a vague plan.

I was picking out salad greens when I saw the tomatoes. They were conventionally grown, and from Maine, but they practically glowed in the store. When I approached them I could smell them. I have been waiting all summer for tomatoes I can smell. I bought about ten, feeling slightly guilty about the distance they traveled. But there are a lot of wonderful smells in the world in front of which I am powerless (roses, hardware stores, libraries) and fresh tomatoes are one of them.

I cuisinarted basil and Gruyere into crumbs and mixed them with ricotta and an egg. After I blind baked the tart shell I layered tomato slices, then cheese mixture, then more tomatoes. The basil and cheese mixture was so bright green.

I think next time I would add more Gruyere, and toast the pine nuts on top. But it was pretty damn good. You can see the whole recipe here. I'll be eating it for lunch all week.

Lucy + California = True Love

I just got back from a truly glorious vacation in San Francisco. I needed a vacation. I needed to not think about movers and renters' insurance, and I needed to sleep. I did both, and it was everything I thought it could be and more.

I had not seen my friend Theresa for over a year, and this was not an okay state. I missed her like hell. What is an okay state, however, is the state of California.

Let me preface this by saying that I do not fully understand California. As a born and bred East Coast girl, a New Englander by circumstance and heritage (my mother's), as well as at least partially a Southerner by food (my grandmother's), small states make more sense to me. I cannot comprehend driving more than four hours and remaining in the same state, the same way I can't really comprehend how much a billion really is, or what exactly goes on in New York City. You know how people talk about the universe and how far it goes on and has black holes, and it's pretty cool, but you still can't really conceptualize it, because it's not actually just like Star Wars and really makes very little sense? That's the way I don't understand California.

But oh, California understood me. Maybe I caught San Francisco on its best weekend, but it was all just a wonderful blur of ocean views, bougainvillea, composting, and sun. We took a cable car at midnight, we ate Greek and French and Burmese food, we barbecued in Oakland overlooking the hills, we hiked along the coast and we basked in avocado sunshine. I was in heaven.

On Saturday Theresa suggested that we make Cobb salad to bring to the barbecue. I had never thought of making Cobb salad - it was something I ordered, but not something I ever made. But Theresa's mother apparently makes a killer one (as well as a killer adobo - next visit, LA). Anyway, what can go wrong with vegetables, avocados, ranch dressing, eggs, and bacon? Nothing, that's what.

While I cut tomatoes and romaine lettuce (we also added avocado, turkey, and bleu cheese) Theresa fried bacon and boiled eggs and chopped them. Instead of adding them to the salad immediately, though, she put the pieces into a cereal bowl. I asked her if the protein had to be isolated, but she said that instead you mixed in a little mayonnaise before adding it to the other ingredients. I knew there was something Cobb salad was missing. Mayonnaise, like garlic and butter, makes everything better. You guys, this Cobb salad was amazing.

On my last night in San Francisco I ate a huge crab and didn't want to leave. Here is what I learned on my trip:

1. Northern California is so awesome
2. When I go to LA I will make Theresa take me to all the stars homes' and then I want to cook with her mom
3. Burmese salad made of tea leaves: who knew?
4. Walking uphill makes your calves hurt in a good way
5. A year is way too long to not see your best friends

Needless to say, I broke all my rules on this trip. It was worth it. I also broke them this morning and for lunch, because I got back to my apartment at midnight and had no food in my apartment. This morning I sort of zombied my way to work (late) and then drank tea all day.  I have a couple of new cooking things going now, but I'll write about them tomorrow or the next day. I had tried to time my trip when DC was so hot you wanted to die, but apparently it was 75 all weekend. Now, of course, it will be in the 90s all week. In the mean time, I will be California dreaming in this ridiculous excuse for a summer's day.

Comfort Food

In three days I am going to San Francisco for a long weekend. In a little more than six weeks I leaving my job and moving to another city.  I ran home at noon today to show a moving company the furniture in my apartment, then hurried back to my cubicle to catch up on work, email my new apartment building about reserving an elevator, call the power company about setting up my electric, and figure out when I’m actually moving. By the time I left work I was wired and nervous, and ready to go back to being a kid when my parents did everything for me.

My friend Lucy was going to come over and we were going to try to bake something. Lucy is the best baker I know. She is the kind of person who offers to make dessert for dinner at your house, then shows up with delicate, filled cookies that she made from scratch. She was (rightly) horrified when I told her that sometimes when I bake I melt butter instead of creaming it. She lusts over cake decorating tools the way I lust over knives and pans. And she thinks she isn’t a cook.

A few weeks ago Lucy and I spent a dreamy afternoon wandering around Washington. We stopped by craft shows and food markets; we wandered up and down the kitchen stores on 14^th Street. We talked about food trends, speculating whether cupcakes were really over when we headed into the Grey Market and ate all the baked goods we could fit, or whether rose was the new cupcake when we stopped into two wine tastings featuring pink wine. Sometime during this time we talked about food blogs, and I mentioned Food52. Last week Lucy casually dropped that she’d recently made gnocchi, from scratch, from a recipe there. This is the girl who thinks she is only a baker.

We were planning on making caramels, but by the time I got home I didn’t feel like doing anything but lying on my couch with wine and watching TV and not thinking about moving. Instead I lay on the couch with wine and looked at Lucy’s photos from her recent trip to Spain (I got a bottle of cava so the transition wouldn’t be too hard for her.) Then we gave up on the caramels and made the ricotta gnocchi from Food52.

I used the leftover filling David and I had from ravioli, supplementing it with a bit more cheese. I more or less halved this recipe. The ricotta still had a lot of thyme in it, which Lucy and I decided we liked. She cut up things for a salad while I rolled the dough into little snakes and then pressed them with a fork, feeling like I was back in elementary school. Elementary school was exactly where I wanted to be. They do not care about renter’s insurance there, only things like colors and numbers and bears.

While I did a few dishes Lucy arranged the little gnocchi bits into a checkerboard.

I didn’t bother with a sauce or with pre freezing the gnocchi, but just dressed them in butter and Parmesan and salt and pepper after we boiled them. We talked about gnocchi and cucumber slices. We talked about tapas and ham and croquetas. We talked about our families and friends and grilling in the summer. And I felt better. 

Ravioli

Sunday morning after omelets and blog formatting (David figured out in about five minutes what I’ve been trying to do for a week), we made our way to the Dupont farmers’ market. I had read on Food52 about a great local ricotta from the Blue Ridge Dairy Company. Of course, I forgot to look up the name, so we had a good time wandering from stall to stall to try to taste the ricotta. I ended up passing up the Blue Ridge, because they didn’t have any to taste and it was getting too hot to be outside, but we did use Blue Ridge mozzarella for the pizza last night. The ricotta I got was from Keswick Creamery in Newburg, PA. Look how happy the cows are!

We were both slightly melted by the time we got home and I did not feel like making pasta dough. I felt like lying on my sofa. I am ashamed to admit that this is exactly what I did. David made the dough all by his onesies. I will justify this by saying that he really wanted to make the pasta with all white flour and Michael Pollan told me not to do that so it was sort of his dough. He did a fantastic job, too. A few weeks ago he was scared to break eggs and now he is separating them like a pro.

We decided on a simple herb and ricotta filling because we didn’t want to try anything too complicated the first time around. I had some ricotta left over from my kale and sausage tart last week, and David tasted them with his Serious Concentrating Face and decided that, although we loved the tangyness of the Keswick Creamery cheese, the smoother Vermont kind would make a milder ravioli filling. We used a bit of each, and added fresh thyme, basil, and parsley, salt, and an egg.

Rolling out pasta dough is serious business. David was NOT happy when I told him how thin it needed to be. We worked out a system. He rolled (violently, making the entire kitchen shake) and I took bits that he was rolling and sort of awkwardly stretched it in between. The stretching actually really helped. Soon we had some very awkward shaped pieces of vaguely thin dough. It was stuffing time.

The Joy of Cooking has a lovely illustration of two perfectly rectangular pieces of dough, studded at even intervals with little blobs of filling to make very uniformly square ravioli. Ours looked more like this:

You brush water between the filling blobs so the dough will stick together. David likes big ravioli because he says that the dough-to-filling ratio is better. They were all crazy shapes because of our unconventional folding techniques, but they really looked like ravioli! Just trapezoidal ones, and maybe some rhombi. 

David has Pasta Sense. Like I can cut into a chicken and estimate how much time it needs to cook, he can stir pasta and, at the most, touch it with a fork, and announce, “Five minutes.” His Pasta Sense told us that it was going to be long time until the ravioli was cooked. We heated up the leftover sauce from yesterday and put in some peas.

So the shapes were unconventional, and the dough was a bit thick. But these were fantastic! I had about four and David had about ten. 

Equality and Dough

David is visiting this weekend. Our weekends usually revolve mostly around food, but this one was especially so. I was trying to follow my new one ingredient experiment, David had experiments of his own, and suddenly there were three different kinds of dough in every room of my apartment. 

David is half Italian and, given my recent success with pasta, we decided to try to make ravioli. We would make the dough and filling on Saturday, refrigerate, and assemble the ravioli on Sunday. But then I invited Fi and her boyfriend Nat over for drinks before the Capital Pride parade and we wanted to make Pimm's.  We also needed to feed them something that fit my rules, and I had leftover pie dough that I wanted to use. And we needed dinner for ourselves on Saturday.

This is how we ended up making pizza for dinner, gruyere and tomato tarts for hors d’oeuvres, Pimm's, and ravioli with homemade ricotta. In one weekend. Because once you’ve committed to three different kinds of dough, you might as well start making cheese too.

Yesterday morning at the 14^th and U Farmers’ Market we picked up berries, herbs, and cucumber, and I got some greens because I wanted them and garlic scapes because they were curly. Lovely local strawberries stretched as far as the eye could see. I also took a neat picture of turnips. We went to Whole Foods for everything else, and then the hardware store for a cupcake pan to make tarts and the liquor store for Pimms. The whole thing took about two hours. This was the haul.

David prides himself on his tomato sauce, which he (totally nonsensically) calls ‘gravy.’* He usually does this while gesticulating and pronouncing ‘ricotta’ in an Italian accent that he swears is genuine. But I put up with it for this pasta sauce. I don’t know why it’s so good. We were using fresh herbs and tomatoes, even though the tomatoes aren’t in season and would have been better if they were redder and riper. First he cored them and loudly slurped out all the liquid, then he blended them combined them with herbs, garlic, onion and red pepper to simmer for several hours. Because the tomatoes were a little too green, we had to add some tomato paste, but it was still really good. I’ll post his basic recipe below, even though he keeps telling me it’s a secret.

I got the tart recipe from Susan Loomis's French Farmhouse Cookbook. I rolled out my leftover pastry dough and baked it blind in my new muffin tin. The recipe said to coat the bottom of the pastry with mustard, then add some gruyere, chopped garlic, and a tomato slice. When it came out of the oven I was supposed to drizzle them with olive oil, but I forgot. I also added some thyme – we got a big bunch of it (and oregano and parsley) at the farmers’ market and nothing has ever smelled so good. I added thyme to everything today. It was in our sauce, our tarts, and embedded in the pizza dough. I probably should have filled up the tarts more, but they were still good.

I do not have any counter space for pending items. At one point we had:

- Pasta sauce cooling on the living room floor

- Tart shells cooling in the hallway

- Pimm's in a bowl on my bedroom floor

- Pizza dough rising in the bathroom and, later, closet

We had some trouble with the ricotta. I was looking at this recipe, and we just couldn’t get it to curdle. I was kind of ready to give up on the whole thing, but David persevered and looked up a recipe that said we should let it sit for an hour to separate. He is almost obsessively optimistic and spent the entire hour telling me “It’s really cheese now! Oh it’s sooo gooood. It’s the best ricotta ever!” I was writing on my couch when he poured it into the cheesecloth to strain and immediately started making upset noises and hopping around the kitchen in fury. I guess some of it spilled over the cheesecloth and was lost, and he started some complicated rescuing techniques involving spoons and ramekins. I decided to stay where I was.

We had a lovely glass of Pimm's with cucumber, (local!) raspberries and strawberries and (South Carolina) peaches with Fi and Nat. Then we spent a wonderful few hours getting leis at the parade and watching, alternately, Chippendale dancers on floats and happy same-sex couples with babies awwwwwww.

I let David punch down the pizza dough and he punched a HOLE in my green bowl. While he ordered a new one online, I rolled out dough and chopped the mozzarella, mushrooms, and peppers for the pizza. David felt that his tomato sauce was one of the best ever – and I agree. Its weird orangy-brown color just means that a) the tomatoes weren’t quite in season and b) no Red Dye No. 5 was used.

I totally screwed up the pizza process, though. I was looking at this recipe, which wants me to have all sorts of well-floured transferring trays so that everything remains pizza-oven-quality. In case you are thinking about it, it’s not a good idea to go into it saying, “sure! I have the tools to do this! It doesn’t matter that all my cutting boards are smaller than my pizza pan and that I didn’t flour it and now it’s sticking to the counter! I’m being professional!” We had to awkwardly roll up the whole toppinged pizza dough and unroll it on to the pizza pan. My pizza that was so beautiful before turned into a weird, stretched out mutant with all the toppings in the center.

But we ended up with this, so I think we’re in the clear.

David got really into photographing the process. He says his leis still make him feel “fabulous.” 

In the end, we didn’t make it to the pasta dough, or the filling. The homemade ricotta we had to write off (David admitted that it tasted good initially because it was just heavy cream, which, let’s admit, tastes really good). A learning experience, and a good opportunity to go to the Dupont farmers’ market for the local stuff I’ve heard raves about. Any weekend where farmers’ market visits are maximized = a good weekend. Today: ravioli!

David's Pasta and Pizza "Gravy":

Six large, ripe tomatoes

Thyme (lots)

Parsley

Basil

Oregano

Salt

Pepper

Crushed red pepper (for pizza sauce only)

About 1/3 of a red pepper

4 garlic cloves

1/3 of a large onion

About 3/4 cup olive oil, or to taste

About 1/3 cup red wine 

About 1 tablespoon sugar 

1 small can or 1 partial can tomato paste (optional - it will speed up the cooking time. It is also a good rescuer if things don't work out as planned, so it's nice to have around even if you don't end up using it)

1. Cover the bottom of a large pot with about 1/4" of olive oil. Core the tomatoes and drain seeds and as much of the liquid as you can. Puree in a food processor or cuisinart and add to the pot. Put over very low heat.

2. Chop finely, or cuisinart, all the herbs, onion, garlic, and red pepper (we used fresh herbs and they were dreamy.) Sautee in a skillet with olive oil to make a pesto-consistency paste, about 5 minutes. Add to pot with tomatoes and add some salt and pepper, wine, and sugar. If possible, blend in the pot with a blending stick until smooth. If you don't have a blending stick, stir until olive oil has blended with tomatoes.

3. Raise the heat to a bubble, then reduce to maintain a low simmer. Simmer for as long as you can - 1-2 hours. If you want to accelerate the cooking time, forgo one tomato and add some tomato paste. 

4. Add salt, pepper, olive oil and herbs (or tomato paste, if it's not tomatoy enough) to taste. 

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*Apparently this is normal for Italians, of which I am not one. Gravy is for turkeys. 

Two Dinners with Friends

Chicken stock, pork chops, tarts… it’s been an active few days. Good active, but… yeah, active. This week I actually went grocery shopping before work in the morning because I had no other time to do it. Honestly, I am very ready to curl up somewhere soft and sunny and sleep for a week.

I guess trashy TV and wine will work too.

Anyway, Tuesday night I dealt with my chicken stock. There was, as promised, some grease on it when I took it out of the fridge, but I skimmed almost all of it off with a spoon. I set aside about half a cup for my pork chops that night, and filled my ice cube trays with the rest (for storage, not cocktails. Though there was a close call). There was quite a bit leftover, but I’m sorry to say I threw it out. There is only so much chicken stock you can save when your kitchen is smaller than a mid-size SUV.

My friend Fi was coming over for dinner, so I decided to make pork chops, polenta with (a lot of) Parmesan, and asparagus. I lovelovelove with little hearts drawn in the margins this pork chop recipe from The Essential New York Times Cookbook (which I also desperately want). It’s delicious and complex tasting and stupidly easy. I think Fi liked it too because she gnawed at the bones, and I had a great time. And she brought wine, which is always a winner.

Note: My camera battery died and my sister downloaded a fancy photo app on my phone. I took this picture of the pork chops and polenta with it. I do NOT know how to work this app. They do not look scary and green in real life. 

My lovely friend Colleen asked me about my salmon recipe the other day, and I’m really going to try to post more recipes in more specific terms, or at least link to people who describe them better than I do. The problem is that I very rarely measure, and I mostly ignore recipes. Usually I treat them as a sort of flexible inspiration, and do my own thing. The two recipes tonight, though, are uncharacteristic in that I actually mostly stuck to them. Case in point: for the first, the only changes are that I use pork chops instead of veal, wine instead of water, and add a lot more chicken stock and wine and boil it down. This is big for me! Try it, it’s great.

The pork chops were another good choice because I wanted to have everything as ready as it could be when Fi got here so I could hang out with her. This is how easy the prep is: When I got home from work I got out my big casserole and put in a dollop of butter and some olive oil. Then I skinned and halved three garlic cloves, and set on the counter the garlic cloves, my chicken stock, thyme, and salt and pepper. I dredged the chops in flour on a plate. I put my asparagus in the steamer, ready to be turned on, and put the polenta, water, and salt in a pot ready to start. Done. I had less than an hour between getting home from work and when Fi arrived, and I still had time to do all my abovementioned fussing with the chicken stock, change, do the dishes, tidy my apartment, clean my fridge shelf where the pork chops oozed on it, and play with the Internet for a good 25 minutes. It felt like cheating.

My second dinner was actually for a work potluck this afternoon. Gina stayed over on Wednesday night, and we made a great, light salad while I worked on my potluck dish. Actually, Gina cut up things for the salad while I showered. She is an artist as well as a nurse and a neuroscientist, and every time she cuts everything up all the pieces have uniform thinness and perfect right angles. Her salad was a work of art.

For my potluck I decided to make this recipe for sausage and kale tart from Food52 (my new BFF forever), which I also almost totally followed! Except I added more cheese (mostly ricotta, which came from small Vermont family farms, but some feta), and put in ½ of a cup of whole wheat flour instead of totally all-purpose. Gina and I had a great time making pie dough. I don’t have a food processor (I know, Mark Bittman, I KNOW) so I crumble the cold butter into the flour with my hands, which is more fun anyway. I still have a nice little ball of it, any suggestions?

I’m not a fan of kale but with all the cheese it was yummy. I would have liked to use better Italian sausage than I got at Whole Foods, but you know, when you shop at 8 am you have to make sacrifices.

One of these sacrifices is not writing in detail about everything I cook, because I’m tired and I don’t have that much space. But I’m doing a lot of happy dancing because of all the lovely facebook comments I’ve gotten, and the fact that I have at least one follower I’m not related to! Amazing. If I mention anything that you would like me to write more about, let me know. This is honestly just fun for me. 

BEST. DAY. EVER.

It has been my months-long dream to win something - anything - on Food52. At first it brought out my competitive nature, but everyone on there is so damn nice and supportive that it's hard to be competitive. And I was terrified of the site for the longest time. As you may have noticed, I'm more than a little obsessed with the New York Times dining section. It totally freaked me out that Amanda Hesser might actually read my recipes. And everyone else there! A lot of them cook for a living! You guys, I work in a cubicle.

And then THIS happened.

My 'featured' answers are about eggs, Pimms, and salmon. OF COURSE. I love to make up recipes and play in my kitchen and feed people, but really? I didn't think it was particularly legitimate. This is exactly like when I got into law school. I didn't think that was legitimate either.

In all seriousness, I am beyond honored and am doing a happy dance around my apartment.

THANK YOU FOOD52!!!!

Do Not Obsess about the Chicken

Note: This post contains sensitive material. If you feel you would be offended by a detailed description of a young woman inexpertly hacking up and skinning a raw chicken, read no further. There are some wonderful links on the right side of your screen written by people who are much, much better than I am. Look! Some of them even have real-life things like children and pets and grill pans! And they probably didn’t spend part of their evening on their hands and knees with a glass of wine cleaning raw chicken off their kitchen floors!

My deepest, darkest cooking secret is that I don’t like raw chicken. I don’t hate it, like I hate taking out the trash, and I’m not afraid of it, like I’m afraid of my mandoline. I cook with it, and I make nice things out of it and have no problem holding and trimming and massaging it, I just don’t like it. I think it’s the way it smells. I do this a lot:

Guest: So, what can I do to help?

Me: I think everything’s under control… Let’s see. Well, if you feel like cutting up the chicken, that would be great!

And then I’ll cut up something innocuous like tomatoes. I know, I suck.

It’s not raw meat that bothers me. Pork is all pretty and pink and swirly, and raw beef is just plain fun. Also, I’ve been known to hack turkey necks to bits - and turkeys are just big chickens so that makes no sense (but they’re so big! They’re awesome). It’s just chicken, and it’s weird chickeny-ness. I once saw my dad cut up a block of frozen chicken breasts that fused together and was about two feet square with a hacksaw, and it left weird frozen chicken dust in the kitchen. 

This probably explains why I haven’t before dismantled a chicken, but I wanted to make stock. My one previous attempt (which ended poorly) involved a roast chicken carcass, but I read in this Mark Bittman column that stock is better when made with raw chicken. I don’t know why I’ve been cooking so much from Mark Bittman recently, but he does simplify things that I haven’t done before, and I guess I have been trying more new things recently. Look at me, growing!

Anyway, Mark has very specific instructions for dismantling the chicken and cutting of the meat so that you just have bones to boil for the stock. I got out my biggest cutting board, my biggest knife, and put on some music. I was ready.

You know what? It was awesome. This particular chicken didn’t smell at all (probably because it was local and organic and had a lovely lawn to play on - more than I can say for myself) and I had a ton of fun hurling it around my kitchen chopping and peeling. Sadly, I was alone, so I don’t have photos except for the 'after' picture below. Here is what I learned:

1. When you cut the wings off, you will end up holding a wing and dangling the entire carcass from it while you hack at it with your knife.
2. Have your stock pot next to you so you can toss in the bones etc. as you go along.
3. The legs are harder to cut off than they are on a roasted chicken but easier than you would expect. You have to break all the joints, and it feels weirder than in a roasted chicken.
4. Mark Bittman says to cut the back off the breasts. Mark Bittman, this makes NO sense. I cut the breasts off the back instead, in a lot of small pieces.
5. If you are cooking with the meat you cut off (as I am), do not plan to have nice, whole, chicken breast cutlets (at least not the first time you try) unless you are magic. Pretty much everything you remove from the carcass will be hacked to little bits. It’s okay. Make a salad with greens, tomatoes, cucumber, avocado, and some really, really good goat cheese (don’t get those little crumbles they have the grocery store. Get real cheese and cut it up). Then cook the chicken in olive oil with a little cumin, salt and pepper, let it cool a bit and add it to the salad while it’s still warm. Dress with olive oil, vinegar, and a little mustard. The goat cheese will melt and it will be glorious.
6. Skinning legs and thighs is hard!
7. (This is the most important one). Do not obsess about the chicken. You will find that there are tendony bits (chicken tendons are WEIRD) and blood vessels and all sorts of interesting things and you don’t have to eat them. You don’t have to get all the bits of meat off the bones; it’s hard and time consuming and doesn’t actually really matter. Throw them in your stock. Throw away the bits of fat and skin if you want. No one is judging you. Go have a drink.

 

Mark said to put celery, onion, and carrot in the stock, but celery and carrots come in big packets and I didn’t want to bother getting a whole one so I skipped them. I know, I suck. I did add onion and some thyme and rosemary. When it boiled grayish foam formed on the top, and I skimmed it off because I read somewhere that you should do that. Then I turned it down and let it bubble at various speeds for a while – over an hour – before straining it through cheesecloth into another pot. I’m putting it uncovered in the fridge so that the grease can rise to the top (I’m told this happens) and I can skim it off. 

My sister just asked where the goat cheese is. I deliberately put it in the bottom of the salad so she wouldn’t pick at it, and then she dug through the lettuce just ‘to make sure it was in there.’ But I will forgive her, because a) she ran a half marathon yesterday and had to swim through a river and now her feet are falling off; and b) she suggested a great new blog name, probably because she has been in the kitchen and heard me saying “No! You’re cooking too fast! Slow down! Are you finished yet?” too many times. Hi, my name is Lucy, and I talk to my food. 

In Which We Return to Caveman Times (or: Go Eat a Sandwich, Paleo Kid)

Yesterday my friend Gina came to visit for dinner. Gina is studying to be a nurse practitioner and she is very Brave. I had spent all day at my boss’s house for a retreat, and therefore had made an exception to my cooking rules in order not to be the jerk who shows up with her own food. Gina had a shift that started at 6:45 AM. She was exhausted and I had a food hangover from too many fried and mayonnaisey things. I made a big salad and sautéed shrimp in olive oil with garlic, salt, and cumin. It was clean and light, and I think we both felt better. I asked Gina to look at my finger cut with all her nurse-y wisdom, and found that it was looking so much, much better than it had the day before. I think she is magic.

My sister is running a half marathon tomorrow which means I will be getting up at six to drive her into Virginia. Because the half marathon is through the woods, I won’t be able to watch it and have therefore lined up some farmers’ markets to visit while she’s zipping along. I will meet her at the end with vegetables and eggs. I was going to make her homemade pasta so she could carbo-load tonight, but she eats vaguely paleo (no grains allowed and dairy products have cooties) and decided that she didn’t want change her habits right before the race. Which, fine. That makes sense, even if paleo eating may or may not. I’m not arguing with the fact that we as a society probably eat too many grains, and definitely eat too many white grains, but I think that paleo cavemen (actually, there were no cavemen in the paleo period, what do you think of that, paleo kid?) probably ate whatever the hell they could find. And in the Fertile Crescent, they were starting to cultivate wheat and barley and all their grainy friends right about the same time they were starting to cultivate vegetables (you can trust me, I took a class). As caveman cookie monster (cavemonster?) would have said, grains were a sometimes food. Whatever. I’m going to show up to her next potluck with a bigass lasagna and a bottle of vodka and they will eat it and like it.

Anyway, I’m making pasta because my sister loves pesto and if her sneaking into my apartment when I’m at work to eat my cheese is any indication, she’ll eat at least some of it. I want to learn how to make pasta from scratch anyway.

I got this recipe from Mark Bittman, which I liked because it looked like I didn’t need to buy any extra equipment. But, as I’ve noticed in a lot of Mark’s recipes, he extols his food processor at length and reluctantly offers a more difficult, by-hand alternative, with a ‘why would you do this if you weren’t Amish’ sort of tone. With my lack of food processor, I’m probably closer to the cavemen than I thought.

This recipe calls for all-purpose flour. I much prefer to use whole wheat because Michael Pollan told me to, but I know that whole wheat often doesn’t have the same dough properties, so I split it half and half. I had to grind the wheat with my oxen, which took a while, but you have to make sacrifices if you don’t have a food processor. I stole one of my sister’s eggs while she was out, and put them in a nice well in the middle of the flour. Then I was supposed to start slowly incorporating the flour into the eggs with a fork, or perhaps a nice forked stick. So far so good.

I started to use my hands about halfway through the flour, and about three quarters of the way through I couldn’t incorporate any more. I set the little dough ball aside to sit, and then started wondering if I was really screwing the recipe by giving up on the rest of the flour. And how was I supposed to store it? Mark was uncharacteristically silent on this issue, so I did what I should have done in the first place – cross-referenced with the Joy of Cooking. Their recipe was suspiciously similar to Mark’s, except that they offered the food processor as the alternative to more primitive methods (cavemen: 1). Then they said: “Knead the dough until satiny and very elastic, about ten minutes.”

Oh.

I didn’t knead for quite ten minutes, but it was close enough. It looked much better afterward.

I had to let it sit for a while so I made the pesto. My sister wanted to bake some chicken in it so I had to make a lot. I packed the baby cuisinart with basil again and again. Finally I added pine nuts, salt, and cheese. I researched the pine nuts quite a bit, because the last time I made pesto everyone who ate it came down with pine nut syndrome. Everything we ate tasted like pennies for days. It was horrible. Apparently most of the bad pine nuts come from China, though, and are a particular species. The ones I got didn’t look like the bad kind, and were from Spain, so I think we’re in the clear.

      

I divided the pasta dough into two to roll it out. I am no longer surprised that the non-caveman among us use machines to do this. This shit is HARD. If you were an Italian housewife before the days of pasta machines, I have new respect for you. The Joy said to roll it out until you could see the shadow of your hand through it, which I didn’t think was very specific. Are you holding it up to a light source? What if your hands have fallen off from so much rolling dough?


The dough is tough, though, and firm enough to actually pick up and flip quite a lot. When I got it thin enough I cut it into about 1/2” strips, not quite fettuccine but maybe in the family. The second half was easier because I’d formed a strategy: start in the middle, press hard, and roll out to the sides and back in little bursts. Here is my second ball of dough on top of the first rolled out sheet, which exactly matches my counter and is shaped vaguely like Zimbabwe.

My sister came in and immediately started eating pesto. I dotted some on top of her chicken, spread it out, and we baked it. When the chicken was done I cooked the pasta.

The pasta was definitely rolled too thick. Not enough dedication on my part. But it really tasted like pasta! And the pesto was great. I have lots left over to take to the race tomorrow.

On an unrelated note, I'm not thrilled with this blog title. Any suggestions? 

Seriously, cucumber?

My sister came back from the beach today and we were making salmon. She was all tanned and nice and I was... making salmon.

In my year-long quest to duplicate the Legal Seafood lobster bisque (seriously! Please! Just TELL ME HOW!) I was given the Legal Seafood cookbook. I've made a few things from it, the best of which was a baked salmon filet with an avocado salsa. It's really easy: bake the salmon with olive oil, salt, and pepper; mix chopped green onions, garlic, lime juice, cilantro, and Tabasco with avocado chunks. Garnish. But I was sick of it, and wanted to go back to one of my favorite salmon recipes, poached salmon with cucumber sauce.

I had half a cucumber and dill in the fridge, so I asked my sister to pick up salmon, wine, and green onions. You decorate the salmon with the dill, green onions, and lemon slices poach it in white wine. Then you puree the cucumber and more dill, and mix them with yoghurt. The original recipe is yoghurt and sour cream but I wanted to be all healthy and shit.

I put the salmon in tinfoil. I think you could also use a pot with a lid but I didn't have one I wanted to get dirty at this particular time. After I got it all pretty I wrapped the tinfoil around it like a tent and put it in a 350 oven.

Then I opened my fridge and there was no cucumber. I must have eaten it. FINE. I cut up an avocado and mixed it with lime juice and Tabasco only, cutting out the onions and garlic because I didn't want to pull out my baby cuisinart for my second-choice sauce. And I made a gin and tonic because I'd already cut up the lime. 

I put the salmon in the oven and then went back about ten minutes later to get something out of the fridge. And of course my cucumber was there. Of COURSE. Whatever. I peeled it and cuisinarted it and added dill, a bit of salt, and yoghurt. I had to use the lime wedge from my gin and tonic so there might have been a bit of that in there, but it was delicious and totally worth it.

My sister ate the avocado. And she's doing the dishes!

Notes: If you bake the salmon, it only takes about ten minutes, but poaching will take a half hour or so. You can really make either sauce with either one. Don't worry too much about wine leaking out a bit from your tinfoil tent, or obsess about it not being airtight: enough will stay in to poach. Technically, you are supposed to use lemon for all these things (except the G&T, of course) but I didn't have one.

Do you live in the DC area? Do you love granola?

Come to my house!

I have so much granola it won't fit in one tupperware. The two I have it in are so full that I can't stir in the raisins and have to add them separately. It was good dry, though - nutty and with a nice honey undertone.

I had it with blueberries and yoghurt this morning, though, and I have to say that I think there are better granola recipes out there. Once I mixed it up it sort of just tasted like oats. A work in progress. In the meantime, though, I think I have enough to keep me going. Sorry this picture is out of focus, it was very early in the morning.

Nothing elaborate to cook tonight. DC in summer has all the qualities of a spa steam room, only cheaper and grittier, and I after last night I didn't feel like a big project. It rained, briefly and hard, as I walked to the bus, but did nothing to clear the air, and the three block walk back to my apartment was even steamier than it had been before the rain. By the time I got home I was sweaty and tired and my finger was throbbing. Typing is not doing me any favors.

Inside, though, it was cool and dim enough to turn on the lights. After I did the dishes I neglected after I finally finished making granola last night, I settled on the couch just as fat drops were smacking my window. Then it POURED. My cocoon was cool and dry. It's supposed to be less hot tomorrow, but I don't want to open my windows to check. It took me a long time to get up and make dinner. 

Anyway omelet night tonight. I finally figured out how to make proper omelets this year, after Sam Sifton showed me this video. For years I just scrambled the eggs, but I've always wanted to do it properly and I'll do pretty much anything Sam Sifton tells me to. I mix dill into the eggs, then cover one half of the omelet with feta and Parmesan cheese before folding it. I stumbled upon this combo when it was all I had in the house and now I can't stop making it. The dill is great with the eggs, the feta adds creaminess and means you don't have to add salt, and the Parmesan gives it that gooey cheese omelet texture.

(Michael Pollan told me to fill half my plate with vegetables.)