tales of the basil queen

the first day of the rest of your life

2012-01-17T16:28:00.000-05:00

In the morning, you wake up early. You eat fruit and yogurt and drink a cup of tea while reading your e-mail, keeping an eye on the clock. Shoes on, keys in hand, you do a quick check: knife kit, jacket, apron. You pull the door behind you with a solid bang, and run your hand over the lavender bush by the door, filling the air with its warm scent.

You can walk to work. It's a long road, but straight and wide, and on a sunny morning, it's a good commute. When you arrive at the restaurant, the open kitchen is already bustling, filled with the sizzle and clatter of meals being readied, echoing with cries of "Behind you!" and "Order up!"

You pull on your jacket and apron, roll up your sleeves. Hands are washed, knives set up. You grate potatoes to pack into ramekins, the first stage of hash browns. You cut tomatoes and sweet red onion for bruschetta. You pick over basil and scrub zucchini. There is butter and sugar to cream together, an easy, familiar routine, for cookies filled with raisins and chocolate chunks.

In the lunch rush, you griddle buckwheat pancakes to layer with lemon curd, decorating the plate with powdered sugar and orange zest. You toss greens and tomato dice with red capsicum and cucumber as a base for a warm haloumi salad. You learn to keep an eye on the temperamental toaster, pulling slices of fruit loaf and sourdough before they char. Old habits merge with new lessons. In time, the rhythm of this kitchen will become second nature.

The hours vanish. Soon the dining room is quiet, just one or two guests relaxing with an afternoon espresso and the paper. You sit down to staff meal, eating pasta in red sauce with feta and rocket and olives, suddenly aware of the ache in your feet. After you've eaten, you begin closing down the kitchen, restocking ingredients and returning parchment and plastic to their places on the shelf. Sinks are scrubbed, floors are swept. The fryer is emptied of oil in a steady, reassuring gurgle.

This is the first day of the rest of your life. No more computer. No more office, no more suit. No more crying at your desk and fabricating allergies to explain away your red eyes. You've finally exchanged your mouse for a chef's knife, and now you can wear jeans to work.

Your new employer stands at the cake case, clearing desserts that are no longer in their prime. When he reaches the cake stand holding croissants, he asks if you'd like to take the old ones home. He wraps them neatly in greaseproof paper and tucks them into a paper bag that goes in your backpack, nestled on top of your apron and jacket. A gift, a welcome. A homecoming.

Croissants

A croissant is pretty much a yeasted puff pastry. Baking your own is not as complicated as many cookbooks make it out to be, but it is a multi-step process with long stretches of waiting time, so patience is essential. Begin the recipe three days before you plan to eat them.

Note: I've given measurements in metric and imperial, but I recommend the metric.

(Inspired by this recipe. Makes a half-dozen regular-sized croissants, or a dozen mini-croissants. Recipe not for one unless you're trying to make stale croissants for bread pudding, or you really do want to eat half a dozen croissants in a single sitting.)

First, the dough: In a bowl, combine two hundred and fifty grams of flour, three tablespoons of sugar, one-and-three-quarters of a teaspoon of yeast, and three quarters of teaspoon of salt. Rub in one tablespoon of butter. Stir in one hundred and seventy mililitres (half a cup, plus two tablespoons) of cold milk. Stick a hand in the bowl, and stir until the mixture comes together. Knead until a smooth dough forms. Pop it on a plate, cover with plastic, and chill in the fridge overnight.

The next day, begin by prepping the butter: Lay out a sheet of parchment paper, and sprinkle it lightly with flour. Take one hundred and fifty grams (five ounces) of chilled butter and cut it into slices. Arrange them in a square on the floured parchment. Sprinkle with flour, and top with another sheet of parchment. Using a rolling pin, thump and/or squish the butter until the pieces join together. You'll have a rough square; trim it to five-by-five inches (it will be about a quarter-inch thick), and place the trimmings on top. Use the rolling pin to press them in. The butter square should be on the pliable side; if it's very stiff, give it another thumping with the rolling pin.

Wrap the butter in the parchment paper, and place it back in the fridge.

Pull your dough from the fridge. Shape it into a rough square, and roll it, from the center out, so that it's large enough to fit the butter square diagonally (the corners of the butter square should touch the mid-points of the dough square.)

Fold the dough over the butter, and pinch the edges to seal.

Grab your rolling pin. Placing gentle pressure on the dough, roll until you have a rectangle that measures roughly seven by twelve inches.

7 x 12inch - 3x turns.

Gently fold the dough into thirds, like a letter. Wrap in plastic and chill for twenty minutes in the freezer.

When the twenty minutes are up, pull out the dough and place it so that the long side is perpendicular to your counter. Roll it out again into a rectangle that measures roughly seven by twelve inches, and fold it into thirds again. (Every fold is called a turn.) Rewrap the dough and return it to the freezer for another twenty minutes.

Roll and fold the dough one more time, so that you've given it three turns in total. Wrap well in plastic, and place in the fridge to chill overnight.

The next day, pull the dough from the fridge and place it on the countertop. Working slowly, roll it out so that it's eight inches wide by about thirty inches long (or for mini-croissants, about five inches wide by about forty-two inches long.) The dough will become resistant as you roll; pull it up from the counter gently to let it shrink back fully. When you reach the desired length, take a ruler or measuring tape and trim the excess dough so that you have a neat, long rectangle.

Mark the dough at five-inch intervals along one of the long sides (three-and-a-half inch for mini-croissants.) On the other long side, mark one interval at two-and-a-half inches (one-and-a-quarter inches) and then mark the rest at five (three-and-a-half.) With a small sharp knife, using these intervals as starting points, cut the dough into triangles.

Use your knife to cut a small notch, about half an inch long, in the wide end of each triangle. (This helps the croissants hold their shape once they're rolled.)

Take one of the triangles between two hands, and pulling very gently, stretch until it becomes about ten inches long (six and a half for mini-croissants.) Try not to compress the dough.

Place the triangle on the counter with the point facing upwards. Starting from the wide end, roll the dough away from you. Be firm, but gentle. You want enough pressure to get the dough to stay, but not so much that the layers become squished.

Roll until the very point of the dough is tucked under the body of the croissant. Turn it around, so that the point faces towards you.

Take hold of each end gently, and bend them inwards to form a crescent shape.

Shape the remaining dough in the same fashion, and arrange the shaped croissants on two parchment-lined baking sheets. The croissants will expand as they proof, so leave plenty of room in between.

Make up an egg wash by beating together one egg with a teaspoon of cold water until very smooth. Brush the croissants with egg wash (hang on to it, you'll need it again later) and place them in a warmish, draft-free place to proof. (Someplace not too chilly, but not so warm that the butter in the croissants melts out.) Leave them, and go do something else for about two hours.

The croissants are fully proofed when you can see the layers of dough if you look at the croissants from the side. Also, if you shake the tray, the croissants will jiggle.

They're almost ready for the oven! Get the oven preheated to 425F. Brush the croissants with egg wash again. Slide the trays into the oven. Bake for ten minutes, then rotate and swap the trays. Bake for another eight to ten minutes, or until the croissants are a deep, rich brown all over. (If they're browning very quickly, lower the temperature by ten degrees or so.) When the croissants are fully baked, pull them from the oven. Transfer to cooling racks.

Allow the croissants to cool until just warm. Serve with jam or Nutella.

not just for the birds

2012-01-04T20:07:00.001-05:00

Of all the many exciting things about relocating to Melbourne, one of the most exciting might be having a garden again.

It's a small backyard - more of a courtyard, really - but there's a little square of garden, just enough for herbs and a few plants. I've planted basil and mint, and we'll see if my minimal experience with gardening is enough to keep them alive.

There's also an apricot tree. Technically, it's the neighbors' tree, but several boughs protrude over the fence, and as far as I can see, only the birds have shown any interest in the fruit on their side.

Unfortunately for the birds on this side of the fence, I've been up early since the apricots began to ripen, and I've collected what fruit I can every morning. Even at a rate of just four or five apricots a day, the fruit bowl has been getting full, and there's only so much of a dent I can put in the pile by adding apricots to my morning yogurt. I decided it was time to do some baking.

Apricots are stone fruit, of the same family as peaches and plums, and like peaches and plums, are well-suited to desserts such as crumble and tart. I didn't have quite enough apricots for a crumble, however, and I baked a tart the last time I encountered fresh apricots, so I turned my thoughts to cake instead.

As I was considering flavorings, the sage bush in the garden caught my eye, and I decided that a pound cake flavored with brown butter and sage might make for an interesting contrast to the tart-sweet quality of the apricots. I hit a slight snag after gathering all my ingredients, however - I was a little short on butter, and reluctant to make a trip to the grocery store.

Instead, I decided to bake muffins rather than pound cake, using a mixture of butter and olive oil and adding a generous amount of finely chopped fruit. The apricots turned soft and jammy and kept the muffins nicely moist, and the sage aroma came through well, just as I'd hoped.

I sat outside for afternoon tea. It only seemed fair to leave any stray crumbs for the birds.

Apricot Sage Brown Butter Muffins

These muffins are modified from classic pound cake proportions, so they're still quite sweet and rich, and best baked as small muffins, rather than large ones.

(Makes one dozen small muffins, which may be frozen.)

In a small saucepan over low heat, melt seventy grams of unsalted butter (about two ounces) and add eight to ten large sage leaves. Cook, stirring occasionally, until butter foams and turns golden in color, and the sage leaves darken and crisp up. Remove from heat, and transfer to a mixing bowl. Using a wooden spoon or spatula, break up the sage leaves into small pieces. Set aside to cool.

Take five or six small ripe apricots (about a hundred and fifty to two hundred grams; five to seven ounces) and cut an X in the bottom of each. Place in a colander and pour boiling water over, then rinse under cold water. Using a paring knife, peel away the skin of each apricot. Cut each apricot in half and discard the pits. Cut the apricots into small dice and transfer to a small bowl. Set aside.

Preheat the oven to 165C (325F.) Grease and flour a quarter-cup muffin tin.

Take the mixing bowl with the sage brown butter, and add thirty mililiters of olive oil (two tablespoons), followed by a hundred and ten grams (half a cup) of white sugar. Add a quarter-teaspoon of salt, and an eighth of a teaspoon (just a few drops) of vanilla extract. Stir well.

Crack in one egg, and using a fork or a whisk, beat the mixture until the egg is well-incorporated. Crack in a second egg, and beat the mixture again. It will be quite thick and smooth.

Fold in one hundred and forty grams (one cup) of self-raising flour, little by little, until you have a smooth batter.

Spoon a little batter into the bottom of each muffin cup, add a sprinkling of apricot dice, then spoon over more batter. The muffin cups should not be completely full - you'll have a little space at the top. Once the muffin cups have all been filled, sprinkle them with the remaining apricot dice. Transfer the muffin tin to the oven.

Bake for forty to forty-five minutes, or until muffins are golden and a skewer or fork stuck into the center comes out cleanly. Allow the muffins to cool in the tin for ten minutes, then turn out on a rack.

Serve warm for afternoon tea or breakfast.

the obligatory new year's eve cocktail post, sans cocktail

2011-12-31T00:49:00.000-05:00

I had the idea that my taste in alcohol would mature after college.

I thought it would be part and parcel of that mysterious metamorphosis from which I'd emerge a full-fledged Grown-Up. At some point in my twenties, my dress sense would evolve, I'd lose my taste for hot wings, and somewhere along the way, I'd also acquire a taste for gin-and-tonics and develop the ability to drink wine and have something intelligent to say about it.

So far, I've decided that hot wings lose a lot of their appeal when there are no late nights in dorm common rooms involved, but my taste in clothing is stuck at dark jeans and t-shirts with funny slogans, I find that gin still tastes medicinal, and the only comment I can make about wine is what it smells like when I stick my nose in the glass. I still drink dry whites, fruity reds, dark beers, Frangelico-spiked coffee, and not much else. I might learn to mix a proper martini at some point (it seems like a useful skill), but it's doubtful that I'd actually drink the finished result.

Suffice to say, no-one would put me in charge of drinks at a New Year's Eve gathering. (Well, not unless they planned to serve nothing but large quantities of bone-dry prosecco.) That's fine with me, because I'm perfectly happy to handle canapes and cocktail nibbles instead.

I think of canapes and cocktail nibbles as two distinct categories of appetizers. Canapes, in sufficient quantities, will make a meal. Cocktail nibbles, however, are closer to bar snacks - something to graze on before the mini quiches and prosciutto-wrapped asparagus spears make their appearance - and therefore shouldn't be too elaborate, or too numerous. Toasted nuts, mixed olives, maybe a few thin curls of salty ham. Items that can be found at a good deli or import store, and don't require any cooking.

Of course, there's always an exception to the rule. Cheese twists (or cheese straws) are long spirals of cheese-flavored pastry, pleasant to nibble on with a glass in hand, and quite festive as part of a cocktail spread. While you can find some perfectly serviceable varieties at a good import store, they're even better when baked from scratch.

The recipe below is essentially a basic pastry recipe, modified to incorporate cheese, and given the "rough puff" treatment to produce flaky, crispy twists. Classic flavorings for cheese twists include paprika and rosemary, but I've chosen to flavor mine with toasted cumin seeds and black pepper. They're quite moreish, and they have the added bonus of making my underdeveloped taste in alcohol irrelevant. Never mind the martinis - I find that they pair best with bone-dry prosecco anyway.

Parmesan Cheddar Cheese Twists with Toasted Cumin and Black Pepper

For rosemary and black pepper twists, replace the cumin with one teaspoon of finely chopped fresh rosemary.

(Makes about three dozen six-inch twists. Will keep in an airtight container for up to a week, but they're best consumed fresh.)

In a dry pan over low heat, toast one tablespoon of whole cumin seeds until aromatic, about five minutes or so. Transfer the cumin to a small bowl, and set aside to cool.

In a mixing bowl, combine two hundred grams of plain flour (about a cup and a half) with a quarter-teaspoon of salt. Cut in a hundred grams of chilled butter (about seven tablespoons) and rub it in with your fingertips until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in fifty grams of finely grated - preferably Microplaned - parmesan (one point eight ounces, about a cup), a sprinkling of freshly ground black pepper, and the toasted cumin seeds.

Add four tablespoons of ice water, and turn the mixture gently until it just starts to hold together. Add sixty grams (two ounces) of finely chopped sharp cheddar and work it into the dough.

Turn the dough out on a clean countertop. Flatten it out roughly with the palm of your hand, and fold it over into thirds, like a letter. Flatten it out again lengthways, and fold it over into thirds again. Flatten and fold one more time, to make three times in all. Wrap the dough in plastic and chill in the fridge until firm.

When the dough has been fully chilled, pull it from the fridge and cut it in half. Wrap up one half and stick it back in the fridge.

Preheat the oven to 180F. Line two baking trays with parchment paper.

Take the dough half and roll it out between sheets of greaseproof paper until it's three milimetres (about an eighth of an inch) thick. Trim the dough so that it's fifteen centimetres (about six inches) long (keep the scraps) and then cut it into centimetre-wide strips.

Take a strip of dough and set it on the countertop. Take the ends between your fingers, and turn them in opposite directions so that the dough twists upon itself. (Give the strip plenty of turns, because the dough will untwist a little after it's been placed on the baking tray.) Lay the twist on a baking tray, and repeat the process with the remaining strips. Transfer the twists to the oven.

Bake the twists for twenty-five to twenty-eight minutes, switching the trays halfway, until twists are golden brown. As they bake, roll and cut the remaining dough. (Any scraps can be re-rolled, too.)

Transfer the finished twists to a cooling rack, and finish shaping and baking the remaining dough.

When all the twists are cool, transfer them to an airtight container. To serve, arrange in wide-mouthed jars or glasses. If you like, they may be warmed slightly before serving.

Note: I suspect the twists may be shaped, frozen, and later baked from frozen, but I have yet to test the theory, so don't take my word for it.

the hostess gift

2011-12-24T18:45:00.000-05:00

Of all the voices I joke about hearing in my head, there's one I sometimes forget. It's a quiet little voice, easily overlooked, and it gets lost when all the other voices - the ones that talk about food and cooking - start clamoring for attention.

That little voice only pipes up when I'm invited to dinner, or lunch, or tea, or any other sort of social occasion at someone's home. And then I wonder how I ever could forget about its existence. You see, the voice sounds suspiciously like that of my mother, and it likes to announce, in the sternest tones possible, that should I forget a hostess gift, I do so on pain of death and dishonor.

My parents were not etiquette mavens. I cannot remember receiving any instruction in, say, table manners. (I suspect I may have been taught by my grandparents, with a little polish added by my stint at a private, all-girls school in Sydney, which was occasionally old-fashioned to the point of anachronism.) Like all Asian children, however, I was instructed in the various complex and arcane forms of address for courtesy aunts and uncles. I was on strict orders to answer questions about school and study without any of my customary snark. And I learned that it was unthinkable to show up at someone's house for a social occasion empty-handed.

Flowers, I learned, were an acceptable hostess gift, and the easiest if one was pressed for time and happened to be close to a supermarket with a florist's stand. Occasionally, if my parents knew the hosts very well, and were certain of their drinking habits, we would make a detour en route at a liquor store for a bottle of wine. Their preferred gift, however, was food, and preferably fruit. Netted bags of mandarins. Thick-skinned clusters of grapes. Golden pears, the bigger the better. During Chinese New Year, every home we visited looked like its inhabitants were thinking about making a foray into the greengrocer's business.

When I received an invitation to Christmas lunch with people I'd only just met here in Melbourne, the little voice didn't falter. My taste in hostess gifts runs to baked goods, however, and so I decided Christmas cookies were in order. Give my fondness for traditional Christmas sweets in the European tradition - panettone, stollen, springerle, even old-fashioned, brandied fruitcake - spices and dried fruit were an obvious starting point.

I began with a simple shortbread base, and seasoned it with vanilla, brandy, orange zest and various spices before adding dried currants and crystallized ginger. I let the dough chill before rolling and cutting simple rounds. Baked at low heat, the resulting cookies were richly fragrant, with a delicate, sandy crumb. Packaged in cellophane and tied with bright ribbon, I think they make quite a pretty hostess gift.

Even the little voice in my head is in grudging agreement.

Christmas Spice Cookies

I've baked these as a rolled cookie, but the dough can also be shaped into a log before chilling, and then sliced and baked. These taste best a day or two after baking, when the flavors have had time to develop.

(Makes somewhere between one-and-a-half and two dozen. Dough will freeze. Cookies will keep in an airtight container for a week or so.)

In a mixing bowl, cream together one hundred and twenty-five grams of softened butter (about four ounces) and fifty-five grams of sugar (about a quarter-cup.) Stir in a quarter-teaspoon of salt, followed by a quarter-teaspoon of cinnamon, a quarter-teaspoon of allspice, an eighth-teaspoon of allspice, and an eighth-teaspoon of cloves.

Add the zest from one small orange, a half-teaspoon of vanilla, and a half-teaspoon of brandy. Stir again to combine. Beat in one egg yolk.

Stir in one hundred and forty grams (one cup) of plain white flour, little by little, until you have a nice sandy dough. Mix in fifty grams of finely chopped crystallized ginger (one-third of a cup) and fifty grams of dried currants (one-third of a cup.)

Wrap the dough in plastic and chill in the fridge for at least an hour.

Preheat the oven to 160C (325F.) Line two baking trays with parchment paper.

Roll the dough out between two sheets of parchment or wax paper (flour lightly to keep it easy to work with) to a quarter-inch thickness. Cut out two-inch rounds and place them on the baking trays. These cookies won't spread, so you can keep them quite close together.

Place the trays in the oven, and bake (switch the trays halfway through) for seventeen to twenty minutes, or until cookies are just barely colored. Transfer to cooling racks. When fully cool, place in decorative bags or cookie tins.

Serve with tea or coffee.

the breakfast battle

2011-12-09T00:08:00.000-05:00

I am not a morning person.

Scratch that. I am Not A Morning Person. I do not react favorably to the sight of early morning sunshine. I build defensive trenches of comforters against the creeping threat of seven am. I sleep soundly and cannot be woken by anything other than an alarm clock, because only an alarm clock is implacable against my threats and invective. I do not merely abuse the snooze button - I am guilty of capital crimes against it.

If I had my way, I'd only ever sneak up on mornings from behind, catching them in passing after staying up all night.

Mornings are difficult. Breakfast, more so. My stomach doesn't wake up until at least half an hour after my eyes are open, and while I like many breakfast foods, I have no love for breakfast hour. Pancakes are delicious at four am and eleven am. At eight am, they are an abomination.

I didn't grow into my aversion to mornings. Even as a child, it took a lot to rouse me out of bed before nine. If there was ever an argument for giving children caffeine, I was a walking point in its favor. My mother, who took to heart the idea of breakfast as the most important meal of the day, would sigh and fret as I sat sullen and bleary-eyed at the kitchen table, refusing fruit and yogurt and Weet-Bix before finally choking down a few half-hearted bites of margarine toast, pointedly avoiding the crusts. When my sister reached an impressionable age and began imitating me in everything I did, my mother - my sugar-phobic mother - broke down and bought Pop-Tarts.

If the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation had created a snack machine to go with their Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser, a Pop-Tart is the sort of thing it would produce. Rectangular, about the size of a small envelope, consisting of a sickly, jammy confection sandwiched between sheets of damp, crumbly pastry product, the Pop-Tart is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a jam tartlet. Their tooth-aching sweetness was enough to give even me and my sister (hardened sugar junkies, the both of us) serious pause. Still, the joy of the forbidden was enough to get us eating them, and for a few weeks, the breakfast battle reached a ceasefire. Then the novelty wore off, and Pop-Tarts didn't last on their merits. We went back to margarine toast.

Later, I left for boarding school and discovered the magic of coffee. Mornings, while still not agreeable, became at least bearable, and I found that granola bars were a fairly effective mid-morning compromise. The last time I encountered Pop-Tarts - in the vending machine at law school - I noted with a certain bafflement that they'd introduced a double-frosted chocolate variety, complete with sprinkles. I had neither the nostalgia nor the morbid curiosity to try them.

Suffice to say, Pop-Tarts were the last thing on my mind when I was tinkering with a recipe for maple cookies. The results failed on their merits as cookies - the amount of maple syrup required to give the cookies a strong maple flavor also gave them an odd texture - but showed promise as pastry. Replacing the sugar and water in a standard sweet shortcrust with maple syrup and egg yolk, trading out regular butter for browned, and giving it a few quick turns produced a pastry that was flaky and fragrant. All I needed was the right recipe in which to use it.

A tart or pie didn't seem quite right. Then I learned through the blogosphere that people make homemade versions of Pop-Tarts, little pastries that keep the Pop-Tart's rectangular shape, but more like turnovers or hand pies in character. The pastry-to-filling ratio struck me as a good one, and it was easy to cook up a sweetly spiced mixture of apples and raisins to sandwich between sheets of pastry. A wash of egg and a spell in the oven, and the results were browned and delectable, perfect for eating at the kitchen table in one's pajamas.

Well, maybe not at breakfast hour. Could we skip that battle - and make it a late brunch?

Apple-Raisin "Pop-Tarts" with Flaky Maple Brown Butter Pastry

If you're not inclined to fuss with measuring and cutting rectangles, this recipe can also be used for turnovers: stamp out rounds of pastry with a large cookie-cutter, top with filling, and fold over into half-moons. Feel free to play with the filling, too - apple-cranberry and apple-cherry are possible variations, and I imagine these might be tasty with rhubarb compote or pumpkin butter too.

(Makes six, with leftover filling, which can be eaten with pancakes or toast.)

Start by cutting eight ounces of butter into small chunks and placing them in a light-colored pan over low heat. Cook until the butter melts and you can see the milk solids at the bottom (they'll be a whitish sediment); keep cooking until they turn a toasty, caramelly brown. Pour off the melted butter into a heatproof container; scrape the pan to get all the solids. Allow to cool, then refrigerate until solid. (You'll have roughly six ounces of brown butter.)

In a big mixing bowl, combine eight ounces of flour and three-quarters of a teaspoon of salt. Cut in the chilled brown butter, and rub it in with your fingertips until the largest bits are pea-sized. Add six tablespoons of maple syrup and half a beaten egg (set aside the other half) and stir until the mixture just starts to clump.

Turn the mixture - it will be a crumbly mess - out on a sheet of wax paper. Top with another sheet of wax paper and roll it out until it's about half an inch thick. Peel off the wax paper, and fold the dough - it will still be a crumbly mess - into thirds. Turn the pastry so that the folded seam is perpendicular, cover with wax paper and roll it out again. (It should be a little less crumbly by this point.) Fold it into thirds. Turn and repeat the folds again. (It should look like dough now.)

Fold the wax paper back over the pastry and wrap the whole package in plastic. Stick it in the fridge to chill.

Meanwhile, peel and core two tart apples (Granny Smiths or Macouns are good) and cut them into small dice. Place in a small saucepan with a quarter-cup of raisins, six tablespoons of sugar, two tablespoons of water, a big pinch of cinnamon and a big pinch of nutmeg. (Optional extra: a teaspoon of brandy.) Cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, until the apples have softened and the mixture is sticky. Remove from heat; set aside to cool.

Pull the dough from the fridge. Roll it out to an eighth of an inch, and cut the pastry into a dozen rectangles of three by four inches. Using a fork, prick half the rectangles lightly (make sure the fork doesn't go all the way through.) Take the remaining beaten egg from the pastry, and add a little water to thin it.

Set out a parchment-covered baking tray. Arrange six of the rectangles on the baking tray. Use a fork to prick the pastry lightly (make sure they don't go all the way through.) Spoon apple-raisin filling onto the rectangles, leaving space at the edges. Dip a finger in the egg mixture and use it to moisten the edges, then top with another pastry rectangle. Press the edges with the tines of a fork to seal. Repeat the process with all the remaining rectangles.

Brush the tops of each pastry with egg wash, then prick all over with a fork, making sure you do pierce all the way through. If you like, the pastries can be sprinkled lightly with fleur de sel or cinnamon sugar.

Bake at 350F until nicely browned, about fifteen minutes. Turn out on a rack to cool a little - you don't want to burn your tongue on the filling. Serve warm.

Note: I haven't tried baking these from frozen, but I see no reason why it couldn't work.

the secret world

2011-11-14T01:10:00.001-05:00

“Do all the Disciplines have their own clubhouses?”

“It’s not a clubhouse,” Eliot said sharply. He dumped a huge clump of fresh pasta into a tall pot of boiling water and stirred it to break it up. “This’ll cook in about a minute flat.”

“Then what is it?”

“Well, all right, it is a clubhouse. But don’t call it that. We call it the Cottage. We have the seminars here, and the library isn’t bad.” He tasted the sauce, then glugged in a slug of heavy cream and stirred it in widening circles. The sauce paled and thickened. Eliot had a jaunty, offhanded confidence at the stove.

“I hope you don’t mind pasta,” he added, to Quentin. “It’s all I made. There’s bruschetta out there, or there was. At least there’s lots of wine.” He drained the pasta in the sink, sending up a huge gout of steam, and dumped it into the pan to finish in the sauce.

“God, I love cooking. I think if I weren’t a magician, I’d be a chef. It’s just such a relief after all that invisible, intangible bullshit, don’t you think?”

Quentin Coldwater is seventeen, an overachieving, Type-A student with an unusual aptitude for advanced math, a hopeless crush on his best friend Julia, and a long-standing interest in magic tricks. On the day of his interview for entrance to Princeton, his life quite literally takes an odd turn. In pursuit of a letter blown away by an errant gust of wind, he runs into a back garden and suddenly finds himself in a place where it is not winter, but summer - and he is invited to sit a very strange entrance exam for a genuine magical college.

My selection for the Fall 2011 edition of Novel Food, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians is a story about college and growing up that shows how even being able to do magic does not make coming of age any less awkward. Despite Quentin's initial excitement, he discovers that life at Brakebills School of Magical Pedagogy still has much in common with life in the ordinary world, and just because he's in a new place doesn't mean that he's become a new person. It's a sharp, clever urban fantasy tale, and Grossman writes with an eye for detail that produces unexpectedly delightful food scenes.

Quentin, after sitting a written entrance exam that includes exercises in making up a foreign language and drawing a rabbit that doesn't stay put on the page, receives a lunch tray from a "silent, comically correct butler in white gloves." It consists of "a sandwich – roasted red peppers and very fresh mozzarella on sourdough bread – a lumpy pear, and a thick square of dark, bitter chocolate" plus "a glass of something cloudy and fizzy" poured from an unlabelled bottle. (Nothing strange - it turns out to be grapefruit soda.)

During his semester at Brakebills South - an unlikely campus in an even unlikelier location - he is served "a cup of hot tea, a tumbler of water, a plate with a pat of yeasty European butter and a thick slab of sourdough bread on it, and a glass containing what would turn out to be two fingers of peppery vodka" as lunch after hours and hours of casting a spell to drive nails straight into wood. He then spends his afternoon with another spell - one for removing nails from wood.

Later, after graduation, Quentin and his friends throw a ridiculous, tipsy dinner party in Manhattan whose menu includes Lillet cocktails (Lillet, vodka, and champagne), miniature sweet-and-sour lobster rolls, pork chops dusted with bitter chocolate, and individual baked Alaskas. They overdo the carefully planned wine pairings, and don't make it to the cheese course.

The scene I like best, however, begins on the very first day of Quentin's Third Year. The students have been placed into their Disciplines - the magical equivalent of majors - and Quentin and his friend Alice are the would-be new members of the Physical Magic group. Their first challenge, however, is getting through the front door of the small Victorian bungalow where the seminars are held. Several hours after they arrive at the building, they finally succeed by burning the door in half. Once inside, Quentin and Alice make the acquaintance of the Janet, Josh, and Eliot - "Physical Kids" - and drink quite a lot of red wine as they wait for Eliot to finish making dinner.

They were in a shabby but comfortable library lined with threadbare rugs and lit by candles and firelight. Quentin realized that the little house must be larger on the inside than it was on the outside; it was also a lot cooler – the atmosphere was that of a nice, chilly fall evening. Books overflowed the bookcases and stood in wobbly stacks in the corners and even on the mantelpiece. The furniture was distinguished but mismatched, and in places it was severely battered.

When the pasta is ready, they sit down to eat:

With a white tablecloth and two heavy silver candelabras and a wildly eclectic assortment of silverware, some of which bordered on light hand-to-hand weaponry, the table in the library almost looked like somewhere you could eat. The food was simple but not at all bad.

Quentin let the chatter wash over him. Eating a sophisticated meal, alone in their own private dining room, felt very adult. This was it, he thought. He had been an outsider before, but now he had really entered into the inner life of the school. This was the real Brakebills. He was in the warm secret heart of the secret world.

Quentin's first dinner in the Cottage makes me think of the meals we had in the vegetarian co-op I lived in during senior year of college. Though it was a bigger (and somewhat rowdier) crowd, the house had a similar shabby charm. We had a shelf of battered cookbooks in the common room, and it wasn't unusual to wander into the kitchen and discover all the countertops covered in flour or laid out with phyllo because someone had decided to make bisteeya or puff pastry on a whim. Dinner took place at a long dining table in a room with creaky floorboards and odd angles, and in winter we'd hang out in the common room, curled up on the ancient couches or lying on the floor by the fireplace.

I decided I wanted a dish that reminded me of cooking by trial and error without being too fussed about the results, of wandering into the kitchen late on a Saturday afternoon and watching a meal evolve, unplanned and unrehearsed, as more people trickled in with thoughts of food on their minds. I wanted the kind of casual meal I might prepare with a group of people who didn't mind spending the afternoon in the kitchen.

The ravioli dish below uses a little trick I figured out just this year. As much as I love using ravioli stamps to turn out neat little squares and rounds that are perfect to freeze, I'll be the first to admit that it's a time-consuming process and not quite the sort of thing for a casual group dinner. You can speed up the process, however, if you're not too fussed about the presentation: instead of making perfectly regular ravioli with stamps, cut rolled-out sheets of pasta dough into wide strips using kitchen shears, fill them, fold them and use the shears again to trim them. A quick dip in boiling water, a slick of butter and garlic, and all that's left is to set the table and open the wine.

Not quite magic, but I think the Physical Kids would approve.

Swiss Chard Ravioli - The Quick(ish) Version

The filling is just Swiss chard pureed with a little ricotta and garlic, but ground walnuts or finely chopped mushrooms are also a nice addition.

(Makes three or four servings. Ravioli may be frozen, but it's not really the point of this exercise.)

Start with the pasta dough: Dump two cups of all-purpose flour on a clean countertop. Make a well in the middle. Crack in two eggs. Pour in a tablespoon of olive oil and a tablespoon of water. Use your fingers to break up the eggs and swirl them around to pull the flour in, little by little. (More detailed instructions can be found here.)

Once you have a rather shaggy mass of dough, start kneading. Wet your hands if it seems very dry; continue kneading. Knead until you have a stiff dough that is very smooth to the touch. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge for at least an hour.

For the filling, begin with a pound of washed and trimmed Swiss chard. Put the leaves in a large pot or heatproof bowl, and cover with boiling water. Let it sit for a few minutes, until the leaves wilt. Transfer to a colander. When it has cooled enough to handle, pick it up in handfuls and squeeze out all the excess liquid.

Chop the chard roughly, paying attention to the stems. Gather it in handfuls once again and squeeze out any remaining liquid.

Heat a little olive oil in a large pan, add three cloves of finely chopped garlic. Add the chard, and saute until soft. Allow to cool.

Transfer the cooked chard to a food processor. Add a generous scoop of whole milk ricotta and a handful of walnuts, if you're using them. Add a fat pinch of salt and a dusting of freshly cracked black pepper, and puree until smooth. The mixture should be predominantly green in color, and taste more of chard than ricotta.

To assemble the ravioli, pull the dough out of the fridge and let it come to room temperature. Set up your pasta maker, and roll out a sheet of dough to the second-thinnest setting. (Probably about 5 or 6 on the dial, depending on your model.)

Using kitchen shears, cut the dough into wide strips crosswise. Pick up a strip of dough, place a spoonful of filling on it, and fold it over. Pinch to seal. Trim the edges of excess dough. Place the finished ravioli on flour-dusted trays. (If you're cooking with friends, this process works quite well assembly-line style.)

To cook the ravioli, put a big pot of salted water on to boil, and drop in the ravioli a dozen at a time. When they float to the surface, they're cooked through. Lift them out with a slotted spoon.

Sauce them with butter and more garlic. A bit of bacon wouldn't go astray, either.

(Alas, I experienced critical camera failure, so I'm lacking a photo of the finished dish.)

rampion, or the witch before the law of unintended consequences

2011-10-30T22:22:00.000-04:00

He's at it again.

He’s a clumsy oaf, and indiscriminate, too. If it's green and broad-leafed, he wrenches it from its stems, rips the roots right out of the earth. I don’t know that he sees that purslane’s teardrop leaves are not like the rosettes of lamb’s lettuce, that the pale blush shading the stems of spinach is distinct from the bold scarlet of chard. Lucky for him that rhubarb's not in season. Luckier still for his pretty wife.

She's no plump-cheeked, wide-hipped milkmaid, but slight and fine-boned as a bird. Hair like winter butter, skin like twice-skimmed milk. A swollen belly like a sickness, draining the very marrow from her bones. Her blood must be thin and tired. No wonder she begs him to seek out greens.

I’ve seen him with her at the market, the stall piled high with wares. Pots of thick clotted cream, butter both sweet and salt in stone crocks, cheese in great golden wheels ripened beneath a rind of beeswax. He has a word for each passer-by, but she doesn’t speak. He looks as her desperately, as though he were afraid to look away. As though she might vanish from his sight if his back were turned.

Market day comes once every week in the village square, at the place where the road ends. This was once the last settlement before a hostile border, before the mapmakers brought out fresh parchment and ink, and allies and enemies changed places with the stroke of a quill. There was once a garrison here, and it left an empty watchtower after the soldiers departed. A lasting legacy: an edifice fashioned from great hewn blocks of unyielding stone, a stark column against the horizon.

The road runs all the way to the far west in a long meandering line. There is one village where it passes by a river. There was plague in that village some seasons ago.

It came swiftly and suddenly, like a change in the wind. It carried away the butcher and the baker and the blacksmith and all his brood. The gravediggers worked their shovels until their hands left bloody marks upon all that they touched. After the priest expired, there were no more funeral rites. After the midwife succumbed, there were no longer enough living to bury the dead.

The midwife’s apprentice did what she could. She spooned broth and tea into parched mouths and laid cool poultices on feverish brows. She held trembling hands and listened as cracked lips whispered empty prayers. They perished all the same.

At the end, the village was silent save for the buzzing of the flies. The midwife’s apprentice walked to the riverbank and peered into the water. Her face was no longer that of a child’s. There were new hollows in her cheeks, and her dark hair was shot through with silver.

She stepped onto the road and began walking. She stopped only when the road came to an end.

The old watchtower stood abandoned. Too small for a family, too isolated in winter, too silent save for the howling wind. Nothing but the woods and meadows for company. When I came to the village, I claimed it for my own. The village did not want me, for I could neither bake bread nor sew a seam, and the tavern had no need of another pair of hands. Instead I foraged in the woods, and sold what I could at the market.

He thinks he's being stealthy, the fool, crossing from his back meadows to my garden. As though I would blame wild animals for the crushed lace of the wild carrot flowers and the fragrance of bruised mint. Deer eat all plants, wolves eat none, and only a man embosses the soft earth with the stark prints of hobnailed boots.

When I made my home in the tower, the villagers were wary, but their children weren’t afraid. They came to the watchtower for a glimpse of the stranger. All ragged urchins, the ones too young to work in the fields and too poor for schooling. They came to me, and I taught them to find beechnuts in the woods and trout in the brook. Their families ate the better for it. The children laughed and told me their secrets. Some even called me Mother Gothel.

I did not fear all All Hallows Eve. Only winter frightened me. Still, I had done a steady trade in herbs and nuts, and careful thrift had brought me a goat and a speckled hen. When the children came to me, breathless with stories of bonfires and mulled cider and ghost stories, I felt a thrill too.

There were apples in the woods, and nuts for the taking, and I thought to make caramel apples as a treat for the children. A traveler at the market had paid me a small sack of sugar for a rare basket of penny buns and hen-of-the-woods. All I needed was a little butter.

Butter, though, was more luxury than my purse afforded, and I ate my daily bread and wild onions dry. I had never paid a visit to the dairy before the day I crossed the meadow to the farmhouse.

An iron horseshoe hung above the lintel, and sage grew by the door. Old superstitions. I waited a long while after I knocked. When the dairy farmer’s wife finally opened the door, she did not ask me in, but stood on the threshold. Her hair was unbound and spilled in a long fine fall almost to her knees. Her hands and arms were smooth and soft, as though she had never clutched the heavy dash of a churn or hoisted the wide wooden frame of a cheese hoop. She held a young babe – a son – in the crook of her arm, and she looked at him desperately, though she were afraid to look away. As though he might vanish from her sight if her back were ever turned. Seeing her closely, she was not that much older than I.

I told her I had come for a lump of sweet butter. I had no silver, but I had made a goat's cheese for barter, fresh and sweet, wrapped in chestnut leaves and bound with sedge in the way of the village by the river. She eyed it, and wrinkled her nose in distaste. I told her I could bring her a sack of walnuts or hazelnuts from the woods. She looked at me as though she’d bitten into an apple and discovered a worm.

I pressed on; if she wouldn't barter, would she wait two days, just until market day? I could have silver with which to pay her then. I told her about the apples, thinking that perhaps she would think of her son, and show a little kindness. She pursed her little rosebud mouth and told me she didn't provide goods on credit.

I left. I was upset. More than that, I was angry with myself. I should not have been counting my chickens before they hatched, but I had let myself think about dipping tart apples in coats of glossy caramel and rolling them crushed nuts. I was not so far removed from childhood that I did not remember the rare pleasure of sweets, and I would have joined the children in their delight.

All the same, I made do. I toasted whole hazelnuts with sugar, and the children’s faces were still bright with joy. In the days following, I foraged in the woods, laying in supplies of gingerroot and willow bark for the winter, and so it was several days before I learned that the dairy farmer’s wife had lost her son.

A fever. A fall. No two stories were alike. After his death, the whispers began.

It was one of the children who brought me fresh news, with an honesty that was all the crueler for its innocence. The dairy farmer’s wife had told another story. I had come to her for butter, and she had refused me because she had no more to sell. In my rage, I had cursed her son, and he had sickened and died.

Cursed him to death. A laughable idea. I knew no magic. If I had magic, wouldn’t I be fat and prosperous? Wouldn’t I dwell in a fine house in the village, and not a chilly tower of stone? Wouldn’t I have my own cow - nay, several cows - to give milk for butter?

The villagers didn’t laugh. They called me a witch, and some of the older children threw stones. One of the tavern girls came to me for a love potion. She left, hissing angry words, when I told her I could lance a boil and set a broken bone, but I could no more give her a love potion than I could charm lead into gold. The tower took on a new name. Not the watchtower, but the witch’s tower. Some claimed that I had made my home there because I could perform dark magic in its lookout.

I spent the winter in the tower with my goat and speckled hen, waiting for spring. When the snows melted and the ground thawed, I cleared stones from the earth and turned the soil, sowing seeds and bringing whole plants from the meadows and woods to make a garden. When I brought baskets filled with pea shoots and rhubarb to the first market of the new season, the villagers’ words were kind, their memories softened by the long dark months. A fear that had been banding my chest loosened and slackened.

The dairy farmer’s stall displayed pots of cream quark and muslin-wrapped cheeses, flecked with herbs or rolled in ash. The farmer cut morsels for passers-by to sample, but his gaze kept returning to his wife, his eyes hungry enough to devour her whole. Her eyes were on the crowd, and when she saw me, she opened her mouth. Witch, she called. Stay away. I’ll not let you take this child too.

Then I saw it, the swelling beneath her gown. The farmer’s eyes changed when he looked at her belly, turning hard like flint. As though he could vanish away that swelling if he only wished it hard enough. I am no more a fortune-teller than I am a witch, but I looked at them both and saw nothing but an ill-omened end.

I found my speckled hen with a broken, bloodied wing today. The farmer’s wife stirred up the villagers’ memories, and a stone found its mark. The damage was more than I could mend, and I put a knife to her throat for mercy's sake.

I can still hear him, scrabbling in the dirt. Trampling my radishes and uprooting my thyme. After each and every visit in the night, I've spent the morning mending the damage he has wrought. It wears upon my patience, this petty thievery. He is fat and prosperous, and I could not even begin to beggar him, not even if he paid me twice over for all the harvest of my garden.

If it's a witch they want, it's a witch they'll get. I don’t need to threaten him. If I walk up from behind while holding a knife, still bloody from butchering my poor speckled hen, his uneasy mind will do the rest. If I whisper, he’ll cower and piss himself in fear.

I wonder what he'll do, what he'll say. What might a gibbering man promise me, to deliver his beloved wife from harm?

Golden Couscous Salad

Beets are rich in both folate and iron, both important nutrients during pregnancy. This salad uses golden beets for their color, but normal red beets are fine if you don't mind that they'll turn the couscous pink. I serve this salad cold during late summer, but it can also be eaten warm during cooler months.

(Serves one, with leftovers. Recipe scales up well.)

Preheat the oven to 400F. Scrub two medium-sized golden beets, pierce them all over with a fork, and wrap them in tinfoil. Place them on a baking tray or in a cake tin, and roast for an hour or so, or until the beets are tender when poked with a knife. Uncover them carefully, and set aside to cool. Meanwhile, zest half an orange and cut it into segments.

In a microwave-safe bowl, cover half a cup of couscous with half a cup of water. Let stand until water is fully absorbed. Cover and cook in microwave for five to six minutes, or until tender and fluffy.

Photo above is not my work.

While the couscous is still hot, stir in a quarter-teaspoon salt, half a tablespoon of olive oil, two teaspoons apple cider vinegar, a quarter-teaspoon ground cumin, a quarter-teaspoon cinnamon, and the zest from the orange half. Let the mixture sit.

Take the beets and rub them to slip them out of their skins. Cut them into dice. Finely chop a quarter of a red onion. Stir the beets, onion, and orange segments into the couscous.

Before serving, stir in a quarter-cup of flaked almonds and a generous quantity of chopped fresh mint. Garnish with additional chopped mint (and extra oranges, if you like.)

Note: If you're making this salad to serve cold, let the couscous and the beets cool completely before combining everything. Add the almonds and mint until just before serving.

a bit of earth

2011-08-10T01:20:00.004-04:00

Everything I know about gardening, I learned from British children's literature.

My parents are not gardening enthusiasts. In the years when we lived in a house with a front lawn, they paid an enterprising neighborhood teenager to cut the grass, and espoused a policy of benign neglect for the gardenia bushes by the door. The backyard contained a lemon tree that produced no lemons (I only knew it was a lemon tree by dint of the faded label hanging from its trunk) and an oak tree that produced prolific showers of lawnmower-threatening acorns. A relocation to Hong Kong, with its apartment-dwelling lifestyle, proved a convenient excuse to abandon all efforts at horticulture. My mother chose artificial orchids for the sitting room, and set a cheery green plastic facsimile of a ficus on the kitchen windowsill. To say that my parents keep plants is accurate only if you expand the definition to include the contents of the refrigerator's crisper drawer.

My ability to have a conversation at the farmer's market without embarrassing myself owes a good deal to the works of Enid Blyton and other British writers. Their stories are full of plucky children who plant their own gardens and cantankerous gardeners who are secretly good-natured beneath their gruff exteriors, and in the course of exposition the characters dispense a surprising amount of gardening advice. Without Jack and Dinah and the other Adventurers, I might not have learned that strawberries propagate from runners rather than seeds, and that lettuce has to be picked regularly, or else it will bolt. Without Peter Rabbit, I would have been slower to recognize that string beans and radishes share a growing season. Without the Milly-Molly-Mandy stories, I might have lived well into adulthood before discovering that marrow and pumpkins do not grow on trees.

My personal experience with gardening has been minimal, legacy of years of dorm and apartment living. The closest I've been to Mary Lennox's "bit of earth" were the sage and rosemary I grew in pots on the kitchen balcony of my student housing in Rome. The plants weren't much to look at, but they were surprisingly tolerant of both steady harvesting and the occasional overwatering. They spared me the frustration of buying bunches of herbs when I only needed a few leaves, serving as a quick way to add extra flavor to buttered pasta or plain omelettes.

The following herbed frittata is a more substantial take on an omelette, filled with zucchini and onion and enriched with cheese. While it's not the sort of dish that shows up in the canon of British children's literature (there would be courgettes and not zucchini, for starters), it's one of my favorite quick summer meals, and also a handy way to use up zucchini if you're growing your own.

Still, if you are growing your own zucchini plants, and their output is driving you to your wits' end, you could try another approach. I've read that the fruit of a courgette vine can be kept under control by regularly culling the blossoms - a bit of wisdom from one of those cantankerous British gardeners, if my memory serves me right.

Herbed Zucchini Frittata

You can use any mixture of fresh herbs that strikes your fancy. Leafy herbs like basil, mint, chives or even dill are best, but thyme and rosemary will also work if you chop them finely and keep the quantities small. You can also put this in a pastry crust to make quiche, or prepare the sauteed vegetables and egg separately to make an omelette.

(Makes three or four servings. Leftovers are good for breakfast.)

Finely chop two cloves of garlic and one small white onion. Cut two medium zucchini into small dice. Finely chop a small handful of fresh herbs.

Heat a little olive oil in a nine-inch ovenproof saute pan or skillet over low heat. Add the garlic and onion. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the garlic and onion start to smell fragrant. Add the zucchini and the herbs. Cook until the onion takes on color and the zucchini has softened.

In a small bowl, beat five eggs with half a cup of milk until smooth and pale. Grate two ounces of sharp cheddar.

Pour the beaten egg into the pan, and sprinkle with cheese. Use a spatula to lift up the edges as they cook, letting the uncooked mixture flow underneath. Cook until the frittata is mostly set, but still wobbly in the middle.

Transfer the pan to a broiler on low heat. Cook until the top is set and lightly browned. Remove from heat. Serve warm or cool, with a green salad on the side.

stories echoing our own

2011-07-10T12:04:00.000-04:00

Zubin couldn't believe that any American father would let his teenage daughter go out at night in Bombay. "Go out where?"
"My friends have parties. Or sometimes clubs - there's that new place, Fire and Ice."
"You should be careful," Zubin told her.
Julia smiled. "That's so Indian."
"Anyone would tell you to be careful - it's not like the States."
"No," Julia said.
He was surprised by the bitterness in her voice. "You miss it."
"I am missing it."
"You mean now in particular?"
Julia was putting her things back into the knapsack hapazardly - phone, cigarettes, date book, lip gloss. She squinted at the window, as if the light was too bright. "I mean, I don't even know what I'm missing."

Sometimes the stories we love best are not those that teach us something about other lives, but those that echo our own. These are stories in which we meet characters we know, and see our own thoughts laid out on the printed page. Stories in which we find that a stranger has described us better than we could describe ourselves. "The Tutor," from the collection Lucky Girls by Nell Freudenberger, is a story in which I see my own history, and it's the work I've chosen for the Summer 2011 edition of Novel Food.

"The Tutor" is the story of Zubin, who left India to study literature at Harvard and Oxford and returned after dropping out of his PhD program, and Julia, who has lived all over the world with her family, and chose to move to Mumbai with her father when her parents divorced. Zubin is Julia's SAT tutor, hired to help her improve her weak verbal scores. Julia wants to go to Berkeley more than any other college, because San Francisco is where her family lived before they moved anywhere else. It's a quiet, layered story, and it captures the mood of being adrift, of wanting something that lacks a name. The sense of displacement is reflected in the food and drink: cuisines never match locations, no matter where the characters might be.

"In Paris, after her mother left, her father became a cook. He would go all the way to Les Freres Tang to buy rare vegetables for Thai soup. None of the roots and leaves and grasses in the Thai soup were edible, but the broth was fantastic. You poured it, garlicky and golden, over rice. It was so spicy that her eyes teared and her nose ran and her mouth burned so no drink could cool it... Her father wore an apron with the Durer rabbit on the front, and he fogged the black windows with his soups and curries. In the morning you could taste the lemongrass and cumin in the bread that had been left out on the table."

Thai soup in Paris is followed by coquilles St. Jacques in Mumbai. Julia won't eat Indian cuisine, and buys coffee from a trendy expat coffeeshop "five times a day." Zubin drinks sambuca and other foreign liquors alone in his room. Food and eating evoke nothing of home, but become one more reminder of how Julia and Zubin are always out of place, seeking an escape.

Like most expats, I had my own stint as an English tutor. I don't object to the local cuisine here in Hong Kong, but it's not something I enjoy eating on a daily basis. If anything, my childhood monotony of steamed rice and stir-fry is an experience I've tried not to repeat. Rather than drawing inspiration from any particular food scene in the story, I decided to focus on the idea of food as an escape.

Cacio e pepe is a classic Roman dish, spaghetti tossed with grated Pecorino-Romano and plenty of freshly cracked black pepper. It's a dish I didn't eat that often while I was actually in Rome (I was more enamored of its close cousin, spaghetti alla carbonara) but it's quick and simple to prepare - a classier, smarter version of pasta with melted cheese, one of my longtime comfort foods. Digging into a bowl of this is a welcome escape on days when I'd rather be someplace other than Hong Kong. For all I know, it could work for Zubin and Julia too.

Cacio e Pepe

This dish uses nothing but Pecorino-Romano, pasta and black pepper, so don't skimp on quality. Make sure the black pepper is fresh, and if you can't get decent Pecorino-Romano, you're better off substituting Parmigiano-Reggiano.

(Adapted from a recipe that appeared in the March 2003 edition of Gourmet magazine. Serves one, generously, if cheese and pasta are one's comfort food.)

Set a large pot of salted water on to boil. Set a large mixing bowl in the sink, and rest a colander on top of it.

Using a grater with teardrop-shaped holes (not a microplane grater; the cheese will clump), grate two ounces of Pecorino Romano into a small bowl. Set aside.

When the water hits a rolling boil, add a third of a pound of spaghetti and cook until al dente.

Drain the pasta into the colander. Carefully pick up the colander, and set it aside.

Carefully (very carefully) pour off all but two tablespoons of the pasta cooking water from the mixing bowl. Add the pasta back in. Sprinkle over the cheese, and toss to coat. Grind a generous quantity of fresh black pepper over the pasta, and toss again. Transfer to a plate or bowl, and serve immediately.

serve with strawberries and cream

2011-06-20T07:44:00.000-04:00

The summer I worked in the pastry kitchen, I began each morning by preparing the day's strawberries.

The pastry kitchen went through a lot of strawberries. Our routine requirements - tarts for the hotel's cake shop, garnishes on all the single-serving Earl Grey chocolate cakes and tiramisu for the set lunch menus, and a small mountain of fruit to accompany the chocolate fountain at the afternoon tea buffet - added up to a case each day. Additional requirements - strawberry desserts for catered functions, special requests from room service, unexpected ingredient borrowing by one of the restaurant kitchens - could easily mean a second round of strawberry prep in the afternoon, and day's tally somewhere in the range of forty pounds of strawberries, cleaned and hulled and cut.

(Not my photo. This is Alex's work.)

Every morning, I'd collect a case of two-pound boxes from the walk-in. I'd fill the sink full of very cold water, and tip in the berries, swishing the water to rinse off the dried strawberry flower petals and their fine, fuzzy stamens. I'd scoop the berries out into a big prep bowl, and then I'd set out our big, boxy plastic storage containers. I'd hull the strawberries with a paring knife, and when the last berry had been trimmed, I'd clear away the heap of green calyxes and the stack of plastic clamshells, and stack the storage containers in the walk-in.

We'd cut the hulled strawberries into halves and quarters and slices for tarts and garnishes as we needed them, and in the afternoon, after we'd piled warm cream scones into napkin-lined baskets and arranged tea cakes and tiny tarts on tiered salvers, I'd take two big white china serving bowls and heap them high. At the afternoon tea buffet, the strawberries would be the prime attraction of the chocolate fountain, speared on cocktail skewers and placed underneath the rippling flow of chocolate.

The chocolate fountain didn't inspire any fond memories (the "chocolate" was a ready-to-pour commercial mix, stabilized with vegetable oil and soy lecthin so that would stay smooth and unctuous without gumming up the fountain's moving parts), but hulling all those strawberries left its mark. When it comes to pleasing a crowd, my thoughts easily turn to desserts that can be served alongside small mountains of berries and whipped cream.

Chocolate may be the most popular pairing when it comes to a match for strawberries, but it's a relatively recent arrival. Desserts with fruit and honey date back to the Roman era, and summer is both bee and berry season. Whip cream with a touch of orange blossom honey, and it's a lovely accompaniment for strawberries. For something a little more unusual, however, there's medovnik.

Medovnik is a honey cake, often referred to as Russian, but found throughout the former Soviet Union. Like borscht or golubtsi, there is no single fixed recipe for medovnik, but it all comes down to one basic concept: the cake is flavored with honey, made up of many thin layers, and sandwiched with a creamy filling. It works on the same principle as a chocolate icebox cake: the layers are fashioned from dough rather than batter, and baked until crisp. After being spread with filling and left to sit overnight, the layers soften and take on a moist, delicate texture. When cut into slices, the golden color and individual layers are reminiscent of puff pastry, which accounts for the cake's other name, napoleon cake.

There is no set number of layers (five or eight are popular), but the more layers, the more impressive the finished results. I've gone for fifteen, which is a lot of rolling and baking, but the extra effort produces a tall, dramatic cake. Serve with a mountain of strawberries and a big bowl of cream, and listen to the oohs and aahs. It'll be gone before you can say "chocolate fountain."

Medovnik (Napoleon Cake)

Traditionally, this cake calls for buckwheat honey (a very strong monofloral honey), but if you can't obtain any, use the darkest honey you can find. While I'm fond of pairing it with strawberries and honey cream, I suspect you could also serve it with poached apples for a nice Rosh Hashanah dessert.

The quantities given in this recipe will make a lot of cake, but the recipe is easily halved. You can also use biscuit cutters to produce rounds for individually-sized cakes - just keep a close eye on the layers when they're in the oven.

(Adapted from this recipe and this recipe. Makes one tall nine-inch cake, which will serve at least sixteen people. Cake will keep for up to a week, wrapped tightly and refrigerated.)

This cake needs to sit for at least twelve hours (preferably fifteen) after assembly, so you'll need to start the recipe the day before serving.

First, the cake layers. In a mixing bowl, beat together four eggs, one cup of sugar, four tablespoons buckwheat honey and two teaspoons baking soda. Set aside.

Place two sticks of butter in a large, heavy-bottomed pot, and place over low heat. Once the butter has melted, pour in the egg mixture; beat well to combine. Stir in four cups of flour, one cup at a time, to form a sticky dough.

Remove the dough from heat. Coat the inside of a mixing bowl well with flour, and scrape the dough into the bowl.

Preheat oven to 350F. Ready two baking sheets and several pieces of parchment paper.

Lay a sheet of parchment paper on a flat surface. Place a small handful of dough on the parchment paper, about one-third of a cup.

Top with another sheet of parchment paper. Roll the dough out as thinly as possible, then peel away the top sheet of parchment. Using a nine-inch dinner plate or springform tin base as a guide, cut a circle into the dough.

Gather up the trimmings and place them back in the bowl.

Transfer the dough and parchment to a baking sheet. Bake for four to five minutes, or until the round has risen and is golden brown in color. Use a small, sharp knife to trim any ragged edges, and save the crumbs in a bowl. Transfer the round to a wire rack to cool. (When cooled, the rounds will be hard.)

Lay out another sheet of parchment, set another lump of dough on it, and repeat the process as above until you have fifteen rounds. If you still have dough left over, roll it out thinly, and bake it like the rest. Once it cools, break it up into small pieces, and add it to the bowl with the crumbs.

Next, prepare the cream filling. Using a stand mixer or electric hand mixer, beat together two sticks of softened butter, one can (fourteen ounces) sweetened condensed milk, and eight ounces sour cream until smooth. The mixture might be a little on the runny side, which is fine.

Now prepare the topping: Take the crumbs and other broken bits (you can run them through a food processor to get them very fine, if you like) and combine with a half-cup of finely chopped walnuts.

(Note: If nut allergies are a problem, turn one of the fifteen rounds into extra crumbs instead.)

To assemble the cake, ready a cake platter or serving dish. Place a smear of cream on the platter and set the first layer down. Spread the layer with cream, making sure to go to the very edges. Top with another layer. Alternate layers and cream until all the layers are stacked.

Coat the cake with the remaining cream, then grab handfuls of the topping and sprinkle all over the top and sides.

Cover the cake with foil, and leave in the fridge to chill for at least twelve hours.

Remove the cake from the fridge an hour before serving. Immediately before serving, whip heavy cream with honey to sweeten.

Cut the cake into slices, and accompany with honey cream and fresh strawberries, and an extra drizzle of honey, if you like. A glass of mead might not go amiss, either.

an education in bread and chocolate

2011-06-08T14:16:00.000-04:00

For a month during my time in Paris, I didn't attend class.

I promise this wasn’t poor attitude on my part. I didn’t go out clubbing and sleep through morning lectures. I didn’t meet any charming locals who urged me to cut class and go on madcap adventures. I didn’t even get sick with something lingering and unpleasant, like mono, and spend my days in bed.

I didn't attend class because my classes weren’t in session. The semester I spent in Paris was during the year that the French government tried to push forward the contrat de premiere embauche, a sort of provisional contract intended to make it easier for employers to give younger workers a trial period before hiring them on permanently. Backlash was immediate and furious. The students rioted, the Metro workers went on strike, and the universities shut down. It was all very French.

I suppose I acclimatized easily, because not having class suited me quite well. Higher learning, French-style, is more about self-directed learning than formal instruction. Lecture attendance isn't strictly required, and indeed, the content of the lectures often has little or no bearing on the content of reading lists or - more importantly - the content of the final exams. And so, for the better part of a month, I made my own schedule.

Some days I spent in the Bibliothèque Nationale, paging through brittle copies of 1920s food industry periodicals in search of useful sources for my independent research paper. Some days I camped out in my program office and typed up notes on the history and evolution of the French language.

And some days, days when the weather was unusually nice, I took advantage of not being stuck in a classroom, found a nice park, and did my nineteenth-century French literature reading on a quiet bench. By mid-afternoon, having had enough of Hugo - Notre-Dame de Paris is a hefty volume - I'd make my way to the nearest patisserie for a snack.

I enjoyed all the usual suspects: brioche and pain au chocolate and croissants aux amandes. I ate palmiers and religeuses and eclairs and tartes aux fraises. And I developed a taste for viennoises au chocolat.

A viennoise au chocolat isn't quite as eye-catching as some of the other delights you'll see in the window of a patisserie. Shaped much like the humble baguette, it can't really compete with the graceful whorls of a palmier, or the pleasing roundness of a brioche à tête. It doesn't look any fancier beneath its unassuming crust, either: just a fine white bread studded with chocolate chips.

No-one (at least no-one in their right mind) ever bought a treat from a display case just to look at it, however. Taste-wise, the viennoise au chocolat can easily hold its own. Frankly, I think that if a chocolate chip muffin grew out of its sweetness and moved to France, it would be a viennoise au chocolat. The bread is soft, a little chewy, and only faintly sweet, and the slight resistance of the chocolate chips provides a textural contrast quite unlike that of the melting heart of a pain au chocolat or the voluptuous stickiness of a tartine au Nutella.

Maybe it's just me, but the viennoise au chocolat also seems conducive to learning: I found sitting on a park bench while tearing bite-size pieces off a viennoise au chocolat and pondering Hugo's thoughts on architecture a very effective study method. I think that Notre-Dame de Paris may even bear few chocolately smudges as proof.

Viennoises Au Chocolate

(Makes two half-baguette-sized breads.)

In a mixing bowl, combine two hundred and fifty grams all-purpose flour, one teaspoon instant active yeast, a half-teaspoon of salt, and two tablespoons sugar. Add a hundred and fifty mililitres of warm milk. Stick your hand in the mixture, and stir until you have a soft, lumpy dough.

Turn the dough out on a clean countertop. Knead until the dough is smooth and elastic, then work in four tablespoons of unsalted butter, one tablespoon at a time. Continue to knead until the dough is soft and very smooth in texture.

Knead in three ounces of chocolate chips. Place back in bowl. Cover and leave in a warm place to proof. (One to two hours.)

Deflate the dough. Shape it into a tidy ball, pulling and tucking any stray bits underneath. Gently squeeze this ball until you have a long sausage of dough. Cut this into two equal pieces, and gently squeeze each piece into a long, skinny length.

Arrange the two lengths on a parchment-lined baking tray. Cover lightly with plastic wrap; allow to proof in a warm place for an hour.

Preheat oven to 400F.

To make the glaze, beat together one egg yolk with a tablespoon of milk and a tablespoon of powdered sugar. Brush the glaze on the baguettes.

Right before baking, take a straight razorblade or very sharp knife, and cut angled slashes along the top of each baguette.

Bake until golden brown in color, about twenty to twenty-five minutes. Transfer to a rack to cool. Enjoy plain or with coffee for an afternoon snack.

when come back, bring pie

2011-06-02T14:26:00.002-04:00

My absence for the past month has been largely inadvertent.

I didn't intend to wait until June to write again, but somewhere between leaving Beijing, watching Lucille graduate, and picking up fresh employment in Hong Kong, May disappeared like a conjuror's trick, roses to doves in one quick turn. There have been many, many items on the lists of things cooked and things eaten - croissants, cauliflower cheese, and a lovely lunch at Prune, to name just a few - but little time to sit and sort out my thoughts in writing.

I'm back, though. And I come bearing pie.

As much as I love playing with pastry, I don't bake many fruit pies. I like galettes and freeform crostata as quick, improvised desserts, but I can practically count the times I've made anything involving a pie dish and a top and bottom crust on one hand. The last pie I recall baking (about a year ago) had a fairly unremarkable mixed berry filling, and I did it largely for the fun of weaving a lattice top.

When I sighted rhubarb at the supermarket, right next to strawberries, my first thoughts were of crumble, not pie. A crumble is a very quick dessert, however, and I wanted the pleasure of making something more involved. The answer? Add pastry, and turn crumble into a pie with streusel topping.

Of course, there was some tinkering along the way: when making the pastry, I switched out half the water for brandy, and gave it folds and turns in puff-pastry fashion to produce rough, or blitz, puff pastry. Baked unweighted, "rough puff" rises like puff-pastry (though not to the same heights), but baked blind (weighted) in a pie dish, it produces a particularly crisp and flaky crust.

Rhubarb and strawberries went into a pan with sugar, vanilla, and more brandy. After the fruit softened, I strained the mixture, and reduced the extra liquid to a thick syrup. Finally, I mixed up a very buttery streusel with walnuts for extra crunch. After assembling the components, I slid the pie into the oven and awaited the finished product. Would I regret not following my original idea for a simple crumble?

The pie came out golden brown and bubbling, and filled the kitchen with the scent of butter and bright fruit. We cut slices while was still a little warm, the sweet-tangy filling soft and almost jammy. The crust turned out satisfyingly flaky, and the nutty, shortbready streusel gave it a certain Linzertorte-like quality. I didn't miss the crumble at all.

Note to self: when come back, bake more pie.

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie with Walnut Streusel

(Inspired by Bobbie Sue's delectably tart, gingery rhubarb streusel pie. Makes one nine-inch pie.)

Start by making the pastry. In a mixing bowl, combine a cup of flour with a pinch of salt, and cut in one stick (four ounces) of chilled unsalted butter. Rub the butter into the flour until the largest pieces are pea-sized. Add two tablespoons cold water and two tablespoons brandy. Stir lightly until you have a dough that just barely holds together.

Turn the dough out on a sheet of parchment paper. Shape it into a rough rectangle, and top it with another sheet of parchment paper. Roll the dough out to a quarter-inch thick, and fold in thirds, like a letter. Turn the dough so that the seam side is down, and roll it out again. Repeat the folding process. Repeat the rolling and folding one more time, then wrap tightly in plastic film. Leave in the fridge for at least two hours to rest.

Meanwhile, prepare the filling. In a small saucepan, combine one pound of rhubarb (cut into one-inch pieces), one-and-a-half pounds of strawberries (halved if large), a half-cup of brown sugar, a teaspoon of vanilla, and two teaspoons of brandy. Cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, until the rhubarb turns soft. There will be plenty of liquid in the pan.

Set a sieve over a bowl and strain the fruit. Return the liquid to the pan; transfer the fruit from the sieve to the bowl and set aside. Reduce the liquid in the pan over medium heat until it foams and turns thick and syrupy. Pour it over the fruit; set aside to cool.

While you wait, prepare the streusel. In a mixing bowl, combine half a cup of flour with two tablespoons of white sugar (double the sugar for a sweeter topping) a fat pinch of salt, and a few drops of vanilla. Cut in half a stick (two ounces) of chilled butter. Rub the butter in until the mixture forms sandy clumps. Stir in a quarter-cup of chopped walnuts. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and leave in the fridge to chill.

Preheat oven to 350F.

Remove the pastry dough from the fridge. Roll it out to fit a nine-inch glass or ceramic pie dish, and trim the excess. Prick the pastry lightly all over with a fork (don't pierce it, or the filling will leak), and weight with pie weights or dried beans. Bake the pastry until it's lightly colored, about twenty minutes.

Remove the pie weights. Spoon the fruit mixture into the pastry shell, and sprinkle the streusel on top. Bake until the pastry is a rich golden brown and the filling is bubbling, about forty minutes. Cool on a rack. Serve warm. A scoop of vanilla ice-cream wouldn't go amiss.

a chocolate cheat

2011-05-02T15:48:00.004-04:00

I have mixed feelings about my microwave.

Oh, it has its uses. It's faster than an oven for reheating leftovers (and doesn't destroy risotto.) It's convenient for softening butter, which is nice if you're baking on short notice. And it's good for steamed vegetables on days when dinner could use the extra nutrients. Quite handy, really.

A microwave is an appliance with many applications. You can do fish en papillote in a microwave. You can roast garlic in a microwave. You can even make candy in a microwave. All the same, the spectre of frozen TV dinners lingers, and I can't help but feel that it's a bit like cheating. I've lived quite comfortably without a microwave in the past. It's not an essential kitchen appliance, is it?

Well, as it turns out, it does affect the picture when there's chocolate involved. You see, it's much, much easier to temper chocolate with a microwave than it is to do it with a chilled surface and a pan of simmering water on the stove.

Tempering is the process of melting chocolate in a way that allows it to harden and keep its shape when it cools. You can't melt chocolate and expect it to harden to its original state on its own because chocolate is a curiosity: the fat crystals in cocoa butter form differently depending on the rate of cooling. Left to its own devices, the chocolate will cool with big crystals in a loose structure, and the end result will be dull in appearance and soft to the touch. (Consider the chocolate in chocolate chip cookies, and how they remain sticky even when the cookies have cooled.) If the cooling is controlled, however, the crystals formed are small and tightly arranged, and the chocolate becomes glossy and hard.

(You can read more about the chemistry of chocolate and tempering in this excellent article over at Cooking For Engineers.)

Tempering chocolate the old-fashioned way involves melting chocolate over simmering water, cooling some of it (typically on a marble slab or other chilled surface), and then reheating it just enough to bring it back up to the magical temperature point of thirty-one degrees Celsius, or eighty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. It requires the use of a chocolate thermometer, and I have yet to manage it successfully. (There's another, slightly less involved method known as "seeding": melting a small quantity of chocolate, and adding small "seeds" of unmelted chocolate to bring the temperature back down - but I've had no luck with that method either.)

With a microwave, however, you can take advantage of the flip side of chocolate's curious nature: its melting properties. Melted chocolate, you see, has stages. There’s the soft stage – what happens when you leave a chocolate bar out in the sun. There’s the gooey stage – what happens when you leave a chocolate bar near a heat source. And then there’s the liquid stage – what happens if you expose a chocolate bar to direct heat.

If you use good-quality chocolate (which is already tempered), and melt it in the microwave to a middle ground between soft and gooey, what you'll get is melted chocolate that is still tempered. The melted chocolate can be used to dip strawberries, coat caramels, or decorate biscotti, and it will harden as it cools, no extra steps required.

For the time being, I'm calling a truce on mixed feelings about my microwave. There's something to be said for not having to fuss with chilled marble and a chocolate thermometer, even if it does still feel a bit like cheating.

Chocolate Hazelnut Biscotti with Chocolate Drizzle

Caramelized white chocolate makes for the most arresting visual contrast, but milk or dark chocolate are also fine, flavor-wise. For a deeper flavor, add two teaspoons of instant coffee powder to the dough along with the cocoa powder.

(Makes twelve to fifteen, depending on how wide you slice them. Will keep in an airtight container for two to three weeks.)

Preheat oven to 325F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

In a large mixing bowl, stir together a quarter-cup of olive oil, a quarter cup plus two tablespoons of sugar, a heaped quarter-teaspoon of salt, and a quarter-teaspoon of vanilla extract. Beat in two egg whites.

Stir in a quarter-cup of cocoa powder and one cup of all-purpose flour to form a stiff dough. Fold (or knead) in half a cup of chopped toasted hazelnuts.

Turn the dough out on the baking sheet. Shape into a log approximately twelve inches long; then flatten into a rectangle approximately four inches wide. Bake for twenty-five to thirty minutes, or until the surface has small cracks in it.

Remove from oven, and slide onto a cutting board. Use a serrated knife (or a sharp chef’s knife) to cut the biscotti on an angle into slices a little less than a half-inch thick. Arrange the slices, cut side up, on the baking sheet. Return to the oven, and bake for an additional twenty to twenty-five minutes, or until biscotti are mostly firm to the touch.

Cool the biscotti on a wire rack.

To decorate, begin by finely chopping or grating four ounces of the chocolate of your choice. Place in a small bowl, and microwave on low heat, twenty seconds at a time, until the chocolate starts to melt. Stir between each interval in the microwave. Stop heating once the mixture is mostly smooth, but still contains a few bits of solid chocolate. Stir until the last bits of solid chocolate melt. The mixture should be smooth but thick, and a little sticky.

Lay out a sheet of wax paper. Spread each piece of biscotti with chocolate on one side, then place it chocolate side down on the wax paper. If the chocolate starts to get difficult to spread, return it to the microwave (ten second intervals) until it softens.

Take a square of parchment paper and fashion it into a piping bag (or use a Ziploc bag.) Spoon the chocolate into the bag, and cut off the very tip. Drizzles or scribble designs all over the biscotti. Allow to set completely before peeling away from the wax paper.

Serve with tea or coffee.

hot cross buns and a pirate named Pontius: religious (mis)education of a young glutton

2011-04-21T14:28:00.002-04:00

When I am nine years old, after three unhappy years at an international Japanese school, my parents abandon their hopes of making me trilingual, and enroll me at one of Sydney's all-girls’ private schools instead. When I am nine years old, I have my first experience with culture shock.

My new classmates do not covet Sailor Moon and Hello Kitty stationery, but collect and trade brightly colored stickers. (“Oilies” – stickers filled with a shimmery, iridescent liquid – are the most prized.) They enjoy plaiting each other’s hair in complicated fashions, and handball is all the rage on the playground. I find the demands of handball to be beyond me, but I do acquire a sticker book, and I learn to French braid. At this new school, socializing with my classmates is no longer an ordeal.

There are new rules to absorb at this school. Stand up when any teacher enters the room. Greet the Headmistress in the hallways. There are four school houses, and they are named for the royal houses of England. (Mine is York, and the house symbol is a lamb on a field of blue.) The foreign language we study is French, and I learn to address the teacher as Madame, and to make polite conversation: Comment allez-vous? Très bien, merci, et vous?

Art class, music class, and P.E. class are all familiar, but Religious Education is entirely new. I learn that there is an entity named God, and he – ahem, He – created the world. He also created the first human beings, and they were named Adam and Eve. The teacher seems taken aback when I put up my hand and ask about the apes and dinosaurs I learned about at my previous school. A funny expression crosses her face when I ask who created God. I realize that perhaps Religious Education class is not like Maths class, and maybe it is best to not to raise my hand whenever I have questions. I have many questions, though. I find that Religious Education often does not make much sense.

In addition to Religious Education, we have Chapel on Tuesdays, and the Reverend tells us more about God. I learn the Lord’s Prayer, and then another version of the Lord's Prayer, from then on I am always confused as to whether I should be saying trespasses or sins. We sing hymns from a navy blue hymn book. Though the words are often very strange, I like the singing well enough.

Come autumn, we learn about Easter. As it turns out, Easter is not about the Easter Bunny, which I have never seen and do not believe in, because my mother does not believe in sweets. Not is it about the Easter Bazaar organized by the class mothers, at which I scoped out all the stalls before making any purchases with my carefully-hoarded dollar and ten cents, and netted enough chocolate eggs to give my mother a conniption.

Easter is about Jesus, who is the son of Mary and Joseph, but also the Son of God. (It is probably a good thing that I don't yet know anything about the mechanics of human reproduction, because my questions during that particular Religious Education class would probably give my teacher a conniption.) Easter also involves a man named Judas, and a pirate named Pontius with thirty pieces of silver. (I thought pirates had gold, but maybe I am mistaken.) Jesus was nailed to a cross, which is a very unpleasant way to die, and so the symbol of Christianity is a cross (though it was also a fish), and that is why there are hot cross buns, like the ones from the nursery rhyme.

We are given forms to place orders for hot cross buns, and after some badgering, my mother agrees to place an order. The buns turn out to be soft and mildly sweet, a little like finger buns, and studded with sultanas and orange peel. I am puzzled by the makeup of the white crosses on the buns (not icing, but not bread, either) until a good-intentioned class mother gives my mother a Xeroxed copy of a recipe for hot cross buns. In reading it, I learn about flour paste, and yeast, and the fact that yeast dough must rise, be knocked down, and rise again before baking.

The week of Easter itself, the hymn we sing in Chapel is called "Christ the Lord is Risen Today." The Reverend makes a point of announcing it, too: "He is risen! Truly, He is risen!" For once, I don't have any questions. It all makes sense. He is risen, of course. Like hot cross buns, I think.

Hot Cross Buns

This is not your traditional hot cross bun. The dough has more of a brioche-like character, and the fruit is decidedly nonstandard - I love dried cherries, and I had leftover candied kumquat peel. I did keep the flour-paste crosses I grew up with, though you can also mix up a plain white frosting if that’s your preference.

(Makes eight buns. May be frozen.)

In a mixing bowl, combine three hundred grams of flour, one teaspoon instant active yeast, a half-teaspoon of salt plus an extra pinch, and a tablespoon of sugar. Stir in a quarter-teaspoon of nutmeg, and a quarter-teaspoon of cinnamon.

Add three tablespoons (ninety mililitres) warm milk, and stir until the mixture forms shaggy clumps. Crack in one egg, and work it into the mixture. Crack in a second egg, and work that in too. You’ll have a fairly sticky, lumpy dough.

Turn the dough out on a clean countertop and knead for five to seven minutes, or until the dough loses its sticky, lumpy quality. Knead in two tablespoons of softened butter, a tablespoon at a time.

The dough will stick to the countertop in small pieces; knead until the mass of dough picks up those stray pieces and holds together in a smooth, silky whole.

Work in two tablespoons of chopped candied kumquat peel (or other candied citrus peel), and two ounces of dried cherries.

Place the dough back in its original mixing bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and leave in a warm place until doubled in volume, about an hour or so.

After an hour, gently deflate the dough and transfer it to the fridge. Chill for at least two hours (can be left overnight.)

Remove the dough from the fridge and press down upon on it gently to deflate. Butter a five-by-nine inch loaf tin. Divide the dough into eight equal pieces and shape them into squares to fit the tin.

Cover the tin with wax paper, and leave in a warm place to rise for fifty minutes, or until the dough is light and nearly doubled in volume.

Preheat the oven to 375F.

Crack one egg, beat until frothy, and brush it all over the tops of the buns.

Mix together two tablespoons of flour, a tablespoon of icing sugar, and enough water to make a thick paste. Spoon the paste into a piping bag (or a Ziploc bag – cut off the tip of one corner once it’s been filled) and pipe a cross atop each bun.

Bake for twenty to twenty-five minutes, or until the buns sound hollow when lightly tapped with a finger. Cool in the pan for five to ten minutes, then turn out on a wire rack.

Serve warm or at room temperature, with or without extra butter.

playing well together

2011-04-16T16:16:00.001-04:00

There are some dietary restrictions that play better together than others.

Cooking for vegans and vegetarians is straightforward: just make the meal vegan. Gluten-free and vegetarian? Serve an egg dish with potatoes or rice. Though I try not to cook for multiple dietary restrictions in one go, it's doable so long as there's a culinary lowest common denominator. The challenge lies in avoiding the dietary restrictions that are at odds with one another: the very idea of putting together a single meal for a vegan, a celiac, and an Atkins adherent is enough to make me reach for takeout menus.

Some dietary restrictions that seem challenging at first glance, however, can be surprisingly complementary. Though I’ve never needed to prepare a meal that was both gluten-free and kosher for Passover, I know it can be done with minimal frustration. Consumption of virtually all grains - including gluten-containing wheat, barley, spelt and rye - is prohibited during Passover (in the Ashkenazi tradition), unless in the form of matzah or matzah-derived products. Therefore, a lot of Passover cooking is automatically gluten-free. In fact, when I first started experimenting with gluten-free recipes, I took many of my cues from Passover desserts.

My latest experiment, however, involved going the other way: taking a gluten-free recipe and adapting it for Passover use.

It started with leftovers. I had a lot of caramelized white chocolate left over from my complicated chocolate torte dessert, and I started casting about for other recipes in which I could put it to use. After browsing a little online, I hit upon blondies. A plain blondie is not much to write home about, but it’s a good blank canvas for mix-ins, and it seemed like a perfect starting point.

Adding caramelized white chocolate to a blondie would produce very sweet results, so I needed another flavor - something sour, or salty, or spicy - to balance it out. After rifling through my pantry, I pulled out a bag of tart dried cherries. Then a container of ground almonds caught my eye.

A blondie, like a brownie, is mostly fat and sugar, bound together with egg and a little flour. It occurred to me that I could probably make gluten-free blondies by switching out wheat flour for ground almonds. The trick would be adding some kind of extra binder so that they didn't become too crumbly. Thinking on it further, I decided to treat them as more of a candy than a bar cookie, a caramel with extra texture.

Caramel candy is produced from a mixture of sugar, invert sugar (some kind of syrup), and fat (butter, in this case), so my first move was to replace part of the sugar with golden syrup. Knowing that my dry ingredients would soak up less liquid than in a recipe with wheat flour, I opted to replace whole egg with egg yolk. Finally, I decided on a mixture of ground almonds and sweet rice (sticky rice) flour, reasoning that ground almonds alone might produce unpleasantly oily results. After some trial and error in baking pans (a larger surface area proved crucial), I had soft, chewy gluten-free blondies.

With the approach of Passover, I started wondering if I could tweak the recipe further. Kosher for Passover caramelized white chocolate might be too tall an order, but dried cherries pair equally well with dark chocolate. If I could do away with the sweet rice flour, I could produce a blondie that was both gluten-free and kosher for Passover. Unfortunately, the easiest modification - using just ground almonds - created the problem I'd originally predicted: the results were far too greasy. I needed a different approach.

I found a possible solution at Cake and Commerce (an excellent resource for allergen-free baking), after looking at a brownie recipe that used a gel made with tapioca flour, which is kosher for Passover. I reasoned that I could produce a sort of suspension by trapping the ground almonds in a mixture of tapioca gel, sugar, egg yolk, and butter, and that it should produce soft, chewy results. Unfortunately, the results were worse: I ended up with a gelatinous, greasy mess.

Back to the drawing board. Clearly, the recipe wasn't benefiting from the addition of butter. I had the feeling the egg yolk wasn't doing much good either. Why not see what would result from combining the ingredients that remained?

As it turns out, you can create a blondie from little more than ground almonds, sugar, and tapioca gel - and not only are they gluten-free and kosher for Passover, they're also vegan. I may still want takeout menus for dinner with a vegan, a celiac, and an Atkins adherent, but if I ever need to prepare a kosher for Passover meal that is both gluten-free and vegan, I'm all set for dessert.

(Kosher for Passover, Gluten-Free and Vegan) Cherry-Chocolate Almond Blondies

Tapioca starch is a kosher for Passover ingredient, but pay close attention to the labels – not all brands are certified kosher for Passover. The same goes for dried cherries, ground almonds, and vanilla extract.

If you can’t find certified ground almonds, run whole almonds through a food processor until powdery.

(Makes ten to twelve, depending on how small you cut them. Recipe may be doubled for a nine-by-nine inch pan.)

In a small saucepan, place a teaspoon of tapioca starch and add six tablespoons of cold water. Swirl the pan until the tapioca starch is fully dissolved. The liquid will turn cloudy and white.

Place the saucepan over low heat, and whisk steadily until the mixture thickens up and turns clearish in color. Remove from heat.

Allow the saucepan and contents to cool until just warm. Stir in a quarter-cup of white sugar and a quarter-cup of brown sugar. Add a half-teaspoon of salt, and a half-teaspoon of vanilla. Stir in a teaspoon of safflower or walnut oil.

Fold in one cup of almond meal, a little at a time. The mixture will be thick and sticky, more like dough than batter. Fold in three to four ounces of dried cherries, and three ounces of roughly chopped dark chocolate.

Preheat oven to 350F. Grease a nine-by-five inch baking tin.

Press the blondie mixture into the tin. Transfer the tin to the oven, and bake for twenty-five to thirty minutes, or until the mixture has puffed and is golden brown on top. Remove from the oven. Allow the blondies to cool completely in the tin before cutting them into squares.

(Gluten-Free) Caramelized White Chocolate and Dried Cherry Almond Blondies

For a more pronounced almond flavor, bump up the amount of extract to a half-teaspoon.

(Makes ten to twelve, depending on how small you cut them. They'll keep for a few days in a sealed container.)

Melt half a stick (two ounces) of butter in a heatproof bowl, either in the microwave or over simmering water.

Stir in two tablespoons of white sugar, a quarter-teaspoon of almond extract, and a quarter-teaspoon of salt.

Add a quarter-cup of sweet rice flour, followed by two tablespoons of golden syrup. Stir in six tablespoons of ground almond meal. Beat in one egg yolk. Allow to rest for at least twenty minutes.

Preheat oven to 350F. Grease a nine-by-five inch loaf pan.

Stir at least two ounces of tart dried cherries into the batter. (I say “at least,” because I can never resist adding a few extra.) Spoon the batter into the prepared pan.

In another bowl, melt two ounces of caramelized white chocolate, and dollop spoonfuls of it all over the blondie batter. Use a skewer or a thin knife to incorporate it in swirling designs.

Bake for fifteen minutes, or until the blondies are golden in color. Transfer to a wire rack to cool. Cut into squares and serve alongside tea or coffee.

a study in white (pizza)

2011-04-11T12:28:00.000-04:00

During my semester in Rome, my favorite class was an art history course on the High Renaissance.

Rome made art history easy to love. In Rome, the past and the present are pressed up against one another like passengers on a crowded bus. The relationship is cramped and awkward, even a little invasive. History is accommodated, not enshrined, and much of the city’s older art is startlingly immediate and accessible.

My High Renaissance course had no excursions to crowded museums, no squinting at works in a blank, neutral environment while desperately trying to imagine them in their original contexts. Though our lectures took place on campus in a regular classroom, our on-site visits involved excursions to churches and other buildings all over Rome. Along with a happy dearth of museums, High Renaissance class also had another draw: Professor H.

Our first introduction to Professor H. came during our program orientation, during an excursion to Umbria. A slight, soft-spoken man, he gave the impression of being bookish, even mousy, as he provided notes on the history of the region on the way to our destination. Upon sensing a general lack of interest when he resumed his lecture on the return trip, however, he abruptly switched gears – and declared that we'd probably get more use out of a lesson in Italian swear words. Within minutes, he was leading students in a chorus of curses, cheerfully shouting profanities at the top of his lungs. It was a very clear sign that High Renaissance would probably not involve the staid, theoretical lectures we'd expected.

Professor H.’s on-site discourse was peppered with anecdotes about popes and Italian noblemen, and we were often given a good dose of saucy Renaissance humor along with observations on contrapposto and color theory. Furthermore, on-site visits demanded little in the way of note-taking. He left us to refer to our textbooks for hard facts, preferring that we listen and observe. It may not have been the most academic of courses, but it was decidedly entertaining.

Best of all, Professor H. was knowledgeable about food. He had earned his degrees in art history part-time while working as a chef, and asking him just a brief question about a Roman specialty could elicit detailed instructions for its preparation. On organized trips to towns outside of Rome, he’d take willing students to little osterie serving pasta with chestnut flour and lamb chops with fried potatoes. In Venice, city of a thousand tourist traps, he led us to a restaurant where all the patrons were locals, and the menu included sarde in saour and squid in its own ink served with white polenta. Our on-site class meeting just happened to conclude at lunchtime, and Professor H. would often announce that he’d be having lunch someplace in the neighborhood, and that anyone who had time to spare before afternoon class was welcome to join him.

The day our class met at the church of Santa Maria della Pace, I did not have a good morning. I overslept and missed breakfast. I took a wrong turn after crossing the river, and my map proved virtually useless when I hit a particularly serpentine collection of streets right near Piazza Novona. By the time I located the church, I’d run through my entire newfound vocabulary of Italian curse words, mentally heaping invective on Professor H., on-site visits, and all High Renaissance art. Bramante’s cloister might have been a charming example of Renaissance architecture, but I was in no mood to appreciate it. When Professor H. dismissed the class, I couldn’t help but sigh in relief. I perked up, however, when he mentioned the words lunch and pizza bianca.

Roman pizza bianca is not white pizza. Not in the American sense, at least. It’s a thin, chewy bread with a light outer crust, baked in blazingly hot ovens and seasoned with nothing more than olive oil and salt. It’s typically eaten plain as a snack, but the hole-in-the-wall to which Professor H. led us specialized in pizza bianca sandwiches – slices split horizontally and stuffed with all kinds of fillings. The smell was wonderful, and the selection generous. One overstuffed assemblage of hard-boiled eggs, tomato, arugula, capers and salsa tonnata later, I was in a much more forgiving mood. Professor H. was a riot; Santa Maria della Pace, delightful; High Renaissance art history, still my favorite class.

I didn’t plan a repeat visit to that sandwich shop, though. Getting lost in that neighborhood just once was enough for me.

Pizza Bianca

Pizza bianca should be crisp on the outside and springy on the inside – pleasantly chewy, but not aggressively so. If you can find Italian “00” grind durum flour, it produces particularly flavorful results, but otherwise, use a good unbleached all-purpose. Don’t use bread flour unless your jaws are in dire need of exercise.

The tray-switching trick in this recipe is intended to compensate for the lack of a baking stone. If you have a baking stone, bake the pizza bianca on a rack in the upper third of the oven, and don’t worry about moving it.

(Makes enough for three servings, if you don't eat half of it hot out of the oven.)

At no less than ninety percent hydration, this is very, very, very wet dough. It’s entirely workable by hand if you don’t mind a little mess, but I won’t hold it against you if you mix it up in a heavy-duty stand mixer.

That said, if you're willing to do this by hand, get out a large mixing bowl, and stir together one-and-three-quarter-cups (two-hundred and fifty grams, eight point eight ounces) all-purpose flour, one teaspoon (five grams) instant yeast, and half a teaspoon (four grams) salt. Pour in a little under one cup of lukewarm water (two hundred and twenty-five mililitres, seven point six fluid ounces.) Stir to combine. The mixture will look like thick paste.

Scrape the paste out on a clean countertop. Work it by either sticking your hand it the mixture and stirring, or smearing it out on the countertop and scraping it back together. It will take a while before the dough develops any kind of body; be patient. It will gradually go from pasty, to sticky, to gummy.

The way to tell if this dough is kneaded adequately is to take your hand, pull it away from the dough, and hold it flat above the dough. The excess dough will fall off in a sticky ribbon. If it falls off immediately, you’re not done. If it hangs for a few seconds before falling, you’re good to go.

Grease the bowl with olive oil and scrape the dough back into the bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and leave in a warm place until it triples in volume (one to two hours.)

Lay out a sheet of parchment paper. Scrape the dough onto the parchment paper, and gently stretch and pat it (resist the urge to roll it out; you'll destroy all the air bubbles) until you have a rectangle a little over half a centimeter thick (about five-sixteenths of an inch.) Let the dough proof for another forty minutes, then brush with olive oil. (You can sprinkle with sea salt too, if you like.)

While the dough is proofing for the second time, place an oven rack in the top third of your oven, and another in the bottom third of your oven, as close to the bottom heating element as possible. Place a metal baking tray on the bottom rack.

Crank up your oven as far as it will go. (Mine goes to about 550F.)

Once your oven reaches temperature, carefully hook the rack and slide it out far enough to drop the parchment with dough on the baking tray. Bake for ten minutes.

After ten minutes, carefully (very carefully) move the tray to the top rack. If your oven has a broil setting, switch it on. Bake until the pizza bianca is a deep golden brown and just starting to blister in a few spots. (The blackened spots in the photo are where I stretched the dough too thin; ideally, your pizza bianca shouldn't burn like that.)

Remove from oven. Let it cool to the point where it won’t burn your fingers before you give in to the urge to nosh.

For sandwiches, cut the pizza bianca into rectangles, split them horizontally (not all the way; you want to form a sort of pocket, like pita bread), and stuff with your choice of fillings. If you can get your hands on fresh figs, figs and prosciutto are classic.

better than my imagination

2011-04-05T13:45:00.006-04:00

When I applied to college, I wrote my essay about cooking. I titled it "Imagining Alchemy."

Alchemy, because I found cooking to be almost magical; imagined, because I did very little cooking outside of my daydreams. I wrote about my desire to cook: the fact that I'd spent much of my childhood leafing longingly through cookbooks, that I eagerly awaited the arrival of the far-off day when I'd be out of my parents' kitchen (the one in which I could barely fry an egg and use the toaster without permission) and in a space of my own. I wrote about dishes I'd never made and processes I'd only ever tested in my mind. My essay was dreamy and wistful, and by rights, I should have had a good-natured chuckle at my naivete upon re-reading it eight years later.

The funny thing is, I didn't. Though most of the predictions I made during senior year of high school about college and my future in general were completely off the mark (I didn't study psychology, and I didn't take a single class in the English department, let alone declare the major), the sentiment of that essay has held true.

I still like the word sabayon (and its Italian equivalent, zabaglione.) The process of baking bread still fascinates me. I've learned more about the tedious, dirty and exhausting parts of cooking, but the activity hasn't lost its charm. I know it doesn't usually play out this way, but for once, reality doesn't pale in comparison to daydreams.

Now that I have kitchen space of my own, I can devise multi-part, multi-step recipes building on all the untried dishes I thought about years ago. I can learn about caramelized white chocolate, and I no longer have to content myself with merely reading through the steps.

I can steal spoonfuls of the mixture as it cools - sweet and toffee-like, with a browned-butter edge - and wonder about what I might use it in, what other flavors I might combine it with.

A sauce, something very simple, just the white chocolate thinned out with heavy cream. Use it to dress an ultra-dark, bitter flourless chocolate torte. Accent with raspberry - no, citrus. Citrus peel, for its floral, bitter note, the one that plays off the fruity quality of dark chocolate. Serve with orange liqueur-spiked whipped cream to cut the richness.

I can candy kumquats (and forget to take photos of the process - oops. Wikimedia Commons to the rescue!)

I can sketch out exactly how I'd present such a dessert. (Even if my drawing skills leave something to be desired.)

I can determine the exact cocoa content I want in the chocolate for the flourless torte. (Seventy and eighty-five percent, in equal parts.)

And on a quiet weekend morning, I can put all the pieces together.

Imagining alchemy may be lovely, but the reality is much, much better.

Bitter Flourless Chocolate Torte with Caramelized White Chocolate Sauce, Candied Kumquat, and Orange Whipped Cream

I will freely admit that this is probably one of the most finicky recipes I've ever devised. It's not a terribly difficult recipe, but the whole thing takes a week from start to finish, and some of the steps are time-consuming and rather fiddly. I wouldn't hold it against you if you skipped the kumquats - you could probably substitute a spoonful of decent-quality marmalade without too much drama.

(Serves six to eight, depending how thickly you slice the torte. It's very rich, though, so a little goes a long way.)

For the candied kumquat peel:

Start preparing the candied kumquat peel a week before you plan to serve the finished dish. You'll have more than you need for this recipe, but the leftovers will keep for weeks in the fridge. (They can be added to baked goods, or used to garnish other desserts.)

Take eight ounces of kumquats, and clean and dry them well. Place in a large glass jar or a small, deep bowl.

In a small saucepan, combine seven ounces sugar with seven ounces water, Bring to a boil and cook for two minutes. Pour the hot syrup over the kumquats. Cover with a round of parchment paper, and place a can or other heavy object on top to keep the kumquats submerged. Allow to sit until fully cool.

Transfer the kumquats and syrup to a glass container with lid. Place in fridge; leave for four days. After four days, remove the kumquats from the syrup. Cut each fruit in half and scoop out the pulp (it should come out cleanly.) Cut each peel into strips.

Preheat oven to 120C. Place the strips on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake for one hour; allow to cool. Place the kumquat peel back in the syrup. Return to fridge for two more days.

To prepare for serving, take a spoonful of kumquat peel and place in a saucepan with a little water. Simmer 1 min. Allow to cool, then drain well and cut the peel into fine slivers.

For the caramelized white chocolate:

(follow link to David Lebowitz' blog for detailed instructions)

Preheat oven to 250F.

Take twelve ounces of good-quality white chocolate, cut into rough chunks, and place them on a rimmed baking sheet. (Line with parchment paper for easy cleanup, if you like.)

Place the baking sheet in the oven. After ten minutes, smooth out the chocolate with a wooden spoon or spatula.

Bake for thirty to sixty minutes, stirring at ten-minute intervals, until the chocolate is a deep shade of golden brown. Season with a pinch of salt.

Transfer to a jar with lid. Allow to cool completely before sealing. Store at room temperature.

For the flourless chocolate torte:

Make the torte the day before you plan to serve the finished dish.

Preheat oven to 400F. Line a 3.5 x7 inch baking tin with parchment paper.

In a bowl set over simmering water, melt together half a stick of butter (two ounces), two ounces finely chopped seventy-percent dark chocolate and two ounces finely chopped eighty-five percent dark chocolate. Remove from heat; set aside.

Crack two eggs into a second bowl and place over simmering water. Beat until eggs are pale and tripled in volume. Fold half the mixture into the melted chocolate, then the remaining half. Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin.

Set the tin in a larger baking dish, and fill the larger baking dish with water until it comes about halfway up the tin. Transfer the dish to the oven.

Bake for nine minutes uncovered, then cover with tinfoil and bake for an additional three minutes. Allow to cool completely before refrigerating overnight.

For the caramelized white chocolate sauce:

Make this an hour before serving.

Gently heat a quarter-cup of heavy cream, and pour it over two ounces of chopped caramelized white chocolate. Stir until the mixture is smooth and even; chill.

For the orange whipped cream:

Make this shortly before serving.

Whip half a cup of heavy cream with a tablespoon of sugar and a few drops of Grand Marnier or other orange liqueur - just enough to flavor it lightly.

To assemble the whole affair:

Unmold the torte by using the parchment paper to lift it out of the tin. Cut the torte into slices, and allow them to come to room temperature, or microwave very briefly, on very low heat, until just barely warm.

Drizzle sauce on serving plates in a decorative pattern. Arrange torte slices on serving plates. Top with whipped cream, and garnish with kumquat zest. Serve with remaining whipped cream and extra kumquat on the side.

not by halves

2011-03-29T08:32:00.001-04:00

I wasn’t always homesick.

Long ago, before my life story became complicated, long before I ever came across the term “third culture kid,” let alone recognized myself in its description, my sense of home was certain. When I was ten years old, I could tell you where I was from in a single sentence. When I was ten years old, I was an Australian schoolchild at an all-girls’ school in Sydney.

My parents were Chinese, which gave me an extra adjective and a hyphen, Chinese-Australian, and complications in the form of math tutoring, piano lessons, and writing my own sick notes, but I had classmates who were similarly hyphenated, and classmates who were unhyphenated, and we all wore the same checked blue uniform dresses in summer, and the same navy blue tunics over lemon yellow blouses in winter. We did our best to avoid wearing our school hats (navy blue, hot and ugly) but never our school blazers (navy blue, boxy and ugly), because you could get into Serious Trouble if you were ever caught wearing your school jumper (navy blue, itchy and ugly) without your blazer. (None of us knew why this was the rule, but it was, and it came right after the rule about not being allowed to wear your sports uniform in public.)

We sat underneath the trees on the playground and ate packed lunches, swapping ham sandwiches for cheese-and-pickle, sharing bags of chips (chicken chips were good, but salt-and-vinegar chips were better), and sometimes bemoaning the rice balls or steamed buns our mothers saw fit to introduce into our lunchboxes, even if we secretly enjoyed them. We preferred the days when our parents were feeling either harried or indulgent, and we could buy lunch at the tuck shop.

A tuck shop, or a canteen, is the place that sells food at school in Australia. Typically staffed by parent volunteers, it offers homemade sandwiches (and possibly soups and salads if the volunteers are particularly enthusiastic) and a standard array of unhealthy but delicious lunchtime staples. The tuck shop is where we would buy potato pies with crispy browned tops, sausage rolls with deliciously salty fillings, and meat pies with tiny single-serve squeeze packets of tomato sauce.

The tuck shop is also where we went when we were in possession of unexpected wealth: ten cents discovered in the pocket of a rarely-worn jacket, a fifty-cent piece found on the train platform, five whole dollars from a generous relative. (Even now, an Australian five-dollar note still seems more valuable than its American analog.) Thirty cents meant six sticks of plain liquorice, or two sticks of carob-coated liquorice, or a tiny bag of eucalyptus drops. For seventy-five cents you could get a Paddle Pop, chocolate or rainbow. (I preferred rainbow.) And for eighty cents – extravagance of extravagances – you could have a finger bun.

A finger bun is a rich yeasted bun, elongated in shape, studded with sultanas and topped with pink icing. (Wikipedia claims that they may also be topped with white icing, but that’s an aberration I’ve never witnessed. The icing is supposed to taste pink.) Finger buns are pleasantly soft and agreeably sticky, and they are much beloved by schoolchildren, if not so much by adults.

My Year 5 teacher was one of those rare adults who understood the delights of the finger bun. Miss Wettone was everyone’s favorite teacher, and I felt privileged on the occasional mornings when she’d stop me on the way out to morning recess, hand me a few coins, and ask me to pick up a finger bun for her from the tuck shop. Miss Wettone would eat half a finger bun for morning tea, and save the other half for later, but she had a tendency, or so she said, of losing track of the remaining half before it ever made it to her afternoon tea. The disappearance of her finger bun halves became a running joke. Somewhere in the accordion file folder that contains all the detritus of my schooling years – reports, test scores, certificates, ribbons, diplomas – there’s a card from Miss Wettone wishing me luck in Year 6, with a comment about baffled archaeologists in the future digging up a trove of fossilized half-finger buns.

I was once an Australian schoolchild at an all-girls’ school. I knew where home was, and I could tell you where I was from in a single sentence. I don’t have that certainty any longer, but as the saying goes, you can’t go home again–even if you do know where home is.

Instead, what I can do is make rich yeast dough, and put it to proof. I can shape it into logs, and glaze and bake them until they’re richly brown and shiny on top. I can mix up sugar icing to a perfect sticky consistency, and tint it to taste properly pink. I can eat finger buns for morning tea, and amuse myself with the thought of future archeologists who will dig up absolutely nothing, because I don’t eat my finger buns by halves.

Finger Buns (with Pink Icing, of Course)

This recipe can also be used to make iced scrolls - just shape the dough into spirals rather logs.

(Makes three buns. Best eaten fresh.)

Soak half a cup of raisins (approximately ninety grams, about three ounces) in hot water until softened. Drain; set aside. Leave one large egg and two tablespoons (sixty grams) of butter to come to room temperature.

In a mixing bowl, combine one-and-three-quarters of a cup of flour (two hundred and fifty grams, eight point eight ounces), a teaspoon of instant yeast (five grams), half a teaspoon salt (four grams), and two tablespoons sugar (thirty grams).

Add half a cup (one hundred and twenty mililitres) lightly warmed whole milk. Stick a hand in the mixture and stir until it forms clumps. Crack in the egg; knead until you have a sticky, lumpy dough.

Turn your dough out on a clean countertop. Ready a bench scraper. This dough isn't terribly wet, but it is very, very sticky, and every so often you'll need to stop kneading to gather together stray bits. Knead for ten minutes, or until the dough smooths out and starts to develop resistance.

Flatten out the dough, and place a tablespoon of softened butter on it. Fold it over, and knead so that the butter works its way into the dough. Repeat with the remaining tablespoon of butter.

Work the softened raisins into the dough. They will be reluctant to incorporate at first; keep going, and don't be afraid to push them in with a finger if they really refuse to stay put.

Grease your mixing bowl lightly with butter and place the dough back in it. Cover with plastic wrap; leave in a warm place until doubled in volume (about an hour or two.)

Grease an eight-by-eight inch (twenty by twenty centimeter) square cake tin.

Press down on the dough to deflate. Divide the dough into three pieces; shape each piece into a long, thin log just small enough to fit into the cake tin. Arrange the logs in the tin (there should be room in between.) Cover with wax paper; leave in a warm place until doubled in volume again (another hour or so.)

Preheat the oven to 375F. Crack and egg and beat until foamy; brush the buns with the beaten egg.

Bake for twenty-five to thirty minutes, or until the buns sound hollow when tapped with a finger. (If necessary, tent them with foil to keep them from browning too quickly.) Allow the buns to cool in the pan for five minutes or so, then turn out on a wire rack.

When the buns are merely warm, gently pull them apart.

To make the icing, start by putting a tablespoon of milk in a bowl, and stir in icing sugar, a heaped tablespoon at a time, until you have a thick, sticky mixture that falls off a spoon in a ribbon-like dribble. If it pours steadily, like pancake batter, it's too thin - add more sugar. If it's pasty, it's too thick - add milk, a drop at a time, until it thins out to the right consistency. When you have your icing at the right consistency, add a drop or two of vanilla extract, and use a toothpick to add just enough food coloring to tint the mixture pink.

Slide a sheet of wax paper underneath the wire rack. Spoon the icing over the buns; let the excess drip off completely before serving. For strict authenticity, sit out in the sunshine on a metal bench, and eat them out of waxed brown paper bags.

practical applications

2011-03-21T20:13:00.001-04:00

Chemistry was not my forte in high school.

I liked some aspects of it well enough. I liked setting up Bunsen burners and test tubes and Erlenmeyer flasks. I had fun with experiments that produced smoke and sparks. I could turn out a decent lab report, and I could explain why nitrogen triiodide behaves the way it does, even if my teachers balked at letting me create it. So long as the assignments involved writing up observations, I could handle them just fine.

Unfortunately, theory was not my strong suit. I couldn’t grasp the concept of a mole. My equations were a string of disasters because I never figured out the rules for significant figures. If the reading in our textbooks had any bearing on the problems that showed up on our final exams, the connection was beyond me. Thanks to the lab reports, I was never in any danger of failing, but I wasn't destined for advanced courses. In fact, I never took another science course after junior year of high school.

The practical application of chemistry is a different matter. A little knowledge of chemistry goes a long way in baking. Chemistry, after all, is a study of building blocks, and fiddling with a recipe is like playing Jenga - how many blocks can you remove without making the whole structure collapse?

Sugar, for example, provides not just sweetness but texture, which is why Splenda-based baking often comes out so disastrously. Eggs serve as either a scaffolding element or a binding agent, and they can be either essential or irrelevant. (You cannot make a soufflé without eggs - well, maybe you can if you’re Ferran Adria, but not us mere mortals - but you can omit the egg from your typical wheat pancake recipe without any drama whatsoever.) Fat adds moisture and shortens gluten chains, keeping cakes soft and pastry tender. An understanding of this basic theory lets me tweak recipes for dietary restrictions the way I like to handle them - by omitting the problem ingredients wherever possible.

Which brings me to the question of gluten-free brownies.

I know brownies are sometimes characterized as failed chocolate cake, but I tend to think of them as flourless chocolate cake to which someone added flour by mistake. After all, you can bake a chocolate cake using just chocolate, butter, and eggs. The sticky texture of a brownie comes more from sugar than anything else. Flour, therefore, isn't essential to the structure of a brownie. Ergo, gluten isn't essential to the structure of a brownie either.

Replacing wheat flour with a gluten-free option produces brownies that are a little more fragile, but very tender. A high proportion of dark chocolate allows for depth of flavor, and also serves to balance out the quantity of sugar required for optimal texture. Finally, a generous amount of butter keeps them rich and soft.

I still don't understand what a mole is, but I think I'll get by. As far as practical applications go, my working knowledge of chemistry is serving me just fine.

Dark, Fudgy Brownies

I like my chocolate desserts on the dark and bitter side. For a sweeter brownie, swap out half the unsweetened chocolate for bittersweet, and toss in a quarter-cup of milk chocolate chips.

(Adapted from Dorie Greenspan's "Rick Katz's Brownies For Julia." Makes eight small brownies.)

Preheat oven to 350F. Ready a three-and-a-half by five inch loaf tin.

In a bowl set over simmering water, melt together half a stick (two ounces) unsalted butter and two ounces unsweetened chocolate. Stir in four tablespoons of white sugar, half a teaspoon salt, a half-teaspoon of vanilla, and teaspoon of brandy. (Optional extra: half a teaspoon espresso powder or microground instant coffee, which gives the brownies a deeper flavor.)

In another bowl, beat together one egg with two tablespoons of sugar until thick and smooth. Fold a few tablespoons of this egg mixture into the chocolate mixture. Beat the remaining egg mixture until light and foamy, then fold it into the chocolate mixture.

Gently fold in four tablespoons of buckwheat flour. Spoon the batter into the tin, and give it a shake to smooth out the top.

Bake for sixteen to nineteen minutes, or until the brownies look dry on top but are just barely set in the middle. Place the tin on a wire rack to cool. When cool, cut the brownies into squares. They’re soft and fragile, so they’re best served out of the tin.

Note: This recipe can be quadrupled to make an eight-by-eight inch pan of brownies. Up the baking time to twenty-five minutes or so (until the top looks dry), and when making the batter, add one third of the sugar to the chocolate mixture, beat one-third of the sugar with two eggs until smooth, and beat the remaining one-third of the sugar with two eggs until foamy.

due ciabatte

2011-03-14T20:09:00.002-04:00

I didn't learn to speak Italian in a classroom.

I was definitely taught Italian in a classroom, sitting through intensive sessions filled with verb conjugations and vocab lists and pop quizzes aplenty. Grammatically, Italian doesn’t look all that different to French, and it shares a lot of cognates, so reading and writing came easily. Movies and music helped with listening comprehension, but when it came to speaking Italian, as opposed to merely stringing words together in an approximation of the instructor’s speech, I didn’t learn until I went abroad to Rome.

Italian is a language of cadences. Unlike French, in which you only pronounce about half the consonants in each written word, and the accents are notoriously, unabashedly irregular, Italian is phonetic, with stressed syllables falling in rhythmic patterns. The only way to learn that cadence is to listen and mimic, and I navigated the unfamiliar terrain in the same way that I navigate any unfamiliar city: I followed my stomach.

Each morning, I'd stop by the bar down the street from our program housing for coffee and a croissant: (un) cappuccino e un cornetto, learning to articulate the "r" without pushing it into a trill. A walk down the street and left at the intersection would bring me to the Trionfale Market: quattro fichi neri from Nunzia, the lady at the fruit stand, learning that "fichi" is pronounced "fi-gi." From Massimo, the butcher who cut paper-thin slices of prosciutto by hand and gave me bits of the skin (for flavoring bean soup) for free, un etto di prosciutto e qualche pezze di pelle, learning to form my mouth around all the doubled consonants. A little more knowledge with each visit to the market, consumed in every mouthful.

One windy autumn day after morning classes, I passed through the market with a shopping list on my mind. Fruit and cheese for lunch, zucchini and peppers to roast for sandwiches, and maybe a head of puntarelle to make salad dressed with anchovies, the way I'd seen it on so many restaurant menus in the city. I made it as far as buying a perfectly ripe pear and a thin wedge of Gorgonzola before remembering that I'd run out of bread and needed to make an extra stop at one of the baker's stalls.

I liked to buy my bread from a bakery in Trastevere (completely impractical in terms of geography, but utterly delicious), so I didn't have a favorite baker's stall at the market. Instead, I chose one that seemed to be doing a particularly brisk trade, joined the queue, and placed my order.

“Due ciabatte, per favore.”

The sharp-eyed woman at the baker’s stall frowned at me. Held up one of the loaves in question, and cocked her head questioningly.

“Si. Due ciabatte. Per favore.” I pronounced it as though it were French: “cha-batt,” two syllables with equal emphasis.

The woman shook her head. “Una ciabatta.” Three syllables, with a stress on the second syllable and a brief pause for the doubled t. "Due ciabatte." Three syllables again, and a crisp enunciation of the “e” on the end. Her stern expression rivaled that of my old-fashioned French teachers in its severity.

I knew what was expected of me. I took a quick breath and enunciated carefully: “Due ciabatte, per favore.” Uncertain, I ventured a smile.

She nodded - a very slight nod, but a nod all the same - before handing me my purchases in a paper sack and calling for the next person in line.

Feeling a little as though I'd just been through a particularly unexpected pop quiz, I hoofed it right back to my apartment for lunch. The vegetables would have to wait. I'd called the ciabatte by their name, and now they (along with the pear, and the Gorgonzola) were definitely calling mine.

Ciabatta

A lean dough cooked at high heat, ciabatta is a close cousin of focaccia. The difference is that ciabatta is even wetter – eighty-five percent hydration or higher – and shaped into long, flat loaves, perfect for splitting horizontally and filling with sandwich fixings. I like this as a base for one of my favorite sandwiches ever: prosciutto and mozzarella with a mile-high stack of garlicky roasted zucchini, peppers, and eggplant, drizzled all over with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

Bread is finicky, so I've given measurements in volume, imperial weights, and metric weights. For best results, go with the metric.

(A hand-mixed adaptation of Jason Molina’s Quick Cocodrillo Ciabatta Bread. Makes two long loaves, or three sandwich loaves.)

In a large mixing bowl, mix together one-and-three-quarter cups (eight point eight ounces, two hundred and fifty grams) all-purpose flour, one teaspoon (five grams) yeast, and half a teaspoon (four grams) salt. Pour in one cup (eight fluid ounces, two hundred and thirty-eight mililitres) water.

Stick a hand in the mixture and start stirring. At first, it’ll be like stirring pancake batter – no body whatsoever. Keep going. It will gradually develop into something that looks like dough.

Scrape the dough out onto a clean countertop. Get out a bench scraper – you’re going to need it.

The easiest way to begin kneading is to imitate an electric mixer: stick your hand in the middle of the mess and move it in circles. Once the dough develops more resistance, you can knead it by smearing it out on the countertop and gathering it back into a blob.

The dough is adequately kneaded when you can lift it off the countertop and it pulls away more or less cleanly. (If it moves like taffy and doesn’t want to come away, keep kneading.) When it reaches that point, oil it well with olive oil, and place it back in the bowl. Cover with plastic wrap. Leave in a warm place until it triples in volume. (Two to three hours.)

Liberally dust your countertop with flour. Take the dough from its bowl, and working as gently as possible, turn it out on the countertop. Cut it into two or three pieces, and shape the pieces into rectangles. Oil each piece, and dust liberally with flour. Leave to proof until light and puffy. (Fifty to sixty minutes.)

While your loaves are proofing, crank up your oven to 500F. Cover a baking tray with parchment paper and dust liberally with flour.

To transfer the loaves, carefully gather each loaf off the counter (use the bench scraper to help.) Don’t worry if they stick. Flip them onto the baking tray. They might look a little messy; again, don’t worry about it. Dust with more flour.

Bake for fifteen minutes or so, or until the loaves are a rich golden brown. Transfer to a cooling rack. Allow to cool before slicing.

lamb meatballs, in triptych

2011-03-08T08:52:00.003-05:00

i. subject

During my final semester of law school, towards the beginning of spring, I visit Lucille in New York. It is her turn to choose where we go out to eat, and we end up at Boqueria for tapas.

We begin with glasses of pale, minerally cava and a dish of mixed olives – tiny brown olives, shrivelled black olives, and my favorites, the big fat green olives. We eat jamon serrano and smoked blood sausage, and lamb skewers seasoned with lemon and garlic and salsa verde. Our forks make short work of a dish of squid a la plancha, a satisfyingly salty tangle of tender squid, fried radishes, and radicchio, and a platter of asparagus salad, sweetly charred spears and arugula leaves scattered with bits of bacon and flakes of aged mahon cheese, punctuated by two perfect halves of soft-boiled egg.

We dab salt cod fritters with lemon aioli, breaking through their crisp exteriors to reach interiors as smooth and creamy as pommes puree, and tear pieces of chewy, crusty bread to sop up the tomato sauce from a dish of lamb meatballs draped in soft fresh sheep’s milk cheese. Finally, we eat churros dipped in thick, bitter chocolate, licking cinnamon sugar from our fingers.

The salt cod fritters are spectacular, and the churros are just the way I like fried dough, but it is the meatballs I file away for future reference, warm and savory in their bright tomato sauce.

ii. gesso

The summer I study for the bar exam is also the summer I cater my first wedding. I plan during borrowed time, writing out recipes in the margins of my notes and scribbling ingredient lists on the backs of discarded practice essays. I compose emails discussing shopping and equipment and logistics as I listen with half an ear to lectures over streaming video. I think about the menu when the steady thrum of anxiety threatens to fill my head, reviewing and refining until I find some measure of calm.

White cake filled with mixed berries and lemon curd, frosted with mascarpone cream. Roasted mixed vegetables: red and yellow bell peppers, zucchini and eggplant. Wheatberry salad with goat’s cheese and dried cranberries. Greek salad, insalata caprese. Spiced couscous with orange zest and golden beets. Brook trout with herbed brown butter. Chicken phyllo triangles, sautéed Swiss chard. Lamb meatballs in tomato sauce bright with mint and basil, topped with creamy ricotta. A plan, a promise. A prayer.

iii. tempera

Fifteen pounds of ground lamb. Fifteen pounds of crushed tomatoes. Four heads of garlic, one-and-a-half dozen eggs. Eight pounds of onions, and a bundle of fresh rosemary, mint, and basil as thick as my wrist. There's a rapid tattoo of blade against board as herbs are blitzed into chiffonade and onions become fine, translucent dice. Never have I been so grateful to have an assistant with the knife skills I lack.

Bowls of raw lamb and onion, spiced and salted. Meatballs resting on wax paper, sauce simmering on the stove. Meatballs browned in the pan, moistened with tomato and braised in the oven. The air grows thick with the scent of lamb fat and spice, spilling out of the kitchen into the summer night.

This work, complete. All that remains is the unveiling, the eating.

(Not my photo. I wasn't going anywhere near a camera that day.)

Savory Lamb Meatballs in Herbed Tomato Sauce

These work as either part of a spread, or as a main course. Serve with polenta or rice for a gluten-free dish, or crusty bread if not.

(Makes twelve to sixteen meatballs. May be frozen.)

This is a chopping-intensive recipe. Ready your chopping board and favorite knife, a small mixing bowl and a big mixing bowl.

Grab a small bunch of fresh mint and a small bunch of fresh basil. Pick off the leaves. Place the leaves on your cutting board, and blitz them into fine shreds. Put these in the small mixing bowl.

Mince four cloves of garlic. Heat a little olive oil in a shallow, heavy-bottomed pan with lid. Add the garlic. Cook until the garlic starts to smell fragrant, then add two tablespoons of the chopped basil and mint. Give everything a stir, then pour in a sixteen-ounce can of crushed tomatoes. Add water. Cook the mixture at a low simmer, stirring occasionally.

While the sauce simmers, make the meatballs. Start by prepping your workspace: cover a few baking sheets with wax paper, and a few plates with paper towels.

Grab the big mixing bowl and put a pound of ground lamb in it.

Take a small yellow onion and mince it very finely. Take your time; you’re going for something that’s almost onion mush. Place the minced onion in the bowl.

Take a sprig or two of fresh rosemary, strip off the leaves, and mince them, same as the onion. Measure out one tablespoon; add it to the onions.

Add half a teaspoon ground coriander, half a teaspoon ground cumin, and half a teaspoon salt. Crack in one egg.

Stick your hand into the bowl and start turning the mixture. Stop when your onions and meat are well-combined, and a handful holds together when you squeeze it.

Form the lamb mixture into golfball-size balls, setting them on the wax paper as you go.

Place a heavy-bottomed frying pan over medium heat. Brown the meatballs in the pan without adding oil – ground lamb, like sausage, will cook just fine in its own fat.

Drain the browned meatballs on paper towels, then slide them gently into the tomato sauce. Put the lid on the pan. Cook at a gentle simmer for an hour, stirring occasionally to make sure the sauce doesn’t burn on the bottom. (Add a little water if it seems to be getting too thick.)

When the cooking time is up, spoon the meatballs and sauce into a serving dish and sprinkle with extra chopped basil and mint. Serve with fresh ricotta for dolloping on top.

Note: This recipe multiplies well, and if you’re making it in big quantities, the meatballs can be cooked in covered pans in the oven at 350F for an hour.

song of my little carboholic heart

2011-03-02T10:05:00.002-05:00

I pay close attention to the bread in restaurants.

Is it good bread, worth eating for its own sake? Or is it just something to keep diners occupied before the food shows up? Does it come with interesting accompaniments? Does it go well with the food? Is it better than the food? The bread may not make or break a restaurant, but a restaurant with the right answers can easily earn a place in my little carboholic heart.

I've been to a restaurant in Boston's North End where the food was wildly hit-or-miss, but the foccacia was to die for. At Prune in New York's East Village, they had pappadams better than the ones I've eaten in Indian restaurants. I was won over by the crusty rolls with little crocks of pork rillettes and butter served at French restaurant of the hotel I interned in, and I didn’t waver in my enthusiasm - even after I was assigned to fill the crocks.

The restaurant bread that stands out most clearly in my memory, however, is that of The Lobby at The Regent in Sydney. While the food at The Lobby was decent enough, there must have been someone, either in management or in the kitchen, with a love of bread like mine.

Only a carboholic after my own heart could have dreamed up their enormous breadbaskets with lavish arrangements of assorted breads, embellished with sprays of grissini and flourishes of crisp homemade crackers. I could have made a meal out of one of those breadbaskets alone, and were it my last meal, I would have died happy.

The sheer variety would have been memorable enough, but the selections had their own distinguishing features. Nestled between neat slices of crusty white, whole wheat, and poppyseed were cornbread muffins (the first I ever tasted), delicate little caraway rolls, and, most unusually, brioche buns scented with dill.

Tender and fragrant, with a light, buttery crumb, the brioche was always the first item to disappear from the breadbasket. On the rare occasions when it didn’t vanish completely, we’d take the leftovers to go. Lightly warmed, they became a wonderful breakfast, a welcome change from our usual toast and margarine.

Now that the Regent has become the Four Seasons Sydney, and the The Lobby is no more, those breadbaskets are only the stuff of memory. The brioche, however, was too good to forget, and so I've combined rich buttery dough with finely chopped fresh dill to make my own.

The results make for a superb breakfast or brunch, whether served alongside smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, split and toasted as a base for eggs norvegienne, or simply presented warm and unadorned. They're every bit as wonderful as the ones I remember. It makes my little carboholic heart sing.

Dill Brioche

The Lobby remains the only restaurant I’ve been to where the breadbasket included brioche, and the only place I’ve ever seen brioche with dill. It’s a wonderful addition, though. Somehow, the aroma makes the buttery quality of a brioche even more intense. I think the original used dried dill rather than fresh, and if that's your preference, cut back on the quantity by a tablespoon.

I've provided measurements by volume, and weights in metric and imperial, but for best results, use the metric measurements.

(Owes some inspiration to this brioche recipe by Dorie Greenspan. Makes eight dinner-roll-size buns, which can be frozen.)

This dough needs to rest overnight, so begin the recipe at least a day before you want to eat the results. It's easiest to work with in a cold (or at least cool) room, so don't start the dough if you have the heating or the oven on.

First, a spot of prep: leave two large eggs and three-quarters of a stick of unsalted butter (one hundred and seventy grams, six ounces) out of the fridge to warm up. The butter needs to be soft, and the eggs shouldn't be cold. If you, like me, keep your flour in the freezer, let that lose its chill too. Clear off and wipe down a section of your countertop.

Finely chop a small bunch of fresh dill. Measure out three or four tablespoons (depending on how strongly you'd like your bread flavored); set aside in a bowl.

In a mixing bowl, combine one-and-three-quarters of a cup of flour (two hundred and fifty grams, eight point eight ounces), one teaspoon (five grams) instant active yeast, half a teaspoon (four grams) salt, and a quarter-cup (sixty mililitres) warm milk. Stick a hand in the bowl, and stir the mixture until it forms dry, shaggy clumps.

Crack in one egg, and work it into the mixture. It will be sticky and difficult to work with; that's normal. Crack in the second egg, and work it into the mixture. You should have a sticky, lumpy dough.

Sprinkle the dough with four teaspoons (twenty grams) of white sugar - as though it were flour - and work it in. When no loose sugar remains in the bowl, turn the dough out on your countertop. Knead for six to seven minutes, or until the dough is smooth and no longer lumpy.

Time to add butter. Grab the butter, and cut it into six equal pieces. Flatten the dough out slightly with your palm. Place one tablespoon of butter in the center of the dough, and fold the dough over so that the butter is trapped inside. Start kneading. The goal is to get the butter to work into the dough from the inside out. Once the butter has been fully absorbed, repeat the process with another tablespoon of butter.

Keep going until you run out of butter. The dough will become softer and silkier; when all the butter has been incorporated, it will have an oily sheen, but shouldn't be too greasy. Knead for another ten minutes or so, or until the dough develops resistance and doesn't stick to your palms when you pull them away. (If you gather the entire ball of dough and pull, and it comes off the counter cleanly, it's good to go. If it sticks, and pulls like taffy, keep kneading.)

When the dough has achieved the right consistency, sprinkle the fresh chopped dill over, and knead until it's evenly distributed.

Place the dough back in your mixing bowl. Cover with plastic wrap, and leave in a warm place to rise for an hour.

After the dough has risen, press down upon it gently to deflate. Cover it over again with plastic wrap, and place it in the fridge to chill overnight. (Check back on it after the first hour - if it's started rising again, deflate it.)

The next morning, remove the dough from the fridge and press down upon on it gently to deflate. Butter a five-by-nine inch loaf tin. Divide the dough into eight equal pieces and shape them into small brioches to fit the tin, leaving a little space between each brioche.

Cover the tin with wax paper, and leave in a warm place to rise for fifty minutes, or until the dough is light and nearly doubled in volume.

Preheat the oven to 400F. Crack one egg and beat until frothy. Brush the beaten egg all over the tops of the brioches.

Place the tin in the oven. Bake for twenty minutes. If necessary, tent the brioches with tinfoil to keep them from browning too much on top. When baked, remove the tin from the oven. Let the brioches cool in the tin for ten minutes, then transfer to a cooling rack. Serve warm.

finally, the story of the mad italian chef

2011-02-25T11:30:00.005-05:00

I have never ordered soufflé in a restaurant.

Most restaurants that do soufflés are in the price range that puts them in the “dinner out with family on special occasions” category. Even when I can persuade my mother of the merits of dessert, there's no way that my father would ever agree to wait the required thirty minutes. Soufflés are usually made to serve two, so even when I splurge on dinner out alone, it’s too much dessert to eat by myself. Finally, it does seem a bit silly to pay for something I can whip up pretty easily at home.

But I’ve eaten soufflé in a restaurant – as long as a restaurant kitchen counts.

I spent a summer as a stagiaire in the pastry kitchen and garde-manger of a big hotel in Hong Kong. The summer after that, I had a rotation in the hotel’s Italian restaurant.

The dessert menu at the Italian restaurant was notable for its white chocolate soufflé, an enormous, airy golden cloud that came with four different sauces. Not a choice of different sauces, but a silver salver with four gleaming silver sauceboats: chocolate, vanilla creme anglaise, raspberry, and orange, presented for the diner to dress the soufflé to taste.

I watched waiters carry soufflés out to the dining room. Sometimes I was tasked with filling the sauceboats. Then I met the Mad Italian Chef.

The Mad Italian Chef had been brought in to make changes to the food after the hotel decided to renovate the Italian restaurant. While the managers and bigwigs met with architects and discussed color schemes, draperies, and furniture, the Mad Italian Chef was on a mission to overhaul the menu. He embarked on a recipe-development spree almost immediately upon his arrival.

Two things became rapidly evident: one, he needed an assistant he could send on scavenger hunts in the other hotel kitchens for ingredients, and two, he needed an editor to proofread his menu proposals. Given that my sole fixed job duty consisted of scraping enough asparagus for each day’s lunch and dinner service, both assignments fell to me.

The Mad Italian Chef was glad enough to have a kitchen minion to send on quests for baking soda or maple syrup, and grateful that he could leave the task of correcting his typos to someone else, but he kept our interactions polite and perfunctory. This wasn't a surprise. Chefs don’t usually devote much time or attention to stagiaires unless they screw up.

During the course of one particularly mad ingredient goose chase, however, it came out that I’d spent a semester abroad in Rome. Suddenly, I had the Mad Italian Chef’s attention. His spoken English wasn’t much better than that of his Cantonese sous-chefs, and he was delighted to have a kitchen minion he could yell at in his native tongue.

So, in addition to scraping asparagus, chasing down ingredients, and correcting typos in menu proposals, I spent the summer as a general assistant to the Mad Italian Chef. I lent a hand during recipe testing, took notes during menu planning, and kept track of the toque he had a habit of misplacing.

The Mad Italian Chef had a temper, but he also had a merry impulsive streak. He took a shine to a dinner guest, and I watched him whip up an off-the-menu concoction with vin santo zabaglione and fresh berries as a complimentary dessert. He put bellinis on the menu for a bigwig's dinner party and roped everyone into peeling white peaches for puree. By the time he decided on the exact proportions of puree to liqueur to prosecco, the multiple rounds of taste-testing had made the entire kitchen crew tipsy.

During one dinner service on a slow night, he disappeared to the pastry station and when he reappeared some time later, he had the dessert chef in tow. Between them, they carried two white chocolate soufflés and a salver of sauceboats.

The dessert chef set these soufflés in all their airy, golden glory on the counter. The Mad Italian Chef set down the salver. Producing two spoons from his jacket pocket, he pushed one of the soufflés towards me and told me to dig in before it deflated.

It was delicious, and the sheer unexpected delight of eating a soufflé too big for me to finish – right in the middle of dinner service (!) – carried me all the way through the next day’s wild goose chase.

No surprise, then, that I wanted to come up with a white chocolate soufflé of my own. I know the dessert chef at the Italian restaurant used a roux base for his soufflé, but I like the simplicity of eggs, sugar, and chocolate. My version is a little on the eggy side, but the texture is light and creamy, and the white chocolate flavor really shines through.

I think it's pretty impressive, even without the sauceboats.

White Chocolate Soufflé

(Recipe not for one. Soufflés don’t keep.)

Prep first. Get out two big bowls and one big balloon whisk or electric mixer. Wash everything in hot soapy water and dry thoroughly.

Preheat the oven to 375F. Butter and sugar a soufflé dish.

Separate eight eggs. Put four of the yolks in one bowl; put all eight whites in the other. (Leftover yolks can be used for pasta or mayonnaise.)

Add two tablespoons of sugar to the bowl of egg yolks. Set the bowl over a saucepan of simmering water, or transfer the mixture to a heavy-bottomed saucepan set over very low heat. Whisk steadily until the mixture thickens to custard. Stop when the whisk starts to leave trails in the mixture.

Working quickly, stir in six ounces of finely chopped white chocolate, an ounce or two at a time, until the mixture is thick and almost taffy-like in stickiness.

Add two tablespoons of sugar to the bowl of egg whites and beat until stiff. (You should be able to tilt the bowl without the egg whites sliding.)

Gently fold a little of the egg white into the mixture to lighten it, then fold in half the remaining mixture, and then the rest. Spoon the mixture into the soufflé dish.

Bake for forty to forty-five minutes, or until the soufflé is light and risen, but still wobbly in the middle. Carve out portions with a big spoon. Serve immediately. Raspberry coulis is a nice accompaniment.

getting my hands sticky

2011-02-19T00:05:00.003-05:00

I have no interest in no-knead bread.

Don't get me wrong. I love the counterintuitive logic of no-knead bread. As creative thinking in food chemistry goes, it's brilliant, and I can't deny that anything that gets people baking their own bread instead of buying spongy plastic-wrapped stuff at the supermarket is a Good Thing.

As long as I'm the one handling yeast and flour, though, the bread will be kneaded. Call me a masochist, but it just doesn't feel like baking bread if I can't get my hands sticky.

And I do mean sticky. Maybe I didn't play with enough paste and Play-Doh as a child, but for whatever reason, I find wet, recalcitrant doughs more interesting than their well-behaved cousins.

The "wetness" of a dough is its hydration - that is, its flour-to-water ratio by weight. A dough with half as much water as flour is at fifty percent hydration; a dough with equal parts water and flour would be at one hundred percent hydration. The higher the hydration, the stickier the dough.

At eighty percent hydration by weight, focaccia is one of the wettest bread doughs around. Furthermore, focaccia is made with a lean dough – just flour, water, yeast and salt – meaning that it lacks add-ins like fat or eggs, which make dough easier to handle. (Doughs with such extras are known as rich doughs. Challah is made with a rich dough, as is brioche.) It's probably no surprise that many recipes for focaccia begin with references to heavy-duty stand mixers.

Focaccia is a very old bread, however, and the dough has a long history of being worked by hand. The process requires patience, but there's a pleasure in feeling the dough develop as you knead, in learning to gauge when it's ready by touch. The effort shows in the results, too. Maybe I am a masochist, but I think bread just tastes better when you've gotten your hands all sticky.

Rosemary Focaccia

I tend to bake by volume, but bread is finicky. I've offered measurements by volume, and in metric and imperial weights, but for best results, use the metric weights.

(Makes one small loaf – enough for two large or three smallish sandwiches.)

Before you begin, secure your hair and roll up your sleeves. Turn off your phone or set it to voicemail. Scratch any itches that need scratching. Your hands will be coated in sticky, goopy dough for the better part of the next half hour, and you're not going to be a happy camper if you have to stop and scrub your hands midway through the process to deal with something else.

Clear off your countertop and wipe it down well. Measure out a teaspoon of olive oil into a small bowl; set aside.

In a mixing bowl, stir together one-and-three-quarter-cups (two-hundred and fifty grams, eight point eight ounces) all-purpose flour, one teaspoon (five grams) instant yeast, and half a teaspoon (four grams) salt.

Pour in a little over three-quarters of a cup (two hundred mililitres) of lukewarm water. Stick a hand in the bowl and stir until you have sticky, lumpy dough.

Turn the dough out on your countertop. Kneading time for this dough is about fifteen minutes, possibly longer. Take breaks if you need them.

This is not an easy dough to knead. This dough will start out goopy, with a taffy-like sticky quality.

For the first ten minutes, you won't be kneading so much as smearing the dough all over the countertop and scraping it back together. It will stick to your fingers and palms like crazy. This is all normal.

After ten minutes, the dough will probably start to feel a little less goopy and a little more elastic. It won't gum between your fingers quite so badly. Keep going.

At fifteen minutes, the dough should be less of a mess on the countertop and more of a cohesive blob. As you knead, it should pull away from the countertop. Keep going.

Stop when you can pull your palms away from the dough without it sticking. Gather the dough into a rough ball, and coat it with the teaspoon of olive oil you measured out earlier.

Place the dough back in the bowl. Go scrub your hands, and then cover the bowl with clingwrap. Leave the dough until it doubles in size. (If you leave it in a warm place, this will take about an hour. If you leave it in a cooler place, it can take anywhere between two and three hours.)

Cover a baking tray with a sheet of parchment paper. Gently ease your dough out of the bowl and place it on the baking tray. Shape it into a rough rectangle, about 7 x10 inches; tuck any stray bits underneath to keep the loaf neat. Measure out another teaspoon of olive oil, and smear it all over the dough. Leave uncovered for an hour to an hour and a half.

Preheat your oven – turn it up as far as it will go. (Mine tops out at around 500F.)

Use your fingertips to press dimples in the top of your focaccia. Pour over another teaspoon or two of olive oil. (The more oil you use, the chewier your crust will be.) Scatter with fresh rosemary needles and sprinkle with sea salt.

Turn the oven down to 450F. Transfer the baking tray to the oven. Keep a close eye on the focaccia - it's done when it turns a rich, golden brown all over, which will take somewhere between fourteen and seventeen minutes.

Remove the baking tray from the oven. Transfer the bread to a cooling rack. Allow to cool fully before slicing.

cooking is just a socially acceptable excuse to play with boiling oil

2011-02-15T19:28:00.002-05:00

I had a fairly concise to-do list for my visit to Boston.

Drop by a proper kitchen supply store and pick up a bench scraper. Eat cheese from Formaggio Kitchen. Make another attempt at the white chocolate souffle recipe that I've never quite managed to get right.

My to-do list didn't say anything about boiling oil.

Then again, my to-do list didn't take into account a full pint of goosefat, a convenient surfeit of potatoes and onions, and the encouragement of culinary partners-in-crime.

Blame Matt for the first item. He made cassoulet from scratch - the kind that calls for roasting an entire goose - and ended up with an enormous quantity of rendered fat. Blame Isobel for the second - the offerings from her winter CSA had started to pile up, and she had the beginnings of a root cellar in her pantry. Blame a whole host of friends for the third.

And then I suppose I should take a share of the blame myself. After all, I did utter the words "goosefat French fries."

It was only an idle thought. After all, French fries are fussy enough and messy enough to require deliberation and preparation. There should be carefully-selected potatoes and a thermometer to check the temperature of the oil. The planning process shouldn't go from "Goosefat - potatoes and onions - leftover herbs - French fries!" to "Where's the peeler? And get me the biggest, sturdiest pot we've got!" in the space of a minute.

Except when it does. In fact, the whole process didn't take more than thirty minutes from the first peeled potato to the first batch of fries - with remarkably tasty results.

(Thanks to Alex for the photos.)

Herb-and-Onion Goosefat French Fries: A Picture Guide

Rinse, peel, and cut potatoes for a heap of fries, and put them through two changes of cold water.

Slice onions into thin curls.

Sweep the kitchen for the biggest, most solid pot available. Set it on a burner. Heat up the goosefat. Add rosemary and thyme to perfume the oil. Drain the potatoes. When the oil is bubbling, start frying.

Watch with greedy anticipation as the fries color. Wait with slotted spoon in hand to fish them out.

Drain the fries when they turn deep golden brown.

Salt generously, and enjoy the heck out of them while they're hot!

Note: While this is a fun party trick, do not attempt it while intoxicated, and don't let anyone else try it either. Friends don't let friends fry drunk.

"già la mensa è preparata..."

2011-02-12T12:41:00.000-05:00

It had been a beautiful party, though no-one would remember that. White asparagus in hollandaise, a fish course of turbot with crispy sweet onions, tiny chops, only three or four bites apiece, in a cranberry demiglaze.

Every element was planned: crystal saltcellars, lemon mousse, American bourbon. There was no dancing, no band. The only music would be after dinner.

The fifty-third birthday celebration of Katsumi Hosokawa, chairman of Nansei, a Japanese electronics company, takes place at the Vice-President's estate in an unnamed South American country eager to woo foreign investors. Hosokawa, truth be told, is largely indifferent to the prospect of his fifty-third birthday, and has no plans for investments in countries not known for their political stability. He is, however, a fervrent lover of opera, and he has been enticed to attend the celebration by the promise of a performance by Roxane Coss, the famous American lyric soprano.

Dinner proceeds flawlessly, and Roxane's performance is everything the audience could hope for. Then the evening is rudely interrupted by a group of revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the government. They have come to kidnap the President, but the President is not in attendance - he changed his mind at the last minute, because he didn't wish to miss another episode of his favorite soap opera.

Flustered, the revolutionaries keep the entire assembly hostage while they draw up fresh plans. After deliberation, they decide to release all but the wealthiest and most influential attendees. Their demand is simple: all the hostages will go free if the President comes to take their place. Without the President, however, they will hold the hostages indefinitely.

Though the premise might sound like that of a plane flight novel, Ann Patchett's Bel Canto is no thriller. Instead, what unfolds is a graceful, operatic tale, a tragicomic story of language, music and the community that slowly develops as the hostages and revolutionaries learn to live together. It's the story I've chosen for the Winter 2011 edition of Novel Food.

Though food is not a central theme of the story, it plays a crucial role in setting the stage. The refinement of the menu at the birthday celebration comes in sharp contrast to the rough fare brought to the hostages by a Red Cross mediator the next day. As the hostage crisis becomes more of a hostage monotony, the outside world loses interest, and the food delivered to the Vice-President's estate reflects the change in attitude.

Prepared sandwiches and casseroles give way to sandwich fixings, which are then passed up in favor of boxes of vegetables and raw chickens - "pink and cold, their stomachs greasing the counter" - much to the consternation of the Vice President-turned-butler-and-housekeeper. By the time Simon Thibault, the French diplomat, takes the role of directing meal preparation, the situation has evolved into something entirely outside the realm of a classic hostage-captor setup.

Though I dearly love the scene with the Vice President, as he bewilderedly wonders how raw chicken might be transformed into dinner and tries to find someone - anyone - among the hostages (or the revolutionaries) who can cook, it was ultimately the first meal after the dinner party that drew my interest:

Roxane, Hosokawa, and Hosokawa's interpreter Gen are sitting together when the meal is distributed. The food itself doesn't sound particularly appetizing: "sandwiches and cans of soda, wrapped slices of dark cake and bottled water." The sandwiches are made of "heavy slabs of bread," with "a piece of meat, orangish-red with sauce or watery peppers," and they leave pools of orange oil on their paper wrappings.

The hostages are too hungry to care. Roxane, who ruefully admits to being particular about her food, eats as though she were starving. Gen briefly ponders the exact nature of the meat in the sandwiches, and then decides that he is hungry enough for the answer to be irrelevant.

Unfortunately for Gen, he is not only an interpreter, but an excellent interpreter, versed in many languages, and as the sole person present who can communicate with all the hostages, the revolutionaries find him invaluable. He's interrupted mid-sandwich when his assistance is required.

"Forgive me," he said in English and Japanese, wrapping up what was left of his meal and putting it discreetly beneath a chair in hopes it would still be there when he returned. He had especially wanted the cake.

Even as he assists, interpreting Spanish questions and instructions into French German, Greek and Portuguese, Gen's mind is elsewhere. When General Benjamin, one of the revolutionary leaders, asks him where he learned so many languages, he has no desire to explain. His thoughts are with the sandwich and cake left beneath his chair.

Poor Gen. The story (rather frustratingly) doesn't say if he ever did get his cake after the generals were through with their demands, and so I decided I'd have to bake one to make up for the possible deficiency.

"Wrapped slices of dark cake," isn't much detail to go on. A search of South American desserts didn't turn up any cakes fitting that description, and while it could have been something prosaic like chocolate cake or gingerbread, I wanted something a bit more fitting for the setting and the mood.

Pastel tres leches is a cake popular throughout Latin America, a sponge cake soaked in a mixture of sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, and cream. The novel references many operas, however, including Bizet's Carmen, which is set in Spain. I decided to model a cake on pastel tres leches, but lift a little inspiration from Spanish desserts.

This cake uses a batter inspired by magdalenas (the Spanish equivalent of the French madeleine), flavored with orange zest. The cake is brushed all over with plain evaporated milk,and then topped with a glaze made with dulce de leche, a soft caramel made using sweetened condensed milk, popular throughout South America.

The end result is soft and moist, gently perfumed with orange, and agreeably sticky. It's probably too messy to be wrapped in slices as part of a hostage's box lunch, but it could be delivered whole, and sliced to serve on arrival.

Gen, I think, would deserve seconds. Interpreting is difficult work.

Orange-Scented Dulce de Leche Cake

(Makes one eight-inch cake, which will serve somewhere around eight to ten hostages and revolutionaries.)

Start with the glaze. If you have ready-made dulce de leche on hand, skip the next few paragraphs. If not, read on.

A common way of making dulce de leche is to submerge an unopened can in a big pot of water and heat it for several hours until the contents caramelize. It can also be made in the oven. For relatively small quantities, however, it can also be done in the microwave.

To make the dulce de leche glaze using a microwave, pour six tablespoons of sweetened condensed milk into a microwave-safe dish. Cover the dish. Cook on low heat in one-minute intervals, stirring after every interval, for five minutes. Cook on low heat in thirty-second intervals, stirring after every interval, for another five minutes. Continue to cook the mixture in thirty-second intervals, stirring after every interval, until it is golden brown in color.

Combine the dulce de leche (about four tablespoons) with half a cup of evaporated milk, and whisk until the mixture is smooth and free of lumps. (If necessary, pop it back in the microwave for a minute or two.) It will be thick, but pourable.

For the cake, start by preheating the oven to 350F. Butter and flour an eight-inch cake tin.

In a small mixing bowl, sift together one cup (five ounces) pastry flour and one teaspoon baking powder. Set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, cream together half a stick (two ounces) butter with four tablespoons of white sugar, two packed tablespoons of brown sugar, and a half-teaspoon of salt.

Grate the zest from one small navel orange, and measure out one teaspoon into the bowl. (Leftover zest can be used to garnish the finished cake.)

Separate two eggs; place the whites in another mixing bowl, and add the yolks to the butter and sugar. Beat the mixture until it becomes smooth and creamy.

Beat the egg whites until they reach stiff peaks. Measure out a half-cup of milk.

Fold a third of the flour into the butter mixture; stir in a third of the milk, then fold in a third of the egg whites. Fold in another third of the flour, stir in another third of the milk, then fold in another third of the egg whites. Repeat again with the remaining flour, milk, and egg whites.

Spoon the batter into the prepared tin; give the top a shake to smooth out the mixture. Bake for twenty-two to twenty-five minutes, or until a toothpick or knife stuck in the center comes out clean.

Remove the cake from the oven. Cool in its tin for ten minutes, then turn the cake out on a baking sheet or light cutting board. Pierce its underside all over with a skewer or small knife, then brush with four tablespoons of plain evaporated milk. It should absorb fairly quickly. Set the cake tin back over the cake, then flip the baking sheet over so that the cake is back in the cake tin, right-side up.

Pierce the top of the cake all over with a skewer or small knife, then brush with four tablespoons of evaporated milk, letting it run down the sides.

Brush the top of the cake with four tablespoons of the dulce de leche mixture. Once the mixture has been somewhat absorbed, pour over the remaining mixture. Allow to cool completely in the tin before covering with cling wrap and transferring to the fridge to rest overnight.

Let the cake to come to room temperature before serving. It's moist and quite fragile, so it's best to ease slices out of the tin rather than trying to turn it out on a platter.

year of the rabbit (ragu)

2011-02-09T11:34:00.000-05:00

The Chinese zodiac is potentially hazardous to mad culinary minds.

While Chinese New Year has an extensive, exhaustive, exhausting list of "lucky" foods - daunting even without all the regional and cultural variations - its guidelines appear to be silent regarding the fortune-bearing properties of consuming any of the twelve animals that mark Chinese calendar years. It's an unfortunate omission, one that prompts all sorts of wild speculation.

Would eating chicken at the start of the Year of the Rooster bring extra luck? Or would it be particularly unlucky? If it were lucky to consume rat at the start of the Year of the Rat, would there be a sudden spate of rodent consumption every February? And if you somehow managed to tap into an alternate universe and slaughter a dragon, would you be the luckiest of all?*

This year is the Year of the Rabbit, and lucky or not, I couldn't pass up the chance to prepare rabbit as my token nod at Chinese New Year festivities. (No dumpling-folding this year.)

You see, the Chinese New Year period is a state holiday in China, and rather than subjecting myself to a nightly symphony of firecrackers, I disappeared to Boston for a few days of real cheese, easily-acquired baking supplies, and traffic that's not quite so maniacally bent on scaring pedestrians to death.

So long as I was in Boston, I wanted an excuse to fit in a visit to my favorite butcher. Cue the rabbit.

While there are definitely sources for excellent local meat at the various farmers' markets, there's nothing like a good butcher to fashion a cut of meat just the way you want it. My favorite butcher in Boston is Sulmona's Meat Market in the North End, a family-owned business where it's not uncommon to see a little old Italian lady instructing the staff in rapid-fire Italian on exactly how she'd like beef slices cut for involtini. They make their own Italian sausages (both sweet and spicy), and sell a beef-pork-veal mixture (ground to order) that is excellent for meatballs and meatloaf. Crucial for my purposes, they also carry whole rabbit.

Early Thursday afternoon, I left Sulmona's with a neatly packaged rabbit, trimmed and cut into six pieces, plus a pound of sweet Italian sausage for later consumption. The rabbit was destined for ragu, which I planned to serve over fresh pappardelle. This was my token nod at Chinese New Year: noodles are popular because they symbolize longevity, and pasta, after all, belongs to the same family as noodles.

This is a fairly simple, unassuming ragu. It uses leeks rather than onions in the base for a sweeter, milder flavor, and the tomato is light rather than assertive, allowing the faintly gamey flavor of the rabbit to shine through. Served over pasta or polenta, it makes for a satisfying winter dinner, even if you're not trying for extra luck.

That said, if you do somehow open a portal to an alternate universe and slay a dragon, let me know, would you? I wouldn't mind doing roast saddle of dragon for next year's festivities.

Rabbit Ragu

Contrary to popular belief, rabbit does not taste like chicken. It is similar to chicken in that it is white meat without a strong flavor, but what flavor it has is distinctly its own. Furthermore, when braised, it takes on a texture closer to that of pork than poultry, so if you can't get rabbit, a braising cut of pork might be a more appropriate substitution, albeit with a longer cooking time.

This goes well over buttered polenta or fresh pasta.

(Serves one with a lot of leftovers. Freezes well.)

First, you'll need a rabbit weighing about three pounds, preferably with liver and kidneys intact. Feel free to name it if your sense of humor resembles mine. (This one was Roger. The previous one was Peter.) Ask your butcher to cut it into six pieces for you, or do the job yourself with a heavy cleaver.

Decide how you feel about offal. If it's really not your thing, place the liver and kidneys in a small pot with half an onion, a rib of celery, half a carrot and a bay leaf. Cover with water and leave to simmer. (You'll use this liquid to add extra flavor to the sauce.) If you're fine with offal, cut the liver and kidneys into small pieces and set aside.

Rinse and pat the rabbit pieces dry. In a large, heavy-bottomed pot with lid, heat a little mild-tasting vegetable oil. Brown the rabbit pieces; transfer to a plate and set aside.

Wash and julienne one large leek (or two small.) Finely dice three ribs of celery and two small carrots. In the same pot you used to brown the rabbit, sauté three slices of finely cut pancetta until the fat renders out. If you're not afraid of offal, add the cut-up liver and kidneys at this point. Add the leek and cook until it softens, then add the celery and carrots. Season with a fat pinch of salt. Add two bay leaves and a sprig each of fresh rosemary, sage and thyme.

Add half a can of tomato paste (about three or four tablespoons) and enough water to thin the mixture. Cook, stirring occasionally, making sure to scrape up any browned bits stuck on the bottom.

Arrange the rabbit pieces in the pot – make two layers if they won't fit in one. If you opted to turn the offal into stock, grab a strainer and strain the liquid right into the pot. If not, add a little more water, just enough to cover.

Bring the mixture to a simmer, then put the lid on the pot. Cook, checking back once every half-hour or so, until the rabbit is tender enough that the meat can easily be prised away from the bone with a fork.

Ready a cutting board. Remove a piece of rabbit from the pot, set it on the cutting board, and use a fork (and your fingers, if necessary) to pull the meat off the bones. Return the meat to the pot, and repeat the process with the other pieces. Rabbits have some very small bones that are easy to miss, so work carefully and take your time.

Turn up the heat slightly, and with the lid off, let the mixture reduce, stirring occasionally, until it reaches the consistency of sauce. Use a wooden spoon to break up any particularly large chunks of meat. Add salt and ground black pepper to taste.

Ladle the ragu over fresh pappardelle or buttered polenta. Serve with a dusting of finely chopped parsley, and pass grated Parmigiano-Reggiano at the table.

*Probably not a recommended course of action. Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

cake culture

2011-01-31T06:36:00.001-05:00

Chinese New Year begins this week. The streets are filled with red lanterns, and the foyer of my apartment building has been decked out with strings of firecrackers and miniature orange trees. The festive atmosphere reminds me of the December holiday season, but its trappings are somehow both oddly familiar and utterly alien. This might be my heritage, but it isn't my culture.

I don't have any notable childhood memories of Chinese New Year. I know I received "red packets" - a nice addition to my bank account - but I don't think my family ever engaged in any of the other rituals. What I know of the traditional foods associated with Chinese New Year comes less from personal experience and more from Wikipedia.

I've folded dumplings for Chinese New Year, but at my table, they probably make for better comedy fodder than they do celebratory material. I'd rather do as I often do, and make it up myself. This year, I decided I wanted cake.

My starting point was the little sponge cakes with raisins that are typical fare at Chinese bakeries. (They're small, round and yellow, suggestive of gold coins, which would be appropriate for the wealth theme of Chinese New Year.) They tend to be sweet and bland and a little too dry for my taste, so I set about to tweak them into something richer and moister.

Butter was an obvious addition, and when I thought about soaking the raisins to improve their texture, I remembered I had a bottle of brandy from my grandfather. The brandy darkened the batter, though, so I skipped the idea of small golden cakes and baked one big cake instead.

This cake bakes up to a fairly unremarkable shade of light brown, but it fills the kitchen with a heady scent of butter and brandy when it's in the oven. It comes out nicely moist, and its flavor improves with age, making it eminently suitable for making in advance. Even if I give heritage another shot and submit to the comedy routine of dumplings again this year, I'll be all set for dessert. As far as cultural traditions go, that's one I can definitely get behind.

Brandy Raisin Butter Cake

Brandy is the dominant flavor in this cake, so use a variety you'd drink. Feel free to play with the seasonings - I imagine a little fresh orange zest or a pinch of cinnamon and cloves might be a nice addition. This cake tastes best a day or two after it's been made.

(Makes one eight-inch cake. Leftovers keep for a while in the fridge.)

Place a quarter-cup of golden raisins in a bowl or jar with a quarter-cup of brandy. Cover well, and leave to soften overnight. (You can speed up the process by putting them in the microwave for a minute or two.)

Preheat oven to 325F. Butter and flour an eight-inch cake or tart pan.

In a small mixing bowl, sift together a little over three-quarters of a cup (four ounces) of pastry flour, a half-teaspoon baking powder, and a half-teaspoon salt. In a bigger mixing bowl, cream three-quarters of a stick (three ounces) softened butter with a half-cup (four ounces) of sugar.

In a third bowl, beat two eggs until light and foamy. Pour a little of the egg mixture into the creamed butter, beating steadily, until the mixture reaches a pourable consistency. Fold in half the flour mixture. Fold in the rest of the egg mixture, then the other half of the flour. Finally, fold in the raisins along with any remaining brandy.

Spoon the batter into the prepared pan; shake gently to smooth out the top. Bake for twenty to twenty-five minutes, or until a tester inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool in the pan on a rack. When fully cool, turn out gently and wrap tightly in foil, and let it sit for at least a few hours before serving.

Serve slightly warm with tea, or coffee, or a glass of brandy.

a little incentive

2011-01-23T12:32:00.005-05:00

When I lived in Boston, I had no reason to bake my own bread.

I lived within walking distance of several bakeries – I had Kupel's, Yi Soon, and Cafe Japonaise just a few blocks away. For a few months, I even had a sublet on the same street as Clear Flour. With a quick stroll and a few dollars, I could easily satisfy every desire of my little carboholic heart.

Here in Beijing, I have every reason to bake my own bread. The one import store within walking distance has mediocre baked goods, and the city's awful traffic leaves me reluctant to trek further afield. Frankly, I could have a yeasted dough on its second proofing in the time that it would take me to go out and come back with better bread.

Instead, I'm working with the ten-pound bag of flour in my freezer, the brick of instant active yeast in my fridge, and a half-size electric oven with a single baking tray. Necessity is the mother of invention: I finally came up with a recipe for the kind of challah they sell at Kupel's.

The challah from Kupel's is soft and chewy, with a dense, almost doughy texture. It's the kind of bread that you can tear into without bothering with a knife, the kind of bread that tastes good plain. Placed on a countertop with easy access, it has a tendency to disappear with alarming speed.

I tried my hand at replicating Kupel's-style challah when I went through my sweet yeasted bread phase last summer, with little success. Though the internet abounded with recipes for light, airy challah, instructions for soft, chewy challah proved elusive, and frankly, I lacked the incentive to puzzle out a recipe myself. Why persist with hard-crusted, airy failures when I could find soft, chewy perfection just minutes away?

As it turns out, the threat of passing two-and-a-half hours in some of the world's worst traffic is more than adequate incentive. After re-checking the internet for soft, chewy challah instructions and still coming up empty-handed, I sat down to reason my way to a recipe.

Soft bread suggests a lowish baking temperature (it's high temperature that produces crackling crusts.) Chewy bread is bread with heavy gluten development. Dense bread means a dough on the drier side (the wetter the dough, the lighter the bread.)

The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that the dough for soft, chewy challah might look more like pasta dough than bread dough. So I cross-referenced my pasta dough recipe with my sweet yeast bread recipes, sketched out ingredients and quantities, and set to work.

A few hours later: soft, chewy challah, and not a traffic jam in sight. And yes, I did tear into it without bothering with a knife.

Soft, Chewy Challah

I used instant active yeast in this recipe, which is mixed in directly with the dry ingredients. I haven't tested it out yet with regular active yeast, but if you try it, bump up the quantity to one-and-a-half teaspoons, and stir it into the lukewarm water along with the sugar. Let it sit until foamy, then add the mixture to the flour, and continue with the recipe from that point.

(Makes one large loaf. Can be frozen. Stale leftovers make for good bread pudding.)

Dump four cups of all-purpose flour (twenty ounces) in a big mixing bowl. Add a quarter-cup of sugar, one teaspoon instant active yeast and one teaspoon salt. Stir briefly to combine.

Separate four eggs. Set the yolks aside. (Use the whites for meringues.)

Add one-and-a-half cups lukewarm water. Stick your hand in the bowl and mix until you have the beginnings of dough. Add the yolks along with a quarter-cup of vegetable oil. Mix until you have lumpy dough that is only a little sticky. If the mixture seems very dry, with a lot of loose flour in the bowl, add a few more tablespoons of water.

Roll up your sleeves. Turn the dough out on a clean countertop.

Get ready for a workout. This dough has to be kneaded for at least twenty minutes, if not longer. It's fine if you take breaks, but don't be tempted to cut back on the kneading time - the texture of the bread will suffer.

The dough will start out tacky, but it shouldn't be too wet. If it is, sprinkle it with additional flour. As you knead, the dough will gradually lose its sticky, lumpy quality, and start to pull together, becoming more elastic. Keep going. The dough will lose elasticity and develop more resistance. Stop once it develops a smooth, almost skin-like texture.

Shape the dough into a ball, and place it back in the mixing bowl. Cover with plastic wrap, and leave in a warm place for an hour to rise.

Press down on the dough to deflate. Divide into three (or four, or six) pieces, and roll or squeeze each piece out into a rope. (It will be quite resistant.) Braid the ropes together. Place on a parchment-covered baking sheet. Cover with foil, and leave in a warm place for another hour.

Preheat the oven to 375F. Crack an egg in a small bowl and beat it well. Brush the challah with beaten egg. If you like, you can sprinkle it with sesame or poppy seeds.

Place the challah in the oven. Bake uncovered for fifteen minutes, or until the loaf is golden brown in color, then tent with foil and bake for another fifteen to twenty minutes.

Transfer to a baking rack to cool. Store in a plastic bag to keep it from drying out.

boundaries of the familiar

2011-01-18T19:13:00.002-05:00

There is an adjustment period for every relocation.

No matter how well you plan, there are always the details you will not think about until after you arrive. Where to buy a padlock in Rome (hardware store), how to say "bleach" in French (eau de javel), why there is no drip coffee to be found in Perth (no Starbucks.)

It isn't the language or the landscape that feels most foreign. It's the tiny things that make up everyday living, the fixtures you have come to rely on without realizing it. Their absence puts you off-kilter. Like stepping off a curb just a fraction shorter than you expected, the missing milimetres that leave you reeling.

To navigate, you must reestablish the baseline. Trace the lacunae, mark their lines. Seek out windfalls to stop the gaps. Redraw the boundaries of the familiar.

That which was prized is prosaic; that which is commonplace becomes rare. Know that this city will offer you neither apples nor buttermilk; here there is rosemary, but no sage, no thyme. Instead, chestnuts and fennel fronds; buckwheat flour, cheap and plentiful. Not an oddity here, but a constant.

Blended with ground almonds and sugar, mixed with butter and eggs, buckwheat produces a rustic cake of unusual fragrance. Absence of gluten gives it a delicate, tender crumb. There is still afternoon tea, basking in late winter light. Soothing, this ritual. Settling. The boundaries of the familiar, shifted.

Buckwheat Almond Cake

Despite its name, buckwheat bears no relation to true wheat, and is gluten-free.

I've kept the flavoring in this cake simple - just a little vanilla - but you could also add cinnamon, nutmeg, or orange zest, or use browned butter in place of plain. This cake can be served warm from the oven, but it's really at its best a day or two later.

(Draws some inspiration from this and this. Serves one with leftovers; cake may be wrapped and frozen.)

Preheat the oven to 350F.

In a mixing bowl, cream together one stick (four ounces) softened butter with half a cup of white sugar. Beat in two eggs, one at a time, until the mixture is thick and creamy (it's fine if it looks slightly curdled.) Stir in a half-teaspoon of salt and a half-teaspoon of vanilla.

Stir in a half-teaspoon of baking powder. Fold in half a cup (two ounces) of finely ground almonds. Fold in three-quarters of a cup (three and a half ounces) of buckwheat flour. The batter will be quite thick.

Glop the batter into a greased 5.75 inch by 3 inch loaf pan (two-cup capacity) or an eight-inch false-bottomed tart pan. Bake for thirty minutes, or until lightly browned on top. Allow the cake to cool in the pan. Wrap tightly and let it sit overnight before serving.

Serve with tea or coffee.

in home itself, there is no room for home

2011-01-12T19:18:00.003-05:00

I am homesick.

In some ways, this goes without saying. As a third culture kid, I am always homesick, because I am never homesick.

There is no "homesickness" when you cannot define "home;" when you cannot define "home," there is nothing but. "Home" is best described by tracing the arc of what it isn't: home is somewhere else, home is someplace not here. "Home" is a space or time you mislaid but surely could find, if only you knew where to start looking.

Such nebulousness breeds uncertain allegiances. If patriotism is the memory of foods eaten in childhood, then the closest thing to home and country lies somewhere within a foreign grocery store. Homesickness cannot be cured, but it can be soothed by wandering the aisles, finding some comfort within their unlikely juxtapositions.

There is neither rhyme nor reason to the selection here. The biscuits span two aisles and four, maybe five continents, but the cheese counter is determinedly Western European. The store won't stock exactly what you look for, but it will stock what you never expected to find, and sometimes it will offer just what you longed for, even before you could ever have pinned it down and given it a name.

The produce aisle is generally unremarkable, which makes its rare oddities all the more pronounced. I notice the passionfruit immediately.

Dark and wrinkled, they look strange and sad next to the finely waxed sheen of the Red Delicious apples, the coddled plumpness of the organic strawberries. I know instinctively that these fruits have been passed over by the patrons, dismissed as products past their prime, evidence of poor inventory control.

Management, it seems, feels the same way. I could buy lunch for a week with the asking price for four fresh figs, but two dozen passionfruit will set me back little more than the cost of a cup of Starbucks coffee.

Passionfruit are the product of passiflora edulis, a vine that grows energetically and profusely on many a backyard fence and swimming pool enclosure in Australia. Passionflowers are strange and stunning blooms, almost alien in appearance. The fruit, like other strange fruit from tropical climates, reach their peak flavor when they look their worst.

Unripe, a passionfruit has an appealing egg-like smoothness, a skin a beguiling shade of red-hued purple. Unripe, its shell rejects the onslaught of all but the sharpest of knives, and its pulp is as sour and tart as a lemon's flesh.

A ripe passionfruit has a wrinkled, shrivelled appearance. Its shell is almost brittle, and splits with ease under pressure from a blade. The pulp is a glorious yellow-orange hue, like the yolk from a freshly-laid egg, and intensely, deliciously fragrant.

The fragrance is the smell of a hot summer morning, the light sparkling off the water of the backyard pool, the promise of a whole lazy afternoon for swimming. The pulp tastes of fruit ice-blocks and Deep Spring fizzy drink, of custard slice and finger buns. The seeds contain the sheen of sunblock, the traces of chlorine that cling to hair and skin.

This is not a remedy or panacea; the story is not so simple. Instead, I'll take this fruit and scrape the pulp, and blend it with cream and sugar and bloomed gelatin. I'll use all I've learned since I left that child in her Australian summer, still splashing in the backyard pool.

Maybe when I'm done, I'll know where to start looking for home.

Passionfruit Bavarian Cream

The French culinary lexicon appears to be lacking a name for a gelatin-stabilized whipped-cream dessert that doesn't contain eggs. This dessert would be bavarois if it had a custard base, but it uses just sweetened fruit puree, so the name doesn't quite fit. Early American cookbooks do offer examples of "plain Bavarian cream" that don't contain eggs, however, and so that's the name I'm sticking with.

(Makes about four quarter-cup servings.)

Place a sheet of unflavored gelatin (two grams) in a small bowl, and sprinkle over three tablespoons of water. Set aside to soften.

Next, take four to six ripe passionfruit, depending on their size, cut them in half, and scrape the pulp into a small bowl. Measure out one quarter-cup of pulp into a small saucepan. (Strain out the seeds, if you object to seeds.)

Stir in two tablespoons white sugar (one ounce.) Cook the mixture over low heat until the sugar dissolves. Allow to cool to lukewarm.

Check on the softened gelatin; it should have dissolved into a thick, sticky liquid. If there are still uneven bits, stir until you have a smooth consistency.

Stir the softened gelatin into the passionfruit mixture. Set aside.

In a mixing bowl, beat half a cup of heavy cream until it holds stiff peaks. Gently fold the whipped cream into the passionfruit mixture.

Spoon the mixture into small ramekins or molds. Cover with plastic wrap. Chill in the fridge for several hours, until firm.

To unmold, briefly dip the molds or ramekins in hot water to loosen, and turn out on chilled plates. Decorate with extra passionfruit pulp. Serve immediately.

drawing the kings to the Orient, or an Epiphany in Beijing

2011-01-06T13:00:00.004-05:00

January sixth is a day that goes by many names.

It's the final day of Christmas (also known as the very last day on which retailers can possibly get away with playing obnoxious holiday music before unpleasant fates befall them.)

The British call it Twelfth Night (as in Shakespeare's play.)

It is most widely known as the Epiphany, a day celebrating the three wise men who followed a star to Bethlehem, bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh for a new king.

And it marks my latest mad culinary endeavour.

It's no secret that I like obscure holidays, particularly those that come with culinary curiosities. No surprise, then, that I couldn't resist Epiphany, which has rich and storied culinary traditions that vary by country. This year, I opted for a classic, the French dessert known as galette des rois.

Galette des rois is a puff pastry tart with an almond filling. It hails from northern France, and according to tradition, it contains a fève, a bean, "to draw the kings" to the Epiphany. After the galette is cut, whoever finds the fève in their slice is crowned king or queen for the day. (The French pastry shops take this seriously – galettes are sold with paper crowns, and the fèves are porcelain trinkets, often quite elaborate.)

It's a charming tradition - if you're in France. In Beijing, it's a little less charming, and a little more mad.

A porcelain fève is out of the question unless you have helpful friends visiting you by way of France. (You'd best make do with a dried bean, or a whole almond.)

Good luck finding a paper crown. (Looking inside a British Christmas cracker might be your best bet; try the sale aisle of an imported goods store.)

Should you find the requisite items, there's still no guarantee that you'll be able to explain the holiday and the tradition to your bemused family or your befuddled co-workers. (No, not even with the combined help of multiple dictionaries, Google, and Chinese-language Wikipedia.)

And all that's before you even get to the baking.

There's puff pastry you'll have to make from scratch, because your chances of finding any sort of ready-made puff pastry, let alone all-butter ready-made puff pastry, are very close to nil. By the time you're standing in a freezing cold kitchen, bundled up in your heaviest jumper (and contemplating the merits of adding a parka) as you give your puff pastry a fourth turn, you might - just might - start to question your sanity.

You'll stop questioning your sanity when you come to the frangipane. That's when you'll know you've definitely lost it.

The terms frangipane and crème d'amandes are often used interchangably outside of a French-speaking context. Unfortunately, they don't refer to the same thing. Crème d'amandes is a paste of butter, sugar, ground almonds, egg and flour, and it's mixed with crème pâtissière - a custard of eggs, sugar, and milk, thickened with flour - to produce frangipane. Crème d'amandes is a little like marzipan in texture and flavor; frangipane is more like a dense, eggy almond custard.

The traditional filling for galette des rois is frangipane. Strictly speaking, a puff pastry tart with a filling of just crème d'amandes isn't a galette des rois, but a pithiviers feuilleté. But if you forget to buy the damn milk for the crème pâtissière, and don't realise your mistake until well after the shops have closed for the evening, you'll use crème d'amandes alone and call it galette des rois anyway.

That's fine. The insane are allowed to dispense with tradition. Besides, neither your bemused family nor your befuddled co-workers will know the difference anyway.

Galette des Rois

This dessert was originally eaten only on Epiphany, but its season has gradually been extended to span nearly the whole of January. If you're reading this on January seventh, you've still got time to make it in season.

(Inspired by the recipes here, here, here, and here. Makes one eight-inch galette – enough for eight to twelve servings, depending how thinly you slice it.)

First, the puff pastry. If you have a source for all-butter puff pastry, this is a same-day recipe, and you can scroll down to the paragraph about crème d'amandes. If you don't have a source for all-butter puff pastry, this is best done over the course of two days.

Puff pastry begins with a detrempe, a water-flour dough with a bit of butter in it. So: dump one-and-a-half cups (seven and a half ounces) flour in a mixing bowl. Add half a teaspoon of salt. Rub in half a stick (two ounces ) of chilled unsalted butter until you have a loose, crumbly mixture. Add a half-cup of cold water. Stir. Add additional water, a tablespoon at a time, until the mixture forms a soft dough. Cover with plastic wrap, and leave in the fridge to rest for at least half an hour.

Lay out a sheet of parchment paper. Dust it with flour. Take one-and-a-half sticks (six ounces) chilled unsalted butter, and cut them so that the pieces can be arranged in a rough square. Sprinkle with more flour. Cover with another sheet of parchment paper. Whale on the butter with a rolling pin until you have a rough square about three-sixteenths of an inch (four milimetres) thick. Put the butter in the fridge.

Lay out a sheet of parchment paper, and sprinkle it lightly with flour. Remove the dough from the fridge and set it on the parchment. Sprinkle with flour, and cover with another sheet of parchment. Roll it out into a rough square large enough to fit the butter square diagonally, such that the corners of the butter square touch the mid-points of the dough square.

Get the butter out of the fridge. Place it on the dough diagonally, so that the corners of the butter touch the edges of the dough. Fold the dough over and pinch gently to seal, creating a dough envelope with butter inside. Wrap in plastic wrap, and put it back in the fridge to rest for at least half an hour.

Now the rolling-and-folding process begins. Most cookbooks will tell you this is best done with a marble rolling pin on a marble board. Neither is essential, but it helps to get the room as cold as possible. (Don't do this near a warm oven; chances are you'll end up with a greasy mess.)

Lay out parchment, sprinkle with flour. Get out your pastry-butter envelope and set it on the counter. Cover with more parchment. Roll it out until you have a longish rectangle roughly three-sixteenths of an inch thick. (For photos of the process, look here.)

Gently fold the dough into thirds, like a letter, and flip it over so that the seam is on the underside.

Roll it out again to three-sixteenths of an inch, and fold and flip again. Every fold-and-flip is called a turn. You've given the dough two turns, so gently press two fingertips into the dough. Wrap in plastic, and allow to chill for at least an hour, preferably two.

Give the dough two more turns. Mark the dough with four impressions. Wrap in plastic; chill for at least an hour, preferably two.

Give the dough two final turns. Mark the dough with six impressions. Wrap in plastic and stick in the fridge. Let it rest for at least three hours, preferably overnight, before you use it.

While the dough rests, make the crème d'amandes. Start by creaming together half a stick (two ounces) of softened unsalted butter with a quarter-cup of sugar. Work in half a cup of almond meal (a little less than two ounces). Add one egg; beat the mixture until it is smooth and well-blended.

Stir in two tablespoons of flour. The mixture should be a thick paste; if it seems runny, add a little more flour. Finally, stir in a few drops of vanilla extract and a pinch of salt. (Optional extra: a half-teaspoon of dark rum. And a nip of rum for yourself.) Cover with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge.

To assemble the galette, take the puff pastry from the fridge and divide it in half. Roll each half out on a floured surface until it's about one-eighth of an inch thick.

Use a sharp knife to cut an eight-inch circle from the first half (you can use a plate or a cake pan as a template). Cut a slightly larger round from the second half – about eight-and-a-half inches in diameter. (Any pastry scraps can be sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon and baked for a snack.)

Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper. Place the eight-inch pastry circle on the baking sheet. Remove the crème d'amandes from the fridge.

Crack an egg into a small bowl and beat well. Brush the beaten egg on the outer half-inch of the circle. Avoid the very edge of the pastry circle – the egg will seal it, and it won't rise properly.

Spoon the crème d'amandes into the space inside the eggwash ring and spread it out with a spatula or the back of a spoon. If you're keeping with tradition, hide a whole almond or a dried bean (the fève) in the crème d'amandes, close to the edge.

Lay the second pastry circle atop the first. Smooth out any air pockets, and press around the eggwash ring to seal. (You can press the edges with a fork to decorate.)

Use a knife or a skewer to score a decorative pattern in the pastry. If you're unsure of your abilities, try a diamond-shaped grid or a series of straight lines radiating outwards from a center point; if you're feeling a little more confident, you can cut curved lines radiating outwards to form a sun- or flower- shape. Either way, you only want to score the pastry – don't cut all the way through.

Brush the galette with beaten egg. Cut four or five evenly-spaced slits – cut all the way through the pastry this time – for steam vents. Chill the galette in the fridge for an hour.

Time to bake. Preheat the oven to 375F. Pull the galette from the fridge and place it on a middle rack in the oven. Bake for thirty minutes, or until the pastry is a rich golden brown.

Transfer to a cooling rack. The galette can be served at room temperature, or slightly warm (I prefer it slightly warm.) If you placed a fève in the galette, warn your guests that it's there before they start eating. The person who gets the slice with the fève is royalty for the day.

a sated appetite

2010-12-30T06:01:00.000-05:00

My family is utterly boring when it comes to celebrating New Year's Eve.

Admittedly, we're boring about celebrating holidays in general, but the closest we've come to a New Year's tradition is a habit of nodding off before the New Year is actually rung in. Sometimes we watch the fireworks, but mostly, we're dead to the world when the clock ticks over. New Year's dinner is only noteworthy for its complete lack of noteworthiness: we eat a perfectly ordinary meal, or else we opt for (vaguely dissatisfying) takeout.

It's quite clear that if I'm ever going to have any New Year's traditions worth mentioning, I'm either going to have to make up my own, or appropriate someone else's. The latter is easier than the former, of course. There's no shortage of food-related traditions, so it's a question of choosing one that appeals.

Lentils and other legumes play a part in the New Year's dishes of countries all over the world because they look like coins and represent wealth. I'm not terribly intrigued by the symbolism, but I like lentils, and they are reliably available at the supermarkets here.

Which brings me to lentil stew - a simple mixture of lentils, olive oil, mirepoix, herbs and water. It may not sound like much, but when treated with care, these unassuming ingredients produce an end result that is startlingly flavorful. This year, New Year's Eve may still be boring, but at least I'll ring in the New Year with a sated appetite.

Lentil Stew

This stew is completely meat- and dairy-free, but you'd never guess it from the flavor. The key tricks: be generous with the olive oil and seasonings, and make sure the vegetables are properly browned before you add the lentils.

While this stew is perfectly good on its own, it also makes a nice side dish for pork or fish.

(Makes about four portions if eaten plain, and six portions as a side. Will freeze.)

First, the mirepoix. Start by finely chopping one large yellow onion. Rinse one celery heart. Peel two cloves of garlic. Peel three medium-sized carrots.

Heat a generous splash of olive oil in heavy-bottomed pan with lid over very low heat. Add the onion. Stir briefly with a wooden spoon.

Dice the celery. Add it to the pan. Sprinkle over a fat pinch of salt. Sprinkle over dried rosemary, thyme, basil and oregano. (A herb blend also works.) Add one bay leaf. Stir.

Mince the garlic, add it to the pan. Grind over a generous quantity of black pepper. Stir.

Dice the carrots; add them to the pan. Stir. The mixture should smell fragrant; if it doesn't, add more herbs.

Keep the pan over low heat. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables start to go dry. The pan will develop a rich brown coating on the bottom; this is exactly what you're looking for. Continue giving it an occasional stir; pay close attention once the onions have browned. When it looks as though your vegetables might scorch, add a splash of water, scraping up any stuck-on browned bits from the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon.

Add one pound of cooked lentils (or half a pound of soaked dried lentils). Pour over enough water to cover. Cook at a simmer, covered, until the lentils are tender, then uncover and reduce until there is only a little liquid in the pan. Check for salt and pepper; adjust to taste. Serve warm.

this landscape in winter

2010-12-22T19:03:00.003-05:00

In winter, Beijing is a city of street vendors.

Perhaps they are not quite so common now as they were a decade ago, before the Olympics and the city's efforts at beautification, but the roads still sport pushcarts and makeshift stalls, and their owners continue to ply their trade.

Walk along any major thoroughfare, and you'll pass vendors selling baked sweet potatoes out of big metal drums pulled on pedal bikes. Turn down a side street, and you'll find hawkers with bing tang hu lu, bamboo skewers of candied hawthorn berries sold out of pushcarts with glass cases. Stand at a street corner in an older corner of the city, and you might catch the scent of smoke and charring sugar that marks a stall selling tang chao li zi, sweet roasted chestnuts.

The chestnut sellers come out in late autumn, after the trees have shed their leaves, becoming part of the landscape in winter. Sometimes these stalls evolve to sell a variety of snacks, and then remain as permanent fixtures.

There is one such stall near my office, a small space with a counter that opens onto the street. It sells all kinds of snacking nuts by weight: whole almonds and walnuts, peanuts and sunflower seeds in the shell. The draw, however, is still the roasted chestnuts.

The chestnuts are roasted whole, tumbled with hot charcoal in big metal pans. Even when it is bitterly cold outside, queues form when a new batch is being prepared.

The vendors stir the nuts, testing them as their shells begin to turn dark. When they are judged to be ready, the vendors pour them into big mesh baskets, and weighed them out into sacks fashioned from coarse brown paper.

Shelling these chestnuts is a two-handed process, so there's no eating them out of the bag on the street. Instead, I cradle the paper sack in my hands, warming my fingers in the chilly air. Returning indoors, I place the bag on a flat surface and set to work.

Chinese chestnuts are smaller than the European varieties, with a fine, papery skin and creamy yellow flesh. The shells are thin, easily cracked by breaking open their flat sides with the edge of a thumbnail. There's a pleasure to the process, like that of eating boiled shrimp or picking over a whole crab, each chestnut its own reward.

The last time I stopped at a roast chestnut stand, I bought more chestnuts than I planned to eat and shelled the rest for use in culinary experiments. My first thought was Mont Blanc, the classic French dessert: a meringue base topped with sweet chestnut puree, decorated generously with whipped cream. Much of its charm lies in effective presentation, however, and I lack the equipment necessary to form the chestnut puree into fine threads.

Instead, I opted for a different preparation. After turning my roasted chestnuts into sweet puree, I combined them with custard and folded in gelatin and whipped cream, spooning the mixture into decorative glasses. The French call this dessert crème bavaroise (or just bavarois), and it's a lovely finish to a holiday meal.

In this city of street vendors, it might even become part of my culinary landscape.

Chestnut Bavarois

If you're not in a place where roasted chestnuts in the shell are readily available for purchase, don't drive yourself mad trying to track down fresh chestnuts to roast from scratch. Vacuum-packed, jarred, or tinned chestnuts will all work just fine - just make sure they don't have any sugar added.

(Makes a lot. It's very rich, so a little goes a long way.)

Take seven ounces of shelled chestnuts (about eight ounces in the shell) and place them in a small saucepan with two tablespoons sugar and enough water to cover. Cook, stirring frequently, over very low heat, until the chestnuts start to soften and break up easily when pressed with a spoon. (Keep an eye on them. Chestnuts are like beans, and will burn on the bottom if they catch.) Set the mixture aside to cool.

When the chestnuts have cooled to lukewarm, use a stick blender or food processor to blend them into a smooth puree. Measure out eight ounces of chestnut puree, and set aside. (Any extra is nice on toast.)

In a small bowl, cover two sheets of gelatin (four grams) with a quarter-cup of warm milk.

Separate four egg yolks into a heatproof bowl. (Save the whites for baking.)

In another saucepan, combine half a cup of milk with two tablespoons sugar and half a teaspoon of vanilla. (Optional extra: a tablespoon of brandy or rum.) Heat, stirring frequently, until the sugar dissolves.

Carefully whisk the hot milk mixture into the egg yolks, beating well to incorporate. Transfer the mixture back to the saucepan. Add a fat pinch of salt. Cook over low heat, whisking steadily, until the mixture thickens and the whisk starts to form trails. Remove from heat, and whisk in the gelatin mixture. Stir in the chestnut puree. Set aside to cool.

Beat three-quarters of a cup of heavy cream until it forms stiff peaks. Gently fold into the chestnut custard.

Spoon the mixture into glasses, and chill in the fridge overnight. Decorate with whipped cream (and marrons glaces, if you like) before serving.

the bells of st clement's

2010-12-20T09:31:00.003-05:00

I developed a taste for many things in defiance of my mother.

My mother, as I've mentioned before, has an aversion to sugar. Butter, too, was verboten in the household where I grew up. (In the unhappier recesses of my memory, there are recollections of box mix cake made with margarine.) We ate soft, cottony bread - the sort that doesn't so much have a crust as it does a skin. And my mother held to a few other fierce and somewhat eccentric rules: no food coloring of any sort, no cinnamon, and absolutely no citrus peel.

Most recollections of teenage rebellion involve secret experimentation with drinking or smoking (or both.) The culprits in my stories are somewhat less typical: sticky cinnamon rolls, packages of unnaturally bright candy, and baguettes with crackling crusts, consumed secretly and delightedly without my mother's knowledge or permission. The sense of getting away with something forbidden, however, is much the same.

I grew up to keep sugar and butter as pantry staples. Margarine does not darken the threshold of my kitchen. And I delight in the baked goods that mark Christmas, revelling in stollen and panettone and fruitcake of the really boozy variety, in all their spiced, citrus-peel-filled goodness.

For all that I love a good baking project, however, I am not quite ambitious (or mad) enough to make my own versions of these delicacies. Instead, my oranges and lemons flavor pound cake and all a manner of cookies, joining my purchased delicacies in a selection ready for holiday nibbling.

The following chocolate orange shortbread is another of my many variations on a basic shortbread recipe. Dark with cocoa, flecked with chocolate, and perfumed with orange zest, I like this for last-minute baking - it's a quick, simple way to round out a cookie platter. I admit, too, that I enjoy it for another reason: while I'm really too old for teenage rebellion, zesting the orange still fills me with delight.

Orange Chocolate Shortbread

(Makes two dozen. Will keep for a week in an airtight container.)

Put a stick of butter in a mixing bowl and let it sit at room temperature until soft. (Not just softened, but soft.) Use a fork to cream in a quarter-cup of white sugar. Grate over the zest of one well-washed orange (preferably organic), and add half a teaspoon of vanilla extract and a quarter-teaspoon of salt.

Stir in a quarter-cup of cocoa powder until you have a smooth, dark mixture, then work in a scant cup of flour, little by little, until you have a soft dough. Stir in two or three ounces of finely chopped dark chocolate.

Turn the dough onto a sheet of plastic wrap or wax paper. Form into a log roughly one-and-a-half inches in diameter; wrap and chill for at least an hour.

When you're ready to bake, preheat the oven to 325F. Line two baking trays with parchment paper.

Remove the dough from the fridge and cut discs, about quarter of an inch in thickness. Lay them on the baking trays. Transfer the trays to the oven.

Bake for twenty-five to thirty minutes, switching the position of the trays halfway through. Allow to cool for five minutes on the trays, then transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling.

Serve with tea or coffee.

stewing about it

2010-12-16T19:03:00.005-05:00

According to Shakespeare's logic, if a rose went by the name of " garbage bin," it would still smell just as sweet.

Shakespeare, though, must not have been very well-versed in cooking, because that's decidedly not the case when it comes to naming dishes. Even after figuring out ingredients and proportions and writing up a method for a recipe, there's one last, crucial step: giving it a name.

The chefs of haute cuisine had it easy; for them, it was enough to name the main ingredient, and tack on an a la So-and-So. Name the dish for a refined aristocrat, a famed beauty, or even a revered chef, and voila, an instant hit.

Not so today. Now, the trick is to be descriptive without being excessive, to be accurate without being a bore. The recipe name has to hit the sweet spot between "yes, I know what that is," and "mmm, that sounds good," preferably in under six words.

This brings me to the problem of stew.

The words "vegetable stew" are cheerfully wholesome, evocative of big bowls of rough-cut vegetables, healthy and nourishing. "Beef stew" suggests something slow-cooked with red wine and plenty of mushrooms, or maybe a hearty goulash fragrant with paprika and sour cream.

"Stewed," though, tends to have decidedly different connotations. It carries overtones of something overcooked, limp, and possibly malodorous. Stewed cabbage, however delicious, doesn't sound it. Stewed apples could be a crime against fruit. And even for someone who genuinely likes prunes, a stewed prune sounds more like a remedy for digestive issues than an appetizing dessert.

So, by rights, I shouldn't be writing about stewed fennel, or at least I shouldn't be calling it stewed fennel. Still, it's the best way of describing the low, slow cooking that turns slices of tough older bulb into softly slumping tangles, mellowing its aggressive anise flavor into something sweeter and subtler. Stewed fennel might be an exception to the usual rule.

Cooked with garlic and orange zest, and simmered in tomato sauce, it's a nice accompaniment to plain-cooked white fish. It might be even nicer, though, when spooned over homemade gnocchi. Which brings me to the final name for this dish.

I think it sounds pretty good, even if it isn't under six words.

Potato Gnocchi with Stewed Fennel in Tomato Sauce

(Makes four to six servings, depending on your appetite. Uncooked gnocchi may be frozen. Sauce may be frozen.)

To make the gnocchi, take a pound of boiling potatoes (Yukon Golds are good), peel, cube, and cook in salted boiling water until tender. Drain and allow to cool.

Put the cooled potatoes in a mixing bowl and mash with a fork. (Or put them through a food mill, if you have one.) Beat in one egg until the mixture is thick and creamy. Stir in one cup of flour and a half-teaspoon of salt. You should have a soft dough that is still a little on the sticky side.

Put a quarter-cup or so of flour on a clean countertop. Pinch off rounded teaspoon-size lumps of dough and roll them in the flour. Press on each side with the tines of a fork to create a grooved pattern. Place the gnocchi on baking trays. Gnocchi may be frozen at this point.

To make the sauce, heat two tablespoons butter and a little olive oil over low heat in a heavy-bottomed saucepan with lid. Add two finely sliced cloves of garlic. Once the garlic starts to smell fragrant, add one large sliced fennel bulb (or two small.) Sprinkle over a fat pinch of salt, give everything a quick stir, and pop the lid on the pan.

Wait ten minutes, then give everything another stir. Put the lid back on the pan. Repeat this process every ten to fifteen minutes until the fennel starts to soften and take on color.

When the fennel starts to look browned around the edges, leave the lid off the pan, and grate over the zest of one orange. Add one six-ounce can of tomato paste, and enough water to thin it to a saucy consistency. Stir well to combine.

Bring the sauce to a low simmer, and put the lid back on the pan. Cook for thirty to forty minutes, giving it an occasional stir. Turn off the heat; keep warm.

To assemble, cook gnocchi in simmering salted water (not boiling water; they'll fall apart) until they float to the surface. Spoon into a bowl and cover with sauce. Serve with Parmigiano-Reggiano or Gorgonzola.

cake on its day off

2010-12-13T10:42:00.003-05:00

I am very bad at winter.

More precisely, I never really got the hang of winter. Despite my decade in New England, I never quite learned to navigate an ice-glazed sidewalk, never quite figured out the correct combination of outerwear and underwear to withstand freezing winds, and never went a single December without wishing for the ability to hibernate.

While many of things I never got the hang of – rollerblading, the one-loop method of tying shoelaces, applying mascara without threat of injury – are entirely avoidable, or very occasional irritations, winter is a more intractable problem. My plan to move south having changed, winter is still on my calendar this year, and in much the same form. After moving several degrees in longitude, but not much in the way of latitude, there’s less ice, but more biting wind, and I still find myself wishing for the ability to hibernate.

I have grudgingly accepted that the closest I may come to hibernation is sitting in a warm kitchen, bundled up in an unflattering woolly cardigan with a very large mug of tea in hand as I wait to take something out of the oven. Of the many possibilities for that something, I have a soft spot for apple slump.

Slump is appropriately named: it's like cake on its day off, lounging at home in a fuzzy old robe and slippers. A quick assemblage of sliced fruit and basic batter, it's dished out of the baking pan rather than cut into neat slices, more like cobbler or crisp than a traditional cake. Slump is neither glamorous nor photogenic - it also goes by the name of "pan dowdy" - but it's agreeable and thoroughly comforting, an excellent winter tea treat.

This version builds on the basic idea, opting for browned butter rather than plain melted, and offering the option of brandy-soaked dried apricots to liven up the apples. It's still very much on its day off, however. Maybe it's not lounging in a fuzzy old robe and slippers, but it's sitting in a warm kitchen in an unflattering woolly cardigan, at the very least.

Apple-Apricot Brown Butter Slump

(Serves one for a few days. Leftovers will keep in the fridge; warm them up for breakfast.)

Melt three-quarters of a stick of butter (three ounces) in a nine or ten-inch ovenproof pan. Cook until butter foams and deepens in color; stop when butter is golden brown. Transfer to a mixing bowl.

To the same pan, add three or four apples, cut into eighths, plus a handful of dried apricots (soaked in Calvados or brandy, if that's your fancy.) Season with a sprinkling of cinnamon and nutmeg. Cook over low heat until the apples start to soften.

Preheat the oven to 375F.

Stir a quarter-cup of sugar, three-quarters of a cup of flour, a scant teaspoon of baking powder and a pinch of salt into the melted butter. Beat in two eggs. Add enough milk to make a pourable batter (think pancake batter.)

Pour the batter over the apples. Place the pan in the oven and bake for thirty to thirty-five minutes, or until golden and faintly browned on top. Allow to cool for ten minutes before serving.

Serve warm, preferably with custard.

appetize me

2010-11-24T11:50:00.003-05:00

I have a weakness for appetizers.

This is partly the legacy of the hotel kitchen: you have to enjoy turning out mini roast beef roulades and finger sandwiches and tuna-stuffed cherry tomatoes if you want to keep your mind when preparing canapes for a cocktail party of two thousand. This is partly the legacy of one too many law school social events: if you're bad at social chatter and unnerved by large crowds, you'll find that the safest place is by the refreshments, because you can't talk with your mouth full.

But this is mostly the legacy of cooking for gatherings of hungry guests: appetizers buy you time. Even the simplest of appetizers - cheese and crackers, chips and dip - can take the edge off, and keep people from venturing into the kitchen to ask when the meal will be served. Done right, appetizers can cover everything from a roast that needs an extra fifteen minutes in the oven to a full-out kitchen disaster.

I made the following chicken-and-onion phyllo turnovers as part of a menu for a wedding dinner this past August. I didn't originally plan to use them as appetizers, but I had a need-to-do-everything, could-really-use-four-hands time crunch. The triangles had been made ahead to be baked from frozen, and dinner was a buffet spread, so I had the leeway to rearrange the menu a little. I had unwary volunteers, and so I put one in charge of baking turnovers and sent another out to meet the horde of hungry guests with a heaped platter and a stack of cocktail napkins. The move bought me a much-needed half-hour of breathing room.

These turnovers are loosely inspired by spanikopita, the classic Greek phyllo pastries stuffed with spinach and feta cheese. Generously buttered and filled with a mixture of sauteed chicken and caramelized onions, they're an excellent way to greet hungry guests. Make up a few bags for the freezer, and they'll buy all the time you need when cooking for holiday gatherings.

They're worth having on hand even if time's not an issue. You see, there's one more reason why I have a weakness for appetizers: as long as the oven's on, a few of these on a baking tray will tide over the hungry cook.

(Not my photograph. I definitely didn't have time to be fighting with my camera that day.)

Chicken and Onion Phyllo Turnovers

If you're in or near Vermont, I highly recommend Misty Knoll chicken.

(Makes about sixteen appetizer-sized turnovers. Suitable for freezing.)

For the filling, take one pound of boneless chicken thighs and cut them into small chunks. (Use kitchen shears if you have them - it's easier than cutting them with a knife.) Set aside in a bowl.

Cut one small yellow onion into half-moons. Finely chop a handful of fresh thyme - enough to come to about two teaspoons.

Heat a little olive oil in a medium heavy-bottomed saute pan over low heat. Add the onions to the pan, then add the chopped thyme, a quarter-teaspoon of salt, and a quarter-teaspoon of ground cinnamon. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions are soft and caramelized.

Turn the heat up a little and add the chicken. Stir occasionally until the chicken is browned and cooked all the way through. Add one tablespoon of brown sugar and a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar. If there is a lot of liquid in the pan, turn up the heat a little further and let it reduce until thick and a little sticky. Season with a sprinkling of black pepper.

Transfer the chicken to a shallow pan to cool, then refrigerate until you're ready to assemble the turnovers.

To assemble the turnovers, start by thawing an eight-ounce package of frozen phyllo dough. Melt half a stick of butter in a small bowl. Set out a large cutting board or other flat, clean work surface. Set out a baking tray. Pull the chicken mixture from the fridge.

Carefully unroll the package of phyllo. Pull out one sheet and lay it on the work surface with the long side horizontal. Brush the phyllo with melted butter. Lay a second sheet of phyllo atop the first, and brush with more melted butter.

Use a knife to cut the phyllo into thirds horizontally, so that you have three strips.

Place a heaped tablespoon of the mixture at the end of one strip. Fold up the corner to make a triangle. Fold the triangle over on itself until you reach the end of the pastry strip. Trim any excess with a knife. Set the finished triangle on the baking tray. Repeat with the remaining mixture until you run out of either phyllo or chicken.

Finished triangles can either be baked immediately, at 375F for twenty to twenty-five minutes or until golden, or they may be placed in the freezer on the baking tray, and transferred to freezer bags once fully frozen.

Frozen triangles will keep for up to a month in the freezer; they should be baked at 375F for thirty to thirty-five minutes, or until golden.

gingerbread, or, the witch speaks on all hallows eve

2010-10-28T22:54:00.004-04:00

The Brothers Grimm would have you believe that I was a bloodthirsty crone. That I built a cottage of gingerbread in the woods to lure small children, that I emprisoned Hansel and enslaved Gretel and died a terrible death in the flames of my own oven. That the children were cruelly mistreated and escaped only by their own cleverness. That I deserved my fate.

I don't begrudge the storytellers their livelihood; let them tell their tales as they will. For all I know, there lived such a witch, and such children, and all received such a fate as they deserved. But that is their story, not mine.

There was no gingerbread cottage in the woods, nor famine in the land. It was a time of plenty, and I lived in a fine, prosperous town. Mine was a dwelling of timber, with rooms upstairs and a shop below.

No potions, no charms. I dealt in sweets, in candied pleasures. Sugar mice for the children. Turkish delight and cocoa-dusted truffles for the lovers. Jordan almonds for the brides. The closest I ever came to a cauldron was a copper panning kettle. The only herb I kept was a pot of horehound, used in comfits to soothe a sore throat.

Perhaps it wasn't seemly for a woman with an unlined face and no grey in her hair to keep a shop alone. Even if I wore a band of gold threaded on a silver chain about my neck, and told those who asked that I had lost my husband to the war. The ring was my father's, the chain my mother's, and both of them long in the ground.

So I lied about being a widow. What of it? There are worse sins.

They weren't children. Gretel may not yet have been of marrying age, and Hansel still seeking a bride, but their days of short trousers and pigtails were long gone by the time they came to town.

Their father, a wealthy merchant, had been a widower. For his second wife, he chose a woman young and fair and vain. A fall from his horse made her a widow a bare month after the wedding feast. She had left her hometown to marry him. Upon his death, she chose to return, and her dead husband's children had no choice but to follow.

She had a weakness for crystallised violets. Her lady's maid had a wagging tongue. I knew of Hansel and Gretel well before either set foot in my shop.

Hansel came to me for a lover's tokens, the same as any young man of courting age in town. Boxes of marrons glacés tied in bright ribbons. Silvery coffrets of blackcurrant pastilles. Curls of chocolate-dipped orange peel, nestled in golden paper. His manner was gentle, his coin generous. I was glad for his custom, and so I took the time to listen when he spoke.

He told me of his sister Gretel, trapped in a household with a stepmother young enough to be her sister and too vain to treat her with anything but scorn. Sometimes, his gilded boxes of calissons and mendiants would be joined by a paper sack of sugar mice, though he ruefully admitted that Gretel preferred to steal crystallised violets from her stepmother out of spite.

In midwinter he brought me roses. Not a bouquet of blushing long-stemmed blooms sheathed in fine paper, but an untidy bunch of full-blown crimson blossoms wrapped in canvas. I asked them as a favor of him, for he had spoken of his family's hothouse, and my supply of rosewater had waned. I would have paid him, but he wouldn't accept my coin. Instead, I gave him a parcel of candied gingerroot, for he mentioned that Gretel had fallen ill with a cold.

Gretel came to me some weeks later. I knew her for who she was without asking her name. I read it in her clever, curious eyes. She told me she liked candied gingerroot better than sugar mice. She insisted that her brother had no sweetheart, that his boxes of buttered caramels and sugared figs became the servants' spoils. She had come to see what secrets I might be hiding.

At first I only spoke to her of my craft, describing the tricks of cutting toffee, explaining the art of whipping marshmallow sap. Later, I taught her to form rabbits and pigs from marzipan, fingers quick and light. She helped me crystalise violets in the spring, carefully turning the fragile clusters on their drying racks. She stole out early on summer mornings and I showed her how to choose the brightest, plumpest berries for pâtes de fruits.

She didn't speak of her father or her stepmother. I never asked.

With autumn came pressed cider and bonfires of crackling leaves. The streets were bright with lanterns, and spirits high. The townsfolk had coin in their pockets, and were eager to spend it. My days were busy, and I dreamed of sugar at night.

I had promised to teach Gretel to make candied apples once they were plentiful at the market, but she remained absent, even when the stalls were piled high. Hansel, too, had vanished, and I wondered if perhaps his courting had borne fruit, if a match had not been made. I could have asked the lady's maid when she came for her mistress' crystallised violets, but I chose to hold my tongue. I would hear soon enough, should there be call for Jordan almonds.

In the days before All Hallows Eve, I fashioned a house from gingerbread. A house with a steep gabled roof and wide eaves, embellished with scrolls of royal icing and silvered dragées. A house with windows of poured sugar, a chimney of mixed glacé fruits, and a harvest wreath of marzipan on the chocolate-painted front door. I made the house for my shop window: a beacon to draw young lovers on evening walks, a wonder to entice children to marvel and press their noses against the pane. A proof of my craft, to bring them inside.

The night before All Hallows Eve, Gretel knocked upon my door.

In a voice like stone, she told me Hansel had joined a merchant ship sailing for foreign lands. Her stepmother sought to betroth Gretel to a man both rich and cruel, and without her brother to stay her hand, the match would be made. She swore that this was my doing, that I had driven him away and doomed her to a hopeless fate. Did I not see that the boxes upon boxes of sweets were his excuse to speak with me, the winter roses a lover's offering? What good did it serve for me to pine for my lost husband as he rotted in the ground?

She left without waiting for an answer. As she passed through the door, she turned back briefly - to warn me that I would be sorry.

Gretel's words were mad fancies, bred of fear and sorrow. Hansel had made his escape, and had Gretel asked, I would have offered her a way to do the same. I would have told her that I was no widow, that the falsehood kept me free to practice the craft I loved. She had learned my lessons well. She could find her own way.

Let it be known that I did not spurn Hansel, for if he thought well upon me, he never said a word. I admit I would have turned him away had he asked. Though he spoke kindly, I had no love to spare for a husband.

I candied apples that night, dipping each fruit in molten sugar crimson with cochineal. Rows like a regiment of soldiers lined up along my workbench, awaiting an onslaught of teeth and tongue. When I set the last apple on the bench, shining in its sweet shell, I thought a full night of sleep well-earned.

Late in the night, a crash startled me awake.

In my workroom, I found candied apples tumbled all over the floor. Gretel stood at the bench with a mallet in hand, the house a wreck of crumbled icing and broken gingerbread. I came up behind her too quietly. Surprised, she turned and swung the mallet at my head. When I came to, the room was ablaze, the air filling with smoke and the scent of scorching sugar.

I don't believe Gretel lit the fire. More likely that she knocked the panning kettle into the fireplace and scattered the burning embers in her haste to flee. Whether she found her betrothal to a cruel and wealthy landowner punishment or penance, I couldn't say. I know nothing further of Hansel, either.

As for my fate, I will let you decide if it was deserved. I escaped the fire with my life, but lost my craft. Burns left my hands scarred and trembling, too ruined for delicate work.

There is still no cottage in the woods. I started afresh in another town. No sweets, no candied pleasures. I deal in bread, a plain trade of yeast and flour. No iced buns for the children, nor brioche for the lovers, but boules and baguettes for ordinary folk. Now that my hair is completely grey and my face fully lined, I no longer lie about being a widow, for no-one cares to ask.

And if on All Hallows Eve I should make biscuits studded with chocolate and candied gingerroot, in memory of the craft I lost, that is no-one's business but my own.

Ginger Chocolate Chip Cookies

Mars and Hershey's might do for the trick-or-treaters, but these make for far more pleasant nibbling if you're waiting to hand out candy at the door.

(Makes one dozen. Dough will freeze.)

In a mixing bowl, cream together one-and-a-quarter sticks of unsalted softened butter and half a cup of brown sugar.

Beat in one egg, one teaspoon of ground ginger, half a teaspoon of vanilla, and a quarter-teaspoon of salt.

Stir in one teaspoon of baking powder, followed by one cup of flour.

Stir in one cup of dark chocolate chips, and one-third of a cup of finely chopped crystallized ginger.

Allow the dough chill in the fridge until firm, then divide into a dozen balls (dough may be frozen at this point.)

To bake, preheat the oven to 350F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Place the cookie dough balls on the baking sheets, and flatten them slightly with the palm of your hand. Bake the cookies for twelve to fifteen minutes, or until golden brown.

Allow cookies to cool for five minutes on baking sheets before transferring to a cooling rack.

Serve cool.

dreadfully detailed disclaimers

2010-10-25T22:24:00.001-04:00

I am always surprised when people tell me they cook from my blog.

I know it sounds ridiculous. It is, after all, the ostensible purpose of this whole enterprise. I should be delighted to know that I'm not sitting on the stage in an empty theatre, monologuing in the dark. Indeed, I am delighted to know that I'm not sitting on the stage in an empty theatre, monologuing in the dark. I'm glad to have an audience. But - to push the metaphor further - I'm a little unsure of my lines.

There's a difference between inviting people to partake of a meal and offering advice on how to prepare a meal. The idea that people trust my taste in food without having tasted it, that they're willing to believe that what I think is good is, well, good, is just a little scary. Knowing that there are people out there who trust my ability to give directions, to the point where they'll prepare food accordingly, is still a little unnerving. Two hundred entries and counting, and I still have the faint urge to write a dreadfully detailed disclaimer disavowing all responsibility for anything that could or might go wrong.

(The fact that I can write dreadfully detailed disclaimers disavowing all responsibility for anything that could or might go wrong is unnerving on a whole other level.)

Even more surprising, perhaps, is discovering that people not only cook from my blog, but learn to cook from my blog. There's nothing like being asked for a recipe for such-and-such (and discovering its marked absence) to cue the urge to write an entirely different dreadfully detailed disclaimer - one that explains that the collection of entries is by no means a complete or comprehensive overview of culinary how-tos.

Granted, I'm not setting out to write my own version of the Joy of Cooking. I have my particular areas of interest, and barely touch on many others. Still, this doesn't explain some of the gaps in my recipe index. For example, I don't know how I managed to go three years without ever posting a frittata recipe.

A frittata lies on the egg continuum, somewhere between omelette and quiche. A mixture of eggs and whatever's on hand, it's a way of making a respectable dinner out of odds and ends, particularly good if you have unexpected guests. In terms of difficulty, it's not all that different to making an omelette (no rolling or folding, even), and nearly as fast.

All of which is excellent news. Thinking about dreadfully detailed disclaimers has made me hungry, and I believe there are eggs in the fridge calling my name.

(No photos. It always gets eaten before I think to get out the camera.)

Chicken, Potato, and Onion Frittata

This particular version is my way of using up leftovers from a roast chicken dinner, but you can vary the fillings as you please.

(Serves one for two, perhaps three meals.)

Shred one leftover chicken breast into bite-size pieces. Cut one leftover roast potato (three or four baby potatoes) into rough dice.

Heat a decent splash of olive oil in an ovenproof pan (nonstick is useful, but not essential) over low heat. Slice up one white onion or a few shallots, and fry until sweet and caramelized. Sprinkle with coarse salt and a few teaspoons of chopped fresh thyme. Add the chicken and the potatoes, and give everything a stir.

Beat three or four eggs in a bowl with a splash of milk, enough to turn the mixture pale yellow. Pour the beaten egg into the pan.

Cook until the frittata starts to look set around the edges, but is still wobbly in the middle.

Transfer the pan to a broiler on low heat. Cook until the top is set and has those tasty-looking golden brown spots.

(For faster cooking, you can treat the mixture as you would an omelette, lifting up the edges as they cook to let the uncooked mixture flow underneath, in which case you'll only want it briefly under a broiler on high heat.)

Remove from heat. Serve with green salad, and a dollop of tapenade or other olive spread on the side.

world enough and time

2010-10-16T12:41:00.004-04:00

Someday, when I have the time, my blogging to-do list will be organized. I will no longer have fifteen to twenty unpublished posts in various states of completion. I will delete the half-formed thoughts that were never going to go anywhere. And I will reorganize the bits that might be a starting point for a post sometime in the future.

Someday, I won't leave restaurant reviews to languish for so long that they'll no longer be worth finishing when I get back around to them. I'll recognize passing fancies for what they are, so that I don't have random notes about syllabub and earl grey sachertorte staring at me every time I open my "idle thoughts" Word file. Someday, I'll be disciplined enough that I won't need an "idle thoughts" Word file.

Or so I've been telling myself for the past two years. It's all become rather moot in the past two months.

Lately, I haven't had to worry about finding the time to blog. I haven't been scrambling to get posts published so that they don't get lost before I start the next round. I haven't been trying to keep abreast of everything I've cooked. I haven't been doing much cooking at all.

I've been sidetracked from my plans to move to Sydney. My parents aren't quite willing to let go of their dream of having a lawyer in the family, and so everything's been up in the air. I'm not really in a place where I can cook new and interesting things, but I've got a lot of empty space in my schedule.

"Someday," it seems, is now. A tentative glance at the disaster that is my drafts folder reveals that I have no shortage of material. Even if I can't cook, I can certainly blog. So until I get back into a cooking space, I'll be going over some of the dishes from the past three years that I just didn't have time to write up the first time around.

Let me begin with a recipe from the I-really-meant-to-write-about-this-honestly-I-swear-it-just-got-away-from-me list.

Tarte Tatin was supposed to be the logical follow-up to my puff pastry tutorial. It's a French classic: an upside-down tart with a puff pastry base and a topping of caramelized apples. Of all the things you can do with homemade puff pastry, it's one of the simplest, and possibly the most delicious.

When I made this, I remembered to take photos and I wrote up the recipe, but the blog post got lost somewhere between my retelling of Peter Rabbit and my first O.N.C.E. dinner. I think this dates from winter of 2008, so it's a belated post by well over a year. I'm consoling myself with the fact that I rediscovered it in time for this year's apple season, at least.

Tarte Tatin

Instructions for homemade puff pastry may be found here.

(Makes one seven-inch tart.)

Set a seven-inch, oven-safe pan (cast iron is good) over very low heat. Place a quarter-stick of salted butter in the pan and let it melt, swirling to coat. Sprinkle over a quarter-cup of white sugar and a generous pinch of salt.

Take two large apples (I like Granny Smith, but any tart cooking variety will do), peel them, and core them. Cut the apples into eigths and arrange them in the pan in rings. Don’t worry if they don't fit quite properly – they're going to cook down. Bring the heat up to low.

Keep the contents of the pan at a steady simmer. The apples will soften, and the liquid in the pan will thicken and darken. (If you're using a dark-colored pan, like cast iron, dip a spoon in the liquid every so often to check on the color.) Once the liquid turns deep caramel, turn off the heat.

Preheat the oven to 400F.

Roll out a square of puff pastry to a size a little larger than the pan. Place it over the apples. Cut five slits in the pastry, radiating outwards. (This helps the pastry to rise.)

Place the pan in the oven with a baking tray beneath, just in case the apple mixture bubbles and drips. Bake for forty to fifty minutes, or until the pastry puffs and browns.

Remove the pan from the oven, and turn the tart out on a serving plate. If any of the apples get stuck, use a fork to rearrange them. Serve immediately with whipped cream or ice-cream on the side.

saga of the delicious red

2010-10-10T16:38:00.035-04:00

According to an old Italian expression, se non è vero, è ben trovato. "Even if it's not true, it's well-conceived."

With that in mind, let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, there was a law student named Virgin. (Her name is neither accurate nor true, but that’s beside the point.) Virgin, like most law students, was stressed and rather unhappy. And like most students, she had developed various coping mechanisms.

Virgin’s coping mechanism was alcohol. Top-shelf bourbon. Imported beer. Red wine.

One day, Virgin, after a long day of reading, briefing, and reviewing, went to her fridge for a drink. (Or several.) Unfortunately, she was out of beer, out of wine, and the top-shelf bourbon in her liquor cabinet was not something for a night of heavy drinking. Virgin grumbled, for it was cold outside, but she shrugged on her jacket, put on shoes, grabbed her keys and wallet, and trudged down to the liquor store.

No lights were on in the liquor store. “Closed For Inventory” read the sign. Virgin sighed, uttered a few words that are best not repeated, and turned to make her way back home.

But what was this? Across the road from the liquor store, sandwiched between the 7-11 and a laundromat, stood a dimly lit package store. Virgin crossed the road to investigate more closely. Perhaps there would be beer.

There was beer. The options were dismal. She found something else: a box wine by the name of Delicious Red. Virgin knew that box wine was a dicey proposition, but decided to take her chances. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Sadly, the Delicious Red, though very red, was not delicious in any way, shape, or form. Even the European trick of mixing it with Coca-Cola didn’t help. And the hangover the next day was brutal. Virgin was left with four and a half liters of red wine she had no intention of drinking.

(Maybe Keystone Light would have been the wiser choice.)

What does one do with four and a half liters of dreadful red wine?

The same thing one does with any wine that isn't fit to drink: use it for cooking. And so Virgin went to class with the red wine hidden in juice bottles, and passed them on to a friend who had plans for braised pork.

Or had plans, at least. They only lasted until said friend tasted the wine.

Cloyingly sweet, unpleasantly sticky. Echoes of Welch’s Grape in the body. Overtones of Jolly Rancher candy in the nose. The Delicious Red had all the character of Manischewitz, albeit slightly less viscous. Not a wine for braising pork, unless one wanted candied stew.

Instead, Virgin's friend poured a bottle of the Delicious Red into a pot and added sugar and mulling spices. Reducing the liquid, she added quartered pears and hoped for the best.

After a long, slow simmer, the pears turned a lovely shade of deep red, the syrup, spicy with cherry notes. They paired remarkably well with chocolate souffle, and were good with ice-cream too.

Thus were mulled-wine pears born.

Mulled-Wine Pears

Don’t use a wine you’d drink for this. Instead, use the sweetest, most awful cheap red wine you can find.

(Serves one with leftovers, if one likes pears. They’ll keep in the fridge for a week.)

Set a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan on the stove. Pour in four cups of sweet red wine. Add a teaspoon of mulling spice (cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, allspice, orange peel). Bring to a boil, and allow to reduce by half.

Meanwhile, take four firm pears, peel them, core them, and cut them into quarters.

Stir two or three teaspoons of sugar into the poaching liquid. Gently slide the pears in.

Cook at a simmer until the liquid reduces to a light syrup (about an hour or so), then turn off the heat. Allow to cool.

Serve warm with something soft and chocolately. Leftovers are also good over ice-cream.

a cookie for Bobbie Sue

2010-10-04T18:04:00.003-04:00

I'm not much of a specialty baker.

For all my meddling and reluctance to follow a recipe directly, I don't do much in the way of adaptations for dietary restrictions. Tinkering with seasonings and proportions is one thing, but making wholesale substitutions is quite another. I know where I am with whole eggs versus egg whites. When it comes to egg replacer, all bets are off.

I play it safe, seeking out recipes for given restrictions that don't use (or need) the problem ingredients in the first place. Gluten-free cookie? Try a delinquent macaron. Vegan tea treat? Have a slice of banana bread. Sugar-free baked good?

Er. Did you try Googling for "nearest specialty bakery?"

I carried out a few experiments in sugar-free baking during college. There was a lot of Splenda involved, and the results were terrible. (File under "youthful stupidity, in the name of." Blame the Atkins diet. Lesson learned: don't date anyone who doesn't eat pasta.)

Even after I gained more experience in the kitchen, I had no need for sugar-free baked goods in my repertoire, and so I never bothered revisiting that particular dark chapter of my culinary endeavors.

Then I met Bobbie Sue.

Bobbie Sue, Bella's mother, is a spectacular baker. From rich, moist blueberry buckle, to flaky snickerdoodles, to tangy rhubarb pie, her creations defy guests to not go back for seconds. Unfortunately, Bobbie Sue can't eat sugar for health reasons, and while she looks on with good grace during the dessert course at holiday gatherings (and urges guests to take seconds), it still seems unfair.

My chance to remedy that came at a Fourth of July potluck. Short on time, I decided to bake shortbread. Casting about for seasonings, I came across a package of Trader Joe's cranberry, pecan and rosemary snack mix. Lining up all my ingredients on the counter, it struck me: sugar isn't essential to the structure of shortbread.

The rest was easy: skip the sugar. Throw in an egg yolk for extra binding. Add vanilla to enhance the sweetness of the dried cranberries.

The result? Delicate, buttery cranberry-pecan rosemary sandies. Cookies that Bobbie Sue could eat. A decent sugar-free recipe for my repertoire.

And not a Splenda packet in sight.

Cranberry-Pecan Rosemary Sandies

If you live near a Trader Joe's, you can use one package of their rosemary cranberry pecans in this recipe, instead of buying the ingredients separately.

These work well as part of a cookie assortment, and also make an interesting addition to a cheese tray.

Appended note: These are technically sugar-free, in that the recipe doesn't call for sugar, but as one of my commenters points out, dried cranberries are sweetened. Double-check with your dietary restrictions as necessary.

(Makes two dozen. Dough may be frozen.)

In a mixing bowl, combine one stick of softened unsalted butter with one egg yolk, a half-teaspoon of salt, a half-teaspoon of vanilla, and a half-teaspoon of dried rosemary. Work in one cup of flour, a quarter-cup at a time, until you have a sandy dough. Mix in half a cup of toasted salted pecans and half a cup of dried cranberries.

Turn the dough (it will be quite crumbly) out on a sheet of wax paper. Form the dough into a one-and-a-half-inch log, roll it up in the wax paper, and chill in the fridge for an hour.

Preheat the oven to 325F. Line two baking trays with parchment paper.

Cut the log into two halves. Cut each half into a dozen slices, and arrange the slices on the baking trays. (Dough may be frozen at this point.)

Bake for fourteen to fifteen minutes, or until browned at the edges. Allow to cool for five minutes on baking trays before transferring to a cooling rack. Cool fully before serving.

omreeh. omreeht. omelette.

2010-09-20T14:51:00.003-04:00

"There are no Japanese restaurants anywhere in the world outside Japan that serve [okonomiyaki], so terribly evocative, both simple and subtle, down-to-earth and sophisticated. I was five years old again, I had never been out of sight of my Nishio-san, and I was screaming, broken-hearted, my tastebuds in a trance. I devoured my okonomiyaki and my eyes glazed over as I uttered faint little cries of delight.

Only when I had eaten everything on my plate did I notice that the others were staring politely, embarrassed.

"Every country has its own table manners," I muttered. "You've just discovered the Belgians'."

Owing to my most recent geographic upheaval, the concepts of home and belonging have been on my mind of late. Like many third culture kids, I waffle when I'm asked where I'm from. I can't point to any fixed place on the globe and say "This is home." I know that it is sometimes easier to live someplace where you don't fit in at all than someplace where you fit in just well enough to make your quirks and missteps all the more prominent.

And so I've turned to a book by a TCK for the Fall 2010 edition of Novel Food. Ni d'Ève ni d'Adam (titled Tokyo Fiancée in English) is an autobiographical novel by Amélie Nothomb, a French-language Belgian author whose parents were diplomats. Born in Japan, Nothomb spent her childhood living in various Asian countries, re-entering Belgium only when she began her university degree.

Tokyo Fiancée describes Amélie's return to Japan at the age of twenty-one, and the unconventional relationship she embarks upon with Rinri, a Japanese student she meets through a posted ad for French-language tutoring. The story is a wry commentary on identity and belonging, a quietly subversive non-love story.

Cuisine is a recurring theme in the novel, used to illustrate the fascination that Amélie and Rinri each have with a culture not their own. Amélie is charmed by the delicacy of Japanese cuisine; Rinri delights in preparing fat-laden Western-style dishes because they are the antithesis of meals with his tradition-bound family. In one scene, Rinri sets the table with a selection of Japanese delicacies ("sesame spinach, a chaudfroid of quails' eggs with chiso, and sea urchins") and urges Amélie to eat. He then produces for his own repast a plate of mayonnaise-slathered salami.

Food also marks key moments in the development of the relationship. The major breakthrough in Amélie and Rinri's first French lesson is moving from "omreeeh" to "omreeeht" in the pronounciation of "omelette." Amélie's Proustian rediscovery of okonomiyaki is followed by a charmingly ridiculous dinner of cheese fondue, Japanese-style, which involves "polystyrene cheese" and "imputrescible bread." And there's the chawanmushi ("flan made with seafood and black mushrooms in fish fumet") that Amélie - trapped at the dinner party from hell - never gets the chance to taste.

I toyed with the idea of making chawanmushi, but it's a finicky dish that requires practice to perfect. Okonomiyaki - stuffed pancake with shrimp, cabbage, and ginger - is more forgiving, but I've never been a fan of the plum sauce that is poured over the finished dish. Instead, I decided to go with an "omreeet" made with some of the key ingredients found in okonomiyaki, aiming for a dish that would be acceptable to both Eastern and Western tastes.

The finished dish is quick and simple, consisting of shrimp stir-fried with ginger, garlic and green onions, lightly seasoned with sesame oil, and rolled in a thin sheet of egg. I imagine that Amélie could eat it with plum sauce if she liked. Rinri, if he insisted, could douse it in ketchup.

Shrimp Omelette with Ginger and Garlic

Owes some inspiration to this recipe. Adding rice to the stir-fried shrimp will produce shrimp omurice.

(Makes one.)

Beat two eggs with a pinch of salt until light and slightly foamy. Set aside.

Heat a little vegetable oil (canola or grapeseed is good) in wok or a large frying pan over medium-high heat. Add two finely minced garlic cloves and a half-teaspoon of grated ginger. Cook until the garlic is fragrant, then add four to five ounces of cleaned, peeled shrimp, either fresh or frozen. Add a sprinkling of salt, and stir well with a wooden spoon. Once the shrimp are pink and firm, add a drizzle of sesame oil and stir in a handful of finely chopped green onions. Remove the pan from heat. Transfer the stir-fried shrimp to a bowl.

Set the pan back on the burner. Add a little more oil to the pan. Pour in the beaten eggs, and swirl to cover the pan in a crepe-thin layer. Cook until the omelette starts to look set in the middle, then add the stir-fried shrimp to the pan. Remove the pan from heat.

Fold the omelette over in thirds, the way you'd fold a letter. Transfer carefully to a plate. Garnish with extra green onion. Serve immediately.