Roving Gastronome: The Blog

Three recipes under consideration here at Roving Gastronome HQ, aka Winslow Place, aka the Astoria Museum of Obsolete Technology, aka David Bowie Fan Club, Queens Branch:

1) Six-Minute Chocolate Cake

Under consideration? Hell, I’m eating it right now! It’s from the Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home book, and I’m sure I’ve praised it before. It is the consummate mood-lifter. I don’t usually eat for mental health (by which I really mean, eat a pint of ice cream while watching chick flicks to make myself feel better). But sometimes I crave a little sweet. And this ridiculous cake (as in ridiculously easy) has a proven track record: I ate it practically every other day while I lived in Cairo, and got through the year without jumping to my death from atop my pile of Arabic homework.

2) Caramelized Onion Tart with Poppy Seeds, Bacon and Dates

OK, I already ate this too. Except I didn’t have the poppy seeds, or the creme fraiche it called for. So I used nothing and yogurt, respectively. This is from Ana Sortun’s fantastic book, Spice, which Tamara has already cooked like a madwoman from. But I was out of town for that (and so couldn’t avert the Starch Stampede), so last week I flipped open the book, I Ching-like, and there was bacon and dates. Like a sign from heaven!

The upshot is that, with the yogurt substitution, it basically wound up tasting like the standard pasta I make, a Greek-before-effed-it-up thing with yogurt, caramelized onions and bacon. Now I’m wondering if I should add dates to that?

3) Central Park Egg

“Into a 12-ounce glass draw 1 ounce of blood orange syrup and 1 ounce of pineapple syrup. Into this break an egg, add a few dashes of acid phosphate and a little finely shaved ice. Shake thoroughly and fill with carbonated water, as is done in preparing all egg phosphates. Strain into a clean glass and serve. Charge 10 cents.”

I’m bawling. I don’t know why. I wasn’t even alive when The Dispenser’s Formulary or Soda Water Guide was published, in 1915. I don’t even know what acid phosphate is. Or that things with the word “egg” in the name actually had an egg in them (you’re saying “Duh!” but I’m thinking “Egg cream!”).

Our friend Katie gave Peter this book, and John, if you’re reading this, yes, it should’ve been yours. But spring has sprung, and a whole season of refreshing fizzy-water drinks is about to open. I’m also considering the Mexican Mint Glace (”The name is suggested by the fact that the beverage duplicates the colors of the Mexican flag”), the Hyacintha (American saffron, juniper berries and dates are the first three ingredients–gets crazier from there–but to be fair, I think it’s a fermented business) and, what the heck, the Celery Cocoa (just what it sounds like).

Yes, I’m getting completely stir-crazy. Hopefully when I’m done reading the next book in the stack, Darra Goldstein’s The Georgian Feast(sour plum sauce? Whaaa?), and done eating all this damn cake I made, summer will be here, for real.

PS: I planted grapevines. Can’t wait.

Peter pointed out this nice essay in the NY Times by Kate Stone Lombardi: The Joy of (Still) Cooking.

She’s practical–talking about the fun of listening to music while you cook, and of using up all the leftovers–but I think I like this bit best:

I equate feeding my family with love, which is why I cannot imagine stopping now. What would that say to my husband? What would it say to me? I have a friend who opens the freezer every night and selects a Lean Cuisine to microwave for herself and her husband. They seem very happily married, which remains a complete mystery to me.

Yes, the idea of being a nice wife and cooking a nice dinner for my lovely husband makes me gag. But the practice of it is actually quite enjoyable. Just one of those postfeminism disconnects. And of course it helps that Peter does the same for me.

Stuff White People Like gave a shoutout to dinner parties recently. With 743 comments and counting, it seems to have struck a special chord.

This is either bad for my professional future (I am engaging in something that everyone is about to be _totally over_), or it’s really really good–I mean, there are tons of white people in the world, right? And a lot of them need me and Tamara to tell them how to have dinner parties.

First, of course, we’d tell them that they don’t have to worry about most of the crap mentioned in the SWPL post. In fact, leave out the Us Weekly! My god–what kind of beasts would scour their house clean of Us Weekly to impress their friends? They need new friends!

Because Peter isn’t as much a fan of found art as I am, he went on to tinker with the flipbook.

OK, fine, so it no longer threatens to give you a seizure–I _guess_ that’s an improvement. Still…I liked the simple insta-elegance of the first one–well, if you can call me sticking my whole avocado-covered hand in my mouth elegant.

Here’s the link to New Improved Sunday Night Dinner a la Mexicana Flipbook.

File under Found Art:

Last Sunday, Karl took 526 photos. (That’s a lot, but not a lot more than he usually takes.)

Peter strung it together with his movie-maker software, and added a little sound loop.

(It’s 8MB–takes a sec to load.)

(What we made, if you’re curious: guacamole–with Mexican avocados, of course; jicama sprinkled with chile and salt–that’s what the French-fry-looking-things are; sopes with goat cheese and salsa roja–the little fried guys; chicken broth with mushrooms and epazote; duck legs with red mole; wild rice; steamed purslane and chayote; Caesar salad; flambe bananas with chocolate sauce, which wound up being the nastiest-looking dessert ever. Spaten provided the beer–classy!)

Every time I read anything about Alice Waters and how much she relishes local, adorable, fresh-garden-soil-strewn, covered-in-a-hand-knitted-cozy produce, I want to fucking strangle her.

One perfect peach for dessert? Thanks for the tip, lady.

Your little pig that you fed on nothing but green garlic shoots, and then when you ate it, it tasted like garlic? Well, isn’t that niiiice.

But I live in the real world, not California, and transforming supermarket food into something tasty for dinner takes more than slicing it in half and putting it on a plate and garnishing it with fairy dust.

But then…then I actually read a nice interview with the nice lady. She’s pretty freakin’ infectious. I agree with her 100 percent when she says food should be the No. 1 issue in the presidential race. And of course Edible Schoolyard is what we need more of.

Here’s the link: Go Ask Alice (on Slate.com).

Oh, to be in Californ-I-A. I ate some kale tonight. Does that count?

More on my current travel experiences in a bit, but first I just want to say:

Current models of the Easy-Bake Oven are styled on the outside to look like a microwave oven.

That’s so retarded and marks the downfall of society in such a ghastly way that I can’t even think what else to say.

I am proud to be from Albuquerque when I click over to Duke City Fix and see the new tagline “More Dick, Less Knipfing.” See, DK is a newscaster and, uh…I guess you had to grow up there.

Anyway, I went to the equally obscure (sort of) city of Pittsburgh this weekend, partially to see Loretta Lynn sing and partially to visit Peter’s friend from grad school, who’s just moved there and illustrates the shocking truth of NYC real estate by living in a house a million times nicer than hours and paying about a tenth as much. Or something like that.

Anyway, really, the point of this post is to say I’m glad I got my creative desperation-cooking juices flowing in the kitchen last week before we went (I did finally go grocery shopping on Wednesday, but I still cooked a pantry-style meal: sloppy joes, succotash, and some radishes rattling around the bottom drawer).

Because as Peter and I are puttering around the kitchen, getting out pans, turning on the burners to make dinner, Gaby says, “Oh, I should’ve mentioned at the store–we don’t have any salt.”

Grrrrrrrrrkkkkreeeeeeekkk. Or however you spell the sound of the record being quickly ground down to a stop.

Wha?

Gasp.

Several more dramatic pauses for emphasis.

…

…

OK. Have I made myself clear? Cooking without salt is a little hard to imagine. It’s every cook’s not-so-secret trick. I mean–you can’t boil pasta without salting the water, right? The Constitution would probably spontaneously combust in its little secret vault. The Starship Enterprise would fall into a black hole and never recover. The earth would flatten out, and I’d probably fall off the edge, to where the dragons are.

Peter offered to run out and get salt. I, typically, dug in my heels. NO. We’d manage. We’re creative people. We had one packet of Chinese-takeout soy sauce, half a bottle of reduced-sodium soy sauce, a jar of anchovies and half a pint of olives. And some parmesan. We’d wring the umami out of those babies and whip up a damn fine dinner–no extra grocery shopping required.

Luckily, my dinner plan consisted of making some grocery-made lamb sausages into a pasta sauce. Those sausages were probably already loaded with salt. I’d been planning to add olives anyway–I added more. I hacked the rind off the parmesan and threw it in the sauce with the canned tomatoes, that probably had salt in them too.

Peter made a Caesar salad dressing heavy on the anchovies. He grated extra-coarse parmesan cheese.

I smothered the butternut squash with feta cheese.

I glugged so much soy sauce in the pasta water that it looked like it had come out of lead pipes that had been rusting for three hundred years.

At the last second, I panicked and added an anchovy to the pasta sauce too.

It all turned out totally freakin’ fine. And for once in my life, I actually had a meal involving feta cheese and olives where I didn’t think, Gah, this stuff is good, but it’s soooo salty.

Lesson learned. New Year’s resolution: Less salt, maybe. Definitely less Knipfing.

Using up all the odd bits of food in the fridge is one of the kitchen challenges I really like. It’s like a card game where the goal is to get rid of all your cards. (And not go out in the freezing cold and buy groceries.)

Due to the high winds advisory and my looming deadlines, leaving the house is the last thing I want to do…which has led to me shouting “Rummy!” triumphantly (uh, and figuratively) in the kitchen the last couple of nights.

Sunday, we were cheating a little, with leftovers from Kabab Cafe, plus a handful of green beans. I got into the kitchen just in time to deter Peter from mixing the green beans with a can of black beans he’d found in the pantry. My rule with leftovers and slim pickings is to make as many discrete dishes as possible–loaves ‘n’ fishes, fishes ‘n’ loaves.

So instead, Peter sauteed the green beans, while I mashed the black beans up with garlic and some chicken stock. (What, no lard? I told you, it’s slim pickings…)

There was some fresh mozzarella in the fridge, left over from an over-ambitious purchase the previous week. I melted a bunch of that on top of the beans, and threw the last of a bag of poor, frost-bitten corn tortillas from the freezer in the oven to warm up. Then, in a great “Rummy!” moment, I fished out about a quarter-cup of green tomatillo salsa from the fridge, the leftover bit of a Herdez can. In my mental fridge inventory, it had been sitting back there, nagging at me for months. Ha–gotcha!

So we had melty, cheesy black beans, some fresh, crispy green beans (with a few more even left over from that) and reheated assorted rice and squab tastiness from Ali. Something about the black beans and the garlic and the cheese and salsa just struck me as super-bachelor food–the kind you cook in college, or just after. In a good way.

The next night…obviously the kitchen situation was even bleaker, but the weather was even nastier. Windows were getting blown out of Manhattan high rises.

There was a chicken carcass in the fridge, stuck there post-stock-making, hoping I would pick the last bits of meat off of it. Since I was desperate, I did - while I was reheating my six last green beans for lunch, with an egg. The chicken was in such miserable little bits that it wasn’t even appetizing to put in a soup. While I picked, I thought…

And I remembered AV saying how she’d just whipped up some croquettes, casually, one day, as you do. To me, croquettes are a weird thing you get in an automat in Amsterdam, and I’m not entirely sure I like them. But there’s something appealing about molten deep-fried goo on a severely miserable day, which I guess is why the Dutch like them so much.

So, I figured: chicken croquettes, and, uh, frozen peas. I looked in the pantry: one potato, and some marinated artichoke hearts. (And while I was looking, I saw a big, unopened bag of panko.) OK, so chicken croquettes, potato croquettes and artichoke croquettes, with super-crispy panko breading. And frozen peas. I could use the frozen last stems of dill out on the porch for the chicken…

Dinnertime rolled around and I was actually excited to start this deep-frying adventure. Until I realized we didn’t have any milk to make a bechamel–the goo that binds croquettes together and sears the roof of your mouth.

This led to a dilemma–should Peter go to the store for milk and all the other millions of groceries we needed? In that case, why would we have something gross like croquettes for dinner?

Then I saw the container of heavy cream. NO. I put my foot down: no grocery shopping–I’d use cream thinned out with chicken stock, dammit, and we would triumph!

So I did all the croquette-making. I was tempted to do a Thor’s Love Kroket treatment, but since I’d never made even simple croquettes before, I didn’t quite trust myself with the complex architecture required. Also, having multiple kinds of croquette, rather than one big, potentially gross one, was more in keeping with my leftover-cooking rule.

Oh, and–ultimate “Rummy!”–I breaded the very last remaining slabs of mozzarella (that shit would not go away!), to fry those up too. Made a little tomato sauce on the side, with tomatoes from freezer and haggard bits of windowsill basil and long-forgotten olives.

Then I fried everything. Did you know mashed potato just disappears in hot oil? I did not. But after peering into a disturbingly light panko crust and contemplating the emptiness at the core of the universe, I do now.

So we lit our Delft-pattern blue-and-white candles (very gezellig) and ate our remaining three types of fried food. And frozen peas (I put mint in at the last minute–one more herb salvage). The mozz sticks Peter dubbed better than Hooters’ because there were no distracting boobs around. The chicken ones tasted just like real Dutch kroketten, for better or worse–the dill gave them that someone-tried-to-season-this-but-with-what-exactly? mystery flavor.

Sadly, we did not have any beer left in the fridge with which to consume our fried snacks. If we’d been proper bachelor diners, we would’ve.

But at least there’s still a pot of frying oil sitting on the stove. Rummy, dude.

The Good (and I can’t believe I’m saying this): Alex Witchel’s column in the New York Times yesterday (“To the Things That Remain”). A lovely ode to the vanishing lifestyle of smoking-with-dinner, via a time-warp steakhouse in Chicago. The accompanying recipe, however, made me not want to eat there: iceberg lettuce with salami and shrimp? I can feel the nasty texture in my mouth right now.

The Bad (c’mon, really, this is why I bothered to write this post): the new issue of Cook’s Illustrated, in which the reader’s tips reach a new low. I can no longer be shocked by any tip involving profligate use of Saran wrap, but I was appalled to read a suggestion from Ari Wolfe of Princeton, NJ. When he found himself without mini marshmallows (an “important garnish” for hot chocolate), he got out his kitchen shears and spray-can of PAM and got to work on normal-size marshmallows.

Let’s just pause while we contemplate the complete idiocy of this, shall we? I hope also that during this pause, Ari Wolfe is googling himself and discovering that at least one person in the world is giving him a reality check.

Not only did he see a lack of mini marshmallows as a problem and then concoct an overly complicated solution to that problem, but then he felt compelled to write to Cook’s Illustrated and tell them about it.

Dude. I hope, I pray you are also doing something good with your time, like adopting profoundly deaf orphan children with leprosy and speech impediments.

Now I’d better get back to constructive, world-saving work. But maybe I need a mug of hot chocolate to get in the mood…