Roving Gastronome: The Blog

Tamara was on WNYC earlier today talking about how some New Yorkers prefer to hang out and eat at home, instead of going to fancy restaurants–crazy, I know! But when you’re picking between fancy restaurant and dinner in Tamara’s backyard, well, the choice is pretty clear.

Listen up here:

For those of you just stopping by, “supper club” is not code for “crazy sex romp,” as some people commenting online seem to think. What the…? Can someone explain to me what era that euphemism is from?

I’m a lazy blogger. I rarely have time or inclination to seek out other food and travel bloggers. The ones I know and like have all come to me (The Homesick Texan, A Thinking Stomach, Daily Gluttony, etc) via comments, which I greatly appreciate.

And now, thanks to a comment on a Flickr photo, I’ve encountered another one, which is gorgeous eye candy and a topic after my own heart: Water Boils. It’s dedicated to boxed lunches.

When I was little, I was entirely responsible for my school lunches. This meant I bought a Peanuts-branded sandwich cookbook from that Scholastic catalog in third grade, and learned to make a million variations on peanut butter sandwich. This meant I would take things like canned sardines and Saltine crackers to the cafeteria, in my purple ‘Disco’ lunchbox. I was not exactly popular. But I really liked my lunches.

And now, as an occasional freelancer in the wastelands of Midtown, I still take great satisfaction in packing my lunch. No $7 sandwich for me, thanks. No heaping mound of halal-whatever-with-MSG. Occasionally I get a fussy officemate who laments the presence of garlic, but occasionally too I get a neighbor who says, “Ooooh, that smells great! What’d you bring?”

Anyhoo, I’m happy to see someone else in the world is just as obsessed–OK, who am I kidding, a hell of a lot more obsessed–with boxed lunches. Must get me a tiffin.

(Thanks so much to all the interesting people who stop by here. I need to get out more.)

So, paella went OK. I mean, it tasted great, and everyone ate well and seemed to have a good time. There are some pics over here.

But.

I got more pleasure out of cooking dinner last week–one of those dinners that starts with, ‘Crap–the fridge is empty!’

Then I remembered the beet greens (shamelessly scavenged at the Greenmarket, as the guys offer to rip them off the beet bunches, and then they just wind up in a heap on the ground).

As I was chopping up the garlic to use as a base for those, I thought some yogurt would go nicely, and we had just a little bit of the thick Greek stuff left. So I crushed an extra garlic clove for that.

The yogurt made me think of the Turkish combo of poached eggs with garlic yogurt. We had a lot of eggs, and they weren’t gettin’ any fresher. Presto, protein.

The beet greens were wedged in a bag with a bunch of radishes (the thing I actually paid for at the beet-farmer’s stall–I’m not that shameless). I figured since the beet greens (and heck, throw in some of the radish tops) were going to be sharp and garlicky, maybe I could tone down the radishes by simmering them in butter–but not so much they lost their crunch, which would be necessary contrast to the soft greens. We also had some leftover beef stock, so I threw in a glug of that, and went and ripped a handful of chives out of the front patch, for color.

Then starch. Something about the greens made me think: polenta. Which we didn’t have. But we did have semolina. Not such an exciting texture, but a perfectly good starch, especially once I added the last of a container of heavy cream that had been sitting at the back of the top shelf for a looong time (ultra-pasteurization can be a good thing, I guess). And grated in some random cheese that had been otherwise unappreciated.

Poached the eggs. Put ‘em on a bed of semolina mush. Scooped on the veg. Dolloped the yogurt. Sprinkled Turkish pepper on the eggs for color and a smidge of heat. Beautiful. Nutritious.

But what was most exciting about the meal was the way my brain was firing as I made it. I didn’t have to sit and plan–I just started working, and while my hands did their bit, my brain was running two steps ahead: ‘Gonna need cheese for the semolina. Right–the cacciowhatever, get rid of that finally… Radishes look so sickly when they’re sauteed. Good–give those chives a little action.’ It’s a feeling that people who don’t yet know how to cook can’t understand–for them, cooking is all about cleaning dishes, lingering smells, other drawbacks. But once you get an inkling of this feeling, you’re hooked.

This feeling is also the closest thing to working in a restaurant kitchen–that’s more adrenaline, but the same autopilot coordination. But at home, of course, you also get to be creative.

Which is why more people should aspire to be home cooks, not schmancy resto chefs. And why more people should cook dinner for themselves and a few friends, rather than for twice-a-year, planning-requiring blowouts. If you don’t believe me, read Robert Farrar Capon for inspiration.

End sermon.

Seeing how I’m shockingly slow on these things, probably everyone already saw the video of Christopher Walken making roast chicken and pears, oh, months ago. But it’s pretty great to see this man speak so calmly while he caresses this carcass.

Which is all a preamble to saying I’m very pleased to see this new I’m Cooked website, which is essentially YouTube for food. Why didn’t I think of that?

(But, disappointing: a video entitled “Cooking Queens” is two gay guys. I guess the world does not revolve around my favorite borough.)

Anyhoo, check it out. I also like the ‘email me the recipe’ feature some videos have, like the Brazilian guy’s (though it’s got some kinks–I got a papaya recipe when I asked for hearts of palm, but…good idea nonetheless).

You’ve probably already watched mine and Tamara’s clip, but here’s the link.

A little while ago I mentioned this new website, the City Cook. It’s basically what I would do if I ever got around to it (albeit with more swooning over the Greenmarket and less swearing). You can go over to the site and sign up for a weekly email full of tips on how to get into the habit of cooking regularly. She’s not dealing with super-fancy food, in terms of prep, but she is suggesting ideas that you only get from having been exposed to all of NYC’s restaurants on a regular basis.

The newsletter she just sent is about stocking your pantry…or your “pantry,” really, because most people in the city don’t actually have a physical pantry. (But I do! It’s the coolest! Sorry to gloat.) Here’s most of the info online. There’s something so soothing about lists like this.

Her advice to tailor to your tastes is essential, though, and she spells it out a little better in the newsletter: “If you rarely cook Asian recipes, resist the abundance of Asian ingredients and sauces. Instead, be candid about how you cook every day and stock for that because pantry goods can spoil, fade in flavor, or just get lost in the clutter, leaving you with more but not better choices.”

But I had to laugh about the suggestion of buying just an 8-oz. jar of mayonnaise. I think ours is the 2-lb. model.

I saw this video about cooking paella over an open fire on the NY Times website earlier this year, and it has stuck in my head.

Basically because I want everything in it: ready availability of the gorgeous seafood in the market in the beginning, that market woman’s giant cleaver, the kitchen “range” made of rebar, the cute little wood spoons they eat the paella with, and, needless to say, the adorable Spanish chef himself. Pep Crespo, I’m yours! As for Mark Bittman himself, I’d normally say thanks, but no thanks–but even he starts looking pretty suave in this context, especially when he says “Balenthia.”

Must go to Spain again soon. In the meantime, here’s hoping this Saturday’s dinner chez Tamara pans out. I’ll start whittling the wooden spoons right now.

It seems like every time I click over to the Cook’s Illustrated website, the whole operation has gotten even more oppressive.

Don’t get me wrong–Cook’s Illustrated was an essential tool in my learning how to cook, and I suppose it is still helping many people out there. By “perfecting” only known and classic recipes, however, it had a built-in lifespan, and I’m not sure how the editors are managing today. I know they lost me when they had the recipe for school-lunch-style tacos about five years ago.

And now, maybe because I’ve shaken myself free, it appears to have gone from just geeky and twee (cute bow tie!) to downright evil.

The website livened up with a big splash photo of CI minions hard at work in “America’s Test Kitchen.” Unfortunately, everyone looks like they’re about to slit their wrists. This may be because Christopher Kimball is a pompous ass, and also that cutting things into tiny, tiny pieces all day, and then cooking the same recipe over and over and over is the closest thing to hell on earth.

Don’t you agree?

Assistant equipment editor Liz Bomze tosses beef while testing pans to determine which is best for stir-frying.

The quiet desperation.

Test cook Charles Kelsey calculates how to best position sauteed pears to maximize caramelization.

The tyrant himself:

While filming the next season of America’s Test Kitchen, Bridget Lancaster and Christopher Kimball debate just how much magic is needed for perfect Kansas City Ribs.

A lot of magic, people. A lot would be needed to reel me back in to the maddening world of Herr Kimball.

Great! Some of the photos from the excellent book Hungry Planet, by Peter Menzel, are up online at Time.com. Love these.

The other night I realized that the guy who runs a blog about Syria that I read frequently is actually the very same person I maintained an eight-hour-crush on at a dinner party in London in 1995. He had long, curly red hair then, and knew about the Middle East, which was part of the reason for the crush.

The other reason for the crush was the party itself, which still stands out in my mind as a model for a brilliant night at home. I don’t remember the food, except for the fact that the blowsy British hostess was cheerfully serving us canned Tesco tomato soup, and she got so drunk that she actually fell down in the kitchen while she was doing it. Actually, I suppose I’ve conflated those memories, because what was nice about the dinner was the slow pace–the hostess got up to cook the next course only when we were done with the current one. So I guess she probably fell down while she was fixing dessert? A technicality.

Falling down drunk and canned soup are horrific dinner-party no-nos in the US, and I do try to avoid them myself. But when I feel myself getting a little too uptight about cooking dinner for people, I actively remind myself about this particular British dinner, which was so much more about a bunch of grad students sitting around bullshitting by candlelight and drinking wine until our teeth were deadly gray than it was about the tastiness of the food.

An even earlier formative dinner party came when I was just a sophomore in college, and my not-really-anymore-because-he’d-graduated-boyfriend invited me to NYC to spend the weekend at his friends’ apartment in Brooklyn with him. This was in 1991, before a lot of people had gotten used to saying “Hoyt-Schermerhorn” out loud. I took the train up with another not-yet-graduated friend of the larger crew, and followed her off the subway, down the shady block in Boerum Hill and up the winding staircase in the old brownstone. Dinner was delicious and eaten in a cramped dining room with a happily-reunited crowd packed around a tiny table–as the youngest and most peripheral of the bunch, I felt lucky to be there.

I still make the salad we had that night, with slices of red pepper and dried currants, and it still makes me think I’m adventurous and grown-up. Never mind that the next day was technically a reversion to college–White Castle hamburgers while watching Dune, the movie–we also consoled my not-anymore-boyfriend about his car getting broken into, and that felt edgy and grown-up.

Truth be told, the really formative dinner parties were the ones my parents had, which were exactly the same kind of thing. Candles would melt down into waxy pools on the table, the grown-ups would starting talking extra loud, and I do remember one person falling down, while carrying about twenty plates–not easy to forget. And the food was always special in some way.

But I couldn’t just spring into the world and do exactly what my parents did. Everybody knows that would be totally lame. I had to follow in the footsteps of people just slightly older–and a lot cooler–than me.

And fortunately I had that model, because I guess a lot of people don’t. Or they have their own brief phase of wine drinking and kitchen experimentation, and then it slips away when the primary crew disperses. I’ve been fortunate to have always had friends who got this general concept of fun (duh–that’s why they’re my friends), but I guess that’s not surprising, since I hung out in grad school for a while and then was pretty broke for a long time in New York. Just like it took me until last year to buy a piece of actual firsthand furniture, I still have not shed the habit of saying, “Let’s just stay in for dinner–it’ll be cheaper.” Even though at this point it wouldn’t kill me to pay to eat in a restaurant.

Of course the friend who liked my style and ran with it most has been Tamara, and Sunday Night Dinners are very often an exercise in “Oh well–there’s always wine” but with the best possible results. I don’t think anyone has even been injured in four years!

So, a belated toast to Ariel K., whose idea I think that red-pepper salad was, and to Name-Forgotten Tesco-Heater-Upper. You made me the (sloppy, in a good way) hostess I am today.

OMG! Tamara has been sitting on a blog domain for years, and now there’s something on it: Check out the One-Ass Kitchen!

It’s nice that she has done this, because I’ve pretty much stopped covering our Sunday Night Dinners, since they all go so swimmingly and don’t really yield the sort of dramatic stories that our early cooking ventures did. But trust me, they’re still a good time.

Also, I highly recommend watching this–it’s the demo we did for our so-far-undiscovered-genius TV show last fall. Good music!