Notebook Lust: Confessions of a Journal Junkie

The Notebook, 1985-2009. RIP.

I don't know when it happened, exactly, or why, but for as long as I can remember, I've been fanatical about notebooks. When I was a child, I could never decide between spiral and stitch-bound for school (spiral always seemed to be sort of non-committal), and when I was old enough for a loose leaf, my father gave me a small, leather three-ring binder that his sister had given him when he was not yet ten. I still have it—it sits on my desk, filled with the same lined paper from 1974, which has not yet yellowed. For years, I've wanted to use it as my kitchen notebook, but I just can't bring myself to; on the one hand, I worry that regular use will harm it after almost eighty years, and on the other, I worry that forcing utilitarianism upon it will somehow render it less meaningful to the universe. Which is just plain nuts, when it gets right down to it.

The other night, while enjoying the artist Patrick McFarlin's book, Life, which is a remarkable visual and textual exploration of that subject culled (I imagine) from the contents of McFarlin's voluminous notebooks, I realized that this form of work—of art, really—is perhaps the most appealing to me because it's a direct window into the mind of the artist. I remember seeing Dickens' notebooks some years back, and I was fixated on the cross-outs and scribbles, and I felt the same way about DaVinci's journals.

When it comes to the subject of food, and cooking, though, I find almost nothing more enticing to read than kitchen notebooks because they place the reader in the kitchen of the cook, with the cook. Given the choice between M.F.K. Fisher's narrative and her notebooks, I'd grab the latter first. My best college friend once sent me James and Kay Salter's Life is Meals, and after years of perusing it, the book now falls open to the entry about their old kitchen notebook. Recently, my colleague and fellow blogger, Heidi Swanson, published a post about creating a new cookbook manuscript, and it was an amazing look at her creative process, involving lots of notebooks. And her photo of all those notebooks? Oh Heidi. So sultry.

I've kept a kitchen notebook for ages; my first one was an old Harvard Coop lab notebook into which I pasted everything from labels sweated off favorite wine bottles to clipped out Molly O'Neill recipes from the Times magazine section, to accounts of dinner parties and what I served, and what my guests liked, and what they didn't:

Served paella to boss.

Ballast.

Years later, whenever Sue and I were given a recipe we liked, or I was testing something, it just got printed out, folded up, and stuck into the book with no rhyme or reason. A few months back, while visiting my mom in Manhattan, I found my fourth grade loose leaf buried in the depths of her den closet. Sturdy as hell (I remember it being a beast to carry to and from school), it seemed to be the perfect next kitchen notebook in the evolutionary process; with a hole punch, I could organize everything properly, and even protect the pages with plastic sheet protectors.

The new book, overstuffed.

Clearly, I'm delusional.

The biggest problem for me now is my Moleskine habit (and I know I'm not alone). I have at least one in every room, and in every bag. So far, only one has been filled up with ramblings, but that doesn't keep me from acquiring them. Not long ago, my late cousin Harris's girlfriend Lea came and visited us for an overnight, and asked me for a particular recipe; as I was talking, I noticed that she was writing it down in her little Moleskine, complete with pen and ink renderings of the prep and cooking techniques themselves. No wonder Harris loved her so much.

My father's notebook

My next cookbook is currently simmering away, and I've already decided to throw caution to the wind and actually use my dad's old leather binder as my project notebook. The subject matter would have made him smile, so it's time.

The Mundanity of Toast

Perfect breakfast, perfect snack, perfect anytime.

"It's impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you."

--Nigel Slater

When Susan and I first met, ten years ago, she made it abundantly clear to me that one of her preferred meals was toast. I learned fairly quickly that where some people crave fettuccine Alfredo, or roast chicken, or pizza, or chocolate, Susan craves toast.

At first, she would only eat toast made from one particular type of bread: Pepperidge Farm Toasting White. On one of our first shopping trips together, I asked innocently why she had to be so specific, and she looked at me like I had three heads: "Because," she said, "of the nooks and crannies."

"Don't nooks and crannies belong to to the English Muffin category of baked goods?" I asked.

"They do," she said, "but they're different. They're more cavernous."

She was serious, and I could actually see her point, even though I'd never given it much thought. When you want toast, you rarely, if ever, mean that you want an English muffin. You want toast: golden, crisp, warm, spread with sweet butter and maybe a bit of jam. And really, in life, a poor man's feast doesn't get much better than that.

Susan's love affair with toast propelled me back in time, where I considered my own relationship with it, and I was surprised, once I gave it some thought, to discover exactly how important it's been to me; I just never really noticed it because it was so mundane, like a kind of culinary wallpaper. Growing up, toast was just there.

That said, I did realize at a young age that if my mother toasted the sandwich bread surrounding her pretty wet rendition of my school lunch tuna salad sandwich, that tuna salad might leak out the sides of the sandwich, but not through the bread. And that was a very big difference. Toasting bread forms a barrier against dampness. Also, cheese goes much better on toasted bread than it does untoasted, for obvious reasons. And if you toast the bread upon which you set down a poached egg during your Sunday breakfast, that toast is better at sopping up the gorgeous, unruly yolk than it would be if it was untoasted. Which is why, I suppose, eggs with soldiers always means that the soldiers are toasted; if they weren't, they'd just be too flaccid to stand up to their mates.

When I lived for a short while in England, one of my rooms had in it a ubiquitous English gas fireplace with a wire grate around it; I moved in on an intensely hot Sunday morning, and my college's porter, a man of about ninety who insisted on schlepping my bags across the street and up two flights of stairs, dropped them in a heap, pointed to the fireplace and said "you do know how to make toast in this thing, don't you?" It didn't matter that the temperature was hovering near eighty seven degrees. Or that there was a perfectly wonderful dining hall right across the street. What was on this man's mind as he mopped his dripping British brow, was toast.

After ten years, I now take my toast very seriously; I own one of those British Dualit four slice toasters that costs as much as a high-end convection oven, and also, a 1910 Knoblock pyramid toaster that you just set down over an ignited burner. I've even toasted on a perforated, French metal flame tamer with a wooden handle, that I got for free at a tag sale, and also a 1920s Griswold griddle that I bought in Vermont for $20. I've toasted whole wheat bread, white bread, rye bread, sourdough miche; I've made terrific toasted tartines spread with an agrodolce tomato jam made from the dregs of tomato sauce combined with a little sugar, sauteed onions, clove, cinnamon, and a drop of vinegar; I've also toasted leftover scallion pancakes, and I've even toasted socca. There have been toasted arepas coated in a swipe of Vermont Butter & Cheese's excellent fromage blanc; I've toasted leftover corn waffles made from a Deborah Madison recipe, which I then used as a base for spicy, cumin-infused black beans. The only thing I've never toasted is matzo, for fairly obvious reasons.

Toast is one of those culturally mundane foods that marries form to function and flavor; in terms of comfort available on mere pennies, though, there is nothing better.

Quick Tomato Jam for Toast

You can certainly start this "jam" from 2 pounds of fresh tomatoes that you've cooked down, but I prefer using leftover marinara sauce (devoid of meat, of course).

1/2 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1/2 large yellow onion, peeled and rough-chopped

2 tablespoons sugar

2 cups leftover marinara sauce

2 cloves

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

splash of balsamic vinegar

Optional: 1/2 tablespoon chopped raisins

1. In a medium sauce pan set over a medium low flame, heat the olive oil until rippling and add the onion. Sprinkle with sugar, combine well, lower the flame, cover, and continue to cook until the onions have become dark and a bit sticky, about 15 minutes (take a peek and stir ever few minutes to keep them from burning or sticking).

2. Add the marinara sauce to the pan, along with the cloves and cinnamon (and raisins, if you're including them). Combine well, cover, and cook until the mixture has become dense and jammy, about 30 minutes. Check repeatedly to make sure it's not too dry, and if it is, add a drop of water. Taste for seasoning and finish with a splash of balsamic vinegar.

Leftovers keep well refrigerated in a tightly sealed jar for up to a week.

My Madeleine, My Rye

I was brought up to be a big believer in the concept of taste memory. This was probably handed down to me genetically by my father, who spent most of his life searching for the perfect plate of salami and eggs to jettison him back to the days of his youth, when all he had to worry about was finding a stickball game, listening to the Dodgers on the radio, and not falling asleep in front of his cantor father while sitting in shul.

As an expatriate New Yorker now living in the New England hinterlands, I have found myself drawn over the years to finding identical versions of the foods of my own New Yorker heart: the perfect pizza slice to match the ones that came from the "pizza place" that stood across the street from my childhood apartment (unfortunately not found at Pepe's, no matter how wonderful Pepe's may be); the perfect hot dog, to duplicate the "specials" my father used to take me for at Ben's Deli, on Queens Boulevard, back before my parents divorced, back before the Summer of Sam, when all was still more or less right with my small Forest Hills world. And over the years, I've managed to unearth some pretty close facsimiles, often in the oddest places.

But the one thing I've never been able to find--anywhere--is the one food that is my own personal Madeleine, that takes me back to certain afternoons when I was so young that I was still not walking everywhere on my own steam. The memory goes like this: It's 3:30 on a snowy Friday. My grandmother has deposited me in my fire engine red stroller and pushed me along 67th Avenue towards Queens Boulevard, where we make a left, past Ballet Academy, past Ben's Deli, and into Jay-Dee Bakery--an old fashioned sort of place selling cookies and cakes and loaves of freshly baked bread of only two varieties: challah (seeded or plain), and rye bread. My grandmother asks what just came out of the oven, and the owner, a wiry man in square black plastic glasses, a white tee shirt, white pants, and flour-dusted shoes, says It's the rye, Mrs. Elice, and pops it into the slicing machine. Seconds later, he steps out from behind the counter, bends down, and hands me the heel, still warm.

It's wildly tangy, redolent of earth and caraway and rye, and it leaves every other bread I eat in these, the 1960s, flat. I eat it toasted, with salted butter; untoasted and dunked into my grandmother's paprika-laden Hungarian goulash; toasted and topped with cold, leftover Friday night chicken; untoasted and blanketed under slices of warm brisket and onions. Whatever I eat, there it is, strong enough in flavor to hold up against the mightiest of forces.

This Friday afternoon activity is repeated every week, until I am old enough to go to kindergarten. But on the odd occasion after school, even into my teens, my grandmother and I go back to Jay-Dee together on Friday afternoons, and the baker comes out from behind the counter and hands me the heel off his still-warm, incomparably delicious rye bread, that my grandmother brings home for us to have with dinner. The last time I had it was one of the last times I saw my grandmother: in 1981, right before I left for college. Nothing has come close to the flavor of that bread, and I must admit that when Saveur Magazine ran a picture of shuttered New York institutions in a recent issue and there was Jay-Dee, I cried like a baby.

I never expected--not in a million years--that I would ever have a rye bread-induced Proustian rush that would land me back at the bakery, the warm smell of rye and flour engulfing me, at the hands of arguably the finest vegetable cookbook author and local food advocate cooking and writing today. Who knew?

It's surprises like this one that make me giddy; we go to Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone for what you'd think--simple, delectable recipes for everything from radishes to kohlrabi, from lentils to butternut squash to shirred eggs, and for information on how to use, store, and serve virtually any edible that comes out of the ground in one way or another. But it was only recently that Susan picked up Deborah's book and turned to the bread section. Sure, we have bread cookbooks--tons of them--in our library; Jim Lahey, Peter Reinhart, Bernard Clayton, Tassajara, Beard on Bread...you name it, we have it. But when Susan said "I think I'm going to make Deborah's rye bread," it seemed natural to me. Everything else in the book works perfectly, and is explained simply and intuitively and without a single drop of fever-pitch hysteria, so why not her rye bread (even though rye is one of those mildly mystical breads that one is totally sure one is not going to get right, unless one is Sam Fromartz, or otherwise has the "bread baking touch")? Does it matter that Deborah is not known necessarily as a bread baker? No, probably not. But guess what? She is the home bread baker's best kept secret, until now.

So Susan made Deborah's rye bread yesterday while I worked, and while it snowed. Every once in a while, I'd hear a squeal of glee coming from the kitchen. And then we discovered that our Viking is now baking 60 degrees warmer than it should be. I wasn't hopeful.

The bread emerged, magnificently lacquered a dark golden brown. We let it cool, sliced it, took a bite, and tears came to my eyes: finally, thirty years after I last had it, here was Jay-Dee's rye bread--tangy, strong, earthy, and utterly delicious.

Today is Friday, and we're in the midst of a snowstorm not unlike the one we were in that afternoon of my first Jay-Dee memory; I had two slices of fresh rye bread, toasted, for breakfast, and closed my eyes. I could see my grandmother, and my fire engine red stroller, and the baker and his flour-dusted shoes.

And then I ate the heel.

Light Rye Bread

(from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone)

Makes 1 loaf

The Sponge

1-1/2 cups water

2-1/4 teaspoons (1 envelope) active dry yeast

1-1/2 tablespoons unsulfured molasses

1-1/4 cups whole-wheat or bread flour

1/4 cup nonfat dry milk or dried buttermilk (Susan used the latter)

The Bread

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 teaspoons salt

1-1/2 cups rye flour

3/4 to 1 cup bread flour or all-purpose flour

Cornmeal for the pan

Egg white glaze (see below)

Mix together everything for the sponge in a bowl, then cover and let rise for 2 hours. It should be foamy.

Stir down the sponge, then add the oil, salt, and rye flour. Beat in the bread flour until the dough is shaggy and pulls away from the side, then turn it out onto a lightly floured counter and knead in the remainder. You can expect it to be a little stickier to handle than all-wheat flour doughs.

Transfer to an oiled bowl, cover, and set in a warm place until doubled in bulk, about 1 hour. Push the dough down, then shape into an oval loaf about 10 inches long. Scatter cornmeal over a baking pan or peel if you're using a baking stone. Place the bread on it, cover, then let rise until doubled in bulk, about 40 minutes. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F during the last 15 minutes. Make three diagonal slashes across the top and brush with the glaze. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes or until browned.

Seeded Rye Knead 1 tablespoon caraway or fennel seeds into the dough. Shape into a 5 x 9 inch loaf or free-form oblong loaf, brush with an egg glaze, sprinkle with additional seeds, and make several diagonal slashes in the top.

Egg White Glaze

1 egg white

1 tablespoon water or milk

Pinch salt

Whisk the ingredients until well blended. Use this on seed breads or country breads.

A Bunny for Your Thoughts

Yes, that's right friends, a bunny. Hide the kids. Look away if you must.

We're talking rabbit.

I first experienced rabbit as a horrified student at Cambridge University, when I was living across the street from the outdoor city market. There they were, bunnies, hung from hooks, and I thought "What heathens, these people." Then I left for a few weeks in France and Switzerland, and of course, there was more of the same, and for all of the fresh, fur-on rabbits I saw in the markets in the Alps, you'd have thought that bunny was the state bird of the Berner Oberland. Then, I came home to New York, and one evening while strolling past Ottomanelli on Bleecker Street, I spied them again, hanging in the shop window.

I decided it was a conspiracy, like the time that my grandmother served me calves brain a week after I saw Young Frankenstein.

It was a few years before I had my first bunny, so to speak, at a now-defunct West Village restaurant, where it was listed on the menu as civet, and came braised in red wine and rosemary which overpowered it to the point that it tasted exactly like coq au vin (with rosemary), which is neither what I wanted nor ordered. But whenever and wherever it showed up, I tried it: all over New York (usually in the winter); in a small restaurant in Pienza, where it was fashioned into a ragu and tossed with pappardelle; somewhere else (I can't remember the location) where it was smothered under a layer of strong herbs, black olives, and preserved lemons, blanketed beneath an unrecognizable cheese that had the consistency of a shaved umbrella handle, and then baked. All of which led me to the conclusion that rabbit was so strong and overpowering that it had to be tempered and teased into being edible, like an aging bluefish.

Not true.

Rabbit is tender, succulent, exceptionally lean (so much so that the saddle can cook far faster than the balance of the bunny, which is what happened to me the first time I tried to make it), and flavorful in a slightly sweet, very mildly and pleasantly gamey way. Unless you live near a great farmer's market or know an old-fashioned butcher, it can be hard to come by and is often expensive, especially if you compare the price of a locally procured, fresh "meat" rabbit to your basic organic chicken. I justify the purchase by eating it very infrequently, and taking very good care of it when I do.

Despite its leanness, rabbit seems to naturally be a cold-weather dish for some reason, and when Susan and I were stuck in the house the other day during a raging snowstorm and realized that we had a rabbit in the fridge, I grabbed my copy of David Tanis's remarkable A Platter of Figs, which has in it a simple, phenomenally good recipe for oven baked rabbit in mustard sauce, which is a kind of riff on traditional Lapin a la Moutarde only with a very small amount of bacon in it. What I didn't have nor had the time to make (it has to stand for at least twelve hours) was creme fraiche, which is a key ingredient in the dish (both David's and in the traditional version); I did, however, have some very good quality sour cream, buttermilk, and regular cream, with which I managed to make a sort of mock creme fraiche which, when combined with Dijon mustard, worked perfectly. No sage either, but plenty of thyme. I don't know David, but he seems from what I've heard of him to be a sort of mellow guy with a tendency towards producing exuberantly simple dishes, and I'd like to think he would have approved. (Maybe.)

The result? Remarkable. The house smelled like there was a French grandmother locked in the kitchen all day, and the dog, my partner, and our three cats refused to stop staring at the stove. What can you do with rabbit leftovers? Make rabbit risotto with wild mushrooms. And yes, I followed David's suggestion, and roasted the kidneys together with the dish, and they were, as he promised they would be, luscious (and I'm not an offal kind of gal).

Rabbit is one of those elusive dishes that, as Tanis says, has never quite caught on in the United States for reasons that I don't understand, apart from the fact that some of us like to keep them as pets. Some people like to keep fish as pets too, but you generally don't see them passing up a tuna salad sandwich because of it.

Whatever the reason, I implore you; try it. You'll like it.

Baked Rabbit in Mustard Sauce

(adapted from A Platter of Figs, by David Tanis)

Tender, earthy, and fragrant, this dish was perfect served for dinner on a very snowy night, with little more than some roasted root vegetables, a green salad, and an inexpensive and uncomplicated bottle of Rhone. Leftovers were pulled off the bone, shredded, and folded into a simple risotto. Note: I like my rabbit quite mustardy, so the proportions here have been altered substantially from the original recipe.

Serves 4, or 2 with leftovers

1 rabbit, cut into 6 pieces (cut the saddle into 2 pieces, the front legs into two pieces, and the back legs into 2 pieces)

salt and pepper, to taste

1/4 pound unsmoked bacon, sliced into lardons

1/4 cup good quality sour cream

1 tablespoon buttermilk

1 tablespoon heavy cream

1/2 cup Dijon mustard

1 teaspoon yellow mustard seeds

2 tablespoons fresh thyme leaves

6 garlic cloves, sliced

2 Bay leaves

1. Place the rabbit in a large bowl and sprinkle with salt and pepper, and add the lardons. In a separate, small bowl, combine the sour cream, buttermilk, heavy cream, Dijon mustard, and mustard seeds, and whisk together until uniformly blended. Using a pastry spatula, scoop the cream mixture into the bowl, add the thyme leaves, garlic cloves, and Bay, and using your hands, toss the rabbit in the sauce so that each piece is well-coated. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and set aside for an hour, unrefrigerated (or overnight, in the fridge).

2. Bring the rabbit to room temperature (if chilled) and preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Place the rabbit in a heatproof clay baking dish, and top with any remaining marinade. Roast for thirty minutes, basting frequently, then turn; roast for another thirty minutes, continue basting, and then turn again. Crank the heat up to broil, and continue to cook for another few minutes, until the rabbit is golden brown. Serve immediately, with the sauce.

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and a Block of Velveeta: Hastening the Road to Amour

Omar Khayyam had it easy.

His jug of wine was probably cheap swill, his loaf of bread, likely simple. And the object of his affection certainly wasn't moping around the Valentine's Day section at the local card shop, hoping to come home to a dozen Willapa oysters, foie gras, a bottle of vintage Krug, and all of those other mildly pornographic delights which are reputed to hasten the road to amour for everyone on February 14th, the libidinally sleepy included. If Mr. Khayyam was shopping for Valentine's Day today, he would have been flat broke.

And honestly, that's just not what Valentine's Day is about, is it? Granted, thanks to marketing geniuses far and wide, we're bombarded by images of beautiful, hand-holding couples sitting at restaurants like New York City's Masa, where, half a decade ago, you could have a sushi tasting menu for one and it would set you back $350, as it did for the erstwhile New York Times restaurant critic, Frank Bruni, who once described his toro fairly sensually as "buttery belly of bluefin tuna."

Or, Valentine's Day could mean expecting to come home to a table set for two by your better half, a bottle of Cristal chilling in a champagne bucket, and Ravel's Bolero playing in the background. Very nice.

Who are these people?

First: Even though Valentine's Day falls on a Sunday night this year, Monday is a national holiday, which means the kids will be home and wanting breakfast first thing in the morning. So if you have children, whatever it is you're thinking, think again.

Second: Special doesn't have to mean expensive, or fancy. A friend of mine with exceptional taste did splurge on a nice bottle of Barolo for herself and her husband, which will accompany a steak (which she'll likely prepare magnificently). Another friend is making oeufs en meurette, which, if I had a choice, might be my last meal on earth. On the occasion of our second Valentine's Day together, Susan, who was a poor freelancer at the time, carved I ♥ U out of a block of Velveeta; she wanted to give me something that would last forever, and I'm pleased to say it did. It sat in the bowels of my fridge, wrapped in plastic and entombed in an old Anchor Hocking container with nary a drop of mold until last year, almost ten years after the fact. Now that was special.

My sense these days is that whatever our cultural lexicon/advertising industry is imploring you to do, it's probably wise to do the exact opposite. Shelve the excess, and the screaming consumerism, and go simple: my dish of choice on Valentine's Day, if I'm cooking at home, is nearly always roasted salmon and French lentils, which are braised in red wine, along with thyme, shallots, and pancetta. Dessert, if we make it at all, is a diminutive portion of chocolate pot de creme, and a glass of Banyuls.

So when you hear stories of $350 Valentine's Day tasting menus, and bottles of vintage Krug, don't worry. Take control and just make a nice dinner. Failing that, there's always Velveeta.

Salmon with French Lentils Braised in Red Wine

Made a day prior to serving, the smoky flavor of this classic lentil recipe, which was adapted from one appearing in 1997, in Metropolitan Home, has a chance to deepen and develop. Reheat the lentils in a stickproof sauté pan while the salmon is cooking.

For Lentils (can be made a day in advance):

2 Tablespoons Extra Virgin Olive Oil

½ Cup Pancetta, diced in ¼ inch cubes

½ Cup minced shallots

½ Cup peeled and diced carrots

½ Cup diced celery

1 Cup Dry Red Wine

2 Cups Lentils, preferably Lentils du Puy

6 Cups Chicken Stock

2 Tablespoons Fresh Thyme Leaves (or 1 Tablespoon Dry)

½ Cup Chopped Tomatoes

1 teaspoon of unsalted butter (optional)

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

For Salmon:

2 4-ounce salmon fillets, skin removed

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1 Tablespoon Extra Virgin Olive Oil

1-1/2 Teaspoons Lemon Juice

1-1/2 Teaspoons Unsalted Butter

Prepare the lentils by sautéing the pancetta in a medium-sized soup pot, until their almost crisp and they have released their fat. Add the shallots, the carrots, and the celery.

When the shallots are translucent, add the red wine and simmer over a medium-low flame until all of the liquid is evaporated. Add the lentils, the chicken stock, and the thyme.

Simmer the lentils over medium-low heat, about 35 minutes until tender. Once they are cooked, add the tomatoes, stir in the butter if desired, and season to taste. If re-heating, place in a stick-proof pan, and warm gently, tossing carefully until warmed throughout.

Season the salmon fillets with salt and ground pepper to taste.

In a medium-sized, stick-proof skillet, heat the olive oil until rippling but not smoking. Carefully place the fillets flesh-side down in the pan, reducing heat if necessary. Cook for 6 minutes without moving the fish. Turn and cook for 3 another minutes. Add the lemon juice and butter to the pan. Remove to a platter, drizzle with the sauce, loosely drape with foil and let stand for 5 minutes before serving.

To serve, place a large helping of lentils on each plate, place a salmon fillet over each portion, and drizzle with lemon and butter juice over all.

(Re-heat leftover lentils the following day, and top with a poached egg and a small salad, for lunch.)

Chocolate Pot de Crème with Berries

Make these lovely desserts a day or two in advance, in small, child-sized pudding cups that you know are heat-proof (or heatproof Duralex drinking glasses).

1 Cup Heavy Whipping Cream

¼ Cup Whole Milk (no skimping)

2-1/2 ounces of bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, of excellent quality, chopped

¼ Teaspoon Real Vanilla Extract

3 Large Egg Yolks

3-1/2 Tablespoons Sugar

Fresh berries (if you can get them)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

In a medium-sized saucepan set over medium-low heat, bring the cream and milk to a simmer together, and immediately remove from the heat. Add the chocolate a few pieces at a time, and the vanilla extract, and whisk well until the chocolate is completely melted and the extract incorporated.

In a separate bowl, whisk the egg yolks and the sugar together, and carefully whisk in the warm chocolate mixture. Let cool.

Divide the chocolate custard among two custard cups (if you have additional custard, simply make a few more pots de crème). Cover each custard cup with aluminum foil (not plastic), place in a baking dish, and fill the dish with enough hot water to come halfway up the sides of the dish.

Bake until the centers of the custard are just set, approximately one hour. Remove from water, remove foil, cover with plastic wrap, and chill for 4 hours. Top with sliced strawberries prior to serving.

Poor Man's Feast on the Road: A Week in New Mexico

The miracle that is Leona's chicken and chile tamale.

Susan and I celebrated our tenth anniversary last week in the most perfect of places: New Mexico. I had never been there before, but there were a lot of reasons why I can call it perfect; on the one hand, Susan has been going on about her last visit there (twenty years ago) since we met. On the other hand, New Mexico is simply magical; all the yammering on you hear about the wildly spiritual nature of the place is both unwaveringly true and completely compelling, and it goes way beyond the ubiquitous tourists searching for meaning in the bottom of a basket of souvenir shop milagros.

I had been invited to speak at the first Edible Institute conference by Edible Communities founders Tracey Ryder and Carole Topalian, alongside writers like Tom Philpott, Deborah Madison, Gary Paul Nabhan, Samuel Fromartz, Brian Halweil, Fred Kirschenmann, and others, and I spent my first three days there wandering around Bishop's Lodge sort of gape-mouthed, in awe at the company I was keeping. At one point, I stepped out of my room to find myself walking in the clouds--literally (Santa Fe is over 7000 feet)--and to say that it was appropriate to feel like I was in heaven would be an understatement. Something very indefinable happens when you get that many like-minded, passionate people together, and when the writings of so many of them have taken up serious real estate on your bedside table, for years; I was jelly-kneed during a lot of the conference, and I walked around for days like a wide-eyed child. At one point, I was sitting at a table listening to Tom Philpott interview Maisie Greenwald about the farm workers in Immokalee, Florida, and I realized that I was sandwiched between Gary Nabhan and Deborah Madison, and I nearly went over like a ton of bricks.

You want spiritual?

Susan flew out to join me last Friday, and of course, our attention turned to the subject of eating, as it always does. We were invited for dinner on Sunday night, along with restaurateur, Edible Iowa River Valley publisher, and founder of Slow Food Iowa City Kurt Michael Friese and his wife Kim, Tracey and Carole, and Edible Cape Cod publishers Doug Langeland and his wife Dianne, at the lovely home that Deborah Madison shares with her husband, artist Patrick McFarlin; the meal was utterly remarkable in its simplicity, its locality (Deborah served a Middle Eastern spice-rubbed, long-cooked lamb, which came from a neighboring ranch), and the precision and care with which it was prepared. Wine, brandy, and friendships both new and old flowed, and it was a dinner and a night I won't ever forget.

Spiritual?

A day later, after the conference had pretty much come to a close, Susan decided that we should drive up to the tiny town of Chimayo, both to see El Santuario de Chimayo--site of thousands of miraculous healings since around 1810--and to eat at Leona's, where Susan had had her first tamale twenty years ago, when the restaurant was actually a small cart parked near the church. I won't comment on the fact that we arrived just as Mass was beginning and that my partner is a seriously lapsed Catholic who actually didn't move until the service was over, except to take communion. I also won't comment on the neighboring church, the Santo Nino Chapel, built in 1857 by Severiano Medina, which was created to honor the saint who, it is said, wanders the hills around Chimayo, feeding the hungry and wearing out his shoes in the process. One of the rooms in the chapel is lined--completely--with baby shoes, brought by pilgrims asking for Santo Nino's intervention on their behalf.

Jelly-kneed, again.

Yes, the sky is that blue.

El Santuario de Chimayo

The finest restaurant in New Mexico:

Leona's in Chimayo

Looking across the plaza, I saw a small restaurant surrounded by ristras, and I realized that we were making a pilgrimage of our own to enjoy the simple, mouthwatering local food created by the petite and soft-spoken Leona Medina-Tiede (yes, a relation, I'm certain). For years, Leona was known for her flavored tortillas--everything from apple cinnamon to pinon--but today, her menu is simpler: it includes chile stew, posole, carne adovado, and tamales that are appropriately miraculous, and which Susan has dreamt about nonstop for twenty years. After days of feasting in some wildly delicious, often extremely expensive local Santa Fe restaurants, I was reminded of the truth about the best food: it needn't be pricey, or even served on china. The best traditional chile stew I had in New Mexico was crafted by Leona, a woman who has fed thousands for years; it was presented to me in a white styrofoam bowl and served with a warm, fresh tortilla. And it was better than almost every restaurant meal I had there, save one (for another time).

Leona's chile stew

New Mexico, to me, was miraculous, beautiful, and jarringly moving; its spirit bubbled to the surface not only in the usual places, like its churches and hills, but also in the friendships I made there, the things that I learned that will forever change the way I think about the production of food in this country, and the extraordinary, unforgettable meals I shared both in the home of new friends, and in a tiny restaurant owned by a small woman with a heart-melting smile.

That is spirit enough for me.

The Mysteries of Kohlrabi

What the hell is this thing?

I've been hearing a lot from readers these days, which is always lovely; however, it appears that many of you are either concerned, disgruntled, or flat out cranky about the fact that my beloved pork belly--the jewel, the flower, the little flavor-packed love button of my kitchen--has been on a vacation for a while. Don't worry; porky is just taking a small siesta, and, assuming that I can find a local pig farmer, will start showing up again soon in interesting and delicious new ways. I promise.

The truth is, for the last few weeks I've been a little bit out of my culinary element and acting like a gastronomically befuddled tourist in a strange land, like Paul Bowles dragging a microwave through the Algerian Sahara. I've been faced with the prospect of eating differently--really differently--for a variety of reasons. My primary guide on the early parts of this trek through the unknown mostly has been Deborah Madison, that omnivorous vegetable genius, and her Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone; if I had to give up absolutely every single book on my shelf, hers would be the one I'd most want to keep hidden in the floorboards. There's also been Lorna Sass's Whole Grains Every Day Every Way; and Roy Andries de Groot's Auberge of the Flowering Hearth. The reasons are pretty simple: sure, it's easy to steam, broil, or roast seasonal vegetables every day, day after day, and toss them with the ubiquitous olive oil, garlic, and a bit of sea salt. But it's another thing entirely to put them at the center of the plate and to learn how prepare them in exquisite but simple ways I never thought possible, and then, to turn meat into a side dish, and that's really what Deborah's work has done in my home. She dashed the fear factor for me--that feeling that emerges when you find yourself at a farmer's market staring at a burdock root and thinking what in the hell? As for Lorna, she's been teaching me that grains aren't just limited to the kasha varnishkes I love (and grew up with) or the millet I've loathed (and equated with bird seed). And Roy? His often forgotten book was the first that told me "keep it local, keep it seasonal, and treat it well" long before I fell in love with the work of another of his fans, Alice Waters.

"Oh dear god, not this vegetarian stuff again---" my mother said to me the other night when I said I was roasting Jerusalem artichokes and having them with pan-braised kale, diced potatoes, and cumin. She audibly reminded herself of a small two year spate back in the 1980s when I was furtively involved with someone who decided that she was an ethical vegetarian (except for the odd prime rib) and, because I was The Cook, I had to be one, too. Ah, love. My mother managed to convince herself that my sudden and extreme weight loss was attributed to the fact that I was not eating meat (although I was replacing it with large quantities of mozzarella), and remedied the situation by immediately sending me a $200 gift package of individually wrapped veal chops, which I was suppose to store in the shoebox-sized freezer I had in my "European-style" refrigerator. Mom never knew the truth: that secret, unrequited love bundled together with extreme aggravation make for a terrific metabolic booster.

Anyway, what I do want to make clear to all of my readers is that no, I am not a vegetarian, and no, I'm not on some weird crash diet involving avocados and Brislings, either; I have, however, decided to approach the way I eat from a different angle. As some of you can probably guess, part of this decision was spurred by the discovery in December of a small cardiac issue that turned into a midlife crisis, and an acknowledgment of my inability to treat my body like it was still 23. The other side of the coin is more straightforward: the more I know of food, how it's produced and the way we eat it in this country, the less I want of it, unless I have at least a decent idea of where it's coming from. And no, a multi-acre industrial feedlot in northeastern Colorado isn't a good thing, no matter how cheap the beef winds up being.

At first, I thought that eating this way was going to be too challenging to even think about, from a practical point of view. But, it seems, there are easy ways to accomplish it: first, I'm buying and preparing local vegetables, and making them the center of my plate. Literally. Putting them down in the center. Second, (and I know I'm repeating myself) I'm limiting my purchasing of meat to what is available locally, and I'm willing to shell out money for it because it is expensive. Very expensive, in some cases. But this also means that I'll probably eat less of it, because I have to. Another way to accomplish this is to eat what grows in my own garden, when Morris, our resident groundhog isn't flossing with the pea shoots. Unfortunately, as of this writing, my garden is sitting beneath a layer of snow and ice, so I'm dependent upon the local farms that happen to have root cellars. They're few and far between in my neck of the woods, so it's a damn good thing I like turnips.

Luckily, we have managed to find a wonderful commercial resource for all manner of fresh, local root vegetables and hearty greens, and I must say, they are stunning, even just aesthetically-speaking. Unfortunately, I've discovered that I do what most neophytes do when faced with alien produce--that stuff that's pretty unrecognizable to most Americans, like kohlrabi, or burdock: I stare. And then I think "What would Deborah do?" Then I go home, open up her book/bible, and find out. She tells me pretty much everything I need to do, every single time.

Long way of saying that if you live in a temperate climate, and you have Meyer lemons growing in your backyard, or you can proudly recognize far more than the usual supermarket suspects--asparagus, celery, onion, carrot, turnip, and rutabaga--and furthermore you actually know what to do with them, you're on the right track. Send me an email, or comment here, if you do. I'd love to hear from you. And whatever you do with them, put the result in the middle of your plate; just give the meat a little nudge out of the way, first.