Shrimp !Bouillabaisse

May 11th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

In a lot of programming languages, a bang, or exclamation point, is the symbol for Boolean NOT. I’ve been working with JavaScript a lot lately, where you’ll write stuff like the following:
if (!bouillabaise) { whatever }

So when I read Ming Tsai’s One-Pot Meals cookbook, and saw the recipe for what he calls shrimp bouillabaisse, I laughed a lot, and then renamed it shrimp !bouillabaisse for my own use. Because, okay: it’s a good soup, and I’ve been enjoying it whenever I cook it, but bouillabaise comes from a fairly specific tradition, and this recipe does not conform to that tradition. I’m all for remixing tradition, all for making recipes your own, but there’s pretty much no way you are going to convince me that this is not just a simple shrimp soup, and Ming’s name for it is false advertising. (The Wikipedia article is a reasonable introduction to the tradition.)

(The title of the book is also false advertising, frankly, and this recipe is one of the most egregious offenders. By my count, this recipe demands a soup pot, a strainer, a large bowl, and various mise en place containers, plus more if you make garlic bread to go with, as Ming suggests.)

Fresh Gulf of Maine Shrimp

photograph by johnnyd2, licensed under Creative Commons BY-ND

Recipe

Peel a pound or so of shrimp (frozen is fine). Don’t throw out the shells. Coat the bottom of a tall pot with olive, grapeseed, or canola oil and heat over a medium-high flame. Add the shells and sauté until they turn that gorgeous pink. Pour in a scant cup of white wine or chicken stock (when particularly forgetful, I have used water and it was perfectly edible), deglaze the pan and reduce by half.

Add another quart of chicken stock. Simmer for five to ten minutes. Strain the liquid into a large bowl, and discard the shells.

Reheat the pot, and add a little more oil. Sauté a mirepoix of a chopped onion, one or two chopped carrots, a stalk of chopped celery — if you like fennel, include that; I hate fennel — and season the whole with a bit of paprika. When the mirepoix is soft, add the strained liquid and the shrimp you peeled. When the shrimp are cooked through, remove from the heat and whisk in a cup of Greek yogurt. Serve with toast.

[one man's poison ivy is another man's spinach]

April 1st, 2012 § Comments Off § permalink

Spinach gets a bad rap.

New Yorker cartoon: it's broccoli, dear. I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it.
“It’s broccoli, dear.”
“I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”
cartoon by Carl Rose, from the New Yorker, December 8, 1928

And sometimes it deserves it — there is little more disgusting in this life than overcooked spinach. But if you get it right, it is delightful. (Also, if you tend toward anemia, as I do, there are times when it tastes like manna from heaven because of the high iron content. Sometimes I’ll look up and realize I’ve been eating raw spinach by the handful, and it would probably be a good idea to take iron pills for a week or so.)

Spinach salad is also excellent, although I find it’s best with other greens — romaine lettuce, red-leaf lettuce, endive, butter or Boston lettuce, preferably all of them!. I generally add walnuts and cranberries and diced cucumber and sliced fresh strawberries if they’re in season (those tasteless, hard, ice-white things from California are worse than nothing), and a red wine vinegar dressing.

Lately, though, even spinach salad has seemed kind of like a lot of work. I’m apparently going through a lazy period, and so I am eating a lot of pasta-with-stuff. And spinach, as a “stuff,” is awesome. You don’t even need to caramelize onions, which is how I start a lot of my pasta-with-stuff meals. Boil pasta (frozen ravioli are an excellent, choice, not least because they cook in about five minutes). Sauté a chopped garlic clove in olive oil until golden; add salt and pepper. Combine rinsed spinach leaves with the pasta, garlic, and oil, toss to combine, let rest thirty seconds, eat all of it yourself. Feel absurdly proud of yourself.

This is a fabulous lazy dinner because it tastes great, requires very little cleanup, and has nutritional content (dark leafy greens! good and good for you!). It is a fabulous dinner for people who are suspicious about spinach, because it is really hard to overcook the spinach if you add it only after everything has come off the heat, but it also doesn’t taste raw because the heat in the olive oil and pasta wilt the leaves.

Wellesley

February 15th, 2012 § Comments Off § permalink

Several months ago, I spent a weekend at the Wellesley College Sustainablity Co-Op, aka SCoop. I was well-fed there, and well-conversationed; one of the meals which lingers is the late tea of sliders and, well, tea.

I pulled together a quick batch of buttermilk biscuits, and while those were baking, we made patties out of the seitan in the fridge (Faithful Minion J., whom I was visiting, made a disapproving face when she saw it and muttered dark statistics about the collateral impact of such fake-meat products), sautéed them lightly on the stovetop, and grabbed ketchup and shredded cabbage (no lettuce, it wasn’t the season yet, the greenhouses on the campus hadn’t finished baking the mesclun, so to speak), before spending the next few hours engrossed in chat and discussion that covered everything from childhood books we have known and loved to the topiary on the Wellesley campus to the various glaciers around the world.

Which is really my point: I don’t think anyone needs to be told how to make hamburgers, which is really all sliders are, only miniaturized, and if they do, I am not the person to tell them. There are some people who are very good at teaching the basics, at breaking down recipes. But it’s not my thing. What I can do is talk about the resonances of food, the context (historical, especially, but also political and otherwise) of what we eat, how we decide what to eat, and other things. The power in that late tea, the reason I remember it, wasn’t in the food itself, wasn’t in the consumption of calories, wasn’t in the baking powder or the heat of the oven. It was in the feeling of friendship, the shared jokes, the sense that nobody at that table had anywhere else they wanted to be.

simple sandwich bread

November 22nd, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

I probably shouldn’t admit how quickly this apartment goes through loaves of bread — we eat the stuff as fast as I or B. can bake it. (Our record is three loaves of pretzel bread, which is B.’s specialty, demolished in less than twelve hours. Almost no loaf makes it more than 24 hours, or 36 at the outside, around here.) So when I was on vacation a while ago, and had some spare time, I made some extra batches of a basic white loaf and stuck most of the dough in the freezer. It’s all gone now, and I’m going to settle down to some serious kneading and shaping again so I can stick to the habit of thawing the dough in the fridge overnight and baking it while I’m drinking my morning tea and catching up on RSS feeds. (You do know you can get A Very Uncommon Cook delivered to your virtual doorstep in a feed, right? I am just looking out for your welfare, folks!)

bread dough

photograph by timlewisnm

(This recipe, I should note, is adapted from King Arthur Flour.)

Ingredients

1 ½ cups warm milk
1 heaping tablespoon honey
2 ¼ teaspoons yeast
1 ¾ teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons soft butter
around 4 cups all-purpose flour

Equipment

2 mixing bowls
1 nine-inch loaf pan
baking rack

Recipe

Pour the warm (not scalded! just warm) milk into a large mixing bowl. Add the honey and yeast, and stir to dissolve. Let rest two to five minutes. Add salt and butter, and stir to distribute. Add three cups of flour and mix. Add the last cup-or-so of flour gradually, kneading in between additions, until you have a smooth, elastic ball of dough.

Oil or butter another large mixing bowl and put the ball of dough in. Roll the dough around so the exterior is a little greasy. Cover with a hand towel or plastic wrap (loosely, in the latter case; don’t make it entirely airtight). Leave in a warm still place (I like the top of the refrigerator) for up to an hour and a half.

Grease a nine-inch loaf pan. When the dough is puffy, deflate it gently. There’s no need to slam your fist into it like it’s done you personal injury; if you want that, I suggest a boxing gym. Shape it into a log that will fit in the pan. Cover the pan with the towel or plastic wrap, and leave it in the warm still place for another hour or so. After an hour, turn the oven to 350°; when it’s preheated, remove the towel or plastic wrap and put the bread in.

Bake for twenty minutes, and then drape some aluminium foil over the top. Bake another ten to fifteen minutes, or until golden brown, and cool on a rack.

XXXIV (You are the daughter of the sea)

September 22nd, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

by Pablo Neruda

Eres hija del mar y prima del orégano,
nadadora, tu cuerpo es de agua pura,
cocinera, tu sangre es tierra viva
y tus costumbres son floridas y terrestres.

Al agua van tus ojos y levantan las olas,
a la tierra tus manos y saltan las semillas,
en agua y tierra tienes propiedades profundas
que en ti se juntan como las leyes de la greda.

Náyade, corta tu cuerpo la turquesa
y luego resurrecto florece en la cocina
de tal modo que asumes cuanto existe

y al fin duermes rodeada por mis brazos que apartan
de la sormbra sombría, para que tú descanses,
legumbres, algas, hierbas: la espuma de tus sueños.

fresh oregano stalks on a white plate

photograph by cookbookman17

trans. Stephen Tapscott
You are the daughter of the sea,
oregano’s first cousin.
Swimmer, your body is pure as the water;
cook, your blood is quick as the soil.
Everything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.

Your eyes go out toward the water, and the waves rise;
your hands go out to the earth and the seeds swell;
you know the deep essence of water and the earth,
conjoined in you like a formula for clay.

Naiad: cut your body into turquoise pieces,
they will bloom resurrected in the kitchen.
This is how you become everything that lives.

And so at last, you sleep, in the circle of my arms
that push back the shadows so that you can rest -
vegetables, seaweed, herbs: the foam of your dreams.

“Human happiness seems to consist in three ingredients; action, pleasure and indolence.” -Hume

July 22nd, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

This post is more for me than it is for anyone else, but that would be why my name is in the URL.
I’m hoping that this move will be my last for at least a year, maybe two. Because seriously, I could give up having refined my pantry list to its most elegant, eloquent form if it meant that I could stop packing up my kitchen and moving house. Ahem.
In no particular order, this is what you will find in my kitchen on any given day (and if you don’t, and you’re visiting, yell at me until I go grocery shopping). (What do you have in your itchen, and consider a necessity, that I don’t? Give me a peek!) » Read the rest of this entry «

Food for Risen Bodies, by Michael Symmons Roberts

April 24th, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

Food for Risen Bodies

by Michael Symmons Roberts

On that final night, his meal was formal:
lamb with bitter leaves of endive, chervil,
bread with olive oil and jars of wine.

Now on Tiberias’ shores he grills
a carp and catfish breakfast on a charcoal fire.
This is not hunger, this is resurrection:

he eats because he can, and wants to
taste the scales, the moist flakes of the sea,
to rub the salt into his wounds.

guilty pleasures

March 25th, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink

Every now and then, a spate of posts go around the foodblogosphere about guilty pleasures. The objectively gross foods you love that aren’t local or sustainable or nutritious (Easter Peeps come up a lot, for some reason); the foods that break every food resolution you’ve got (I know at least one person who calls herself a baconaterian; she’s a vegetarian….plus bacon, because bacon is “the food that makes other food worth eating”); the foods you would never, ever admit to buying or eating, in the company of your fellow foodies.

I can’t link to those posts because I didn’t delicious them; I generally don’t open them in my browser when they come through my RSS reader; when I stumble across them in my day-to-day surfing the web, I close the tab as fast as I can. My attitude toward those posts can be summed up very simply:

Fuck. That. Shit.

A partial list of my fuck-that-shit-I-love-this-and-I-refuse-to-be-ashamed foods includes:

  • candy corn, straight out of the bag (the ones made with honey taste like honey, and that is all wrong)

    • closeup on candy corn
    photograph by Muffet

  • overpriced Sabra’s hummus
  • bubble tea (there’s a place in Boston that makes taro bubble tea, it is bright purple and it tastes like strawberry shortcake and I swear they lace it with hallucinogenic substances; every time I drink it, I emerge blinking and bewildered and utterly satisfied)

    • plastic cup of taro bubble tea, ie an opaque lavender liquid with dark globules of tapioca pearls visible at the bottom
    photography by scaredy_kat

  • Freihofer’s chocolate-chip cookies, heated in the microwave for fifteen seconds
  • Stewart’s Fireworks ice cream (this is so disgusting, the ice cream is creepily gummy, but it is vanilla ice cream with Pop Rocks mixed in, and it is so much fun to eat, and it tastes like childhood to me)

Watch: as soon as I hit “publish” for this post, I will think of half a dozen things I should’ve put on that list and forgot. But I will not go back and edit it, for the simple reason that this post is all about giving the finger to the idea of “should” — specifically, what we should want.

3/2/1 soup

March 13th, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

I am a huge fan of Mark Bittman‘s work; his move from the Dining to the Op-Ed sections of the NYT is dreadful news for those of us who relied on his Minimalist column (and videos), but the essays he’s been writing since the move have been excellent. As a belated gesture of “yay Bittman, I will miss you on Wednesdays” and as a way of using up some of the three quarts of milk we had in the fridge, I made a quick batch of cream of carrot soup, using the 3/2/1 recipe that Bittman provided several years ago and which I have relied on ever since.

It’s much the same idea as in Michael Ruhlman‘s Ratio (I get no benefit by linking to this book on Amazon) — the idea that proportion is the important thing to understand about creating food, and once you have that down, the contents can be modified freely.

You remember those SAT analogy questions, the “bird : nest :: beaver : dam” ones? Think of this recipe as a grown-up, practical version of those — “broth : vegetables : dairy :: 3 : 2 : 1″.

carrot forest at a farmer's market
photography by Robert Couse-Baker

So when I made a big batch of this, I gently sautéed half an onion and a garlic clove in some olive oil, and then dumped in four cups of chopped carrots and potatoes before pouring six cups of chicken stock (you could use vegetable stock or even plain water with a bouillon cube if you had to) into the pot, brought it to a simmer, covered it until the vegetables were tender (about ten minutes), and then blended it with M.’s immersion blender, and kept the whole thing warm until everyone was home. Then I added two cups of milk, mixed to combine, salted and peppered as required, and served with some croutons made out of the heel-ends of the bread we had finished off that morning for breakfast. It was a pretty big hit, if I may say so, sweet and creamy and filling from the potatoes that added bulk to the broth.

I haven’t made this in a while, and I suddenly cannot remember why not. It’s a fantastic weeknight dinner, and I will probably be inflicting it on my flatmates again soon.

Advice to the Young, by Miriam Waddington

February 8th, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

Advice to the Young

by Miriam Waddington

1

Keep bees and
grow asparagus,
watch the tides
and listen to the
wind instead of
the politicians
make up your own
stories and believe
them if you want to
live the good life.

2

All rituals
are instincts
never fully
trust them but
study to im-
prove biology
with reason.

3

Digging trenches
for asparagus
is good for the
muscles and
waiting for the
plants to settle
teaches patience
to those who are
usually in too
much of a hurry.

4

There is morality
in bee-keeping
it teaches how
not to be afraid
of the bee swarm
it teaches how
not to be afraid of
finding new places
and building in them
all over again.

asparagus in the morning dew
photograph by Joi

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