Mixing the savory with the sweet: lamb stew and dried fruit.

During the marathon of cookie baking that has been going on over the last two weekends (and is finally over!), I paused to do other things, both in and out of the kitchen. What I'm finding is that, if I continue with one project for hours and hours and hours, apart from physical fatigue, I develop and almost "mental" fatigue, and begin to resent what I'm doing. If you saw the wonderful movie "Like Water for Chocolate," (and if you haven't, SHAME ON YOU), you are very familiar with the consequences of bad emotions going through your head when you cook (Now, if I could only learn to channel the good ones and the "good, dirty ones, I'd be set...). So I have to pause, because no one wants a cookie that tastes bitter and of bile. So on one of those breaks, I made a lamb stew, with dried apricots.

I suppose this recipe is sort of Middle Eastern/Iranian. I'm not sure. I don't know enough about the cuisine to say that with definitiveness. The spicing is middle eastern, and the use of dried fruit in meat dishes is very characteristic of that part of the world (and Africa too, for that matter. I think that some of the more elaborate Renaissance recipes that caused the passing of the so-called "anti-sumptuary laws probably did, too, but I don't know).

For years, I have made a lamb stew recipe with quinces, and I've posted it here. It's a very good recipe, but it has a very different feel, and flavor profile than this dish does. There are similiarities. And it's a very easy dish to make, although it is one where you can't leave the house when you're cooking it. As the weather gets cold and bleak, that's probably a good thing (although today it is an unseasonable 62 degrees). Let's get started.

First, the meat. You need about 2.5-3 pounds of lamb. Now, the logical place to start is with what is sold as "stew meat." Honestly, I don't see a point in buying this, unless you are dead on sure of what you're getting. I find that my stews work much better if I buy a boneless piece of lamb stew, and cube it myself. I can make the pieces as big or small as I like, and I know that they're uniform. Makes cooking much easier. It doesn't take long to cube a shoulder that is about 3 pounds. Maybe five minutes? Once you have the cubes, pat them dry, salt them and pepper them, and put them aside (if you think ahead, you can salt them the night before and refrigerate, but don't use the pepper until the next day).

Collect your spices. You will need a half teaspoon each of ground coriander, ground cinnamonm, and a quarter teaspoon of saffron. Saffron quality varies. Look for a longer strand of spice, rather than a powder or anything like that. You will also want to chop up two large onions. Also, have some chicken stock ready (the original recipe, like the quince stew, calls for water. Chicken stock makes it better). Finally, get half a pound of dried apricots.

Let's address the question of dried apricots for a minute. You can get California apricots, or Turkish apricots. The "rule" amongst cooks is that Turkish apricots are better, more tasty, and that they need more cooking time. As a general matter, I agree. But you can get delicious California apricots, especially organic ones. Honestly, though, in this dish, I think the standard, beautiful non-organic ones are fine. It will simplify your cooking if you use those, but if you are willing to spend the time, by all means go with organic or Turkish.

If your dried apricots are not soft, then you will have to cover them with water and let them soak for about an hour. You can start that half an hour or so before you begin making your stew, because you won't need them for a while.

Pour two tablespoons of olive oil, and add two tablespoons of unsalted butter (or, go with oil, all the way), into a pot and heat it at medium fire. Add the lamb cubes and brown them. Be patient. If they all don't fit comfortably in the pot, do it in batches. It is REAL important that you get this meat nice and brown because once you start the stewing, the possibility of getting color on the meat is gone. It will probably take you at least ten minutes to get it cooked nice and brown. As the cubes are cooked, put them aside in a bowl.

In my original recipe, it calls upon you to now get rid of most of the fat, and add the onions. I didn't do that, and I'm glad I didn't. If you do not use very fatty lamb, you will need that fat to cook these onions. Lower the heat, and cook them for a full 5-7 minutes. Stir while you're doing this. You don't want them to brown, but you want them soft.

When the onions are done, add the meat back to the pot, and stir in the spices. Now, cover everything - just BARELY cover it - with chicken stock. Let it come to a simmer, lower the heat, and let it cook away for half an hour.

Near the end of that half hour, drain the apricots. Save the water. Cut them into small pieces. Add the fruit and the water to the stew, and cook away, covered, for another hour or so. Check occasionally to check the liquid level. You don't want this to dry out, but you also don't want soup. Add stock as you need to. Near the end of the hour, check the seasonings by tasting a bit of the broth and a small (OK, a BIG ) piece of the lamb. You want it to be very tender.

It is interesting that if you cook this on the stove top as I did, you will get a drier dish, than if you move your pot into the oven, and let it cook away at 325 or so for the length of time given in the recipe. That's the nature of how close the fire is to what you are cooking.

This is really an eye opening dish. And I hope it inspires you to try it with other dried fruit. Figs perhaps, or dates, or even apples? I am also trying to get my hands on some dried persimmons, because I think the combination is going to be a good one. And you now have a general stewing/braising recipe, that you can use with other meats. For example, there is a wonderful dish of chicken braised with dried figs, and there is also one that I have seen of pork and pears. Those of you more clever than I will come up with more combinations. Use your imagination, but use it wisely. Think carefully before you decide that a potroast with dried cranberries is in your future....

More cookies

I want to warn you all ahead of time: this is a sad story in some ways. People die in it. People I miss. But I want to tell their story here. It involves Gertie, and Richard. And it involves horrific things: the holocaust, AIDs, and cancer. And Xmas cookies.

You ready? Ok, here we go.

When we first moved into our apartment, back in the early '90s, I was intrigued by an older, very tough looking woman. Tough was NOT the word: this woman was downright ROUGH. She sort of looked like the kind of woman you see coming out of the nastiest, darkest kind of bar, with a red face, and who looks 15 years older than she was. One day, she was struggling with some bags up to her apartment, and I offered to help. The look I got could have curdled milk and the tongue lashing about "I'VE BEEN DOING THIS SHIT FOR MYSELF FOR YEARS I DON'T NEED YOUR HELP" really scared me. But then she dropped something, and I grabbed it before it could fall and shatter and she agreed to let me help her. I didn't get into her apartment that time, but it was the ice breaker. Eventually, I learned that her name was Gertrude, but she preferred to be called Gertie. I also learned that she was a lesbian. And I learned that she was a concentration camp survivor. The ONLY member of her family who did survive.

One of the things that I learned from Gertie was that, when we study the events of the past, it is very easy to forget the inarticulate, the illiterate, the ones who really are a part of that history, but don't get any say in writing about it. Let's face it: we've all read or at least read about the scholarly histories of the holocaust, and the brilliant doctors, musicians, etc, who died. But there WERE "blue collar" jews, who died as well. Millions of them. And we forget them. Well, Gertie was one of them. Her family was NOT educated, she did NOT go to school, and when she came to the United States, she did not have rich relatives to take care of her. She had to rely on herself, always. Eventually, she became one of those people who clean the subway stations for the MTA, and eventually retired on disability She had a rent stabilized apartment, a studio, and lived alone, because when she moved to Greenwich Village "because people told me I should live there," she didn't know how to express her sexual preferences in a way that would interest any of - in her words "those hoity toity dykes who live around here."

I used to visit with Gertie, and she told me once that I was one of three men besides her father and two brothers who she trusted. I never met the other two. And one day, I was brave enough to ask her about something in her apartment: there was ALWAYS a bowl of lemons on her table. ALWAYS.

Be warned. This story is going to break your heart. It still breaks mine. As poor people, in Poland, her family didn't have enough to eat a lot of the time. Even before the occupation. And they certainly couldn't afford fancy stuff like citrus fruit (remember: this is before easy transportation of food). One day, no one knew quite how, her brother came home with a lemon: one, single lemon. There was, of course, the usual questioning and buzz about how he got it, but ultimately, her mother decided that she'd use it to make cookies.

She never got the chance. They came for the family that day. She never saw her brother or her father again. But by having the lemons , in her words "she remembered them."

At the time, I was working with my much missed baking teacher, Richard Sax. I told him the story about Gertie. He got very silent for a while and then he said "let's make her something. Let's make her some cookies." Richard knew EVERYTHING about cookies, and he recalled a recipe which, as I have learned, is not uniquely Polish, but is middle European, and is classic to Jewish communities because it uses oil, and no butter. And Richard told me that in the classic version, there was no citrus, but we were going to do it because "Gertie deserved it."

We made these cookies, and I brought them over to Gertie. Even though she liked me, she was VERY suspicious of gifts. She ate one of the cookies and I remember her saying something like "damn it, now you're making me think there may be some kindness in this freakin world." The lemon taste startled her (I learned, after making the cookies, that she never actually ATE the lemons she'd put on the table. She'd just replace them as they spoiled).

I made those cookies for her every chance I got. One fall, I went on vacation, and when I came back, the doorman told me that Gertie was "gone." Cancer. All the while, I did not know she had inoperable cancer, she never told me. She had decided not to do treatments because she was "just sick and tired of everything." I never got a chance to say goodbye.

A year later, Richard died, of lung cancer, which was related, I think both to his HIV status, and to the death of his partner a year before. I didn't get to say goodbye to him either.

These cookies are the cookies we made. They are NOT the fanciest cookies in the world, nor are they the easiest to make. Their texture, as with oil cookies in general, is not so creamy and soft as you might like, but "they are what they are." Try them. You may really like them. I make them every year, send them in my assortment tins, and when I make them, I think of Richard when I pour the poppy seeds into the batter, and Gertie when I'm grating the lemon peel. And they're in the kitchen with me.

You will need 3 eggs, half a cup of vegetable oil, 1.5 cups of sugar, and a pinch of salt. Whip all of these up together in a mixer, until you have a light, frothy mass. Then stir in three cups of flour, a tablespoon (yup, a tablespoon) of baking powder, and then AT LEAST a half cup of poppy seeds. Make sure the poppy seeds are fresh. They have a high oil content, and go rancid quickly. Finally, grate the peel from at least one, and maybe two lemons, and stir that into the batter.

This may not come together really easily and if it doesn't, add a little water until you get a cohesive mass of dough. It behaves a bit like piecrust in that respect.

Richard used to refrigerate this dough overnight. I find that unnecessary, and if I DO refrigerate the cookies at all, it's for an hour, maybe two. He also used to roll them out and cut crescent moons of them, and he used to call them "Mohn munds," because "mohn" is a poppyseed, and mund is of course, a moon. But he had better technique at rolling than I do, so I just break off balls, roll them, and line them up on baking sheets. Then I bake them at 375 for 12 minutes or so. Sometimes you need to bake them up to 15 minutes, because they're not browning. That's ok too.

When they cool, you store them in a tin. But like I said, their texture is not the greatest in the world, and after longer storage, they begin to feel almost like a cracker.

My description of these cookies may make you think "why bother?" Well, I don't really have to answer that, do I? I've written before as to how my friends live on for me, through the recipes I associate with them, and honestly, they DO taste good. They're just a little different.

Folks, you have someone out there who you associate with a particular recipe or dish or restaurant or something. FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE before you forget it, record it. You'll never lose it. Holidays are a time of remembrance, and that's when you call these things forth.

Xmas cookies: "The miniseries"

I tell people, with more than a soupcon of truth, that evidence of how much chaos there is in my life, and how far it has gotten out of control, comes from my annual Xmas cookie production. I make, literally, thousands. And unlike your normal crazy baker, I don't make one or two (or three or four) varieities: I make over 40.
How did this start? Well, years ago, someone I loved dearly was spending his last days in a hospital. I brought a tin of cookies at Xmas to cheer him up. "Where's mine?" was asked by several of the people in the room. Given my deep rooted sense of Catholic guilt, next year, I made more. And the "where's mine?" request came up again. So, production expanded, and expanded again. You can figure out the rest. It is, literally, a chaotic couple of weeks between Thanksgiving and Xmas as I get all of these together. And every year when it's done I say "This is IT. No more. I am TIRED of this." And Guy, patient spouse that he is, shakes his head, looks away, and says nothing when I start buying butter on sale in October and November.

The style of cookies I make has changed. When I started, I did stick to basic "cut out" cookies. You know the kind I mean: the snowmen, the stars, etc, and spent yards of time decorating them with frosting, and sugar and everything else. And they just weren't very good. Pretty, but not very good ('fess up: have you ever eaten one of those decorated, icinged, sugared cookies that tasted like anything but frosting?). I started investigating other cookies, especially those of a more European bent: biscotti, shortbreads, nutbased cookies, etc. And they taste much better. MUCH better.

But... and this is something I need to warn you about if you get into cookie baking in a big way. Most of these cookies, like most baked t hings, are BROWN. They are, at best, golden brown, but color wise, you have a certain monotony. It IS broken up by things like dried fruit in the cookies, or jam, or things like that, but if you go for tastier cookies, you are NOT going to have the beauties that you would get from a bakery, where someone pipes frosting in pretty colors all day. Nope, you're not going to get those from me.

In terms of flavors of cookies, I am going to generalize wildly, and say that people seem to fall into three "favorite flavor " categories for cookies: chocolate, spice, and citrus.
I am not a big fan of chocolate type cookies, and actually, as I meet more and more people and put out cookies, it seems that once people break out of the mold of chocolate cookies, and discover the other "tastes," they move to others (let's leave my friend David out of this, shall we?). My own palette goes to the citrus cookies, but only slightly. I'm going to present a recipe below that is not really my own, but I have modified it.

In my opinion, a cookie should leave you feeling SATISFIED. If you feel like you have to eat six or seven of them at one time, the cookie is not well made. You shouldn't need many of them. One or two biscotti, one well made oatmeal cookie, etc etc etc. Granted, there is time for indulgence, but if you're dumping cookies into a bowl, adding milk and eating them like breakfast cereal (as one friend once did), you're not doing them justice, or they're not doing you justice.

In the citrus category, this may very well be my new favorite cookie. I like it because it uses the WHOLE citrus fruit: not just the rind, and not just the juice. I also like it because, even though it was originally written as a log cookie (the kind you form into a log and then slice and bake), it works as a drop cookie too (the kind where you grab hunks of dough and form balls and bake). I LIKE drop cookies. I HATE log cookies.

This is NOT for people who do not like citrus. But they are PERFECT in a holiday assortment, and they are great at the end of a rich meal. They make a lot, and you'll be glad you made that many.

Start with 2 sticks of unsalted butter that have softened at room temperature, and beat them, in a mixer, for about two minutes. Add zest from one lemon and one lime, that you have grated. Put those naked fruits aside (CAREFUL BOYS). Then stir in a cup of granulated sugar, and beat for another two minutes. While that's happening, squeeze the lemon and the lime separating the pits (I didn't have to tell you that, did I?), and then add the juice to the butter mixture. Also add a teaspoon of vanilla. Then add 2 heaping cups of flour (about 2.25 actually) and a half teaspoon of salt. The salt is REAL important. Don't forget it.

You will have a very soft dough, and you DO need to refrigerate it. The minimum time is probably 3 hours, but I will tell you that I have refrigerated this overnight, and it's been fine the next day, right out of the fridge.

You will need three baking sheets lined with parchment paper. Preheat your oven to 375. Break off small balls of dough. Let's say about the size of a really big olive or a really small walnut (that's not really helpful is it? Deal with it). Put about 25-30 of the balls onto each cookie sheet. Then, put a quarter cup of sugar in a small bowl, and press a small glass into it, to take some sugar on the bottom. Press the cookies slightly, and bake them in the middle of the oven, for about 10-12 minutes Use ten minutes if you like softer, moister cookies, and 12 if you like them crispier. If you see them browning around the edges, take em out.

These will be very soft when you take them out of the oven. Leave them alone for a good half hour, and then either eat em, or put em in a metal tin or a glass jar, or something like that. NEVER in plastic.

They are supposed to keep for a week, but I've kept them in a cold place in a house for a month.

If you had some of my huckleberry ice cream around, that would make a nice filling for these guys. But to tell you the truth, I just like to sit there with them, and enjoy each nibble. They are really good.

I have said that gingersnaps are the "house cookie," and I almost always have them around. These may give a run for the money to the snap. Or, maybe we'll make em both and satisfy the spicers and the citrussers.

One of Tati's favorites: stuffed cabbage

I have written, only occasionally, about my grandfather, "Tati." If you've read those entries, you know why. The emotions of writing about him are tough. As my emotions seem to be right out there on the surface of my skin, no matter how I try to keep them in check, the combination of an inherent property of yours truly, and the memories of this wonderful man, sort of overwhelm me. It really isn't until recently that I recalled how much he loved this dish. And how Nana would NOT make it for him. Cabbage really does not have much place in an Italian kitchen. She would make coleslaw every once in a while, and she felt compelled, when we were older, to make corned beef and cabbage on St Patrick's Day (it was awful), that was about it. And I've told you how cabbage gave Tati gas, and Nana would give him grief about this whenever he went out and had it.

It took me a LONG time to "cotton" to cabbage. I'm still not going to eat brussel sprouts (incidentally, I LOVE the Italian word for them: cavolini, or "little cabbages. " That's a new word to Italian, since Brussel sprouts are not an Italian vegetable either). And as far as stuffed cabbage went, I always had a feeling that it was a difficult, time consuming dish, not worth the trouble. And indeed, many of the recipes for it that I found, were so intricate, I wondered how anyone could ever make it.

Well, I found one that I really like. Some years ago, Marian Cunningham, a true treasure in the cooking world, published an almost unnoticed book called "Forgotten Recipes." In going through it, indeed, it is my opinion that there is a reason why most of these recipes were forgotten. They're just not very good. Even the stuffed cabbage recipe, good as it was, needed modification. Ms. Burros had essentially presented recipes from a day long past. In that period, dishes like this one were sweeter, and were "spicier" in the sense that they had sweet spices in them. The original recipe for t his dish contained allspice and cloves. Nice in some things, but they were put into the tomato sauce base of the recipe, and that just bothered me big time. So, too, did the brown sugar. So I make this in a simpler form, and it's a good dish to make. If Tati were around, I would want to make it for him. But I would also want to fall into his arms and have him hold me the way he did when I was very young. I'm fortunate enough to have found a friend who's arms remind me of those strong, "Tati arms," and I try to get him to hug me as much as I can. It's not the same, but we learn that what we have is pretty darn good. I'd make it for James, too.

So, here we go. You will need a head of cabbage, say about 2-2.5 pounds. That's really not that big a head . You can use savoy, or plain cabbage. I'm going to come back to this in a minute. You will also need a generous 2 cups of tomato sauce - you may even want to go with 2.5 cups. Also, 2 cups of cooked white rice. Finally, you will need 2 pounds of ground meat of some kind. I like to use a 50/50 mixture of beef and pork, or all pork in this recipe. You could, however, use whatever you like. I do think that this would even work with ground turkey.

Prepping the cabbage is the hardest part of this recipe, and there are several ways to do it. The way I do it is to start by removing any leaves that I just wouldn't eat. DOn't throw them out. We'll get back to that. Then, cut out the core of the head of cabbage with a sharp knife, to enable you to peel the leaves off, one at a time. Patience and steadiness, and don't worry if they tear. This dish is forgiving.

Eventually, you'll get to the point where "the law of diminishing returns" sets in. In other words, like those stacking Russian dolls, you'll get to something small, and non-separatable. You can chop that up and use it in the dish too. We're gonna "use it all."

Take those whole leaves, and put them into a big pot of salted, boiling water, and cook them for about five minutes. Drain them, and let them cool down. (Indeed, if you do the cabbage prep first, you can make the rice and get the sauce ready while they cool).

There IS an ingenious way of separating cabbage leaves, if you have the room in your freezer. This comes from Jacques Pepin. What you do is cut away that center piece, and freeze the whole head. The next day, thaw the cabbage. If you do this, you don't have to boil the leaves. I never have any room in the freezer for a head of cabbage, so I always use the boiling water method. No big deal.

Okay, w hile those leaves are cooling, take 2 cups of that 2.5 cups of sauce, and add the chopped meat to it. Cook this over low heat, just until the meat loses its pinkness. Stir to break it up. You're going to notice something very interesting: the sauce is going to become "intermingled in the meat, and it won't be very liquid. That's exactly what you want. Taste it and add salt and pepper to your liking (you will need it). Finally, stir in that rice.

Get a big, 9x13 pan ready by pouring that reserved half cup of sauce over the bottom of it. If you had left over small leaves of cabbage, chop them and put them on the sauce. Then, put that aside and take the cabbage leaves, one at a time, and fill them with a spoonful of your sauce and meat mixture. Don't overfill them, because we do have a use for the leftover filling. IF, as is frequently the case, the base stem of the leaf is too tough to allow you to roll it up, cut away as much as you need to allow it to roll, just like a tortilla. Put them, seam side down in your pan, and if you have to stack them, so be it. If there is extra filling left, put that on top of the rolls.

Remember those leaves that were really ucky and you couldn't see using them? Well, now you will. Put the whole leaves on top of everything, as if to protect them, because they will. What those leaves do is act to keep the dish from drying out. You are going to put a big piece of foil over it anyway, but the cabbage leaf protectors are nice, if you have them. Bake the dish at 350 for an hour. It might be useful to you to put it on a baking sheet to bring it to the oven (it is for me).

After an hour, you will have a PLEASANT smell of cooking cabbage in the house, and you'll see bubbling around the edges of the dish. It's VERY hot at this point, so let it cool down. Even better, if you have the time, let it chill overnight and eat it the next day. Reheat it with the foil cover, and take away the cover leaves.

The traditional accompaniments for this are apple sauce or sour cream, or both. I've never gotten used to the sweet element with the dish. Tati used to love it with potato pancakes. He'd put applesauce on the pancakes, and eat the cabbage with sour cream, that he'd augment with sauerkraut juice. I use the sour cream, but not the sauerkraut juice, and now that I think about it, I can't really give a reason why I don't. Maybe it's simply because I don't have it around, but that can certainly be fixed.

This is a time of year for remembrance. As we get closer to December 21, and the days get shorter, and we sink into more and more of the night (can you tell I've been listening to Tristan und Isolde, you OQs out t here?), our departed loved ones do visit more and more, and memories stir up that you thought were gone. In many ways, this is the saddest season of the year. Try to enliven it by remembering something good to go with the sad. Yes, I miss Tati. I miss him DEARLY. But making this and eating it makes me remember all of the good that I had in the too short time that I knew him.

I expect you at the table, Tati. Come and join us.

When you're done, if

Annalena flies solo: is this a new recipe? Monkfish, mushrooms and tomatoes

One of the things that people say about cooking is that, ultimately, there really isn't anything new that comes out of a kitchen. For the most part, this is true. Think of how many people have been cooking since the beginning of time. Steak tartare? Uh, no. Even when you think it's really, REALLY creative. A few years ago, I thought that lemon verbena would make a wonderful sorbet, and it did. I bragged about it. I told my herb vendor (Stokes Farms), that I did it. I was so proud. Mario Batali's sous chef was there. He gave me their house recipe.

Mine was better. But it WAS the same thing. Of course, when you look at the cooks who are "out there," like the restaurant Alinea, or others, this is all new. But is it food? I've not been to these places, but sorry, I remain unconvinced. But perhaps that's unfair. It is invention coming out of those kitchens. Whether one chooses to eat it or not, is a different issue.

You can never learn enough about cooking, and you can study recipe after recipe after recipe, and certain themes emerge. For example, let's look at the example of short ribs. I really don't remember which one of the "brown" spirits was the first one used, but there are recipes for short ribs braised in bourbon, in scotch, in beer, in stout, in lager, etc. I THINK the first one was actually coffee, and if you think about it, certain flavor notes in coffee DO suggest the flavors of those strong drinks, so it was just one step to them. Are they new recipes? Probably. But where does "new" become variation, and where does it just turn into copying?

I dunno.

My recipe has probably been made somewhere, probably by some Provencal cook, because it feels like it. On Monday, shopping at the Farmer's Market, someone was asking my fish monger Dolores about monkfish. She and her buddy Jan were explaining how to cook it, and of course, I jumped in. Now, I was NOT planning to buy monkfish, but now the thought was in my head. Ten minutes later, I had a pound and a half tail of it.

I like monkfish. It's frequently called "poor man's lobster," for reasons I don't get. It doesn't taste like lobster to me (I HATE lobster), I don't think the texture is the same, so I just don't get it. I DO like it. If you saw a monkfish before it was butchered, you might not want to eat it. The fish is UGLEEEE! And scary. All of the meat IS in the tail, it's nice and solid and dense, and it's a white fish with very little fat in it. It's still sustainable, and it's still cheap .

I also picked up a pound of shitake mushrooms. I use a lot of mushrooms at this time of year. These are not foraged mushrooms, but they are really good. Their solid density really appeals to me with winter food. But there wasn't really all that much to work with in the kitchen, t hanks to my latest purge of stuff. So, it was looking like mushrooms and monk, in some way, manner or form.

I like baked monkfish, and while mushrooms do bake up nicely, they throw off a lot of water, and they take a long time to get soft. So I decided to pan fry them a bit first. A few sprigs of rosemary, five small cloves of chopped garlic, and a pound of sliced shitakes went into a pan, and cooked for ten minutes.

A note on shitakes. The stems are tough. REALLY tough. You can save them and add them to a stock or b roth, but I love to just chew on them. I'm weird, I know.

And a note on rosemary. When you cook with i t, leave it on the branch. The reason for this is those needles. They're extremely bothersome if you wind up with one of them in your teeth. If you leave them whole, the flavor will go into the food, and you can pull out the branch at the end, and have no problem.

I put the mushrooms down on the bottom of a 9x13 glass baking dish, with the oil. That was enough for the fish to rest on, patted dry and salted. Looking at it, it just looked, well, lonely. But I had a lot of the baked tomatoes I made when they were in season, all under oil. I crushed four of them in my hands, and added that to the mushrooms. Then I covered everything with foil tightly, and put it in a 400 degree oven.

I DID overcook it. I baked for 30 minutes. 20 would have been fine. But taking the foil off released a wonderful aroma of mushroom, tomato, and fish, with rosemary underneath it all It served up beautifully, with swiss chard and couscous.

Maybe this isn't original. Very little of what a cook does, ultimately, is original. But if you wanted to copy this, either with monkfish, or some other white fish, be my guest. If you use fish steaks or filets, like cod, or flounder, or pollak, or something like that, I suggest you cut the cooking time down to ten minutes or so. Check the fish with a knife to see if it's cooked through.

You will enjoy this. I promise. And you don't have to give me credit.

Sweets for the sweet: nutty candy

As we are heading into the holiday season, I start making my holiday goodies. Cookies and candies. Whilst the cookies seem to change, from year to year, depending on my mood, or whim , or what have you, the candies are very much the same: candied grapefruit peel, quince paste, and a toffee crunch or two.

The first one of the toffee crunches I ever made was called, quite impolitely "white trash fudge." It had marshmallows, candied cherries, chocolate pieces , nuts and who knows what else in it. I thought it was revolting. And I couldn't make enough of it. Every single cookie plate or assortment I sent out, came back with the "fudge" gone, and other cookies, my pride and joy, still there. SIGH.

Well, perhaps it was Freudian, but I lost the recipe for white trash fudge years ago. Toffees of some kind find there way into the assortment every year though.

What is a "toffee" anyway? Well, one way you can think of toffee is as a "butered caramel." If you heat sugar either with or without water, at appropriate heat, it breaks down, and becomes, first, a liquid. Then a slightly darker one, then a very dark one, and then it burns to, literally, charcoal. That process by which the sugar turns to this brown liquid, is the making of caramel. If you add butter to the sugar mix, you get toffee. It's that simple.

Or is it? The chemistry behind this process is quite mind boggling and one of the scourges of every organic chemistry student. Trust me on this one. Also, if you follow basic instructions for making these concoctions, what you will have, essentially, is a toffee or caramel SYRUP. Making the actual candies involves having molds, and scads and scads of time. I have neither. So my "toffees" are really toffee syrup, surrounding some other goody, generally nuts.

I am giving you here a basic recipe for making a batch of excellent nut crunch. This is very similar to really good peanut brittle, except you should vary the nuts and make your own, trademarked candy.

A word of warning (or two). If you have small children, you should NOT let them help you with this recipe. You are going to be cooking sugar to 350 degrees. That's hot. It's as hot as hot oil, and you know how that burns. Sugar is worse. Remember: sugar is sticky. So while you may be able to rub off hot oil, real quickly, you will NOT be able to do that with sugar. It will cool down when it hits your skin, but it will take its time. So, no kids in the room, please. And wear gloves. And an apron. You will also want a paper lined baking sheet, sprayed with cooking spray, and some kind of spatula or bench knife, also sprayed

You will need 2 cups of sugar, a quarter cup of water, a half stick of unsalted butter, cut into cubes, and a quarter cup of corn syrup. You can probably leave out the corn syrup, but this helps stabilize what you're cooking, and allows it to "flow" better. You can find it next to the sugars at the grocery store. And you can use the rest to make a pecan pie. Get the white one. A candy thermometer is just about essential

Mix all of these things together in a pot, and let the sugar melt into the water. Stir itwhile it's melting down. Before that, pour out two - 2.5 cups of nuts, of whatever kind you like. This year, I'm stressing pignoli nuts. Put them at the side. Add half a teaspoon of salt

Once the sugar melts, stop stirring it. This is CRITICAL. If you disturb the sugar, you have a chance of forcing it to crystallize wildly, and inappropriately.

When the sugar has melted down, lower the heat, and get your candy thermometer, or any kind of thermometer tested to over 350 (most of them are). Try to get an instant read one. You'll watch the syrup begin to bubble up in big bubbles, then reduce to smaller ones, and then color. It's going to take about eight minutes to get to the temperature you need, but start checking after four, and check every 30 seconds. When the temperature is reached, take the pot off the heat and stir in the nuts, hard and fast. IF you wanted to add half a cup of chocolate chips at this point, or anything else, no one would mind.

Pour the mass out onto the paper, and IMMEDIATELY spread it out as far as you can. If you use the bench knife , you can use it to press things down, the way you would if you were spreading plaster on a wall. Just keep on spreading. then put it aside and let it cool, for about twenty minutes.

You will come back to a hard, brittle mass, that you break up at random, to make oddsized pieces. And you have nut brittle in your hands.

This stuff keeps, in a dry, metal tin, for months. Make several batches, and you've got holiday gifting done.

Be careful, but do try this recipe. It really is worth the effort. Homemade candy always provokes a smile.

Iconic food: chili

Ok, now I KNOW I'm gonna step on toes with this one. Here you have this Italian guy, treading on one of the sacred foods of Tex Mex and Mexican cooking. I have written about European "canonical" foods and how trying to find "the" definitive recipe is impossible. That's true for chili, which is unarguably an iconic American food. EVERYONE has eaten chili. EVERYONE who cooks thinks theirs is the best. And every single one of them is different.

What is chili? Oi, that gets into a Buddhist kind of thing about "what is desire?" or "what is true love?" The more I have investigated the underpinnings of chili , the more I realized that there was much I would never figure out. One thing I DID learn, early on though: if you are calling it "chili con carne," or if you are adding beans to it, you are NOT making chili. At its most basic, chili is meat, with seasonings. I guess you could argue that it's a way to cook up meat when you have it, and make it last. Fat and spices help to keep decay and mold away from food, and there's both in chili. And it cooks up in large bunches, in a reasonably short period of time. And of course, it permits bulking up if you like. Adding beans to it does that. So, too, does putting it over rice, or noodles ("Cincinnati style," I'm told. Now there's a sign of canonical food. Try to connect Cincinnati and Tex Mex. The dots don't line up). But at its purest, chili is just what I said: meat, spices, seasonings, fat.

I have always made , to be honest, piss poor chili. This year, I tried something new. I looked and looked until I found the most minimal recipe I could. I even had to add things to this recipe, like fat. The recipe called for sauteeing meat and onions, but didn't say HOW to do it. And beyond onions, garlic, meat, it has chili powder and cumin in it, salt, and water. That is it. Try it.

The final product here is remarkably tame, given the amount of seasonings. It DOES have a bit of a kick, but much less than I thought it would. You'll lprobably need to buy some spices for it.

This makes a generous quart of chili. You can cut it back by half, but why do that?

You start with four pounds of ground meat, and four cups of chopped onions. That's about 5-6 medium sized onions. Get ground chuck if you can. Something about 85% lean. Anything leaner like that is probably going to give you chili that is too dry for your taste. Get GOOD meat too. I used grass fed, which at 7 bucks a pound, makes this a not inexpensive dish. You're worth it though.

Also, measure out six TABLESPOONS of chili powder (I used pure ground ancho) and 6 TABLESPOONS of ground cumin . That, incidentally, is about a third of a cup of each. Yeah, it's a lot. Don't worry.

If you can get canned chipotles in adobo, chop about three of them, and then freeze the rest (these will go bad in the fridge, and you don't want to lose them. Use them to spice up something else). Now, you're ready to cook. Really.

Get a heavy duty dutch oven, and slick the pan with olive oil. Add the onions and the meat, cold. Turn up the heat to high, and start turning the meat and onions. You want to cook this until the red is gone from the meat. It will take just under ten minutes. When the pink is gone, stir in the spices and the chipotle. Also add about a scant tablespoon of salt. Stir that all together and cook, for about three minutes. You can also add 6 or so chopped cloves of garlic to this. You don't have to. After the three minutes, add five cups of water. Lower the heat to medium low, partly cover the pot, and go away for ninety minutes. Come back every now and then to stir it and to check the liquid. Mine was wet enough up until the l ast ten minutes or so, when it began to crackle. At that point, I could have either added more water, or kept stirring it. I did the latter.

Over the course of the cooking, the color changes from a bright orange red to this wonderful brick red color that permeates the whole dish. The seasoning is such that I would say a half cup portion is plenty, especially if you add a starch like rice, or grated cheese, or sour cream, or all of t hose things. Add some chopped jalapenos if you like and your hot sauce of choice.

This is really something really, REALLY easy to do. And it makes a lot. And look at that recipe, if you would. Does it seem very fatty? It's not. You can it as rich as you like with additives, but that's up to you.

Now, go and get some ground meat, and make some chili. I THINK you could substitute some ground pork here if you like, but I haven't done that. I'm saving mine for stuffed cabbage.

Yes, folks, winter is around the corner. No more fresh strawberries. Lots of applesauce and baked pears, and dishes like this.

Superbowl party, anyone? :)

I'm a fan: pasta with walnut pesto and kale

Justin Smillie is one of my favorite cooks in the world. I first met him when he cooked at Barbuto, which is one of our favorite restaurants, still. Then he was at Cookshop, another favorite restaurant, and then at The E.U., which was not, but it was worth it for his cooking. Now he's at a new place called "Smith's," and we went for the first time last week. We were Justin's guests, and he served forth - I'm not kidding here folks - a 13 course meal. And there would have been more, but we asked him to stop.

I want to make a comment here, before going on to cooking: if you are ever fortunate enough to be the guest of a restaurant cook or chef, keep something in mind: you are NOT the guest of the staff. TIP. TIP WELL. You have just had a great meal that you did not pay for. TIP WELL.

Ok, out of my system. Now to the point of this blog. Everything we ate that night was wonderful. There are parts of the meal that I liked more than others, but I did like everything. It's difficult to try to pick one favorite, but a pasta dish was up there. I couldn't pick out the flavors, so I asked, and they told me it was walnut pesto with kale. The kale I might have gotten in better light, because I could see the dark green leaves. Walnut pesto, I would never have guessed. But once they told me what it was, I went and chatted with Justin, and I can make this. And in fact, I am making it. You can too. Try it.

Kale is one of those greens that you need to know a bit about. This is a winter type of green, that grows very big, very tough and very stringy. You can get it young and more tender, and you can even get it so young that it's in a salad mix. But at this time of year, it's one of the few greens you will find, because it winters well. But it's a tough bird. To prepare it, you n eed to try to get all the leaves off of the stems. Don't be fancy, just rip em off, and you will have to cook it for a while, in a lot of rapidly boiling salted water. How long? Don't ask me. What you need to do is taste small pieces of it as it cooks, to determine when it's tender enough for you. But this is lazy work: putting the greens in salted water and letting them cook. You can handle that, right?

While they're cooking, make the pesto. I think mine is a little different from Justin's. I put 3/4 cup of walnuts into my processor with a pinch of salt. I ground those, and started adding olive oil, until I had something that was a sludgy mix of nuts and oil. The taste was good. Not the taste of Justin's but good (I suspect Justin had butter and oil in his). I didn't add cheese, and I don't think Justin did either. I suspect that, since there isn't a strong herbal presence in this pesto, adding cheese to it would have overwhelmed the nuts. So if you DO want cheese, then add it as a sprinkle at the end.

You now have your components together. Boil up some pasta - a long variety, and stir it together with the pesto, and the greens, and you have a dinner which, arguably, is good for you. No one is going to say nuts are low calorie, but kale is a nutritional power house, and you should put lots of it into the pasta.

I'm serving this with some plain grilled chicken breasts, as our pre thanksgiving day dinner. I'm looking forward to it. Give it a try, and happy holidays to all

Roll up your sleeves: candying grapefruit peel

I wax rhapsodic about citrus in winter. It really is one of my favorite things about this season. And I've learned so much, and I'm still learning. One of the things that is key to what I've learned, is that EVERYONE loves citrus of some kind, and everyone has a favorite. People who don't care for grapefruit love oranges, people who don't like oranges love blood oranges, and so on and so forth.

Today, we are jaded by the prices we pay for citrus. How many times have you said something like "four for a dollar? NAH. They have them six for a dollar down the street." Well, it wasn't always like that. Citrus were always considered precious, because getting them to climates where they did not grow was a feat worthy of being called a miracle. So they were expensive. To give someone an orange was a gift of true love. Indeed, IF you were a good child all year, you would get an orange in your stocking at Xmas. In the original Cinderella, the thing that wins the prince's heart is when Cinderella gives her orange away to her evil stepsister, because there aren't enough to go around (Cinderella takes place in a cold climate. Probably Russia. T hink about getting oranges to Russia, from Italy, in the 17th century). So all kinds of strategies were developed by cooks to use every part of the citrus. This manifests itself, for example, in Shaker lemon pie, where the whole lemon, not just the juice, is used. And it also manifests itself in this labor intensive, but wonderful confection, candied grapefruit peel.

The first time I made this for people, anyone my age or thereabouts, or older, widened their eyes and said something like "My mom used to make this EVERY YEAR. I missed it." People who didn't have that tradition but tasted it, loved it. Indeed, the crossing of bitter and sweet, with citrus notes, is wonderful. And it's a way to use up all those peels. They weigh a LOT. So, rather than compost them, use them to make this. But I warn you: you are going to need a candy thermometer for this (you can get them cheap), and it's going to take a w hile to do. Trust me, the end result is worth it. I'll give you a little of what I do, but not a lot. I have a lot of people to make happy with this stuff.

Ok, so you start with 3-4 grapefruit. Squeeze out the juice and either drink it down (it's SO good), or make something with it. Make curd, for example, or sorbet, or use it for marinades. Do something.

Now, the work begins. If you cut the grapefruit in halves, half them again to make quarters. Put these in a pot, cover it with water, and bring it to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer for about fifteen minutes. Drain it, and let it cool. BE PATIENT. Then, with the back of your knife, scrape off all of the white pith and anything else that's left, and then cut the peel into long strips, maybe a quarter inch wide. You'll have a lot of them.

Put this under water, bring it to a boil, and cook for ten minutes. Then drain, and repeat the process two more times. You will have cooked the peel a total of four times. You need to do this to get most of the bitterness out. And to soften it, for the candying process.

Now, get the strips into a pot with four cups of sugar, and two cups of water. Bring this to a boil, to dissolve the sugar. You keep the grapefruit in with this. The sugar helps to cure it. Now you start simmering to the point where the syrup is at 230. Here, the chemistry of sugar is interesting. You will get to the boiling point of 212, very quickly. Those 18 extra degrees will take a while. Probably on the order of 30 or 40 minutes. And you MUST get to that point, or the sugar will not "take" properly, and your candy will be a mess. At 230 (use the thermometer), take it off the heat, and let it cool completely again. You may have a lot of syrup left over, and you may have almost none. It very much depends on so many things that it's impossible to predict. If you have extra syrup, save it and drizzle it on cake . It's delicious.

when the peel is cool, get out your baking sheets, line them with paper, and get the peel on it, in single strips. Try not to let them touch each other, and let it cool in the air until it's just barely tacky to the touch.

When you get there (and how long will depend on how much moisture is in the air), get some more sugar and just toss the pieces in it, until they're coated. Then store it in a dry, metal tin. It will keep forever.

What you will see during this process is a color change, as the peel goes from grapefruit yellow to a very interesting, complex pink color. The peel is just toothsome enough to be interesting, and the combination of bitter and sweet is terrific. Some people like to dip this into chocolate as well. I prefer to leave it on the table, with bittersweet chocolate, because some of us like our citrus "straight."

You have made a candy out of water sugar, and , literally, garbage. You would have thrown those peels out, right? Some years ago, I read an article about a woman who made and sold the stuff, at 64 dollars a pound, and the author said it was worth it. I laughed. Grapefruit peel, sugar and water, 64 dollars a pound. Of course, your labor counts. I will probably candy somewhere between 12 and 15 grapefruit this year, using this recipe . Put the strips in a mixed assortment of your goodies, or if theres someone REALLY special, give em nothing but this. If someone gave me a tin of candied grapefruit peel, I would treat it as a true expression of absolute love.

I'm waiting....

Huckleberry Redux: a love letter to some friends

Cycles, don't ya love them? I had remembered that I had written a blog entry entitled "My Huckleberry Friend," and I couldn't remember the precise date. It was back on November 12 of last year- just about a year ago. So, a year passes, a season repeats, and we're back to the same ingredients.

I guess that it is a sign of how creative people can be in the kitchen that someone can write more than one essay about what he does with an ingredient. I WILL confess, however, that what I'm writing about today is awfully similar to what I wrote about last year. It involves cream puff shells, and it involves lemons, and it involves huckleberries, but this time... we're gonna make ice cream.

I have written about certain magical flavor combinations. Tomato and basil. Cinnamon and apple. Foie gras and sour cherries. And I think another one of those magic mixes is huckleberries and lemons. It doesn't SOUND like it should be, if you think about it. There is an old adage in cooking that "what grows together, GOES together. " Tomatoes and basil come into season at the same time, at the same place. Lemons are a little later than huckleberries, though, and now that I think about it, I don't think cinnamon and apples grow in the same place. Oh well. Another Annalena dead end.

But moving along, huckleberries and lemon DO work together beautifully. Not that long ago, I had an incredible lemon/huckleberry granita. I had misread the dessert option and thought it was some of each, but in fact it was a combination and it was GOOD. There was real synergy there. Better than either one alone, or having to mix them in my bowl myself . But putting them together, in different forms, is also pretty darn good.

I have written about cream puff shells a few times, and I gave you all my recipe for lemon curd not that long ago. Please review. We're going to talk about huckleberry ice cream today, and you can , if you like, substitute blueberries for this and do the same thing.

Chances are, unless you're reading this on the West Coast during a very limited time span in the late fall, you're going to be using frozen huckleberries. And that's just fine. In fact, for making this ice cream, having frozen berries is actually better. The pulp of the fruit actually breaks down enough in the thawing of the berries that you don't have to worry about things like cooking them, pureeing them, and all that jazz. So get yourself a pound of frozen huckleberries. That's about two cups (and yes, this is a VERY generous amount of huckleberries for this recipe). You should let them thaw in a pot, until they're soft and very liquid. If you can, you should let it happen overnight. I suggest NOT heating them to hasten the process. I just don't think it's worth it. When they're soft, combine them with 3/4 cup of sugar, and three cups of heavy cream.

Yeah, this is a rich one. But you know what? You're not gonna add any eggs. Nope. That's because the pectin in the berries is such that the stuff will firm up without cooking the eggs. Don't believe me ? Well, try it.

When you've got these three lovely ingredients together, heat them gently, until the sugar has melted. That's all you have to do, except let the stuff cool down until it's cool enough to go into your ice cream maker.

If you refrigerate this mixture, you will get a gelled product that may remind you of the jellied soup that you would get if you made your own chicken soup, with all that gelatin in it. This sort of makes it "gelato" rather than ice cream, at least in many definitions of what gelato is, i.e., a lot of fruit, minimal sugar, good cream, and no eggs.

When you have your ice cream, fill your cream puff shells. then pour the lemon curd over them.

This is a dessert that you should keep for special occasions. Last night, we had our final monthly dinner of the year. That one is reserved for people who come to mind when Guy and I ask "how did I get through this year without....." and a name falls into place. No offense to our other friends at all. These are just people who were SUPER special this year, and they got all the stops pulled out for this dinner. Ragu. Cassoulet. Roman gnocchi. Poule Normande. Grape pie. Peanut vanilla ice cream. And the profiteroles. James, Michael, Chris, Matthew, Kevin, Chuck, David, Keith, you mean the world to both of us. Thank you SO much for getting us this far.

Eating like a peasant: chicken with apples and calvados

Yes, you read the title right. Doesn't sound like a peasant dish to you now, does it?

One of the aspects of "cuisine" that most fascinates me (besides learning how to spell it correctly), is how peasant dishes become "canonized" as sacred, fancy dishes for the rich. Did you know, for example, that truffles were once considered the food of the poor? You had to hunt them ,and dig for them, and rich people "just didn't do that kind of thing." Or that oysters and lobsters were given away to the poor at the turn of the century in NYC. Or, that foie gras was originally a way to use every bit of the animal that you had prepared for food. It's a fascinating kind of "inversion," sort of the "gentrifiation of food," when the people who actually raise and hunt and find the stuff, can't afford to eat it anymore.

A glorifiation also happens to composed dishes that were originally associated with the countryside, or peasants. Cassoulet is one of those dishes. In Italy, the pork shoulder cooked in milk. There are many, many others. You could probably say so is chili.

And we romanticize them, and somehow decide "well, that kind of dish is fine for that kind of person, because they have time for all the cooking it takes. "

Uh, no, they don't. These folks probably had, and have, more to get done than you or I do. So the cooking does NOT take that long, or if it does, it's a long braise, or something that can sit for a while. Like pot a feu. or cassoulet, which really only takes an hour to put together, and then cooks for a few.

Then there are dishes that look complex and that take long, but really don't. Like the dish we're talking about today. And this one also points to one of the interesting things about food from a particular country: never assume that what YOU know of that region's cuisine, is all there is to it. The dish in question comes from Normandy, in France. Normandy is in the Northwest. Grapes don't grow well here. But apples do. So the local beverage is not wine, but cider: hard cider. Or apple brandy: calvados. The fats are solid ones: butter, creme fraiche, that kind of thing. And, again, because it is farming country, the animals that are eaten are older, tougher ones, so there's a bit more cooking time involved.

I have seen this recipe in several different places. There are geegaws associated with it, which I've tossed out. For example, I am not going to sit there and boil 3o pearl onions and peel them, and I'll bet your local French farm woman didn't do it either. It's nice, but who needs it? Also, when I looked at the recipes, I thought they had the steps in the wrong order, so I've reversed some of them. Finally, rather than take the approach of using a whole bird, and then having to cook different parts for different lengths of time, I've gone to legs and thighs. Of older birds. How can you tell? They're BIG. Get the biggest legs and thighs you can find. Get an amount equal to six or eight complete legs.

You're also going to need ample butter, a bit of olive oil, two carrots, two onions, four apples, two cups of creme fraiche, a cup of hard cider, a half cup of calvados, and a cup of chicken stock.

This sounds like an expensive dish, doesn't it? Well, for the originators, it wasn't. They had this stuff around. Here it goes.

First, salt the chicken pieces well and pat them dry. Then put them aside. Peel the apples, core them, and cut them each into eight pieces. Get 3 tablespoons of butter melted in a pan, and add the apples. Fry them until they begin to brown (I like to use a mixture of tart and sweet apples. Today, I used winesaps, and sonatas). When the apples have browned, take them off the heat, and put them aside

While the apples are cooking, chop up the carrots and the onions. If you happen to have some thyme and a bay leaf around, great . Use them when we get to the part where we cook the veggies.

Put two tablespoons of olive oil, and two more of butter, in the biggest pan you have. Get the fat hot, and add the chicken pieces, but don't overcrowd. Do the chicken in batches if you have to, and you probably will. When the legs are as brown as you like, put them aside in a bowl, to catch juice. You'll have more fat than you started with, and you should dump out all but about two tablespoons.

Now, add the vegetables and the herbs if you have them. Cook them at medium heat and wait until the onion is completely translucent. Add the cider, and cook it until it's essentially gone.

Now, we're coming to a dangerous part, but pay attention and you can do it. Take the herbs out of the veggies. Move anything flammable away from the pan. Add the calvados, step back and ignite it. It WILL flame up and it will flame up for a considerable time, but it will stop. It's kinda neat to see this happen. When it has all died down, add the chicken and the juices in the bowl, back to the pan. Add a cup of chicken stock and put the herbs bak. Lower the heat, cover the pan, and go away for thirty minutes.

After the thirty minutes, take out the chicken and put it aside for a minute, and then dump the sauce through a collander set over a bowl. Press on the vegetables, and then get rid of them. Put the sauce back in the pan, and add the creme fraiche, one cup at a time. Stir it until it dissolves, and then taste it for salt, and adjust if you have to. Then boil it HARD until it reduces by about half. Put the chicken pieces back in and the apples, stir them in the sauce, let this all warm up, and you are done.

Walk through that recipe. It's not that hard and ultimately, it didn't take that long to make, did it? You can also make it ahead and warm it.

If you want to be authentic, serve this with french bread. You could also serve boiled potatoes, or if you wanted to, rice, but that's hardly traditional.

This is peasant eating? Well, it's always better than the refined stuff. Try making this. Everyone I know who has, has made it again, and again, and again

It's COLD: chicken soup

Ok, this is NOT going to be soup as good as my friend Andrew makes it. Chicken soup is his specialty. So I am not gonna get into a culinary throw down with Andrew on this. But talk to me about eggplant parmagiana, or mac and cheese. Hmmmm.

But anyway, this is what I call "rescue soup," because it "rescues" me , when I don't have anything else in mind and I need to make a soup.

I always have skinless chicken breasts in the freezer, "just in case." And there are always "soup type" vegetables available. This time, there were carrots and celery. And also for a bit of a Mexican twist, some chopped canned green peppers. Yes, darlings I do use canned stuff.

If you've been following my soup making, you know I'm into easy. For my chicken soup, since the major flavor is CHICKEN, and I'm not fussing with homemade stock. So what I do is I poach my chicken breasts in chicken soup, that way the flavor in the stock is intensified a little. And while that is going on, I cook up a pot of rice. Rice seems to make such a nice compliment to chicken, especially in soup , that I always use it.

I then chopped up a bunch of baby carrots, and an equal amount of celery. I sauteed them in vegetable oil, just until they softened. While that was happening, I opened up just one can of those green chils and tossed them in. As soon as they hit the oil, the smell was amazing. I was onto something. A few minutes of sauteeing, and I left them alone, while I dealt with the chicken.

By "dealt with," all I mean is that I pulled the chicken breasts (two big halves) out of the stock, and sliced them thin and shredded where I could. Big and small pieces are fine. You don't have to be surgically precise with this rustic soup . They went in with the vegetables, and the stock, plus three more cups of water. I let that simmer for fifteen minutes.

Why didn't I add the rice right away ? Because rice will continue to absorb liquid if the liquid is hot. And that's fine if you want a thick gruel, but if you want "soup," wait until it cools, and add your rice thereafter.

This is comfort food, pure and simple. You can change the vegetables as you see fit, or add some. For example, at this time of year, I would LOVE to add chard, or chopped cabbage, or , best of all, spinach. If I added the spinach, I might add a bit of sesame oil too, but that's me being creative.

Andrew, come on out. Let's make some soup. We haven't cooked together since last thanksgiving (remember fettucine alfredo?). It's time we did it again

Green spears: broccoli

I seem to have been inspired by childhood vegetable stories this week. First spinach, and now broccoli.
Remember how hard our parents, grandparents, or other caregivers tried to get us to eat the stuff? Like spinach, it was something that was good for us, so we were supposed to eat it, preferably at least a few times a week (Calves' liver was another one of those things. Allah be praised that that one is off the books). Anyway, I remember one of the tricks that parents used was the "Make food FUN" trick. You were encouraged to take the spears of broccoli, insert them into something soft, like mashed potatoes, so that you could say "Oh, look Hollingsworth, darling. There's a little forest of broccoli on your plate. Wouldn't it be fun to just eat all those trees?"

Don't try to fool kids. You can put trees on potatoes, you can serve it "ants on a tree" style, with fried chopped pork, or however else you serve it, if it doesn't taste good, a kid is NOT GOING TO EAT IT. No one really knows what tastes good to a kid but a kid, and more importantly, WHY something tastes good or doesn't. But let's face it: we ALL know certain things. As adults, we can fool ourselves into thinking we like something and eat it. I eat a bowl of high fiber root and twig cereal every morning. I find myself saying "MMM. Nice and sweet. Nice and crunchy."

I HATE the stuff. But I eat it because it's good for me. There is nothing I can do to fix it to make me like it. That is NOT true about broccoli. There is a lot of badly cooked broccoli out there, and let's see if we can fix it.

Everyone is going to say right away that THE problem with broccoli is that it is overcooked. That's one problem. To me, the other problem, equally bad, is UNDERCOOKING broccoli. See, we were all taught that overcooking vegetables drains them of their nutrients and you'd be better off drinking the water they were cooked in. That's true for SOME vegetables, and broccoli is one of them. But it is equally true that in order to make nutrients available, many vegetables have to be cooked long enough. Otherwise, they stay embedded in that mysterious ingredient "dietary fiber" and leave, when it does, without doing anything good for you.

So, the first thing to do with broccoli is to cook it properly. When you get a head of broccoli, you're familiar of course with the "florettes" at the top, and the big, thick stem. It's the easiest thing in the world to cut off that big florette head, cut the individual florettes apart, and then cook them, tossing the stem. Well, if you do that, you just doubled the cost of what you paid for that broccoli. You can use that stem, it just takes a bit more time. Look at it for a minute. Look at the cut end. You'll see a structure that is reminiscent of the cross section of a tree. There is almost a "bark" around a stem of broccoli. That is non edible. But what's underneath is really tasty - better tasting, to me, than the florettes. So get out a vegetable parer, and cut that stuff away. You can see the layer go off, so it's easy to do. Then, just cut the peeled stem into pieces that are about as big as your florettes.

You were probably taught to steam broccoli. You probably have a s teamer basket that you use for nothing else: you pile up too much broccoli in it, put it in a pot with an inch or two of water, and cook. Then you take it out, dump the broccoli in a bowl, sprinkle lemon juice on it, and crunch, crunch crunch.

YUCK, right? Well, if you're going to steam it, be my guest. But steam it long enough. "Long enough" is long enough so that a sharp knife tip can go into it, with just a bit of resistance. I find that it is easier to do this by cooking the broccoli in a big pot of boiling salted water, rather than by steaming it. The broccoli has more room to move around in, and it actually cooks faster (Review time: when we cook broccoli, do we cover the pot, or leave it uncovered? If you're not sure, cover it one time and then see what happens to that beautiful green color.)

Broccoli cooked this way is just fine, especially if you're eating highly spiced or heavily flavored things with it. But if you're doing something like a grilled piece of meat or fish, and some potatoes, you may want to consider adding some flavor component to the dish. One of my favorites, stolen from Chinese cooking, is sesame. While the broccoli is boiling away, get a DRY frying pan, and heat it up, with no fat in it at all, and add a hefty three tablespoons or so of sesame seeds. Keep shaking the pan over medium heat, because these guys will burn fast. And they will continue to cook after they are off the heat. So, the minute you smell sesame, get em off the heat and dump the seeds into a cold bowl. Let them sit until the broccoli is ready. Drain it in a collander and then get a pan ready with a few tablespoons of oil. If you're not going to use sesame oil as explained below, use olive oil. If you are using the sesame oil, use vegetable.

Heat up the oil, and just turn the broccoli in it a few times. Then sprinkle in the seeds. If you like, pour a little dark sesame oil over the whole thing, and you're done.

You can dress up broccoli with a lot of things. The preserved lemons I wrote about are good. So are sun dried tomatoes, as is the ubiquitous cream sauce of spinach. And if you are feeling especially virtuous, use that lemon juice. With well cooked broccoli, it will taste good. You may not feel like you're not missing anything, but you won't be unhappy.

Try your own variations on broccoli and share them with the gang here. COME ON. We're waiting....

Spinach easy, spinach not so

Yesterday's post on spinach got some attention. It seems that spinach is a favorite of a lot of people, but our y ounguns are not among those. The more things change.... So rather than move onto another veggie or fruit and coming back to spinach in the future, I want to address a couple more recipes with this cool weather green.

The first is an easy one: creamed spinach. One of the interesting, somewhat amusing things about cooking, is that you will sometimes find a dish described with food words, that have nothing to do with the ingredients. Classic creamed spinach, for example, has no cream in it. I HAVE had it with cream, but the resulting dish was so rich that I could only handle 2 or 3 spoonfuls of it. If your system can handle it, then by all means, replace the milk in the following recipe with cream, but for heavens sake, eat smaller portions.

Now, I'm not giving precise amounts here for anything but the flour and butter. For the rest, you'll have to play with what you would like your ratio of "spinach to white sauce" to be. I prefer more spinach than sauce, but if you go to a good steakhouse, for example, the ratio is probably going to be on the order of 1 part spinach to 2 parts of white sauce. It really is all up to you.

First, prepare the spinach in the way I describe for the prior entry, but don't add the oil, currants or pine nuts. Just put it aside and let it cool, while you make the white sauce. Prepare as much spinach as you want. Keep in mind, however, that creamed spinach is much more filling than spinach, so if you're using it as a side dish, you'll want less.

While the spinach is cooling, make the white sauce. We've done this before, but let's do it again. Melt two tablespoons of butter, unsalted preferred, in a big heavy pan. Then add two tablespoons of flour to the butter, and whisk it, over low heat. You will probably get clots and clumps, but that's okay. Have some milk ready. I use whole milk, but 2% is fine, and I THINK 1% is also ok, but I can't vouch for it. DONT use skim milk. If you're going to, make the Roman/Sicilian spinach instead.

Some recipes call for you to warm the milk before this step. I have never found it necessary, but I have a pretty fast whisking hand (CAREFUL YOU PIGS). If you feel slightly clumsy in the kitchen, maybe you do want to warm it. With the heat on low, start gradually pouring milk into the flour and butter mixture. The flour will dissolve into the milk, and you will eventually see a thickening. Start with 1.5 -2 cups of milk. When it thickens, stop whisking and let it heat for a couple of minutes at low heat. It may thicken some more, and then see if it's too thick for you (it won't be too thin). If it is, then add more milk, but DO keep in mind that the spinach is going to loosen it, because of its inherent water.

When you have the sauce to the thickness you like, you need to season it. Salt is a must. Some people require white pepper, which I find to be tasteless dust, but if it's in your flavor palette, add it. Finally, for many people, myself included, a good scraping of fresh nutmeg is essential. There is a synergy between milk and nutmeg, and there is also one between nutmeg and spinach. Use it . (By the way, did you know that you can get a cheap, albeit nasty high, by stirring a tablespoon of nutmeg into a half cup of milk and drinking it down? It's true. But just about every "trip" on this combination is reported to be a bad one. Proceed with caution.)

Ok, after you've gone on your magical mystery tour, get to that spinach. Squeeze it and squeeze it HARD. Get that water out of it. Then squeeze it again. Then get out a knife and chop it roughly. Stir itinto the cream sauce, and you're done.

Or are you? If you REALLY want to push this to a level of sickening excess (nuthin wrong with that), put that creamed spinach into a buttered dish, dot it with butter or grated cheese, or both, and run it under the broiler for a minute or two. Now, you're talking a VERY serious side dish that really sounds more like lunch to me. But it's up to you. The spinach becomes assertive, and you will taste it. It comes down to a question of whether or not you want to spend those calories.

Ok, now to something more challenging. Some would say that spanokopita is the apotheosis of spinach cooking (if you don't know what apotheosis means, look it up. Then use it in three sentences today NOT involving spinach. Then the word is yours forever. It's a good word).

Spanokopita is one of the "mainstays' of hearty vegetarian cooking. It's one of the dishes that is the root cause of the lament "I don't understand why I'm so FAT. I'm a VEGETARIAN." Well, it uses butter. LOTS of butter. Eggs, cheese and spinach. Not the equivalent of a green salad with lemon juice, lemme tell you. But it sure is good.

Something that I have found about this dish is that it does not keep well. Every time I've reheated spanokopita, I have found that it lost its lovely crispiness. So when you make this, plan on having some people over. It's a good dish to share.

You will need phyllo dough, which scares a lot of people. Let me assure you, first of all, that we are NOT going to make phyllo dough here. Annalena has in fact made it twice. Both times, she cursed like a drunken nun. Buy the stuff. It's better than you can make, unless you're an older Greek woman who learned from her mother.
Another thing about phyllo dough. After you make this recipe, you will have lots left. You will be tempted to save it "for another day." Don't. You wont' use it. I know you won't. It will sit in your fridge, taking up space, getting dry and useless, and then you'll toss it. So either find another recipe for phyllo, or bite the bullet and toss it.

You can use frozen spinach for this, if you like. I prefer to do it fresh. You start with a hefty two pounds of fresh spinach - on the stem- and prep it like in the first spinach recipe. Again, cook it like you would without the currants and pine nuts. Put it aside while you prep the other ingredients.

The other ingredients are a pound of feta cheese. Shop around for this. There are GOOD feta cheeses out there. The stuff in your supermarket is NOT good feta cheese. You also need a pound of a soft white cheese. When I learned how to make it, we used something called "pot cheese" or cottage cheese. That will work, but now, I use ricotta, for a little cross cultural meditteranean "thang" You will also need a good handful of chopped parsley, and six large eggs. Mix all of this together in a bowl, stir it well, and season it with salt and pepper.

Optionally, you can chop up a bunch of scallions, and either cook them in olive oil before adding them to the mix, or you can add them raw. I leave them out. Finally, do the squeeze trick with the spinach, chop it, and add it to the cheese mixture.

Now, melt two sticks of unsalted butter. You're going to use it ALL. Get a big baking sheet, and brush it with melted butter (By the way, if you don't have a brush in your kitchen, get one. Get one with natural fibers. You will never regret it). After you brush the butter on the sheet, start laying down phyllo sheets. Probably, they're going to tear. Don't worry about it. Traditionally, you butter each sheet as you put it down. I don't do this, because I don't find it necessary. I DO butter after every SECOND sheet, though, and I continue for ten sheets worth of phyllo. If it isn't precisely ten, don't worry. And as you do this, you will see that the layering effect essentially covers all of the tears that may have resulted.

After you have ten sheets down, dump your filling on it, and spread it out all over the phyllo, nice and even. Then repeat the process, with the same number of sheets, and the butter trick. After this is done, try to tuck the top layer of phyllo down at the ends so that it conjoins the bottom layer. Again, it's not critical to do this precisely, but you do want to try to contain the filling. Finally, what you do is take a sharp knife and score the phyllo all over, down to the spinach, and pour whatever remaining butter you have over it.

Put this into the oven, at 350, for 30-40 minutes, or until you see a nice brown color on the top.

This needs to sit a bit before you eat it, because the filling is very soft. Some say you can cut into it in as little as five minutes. I say a half hour is right.

You really don't want more than a green salad or if it's high season, a tomato salad with this. Get some dry white wine, a Greek wine if you are lucky enough to have one, and celebrate, because this IS a celebratory dish. It's big, it's rich, it's festive. We're getting to holiday season, and what better way to celebrate your friends than with a dish that is both "familiar" and "exotic," and something that I bet they haven't had in a long, LONG time.

"I'm strong to the finish"

Ok, there has GOT to be someone out there reading this, who is as old as I am, and remembers how that ends:

"Cause I eat me spinach, I'm Popeye the Sailor Man"

Remember those cartoons? In every episode, Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Bluto got into various situations. Popeye inevitably had to rescue Miss Oyl from the clutches of Bluto, and was himself in trouble. How many future afficianados of the fine art of bondage got their first taste by seeing this muscular cartoon character tied in various positions? Hmmmm. Ok, did I make some of you blush? It isn't the first time, and it isn't the last either. Trust me.

Whatever the predicament, somehow, Popeye managed to pop open a can of spinach, eat it down, and then rescue the fair Miss Oyl from whatever travails she was involved in.

Popeye must have been desperately in love to eat that canned stuff. I have talked about noxious, disgusting foods before, but as I think about it nothing, and I mean NOTHING is as disgusting as canned spinach. It's not green. It's BLACK. And it smells. And the texture is, well, gross. There's no other way to put it. While no one will 'fess up to it, I believe that the Popeye cartoons were, in part, an attempt to get kids to get over their revulsion to this food, and eat it, because it IS good for you. Even when it's been ruined the way canning does, there are so many minerals in spinach that if you can get it down, you've done a good thing.

Kids cannot be fooled. It didn't work. And meanwhile, as they so often do, Europeans were laughing at us.

There is no excuse, especially this time of year, for not using fresh spinach, or frozen spinach in a pinch. It is very easy to cook, so much tastier than the canned stuff (which, honestly isn't saying much), and at this time of the year, it's available. Spinach does not like the heat. You get it in the spring, and then in the fall. It doesn't take long to come to crop size and it's easy to grow. In fact, when I lived in a house with a garden, I grew this myself.

One thing about fresh spinach is that, once you buy it, you have to use it quickly. It does NOT keep well, and after three days, you will have the equivalent of a science experiment in your fridge, or something that looks as bad as what is in the can. You don't want that, do you?

What I'm going to be talking about here is "spinach" as compared to "baby spinach." The latter is delicious, more expensive, less work, and great in salads. We can come back to that if you like, but for now, let's work with the full grown stuff.

If you buy it fresh, you'll be getting it on the stem. Essentially, the whole plant is pulled up, the roots are cut off, and this is what you will get. There are thick, THICK stems. They take up a lot of space, so buy more fresh spinach than you will need. There are a few steps that you need to take to prep it. First, you have to "stem" it . (I never really understood why this step is called "stemming"). What this means is you have to get the leaf off of the plant. It's easy to do. Take a stem of spinach in one hand, and put the fingers of your other hand just at the place where the leaf hits the stem. Pull firmly. The edible stuff will come away in your hand. You have to go through the whole bunch of stuff to do this. And now, you have to wash it.

Now, here's a warning. You CAN buy "pre-washed" spinach in a farmers market, from time to time. If you do this to save time, make sure you're going to cook the greens that day. Nothing will harm the integrity of spinach more than water. So try NOT to get the washed stuff, and wash it yourself.

When you wash it, avoid a temptation, which you learned from Mom. You will want, very much, to put the leaves in a colander and wash them, with the water running through the holes. Yes, that will happen; however, you will leave the dirt and sand behind , on your spinach. Spinach needs very loose, sandy soil, and it is inevitably there on fresh spinach - way more than dirt in leeks. The only way to get this clean, is to put your spinach in a big bowl that does NOT drain. FIll that bowl with water, and let the spinach rest for a few minutes. Then, pull it out and check what's at the bottom. If there is grit, of course, pour out the water and repeat the process, until you have no more grit. Usually, two rinsings are enough.

So, what do you do with this raw, cleaned spinach? Well, I'm going to tell you my favorite way of cooking it, which I'm told is Spinach in the Roman style. Frankly, I think of it as more Sicilian, but what do I know? I actually do it a bit differently than the classic recipe. In the classic recipe, you have olive oil, raisins and pine nuts ready, and you cook the fresh spinach in hot olive oil until it collapses (and it will collapse a LOT). Then, you stir in toasted pine nuts and the raisins, add a bit more olive oil and some salt, and serve it forth.

I find it just a bit easier to do it this way. After the spinach was washed, there is some residual water on it. And that's enough to cook it. I put it in a pot, cover it, turn the heat to medium, and then come back in five minutes. It usually has not collapsed completely, but a quick stir, and it is. I drain it, and let the spinach cool. Sometimes I chop it, sometimes not. I use this, rather than the raw spinach, and I proceed as with the classic "Roman" or "Sicilan" style

I see recipes that say one large bunch of spinach will feed six people. One large bunch of spinach makes an adequate serving for TWO adults, but not a big one. If you like it, you're going to need more. And it will take a little time to wash and to cook all those greens. But do it. At this time of year, there aren't many "tender" greens around, as we move off to things like kale, collards and other "tougher" or "hardier" greens, that require more cooking.

I think we're going to explore this subject of spinach a bit more. For many people, going to a steak house is not complete without a side order of creamed spinach (and I MUST admit, it IS one of my favorite things). And for others, especially vegetarians, the apotheosis of spinach eating is that wonderful Greek dish, spanokopita. We'll look at both in days to come, but we will NOT be making phyllo dough from scratch. I must leave you to more technically trained people to do that one.

When you have lemons....

Ok, you know how to fill in that sentence, right? And don't get me wrong, I LOVE good lemonade. I can drink it by the quart. But lemons come into season during the winter, when lemonade is not the first thing on my mind. While strong alcoholic beverage with a lemon edge is always on my mind, lemonade is something I drink in summer, and in Mexican restaurants - FOR LUNCH.

So, when you have bags of lemons that, say, a certain Citrus Bomb has sent you, what do you do?

I had always thought that Moroccan preserved lemons were an exotic, difficult thing to make. I equated them, somehow, with a lemon chutney that I used to make. That one was a five day affair, with lemons having pin pricks put into them, sitting in a bowl of salt, washing off the salt, and then multiple steps. Starting with five pounds of lemons, you would get a magnificent three pints of chutney that you couldn't eat for three months. Well, after the wait, the stuff was delicious, but as Peggy Lee so aptly put it , "Is that all there is?' So, with that in mind, I put Moroccan preserved lemons out of my head.

One day, leafing through Paula Wolfert's amazing book "Couscous and Other good food from Morocco," I came upon the recipe. Now, Ms. Wolfert praises authenticity and is not above printing a recipe that calls upon you to stew something for 11 hours, followed by more work. Oh, the stuff is wonderful, but the work is massive. So, I laughed to myself, "this is gonna be GOOD.

Well, it is. But it's easy. This is a two ingredient recipe, or three if you add an intangible. You need lemons, salt, and time. That, incidentally, is NOT a misspelling for thyme. This is a recipe where you DO have to wait for a month to use the guys. It's worth it. It's worth even more if you wait 3 months. More after 6. So, here's my suggestion: take the recipe below, and double or triple it. Mark your jars as 1/3/6, and then use them along those lines. I WILL say, however, that a little of this stuff goes a long way, and your one month jar may last you 3 months.

Here's what you do. You will need 10 or so meyer lemons. These are better, because the skin is softer ,and the flavor is more complex. If you don't have them, regular Lisbon lemons are fine, as is a mix of the two.

You're going to use 10 lemons to make a quart of preserves. Now, that may sound like a lot, but bear with me here. You may actually wind up using less.

You need a sterile quart jar with a good sealing lid. And also, a quarter cup of salt (let's review measurements here: a quarter cup of salt is 4 tablespoons).

Take the six smallest lemons, wash and dry them. Then make cuts longitudinally, cutting the lemon into quarters BUT NOT SEPARATING THEM . You want the six smallest ones because these are going into the jar, whole, and it ain't easy.

Now, take a tablespoon of the salt, which is preferably kosher, and put it in the jar. Use as much of it as you can to salt the insides of each of the six lemons. Put them in the jar and BE ROUGH. Squeeze them in, pound them in, shove them in as far as they can go. This is all necessary to get the juice out. After you have the six lemons in the jar, take a look. Are they covered with lemon juice? Probably not. That's why you have the other four. Start squeezing right over the lemons in order to cover the fruit. Don't worry about pits or anything else, just squeeze. If you have any extra salt, put it in at this point.

Seal up the jars, and shake them. Then put them in a dark cool place for at least a month.

You're done. See???? As you use them, you can replenish them with other lemons. It would behoove you to dump the older ones out and put the younger ones on the bottom (always a good idea, by the way: putting the younger prettier ones on the bottom). When I use them, I scrape away the pulp, wash the skin and only use that. Chopped up, it makes a superb relish on tuna, on lamb, on any of the serious red meats. I was very tempted to use it in mayonnaise on steak sandwiches for lunch tomorrow. You can also use that salty juice, in cocktails like bloody marys, or anything you can concoct.

Now, think about what I've just given you. What's about a month away? Hmmmmm? Wanna give an unusual gift that speaks of YOU, isn't all that expensive, sure as hell isn't a lot of work, and is probably something they've never gotten (If, by the way, your recipient says something like "Oh, Moroccan preserved lemons, how quaint" never visit that person again).

I am very serious about the idea of using these as gifts. You don't have to make a project of this and make six or seven jars at once. It will take you all of about ten minutes to make a jar of these, so if you buy lemons on the way home from work, you're set.

I have a bunch of friends who I think are going to be real intrigued by this recipe. Ben, the mad Englishman, Michael the "kitchen photographer," Kim, the Citrus Bomb, and Sue, the gal who knows everything, are all on the list to get this one. Love ya all. Try it.

Tastes like chicken

We've all had a lot of fun with that phrase, haven't we? I first heard it in connection with frogs legs (which I've had, once or twice). I was very young, and my mom said "Yeah, they taste just like chicken." At that age, I didn't know that was a standard joke for something that really had no flavor. It was bland, nondescript: like chicken.

Well, if chicken is well raised and well cared for after it becomes "chicken" as a food, it shouldn't taste bland. It should taste, well, like chicken. And nothing else should taste like it. I wish that, these days, we would say something like "Tastes like tofu" if all the food has is texture (Now I KNOW that the vegetarian contingent is going to come after me for that. Be kind. I'm vulnerable this time of year).

What provoked these thoughts about "tastes like chicken" is a dish that I made , several years ago, to save money. I didn't think that anyone would like it, and it in fact turned out to be more popular than the original dish.

There is a Northern Italian dish that I have heard called "vitello val d'aostana." Val d'aosta is about as far northwest in Italy as you can get, and some say it's really France. My skiing friends have been there, and love it. The cuisine is "interesting. " There's a lot of rye bread, there's a lot of hearty soups, and there's a coffee drink that is supposed to be quite vile, of very hot, very strong coffee with hot brandy in it, and no sugar. You drink it from a large pot with different "straw" type things coming out.

Doesn't appeal to me. Oh well. If you have ever eaten "fontina" cheese - the ITALIAN variety, not the Danish one, you're eating food of val d'aosta. (the Danish variety, by the way, has a red rind, and I think it's awful. The Italian one has a brown rind. As it ages, it , ahem, smells. The smell doesn't carry over to the taste, which is very delicate and sweet).

I have never found out if this dish is, in fact, authentically Italian. I have my doubts. But it's good. And for some people, the chicken version is even better. So I'll present it both ways. (I have already written about the issue of animal cruelty and veal, by the way, and I refer you back to that. Keep in mind that chickens are raised cruelly too. Don't pick one or the other on that basis. Check out your sources, and then make a choice based on your budget and your like or dislike, because , of course, veal is wickedly expensive).

You need two pounds of cutlets, thin ones. For veal, this will set you back about 40 bucks. For chicken, less. In any event, this is not a dish for a "basic dinner". Save it for something special. If the butcher did not do the meat nice and thin (more likely with the chicken than the veal), do one of two things. Either slice each cutlet horizontally down the middle (not so easy to do), or get out that plastic and a meat pounder and pound your meat.

Now, you will want to coat it. For my carb loathing friend Caz, I will say you don't HAVE to coat it with anything. It WILL work, but classically, you use a breading. You dip the cutlets into something like beaten whole eggs, or whole eggs and milk, or just milk. How much? Wish I could tell you. Just have plenty ready because you'll need more than you think, and replenish it as you use it up. After you've dunked them in the liquid, dip them in some salted, seasoned bread crumbs to coat them. Your fingers will get all gunked up, so have a rag ready to keep them cleaned. When you've coated them, traditionally, you fry them lightly, in a mixture of half oil and half butter, but you don't have to finish the cooking. You'll do that in the oven. You could also dispense with this step and take out some calories in what is a very rich filling dish.

Get a big, say, 9x13 inch baking dish ready. Butter it. Lay down a layer of the cutlets, be they fried or not. Now, have some GOOD quality (that means imported) prosciutto ready. Cover that layer of cutlets with the ham. NOW, slice some fontina as thinly as possible and cover the prosciutto with this. Freezing the cheese for fifteen minutes before you slice it will help here. You're probably going to need about a pound of cheese in total, and six ounces of prosciutto.

Then, cover the cheese with another layer of cutlets, another layer of prosciutto, and then cheese. Get a crane to help you lift this monster dish into the oven and bake it at 400 for about twenty minutes. Now, crank up the broiler and heat the dish for five minutes or so, or just until the cheese is browning. Fontina melts beautifully and it will have melted quickly. Take it out and let it sit for ten minutes or so before serving this.

Yes, this is certainly a complete meal, isn't it? What I would serve with it is something like grilled radicchio, or some other bitter green. For a starter, while I would LOVE to suggest pasta, I think it's too much. This is probably the time to pull out the minestrone recipe that was my first entry on the blog, and start with that.

The holidays are coming up. Sometimes, you need something more than a turkey. You should try this one. Or if you have a special occasion coming up, like a birthday, or an anniversary, or you're just having a bunch of friends over, try this. Just make sure that the meat you buy is "valid," i.e., that you've checked out your source and you can say, honestly, that the animals were not mistreated.

You'll thank me for this one. I promise.

To come: A Puerto Rican dish that is over the top good, and another one that will make you worship at Annalena's feet.

"making" soup, or flying without a net

We all work with recipes, that's for sure. I do. I use a LOT of recipes. Sometimes though, you just go off on your own, and "do" something. And some of the time , it works. This is about one of those times.

I needed to make a soup this weekend, and I began to look around at what I had to work with. I did have some left over escarole (interestingly enough, my very first blog talked about using escarole in soup). I was also looking for something hearty, and that led me to look at the large collection of beans in the cupboard. Hmmm. Things are beginning to come together. There is a classic Portuguese soup that uses beans and kale, and sometimes pork of some type or another. Escarole is close to kale, and of couse I had the beans. But pork? No..... I was thinking something else.

Dan the Butcher Man has wonderful sausages, but they are beef. I swear, if you tasted his , you would not miss the pork. So , making my regular Friday visit, I stopped for some andouille sausages. These have a wonderful heat to them that really is not to be missed. He DID have the sausage meat, but not in casings.

Now, this is where it amazes me that people don't get a bit creative. Sausage meat is sausage meat, that's all there is to it. So, I didn't have the long casing covered sausages to work with. what about sausage meatballs? Indeed, many of you may know of sausage patties, where the meat is formed into something like a hamburger, and fried, just like a hamburger would be. The soup would have round balls of sausage, rather than casing slices. Nothing wrong with that. The soup is beginning to come together.

For something like this, I wanted to use the "holy trinity" of onions, celery, and carrots. Equal amounts of each. About a cup. I chopped them, and here's a hint for all of you who find your carrots rolling around when you try to chop them: cut a long slice off of a section. Now you have a flat surface to work with, and you can chop more easily.

I took the trinity, and dumped them into several tablespoons of hot olive oil, and added a teaspoon or so of salt. As they cooked, I got the other ingredients ready.

My beans had been left to soak the night before, and then I cooked them for an hour at a slow simmer, until they were cooked, but not quite soft. (You COULD use canned beans if you had to. Just wash them real well to get all that gunk off of them). When the veggies had softened a bit, I added a quart of stock (chicken), and a quart of water, and then the beans. I brought the pot to a slow boil, and formed 30 small balls of a pound of sausage meat, and dropped that in, too. I let them cook for twenty minutes. At the end of the 20 minutes, I chopped up two big bunches of washed escarole, and added that to the soup, and cooked it for five minutes.

I adjusted the seasonings, and we were done. A bit time consuming, but not really a whole lot of work was it?

If you need to bulk this soup up, cook some pasta. Cook it separately, and then when it's done, add it to the soup.

ALL DONE. Something just a bit off center, but really very, VERY good. You'll enjoy it I know you will