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

"I"ve got sunshine" Lemon curd

I've been called worse things than a locovore, the new term that is all the fashion. Locovores, for those of you who have not been following trends in food for a while, are the new rage: we try to eat seasonally, locally, and sustainably. Now, to many people, especially the very young amongst us, this sounds like radical, new, and subversive stuff. Maybe it's subversive, if you consider the way food and government are inextricably linked, what with food subsidies, government regulations and so forth. But radical and new? Hardly. This is how people ate, because it's how people HAD to eat, for thousands of years. If it wasn't close by, there wasn't a chance to get it. Today, when you can have a box of sourdough bread shipped from San Francisco overnight, or get tamales from Texas the same way, or Washington huckleberries, and so forth, it sometimes seems somewhat quaint. Until you taste the product. Yes, we have a new way to "dress" the concept, by speaking of things like our "carbon footprint," and reducing the amount of waste we put into the environment. Hey, if it "sells" more people, I'm all in favor of it. But nothing sells better than good taste.

Having said that, I am about to talk about one of the exceptions I make to my own rules, and that's citrus. It is difficult for people to believe that citrus has a season, because it seems to be available all the time. Yes, the price changes, and yes, we hear about freezes in Florida, or Texas, or California, or crop failures, but it IS always available, just like apples (don't get me started on that). Closer to home, however, citrus season starts when the weather gets cold. I don't know much about citrus agronomy, but my friends Kim and Eric and Sandra (you've heard these names before), tell me that if the weather isn't cold, citrus doesn't color properly. Think of the lives of those farmers: you need cold, for color (who wants an orange that isn't orange), but if it's too cold, the fruit freezes and the tree dies. Oi vey. And I think I have problems (well, I do, but...).

I have said, many times, that citrus fruits seem to prove the point that there is a higher intelligence governing all of us. It's dark, it's gloomy. The vegetables of this time of year are decidely muted in their color. And then the BRIGHT BRIGHT BRIGHT colors of yellow, orange, red and all variations come in with the citrusses. I can sit there, when the sky is dark and it's dank outside, and just "breathe in" the colors of these beauties. Pile them in a bowl - especially lemons - and just admire the color. And if you are in need of a life as much as I am, you will do things like start to notice the differences in colors between different individual lemons.

Yes, I DO need a life outside of the kitchen.

OK, back to food: try to imagine your life without citrus. Try to think of no lemons, no oranges, no grapefruits, no limes, no NOTHING. They're kind of essential to you, aren't they? Well, that being the case, don't you think you owe it to yourself to get the best?

I, in fact, do. I have mentioned Kim Sandra and Eric, and I am going to plug their farm, shamelessly. I have not done this often, but you should buy from them. You should go to http://www.ripetoyou.com and immediately place an order for something. Or call and talk to Kim or Sandra and tell them I sent you. They know me. They'll ask you what you want them for, and then they'll tell you what you should buy. The fruit is not expensive, the postage is. Don't blame them, and then think of what you pay for a pineapple that isn't really ripe. Point made?

Lemon curd is one of the nicest things you can make with citrus. It is NOT good for you, but it sure is GOOD. It's one of those pantry basics, like pastry cream. If you make it, y ou have dessert. You also have various options that I'll talk about below.

You can make this with any variety of lemon you have. WHAT? There's more than one? Oh, dahlink, talk to the girls. Meyer lemons, lisbon lemons, pink lemons, Japanese lemons (yuzus), just get to know them all. They all have different flavors, and they all stand on their own. You can make this curd with any of them. You can make it with lime (I really like that one), or oranges, (but I find the orange curd diappointing). You could blend some passion fruit pulp or puree into it, but try it the first time, just pure.

You'll need three large egg yolks, a stick of unsalted butter, cut into cubes (you don't have to soften it, regardless of what other recipes say). You will also need 1/2 cup of lemon juice, and anywhere from 1/2 to 3/4 cup of sugar. We'll come to that in a minute. Finally, about a tablespoon of grated lemon peel. Grate it before you juice the lemons.

Most recipes for lemon curd will tell you to cook it over a water bath, and to cook everything together and then add the butter in small pieces. I used to do it this way, until I learned you didn't need to. Keep your heat low and your powder dry (teasing about the powder), and you'll be fine.

Taste the juice from your lemons. Yes, lemons are tart, but the level of tartness will change. How tart it is will determine how much sugar you use. So, too, will how tart you like it. You get the idea.

Get everything together in a heavy bottomed , not too large pot, and turn on that low heat. Then start whisking with a standard whisk. It's going to take about ten minutes until you see things thicken up. If at any point you see bubbling, lower your heat some.

When it's done, take it off the heat and cover it, to avoid a skin forming on it. You can push it through a fine sieve if you like. That will take away any overcooked egg, but it will also strain out the lemon peel. Your call. I like the lemon peel, but other people find it objectionable.

After the curd has cooled, you should refrigerate it. It won't keep forever - no more than about four days (whenever I see bottled lemon curd that proclaims "ALL NATURAL," I have to wonder). You can eat this as a very rich pudding, or pour it over cookies or toasted sweet breads, like brioche. You could also lighten it by whipping up about a cup of heavy cream (or less, ) and then folding them together. Either with or without the cream, this makes a wonderful filling for a cake, or a creampuff, or poured over something. For example, I will use this to pour over cream puffs that I will fill with huckleberry ice cream later this week.

You'll be seeing a lot of citrus this season as we work our way through the winter. Coming up soon will be preserved, Moroccan lemons. This will take you ten minutes to make, followed by a wait of six months. It will be worth it. Trust me.

It's all green to me y'all

Yes, another one of Annalena's cryptic titles. What is the rant about today? Well, it's not a real rant, but a bit of a piece on cooking greens, a topic I adddressed back in January on the 21st. That piece was very general. This one is more specific, and it also talks about something that fascinates me, which is how different "cultures" seem to have developed the same techniques for cooking.

There is a belief that Italians like their vegetables crispy, almost half raw, sort of like what you expect a good stir fry to be like. That's not really true. SALADS are expected to be crisp and fresh, but if you look at the world of Italian vegetable cooking, most of them are more toward the softer, somewhat overcooked side. I think that is because Italians realized that many vegetables don't give up their flavor unless you cook them for a while. There is nothing wrong with a crispy "green" tasting plate of vegetables, but veggies like broccoli, or green beans, and so forth, do not give up the flavor that makes them stand out as unique vegetables unless you cook them for a while. Usually, that cooking is slow, and usually, it's accompanied by a liquid plus fat, and a seasoning - usually garlic.
If you were raised in the south of the United States, this style may begin to remind you of what are called "smothered greens." The big difference, I think, is that in American southern cooking the flavoring agent is usually something smoky and meaty, like a turkey leg, or salt pork or something like that (I thank my friend Franklin for reminding me of smoked turkey legs with this style of cooking). It shows you how resourceful people are, especially people who HAD to figure out how to cook certain things, or they would go hungry. To this day, if you grew up with that kind of food, you will know that, regardless of what fancies you eat, you want, no , you NEED that kind of soul satisfying food.

One of the greens that people associate with the American south, is turnip greens. And we have them in Italian cooking too. Betcha ya didn't know that. Well, we do.

"Cima" in Italian is a turnip, and Italians do not eat turnip roots; h owever, they do eat the greens. Cima, for various reasons that I can't really explain, became broccoli rabe in the United States. In Italy, there is cima, and there is rapini, but there really isn't anything like the stuff we have as "broccoli rabb" here. You COULD use that broccoli rabb, but if you're lucky enough to find cima at a farmer's market (ask if the stuff labelled as broccoli rabb is really "Italian turnip." ), use that.

Get yourself a WHOLE LOT of the cima, or broccoli rabb. Three big bunches is about right. Do the "stem test" I taught you: look for where it's really tough and big, and cut it away. You're still going to have plenty. Cut those stems in half.

Then, get a garlic BULB. Not a clove, but a BULB. Peel all of the cloves, and cut them into slivers.

Now, put about four tablespoons of olive oil in a big dutch oven - about four quarts - and heat it at low to medium. Put half the greens in, and then add all of the garlic. Put the rest of the greens on top, and then sprinkle about a teaspoon and a half over it. Cover the pot, and let it cook away for about five minutes. Then, open it and add about the same amount of water, and then cover the pot again. Let it cook for another five minutes.

After ten total minutes of cooking, your greens will have reduced by about a third to a half, and they will have started to soften. Stir them up and cover the pot, and cook them for another ten minutes. By this point, they will have lost some or all of their fresh green color, and be really soft. You can cook them some more (I almost always do), with the pot uncovered, to reduce some of the water, but you don't have to.

I could eat the whole pot of these greens, either alone, or with good bread. I seem to have become immune to garlic, because I don't taste these as "garlicky" when I make them, but for the uninitiated, you may be "feelin it" .

And if you wanted to add some meat to this when you were cooking it, don't let me stop you. If you did, I would suggest getting a CHUNK of pancetta, maybe a quarter pound or so, and cubing it to put in with the greens.

Maybe Franklin and I will exchange pots of green in the future. South meets south.

Two "C's" : cabbage and chestnuts

When was the last time you ate cabbage, in a form other than coleslaw? Can't remember that, right? Now, why do you think that was? I have some ideas about why.

Let's face it. Cabbage has a reputation. It's "poor people food." It smells. There's no such thing as a small head of cabbage, and you're eating it forever.

All comments have some truth. But none of them is really sufficient to not eat the stuff. Yes, cabbate is poor people food, but there's a very simple reason for that. It's there in the winter, when nothing else is. It stores well, and it's filling. And let's look at some other foods that WERE poor people food: fava beans. Truffles. Foie gras. Yup, truffles were foraged food, and foie gras arose out of the need to use every bit of the animal. Oysters. There was a time when oysters were tossed to the poor. And the fact that food is associated with one economic class or another, does not make it taste better or worse. Get over that.

It smells. Yes, it does if you cook it wrong. Like all members of the cruciferous vegetable family, you have to cook cabbage in tons and tons of water. If you don't, the sulfurs will concentrate, and you will get that smell that you hate. Broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, are all in that family. You can cook cabbage in plenty of water, and NOT FOR TOO LONG, and you won't have that problem. Trust me.

That actually leads right into the third issue, which is the size of a head of cabbage. Again, this is related to our obsession with "bigger is better." If you go to a farmers' market, you will see cabbages in various sizes. ASK. You can get smaller ones.

To a certain extent, the "head cabbages" are interchangeable: green, red and that lovely crinkly one, called Savoy. I can taste differences. I think savoy is sweeter, and I think red is more "vegetal," and the green one is the blandest one of them all, but these are very small degrees of difference. To a very large degree, they are interchangeable, as they are in this recipe. Later, when I post a recipe for stuffed cabbage, I would stay away from red cabbage, simply because of the tendency of the pigment to bleed.

Onto chestnuts. There was a time when chestnuts were a very , VERY important crop for farmers and foragers. Then, blight struck chestnut trees, and there are almost none left in the United States. For a while, there WERE none. Now, there is a bit of a resurgence, and you CAN buy native, or maybe even local chestnuts . Get them if you can. The stuff you buy on a street corner come from China, for the most part, and they aren't very good. Chestnuts do contain a fair amount of fat, and they go rancid.

Prepping chestnuts is difficult. You will cut your fingers, curse, and spend way more time on it than you want. So, here's a suggestion: buy them already prepped. You can buy them frozen in vacupacks, or you can buy vacuumed jars, or you can buy them in cans, in liquid. For the most part, I find them interchangeable. Many cooks do not agree, and say that the vacupacks are the only way to go. They are also the most expensive. In the recipe that follows, you can use any variety, just make sure you drain those in water really well.

To me , the combination of chestnuts and cabbage is wonderful. I learned this recipe from one of the Chez Panisse cookbooks, and it was for red cabbage. By all means, use that, but I use either savoy or green, and I like it better. One reason is the color contrast. The brown of the chestnuts really disappears against the reddish purple of the red cabbage, and while this may not be a problem with you, I like the contrast of green and golden brown. It really is your call.

There are other points to consider in this recipe, and I'll lead you through it.

You need a pound of chestnuts, before they are prepped. That's probably about 12-13 ounces of prepped chestnuts. You also need a small cabbage, maybe 2 pounds, 2.5 pounds max. Then you need a few tablespoons of butter, or , as Chez Panisse recommends, duck fat.

Do you have duck fat in your fridge right now? Use the butter.

You also need 1/2-3/4 cups of "sweet wine." This does NOT mean dessert wine. What it means is the kind of wine that is just a bit on the sweet side. Some gewurtztraminers are like that, as are rieslings. You probably have a bottle of wine that you dont' want to drink because it's too sweet. That's what you want. If you don't have that around, why don't you take the same amount of white wine, like sauvignon blanc, and combine it with a few tablespoons of sweet sherry or port? You also need salt and pepper to taste, and some vinegar. Now , CP recommends sherry vinegar, and that's fine. For me, I prefer either champagne vinegar, or balsamic vinegar .

Slice up the cabbage into shreds that are about the size you would want for coleslaw. Melt the fat in a pan, and add the cabbage, with some salt. Leave it alone for a few minutes, then start turning it, until the cabbage begins to soften. This is one where you have to make the call on how soft you cook the stuff. The cabbage will cook much more quickly if you cover the pan that you're cooking it in, for a few minutes. Watch how much it shrinks. Taste it, for salt. Then add your wine, with the lid off. You want to cook the liquid down very far, and keep on turning the cabbage to get the nice sweetness of the wine on it.

While this is happening, break up the chestnuts, and saute them in some more fat until they begin to brown. Then add those to the chestnuts. Again, check the salt and pepper. Now is the time to also add some vinegar, to get the "spark" to it. You know what I mean. You recognize that little sting from vinegar in coleslaw. That's what you want. If you want sweetness without more wine, shave an apple into it and just stir it together. Finish everything by cooking until it gets very, very soft.

This goes real well with serious "red" meats like duck and pork or even lamb. Honestly, I like it enough to eat it by itself, just out of a bowl.

Give it a try. You'll find yourself liking something that you may not think you'd like. Betcha you'll make it a second time.

Mezzos, medals, and carrot cake

Ok, that's a very strange title, isn't it? But I bet the carrot cake caught your eye, didn't it? Well, we'll get there...

Why mezzos? Well, in recent days, I have been thinking about a lot of things, and one of them is a feeling that I guess I will have to deal with all of my life, as I have already. I am surrounded by extremely talented, extremely handsome friends. In my view, these guys are the "stars" in my life. They are fun to be around, fun to watch, and to be honest, sometimes it is downright depressing to feel like the "ugly duckling" or the "solid one." I described myself not that long ago to someone as the member of a gymnastics team who always goes up on the apparatus first: that's the person who you KNOW is going to get a good, solid score. They're not going to crack, they're going to be, well, "solid" and make sure that everyone else has a solid backing to work from. No one expects them to win a medal, and if they DO win a medal, maybe it's a bronze for third place. These folks don't take the star role, but you know they're there, and you couldn't function without them.

One music comedian once said that mezzos were invented because "sopranos need maids." When you think about the great mezzo roles in opera, indeed many of these are as servants: think of Suzuki, or Brangane, Princess Eboli, and so forth. But the opera is not "Madame Suzuki," and it's not "Tristan und Brangane" or "Principessa Eboli."

YET. Think of the GREAT mezzos, and there are a LOT of them: Christa Ludwig, Tatyana Troyanos, Marilyn Horne, and more recently, someone like Susan Graham. And the OQs out there will name more, without any problem. You know them, you know them as THEMSELVES and not as the support to the sopranos they sang with. You KNOW their work.

And, sometimes, the dependable, solid guy who goes first on the team gets the gold medal. It happens.

I have four medals for cooking: all first places. I won them for carrot soup, eggplant parmagiana, flourless chocolate cake, and carrot cake. Honestly, I expected to win the medals for the soup and the chocolate cake. The eggplant and carrot cake medals were stunning surprises for me. I could argue the point both ways: they ARE good recipes and they deserved to win, or the field was weak, and the recipe was the best of a bad lot. Whatever the point, I won.

These days, I never make that soup. It calls for a quart of heavy cream. A recipe that was fine in my early 20s, is not right for me these days. I make eggplant parmagiana, but not the old recipe. I found one I like better. I make the chocolate cake from time to time, but to be honest, in its day I made it so many times that I'm tired of it: REALLY tired of it.

But the carrot cake ? Oh, I could make this every week and not get tired of it. Nor would any of my friends. This cake is REVERED. If we have a big party and it's not served, people want to know why. It feels like it's been with me forever, but really, only since law school. I guess that's forever for some people: I graduated from law school before some of my friends were born.

Carrot cakes, zucchini cakes, pumpkin bread, all of these recipes that involve a vegetable, are the product of World War II and rationing. If you look at these recipes, they almost all use an oil base, and no butter. That's because all of the fruit was being canned and sent to solidiers as part of their K rations, and butter was being sent overseas as well. With fruit and butter rationed, and the American sweet tooth being what it is, resourceful cooks went into the kitchen and developed recipes that didn't need them. So, gentle reader, if you find a cake recipe that uses oil instead of butter, you can be pretty sure it's a product of the wartime kitchen. If you also have a vegetable base, that's just about certain.

So, here it is: the "famous" carrot cake, with its accompanying frosting, which DOES use butter. I will confess that when Guy makes this, he lightens it, and likes it better. I like it with the full richness of ALL of the oil. I think you COULD cut the oil back by half a cup, and still have a successful cake.

Let's start with the cake. You will need 1.5 cups of vegetable oil, and four large eggs. Combine these, and beat them. Beat them longer than you think you'll need to. You're looking for something that is like a very thin, liquidy mayonnaise - mayonnaise is, ultimately, oil and egg yolks. Then add half cups of sugar to this, until you have combined 2 cups. You are going to get a very wet, thick mixture, that may very well remind you of wet beach sand. Then add a tablespoon of vanilla. Put this aside.

Separately, combine 2 cups of unbleached flour, a tablespoon of cinnamon (and buy new cinnamon for this. Chances are yours is old and not as potent as it could be), 2 teaspoons of baking soda, and a teaspoon of salt. Put this aside for now, because you're going to grate carrots.

The recipe calls for three cups of grated carrots. In my experience, that's just a little less than a pound of the roots. You scrape them clean, and then either shred them in your food processor, or on the teardrop shaped blade on one of those three sided graters. If you don't want to measure and just want to shred the pound, more power to you. It's what I do (Guy measures).

Optionally, you can use 1.5 cups of "goodies," like nuts or raisins. I think they take away from the cake, and I LOVE nuts in cake. So put them in if you like, but I suggest leaving them out.

Now, stir the flour mixture into the oil mixture (you probably want to move the latter into a bigger bowl), and then stir in the carrots. You have enough here for a BIG 9x13 inch cake, which is almost always how I make it. You could make two thick, or three thin layers as well. Use 8 or 9 inch baking pans. In either case, bake at 350.

It's hard to tell you how long this cake needs, because I SWEAR every time I've made it, it's taken a different length of time. I would start checking after 40 minutes, regardless of the pan you use, and test the center with a cake tester. You know what to do: stick the straw into the center, see if it's sticky and wet, and if it is, let it bake longer. Usually, it takes between 50 and 60 minutes to finish.

If you do it in a 9x13 inch pan, and the middle sinks a little, don't worry. That's fairly common.

While the cake is baking, make the cream cheese frosting. It's easy, disgustingly bad for you, and delicious.

You need a stick of softened, unsalted butter, as well as half a pound of cream cheese. Here, the lower fat version will work, and actually mixes better than the full fat. Whip these together until you get a light, airy mix. Stir in some vanilla if you like that flavor. Anywhere from a teaspoon to a tablespoon. Finally, have a pound of confectioners' sugar ready. You're going to use it ALL, and there's a LOT of it here - almost four cups. Stir this in a cup at a time. IF you're using a strong mixer, lower it to your slowest speed, because otherwise, you'll be breathing the fines of the confectioners sugar for about five minutes.

This frosting will get very stiff if you refrigerate it. So you may want to keep it at room temperature until your cake is fully cool, and then spread it over the top. Then refrigerate it. If you're cramped for space, as I often am, you don't have to refrigerate the cake. You DO refrigerate the frosting, and if you frost the cake later , make sure to take the frosting out at least an hour ahead of time so that it's soft enough to spread over the cake.

So, there you have it. My gold medal carrot cake recipe. I'm not a mezzo, but I'm solid. And this time, for better or worse, I got the medal. Make it, and maybe you'll get one too. What I can guarantee is you'll get wave after wave of applause for what is a truly wonderful cake.

Nuts to you: meringue cookies

Nuts are one of those foods that seems, for some reason, to say "autumn" and "winter." I don't quite know what it is. Perhaps it is because they do ripen in the fall, but nuts are available all year. The technology for storing them so that they stay fresh is pretty good. If your market is scrupulous, you can get fresh nuts all year long. Still, there seems to be a thing about them. I don't use them much, until the fall comes around. Then they are a regular part of my cooking. I don't understand it. I just like them.

It seems to me that, over time, more people have become allergic to nuts . We used to read about an occasional allergic reaction to peanuts, and the consequences. In fact, in law school, when they teach product liability law, we almost always get the case of "peanuts in the chili," and an allergic vegetarian eats the chili, goes into shock at the table, with dire consequences all around. But like I say, these were taught as unusual cases. These days, we all find ourselves leaving nuts out of things when we're cooking for groups of people, or having a nut free option, and that kind of thing. Sigh. Tempus mutantur.

So, with my thoughts turning to various nuts, yesterday I made cookies with a young lady who likes to bake. And who doesn't care for nuts. It was news to me, and I was set up for the cookie, so we made it anyway. It's a good cookie, from a good cook, a woman named Joanne Weir. She works out of San Francisco and the Bay Area, and I encourage you to look up her books and to use them.

The cookie is based on egg whites. I like that, because I always have egg whites left over from ice cream m aking. I don't ALWAYS make these cookies, but they're really good. Even people who don't like nuts, and who don't like chocolate, seem to like them.

You will need 3 egg whites. Now, if you are using small eggs, know that each large egg white is about a quarter of a cup. And you'll need 3/4 cup of egg whites. Also a cup of sugar, a tablespoon of vinegar, and a teaspoon of salt. You will also need two cups of c hopped hazelnuts, and 8 ounces of chopped chocolate. Use either all semisweet, or half semi and half bitter, and spend the money for good stuff. Finally, you'll need a vanilla bean.

You need some techniques here. You can buy chopped hazelnuts, but if you have whole ones (toasted, and unsalted), chop them by pulsing them in a food processor, or put them in a sturdy plastic bag and beat the crap out of them.

To chop the chocolate, it may help to freeze it for about fifteen minutes. Then take a big, heavy knife and carefully shave off the chocolate at an angle. It will take a few minutes to do this, but it's a good technique to have.

For the vanilla bean, slice it in half, horizontally, and then with the tip of the knife, scrape out the seeds.

Preheat your oven to 250. Meringues bake at a low temperature.

Get out your mixer, and combine the egg whites, the vinegar and the salt. The vinegar and the salt take the place of cream of tartar. Most of us do not have "c of t" around, but always have vinegar and salt. With the whisk element of your beater, start whipping the eggwhites, first to a foam, then to the soft peak stage. Know what that is? Stop the whipping, and pull the beater out of the whites. If you get a "peak" that curls back, that's soft peak. When you have it, start beating in the cup of sugar slowly. You can speed it up as you go along, but DO start slowly. You'll have a thick, sweet mass that you COULD bake as it is. But we're going to take that vanilla seed, the chocolate, and the nuts and pour them into the meringue. Gently fold everything together.

You now layer out heaping tablespoon sized portions onto a baking sheet lined with paper. You'll be able to get about 15 on a sheet, spaced correctly. And you'll probably have three sheets worth. So, to speed things up, bake two sheets at a time. If you know that part of your oven bakes hotter than the other (for example, the bottom of my oven is hotter) , double tray the cookies you put on the bottom. Set a timer for forty minutes. After twenty minutes, reverse the trays in the oven, and after 40, take them out. Put in the third sheet while the first two are cooling.

These cookies come out of the oven soft, and almost rubbery. As they cool, they'll get REALLY crisp and it will be easy to take them off of the paper. Store them in a metal tin. DON'T put them in plastic, and whatever you do, do not store them near other cookies. They pick up moisture, and get soggy, spoiling all of your work.

There will be more to come with nuts in the future, but here's one to start. Thanks Joanne. I LOVE you!

Il ritorno del cavolofiore, or "cauliflower returns."

As I sit here NOT doing my Italian homework, I think back to last November, when I did a post on cauliflower (it's in November 28, for those interested in doing research). And as the seasons , like the wheel of dharma, turn, we're back to the same things we had in November of last year.
That should surprise no one, but it always amazes me when people say something like "oh, cauliflower. I had that two days ago."

Well, maybe you did. But as Madonna said "use your imagination, that's what it's for." If there were only one way to use a vegetable, or a fruit, we wouldn't be using it anymore. So if you like a particular vegetable, or fruit, read about it, pay attention, ask in restaurants, and all of a sudden, your one recipe will become 5, or even 10.

So it goes for cauliflower and I. As I wrote last year, this used to be a vegetable I despised. Today, it's not up t here with fava beans and asparagus, or tomatoes and eggplants, but I like it well enough. But I didn't have enough recipes to do things with it, so I made purees, and I made soup. Soup, and purees. And then one day, I read a piece about a Sicilian pasta dish with cauliflower. Off and running was I.

Sicilians use cauliflower a LOT. That kind of surprises people, but it's true. It's a staple on the winter table, in some way or form. In soup, in salads (yup. We got it a lot, and I hated it), as a side vegetable, and in this pasta preparation.

When you see a sweet item, like raisins or currants in a main dish, think Southern Italy. That's almost always where it comes from. The "migration" of culinary ideas was such that much of the cooking of the Middle East (by this, I mean Syria, Saudi Arabia, and so forth), found a way to Sicily. You will see this in cannoli which, if you think about it, has more in common with Middle Eastern desserts than with Italian ones. Also cassata, which is so involved and ornate that it, too, says Middle East, not Italy.

No question that Sicilians have the "sweetest tooth" of all Italians. In this dish, the sweet is modified by the salty and the vegetable flavors, and the result is something that is surprising but also wonderful.

You'll see the use of toasted breadcrumbs in this dish. A word on that, that always makes me tear up. There is a saying in Italy, that you spend one year in Purgatory, for every crumb of bread you waste. It's a good idea, if you think about it, encouraging us not to waste. But what it also means is that there was always bread in the house of some kind, be it stale or fresh.

And sometimes, that is All there was. And breadcrumbs took the place of cheese, when there was no money for grating cheese.

It happened all too often when I was growing up, and Nana resorted to toasted breadcrumbs for pasta, for soup, for coatings on vegetables. We LOVED the toasted breadcrumb pasta, and we always wondered why she cried when she was serving it. Now, when I see that kind of pasta in a restaurant, I'm torn. First, because I still love it. Second, because I can't bring myself to spend 10 dollars on a plate that cost pennies to make, and third, because the emotion of remembering Nana is overwhelming.

She never made this dish. I think she really didn't like capers. You can leave them out if you don't. You can also leave out the pine nuts, and you can substitute raisins for currants. But make the dish. Use the best olive oil you can find.

First, break up a head of cauliflower into florets, and then break up the florets even more. You want VERY small pieces. Cook these in a big pot of salted water. Be generous with the salt here. Cook the cauliflower PAST al dente. Drain it, and put the cauliflower aside.

Meanwhile, put about three tablespoons of capers preserved in salt in a bowl with a few cups of water. Let them sit there while the rest of the cooking goes on

Get a big pan out. Dry, that is, with NO oil, add about a quarter cup of pine nuts, and fry them at low heat. Shake the pan every now and then. When you begin to smell the nuts, pour them out into a bowl, and put it aside. Now add about a quarter cup of olive oil (by the way, that's only four tablespoons). Then add half to 2/3 of a cup of breadcrumbs. You can use the packaged stuff, but use unflavored. Heat this until the crumbs begin to brown. Then take them off and put them aside. Raise the heat, and add a bit more olive oil - maybe another quarter cup. Add the cauliflower, and pan fry it until it begins to brown some. Then toss in the bread crumbs, the pine nuts, about a third of a cup of raisins or currants, and then drain the capers and add them too. Let the whole thing sit for a couple of minutes and then stir it together to mix everything well.

You can put this aside while you cook up a pound of pasta, or you can cook the pasta simultaneously. The Italians out t here will know that for this, you need a chunky pasta. Rigatoni is good, so is orecchiete, or my own favorite, just because it sounds so "right," "strozzapretti," which is a priest strangler. The pasta is so called because , legend has it, the priest was so greedy he choked to death on it.

Served him right.

Sicilians like to cook the pasta just past aldente, and you should do that here, too. You don't have to, but somehow, the flavors work better when the pasta is softer. Scoop out half a cup of the cooking water, and drain the pasta. Then add the water back, together with the sauce and stir. Finally, just before you serve it, be a spendthrift and pour some really good olive oil over everything.

Don't even think about cheese. But if you do, use pecorino. Parmesan is not used in Sicilian cooking. The land isn't arable enough for cows.

I hope Nana is reading. If she knew that I were eating cauliflower without protesting, and serving it to people, she would smile. And yet again, she'd know she was right