Playing with Halibut

Contrary opinion here: halibut has no place on my table. It is in the same class of insipid and boring white proteins as chicken breast. No thank you. Ann feels the same way. You are allowed to feel differently and you can go pay $30-40 per pound for it if you like, but Ann and I, we're going to pay $4-6 per pound for local Pacific rockfish.

Aside: lots and lots of similar and related species are lumped under the moniker rockfish and none of them are to be confused with the amazing Striped Bass on the East Coast which also goes by rockfish, at least in the Chesapeake Bay area from where I come.

Dry-Brined Halibut with Roasted Broccoli and Curry Butter

Ann and I do make an exception to the no-thank-you halibut rule: both the cheeks and the collars are delightful and worth every penny that we pay for them. But they cook up and taste way different than the insipidly dull and low-fat fillet meat.

So why am I even posting about halibut? Because I have a freezer full of it. And why do I have a freezer full? Because, when we were in Alaska, I wanted to go halibut fishing for the experience of it; I love fishing especially out on the ocean. And I have a rule about hunting and fishing: if I am going to take an animal, I am going to use every piece of that animal that gave its life so that I could eat. So, I am going to cook and eat every piece of halibut (the cheeks are long, long gone) in the freezer.

Another aside: halibut fishing is pretty damned boring and I don't need to ever do it again. You anchor and put a bait just off the bottom and the halibut takes your line. Then you use brute force to haul the fish, feeling like a barn door on the line, to the boat. There's no fight and not a lot of skill in taking a halibut; it's just brute force work.

As a chef, I do not have much experience in cooking halibut because I have never really cared for it, but more importantly because my restaurant was located on the mid-Atlantic Coast where we have no halibut fishery. I wasn't going to waste the jet fuel in flying these fish in from Atlantic Canada, Scandinavia, or the West Coast, not when I could make a nightly call to the nearby docks, talk about the day's landings, and have my order arrive the very next morning.

So, ever since Ann and I landed our limit of halibut in Alaska, I have been playing with it trying to make it as palatable as possible. I have learned some things that other chefs more well versed in halibut probably already know. First, dry-brining does help the fish have better flavor and retain a bit more moisture. Second, halibut is extremely temperature sensitive and I am having the best results when I pull it at about 120 degrees Fahrenheit, then rest it just like a steak. Third, it's a fish that really demands a fatty sauce.

With those things in mind, I dry-brined the latest batch by giving them a good coating of a 2/3 salt, 1/3 sugar mixture and letting them sit for 45 minutes before roasting them to 120F and then letting them stand for 6 minutes, just like a steak. And then, I topped them with a simple sauce of melted butter into which I had mixed and gently cooked a spoonful of Madras-style curry powder.

Final aside: I use curry powder in my Indian food as often as Indian cooks do and that is never. I keep a little bit of it on hand for American dishes such as curried chicken salad. For Indian food, I use a mix of individual spices keyed to the particular dish that I am making. But for a simple butter to adorn a plate of roasted halibut and roasted broccoli, it worked just great.

This was the most successful halibut fillet that I have ever eaten. Still, I cannot wait for it to be gone from my freezer.

Hummus

Why is hummus so expensive at the store? When you can make a quart of hummus for $2, even in these inflated times, in five minutes, flavored the way that you want it, why would you buy pre-prepared hummus from the store?

Hummus with Sweet Peppers, Sugar Snaps, and
Roasted Broccoli and Sprouting Cauliflower

At the farmers market in McMinnville last week during our two-day quick trip to the Willamette Valley to see old friends and to do some shopping for wine, fish, and veggies that are unavailable in Central Oregon, we went to the Even Pull Farm stand. This is a farm that I have been doing business with for a long time and I love their products. We really miss being able to shop with them on a weekly basis.

Long story short, I spied several bunches of sprouting cauliflower on the back shelf and asked for two of them to go home with us. The loose heads with tiny florets used to be the secondary shoots that would grow around where the main head was removed, but any longer, seed companies are producing plants whose main crop are these cauliflowers that look more like broccolini in form than cauliflower.

I decided to roast this cauliflower with some broccoli from the fridge, but what to serve them with? As we move fully into spring in early June, the days are getting warmer, some up into the 70s, and with that warmer weather, we are starting to crave more summer-like foods. Spurred by a conversation that we had at dinner the night before with Dyce and Rob, I decided to make a small batch of hummus and serve it with the roasted veggies and also raw veggies that we need to consume before departing this week for Alabama to see my father, who is quite unwell.

Quick Hummus

I really feel awkward writing down a recipe for hummus when it is really something like soup. Everyone makes it to his or her own taste and it is all good. Still, I do understand that people do like to have a recipe to work from and so I offer this one, using a slug of roasted sesame oil rather than tahini. I just don't have the room in my fridge to keep tahini on hand, so I substitute a bit of sesame oil and it works well for me. The following recipe yields about a quart and is flavored as I like it, with olives and lots of spicy sambal oelek.

3 15.5 ounce cans chickpeas, drained
1 tablespoon roasted sesame oil
1 cup pimiento-stuffed manzanilla olives, drained
1/4 cup sambal oelek (I like it spicy)
1 teaspoon kosher salt
juice of two lemons
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Add all the ingredients to a food processor and blend until smooth. For a smoother product, you can rub the chickpeas between your hands to remove the outer husks, but this then starts to become work and is no longer a quick recipe. Sambal oelek is an Indonesian spicy chile sauce that is readily available at most grocery stores. Huy Fong, the maker of our most famous Sriracha sauce, is the brand you want.

Taste for seasoning and adjust as you see fit. You may require more sesame oil, olive oil, lemon juice, sambal, or salt to make it taste like you want.

Alaska Day 16: Return to McMinnville

In our hotel room in Anchorage, getting up to the annoying alarm on my phone at 0445 was no joke. Given that we were all packed except for our toiletries and sleep clothes, we brushed our teeth, finished packing, and were in the hotel lobby by 0500 only to discover that it was pouring rain. I walked down the street to fetch the car and we loaded our luggage under the cover of the hotel portico.

We had no issues getting gas or returning the rental car. We would have had issues if I had followed the directions to the rental car return on the Garmin, but despite the obnoxiously early hour, I had enough wits about me to know that we needed to return the car to the garage where we got it and not to whatever office the Garmin wanted us to visit. At 0520 there was nobody in the garage, so we left the car in the return lane and dropped the keys into the drop box.

Inside the terminal at the Air Alaska counters, there were good lines to check baggage with a lot of people trying to get bulky and overweight items through, especially guys making their commute to the North Slope oil fields. Baggage dealt with, security was a non-issue and there was a coffee stand just on the other side of the screeners. Coffee, finally, a few minutes before six.

Masked and Seated at 0645: An Exhausted Camper

We boarded without issue and we had front-row seats in first class going back. I joked with Ann that it was a very different experience than flying co-pilot in a Cessna bush plane, which we both did on our respective flights to Katmai. The climb out through the low rain clouds was uneventful. I expected worse. Above the clouds between 10-15,000 feet, we had a touch of clear air instability, but it was trivial in the grand scheme of air turbulence. Above the clouds, we had sunshine all the way into PDX, but terrifically warm temperatures when we arrived.

Check Out the Flat "Meat" Product

We preordered breakfast the day before and it proved to be somewhat edible. Ann’s omelette came with a dubious flat meat product reeking of artificial smoke. She did not partake of that particular delicacy. I preordered a pork bowl consisting of layers of black beans, shredded pork shoulder, scrambled eggs, all topped with a bit of sour cream. The eggs and pork shoulder were lame, while the black beans were nicely seasoned with salt and cumin. It might have been a touch better had it been warm all the way through.

My Breakfast was Slightly Better Than Ann's

Back at PDX, we had to wait on the tarmac for a few minutes before pulling to a gate. Like everybody else in these days of COVID, Alaska Air was having staffing difficulty. We needed a ground crew to help park the plane. Ten minutes or so of wait was enough to get us to the gate. The half-hour wait for our baggage at PDX was excruciating. All we wanted to do was get home.

Baggage in hand, we needed to get back to the Ramada to get my truck and start the trip back home. We called the shuttle number only to find out that the shuttle was not in operation, another COVID issue, I imagine. The hotel called an Uber for us and the driver met us within seconds of us getting to the pick-up area. That couldn't have gone any smoother.

The trip from the airport home was as easy as it gets and that is a major blessing from the Portland traffic gods. We skipped the ride into Portland on I-84, opting to take the I-205 bypass which dropped us on I-5 just about Wilsonville. It was a smooth ride on a route that we do not normally take.

During the hour drive home, we decided to stop at the store and grab a few things for an early dinner. After over two weeks of really pretty bad food, we were desperate for a competent meal. We needed something flavorful yet comforting, comforting being our code word for high carbs, preferably pasta. You really don't know how hard it is trying to eat well and foregoing pasta for months on end. We could live quite happily on pasta every day.

We stopped at the local Grocery Outlet, a small store that is far quicker to get in and out of than the big grocery store. GO, being primarily a seller of overstocked goods, usually has at least one kind of Italian bronze die-extruded pasta on the shelves. The markup on these pastas at specialty groceries is unbelievable and so a lot of unsold pasta gets farmed out to the overstock sellers. At our GO, we usually will not have a choice of brand or cut, but at least we can get a bag of decent pasta, unlike the grocery where Barilla is as good as it gets. Today it was fettuccine.

Grocery Outlet is only a couple minutes from the house and groceries in tow, we were in a rush to see the dogs. If you've ever been away from yours, you know the enthusiastic greeting that you get after you've been in the bathroom for a minute. Imagine the greeting after two-and-a-half weeks away!

That's a Happy Pile of Puppies!

We had planned to have an early dinner, but not eating anything since o-dark-thirty, we moved things up and I got to work making our dinner. Along with the pasta, we got a head of broccoli to put with artichoke hearts and sun-dried tomatoes from the pantry, garlic, red pepper flakes, and a big handful of fresh basil which exploded in the garden while we were away. A swirl of butter and a grating of pecorino romano finished our super flavorful and comforting dinner, easily the best meal we’ve had in three weeks.

And that concludes the saga of our 2021 Alaska trip. I'll do a brief wrap-up post next.

Chicken Pot Pie

My wife is a little crazy and I love her for it. This week when I had poached a chicken, she nonchalantly and quite apropos of nothing (that I could ascertain; who knows what was buzzing around in her infinitely circular brain?) asked me to make a chicken pot pie, saying that she would really like that a lot. Why not? Anything for her.

So I poach all the vegetables, make the gravy, make the crust, bake the pies, and get them to the table. Just before we dig in, she says, "I've never had pot pie before." All the while, I assume that she has asked me to make her a pot pie because she had eaten one and found it delicious enough to want again.

Don't you think that she would have said to me, "I've never had a pot pie before and really want to try one! Would you make me a chicken pot pie?" Nut!

Chicken Pot Pie

Pie Vegetables

You can use any vegetables that you want for your pies. I had planned to use celery, leeks, carrots, and green beans. When I got home from the store, I found that someone (not naming names) had roasted all the green beans that I was going to use in the pies. So I substituted some broccoli florets.

I brought some salted water to a boil and gave each of the vegetables a quick parboil. I cooked each vegetable in sequence until it was crisp-soft and put it in ice water to stop the cooking. Meanwhile, I picked a bit of chicken off a carcass that I had poached the day before.

Pies Ready for Topping

I brought the chicken stock that I had made the day before to a roiling boil and thickened it with a corn starch slurry. I poured the thick gravy over the vegetables and chicken, then seasoned with salt, plenty of black pepper, and a mound of freshly chopped parsley.

In retrospect, I should have used a beurre manié (flour and butter mix) to thicken the gravy. I was trying to back off the calories by using corn starch, but the gravy broke down in the oven later, something that flour will not do. Even an old chef learns the hard way (to be fair to myself, in my restaurant career, I did not get any experience in low-fat, low-calorie cooking!).

Pies Ready for Oven

We don't have any special dishes for pot pie and I thought that it would be nice to make individual ones, so I repurposed a couple of cereal bowls. I topped each with pie crust (recipe below), trimmed the crust, crimped it into the rim of the bowls with the tines of a fork, slit the crusts for steam vents, and brushed the tops with egg wash. 

The pies want to be in a hot oven (425F) until the top crusts brown nicely. I want to say that these took 35-40 minutes, but I wasn't watching the clock like a hawk.

Pie Crust Recipe

This is my tried and true all-butter super flaky pie crust. I would love to say that I learned it from my mother or her mother, inveterate pie bakers both, but that wouldn't be the truth. They were diehard Southerners and it was Crisco for their pie crust or nothing. I gave up on trans fats and hydrogenated shortening a very, very long time ago in favor of butter or (rarely) lard.

The following recipe will make a generous single pie crust (with generally enough left over to make a lattice top), depending on what size pie plate you are making. I measure my baking ingredients by weight in grams. If you do not have a scale, get one. It will be the single best thing you can do to improve your baking.

150 grams all purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

140 grams cold butter, in small cubes

ice water as needed

Spin the flour and salt in the food processor for a second to mix it. Add the cold butter cubes and pulse. Pulse until the butter resembles really small peas in size. Add a couple tablespoons of water and pulse. Add water in dribbles and pulse in between. When the dough just starts to come together, bring it out onto a floured counter and shape it into a flat disc. Wrap it in film and refrigerate for an hour to cool it off. After this rest, it will be ready to use.

Roasted Chickpea and Broccoli Salad with Yogurt Dressing

We're starting to eat more and more vegetarian meals and I got to thinking about a salad of roasted chickpeas and broccoli with some sort of yogurt dressing. 

Roasted Chickpea and Broccoli Salad with Yogurt Dressing

The salad turned out pretty well, but without a good bit of dressing, I found the roasted chickpeas a bit dry. If I had dried them and coated them in olive oil, they would have crisped a lot sooner, but we are watching the fat intake as we near 30 pounds of collective weight loss.

Drained Chickpeas Tossed with Salt and Pimentón

I drained the chickpeas and used the remaining moisture to help the salt and pimentón adhere. If you're not watching the calories, pat the chickpeas dry and toss them in olive oil before adding the seasonings: the quality is definitely better.

Roasted Chickpeas

Broccoli on a Sheet Tray Coated with Pan Spray

Broccoli Roasted for 20 Minutes in a 425F Oven

Finishing the Broccoli by Steaming

Once the chickpeas and broccoli are roasted, toss them with as much or as little of the yogurt dressing as you would like. Season to taste. If the broccoli is nicely brown but still a bit crunchy for my liking, I like to put it in a bowl covered in film so that it can steam just a bit more and even out the cooking. File that away under school-of-hard-knocks lessons that they don't teach in culinary school.

Cumin-Chipotle Yogurt Dressing

This is a really easy, very low-fat dressing that is super tasty and versatile. I don't ordinarily like low-fat yogurt: it tastes and feels funny and fake to me. But as the base for a flavorful lower-calorie dressing, it works fine.

1 cup plain low-fat Greek yogurt
1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon freshly ground cumin
1 tablespoon chipotle adobo
1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt
1 pinch dehydrated garlic

Mix everything well. If you need to, thin with additional water and adjust seasonings to your preference. The cumin flavor will expand as the dressing sits in the refrigerator, so go just a little lighter than you think you want, if you are not going to use the dressing immediately.

Ginger-Miso-Green Onion Meatloaf with Soy-Lime Sauce

Ann is pretty good about surfing the internet looking for food that she wants to eat. One afternoon a couple of recipes showed up in my inbox courtesy of her, one for chicken meatballs flavored with ginger and miso and the other for a soy-lime dipping sauce that looks very suspiciously like a classic Vietnamese sauce, nuoc tuong.

I don't need or really even use recipes. All I need is the basic gist of an idea and I am off to the races. Ann sends me recipes for ideas and I really appreciate that: coming up with what to cook for dinner is a universal struggle among cooks.

Ginger-Miso-Green Onion Meatloaf with Soy-Lime Sauce

For a quick dinner, I don't really want to roll out and cook meatballs, so I opted for a meatloaf flavored similar to a filling for pot stickers along with broccoli that would roast at the same time as the meatloaf was baking. You could make meatballs out of this very same mix, but I was feeling lazy.

Mise en Place

Here are all my seasonings and the finished soy-lime sauce to spoon over both the meatloaf and the roasted broccoli. The seasonings for the meatloaf are soy sauce, shiromiso (white miso), garlic, ginger, and green onions.

I have been loyal to one brand of soy sauce since I was a kid: superior soy sauce from Pearl River Bridge, a lighter 100% soy Chinese-style soy versus the heavier and darker 50% soy, 50% wheat Japanese-style (tamari) embodied in Kikkoman or San-J, a fine sauce made in Virginia. 

Soy-Lime Sauce

For the sauce, I mixed in a small bowl:

one quarter cup soy

one quarter cup lime juice (juice of one large lime)

one clove garlic, minced

one teaspoon minced spicy chile (my stand-in for a fresh Thai bird chile)

one teaspoon agave syrup

I use agave as a sweetener in sauces because as a liquid, it mixes in to the sauce better than a granulated sugar. Adjust this sauce to your taste. If you find it too acidic, you can add more sweetener to balance the acid and/or some water to dilute it a touch. After you've made a couple of similar sauces, you'll get the hang of it for your palate.

Ginger-Miso-Green Onion Meatloaf 

Meat Loaf Ready for the Oven

Mixing up a meatloaf is child's play. First, you mix the liquid and seasoning ingredients in a bowl. Then you add the meat and binder and mix well, but gently, until all the ingredients come together. Then you drop the meatloaf on a sheet tray and shape it. After a quick bake and a brief cool-off period, dinner's done.

1 tablespoon soy sauce

2 tablespoons white miso

1/4 cup chicken stock 

4 green onions, sliced

1/3 cup minced fresh ginger

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 pound ground turkey

1 cup rolled oats

Mix the soy, miso, and chicken stock well until the miso is dissolved. Then add the green onions, ginger, and garlic and mix well. Finally, add the turkey and rolled oats and mix gently, but well.

Mound the forcemeat on a sheet tray in an even rectangle. The thicker the rectangle, the longer it will take to cook. This one took about 25 minutes, maybe 30.

Bake in a moderate oven at 350F until a meat thermometer registers 160F in the center of the loaf. Remove from the oven and let stand for 5-10 minutes. As the meatloaf cools, it will continue to cook in the center and will finish at 165F or higher.

As a chef, I don't always follow USDA Food Code guidelines about temperatures (they often want you to char your meat in the name of safety), but with poultry, I don't fool around. They say ground poultry must be cooked to 165F to kill any pathogens and I am with them in this regard. If you don't have a thermometer, go buy one and learn how to use and calibrate it before you embark on this recipe.

I use rolled oats in preference to other binders (such as panko or other breadcrumbs) because oats are relatively healthy for you.

You'll notice that there's no salt in this recipe. The soy and miso have plenty of salt to compensate.

This dinner was delicious, like eating a plate full of pot stickers without the pastry. I know that the pastry around those dumplings is awesome, but not when you're trying to lose your accumulated COVID gut!

Guilty Pleasure: Fried Rice

I have very few guilty pleasures in my life. If I were making a list, though, fried rice would be right up at the top.

Sunday, Ann and I were discussing shrimp around noon as an idea of what to have for dinner without ever concluding anything before we took a nap. After awaking, I started prepping vegetables from the refrigerator.

Seeing me working, Ann asked what I was making for dinner. When I said shrimp fried rice, she thought that she had told me earlier in the day that she wanted shrimp fried rice. But she only thought it, never saying it out loud. I guess we were on the same wavelength!

Broccoli Stem, Carrot, Red Onion, and Chive Fried Rice

There are precious few shrimp in the dish above. Duh! I forgot to prep the shrimp. Oh well, we didn't need them anyway.

Fried rice is one of the great clean out the refrigerator dishes. Leftover bits and pieces of lots of things can find a home in fried rice. Use whatever you have at hand, but avoid wet ingredients that will turn your rice into mush. I found a half a red onion, a carrot, and the stems from about five heads of broccoli.

Broccoli stems are a great treasure in the kitchen and I have never understood why people pay top dollar for them only to pitch them in the trash. Use a paring knife to pull the skin off all the way around the stems and dice the sweet, crunchy interiors as you would any other vegetable. They are wonderful raw and lightly cooked, having a sweet flavor something like kohlrabi.

Peeling broccoli stems is a good down-time activity. I sat out on the back patio with a bowl of stems and a paring knife and peeled the stems while chatting with Ann. this makes me recall that I used to go to a Chinese restaurant where mid-afternoon, the entire crew would sit around tables with bus tubs of broccoli stems to peel, chatting away, and waiting for the dinner rush.

Prepped Vegetables Ready to Cook

As I was at the stove making the fried rice, I couldn't help but chuckle as I remembered overhearing a conversation in the restaurant between a line cook and his mom:

"Seriously, Mom! A recipe? For fried rice? The recipe is in the name: fry some rice!"

Cooking the Vegetables with Ginger and Garlic

Well, there's slightly more to it than that, but not much. Fried rice, when really well made is a wonderful thing: too bad so many restaurants make such terrible fried rice.

Fried Rice Tips

Rice. Use cold, leftover medium to long grain rice for fried rice. Cold rice doesn't clump as much as hot rice and is easier to break into grains if necessary. If you don't have leftover rice, don't sweat it. We don't ever have leftover rice at our house because of portion control. We would pig out on rice if we had it around, so we only make what we need. For this fried rice, I cooked it an hour before needing it, spread it out on a sheet tray to cool, and popped it into the fridge. Done.

To Egg or Not to Egg. A lot of fried rice contains egg. I do and I don't. Last night, because I forgot the shrimp, I added two eggs for a bit more protein. There are several ways to add eggs to fried rice and I do them all from time to time:

• You can cook the egg beforehand into a really thin crepe-like omelet, dice the omelet, and add it as a garnish to the rice. 

• While the rice is frying, you can crack one or more eggs into the rice, then stir fry them along with the rice. This leaves streaks of white and streaks of gold.

• While the rice is frying, you can add beaten eggs to the rice. This gives a more uniform dispersion of gold. Last night, I beat the eggs, added a 1/2 cup of fresh chives from the garden, and a slug of soy sauce. Then I added this mix to the rice at the very end.

Seasoning the Oil. Traditionally, you would season the oil in the wok by frying garlic and ginger slices until golden, then removing and discarding it, before cooking the rest of the dish. I like a stronger flavor of ginger and garlic, so I add both, finely minced, when I am cooking the vegetables. Because I don't have a wok and I don't have particularly high heat, I'm not worried about the ginger and garlic burning.

There is also another way, a non-standard one that I learned from a Thai chef in making khao pad, Thai-style fried rice, which at the time was the best fried rice I had ever eaten. He created a special curry paste of shallots, cilantro stems and roots, green chiles, galanga, and white pepper. Then he would fry a spoonful of this fiery paste in his wok before starting the dish: absolutely fragrantly mind-blowing. I do this from time to time by dropping all the ingredients into the Vita-Mix with enough oil to emulsify. Granted, I get better results by banging this out in my big green granite mortar from Thailand, but I am not cooking in a Thai restaurant, or any restaurant.

No Wok, No Fear. Fried rice is best when you get a great sear on the rice, something that is hard to do without a wok. I don't have a wok and I don't have ventilation worth a darn either, so I have to do things a bit differently at home. I build my fried rice in stages. First I cook the longest cooking items: the vegetables and proteins, in a couple of batches, adding them to a big bowl when done. Then I cook the rice, perhaps in batches, adding it to the bowl. When I'm done, I mix it all together and serve. The point is to not overload the pan so that it stays hot.

Seasoning. At the end of cooking, it is typical to add a splash of soy or fish sauce to season the rice. I like only a little in my rice, preferring to let guests season their own bowls at the table. I use soy sauce when I'm in a Chinese or Korean mood, fish sauce when I'm in a Southeast Asian mood. In this case, I mixed the soy sauce directly into the egg mixture.

Ideas. Use sesame oil or a mix of a neutral oil with sesame oil for a twist. Spicy: curry paste, white pepper, green chiles, kimchee, gochujang. Herbs for last minute addition: chives, garlic chives, Chinese chives, green onions, Thai basil, cilantro, kaffir lime leaves. Proteins: egg, shrimp, tofu, pressed spiced tofu, seitan, ham, lop cheung (Chinese sausage), roast pork, roast duck, roast chicken. Vegetables: broccoli stems, gai lan (Chinese broccoli), turnip, radish, kohlrabi, rutabaga, baby corn, corn kernels, carrots, peas, sugar snaps, snow peas. Other: shiitake mushrooms, tree ear mushrooms, pickled mustard stems, peanuts, cashews, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds. Use your imagination but keep it simple so as not to overload the dish. Pick a protein, something green, and one or two items for contrast.

Dinner al Fresco

Now that the restaurant kitchen is starting to operate more smoothly post transition to a new kitchen crew, I felt like I could take off last evening to spend some time with Ann. In fact, I decided early enough in the day that Ann and I discussed options for dinner and decided that we needed to eat some of the asparagus and eggplant from the refrigerator.

I got home around 4:30 and began prepping and Ann arrived home at 5:30 just as I was finishing cleaning up the kitchen. In an hour, I sliced and blanched all the vegetables for dinner, made a pot of chicken paprikash for Ann to eat later in the week, blitzed a pint of tomato goat cheese (fresh tomatoes, salt, and goat cheese) in the food processor, and made three cups of white bean hummus.

After Ann took a shower, we went out on the patio with this bottle of Ramey Syrah and enjoyed what proved to be an exquisitely beautiful evening. I couldn't have randomly picked any better evening to be off. Or a better random bottle of wine. This Syrah is more French than Californian with an earthy nose riding on top of plum fruit with hints of black pepper. Understated and delicious and decidedly contrarian for California.

Ramey Syrah: More France Than California

At some point later in the evening (gotta love these long days!), I fired up the grill and grilled the eggplant along with the asparagus and broccoli that I had blanched earlier. I went by the farmers market in the morning and found a few things we could use for dinner: two small cucumbers, the first of the year; a small basket of greenhouse cherry tomatoes, also the first of the year; a couple handfuls of broccoli side shoots, again first of the year; and a lone bunch of radishes, about the last of the spring. These are the first new vegetables at the market in weeks!

Vegetable Platter with Two Dips

While we were waiting for the grill to heat, I heard a big crash from inside and knew instinctively what had happened. I arrived in the kitchen about two seconds later to find a shattered platter in the floor; tomato-goat cheese spread plastered all over the dishwasher, cabinets, and walls; and the brown dog happily licking up the mess from the floor. Carter and I cleaned up the mess in the kitchen while Ann hauled Grace outside for a hose bath. Dogs!

Vegetables with Spiced Tofu

I admit that I wasn't too jazzed when I read in an email from Ann yesterday "Let's do a vegetable stir fry with tofu." But, I was in a hurry to get home and really didn't want to try to think of something different, so I just replied "OK" and grabbed a few things at FoodMaxx on the way home.

Vegetables with Spiced Tofu

I also have to admit that it really did taste very good and that my body was craving vegetables, after a week of heavy Thanksgiving eating.



Peppers, Snow Peas, Shiitakes, Green Onions, Carrots

Not shown here is a small crown of broccoli that I prepped into florets and steamed in the microwave for about four minutes before adding them to the pan to caramelize.



Spiced Tofu, Cilantro, Garlic, "Pickled Radish"

The prep took about 15 minutes of chopping and slicing during the afternoon and then it only took about 10 minutes to bring the dish to the table when Ann decided she was hungry. I seared the ingredients in three different batches to keep my pan smoking hot. This is where I miss a carbon steel wok and a smoking wok burner. ;) The heat and the smoke I don't miss.

The green onions and cilantro went in raw. And then when all was done, I put the so-called "pickled radish" into the pan and deglazed with a touch of water. In went a little bean paste, some hoisin, a little soy sauce and it all cooked for another 90 seconds at which point, I poured the sauce over the veg and tossed well.

As for the "pickled radish," that's the name on the shelf tag at the store. The packages themselves are not marked in any way in English, except for a use-by date. So, I don't really know what these sweet and spicy pickled vegetables are, other than addictively good. They are my new favorite find!

Easter 2014

Like other such Easter mornings, I was awakened far too early by the sunrise service at one of the two nearby churches (or maybe both). Amplified voices are just what I need at sunrise after a long, hard dinner slog the night before. But I'm used to it and I don't really begrudge the churches their once-a-year celebrations. They didn't really get the dogs too riled this year, so it was possible to sleep on-and-off through the service. And bless Ann for getting up before me and taking the dogs outside. Not having to do that one day in my life is priceless, not that I really mind, but just this simple luxury was wonderful.

Anemones in the Morning Light

Easter to me means spring flowers, but this year, everything is 2-3 weeks late on account of our long, hard winter. So this year, I had to suffice with our earliest late winter/early spring flowers, anemones, which are quite stunning in the bed out front of the house.

Duck Eggs: Breakfast of Champions

Now that we have a steady supply of duck eggs, four weeks later than in any prior year, Ann asked me to bring some home for Easter breakfast. What a great idea! Duck eggs are so fabulous! These ended up scrambled and eaten in breakfast burritos.

Bob and Mary, Guests of Honor

After attending Easter Mass, Bob and Mary drove out from McLean to have lunch with us. Ann did a fantastic job of putting together a very simple menu that we could execute with very little effort, a good thing because I am now 51 weeks without a vacation and am whipped. My tolerance for large crowds and complex cooking is nil.



Dolmades to Start

We started with dolmades and really delicious goat cheese and green olive crostini.



Along with Green Olive and Goat Cheese Crostini

Ann picked up a recipe somewhere for the olives and they turned out wonderful. We pitted and roughly chopped them, then Ann added orange zest, fresh thyme, and garlic chives. That little pop of orange is really marvelous. Keeper!



Milk-Braised Pork Shoulder, the Main Event

For our main course, Ann decided on milk-braised pork, always a delicious thing! On Saturday, I sliced a few steaks off of a pork shoulder and braised them in milk on a bed of crushed garlic cloves, fresh thyme branches, and a couple of bay leaves. About six hours this pork spent in a slow oven, six hours of becoming super unctuous.

Twin Food Processors

To go with the pork, she decided that we should have pommes Anna, that amazing French classic potato dish. It is an old-school dish and I am an old-school kind of chef. Here you see my twin food processors: a knife and a mandoline. Even at the restaurant, it is very rare that I use our big Robot Coupe.


The Perfect Pommes Anna Pan

And likewise, I eschew the fancy copper cocottes for pommes Anna in favor of the old Griswold cast iron frying pan. As you will see, it does an amazing job at this and many other tasks. I don't understand why everyone doesn't have a cast iron pan. Well, I do. They take work to keep up and most people are lazy.



Ready for the Oven



We Really Need Smell-o-Vision for These Pommes Anna!

And so our dinner was very simple, yet with outstanding flavor. The plates, as Ann commented, were very pedestrian and a great departure from what we do at the restaurant, but the flavors were outstanding: fall-apart tender pork, sensual pommes Anna, and the first broccoli of the year. Easy to prepare and even easier to eat.

"The Most Boring Plate Ever," says Ann; but How Delicious?

Ann decided to make for dessert a batch of lemon cupcakes (because her mom loves lemon cake) with cassis buttercream.



Gearing up for Buttercream

And the result was gorgeous! I am not a dessert eater and these were outstanding. Brava Ann!


Awesome Finale! Cassis Buttercream on Lemon Cupcakes



Every Day is Special

I bought some of the first baby arugula of the winter at the farmers market on Saturday and started to build a Sunday dinner around those beautiful salad greens. But Sunday afternoon after we had a huge and unanticipated steak lunch, we decided to forgo dinner in favor of local goat cheese and Ann's delicious roasted garlic bread. Her bread is so good—and this loaf in particular was so good—that we always gorge on it, leaving no room for anything else. I just want to say here that I have no need to bake bread any longer; my girl does an outstanding job! And so we left the arugula for Monday night.

I got home early on Monday: I worked on year-end closing paperwork until I was fed up and I fled the restaurant to spend some quality time with Ann. Early evening after we wrestled with insurance policies and other family stuff that we just couldn't put off to another day, Ann went down to basement to get a bottle of wine. She wanted to surprise me with her choice, but the cork broke as she was opening the bottle and I hopped up to help her get it out and filter the wine. Broken and crumbling corks are a fact of life with older wines.

1997 Linden Red Reserve

And so I saw the wine label before she poured me a glass of this beautiful 1997 Linden Red Reserve (which we tasted last weekend at the Linden Library Tasting). Jim Law gave us this bottle as a wedding present and we had been saving it for a special occasion. I was a little surprised that Ann chose this bottle, but I always tell her that any time you open a special bottle, it is a special occasion. And she was so happy that I got home early yesterday that she wanted to celebrate.

I spent 90 minutes over two glasses of wine, enjoying each tiny sip like it might be my last. And it probably will be my last of this delicious wine. This bottle tasted even better than the bottle that Jim opened at the library tasting and that was my favorite wine of the day. Really delicious.

Arugula, Tomatoes, Goat Cheese, Almonds and Tomato Vinaigrette

On to dinner, we tossed the baby arugula with halved grape tomatoes, toasted almonds, local fresh goat cheese, and tomato vinaigrette. The salad was so fabulous (it's been months since we last had amazing salad greens) that I am still thinking about how much I enjoyed it today. I love a good salad and good salads seem to be few and far between.

Strozzapreti with Porcini, Pancetta, and Broccoli

And for our main course, Ann and I made a porcini sauce by cooking up some of the pancetta that I cure with minced garlic and rosemary from the garden. To this, we added rehydrated porcini mushrooms and a splash of heavy cream. The tiny broccoli florets (side shoots that grow after the main crown has been cut) from a local farm went into the water with the strozzapreti for the final minute and then everything was tossed with some grated pecorino. The local winter broccoli is so sweet and delicious this year!

Sitting down to a rare meal at the table with Ann and Carter and enjoying delicious local food with a very wonderful and rare bottle of wine made me remember that days like this are more special and worthy of celebration than almost any other!

Dinner with Dan, Yael, and Naama

Sunday evening we went out into the north part of the county to have dinner with Dan and Yael Ben-Daat and their daughter Naama. Carter went with us, making our party six. In 18 months, Yael has most industriously carved a large organic garden and orchard out of what was nothing before and she supplies us things at the restaurant that other growers don't grow: chickpeas, artichokes, borage, and so forth. She wanted us to come see her farm, of which she is obviously and justifiably proud, and so kindly invited us to dinner. It took about a nanosecond to agree to come: people who are willing to cook for a chef are few and far between. Most people miss the part that chefs pretty much eat anything and are not at all critical when other people are cooking for them: it's such a rare treat.

Artichoke in Bloom

Chickpeas (tiny green pod upper left)

When we arrived, we got the grand tour of the gardens and orchards and then went into to a huge three-course feast. It is clear that Yael and Naama love cooking and that they had been at it all day. We started with a beautifully arranged appetizer plate (enough for a whole meal!) of shredded cucumber salad, a moussaka of venison (from the back yard), and a pattypan squash stuffed with mushrooms. I would have been very satisfied to stop there, but then they started bringing platter after platter of dinner from the kitchen to the dining room.

Smoked Turkey in Pastry

How gorgeous is this smoked turkey breast coated with sun-dried tomato pesto and wrapped in pastry? Dan smoked the turkey himself and it was very moist and delicious. If I weren't so full, I could have eaten a lot more than the half slice that I did eat.

Roasted Veg, Yum!

These roasted vegetables were awesome! I love roasted vegetables of any kind and these all scattered with cloves of roasted garlic were amazing. My favorites were the beets, but there were also butternut squash, three colors of potato, sweet potato, and broccoli. I loved them all.

Wheat Berries, Roasted Beans and Tomatoes

I could have gorged on this platter of wheat berries, roasted green beans, and roasted tomatoes but I just didn't have the room. Somehow I failed to get a picture of the big pot of braised lamb that had cooked for a long time. For dessert, we had profiteroles stuffed with ice cream along with chocolate and caramel sauces and fresh berries.

I would be very remiss if I did not mention the gorgeous condiment sauce that Yael made from tahini, garlic, cilantro, and parsley, sort of hummus meets chimichurri. This dinner reminded me how much I like this sauce on falafel. Outstandingly delicious and I definitely plan to make some soon!

Dan, Yael, and Naama, thank you for your gracious hospitality! תודה לכם