Epiventures

Summer held on long enough this year for me to give it a big, sloppy kiss. I love you, summer, and if I didn’t prove it already with a brand new garden and an upgraded lawn mower then this weekend sealed the deal.

It was one of those impromptu dinners — the kind that start with a lazy “let’s stay in tonight” and end with scraped plates piled in the sink and windows cracked over the bed.

We sat in our rickety wooden chairs outside while we grilled on the Weber and let the bug candles light the way. All the while, of course, Dustin sipped his Campari and soda and I concocted a way to extend my bourbon sipper to the salmon. As it turns out, coupled with brown sugar and soy sauce, bourbon becomes a bright, Southern sort of marinade.

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I’m looking at a picture of myself standing in Paris on a bridge with a long, gray river ebbing and flowing under me. I’m ten and I’m wearing a black shirt and a little vest. I keep trying to tell Dustin how fashionable the outfit was for a girl at the time but he throws his head back anyway, barely able to eek out “who is that little man?!”

The snapshot makes me think of what a world-class traveler I was in my youth. From San Francisco to London to Hawaii, I’d paved a lot of ground by twelve. Things are different now that I’m on my own dime and there’s work and school calendars to contend with.

But hold on to your cowboy hats, folks, I’ve carved away some time and I’ve decided to do-si-do over to Nashville for a little weekend adventure! I’ve made Dustin promise that we don’t have to hit every single tourist attraction and instead, I fully intend to make adequate use of my bathrobe. At least when I’m not out eating.

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I bought my house in Columbia Tusculum from the General Manager of Boca Restaurant. It’s a 130-year old, narrow, painted-lady with wood floors and colorful walls and a growing art collection. It’s small and it’s on a hill that from some angles looks like Mount Everest, but it’s renovated, it’s eclectic and the truth is that I fell in love with the kitchen.

Actually, I would say that I’m in a relationship with my kitchen. We cook together. We throw parties together. Sometimes, we even sing together. It hums a dishwasher song and pipes Miles Davis through its speakers and I clang pots and chop vegetables on a bamboo board. I like to think that separated, my kitchen and I are just okay but together we’re something pretty special.

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I’m coming right out of the gate with an admission. Beware. It’s totally un-french and un-fabulous and if we weren’t hitting it off so well already, I might be too afraid to tell you. I made Sole Meuniere without the Sole. That’s right. Instead, I reached into the fridge and pulled out the only thing I had tucked away — a humble, inexpensive, totally every day variety of fish. Which is to say, I made Sole Meuniere with tilapia.

In France, I imagine I might be executed for this sort of behavior. In America though, I imagine busy people everywhere throwing up their hands and saying, “So what! Be resourceful! I buy my cheese pre-cut and prepackaged!”

This is why I like America.

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I was a vegetarian from 2004-2008 and for most of that time my grandma was alive. It’s helpful, for this story, to know that she thought I was absolutely nuts. She used to look at me and ask, “But you eat chicken, right?” Eliminating meat made no sense to her and it didn’t have to. She was German, after all. Her shoulders were broad and her body reached up to almost six feet in the air. When it came to most things, she had her mind made up.

This carried over to her dinner plate. She didn’t put anything on it unless it met very specific qualifications. Pork was okay. Pizza was bad. See? It escapes common logic. But that was her and I got to know her habits fairly well.

She moved in with my parents a year before she died. When I went to visit, I could expect her to be in the same leather recliner, her shoes lined up at the bottom of the stool, a crochet needle in her hand, a bag of candy orange slices by her side. She drew her own eyebrows on and so I used to love to see what new expression she’d be wearing.

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Dear supportive, hungry reader,

Last night was fried chicken for dinner and it got me thinking about something my friend said recently. I can’t remember the conversation that led to this blustering exclamation, I just know that suddenly she jerked her head and cried, “Romantic comedies are brainwashing society!”

I had to laugh. Lauren is impressive for two reasons. 1. She gets most of her clothes from Goodwill and always looks amazing and 2.) just when you least expect it she says something riveting and thoughtful. Really, it’s like hanging out with Oprah except Lauren has blond hair and knows how to pump her own gas. And she’s right about the movies — life will never be like that. Reality is hopelessly flawed; it’s full of morning breath and bills and expired license plate tags.

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So it seems, I like everything about summer. I like watching my nephews eat popsicles in the sun and run through the sprinklers and otherwise act like all of us would if we could. I like eating easy salads (especially the kind that my sister cleverly places in portable jars) and I have no problem with blue skies, twinkle lights, bug spray or the philosophy that “if you can’t tone it, tan it,” which I think I heard on Toddlers & Tiaras, but still.

Summer feels somehow casual and light and celebratory all at once, and I’ve known this for quite some time. What I didn’t know — not until this weekend — was that everything I wanted out of summer could be found between two pieces of bread. Whether you’re reading this stuffed in an office cubicle or you’re at home gathering your nerves between kid naps (shhh!) I have two words for you that should make you want to fling your shoes off and go hang your legs in the pool: lobster sandwich.

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This may be a personal question, but what are your thoughts on chicken breasts? Do we need to have a drink before we can go there? I’ve always been rather unimpressed with them. On scale from 1 to 10 (1 being my 9th grade history lecture and 10 being speedboats and fireworks), I’ve always settled somewhere around a 3. At their best, they taste sort of chickeny and worst they taste dry and bland.

So, imagine my horror. The pantry/fridge situation last night was worse than I hoped: some leftover Gruyere cheese, a jar of dried cranberries, a bunch of onions and two very disappointing chicken breasts. I paced around the kitchen a bit, (ignoring Dustin’s suggestion that “we should just go out for dinner already”) and I paced around some more. I wasn’t solving the oil spill crisis for heaven’s sakes but you would have thought I was.

Thankfully, I ended up resolving the issue (the chicken, not the oil spill). Have you had slow-melted onions? For me, the mere phrase perks my ears and raises one eyebrow. It entails a couple of onions, a stick of butter, a few pinches of sugar and a good glug of madeira wine. Slowly braised for about an hour on the stove top, onions turn into another vegetable from another planet: amber-colored, sweet and a-mazing.

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It happened innocently enough; I was happily watching a movie on my couch (savoring every lazy ounce of vacation). Meryl Streep was on the flat screen and she was wooing Steve Martin in her big, fancy kitchen and frankly that was enough for me and my pajama pants.

That’s when it happened: the only character I’ll truly remember from the movie made her appearance: madame monsieur. This little vixen is actually a hot ham and cheese sandwich, which Meryl Streep pulls out of the oven as if she’s done it every day for the last decade. As you would expect from any ravenous food blogger, I was on the edge of my seat, drooling, cursing the director who was clearly so hell-bent on ruining my perfectly lazy evening.

I was lost in that sandwich — my mouth watering, my brain quietly turning on me and making plans to spend the evening cooking again. I can be strong willed, I can be stubborn, but I’m no match for a ham and cheese sandwich with a fancy French name. If you, like most humans, enjoy puppies/sunsets/decadent food, you’ll surely agree.

So, off to the market with visions of prosciutto and Gruyere I went. Of course, now feeling fully possessed by the idea of a warm, rich sandwich, I could not find it in my heart to stop with the madame monsieur.

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Love makes us do crazy things. In high school, I convinced a boyfriend that my favorite musician was Bob Marley (after seeing his abundant reggae collection). Of course, I was really more of a boring folksy kind of girl, with an overflow of Joni Mitchell and James Taylor mix tapes packed in my Honda Civic. Alas, I learned the Bob Marley greatest hits just to impress him and by way of the ‘ole bait-n-switch, he married me ten years later.

Now I do other crazy things because of love, mainly in the kitchen and mostly relating to unseasonable ingredients; I sometimes like hot things in the summer and cold things in the winter and from there it gets really nuts with specially ordered dishware just so I can enjoy them. That’s how I roll with French onion soup: a feverishly good bistro staple that maybe isn’t very June-appropriate but is totally excusable after the first spoonful.

By way of luck, the day I made this it happened to rain and it also happened to be damp and sort of miserably windy outside. So, the deep broth layered with sherry and topped with an island of Gruyere cheese didn’t seem so out of place after all. I’m probably flattering myself but on this occasion, I looked around the table and saw several spoons clanging the bottom of the bowl and I also heard several unbecoming slurps. As we home cooks know, unbecoming slurps are the true measure of a great dish and so sharing this unseasonably delicious recipe ended up being an easy choice.

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When I’ve been away from the blog for a while (I won’t apologize for this since it happens to champion my list of blogging pet peeves) I tend to get restless. The same is true when I’ve been out of the kitchen for too long. It’s usually a sign, usually that I’m off my game, usually warning me that I’ve let the universe inadvertently tip on its side and that there will be strange side affects. Like last night when I actually watched the movie Twilight with nothing more than a pint of Häagen-Dazs in my lap. Something is wrong here and I’m taking note.

So I’m headed back into the kitchen, friends, and with Rick Bayless as my counterpart, there will be authentic, regional Mexican food abundant.

As it turns out, I have Mexican fever So, it seems, does everyone else. After all, tomatillos, key limes and dried chiles are everywhere these days — even in regular supermarkets. Is it fair to say we’ve all got a little Mexican fever?

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I’ve never consumed so much gumbo in my life. I’m eating gumbo four times a week at this point. I’m even dreaming about it. In the latest thriller, I’m wading through a giant river of gumbo with a walking stick. If you’re a therapist please call me immediately. If you love gumbo, if you love the idea of a dark (almost black) soupy, spicy, meaty, mind-blowing meal spooned over white rice, read on.

I’m not from South Carolina or Louisiana, I don’t talk with a southern drawl or pronounce every word with extra syllables. But I do love pretending I do, especially as I hang over my stove in my new apron (happy birthday to me) whisking a stockpot full of roux.

Of course, I’m not going to lie to you about my success with a black roux, which is what you need to create when you’re making gumbo. The first time I tried to take roux from white to black, I scorched it and my gumbo tasted like ashes from a campfire. There are experts who can make a roux in ten minutes over high heat but if you’re like me, here’s the recipe I’ll suggest:

40 minutes, low heat, a full glass of wine and a hungry dining companion.

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I thought briefly about titling this blog post, “Why I’ll Wear A One Piece Suit This Summer.” But it was too long and anyway, Mark Bittman made me do it. Lately I’ve been (half-heartedly) trying to eat better, eat smarter, eat less. You know the drill. (There’s something about culinary school that urges just a little more butter in the pan.) But then a sneaky little idea crept into my head by way of Mark Bittman’s cookbook, “Fish.”

“Shrimp are easier to fry at home than most other fish,” he wrote. “They cook quickly, don’t overcook too easily and, most important, don’t splatter.”

Fine Mark Bittman. Fine. My supermodel figure will wait.

And anyway, what’s more fun than sinking shrimp (double battered) in a pool of hot oil and watching them turn golden brown? I have half a mind to race back in the kitchen right now and do it all over again. To be quite honest, I have yet to find a shrimp I didn’t love and, of course, any cooking method that works well for twinkies and chicken will certainly work here. I just had no idea how easy it was. (For the record, I didn’t use any fancy equipment — just a pot and a pair of tongs.)

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Here I go again, getting all riled up about something that’s not in season, something that has nothing to do with light summer fare and everything to do with thin-cut pasta and a velvet-laced egg dressing. I’m not trying to be disobedient. But if you bear with me, you’ll understand. Pinky swear.

This isn’t just pasta carbonara with bacon and heavy cream, this is pasta carbonara with a miraculous combination of onions, carrots and celery, reduced in chicken stock and made silky with an egg yolk. If you’re sort of dubious about perverting a classic dish, I understand. I would have never guessed how brilliant chopped mirepoix could be or how light and delicate it could make this dish. But then it happened.

Just as the sun reached its highest point, I looked out in my backyard to see my husband, brother-in-law and dad hauling bags of mulch across the hill. Empty bottles of beer lined the deck but I could see they were going to need more than Amstel Light to finish the job. Frantically, I reached for the easiest, highest-carb recipe I could find. Enter this little number into my life. I’ll never be the same.

As in all simple recipes, ingredients are important in this one. I can tell you this with clarity after having made this recipe three times since. You want the best pasta and the best chicken stock you can get your hot, little hands on. It’s a great excuse to make your own stock but if you don’t have the time, use a good store bought variety with low sodium and consider adding a little spoonful of base, which deepens the flavor and is now available at a lot of grocery stores.

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A consommé is a highly regarded, clear, rich stock and is virtually rid of impurities. You and I have both enjoyed consommés in French restaurants — sometimes as a base for French onion soup, other times straightforward with added leeks and carrots. In a classic sense, a consommé is one of the greatest luxuries in French cuisine.

The thing is, to make it, you have to construct one of the most disgusting floating objects in culinary tradition.

The floating object I am referring to is a mixture of egg whites, ground meat, lemon juice and chopped vegetables. After adding these ingredients and stirring vigorously with a whisk, this hideous combination rises and foams, forming a “raft” on the top of the surface. The purpose of the proteins and acids in the raft is to attract impurities in the stock so that they can be later strained off.

Of course, to me in the moment, the inflated, puffed up thing just looked like a grotesque mess. Maybe I’m not supposed to admit this readily but the process sort of caused the back of my throat to close up. Standing further back from the pot than usual, I was having difficulty accepting the fact that the clearest, most beautiful soup in the world was made by erecting the swamp monster.

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This weekend I fell in love. And of all things to become head over heels for, I fell in love with something that I already really, really had a crush on. I’ve always savored shrimp dunked in a pool of spicy cocktail sauce or wrapped in bacon or fresh, squeezed with lime juice. I’ve known it to be decadent when crushed into a soup or mixed into a seafood paella. But now, dear readers, I know it to be irresistible, yes irresistible, when surrounded by a swirling ocean of coconut curry sauce.

To be quiet honest, Thai cooking has always intimidated me. The last thing I want to do is upset the fine people of Thailand by using the wrong ingredients or incorrect proportions. But this weekend, I felt I really owned it to my husband who had been digging big, muddy garden beds in our yard all day. (I’ll save my disdain for planting seeds and gardening and being forced to wait for the benefits of time later, but for now just know that I was really happy it wasn’t me out there with a shovel.)

When a boy who is not particularly handy has been sweating in the sun doing things he’d rather not be doing, it’s best to sustain him with food that makes him happy. In this case, it meant making something spicy and something soulful. Inspired by a recipe from my culinary school textbook and after having conducted further research, I began production for this coconut curry shrimp dish based on a classic green curry paste.

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Lately I’ve been into Olympic style preparations: complicated stews, long simmered vegetables and 3-day sauces. But don’t think I’m trying to woo you with this statement because the opposite is really true. I want to simplify my life. I want to hear the low chattering evening news coming from the living room while I throw some things in a pan. This is how I remember my childhood. This is what brings me comfort.

Not to mention, the fastest way to turn my husband around in his work shoes and chase him out of the kitchen is to tell him “we’ll be eating late” because I’ve got six things simmering on the range. The problem is this: I don’t like to sacrifice flavor even if it means using every pot and every pan in the cabinet. Even if it means that as a consequence of my behavior, I have to consent to doing the dishes too (because even I can see the line being blurred between normal behavior and a little coo-coo).

The truth is, I might have been tempted to turn the kitchen into a battle zone again if it had not been for this recipe, which came to me by way of fate. After having purchased a jar of spicy kimchi, I saw this recipe on the computer screen starring back at me. It might as well have begged me to create it; I actually had all of the ingredients tucked away in my refrigerator.

Of course, Fab Ferments did the hard part for me. Last week I talked about how they make the most delicious hot Korean sauerkraut in town and it’s true. The stuff is so briny and so spicy, I’d really eat it right out of the jar. In this Asian style stir-fry it’s even better. Oh I know it’s not much to look at, especially given my careless pictures, but its flavor is devilishly complicated and it actually reminds me of something you might order at Riverside Korean in Covington.

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I don’t know if I can contain my excitement for homemade brown stock but I’m going to try. Because I sort of think you might be sitting there wondering why it is you’re being asked to simmer bones in a pot of water all day. But picture me here, my hands and arms animated, my eyes big like saucers.

You should not have to live another day without brown stock in your refrigerator. Once you make a big pot of it, you can freeze it and take it out as you need it. Then you can use it to make more complicated sauces that will absolutely transform the way you cook at home.

Brown stock really is one of the most important flavor vehicles. Take Espagnole Sauce (often called Brown Sauce) for example. Espagnole is one of the five Mother Sauces in French cuisine and its base is a good brown stock. Once you’ve got it simmering and reducing in a pot, you can transform it into a demi-glace. And one of the most delicious, most lavish sauces in the world is a great demi-glace. I experienced this firsthand on Mother’s day, smothered over a piece of beef tenderloin.

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When you combine traditional Mexican tacoria style food with American barbecue, this is what happens: carne asada. This recipe comes straight from the four Vendley brothers who operate two Vendi Award winning taco trucks in New York City and Calexico restaurant on Union Street in Brooklyn.

Originally from a city that borders California and Mexico, the Vendley’s food reflects a merging of two cultures. I’ve read about how their signature dish, skirt steak tacos, have been their top seller for years but I haven’t had the pleasure of tasting them until this weekend. Behold, Food and Wine Magazine actually published the original recipe — just in time for Cinco de Mayo.

I’m not sure how extensive your spice cabinet is but if it’s still stuck somewhere around cinnamon, you need to high tail it over to Herbs and Spice and Everything Nice at Findlay Market. Okay, any grocery store would suffice — but talking up “The Colonel,” is half the fun. (If you haven’t met him yet, look for the guy with the easy smile and the extensive knowledge of star anise.)

I learned in culinary school that using measuring spoons is excusable the first time you make a recipe. After that, though, you should just forget it. When using spices now, I always make small piles in a clear bowl to help estimate proportions. If you do it this way, just remember not to upset the basic ratios.

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They say that things get better with time. I want to believe them, whoever “they” are. I want to believe them because I know wine gets better with time. I know the ache and pain of losing a loved one gets better with time. I’m certain that marriage does. I want to believe that this blog will too.

Six months ago, if you told me I’d soon have a food blog, I’d have cocked my head to the side and wondered what glue you were sniffing. But sometimes I get carried away. When I started immersing myself in the world of food, I wanted to have a record of that experience. And now, here I am — writing, taking photos and hoping that the blog gets even better over time.

If it’s anything like this recipe for peperonata, it will. (Segway!)

There’s a reason I call this one a 2-hour peperonata. It takes time and patience to wait for the sliced onions to release their sugars. This is the secret. There is no substitute for time. But wouldn’t it be nice if we could all be more like these onions when they’re ready: tan, sweet and totally irresistible?

I first cooked this dish the same day I bought Andrew Carmellini’s Urban Italian cookbook. It was a lovely recipe, one that relied on the classic Italian sensation of agrodolce. It’s accomplished by combining a light hit of sweet (sugar) and sour (vinegar) ingredients. Over many months, I simplified (and probably bastardized) his version. Still, it amazes me because it’s a testament to how how few ingredients are really necessary when proper techniques are used.

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