Christine will freely admit she’s a particular eater, and that there are foods that she simply likes and food she simply does not like. Largely, it comes down to a textural issue (potatoes, not rice, never mayonnaise, soft pasta). And while it will be a lifelong journey to learn to cook an increasing variety of foods around these not-often-hard-and-fast rules, she’s also never made a fuss about it, and has never managed to leave a restaurant hungry.

But this post isn’t about her. Jason, bless him, seems to have inherited a particular picky palate (let’s call a spade a spade in his case). Even better, they aren’t picky about the same things. He’s almost never a fan of meat in original (non-ground) form. Chicken is verboten. Pasta and cheese works well. The spicier the food, the better. And, like most late-teens/early adults, if it comes in a bag with a flashy logo on the side and a monster sized soda, even better.

Which is why I’ve frankly been over the moon that, for the last five or six meals I’ve cooked for him, he’s given eager one- and two-thumbs-up reviews. Especially since I’ve been working in things he doesn’t normally like.

Take last night’s dinner, for instance. Flat iron steaks, seasoned with a lemon/garlic/pepper seasoning, macaroni and cheese, and broccolini with garlic. The mac and cheese was a gift from a friend’s holiday party the night before – we should all have such great friends. Broccolini was my nod to keeping vegetables on the table at every meal – sautéed in a too-small pan with some olive oil and garlic, and when it became clear they wouldn’t cook through in the pan without burning the garlic, add a bit of water, cover, and steam ‘em. Season the steak liberally, sear on both sides, and if it’s not done (my thermometer died on me!) put the pan in the oven to finish the steaks.

(Click to embiggen.)
What pushed this over the line, and the long-winded way to getting to the point of this post, was the sauce for the steak. Umami (oo-MAH-mee), Japanese for “savory”, is the fifth taste that doesn’t get all the press (the others being sweet, salty, bitter, and sour). It’s been intuited in food for, well, forever but has only been identified for the last 100 years or so as a distinct taste.

In this case, I knew that steak by itself wasn’t going to do much to win the kid over. So, I decided to create a thick sauce with as many umami-packed things as I could come up with quickly. Mushrooms are packed with it, so into a pot go some sliced mushrooms along with sweated onions. That all cooked down as far as time would let it (just starting to really caramelize), then a healthy dose of Worcestershire sauce – a Western cousin to Oriental fish sauce, full of umami – to cook down. Finally, some heavy cream, to give it more of a sauce consistency and because, well, why not? I let that reduce way down, since this was going to be done on flour tortillas as a soft taco, so I didn’t want too wet of a sauce.

This is part of what pushed Jason over the edge. It didn’t hide the beef flavor at all, but having that addition made it much richer and more complex, so much so that he went back for seconds. (Also seconds on the mac and cheese. And extra broccolini, as a barter for the portion size of mac and cheese…)

So – the moral is, think about flavor not just as what will taste good together, but what helps bring out or balance the five tastes in your food.

For more on umami:
Wikipedia – Umami
NPR: Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter … and Umami
IFT.org – Unleashing the Power of Umami

Oh, and to explain the title of this post:

And, because it’s likely my favorite Muppet musical interlude ever:
(* – the music interludes were added to non-US airings to compensate for the advertising breaks here.)

And no, I haven’t seen the movie yet. No spoilers in the comments, please.

My holiday wish for all of you is to have this feeling.

I made pancakes this morning (well…) for breakfast (lunch). I’ve made pancakes from scratch many, many times before. I know the mix of wet and dry ingredients needed. I’ve got this.

So, when I go to ladle the pancakes onto the griddle, I notice they’re dry. Like, closer to soft wet dough than batter. “Nevermind, trudge onwards”, I tell myself, but I can’t shake the feeling.

I went and added in more buttermilk.

No measuring. No weighing. No idea other than, “this should be wetter”. Throw caution to the wind. And it worked!

I’ve improvised countless times in the kitchen. I’ve screwed up royally, and my batting average for fixing it is better than 50/50. But this pancake batter had me dancing a little jig in the kitchen. I’ve moved past recipes or ratios and get, really get, what the batter should be.

So, for all of you, I hope that your food turns out spectacularly this holiday season, and that you get that little twinge of wonder when you finally get a recipe.

(Pancakes – the first ones, I gave the better ones to the kid – with sausage, shallots, scallions, and reduced cream instead of boring old syrup.)

We hosted the Thanksgiving feast this year, which meant that I got to kick into high gear, plan the food, orchestrate what gets cooked when, and decide how to put my stamp on family traditions.

First off, and let’s get this out of the way – all holiday meals are DEEPLY steeped in family traditions. Food invokes so many memories that even though that green bean casserole is universally reviled, and you’d never think of cooking it any other time of the year, it simply MUST be on the table or else it isn’t Thanksgiving. The result is that regardless of culinary aspirations, sometimes you have to “take one for the team” and prepare food that may be emotionally filling if gastronomically devoid.

(For the record, both my parents and my in-laws are good cooks, and I have no issues with either family’s traditional holiday table. This is a challenge that has come up in every conversation I’ve had about the holidays, though, so it deserved some space.)

Enough philosophy. Let’s get to the food.

MENU:

1. Roasted butternut squash soup
2. Turkey with gravy
3. Mashed potatoes
4. Roasted sweet potatoes
5. Roasted cauliflower
6. Steamed broccoli
7. Glazed carrots
8. Bread stuffing
9. Cranberry sauce
10. Rolls / baguette
11. Apple Pie
12. Pumpkin Pie

Let’s meet the players. All photos are credit to Christine Tremoulet – thanks for holding up dinner and grabbing the camera so I could have photos for this post!

Roasted butternut squash soup
Straightforward with a bit of elegance. Take a couple of heavy butternut squash, and cut off a bit from the top and bottom. Stand up on the base, and halve vertically. Use a spoon to spoon out the inner webbing and seeds, rub down with salt, pepper, and a neutral oil (I keep canola on hand), and put cut-side down in a roasting pan. Put in a hot oven – 425F or so – until the flesh is soft to a fork and the edges have caramelized. Remove from oven, let cool, and scoop flesh away from the skin. Put the flesh in a pot, add about a pint of heavy cream (hey, it’s the holidays) and puree with a stick blender until smooth. If you want it thinner, keep adding cream or milk until it’s where you want it to be. Stir in some spices – cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, things like that – and taste for seasoning.

Turkey with gravy
This is easily one of the best turkeys I have ever eaten, if not THE best. It’s a little involved, but none of the steps are hard and the flavor is incredible.

One blessing is that we’ve never carved the turkey at the table, so none of our traditions involve a whole turkey as a showpiece. This is freeing as a cook. White meat and dark meat are fundamentally different, and need to cook to different times and temperatures. Many, many words have been written about how to manage this on a whole bird – cook it upside down for part of the time, ice the breast before cooking to chill it compared to the legs, all sorts of things to do with foil tents for the white meat to keep it from overcooking, and so on. If one of these works for you, by all means, have at it. I’ve moved on.

In hunting down info on cooking a turkey in parts, I came across this article that gave me the outline I wanted. I hadn’t thought of braising the legs, but it makes perfect sense; the long cooking time gives the added connective tissue in the dark meat time to melt out into the stock, and the breast only cooks for as long as it needs. Plus, you get an over-the-top gravy.

Here’s the outline:

• A day or so beforehand, break the turkey into parts – two leg/thighs, one big intact breast, and the back and wings. Make a stock from the back and wings. Rub the leg quarters and the breast with salt, pepper, thyme, garlic, and oil, and put in the fridge overnight.
• On the morning of, brown the legs in a roasting pan, brown some mirepoix, and braise the legs in the stock from the day before for about 3 hours. Strain and save the double stock for gravy.
• Put the breast on top of the leg quarters and roast at 375F for an hour and a half, until the breast is done (use a thermometer!)
• Let the meat rest before carving. Traditionally, slices are taken along the breast. This worked well, but if you can, take the breast off the bone and cut across it – perpendicular to the muscle fiber. This will give an even more tender breast. Shred the dark meat with two forks.
• While the meat rests, take some of that double stock, let it reduce (MORE! MORE FLAVOR!), and thicken with roux until it’s gravy.

The meat was all extremely juicy, tender, flavorful, nothing was dried out in the slightest, and it’s largely unfussy and unattended cooking.

Mashed Potatoes
This is one of my standby party dishes – I can put it together in under half an hour, and it always gets rave reviews.
Take yukon gold potatoes, peel them, and cut into chunks (maybe 1-1.5 in. in any direction at most – shortens the cooking time). Place in a pot of cold water, bring to a boil, and simmer until the potatoes are fork tender. Drain. Place the potatoes in the bowl of a mixer with the paddle attachment and beat on the lowest setting, adding a stick of butter, some cream, salt and pepper to taste. Finally, throw in a block of Boursin garlic/herb cheese. (Oops, the secret’s out.) It won’t taste cheesy in the potatoes, but it adds a lot of depth of flavor very quickly.

Roasted sweet potatoes
Sweet potatoes are a core part of my holiday tradition. However, having grown up in Kentucky (there’s a better family story on the origin, I think, that may have nothing to do with my home state) these were always a casserole of sweet potatoes, eggs, milk, sugar, and a LIBERAL lashing of bourbon. They’re delicious, but they’re perhaps on the strong side – not everybody’s taste. I can’t abide by marshmallows on sweet potatoes, they’re sweet enough as is. So, instead, I decided to roast them and let the natural sweetness shine.
Peel and cut the sweet potatoes into 1″ (ish) chunks. Toss with enough oil to coat, and some salt, and spread in a roasting tin on a single layer. Throw in the oven at 425F, shaking and stirring occasionally, until all sides are brown and caramelized. Take out of the oven, salt, and serve immediately.

Roasted cauliflower
Similar concept to the potatoes (minus the lore and the bourbon).
Remove the core and cut the cauliflower into chunks – remember, the cut sides are the ones that brown up and get sweet in the oven – and coat with oil, salt, herbs, and place in a single layer in a roasting pan. Roast, shaking occasionally, and serve.

Steamed broccoli
Break a head of broccoli into florets. Put in steamer basket over water. Steam until tender. ‘Nuff said.

Glazed carrots
Originally, these were to be roast with the cauliflower. However, they needed different cooking time and it was getting monotonous with the roast meat and vegetables. Plus, I frankly goofed and didn’t get them prepped in time, so I “called an audible” and went for the glace.
Cut carrots into thick sticks and place in a wide pan (bonus if it’s a single layer of carrots). Add just a bit of water – maybe 1/4 C – especially if the carrots are a little old or woody. Add a pinch of salt, a pinch of sugar, a few pats of butter, and cover. Bring to a boil, then cut the heat to low and let the carrots cook for 15-20 min, shaking occasionally. Remove the lid and let the water evaporate off, leaving the carrots in the glaze. Optional – finish with a spray of lemon juice and some fresh parsley or herbs. The goal is to get the carrots cooked tender without overcooking until they fall apart.

Bread stuffing
Gladly outsourced. This is my mother-in-law’s recipe, and despite my best efforts (and meticulous attention to instruction), it never comes out quite right. I hadn’t picked up what I needed for the stuffing, so I happily asked her if she would make and bring it. Delicious.

Cranberry sauce
Look, tart foods and I don’t normally get along. I’ve never been a fan of cranberry sauce, whether canned or fresh. This year, I ate it and enjoyed it.
Zest and juice two oranges. Add water to make 1C of liquid. Pour over 12 oz. of cranberries and 1C of sugar, stir, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer until the berries have all split and are getting soft. Stir in a bit of salt to taste. They are a bit tart, but the orange kick and sugar definitely help balance.

Rolls and baguette
Phoned it in, and went with King’s Hawaiian rolls (family favorite) and a Slow Dough baguette that I bought spur of the moment at the market the day before. I hadn’t worked into the schedule how I was going to get bread baked anyway, so I cheated a wee bit.

Apple Pie
Pie crust and I get along. I make a pretty good crust – won’t win awards, but it works out well. However, I’ve never actually made an apple pie, let alone a double crust pie. First time for everything, I suppose. On advice of counsel and friends, I used a mix of Granny Smith and Macintosh apples in the filling, with a bit of brown sugar, corn starch, salt, and lemon juice. Putting in the bottom layer was straightforward, filling the pie wasn’t a problem, and laying the top crust over went pretty well. Trying to figure out how to tuck the ends together (wife said over from top, recipe said under from bottom, quick scan showed an even split on the internet), I managed to create something that looked vaguely pie-like. It baked fairly well, although my adventures with making a foil collar for the crust led to Christine’s declaration that I would have failed as a 1950s housewife… Tasted delicious, which is really what matters.

Pumpkin Pie
No shame in canned pumpkin here – from what I understand, breaking down and cooking a raw pumpkin is a fair bit of work, and the canned product doesn’t suffer in quality or taste. Again, this was a stick-to-tradition item, so you can find the recipe proudly on the side of the Libby’s can (of pumpkin, not of pumpkin pie filling – there IS a difference).

And that, my friends, was our Thanksgiving feast.

The other trick was orchestrating all of this. Planning this meant not only setting up a menu, but working out shopping lists, prep lists, and most importantly the choreography of the oven – what dishes needed to be in or on top of the oven, at what temperature, and for how long. There was no way I was going to run into the issue of needing three things in the oven at different temps at the same time.

For grins, here (PDF) are the notes I took for getting this together. I know there are a few holes in the notes as the menu evolved – I think cranberry sauce made the item list but didn’t get onto the shopping list, for example, which almost caused a small crisis. But, for a big event like this, you HAVE to do some sort of preplanning to get your head straight about what to do. The net result is that Thursday’s cooking was easy, assembling final dishes, and only really got a bit hectic right at the end, trying to get everything onto serving plates and out of the kitchen.

In brief:

• Saturday and Sunday were spent obsessing over the menu, writing the notes, researching techniques and recipes, and so on.
• Monday was grocery shopping, breaking down the turkey, and maybe roasting the squash.
• Tuesday was making the turkey stock and par-roasting the vegetables. (Great technique. Basically, like par-boiling, you roast the vegetables until they have just started to color. Pull them out, cool, and they can hang out in the fridge until day of. Let them come to room temp, then throw in a hot oven to refresh and finish cooking – while the turkey gently rests.)
• Wednesday was cranberry sauce, making sure the turkey meat was rubbed down, and baking pies.
• Thursday – the main event. Cook the turkey, finish the sides, make the gravy, and serve.

And THAT, as they say, is that. I’d like to hear about your menus and preparations in the comments. If any of you try these out, by all means, let me know how it goes (or ask for tips first, since my shorthand above may not be complete)!

I was talking a few weeks ago with a friend of mine when the idea for this post hit me. Cooking for one (or two) can sometimes seem to be a hurdle to overcome in quantity – either one makes enough bolognese sauce to keep eating pasta dishes for a week, or a recipe scales down to almost impossibly small quantities to work with effectively. The compromise, of course, is leftovers.

Leftovers have been given a bad rap. Often, the same dish is reheated and served, resulting in monotonous gastronomic repetition that feels about as heavy as saying those three words out loud. Plus, reheating is often done on a single portion, plated – which means the sauce is too hot, the meat is too cold, the vegetables turn to mush, and somewhere a Native American is crying.

There is a secret to leftovers, though – repurposing them. While the original dish may have been a roast piece of meat, or a stew, or sauteed vegetables, there’s no reason this can’t be changed and made fresh with a small bit of work.

Roast chicken is one of my favorite versatile leftovers:

• Slice the breast meat thin, make a quick seasoned mayonnaise (1 egg, 1 clove of garlic, a bit of vinegar or lemon juice, a liberal amount of cajun seasoning, some neutral oil like canola, and a stick blender. 30 seconds or less.) and put it on two slices of bread for a sandwich.
• Cut chicken meat into small pieces – 1″ cubes or smaller, say – and throw in a bowl with some chopped carrots, celery, onion. Season liberally, and mix with just enough mayonnaise (see above) to bind together. Serve on bibb lettuce leaf cups.
• Cut the meat into bigger chunks – 1-2″ cubes, ish – and briefly saute, then add a flavored gastrique (French for “sweet and sour sauce”). Serve over rice (bonus for having leftover rice).
• Chop up the chicken meat fine, add some small or finely chopped vegetables (think green peas, carrots), season well, put it in an oven-safe bowl or casserole, moisten with a bit of cream or wine – or even water, cover with a layer of biscuit or pie dough, and bake until the crust is done. Chicken pot pie.
• Chunk up the meat, and simmer with chunked vegetables in chicken broth. Add noodles. What’s better than chicken noodle soup?

Realize that this is about using leftovers as pre-cooked ingredients, and think about when you add them to the pan so they don’t overcook in the process. Having that initial cooking of the main ingredient out of the way means that all that remains to be cooked are the secondary components (vegetables, aromatics, sauces) which usually take much less time.

Nearly any leftover vegetable can be turned into a cream soup. Make a thin-to-medium bechamel (1 Tbsp butter, 1 Tbsp flour, 3 C milk. Melt butter, add flour and stir to combine, whisk in milk, bring to a boil. Season. Recipe scales as you need it, keep about that butter/flour to milk ratio.), and simmer leftover vegetables in the sauce. Puree the whole mess in a blender, maybe strain for a smoother texture, and enjoy.

Practice what you preach: Tonight’s dinner plans is all about this principle. I have leftover cooked carrots, leftover beef and stout stew, and leftover roast cauliflower in the fridge. The cauliflower will go into a cream soup, with shredded cheddar cheese melted in at the end. Then, I’ll chop up the carrots and add to the stew. I’ll make a pie crust, line the cups of a muffin tin with the crust, fill the mini-pies with the stew filling, top with crust, and bake at 400F until the crust is brown and done.

Oh, and I have leftover lemon vinaigrette (pro tip – xanthan gum is your friend, dressing hasn’t broken a bit) and romaine lettuce in the fridge. Soup, salad, and a beef pie. Not bad for some leftovers, eh?

PS – You can even use leftover Popeye’s chicken nuggets to make a passable General Tso chicken at home (that’s on my list to try). Or even more elaborate reincarnations (those aren’t).

The other request I had was from a friend who is trying to eat healthier, eat more fresh and local foods, and learn to cook. Oh, and is a big fan of the Pioneer Woman. And Jamie Oliver. Kind of a mashup of the two.

I had to phone a friend on this one, since I was aware of the Pioneer Woman but not familiar. The description I got back was:

A summary of the Pioneer Woman? Hmm, where to start! She’s girly, down-to-earth, with a very, very full life.  She wears a lot of hats
(sometimes simultaneously) and has a deep enjoyment of the simple pleasures of life (a sleeping dog, silly, dirty kids, a truly
delicious meal, the pond at sunrise).  I think her hobbies really reflect that, too–capturing precious moments in time, and sharing
them with the world.  She cooks because she has to, really, but she hasn’t let that stop her from doing the exact same thing with cooking
- capturing her deep enjoyment of creating good food–not fancy food, but good home cooked meals that warm the soul–that other people will enjoy too. AND teaching them how to do it.  I identify with that a lot.  She’s the genuine article, too, not afraid to admit her flaws and with the enviable ability to laugh at them.

Immediately I think of Alice Waters. She started the whole fresh local foods movement at Chez Panisse in California. I got her book Simple Foods back at my birthday, but have held off from diving in yet. (There’s a stack of books I haven’t read yet waiting, and history shows that if I start too many cookbooks at once, I tend to stop reading all of them. So, one at a time.) The thing about Waters is that she’s really invested in the idea of local and organic. While I have almost exclusively found farmer’s market fare to be better tasting than the supermarkets, keeping a pantry stocked on local and organic alone isn’t always feasible. Go with what you’ve got, cook it yourself, and you’ll be better off than you were.

Same as last post, anything by Mark Bittman should be good to have on hand. There’s a reason he’s known as The Minimalist at the NY Times. Plus, he’s got a great podcast to watch – I’ve gotten more than a few inspirations from it in the past.

Finally, look at Appetite by Nigel Slater. Nigel is a food writer in the UK, and his writing style is very approachable and easy to read. (Side note – same goes for Michael Ruhlman.) The main reason I bought Appetite (almost ten years ago, wow!) is that his measurements are natural and imprecise. Think “a handful of chopped onion” rather than “3/4 cup of diced onion”. That takes the focus away from doing things just right, fretting over exact measurements, and more on what’s actually happening in the pan or pot.

Oh – and an honorable mention to pretty much anything by the Cook’s Illustrated folks. The magazine is excellent, and they have a number of collected “Best Of XYZ” volumes. This falls very much in the “go here and do this” camp – they’ve taken a fairly scientific approach to their recipes and can describe in pretty exact detail what to do and when. It’s not always the simplest of cooking (although sometimes it is), but it’s a good way to get comfortable in the kitchen.

Okay, that was fun, but it feels good to be back to a more modern look and feel with all the bells and whistles.

One question I get when people find out I’m obsessive about food, after “What do you like to cook?”, is “What’s your favorite cookbook?”. I always have trouble with this. There isn’t one magical book that just does everything for me. It’s my obsessive nature – I read cookbooks like novels.

However, I find I’m much more interested in helping people find the right cookbooks for them. This is a personal thing, since the right books for you will change as you grow, become more skilled, and find your flavors. It also opens up a much bigger conversation about tastes, influences, and goals, rather than me trying to sum up everything I believe about food in a sentence or two.

I’ve had two open questions to me about finding the “right” cookbook, which have been waiting for me to answer for an embarrassingly long time. I’d like to answer them here and encourage the readers to chime in with comments about what I got right or wrong, or with questions of their own.

Some general background, first: I tend to categorize cookbooks into three main categories. The first kind are the massive recipe tomes, big books that remind me of the Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary that we used growing up. These books tend to focus almost exclusively on recipes, giving enough background information to be functional but really serving a need to be a reference point. The second kind are technique books, ones that focus on how and why cooking works instead of what to cook. For convenience, I put the true cooking theory books in this category. Finally, there are the niche books. These may be everything you wanted to know about Italian, Occitane, or Southeast Uzbekistan cooking, or they might be the end-all-be-all book on cooking kumquats or sea anemone (side note – what’s the plural of anemone?), but they universally go in depth into a single facet of cooking. All of these types of cookbooks are valuable as reference or jumping-off points, one is not better than the other, but that system helps me give a foundation to making recommendations.

On with the show. First up are a newlywed couple – VERY cool people – who enjoy food and are wanting to learn more about cooking. Oh, and they like to eat Italian.

Starting out, everybody needs at least one recipe tome to be a catch-all reference, the one book likely to have what you need, no matter what. I grew up on Joy of Cooking, although now that I’ve browsed the book (and downloaded the iPhone app) I’m a fan of How To Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. Either will get you going towards being comfortable in the kitchen.

Ask about Italian food, and I immediately go to Marcella Hazan, the doyenne of Italian food in America. She is for Italian cooking what Julia Child was to French cooking in this country, and her books couldn’t be more useful or exciting. This will get you out of the rut of thinking of Italian food as spaghetti with meat sauce, lasagna, and pizza, and open your eyes to a whole different range of flavors and a different approach to cooking. In a nutshell, Italian cooking is about choosing great ingredients and really not doing anything to screw them up. Marcella makes this instantly accessible to read and follow along at home.

I haven’t recommended a technique cookbook yet, since these two are great books to get started with and get a good feel for being in the kitchen. I’m not sure what technique book I would recommend yet, as I want to see what’s interesting from these two at first.

The other question… Well, that’ll be for another blog post.

UPDATE: Comments are now working. They’re not displaying, but they are being submitted and stored. They’ll show up when the look and feel goes back to normal.

Happy birthday, coffee corner. It’s been ten years since I started blogging.

To celebrate, I thought I’d bring you all back to the original, Blogger-powered, wow-I-really-shouldn’t-be-a-designer layout. Compare to the web.archive.org copy – not bad for my first WordPress template, eh? Apparently, not using capital letters was all the rage. Or something.

Wow. A decade. Let’s see…

• In that time, we went from exchanging email addresses, to identifying ourselves by blog URL, to passing around Twitter names.
• In that time, I’m still with the company I hired into fresh from college.
• In that time, I went on a business trip to London that lasted almost two years. And met some really great friends, who I can blame thank for pushing me to meet Christine.
• Um, yeah. I’m now married, with a stepson who graduated high school, a mortgage, four cats, and I switched – partway – from PC to Mac.
• Ernie was the first person I can say I met through the internet. We’re still good friends today. There are innumerable others who all deserve a mention, but I won’t be able to do justice to it, only to say that I’m amazingly lucky to have so many people all over the world I can claim as friend.
• Gaming has given way to cooking.
• I started this blog as a group blog, before group blogging was in vogue. Chris is now a doctor in New England, while Stephen does amazing research foundation work in the Pacific Northwest. Both are married to amazing women, and have started insanely cute families. Amy is off doing, I believe, theater work in New York; I need to find out…

I can’t get away from this post without talking about food. I’ve been in early morning and long day workshops all week, and Christine hosted workshops at the studio, so I’m a bit off my game lately in the kitchen. For Father’s day, I got a new end-grain butcher block from Ikea (Exklusivt, for anybody who can speak Swedish) that you see in the picture above. Haven’t even had a chance to break it in properly yet. Putting the pictures together for this post, though, reminded me about everything that I’ve got lined up to post about, so it’s time to get cracking.

What I can tell you about is the salt-crusted eye of round roast I cooked last weekend. Our brains are very proficient pattern matching engines, so while salt-crusted roasts have been in my mental bookmarks to try for some time, I saw mention of it a couple of weeks ago and suddenly it showed up everywhere. The idea is simple – get a lot of salt a little wet, so it’s almost like a snowball to pack, and use it to encase a (herb-seasoned) beef roast. Really, a lot. I used three pounds of kosher salt for a two-and-a-bit pound roast, and that wasn’t quite enough. Since you’re not leaving it to sit for hours before going in the oven, the salt doesn’t make the meat overly salty; instead, as it cooks and dries it forms a hard crust that seals in the roast, its juices, and any steam that would otherwise escape. The result is easily the juciest and most tender roast I’ve ever cooked. Add some roast or sautéed potatoes on the side and a vegetable and you’ve got a great meal.

Traditionally, this method would be used on fish or other more delicate meats to prevent them from drying out and getting tough in the oven. Pork loin would be good for this as well. I don’t know about fatty roasts, like a pork shoulder, as I would expect to want to render out some of the fat.

I’ll close this post with the words that started it all:

Welcome to the coffee corner. my hope is that my friends and i can share coffee experiences, tips, tricks, et cetera with the rest of the world and hear your coffee stories in return.
a bit about me: i’m a software/web developer currently in houston, tx. originally from lexington, ky, i spent most of my high school years in coffee shops, particularly coffee times and common grounds. i came down to houston for college, and didn’t have much time to spend in coffee shops, but was rather dismayed by a lack of good ones that i could find. i’ve settled on diedrich’s as my home down here, but there’s a starbuck’s near where i work that’s good for an afternoon fix.
well, enough about me. on with the show.

Thanks for being a part of this adventure. Let’s see what another ten years brings!

Welcome to all the Houston Press blog readers who found this on Eating Our Words. A big thanks to Katharine for reaching out to me, and for taking the time to edit the near-stream-of-consciousness that she got back in return.

There’s plenty of things I have backed up to write about here, but life really has gotten in the way lately. I’ve begun working my way through the French Culinary Institutes Fundamental Techniques of Classic Cuisine, which will get written up along the way here. I’m doing more spur-of-the-moment weeknight cooking, all part of the weight loss plan, which means good food and also getting out of the habit of writing down recipes and notes after the fact. (Oops.) Fortunately, I photograph most of what I cook, so I can reconstruct what I did from the pictures.

I also got challenged when friends of ours were married (at the beginning of May – has it been that long? – ouch) to bring back more of the recipes. I can do that.

To start off, since this is a short post, let’s talk about tomato sauce. This is dead simple, comes together quickly, and really for me beats the stuff in a jar. Plus, it’s infinitely variable – cook it longer to reduce and thicken for pizza, play around with herbs and spices to flavor, and so on.
You’ll need:
* Four to six ripe still-on-the-vine tomatoes. (I get mine at Wal-Mart.)
* An onion
* Olive oil, don’t be shy
* A clove or two of garlic

In a medium saucepan, heat the oil and add the onion and sweat (cover the pot and cook until translucent). Add minced garlic and cook another couple of minutes to take off some of the raw garlic edge.
Meanwhile, chop the tomatoes – if you like it chunky, chop coarsely, if you like it with less pieces, then cut it finer. Add the tomatoes to the pot and cook covered to soften, then uncover to reduce until desired consistency. Maybe 15-20 minutes of cooking in total.

Toss it with pasta, spread on pizza dough, dip something in it, puree it to make soup – sky’s the limit.

To put a little more effort in and raise it up, try seeding the tomatoes. Cut in half along the equator and gently squeeze to remove the water and seeds, leaving only the tomato pulp or flesh. And for bonus points, peel the tomato – cut out the core, cut an x in the base, and a quick blanch in boiling water (30 seconds quick) should loosen the skin enough to peel. The sauce is that much lighter for it.

I like dining out. I love cooking. But, I’m at my best and happiest when I’m feeding people. That’s the best part, being able to share that meal with others. (Who wants to come over for dinner?)

Cooking for the family is all about the long game. It’s no surprise to me that my family and I have fairly different tastes and preferences, something Christine and I discussed after a bowl of decent-but-unremarkable beef burgundy the other day. Shame on me for serving a stew during the early hot days of summer, perhaps, but we have very different ideas of what comfort food lies. It shouldn’t come as a surprise if you’ve read before that I lean towards broadly French flavors and dishes. Some of that comes from my interest in the technique – more on that later – and some of that, I can’t trace. Growing up, while there was sometimes the Louisiana or occasionally outright French dinner at home, I wouldn’t say that either of my parents cooked particularly French food. (They’ll correct me in the comments if I got that wrong.) Whatever the reason, it’s what I lean towards.

Christine is much more in the Italian camp, but to get right to the heart of it, her favorite foods and flavors are classic Midwest American. Grilled steak, baked potato, creamed corn, and so on. Good food, but not what I would ever choose – it’s often bland and uninspiring to me. Neither of us is right or wrong, it’s just two different tastes and palates.

While some of what I cook isn’t to her taste for texture issues (both she and Jason are picky about how food feels) or for being more esoteric (I’ll tweet about food in French when I know it’s something she wouldn’t want to hear about), much of it comes down to flavors. My base herb is thyme, hers is oregano. I use, or would use, a lot of wine in cooking. And so on.

Back to the point about the long game, then. Eating in a restaurant means the chef has one shot to get you a great dish. If you don’t like it, you don’t go back. Cooking for the family, being committed to it, means catering more to their tastes over time. I’m thankful that my family has gamely played along when I go mad scientist in the kitchen, and their … candid … feedback is appreciated. (Seriously. Plus, I figure it’s karmic payback for the times we gave Mom grief about dinner growing up.) But, I’m not exactly winning hearts and minds, either.

Studying cooking means expanding the vocabulary of ingredients and techniques avavilable. Doing a program like Weight Watchers (down 25 pounds this year to date, thank you very much!) has meant changing that vocabulary, replacing some habits with newer ones. This is no different – I need to amend my vocabulary to include more things that my family likes, to balance everything I would choose to prepare otherwise. It sounds so simple to say, once I put it down in writing, but it’s one of those realizations I just had to come to in my own sweet time.

Oh, and I mentioned technique. For my birthday, I picked up a copy of The Fundamentals Of Classic French Cuisine, the book form of the first part of the French Culinary Institute’s course work. I have every intention to cook my way through the book – it’s broken into twenty six units – and blog the hell out of it along the way. I may have even convinced Christine that she needs to do some of the food photography for me. So, throw out everything I said above – I may be going hardcore French soon.

I just have to remember to grill a steak and bake a potato too.

Roasted meats – the essential comfort food. Normally, when “pot roast” comes up, images are conjured of lightly seasoned beef, with some root vegetables, somewhere between cooked deliciously and dry-and-leathery. It’s such a simple food, it’s often overlooked as being too basic, too familiar, too trite to remain part of the home cook’s zeitgeist. (How many food blogs do you see writing about roasted meats?)

However, likely since humans first put beasts on a spit over fire, we’ve had roast meats. While these can be aggressively flavorful, today’s roast is lighter, more delicate, and much more mellow. The French call it rôti de porc au lait – roast pork in milk. Take a pork loin roast – a lighter, mild cut – sear it on all sides, then “roast” (braise, really) in a milk sauce with leeks, carrots, onion, celery, and a bit of garlic and herbs. None of those are really stand-out, punch-you-in-the-gut assertive flavors; the onions and garlic develop a sweetness from long cooking rather than their sharpness in, say, a sauté.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• The ingredients from the book
• Plus whatever I think I adapted.

How it works: Sear the pork roast on all sides, in a bit of oil, over high heat. Set aside on a plate. Either discard and replace the remaining oil or not, as needed, and throw in the vegetables to siften. Cook them until soft/translucent, then add flour. Slowly pour over hot milk, stirring constantly to avoid lumps, and bring to a boil. Return the pork to the pot, cover, and cook over very low heat (turning occasionally to keep the meat moist and stirring to prevent scorching) until the pork is done. Set aside the pork to rest, strain the sauce, and serve.

Interlude: While the pork cooked, I ducked into the guest bathroom to show the cook “in action”. I stepped out to turn the meat, forgot to close the door, and came back to find this (the other two were in the windowsill).

Here, I’ve got sides of roasted sweet potatoes and sautéed zucchini, as well as a green pea purée. Comfort foods all around, as spring starts to make its way through the grey of winter.

Briefly: Peel the sweet potato, cut into thick wheels, lightly coat with oil and throw into a 425F oven for about 20 minutes, turning halfway through, or until nicely browned on both sides. Peel and cut the zucchini into sticks, heat a skillet over high heat, add a bit of oil and when hot sauté the zucchini until lightly browned and done. Remove to a paper towel, add a pinch of salt to taste. Heat a can (drained, rinsed) of peas, or a cup of frozen peas, in boiling water until warm. Drain, and using a stick blender, purée with a little onion, a little butter, salt, pepper, and maybe some herbs as you like.