Kristin Janz

Category: Cooking

  • Why I probably won’t join a vegetable CSA next year

    Although the title might suggest the opposite, I love the CSA I’m in.  CSA stands for community-supported agriculture; you pay the farm a set amount before the start of the harvest season, and each week you get vegetables.  You don’t get to pick which vegetables you receive.  I like all vegetables, so this is not a problem for me.  (My husband Donald, however, has been introduced to all sorts of new vegetables he hadn’t even known he disliked.)  And the vegetables are very good.  I won’t even buy fresh green beans except at Russo’s and occasionally Whole Foods, and even there I have to pick through the bin bean by bean to find ones that haven’t started to rot.  The green beans from my CSA share, on the other hand, are the freshest beans I’ve seen anywhere since my childhood, when we used to grow them ourselves.  Same for the beets, and Swiss chard, and zucchini, and lettuce, and corn, and pretty much everything else.  I like to support local businesses when I can (read:  when it’s not too inconvenient for me), and I don’t like how centralized all our agricultural production is becoming (it makes sense for some crops, like grain, and less for perishable vegetables), and I especially don’t like the crappy quality of the vegetables that I see at most supermarkets.  I feel that the value of what I’ve gotten each week is competitive with supermarket prices, and as an added bonus, the farm whose CSA I joined (Wilson Farm) has a store and they offer a 10% discount to CSA members on their pick-up day, on anything else in the store.

    So what’s the problem?

    Mainly, that Donald and I are having a hard time eating so many vegetables.  Here’s what I received last week.  This is a “half-share”, the smallest size offered, suggested as an appropriate amount for 2-3 people.

    1 head red leaf lettuce
    1 head romaine lettuce
    2 large cucumbers
    1 large bunch of scallions
    1 bunch of salad onions (3 onions)
    2 zucchini
    3 yellow summer squash
    1 enormous bunch of basil
    6 ears of corn
    1 pound wax beans
    1 pound Romano beans
    1 eggplant

    Is that it? I think that’s it. Is it just me, or is this a lot for 2 non-vegetarian adults who don’t eat every meal at home to get through in a single week? Some weeks we get 3 heads of lettuce. We’re eating salad at every meal except breakfast (in addition to another vegetable side dish and sometimes a vegetable main dish), and we still end up with lettuce left over when it’s time for the next CSA pick-up.

    I think part of the problem is me (I do almost all of the cooking in our household, because I like cooking and Donald doesn’t). I like to cook from cookbooks. I like to find an interesting recipe, then go out and buy the ingredients, and cook it. I’m not a spontaneous cook. I can’t say, well, I have beans and eggplant and zucchini, I’ll make a vegetable stew with them. Well, I guess I can say that. But I’d rather find a recipe for a bean/eggplant/zucchini stew, because experience has taught me that a reliable recipe is probably better than whatever I’m going to make up off the top of my head (I’m a pretty boring recipe-inventor, and also always add too much oil if I don’t have a recipe to keep me in check). Wilson Farm has recipe print-outs that you can pick up, and they included a free cookbook with the first CSA share pick-up, but a lot of the recipes they make available call for extra ingredients (including additional vegetables!) that weren’t actually in my share and that I probably don’t have at home, so they’re not that useful (at least not to me).

    (Fortunately, Wilson Farm posts the week’s share contents on their website the day before you pick it up. It’s subject to change at the last minute, but it’s usually roughly accurate, and immensely helpful in menu planning, so that I don’t have to pick up my share on Tuesday and then go to another grocery store on Wednesday once I’ve seen what I’m getting, found some recipes, and figured out which additional ingredients I need.)

    I have been making pesto with the massive amounts of basil we’re getting, and putting it in the freezer. But a CSA share isn’t really great for “putting up” food. For one thing, there’s all that lettuce. For another, although you get too much food each week, you don’t actually get enough for it to be practical to freeze, can or pickle it. I’m just not going to freeze two pounds of beans, or pickle 3 beets.

    Oddly, if we were getting fewer vegetables for the price we paid, I wouldn’t feel like we were getting a very good deal. I wonder if it would make sense for farms to start offering quarter-shares. The most common complaint I hear from friends in CSAs is that they can’t manage to eat so many vegetables, so I think there would be a demand for it (assuming it was half the price of a half-share, and it wasn’t all lettuce). Or, if Donald and I could find another couple to split our weekly take with, or maybe even 1 other person … we are actually getting through everything in our share each week, except for the lettuce, but just barely.

    So, I might just not be the best person for a vegetable CSA (the meat CSA is easier, because everything is frozen when you pick it up, and then you have plenty of time to figure out over the next several days what you’re going to do with it all). It’s been a really good experience, and has encouraged (nay, forced!) me to cook more seasonally. I still look to cookbooks for inspiration, but at least now I’m saying, “Okay, I need a recipe with beets or zucchini; butternut squash soup can wait until fall.” I’m sure I can continue to do this sort of thing even if I don’t also have beans, eggplant, cucumbers and basil to deal with.

    A friend of mine said that she had tried a CSA in the past, but been similarly defeated. She started thinking how great it would be if she could just go each week and buy only the amount of vegetables that she actually needed … and then realized that she had just invented the grocery store.

    But what am I saying: “It’s been a really good experience”? Ha! It’s Week 8 of 20. We’re not even halfway there.

  • Coffee Table Cookbook

    I recently bought this cookbook. It’s a gorgeous hardcover with a colorful cover, and many beautiful pictures of delicious-looking food inside. It was an impulse purchase. I’d been shopping for a dress for my wedding (yes, yes, the store at which I purchased the cookbook also sold dresses!), and the book was just so lovely, and the recipes sounded so good (at least to read about) that I just couldn’t resist.

    The gimmick for this one is that it’s divided into 4 chapters, one for each season, and the recipes in each chapter feature foods that are at their peak in that season (at least, in the northeastern US; the author is based in New York City). Within each chapter, there’s a 2-page spread highlighting what’s best this time of year, then a section for seasonal cocktails, one for appetizers, one for main courses, one for desserts, and one for breakfast foods (also a couple of sample menus at the end of each chapter).

    First off, I love that it includes seasonal cocktails, and most of them sound very tasty. Though the only one I’ve made so far, the rhubarb mule (a Moscow mule with the addition of sweetened rhubarb puree), was WAY sweeter than it needed to be. I made it a second time with extra lime juice, and it was still too sweet. There’s a preponderance of vodka cocktails, as well, which suggests that the recipes are tailored to the palates of those who like the idea of fancy drinks, but don’t actually enjoy the taste of alcohol. But I should try more of his recipes before I judge. Also, the author seems to feel the need to give a shout-out to every brand of premium vodka currently on the market. There are three vodka cocktails in the Spring chapter, and each one suggests a different brand of top-shelf vodka. I mean, really? Do you even need top-shelf vodka when you’re drowning out whatever flavor there is with fruit juice and sugar? Maybe I’m just not a vodka connoisseur, but I made the rhubarb mule with Level vodka one time, and Skyy another, and really couldn’t tell the difference.

    The only other recipes I’ve tried so far are “Mammy Louisette’s Ginger-Rhubarb Tart” and “Vermont Double Cream Ice Cream” (vanilla ice-cream with extra egg yolks and creme fraiche). The ice-cream is quite delicious. It seems pretty hard, but this is the first time I’ve made ice-cream at the new apartment, so I don’t know whether that’s the recipe or our freezer. I wasn’t quite as happy with the tart, but I think that might have been my fault. It had a puff pastry crust, and the center never baked through, even though the edges would have scorched had I left it in for longer. I think I wasn’t as careful as I should have been, though, scooping the sweetened and flavored rhubarb into the crust, and I added too much liquid. I also think the crust wasn’t cold enough when it went into the oven. That might be partly the fault of the recipe, though. It says to put the puff pastry in the tart pan, then chill for 30 minutes, then add the fruit, fold over the edges, and bake. My timing was a little off, because Donald needed the oven for French fries at the 30 minute mark. However, there’s no way, after 30 minutes in the freezer, that those rock solid pastry edges are going to fold over. Even after putting it in the fridge for a bit, they were still quite hard. I had to bring it out to room temperature for a while to soften them up enough. However, it might have been a good idea to stick it back in the freezer for a few minutes after I’d added the rhubarb and folded the edges over, because that might have kept the juices from soaking through the center of the tart as much.

    I do want to make other recipes in this book. However, it does seem to me that most of them are fancy dinner party food, and not really all that useful for helping me figure out what to do with all my CSA vegetables. Many of the recipes would just take far too long (and this is saying a lot, if you know how much time I typically spend cooking already). I mean, I just don’t have time to make “Aromatic Stuffed Suckling Pig” on a Wednesday night after work.

    Which brings me to another issue with this book. I’m an adventurous cook and grocery shopper, and I live in a major urban center in the United States. And a good number of these recipes call for ingredients that I don’t know how to get. Fresh porcini mushrooms? I’ve never seen fresh porcini mushrooms at a store in Boston. Ditto veal sweetbreads. Not to mention suckling pig. Maybe I could order suckling pig from a butcher. But, seasonal or no, these are just not common ingredients. Huckleberries? I don’t think I’ve ever seen fresh huckleberries for sale even at Russo’s. I think you have to live in New York City to make a lot of these recipes.

    I probably sound pretty negative about this cookbook, but I should also confess that I spend a lot of time reading it, and trying to convince myself that the recipes wouldn’t be that much work to prepare. They just sound that delicious! Maybe for a dinner party sometime….

    The best part, though, is Rachael Ray’s blurb on the back cover, which refers to the recipes as “simple preparations and easy ideas.” Which might tell you all you need to know about Rachael Ray’s so-called 30 Minute Meals.

  • When in Rome … or not

    Donald and I are both working on short stories and novels in imaginary fantasy settings inspired by ancient Rome. This is not a case of being influenced by someone you spend a lot of time with. We’ve known each other less than 2 years, and we both started developing these imaginary worlds when we were in highschool. It was a little spooky when we realized how similar some of the stuff we’d come up with was. Okay, maybe not; we have read a lot of the same books, after all. In any event, we figured we’d better start spending more time together, keep an eye on the competition. Before we knew it, we were dating.

    Anyway. Today Donald and I thought it would be fun to prepare an “authentic” ancient Roman dinner. I have several books on Roman cooking, most making liberal use of Apicius (the most famous ancient Roman cookbook author). I’ve found the most accessible and interesting to be Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa’s A Taste of Ancient Rome (translated by Anna Herklotz; original title was A cena da Lucullo). The author is a foodie with an archaeology background, and her goal was to take recipes from Apicius, Cato and other sources and provide a version that a modern cook could follow. The ancient sources tend not to provide a lot of detail. They’ll give the ingredients (most of them), and some vague clues as to preparation. America’s Test Kitchen it ain’t! Giacosa’s versions of the recipes should, theoretically, be doable in a modern kitchen.

    They are, sort of. One thing to keep in mind is that the author is European, and originally wrote this in 1986. She substitutes ingredients when giving her versions of the ancient recipes, based on what a modern cook is likely to be able to find. However, what a European cook could find in 1986 is not necessarily the same as what an American cook can find in 2010 (and there’s also a huge difference between what I can get in Boston, and what someone in the midwest would be able to get their hands on). She’ll call for spices like rue and lovage (which I’ve never seen for sale except maybe in an occasional farmers market), and then suggest you use garlic instead of silphium, when even the Romans themselves (after silphium went extinct) started using asafetida. Which is to say: the recipes are usable, but if you’re an experienced cook you can probably get closer to the original flavors by coming up with your own amalgam of her recipe and the English translation of the Apicius (and your own knowledge of cooking, of course).

    Donald and I prepared and enjoyed a 3-course dinner: to start, we had assorted olives, focaccia with olive oil and rosemary (purchased, not homemade; my focaccia recipe called for potatoes, and obviously that’s not authentic), and cheese: a soft, ripe goat’s milk cheese (Brunet, from Italy); and a Pecorino Romano (Italian sheep’s milk cheese). Apparently, cows were mostly beasts of burden, and most of the cheese consumed by the Romans was made from sheep and goats. For our main course, we had pork and apple stew. Then, for dessert, we made something called globi, which I’ll describe more later.

    Even the modern version of the pork and apple stew recipe called for garum and defrutum. For garum, the ubiquitous Roman fish sauce, I was going to substitute Vietnamese fish sauce. But when we started cooking, I realized I was almost out. So I ended up using anchovy paste diluted with a bit of Worcestershire Sauce. While not exactly authentic, I think it’s reasonable to imagine that Worcestershire Sauce was inspired by garum, since anchovies are a major component of both, and Britain was under Roman occupation for a while. Defrutum is reduced grape must, a product of winemaking. The closest we could get for this was grape juice concentrate from a winemaking store. (You don’t want concentrated Welch’s, because that’s from an entirely different sort of grape, the Concord grape, native to eastern North America. To Concord, Massachusetts, in fact.)

    The dessert globi were made from equal parts ricotta cheese and flour mixed together, formed into balls, and deep-fried in olive oil. We were actually supposed to use lard, but forgot to buy any. Then you drench them with honey and sprinkle with poppy seeds. In appearance, the finished dish actually reminded me of an Indian dessert, gulab jamun. This is made from concentrated milk mixed with flour and deep-fried in ghee, or clarified butter; the finished fried balls are then (in India) soaked in rosewater-flavored sugar syrup. I didn’t think our globi tasted much like gulab jamun, though. In fact, I think I liked them better. We used whole wheat flour for our globi (though the Romans did have white), so the balls were quite dense, and you couldn’t really taste or detect the cheese. But then, soaked in honey, they basically ended up tasting like chunks of hearty bread drenched with honey.

    The pork stew was also very tasty. It called for “Matian apples” (at least Apicius calls for them), but we used Braeburn instead (it was the best we could do at Whole Foods; it’s possible that we should have used Granny Smiths though, because the Braeburns completely fell apart in the stew). The meat was a mixture of cubed pork butt and ground pork meatballs flavored with fresh cilantro and garum; the stew also had onions (it called for leeks, but amazingly we couldn’t find any that didn’t suck), “defrutum”, more “garum”, red wine vinegar, honey, cumin, pepper, more cilantro, and fresh mint. Oh, and some chicken stock to keep it from drying out and burning. The grape juice concentrate, which is very dark red, ends up making the stew very dark and quite sweet, but as long as you don’t mind sweet main courses (which I don’t!), it’s good.

    We decided that reclining at the table would be too much work, and Donald doesn’t like wine. (I could have gotten some, but he probably would have told me I needed to mix it with water in order to be authentic.) We did eschew the use of forks, which were not used as eating utensils until the 1500s.

    It was a good dinner, and a lot of fun to prepare. We might do it again sometime. We still have 375 mL of wine grape juice concentrate, after all.

  • What I’ve been saying all along

    Brought to my attention by Arun, an article in Slate.com about how cookbook writers are incapable of estimating how long it will take to cook a recipe.

  • Fixing the recipe as you go

    If you do a lot of cooking, you start to notice that some cookbooks are better than others. Not just because the food you make from the recipes tastes better. Some cookbooks are also better than others at giving instructions that you can (and should) follow as written for the results. Other cookbooks … not so good.

    My target once again is one of Rachael Ray’s recipes, from her Just in Time! cookbook. (It occurs to me that I have been, probably incorrectly, referring to this title in earlier posts without the cutesy exclamation point. My bad!) Rachael Ray’s recipes are actually better than average, with respect to being able to follow the recipe written in the book. Not nearly as good as America’s Test Kitchen … but then, who is? They’re hardcore. They test every possible permutation of the recipe, and then have all the variations submitted to tasters in a blind tasting. Not everyone can be America’s Test Kitchen.

    The Rachael Ray meal in question is referred to as “Dinner at the Ivy.” This vague and unhelpful name refers to some restaurant in LA that she likes to eat at, and the “Dinner” in the cookbook is her interpretation of their Tomato Salad Stuffed Artichokes and Mushroom Tagliatelle.

    First off, the cookbook said it would take 60 minutes to prepare, and it took me 2 hours. But that’s fine; by now, I double the time estimate given in any Rachael Ray cookbook. The mushroom pasta was a bit too much food for 4 servings, but not as far off as many of her recipes, so that’s fine. The issues were with the preparation.

    I didn’t really like the artichoke cooking instructions she gave: put them in boiling water and put a clean dish towel on top to keep them submerged. Rachael Ray likes to dirty a lot of dish towels in her recipes (she also recommends using them to wring the water out of thawed frozen spinach, which you can do perfectly well with bare hands); but as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’m not looking to have to wash any more dish towels than I absolutely have to. Also, if you submerge artichokes in water to cook them, they’re going to get pretty water-logged. I followed the ATK method, steaming the artichokes by setting them on thick onion slices so they’re just above the surface of the boiling water. Only I didn’t have any big onions (or a steamer rack, the other recommended option), so I used my dessert custard cups instead (empty, of course). This works pretty well, only you have to make sure to have the open part facing up instead of down, or they’ll jump around once the water starts boiling, and the artichokes will fall off into the water (I learned this the last time I made artichokes and didn’t have big onions lying around).

    The tomato salad used to fill the artichokes involved cherry tomatoes. The recipe didn’t say anything about cutting the cherry tomatoes in half, but I thought that was ridiculous. Of course you have to cut the cherry tomatoes in half, if you’re putting them in a salad. Otherwise the flavors won’t meld properly. Also, you won’t be fitting many tomatoes into the hollowed-out artichoke if you don’t cut them in half first. Spheres aren’t going to pack together as tightly as half-spheres.

    The mushroom tagliatelle recipe went more or less according to recipe. Except that when you cook the mushrooms, it says to use “medium to medium-high” heat. Well, even if you don’t have the entire skillet filled with mushrooms (and I did), they’re not going to brown on medium heat. At least not in 7-8 minutes. They’ll slowly release liquid, and you’ll have palid, unbrowned mushrooms swimming in mushroom broth for quite some time. Which is fine if that’s what you want, but it probably isn’t. With few exceptions, anything that can be browned before making a sauce or a soup should be (onions and garlic are usually exceptions, depending on the recipe). Browning food causes a chemical reaction to occur between the fat or oil in the pan, and the sugars in the food, and the product of that reaction provide depth and richness of flavor.

    In any case, if you have a full pan of mushrooms and want to brown them, you pretty much have to turn the heat up all the way, or almost all the way (depends on your stove, of course). It still takes longer than the 7-8 minutes Rachael Ray thinks it takes at medium heat (unless she has some super hot stove); more like 15 minutes. And of course you have to keep an eye on them. Burning food causes a different chemical reaction to occur: the organic molecules in the food being oxidized to elemental carbon. This, of course, contributes a flavor not usually thought of as deep and rich.

    Only three changes to the recipe isn’t so bad, I guess. And it’s not as if the meal wouldn’t have tasted good, had I followed the recipe to the letter. But I don’t think it would have been as good, and it would have been far more frustrating to prepare; even more frustrating than being very hungry after an hour and a half in the kitchen, and still not ready to eat.

    I did make a fourth change, but I’m not 100% sure I should have. The recipe said to transfer the cooked pasta to the sauce with tongs. It was unclear whether you were supposed to drain it first. I assumed not. That seemed unwise, because it was fresh pasta, and that overcooks really easily if you leave it in the water just a hair too long. Also, it seemed that lifting it right out of the water and into the sauce would carry a lot of water along with the pasta (both into the sauce and onto the stove between the pot of pasta and the pan of sauce. And, I’m sorry, but what humongous skillet is Rachael Ray talking about here, that can accomodate sauce and 18 oz. of cooked pasta! I drained the pasta, then put it back in the empty pot and added the sauce to that. But, you know, it’s really hard to mix the mushrooms in that way, which makes me wonder if I really should have added the pasta to the sauce, not the other way around. Hmm. Maybe if I left the pasta in the colander, then transferred the sauce to the big pasta cooking pot, then added the pasta to the sauce…. Next time.

    The recipe called for 1 cup of dry white wine, and I followed my friend Bob’s advice: never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink. In fact, if you use a particular wine in a recipe, a glass of that wine will often taste particularly nice with the finished meal. I used a Toscana from Antinori (an Italian wine). And it was very nice! (It’s not a super-expensive wine, either; I found it for $13 at a local liquor store.) So was the food itself.

  • Environmentalism through laziness

    I really hate drying dishes. We have a dishwasher, which solves a lot of that problem. But some things aren’t diswasher-safe, and some other things–well, there’s just no point putting them in the dishwasher. The salad spinner, for instance. Or anything else that hasn’t been used for anything except cut vegetables or fruit. Might as well just rinse off any juice or residue under the tap, then let it air dry. It’s more sanitary than using a dish towel to dry everything right away; the towel’s probably even more bacteria-laden than the air. Besides, it’s better for the environment. Fewer towels to wash means less water being used to wash them, less detergent being poured down the drain….

    Of course, that way of thinking leads to this:

    Saving the planet, one unused towel at a time

    I’m not crazy about putting dishes away, either.

  • Shame on you, America’s Test Kitchen!

    After all my dissing of Rachael Ray and her so-called 30 Minute Meals, and my holding up of America’s Test Kitchen cookbooks as a sort of star pupil in the school of Giving Realistic Time Estimates For Recipes … the other day, I made Beef Teriyaki from the America’s Test Kitchen The Quick Recipe cookbook. It was supposed to take 30 minutes, and it took an entire hour!

    The ongoing problem with all these recipes, which I think I might have mentioned before, is that they seem to start the clock at the point where the ingredients have already been chopped and diced and minced. Unfortunately, I don’t have a staff of kitchen servants (or even one kitchen servant) to do my chopping for me. (A friend of mine from India said that her mother does, in fact, have the maid chop up the vegetables for dinner, and then the mother does the actual cooking.)

    Not being a Rachael Ray recipe, the America’s Test Kitchen Beef Teriyaki provided only 3 servings, instead of the suggested 4 to 6. But that was partly because my boyfriend Donald had a second helping. (Though Donald often has second helpings of Rachael Ray recipes, and I still end up with 6 to 8 servings when they’re supposed to serve 4.)

    I liked the beef teriyaki too, although I think I might have reduced the sauce a little too long. The recipe instructions said to cook the meat in the sauce at the end “until the sauce reduces to a syrupy glaze and the meat is well coated.” But I had some uncertainty about what, exactly, that meant. The sauce did taste good, but I think it might have been a little too syrupy and candy-like.

    Last night, Donald cooked dinner for me, also from The Quick Recipe. He made Stir-Fried Pork, Celery, and Peanuts in Sichuan Chile Sauce (with rice from a rice cooker; my rice cooker; Donald doesn’t own any cooking utensils as specialized as a rice cooker). In the cookbook, the recipe calls for chicken, but pork was what he had, and besides he’s sort of allergic to chicken.

    It was quite delicious, flavorful and spicy, and the sauce was just the right degree of thickness (it was better than the teriyaki). Donald doesn’t really cook, and this may be one of the few recipes he’s ever cooked completely from scratch (he can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). He even mixed the stir-fry sauce from raw ingredients like soy sauce, sherry, and Sichuan peppercorns (which he first toasted and then ground in a coffee grinder). Which I think is a good illustration of the fact that anyone, no matter how inexperienced they are, can cook perfectly well as long as they have a good cookbook, and are good at following instructions.

    It’s also an illustration of the fact that these cookbooks that promise quick meals, whether Rachael Ray’s or America’s Test Kitchen, fail especially in that promise to inexperienced cooks. (Which is especially aggravating with the Rachael Ray cookbooks, because they’re specifically marketed as being suitable for people who don’t already do a lot of cooking.) The America’s Test Kitchen recipe was supposed to take 35 minutes; Donald said it was more like 2 hours. “Mincing takes a lot longer than you’d think,” he said. Perhaps he’d do better with Lisa’s tomato-feta-pesto pasta dish. (Though I can’t really see him trying it, since he believes that all dinners should include meat, and doesn’t really like pesto.)

  • Pasta is not a 15-minute meal!

    The latest Rachael Ray recipe I tried, Cheesy Pasta Presto, from Just in Time! was supposed to take only 15 minutes. It took 53!

    When you think about it, there’s no way pasta is a 15-minute meal. It takes 15 minutes just to boil the water. And another 10 to cook the pasta.

    The good thing was that Cheesy Pasta Presto tastes much better than it sounds.

  • Springtime Feast!

    Last night I hosted a dinner party. It was me, my boyfriend Donald, my roommates Cory and Aubrey, and my good friend Bob (a former housemate of mine). I did all the cooking, and Bob, who has an extensive wine cellar, brought wine specially selected to accompany the meal.

    I was a bit pressed for time this weekend, since I had to pick up a rental car on Saturday afternoon (which is another story). Also I was kind of tired, and didn’t want to have to get up at 5 am to start cooking. So there were only two courses: the main course and the dessert.

    All recipes were courtesy of America’s Test Kitchen cookbooks. The main course was from the Quick Recipe cookbook: pan-seared veal chops with gremolata and lemon spinach. Gremolata is an Italian seasoning, a mixture of parsley, lemon rind and garlic. I mixed the gremolata with extra-virgin olive oil and spooned the mixture over the chops after they were cooked. The chops were pretty big, so I decided I didn’t really need a potato or rice side dish.

    I don’t eat veal very often, partly because it’s expensive and partly because these days you have to check with your dinner party guests to make sure they’ll eat it. So it’s a taste I’m not that familiar with. Donald, Aubrey and Cory had actually never tried it before (at least I think that’s what they said). Aubrey thought it tasted quite a lot like beef (not surprisingly, since it’s from the same animal), but that she kept looking at it thinking based on the taste that it would be red, and kept being mildly surprised to find that it was so pork-like in appearance. I guess I think it’s a little beefy, but a little like pork, too (except with the “piggy” flavor, if that makes sense). It’s definitely milder than, say, lamb.

    For dessert, we had the fresh strawberry tart from the New Best Recipe cookbook. It was the first time I’d made this particular strawberry tart, and maybe only the second time I’ve made one of these (with the tart pastry, the pastry cream, then the fresh raw fruit on top, glazed with melted jelly – red currant, in this case). It looked pretty just after I had assembled it, but serving it out was fairly disastrous. The recipe said to prepare the baked tart shell and pastry cream ahead of time, cool the tart shell to room temperature and chill the pastry cream, and then assemble the tart no more than 30 minutes before serving. However, when I tried to cut it, the tart pastry was so crisp that it shattered under the knife, and was kind of impossible to slice neatly. Also, the pastry cream gooped out around the edges of the cuts. So it was very messy! Bob, who is a more experienced cook than I am, said it’s usually better to put the pastry cream in the shell, then chill that for 30 minutes before topping it with the fruit. He said that the pastry cream will soften up the crust just enough in that time to make it cuttable, but not enough to lose all the delectable crispness.

    Despite the appearance of the uneven slices of goopy tart, it was very delicious, and the 5 of us all had seconds, and finished the entire thing in one sitting.

    To accompany the veal chops, Bob brought two Burgundies from the same producer, Domaine Francois Lumpp. One white and one red (for the curious, white Burgundy is almost always 100% chardonnay, and red Burgundy is 100% pinot noir). Both were Premier Cru from Givry; the white was the 2002 Crausot (I think Crausot is the vineyard, but maybe I’m wrong; sometimes I forget my wine knowledge) and the red was the 2001 Petit Marole. I liked both wines, though I thought the white was a little too old, and tasted kind of oxidized. But some of the other people liked the white better than the red. Some people actually liked the red better by itself, but the white better with the food. I still liked the red better with the veal, though I agreed that, with the fattier bits of the veal, the white was better. Also, the white was better with the spinach.

    To accompany the tart, we had a 1976 Johannisberger Holle Riesling Beerenauslese from the Rheingau in Germany. This was a very sweet white dessert wine (made from Riesling grapes). It was definitely my favorite wine of the evening, with a wonderful balance of sweetness and acidity, and a great flavor profile. It was a fairly decent match for the tart. It worked really well with the strawberries and with the crust, but wasn’t quite sweet enough for the pastry cream.

    My next “fancy” dinner will probably be my boyfriend’s birthday dinner that I’m cooking on the 3rd of July (not his actual birthday, but it’s a Saturday, and that’s the important thing). But I had better not say what I’m making, because it’s supposed to be a surprise!

    p.s. – Whole Foods did have the veal rib chops I wanted (reduced cruelty “barn-roaming” veal), but they were a little thicker than the recipe called for. I just cooked them a little longer. It worked fine. (I did use a meat thermometer to make sure I got the internal temperature right, rather than relying too heavily on the suggested cooking time.)

  • Mark your calendars!

    Last night, I prepared a Rachael Ray recipe that was supposed to take 60 minutes … and it did! 62 minutes, to be exact. But well within an acceptable margin of error.

    The recipe was “Spicy Lentil Stoup”, from Just in Time. It was good, too! A nice, thick soup with plenty of lentils and kale, plus tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, onion, garlic, various spices, and a bit of pancetta, a couple anchovy fillets, and chicken broth to give it flavor.

    I think that the 60-minute meals are more likely to be accurate estimates of the time required. They tend to be recipes that require simmering for 25 minutes or so, and where Rachael grossly underestimates the time it will take an average person to sprint through one of her recipes is in prep. I just can’t chop that fast! Not to mention finding the ingredients, mopping up all the liquid that the tomatoes I chopped have released onto the cutting board before I mince the thyme. Etc.

    The Spicy Lentil Stoup serves way more than 4, though (and is not really very spicy)! Hopefully Donald will help me to eat lots of it tomorrow night, so that I don’t have to put any of it in the freezer. I’m going to Newport next week for a chemistry conference, so I’m afraid I might not have a chance to finish it (especially since I’m having a dinner party on Saturday night, so I won’t be able to eat it then).

    I’ve mentioned America’s Test Kitchen a few times, and how their cooking time estimates are usually more reliable than Rachael Ray’s. On Monday, I prepared Grilled Tuna and Bok Choy with Soy-Ginger Glaze from The Quick Recipe. Estimated time, 45 minutes. Actual time, 52 minutes. But that includes the time it took me to run back into the house and splash water in my eyes when the glaze dripped down onto the coals and turned into some potent tear gas that could have been used as crowd control.

    That recipe was also tasty. Though the grilling part gets busy, when you have 4 tuna steaks and 8 pieces of bok choy on the grill all at once. And I couldn’t figure out how to keep the bok choy leaves from turning into charred shreds like the newspaper I used to light the coals. The cookbook said to squirt water on them occasionally “to prevent them from drying out”, but it didn’t really seem to help all that much. Besides, I had to keep glazing the tuna, and flipping it periodically (and chasing the tuna pieces around the grill with the spatula). And splashing water on my eyes.

    Whole Foods apparently hasn’t gotten the memo that America’s Test Kitchen recommends grilling tuna steaks at least 1 1/2 inches thick if you want rare tuna, because I couldn’t find anything thicker than about 1 inch.