The Unreal Meal

I’m assuming that most people out there know what latkes are, but just in case, I’ll give a brief history.  Latkes are a traditional Jewish potato pancake, though the traditions of how to make them, when, and why seem to be as varied as there are types of potatoes in the world.  Potatoes are actually a New World crop, so it doesn’t seem that the tradition goes back to, say, the ancient Hebrews.  Wikipedia tells me they’re mostly associated with Eastern European countries and common among Ashkenazi Jews, and really, I’ve no reason to doubt them.  I am personally not Jewish (Ashkenazi or otherwise), nor am I Eastern European, so I have no real traditions of my own.  I just happen to love potatoes (I am Irish, after all).

At any rate, on Sunday night I roasted a chicken, and with it we had mashed potatoes and parsnips.  I boiled the parsnips right with the potatoes and mashed them all together with a little butter and salt and a pinch of nutmeg (something I always put in my mashed potatoes because, well, I like it, and my mom does it with hers as did her mom before her, so that’s the way potatoes are done in the Unreal Meal household).

Of course, when I was getting read to cook them, I heard the dulcet tones of my boyfriend in the deep recesses of my mind crying “Never enough potatoes!  Never too many potatoes!” so I made the whole 5 lb. bag.  I’m here to tell you: there were, in fact, enough/too many potatoes.  As a result, I had a 1.5 quart container filled with leftover potato/parsnip mash.  I then decided that they’d be perfect for dinner last night made into potato pancakes and served with a pan-fried pork loin cutlet and some broccoli (also known as: these are the things I had handy in my fridge).

Now, I’ve eaten many a latke in my day.  I grew up with a lot more Jewish friends than you would probably imagine lived in Akron, OH; my family is all from NY/North Jersey; and I’ve lived in NYC for about five years now.  I’m not wanting for decent latke experiences, I promise.  That being said, I’ve never actually made the suckers before, so I was took a bit of a chance and decided to see what I could fashion from my leftovers.  Mind you, the only real risk would be that I’d have a kitchen filled with four disappointed eaters, so I guess it wasn’t that big a gamble, but still, I don’t like to do things poorly.

Fortunately for all four of us, they were really delicious!  I’m calling them Notkes, because I like silly wordplay like that, and because to be perfectly honest, I have absolutely no idea if they’re remotely cose to anything traditional.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say no, as parsnips probably aren’t part of every Jewish grandmother’s latke recipe.

Notkes

2 cups leftover mashed potatoes (or mashed potatoes and parsnips)
1/2 cup all-purpose flour mixed with
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 small onion, finely minced
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
some kind of oil/fat in which to fry them

Mix the potatoes in a medium bowl with the onions and garlic.  Add in the nutmeg and salt, making sure to distribute evenly.  Stir in the flour and baking powder (this, I found, is most easily done with your hands).  Stir in the lightly beaten egg.  Let the batter rest while you prepare your pan for frying.

Coat the bottom of a pan with the fat of your choice (see the note below).  If you’re using a non-stick pan, you’ll need less oil, and if you’re worried about fat or particularly health-conscious (as I am at the moment), that’s probably a better way to go.

When the oil is hot, scoop about 1/4 cup of batter into the pan for each cake, and press to distribute with the back of a spoon until it is round and flat.  Fry on one side, without flipping, until you see the bottom edges of the pancake start to turn golden brown (about two minutes).  Flip with a spatula and repeat on the other side.  Transfer to a plate to keep warm, and do this in batches.  2 cups of mash will make about 8 pancakes.

Some notes:

• On the oil: I used very little because we’re trying to be more healthful in our house.  I also didn’t particularly want grease-laden pancakes.  I made them in three batches.  The first was done with about 2 teaspoons of olive oil and 1/2 tablespoon of Smart Balance light butter (yes, the fake stuff, again, please don’t judge).  This combination was hands-down the best for getting a perfectly golden brown hue.The second batch I experimented with cooking spray.  Bad choice, steer clear of that one.  The third batch was only olive oil, and I think that in order to successfully do this with oil alone, there probably needs to be a lot more oil to get them to brown well.  Were I thinner and not focused on health at the moment, I’d probably have done them in all butter, and I suspect that would have been the most delicious.  One of my Jewish friends tells me, however, that there should be an “at least 200-1 oil to potato ratio,” so maybe that would really work best.  Another place where I fail to keep with tradition, I guess. ;)
• On the onion: I used a yellow onion because it’s what I had handy, but I think white might give better flavor.  White onions are a little stronger, and while mine had good flavor, I think they could have been a tinge onionier (yes, I just invented that word).
• On the potatoes: The cool thing here is that these could probably be made with any leftover mashed root vegetable.  I once made a mashed root veg accompaniment to a leg of lamb that was parsnips, rutabagas, turnips, and potatoes, and it was really stinkin’ delicious.  I bet that’d be awesome as a ‘cake.  Or sweet potatoes, and instead of the nutmeg (or maybe in addition to it), use cinnamon or allspice.  We even hypothesized what it’d be like to make a scallion mashed potato pancake, as sort of an East Asia meets Eastern Europe type fusion.  I also would have liked to include some fresh chives on top, but I had none handy.

In the end, like I said, they were delicious.  Of course, I still have about three cups of leftover mashed potatoes and parsnips.  I’ve put them in the freezer for another day when I think I’ll try my hand at a different Eastern European goodie: pierogi.

Freshly ground nutmeg is important because it smells/tastes better, and because it allows me to take cool pictures of the inside of the nutmeg seed!

Dinner is served!

Remember that ice cream you’d get as a kid in the square container that had perfect stripes of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry?  Wikipedia tells me that this Neopolitan ice cream was named in honor of its “presumed origins” in Naples, Italy.  I wonder if this stuff is still available today, and if so, has been renamed to reflect the often disingenuously PC culture in which we live?  Whatever the case, anytime that I think of combinations of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, I instantly think of Neopolitan ice cream.

Speaking of things that are tenuously rooted in Italian food history, I’ve recently been having conversations about spaghetti and meatballs with some coworkers.  One particular coworker is somewhat fixated on Italian foodstuffs (I can’t say that I blame him).  For about a month leading up to Christmas he (mostly jokingly) insisted that he wanted one of four things for his Secret Santa gift:  a 55″ or greater LCD tv, an xBox 360, Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2, or spaghetti and meatballs.  No amount of lecturing on my part about how this is really an Italian-American dish and not authentic Italian cuisine would sway him.  In the end, two days before Christmas, we had our group gift exchange and his Secret Santa gave him a box of spaghetti and homemade tomato sauce and meatballs.  It was a huge hit.

After the new year, said coworker announced to us all that his birthday was at the end of January, and his list of gifts that he wanted remained largely unchanged.  This gave me an idea:  spaghetti & meatballs birthday cake.  A quick google search returned Ciao Chow Linda’s Spaghetti and Meatballs Cake.  I opted to do this for my friend, with just a couple changes:

• I used a boxed cake mix.  Please don’t judge — it had to be done in a hurry on a Thursday night, and because I’m not really a baker, sometimes my from-scratch cakes don’t turn out as well as I’d like them, whereas a box is really hard to muck up too much.
• I used the buttercream recipe from the side of the box of Domino’s confectioner’s sugar because it uses mildly less butter (I’m not sure that it’d really matter, mind you).
• I didn’t pipe my spaghetti with a piping bag.  Why, you ask?  Because I don’t own a piping bag.  In spite of the fact that I’ve posted cookies and marshmallows and other sweet treats here, baking isn’t really my niche, so I lack some of the more useful bits of baking equipment.  I tried using a plastic baggie with a hole cut in a corner (that’s how I drizzle chocolate on things as a general rule), but the buttercream was too thick and it kept springing leaks.  My solution was to use a potato ricer.  That worked better than I would have imagined.  If I were doing it again, though, I’d probably tape off half of the holes so that it doesn’t come out so thick.
• I used one jar of Smucker’s strawberry jelly and one of sugar-free strawberry preserves.  I would have used all normal strawberry preserves had the market near my apartment had them at all, but they didn’t.  I wanted preserves or jam so that there were chunks that looked like bits of tomato, but the sugar-free preserves have an unholy red/pink color to them.  As such, I mixed in the strawberry jelly which is really dark.  If I do it again, I’ll probably add a little red food coloring to try and mimic a more tomatoey color.
• The meatballs were outstanding, I thought.  The woman, Linda, from whom I lifted the recipe says that she’d change them the next time, but I thought they were really quite good: dense, chocolatey, and sweet.  The nuts in them really help give them texture to look like a real meatball.

This is definitely a fun project, not remotely hard, and easily done in advance (though I did it all in one sitting).  In the end, it took me about three hours, but that was hardly all active time, what with the baking and the cooling and everything.  I also made and ate dinner in the process.

The cake was a huge hit with the birthday boy, and everyone that had some loved it.  Of course, there are few things better than vanilla buttercream, strawberry jam, and chocolate “meatballs.”  Italian or no, it was delicious!

Spaghetti and Meatballs Cake

The Unreal Meal has been on a bit of a hiatus these last few months.  It’s not that I haven’t been cooking (I do that nearly every night), it’s that I tend to get caught up a bit in minutiae and lose focus sometimes.

For instance, I cook things that are really yummy and awesome, but I forget to write down what I’ve done so that I can post here.  Or I get that much done, but I forget to take pictures until I’m halfway through scarfing things down, and I get mad that I have no proof of deliciousness.  Or I take pictures but they don’t look nearly the way that I envision them in my mind’s eye, because I’m only a mediocre photographer with no lighting equipment and no real knowledge of how to adjust the settings to make things look awesome.  Woe is me sometimes (though if that’s the least of my problems, my life is pretty good!).

Anyway, I will return soon because quite frankly, it’s hard to call oneself a food blogger when one doesn’t write about food, right?  Stay tuned for more!

Also, if someone knows of a good Wordpress plugin to combat spam/trackback spam, I would appreciate some insight.  I get craploads of comments posted from spammers and I want to be able to avoid that.

According to my friend Stacy, and also apparently according to the the NY Examiner, August 30th is National Toasted Marshmallow Day.  Apparently the toasted marshmallow folks are somewhat lacking in their PR department, as I can’t really find anything (besides the Examiner link) outside of the blogosphere to support that claim.  It is, however, a good lead in for this post about marshmallows!

Marshmallows, though not toasted ones.

A couple weeks ago, Food2 posted a blog entry on Extreme S’more Creations, and one of the creations was a bacon s’more.  My instant reaction when I saw it was “bacon s’more, yes please!”  Then I started thinking about what it really is: graham crackers smeared with some Nutella topped with a toasted marshmallow around which a flimsy piece of bacon had been wrapped.  I thought that I might be able to do better, even though part of me was saying, “Really? Bacon? Another thing with bacon? I mean, isn’t this just playing into the current bacon fad in the food world?  Does everything have to have bacon?”

I decided that I didn’t really care if it was a fad or not, that it was probably going to be a fun and delicious experiment.  My brain went to ways in which I could conceivably do this, and started thinking about things that go well with bacon that might include chocolate, and suddenly I was picturing myself eating chocolate chip pancakes with dark maple syrup and a crispy side of bacon, dipping the bacon in the maple syrup and melted chocolate bits.  That’s when it hit me: bacon graham crackers, dark chocolate, maple marshmallows.

I haven’t gotten to the graham crackers yet, but I promise there will a follow-up post about that forthcoming.  Yesterday, though, somewhat coincidentally to it being National Toasted Marshmallow Day, I made some maple marshmallows.

I started with Alton Brown’s marshmallow recipe and actually altered it very little.  Instead of using all corn syrup, I used a mixture of corn and maple syrup.  The recipe site says that this recipe makes nine dozen marshmallows or 1 1/2 pounds of mini ’shmallows, but I think that’s probably reversed, because in no world could I have come up with nine dozen normal-sized marshmallows!  I think I probably got about four dozen from one 13 x 9″ pan (I didn’t actually count).

Maple Marshmallows
(Adapted from Alton Brown’s Food Network recipe.)

3 envelopes of unflavored gelatin (I used Knox)
1 cup ice cold water, divided
12 ounces granulated sugar  (this requires a kitchen scale, which every home cook should have!)
1/2 cup light corn syrup
1/2 cup grade B dark amber maple syrup
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons extra maple sugar
1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar (powdered sugar)
1/2 cup cornstarch
Nonstick cooking spray

First, let me preface the actual recipe instructions with this note: You might think your best friend’s name is Bob or Sue or Tony, but I promise you that when it comes to making marshmallows, your best friend in the world is PAM.  Words cannot adequately describe how sticky marshmallow batter (for lack of a better word) is, and how it can stick to any and everything, including the bowl, the spatula, the kitchen table, the floor, the ceiling, and the cat, to name a few.  More than that, it will stick to you. I promise that you will think to yourself “I just won’t use my hands,” but you will, and you’ll get fluff on everything.  So let me tell you this upfront: nonstick cooking spray will stop the stick.  Use it on everything that might possibly come into contact with the marshmallow goo, including your hands, and you’ll thank me for it, I swear.

Moving on!  In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, dissolve the three packets of gelatin into 1/2 cup of the ice cold water.

While that’s getting all cold and hard and gelatinous in the bottom of your mixer (don’t be alarmed when you look at it and it looks a bit like the surface of an alien planet), combine the sugar, the other 1/2 cup of water, the syrups (minus the extra 2 tsp of maple), and the salt in a medium-sized sauce pan.  (Alton tells us a small sauce pan, but I nearly had molten hot sugar goo boil over the sides of my small sauce pan, so I’m advising an upgrade.)  Place it over medium-high heat, and stir as it starts to melt together.  After a few minutes, strap a candy thermometer to the inside of the pot, and continue to let it heat.

Now, another warning comes in here.  This comes to a boil very quickly (or at least it did on my stove with my small saucepan), and almost as soon as it starts bubbling away, it starts to try and escape the pan.  I pulled it off the heat momentarily to allow it to simmer down a bit, but be really careful.  After all, it’s effectively nothing but really hot sugar, and not only can that burn like hell (it’s like candy napalm), but I can’t imagine that it would be fun to clean if it boiled over onto/into your stove.

Anyway, once you’ve got the napalm under control, let it heat up on the stove until it comes to 240° F.  Don’t be alarmed that this seems to take for-freakin’-ever, or that it seems to hover in the 210-215° range for an inordinate amount of time.  Alton says 7 to 8 minutes for this stage, and he might be right (I didn’t time it), but it seemed longer to me.  Eventually, though, you’ll get it to go up above 215°, and then watch carefully because 240° isn’t too far away.

Now, the tricky part.  Once you’ve hit the magical temperature, turn on your mixer on low.  I have a 6-quart KitchenAid Professional Stand Mixer, and I put it on #2 (just above ’stir’).  While the mixer is mixing, pour the sugar napalm in a single thin stream down the side of the bowl.  Don’t pour it directly on the whisk attachment, or you’ll spray hot molten sugar lava all over yourself and your kitchen, which is really not recommended.  Once it’s all in the bowl, gradually increase the speed to high.  By ‘gradually’ I mean a few seconds in between increases on the switch.  Once it’s on high, let it go for about ten minutes (Alton says 12 – 15) until it’s thick, fluffy, and lukewarm.  When that’s almost finished, add in the remaining 2 teaspoons of maple syrup (or you could probably use just a teaspoon of maple extract).  It’ll look something like this:

Thick and Fluffy!

Now, in the ten or so minutes that you have while this is mixing, you want to prepare your mallow pan and get your utensils (including your best friend, PAM) ready to go.  To do that, first combine the powdered sugar and the corn starch in a small bowl.  You’re going to want some way of being able to dust with it, so either use a fine mesh strainer or a sifter (I used a sifter, since my fine mesh strainer is about 2″ across and takes a long time to dust things of any substantial size with it.

Once your dust is ready, then prep your pan.  You’ll want a 13 x 9″ pan.  Alton Brown says to use a metal one, and of course I don’t have a metal pan of that size.  I have a glass baking dish of that size.  As such, I opted to line it with parchment paper, then sprayed that lightly with my dear friend PAM, and then dusted that with the cornstarch/sugar mix.  I was determined to make sure that it didn’t stick!  It didn’t, but I did look like I was working for Pablo Escobar, circa 1985 or so…

Now, the moment of truth!  Once your napalm has transformed to fluff, it’s time to “pour” it into the pan (and I use that term loosely, it’s more like you’re manipulating it into the pan).  You can see how thick and gooey it is by the column that formed when I pulled the whisk out of the bowl:

It's a column of marshmallow fluff!

It’s light and airy, but thick and a bit cement-like at the same time, if that makes sense.  Here’s what I found to be the best way to get the fluff off the whisk: spray the crap out of my fingers with PAM, and use them to clean it.  Drop all that goo into the bowl, then it’s time to maneuver the fluff into the pan.  To do that, spray a rubber or silicon spatula (I used one that was all silicon with no exposed wood), and then carefully start to scrape the fluff into the pan.  You’ll find that every couple of scrapes, it will start to stick to the spatula.  Stop at that point and respray, and don’t worry about a little residual fluff on the utensil — just spray over it and keep going.  Once it’s almost all in the pan, I ended up spraying my hands again (oh PAM, I do love you so), and scraped what else I could out of the mixing bowl.  There was still a coating of fluff when I was done, but the majority of it went in the pan, and thanks to my future wife, PAM, very little of it got anywhere else.

After you’ve successfully negotiated the fluff into the pan, dust the top with more of the powdered sugar mixture, and let it sit, uncovered, for at least four hours.  After it’s settled, turn it out of the pan onto a cutting board, and cut using a pizza roller that has also been dusted with sugar.  You’ll find that it cuts pretty easily, but it also likes to try and stick back together, so make sure that you dust each piece as you cut it.  I cut my pieces into somewhere in the 1″ cube range, though they’re not entirely uniform, and that’s really fine by me.  I haven’t tried toasting them yet (as the fact that I made them on National Toasted Marshmallow Day was somewhat coincidental), but that’s next, along with the bacon graham crackers!

It's a marshmallow, up close and personal!

September is somehow already close upon us, and with September comes not just the turn of fall leaves and harvesting summer vegetables, but also football season! Football season may mean nothing to a lot of people (and this isn’t a sports blog, so I’ll try not to dwell too much on that), but to many, football games are synonymous with food. In my world, there’s a lot of fantasy football, and with that comes gatherings of good friends for fantasy drafts.

Tonight marks the first draft of my (many) fantasy leagues this year, and since it’s at my humble abode, I chose to bake my favorite cookies to celebrate the occasion.  Once in the past, for one of the boyfriend’s drafts, I baked these cookies in the shape of footballs, and it was highly entertaining to have a friend of ours keep repeating the Ace Ventura quote, ”they’re shaped like little footballs!”  However, they don’t bake nearly as evenly as the standard round cookie shape, and it’s a bit of a pain in the rump to pipe the icing on so that it looks like perfect pigskin laces.  Freeform drizzles are much easier, thus I opted this year for the classic style.

Not shaped like little footballs, in fact.

My very most favorite thing about these cookies is not actually eating them myself, but it’s watching other people eat them.  They’re a bit of a surprise for novice nibblers, as they’re not just plain chocolate cookies with white chocolate drizzles.  They have a chewy caramel center, which I’ve been told is like finding a pot of gooey gold in the center of a chocolate rainbow.  Yeah yeah, it’s a terrible metaphor, but I blame the fact that the cookies are good enough that people are temporarily stupefied after eating them.

Gooey Caramel Center

I’ve been making these for years — I honestly have no idea where I even found the recipe at this point — and since I’ve had so many requests for it, I’m finally sharing this with the world.  The best thing about these cookies is that they’re so incredibly simple, but could so easily be changed to incorporate other stuff and thus a whole new cookie is born.

Chocolate Salted Caramel Cookies

2 1/4 cups All Purpose Flour, unsifted
3/4 cups good quality cocoa powder (I prefer natural, but Dutch processed is fine, too)
2 cups granulated sugar*
2 Tablespoons molasses*
1 cup butter, softened
2 1/2 tsp baking powder (you could use 1 tsp of baking soda instead, but the cookies would be less fluffy)
2 large eggs
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon chocolate extract (optional — not everyone has this, and they’re just fine without it)
48 Rolos candies or other small pieces of caramel
Fine grain sea salt, like Maldon or Fleur de Sel
1 cup white chocolate chips

*Alternately, you could substitute 1 cup white sugar and 1 cup brown sugar, and skip the molasses, but I always tend to be out of brown sugar, and I generally have a jar of molasses for which I have little use.

Preheat the oven to 375° F.

In a mixing bowl, cream together the softened butter, the sugars, and the molasses (I use salted butter and omit putting any salt in the batter).  When the mixture is light and fluffy, add the vanilla extract, chocolate extract (if applicable) and eggs, and mix until lighter and fluffier.

In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and cocoa powder.  Whisk it together until it’s fairly uniform.

Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet, about 1/2 cup at a time, making sure to incorporate all of dry stuff before adding more.  Once it’s all mixed in, let the cookie dough rest in the fridge for about twenty minutes, or it will be hard to form.

Once chilled, wrap about a tablespoon of dough around a Rolo and very lightly sprinkle a couple flakes of sea salt on the bottom of the candy before completely enclosing all the gooey center.  Line up on an ungreased cookie sheet, approximately 2″ apart, and bake for 7 – 9 minutes  until they’re set and just starting to crack a little.

Remove from the oven and let cool on a wire rack.  Once the cookies are completely cooled, put the white chocolate chips in a microwave safe bowl, and microwave on 50% power for 2 minutes.  Remove from the microwave, stir until smooth.  If they’re not completely melted, put them back in the microwave for another 30 seconds at 50% power until completely melted.

Pour the melted white chocolate into a zip-top bag, and snip a very small hole in one of the pointy ends so that you can pipe the chocolate, willy nilly, onto the cookies.  Let the chocolate set, then enjoy!

These are fantastic, and really versatile.  I’ve made them with mini Reeses inside, with Andes mints, with various colors of chocolate on top.  Let me know if you try them and you do a variation on a theme; I’d love to know what other people come up with!

The finished product!

For so many of us, food and wine are a natural complement.  Hell, it’s so natural that there’s a magazine with that name.  So it shouldn’t really have been much of a surprise to me when I got an e-mail this morning from Tasting Table sharing knowledge of a new wine club with a new twist (more on that in a minute).

Wine clubs are a dime a dozen these days (or, more likely, about $45 a two-pack of bottles).  Various vineyards have their own clubs, lots of resellers have them, it’s a fairly common way to introduce myriad selections to people who might be regular wine drinkers who like a little variety.  I, myself, have been a wine.com subscriber for a couple years.  Sometimes they send good things, sometimes it’s average.  My problem with wine.com is that they tend to overcharge for things, and their customer service is not always the best.  Plus, they sell out of popular things way too fast.

Keeping that in mind, I haven’t actively been looking for a new wine club, but Mama always taught me to keep my options open and be receptive to things that might cross my path.  Enter in this morning’s Tasting Table e-mail that talked of a new joint venture between Cookstr and Pasanella & Sons Vintners.

Cookstr is a fantastically well designed recipe database that features recipes from a lot of famous chefs and cookbook authors in one handy website.  Pasanella & Sons (I really need to stop resisting the urge to type panzanella – also delicious, but totally different) is a local wine shop here in NYC in, I believe, what used to be the old South Street fish market.  Combine the two, and you obviously have food and wine, but you get something more with their new service: a wine club plus a book club — a cookbook club, to be precise.  You get a bottle of red, a bottle of white, and (apologies to Billy Joel), a book with which to cook tonight.

I was so enamored of this idea (I’m a bit of a sucker for cookbooks, which is ironic since I don’t use them that often) that I immediately went to the site in the hopes of signing up for a new ongoing membership that could replace my wine.com shipment.  When I got there, they had a few options: a one-time month-only choice for $49.99, a 3-month option for $149.99, 6 months for $299.99, and 12 months for $599.99.  What was missing was a month-by-month option where I could subscribe on an ongoing basis, but without having to shell out six hundred smackeroos.

Doing what any enterprising woman might, I clicked the link associated with questions and comments, and e-mailed asking if this was an option or if it might become an option in the future.  I sent my e-mail at 12:50 this afternoon.  Ten minutes later, Will Schwalbe, the CEO and founder of Cookstr, responded to say that they didn’t have the ability quite yet, but would likely figure it out soon, and that he’d follow up with another e-mail once they did.

I was tickled and, quite frankly, a little stunned to have such a fast and amiable response!  Then I got sucked into various work duties (after all, I can’t spend every minute of my workday on fun stuff!), and before I knew it, I had another e-mail from Marco Pasanella thanking me for such a great idea and letting me know that he’d added that option to their website.

Let me tell you guys, I’ve worked in some sort of service industry (either food or customer) for my entire adult life, and I know two definitive things about it:  First, it’s incredibly easy to provide great service to customers if you’re simply responsive.  Second, in spite of that fact, it’s something that very very very many people neglect.  I don’t know if it’s because they’re just lazy or careless or what the story is, but more and more, I find that people are clueless about what constitutes good service.

Happily, Will and Marco do not fall into that second category!  I was so thrilled by their nearly immediate responses and actions, that I instantly signed up for the shiny new month-by-month program.  I cannot wait for the first shipment, and my first cookbook!

The practical upshot is this: food and wine are delicious, but there’s no substitute for great service.  And since they so willingly accommodated my wishes, I felt that I should do my part to get their name out there to more people that might be interested in the Vino & Cookbook of the Month Club.  You don’t have to be a New Yorker to join!

Once I have my first shipment, I’ll have to find something delectable from the cookbook that will go nicely with the wine they send.  Perhaps a nice bread salad would do.

It’s been a while since I posted, and much of that has been due to the fact that I swear to you that I’ve been sick for the entire month of July, so it’s been sapping my creativity a bit.  For someone who doesn’t get sick very often (usually once a year or so), when I do get hit, I get really whiny and it’s just not fun for anyone (me included).

Anyway, I’m not here to cull sympathy from the masses, but instead to talk about food!  A friend of mine tells me that today is National Lasagna Day, and a quick Google search confirms this for me.  I wish that I’d known this before this morning, or I’d have planned some kind of lasagna dinner for this evening.  Instead, we’ll be having moo shu beef lettuce cups (a Weight Watcher’s recipe), as we’re all trying to be more healthful in our house.

Nonetheless, I’m still inspired by the thought of lasagna!  I love Italian food, and lasagna is one of the best comfort foods there is, I think.  Heck, for me, pasta of any sort is just happy and delicious.  It’s one of those things that I know how to make fresh, but I never do because I don’t have a pasta roller (and rolling it by hand is seriously exhausting – or at least it is with my little rolling pin).  I keep meaning to get myself a pasta roller, but I keep not doing it for some reason.

This morning I was reading my e-mail, and one of the various newsletters/mailing lists that I receive is from a site called Groupon.  Groupon is a site that offers cool things in various major cities across the US at a group discount.  They work with companies to provide a daily offer of something cool to do.  Today’s (NYC) offer was for one of four classes at New York Vintners (a local wine shop here in Manhattan) that does short food and wine classes.  The classes are normally $45, but today’s Groupon price was $20 per ticket, so I snatched up some tickets.

The classes available are Sake and Cheese, Wine 101, Pinot Noir from Around the World, and the one that I really want to try most: Interactive Pasta Class with Italian Wines.  The pasta class is described as “Join us for a Sunday afternoon tasting of six Italian wines while Chef shows us how to make several different pastas, and then demonstrates how to make some of our favorite pasta dishes.”  Aside from an extraneous comma, that synopsis sounds perfect to me.  Like I said, it’s not that I don’t know how to make fresh pasta, but I’m also of a firm belief that you can never stop learning, and there’s always something to be gained from those more experienced.

So in honor of National Lasagna Day, I am going to learn some more about Italian Wines and making pasta.  Of course, today’s Groupon offering was so popular that I may never be able to find an open class, but we’ll see!  Hopefully it doesn’t take me until National Lasagna Day next year to get there!

I’m always interested in seminars and classes like these around the city, especially if they’re not terribly expensive.  I can’t afford culinary school at the moment, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t learn via other avenues, right?  It’s all in a quest to make every meal unreal!

The smell of NYC in the summer is something that probably makes a lot of people cringe. After all, with all the people and all the heat and humidity, it can be an interesting olfactory experience. Every summer, though, there’s something that I always forget, and that’s the sweet fragrance of honeysuckle that briefly wafts through the city. It’s so fleeting that somehow it has come and gone before I really have a chance to stop and take note. Every year when it hits for a few days in mid-to-late June, I stop and breathe deeply and think about what a glorious gift life is and all that it encompasses.

There’s a powerful thing about scent that can transport us to different places and times in our lives. For instance, there’s something about flowers that always makes me feel like I’m home. Give me a noseful of peonies or lilacs or honeysuckle, and somehow I’m sitting in my bedroom where I grew up in Ohio, windows wide open in the spring and summer, without a care in the world. It’s funny how comforting those smells are.

Many cooks and eaters alike will say the same thing about food. I suppose that’s part of the whole notion of “comfort food,” actually. For me, my two strongest food memories are:

1. Perfectly pink roast beef studded with slivered garlic and served with soft, fluffy mashed potatoes. Just thinking about it, I can picture our old 60s era brown electric stove and the way that roasting smell would creep into the living room or upstairs to find me. As a random aside, when I was a little girl, I called it tukaluka, for reasons that I don’t actually know at the moment — I’ll have to ask my mom about that.
2. Juicy pork chops sprinkled with salt and pepper, pan-seared to make them a little crispy on the outside, and then finished in the oven and finally served with perfectly buttered egg noodles.  I tried being a vegetarian when I was 16, and every time I’d go to my dad’s, he’d make pork chops for himself for dinner. After about four months of this, I couldn’t stand how good it smelled anymore, and I broke down and devoured those chops as though I’d never eaten before. I’ve never looked back. Oh pig, how delicious and wonderful you are!

I’ve heard or read of other cooks when they talk about about things like beef bourguignon, fish stew, osso bucco, pasta carbonara or a perfect bolognese sauce.  Somehow they’re always simple, homey dishes.  I’m not a critic of haute cuisine in any way, but you don’t generally see someone talk about those types of dishes with that faraway look that you get when someone’s describing a parent’s or grandparent’s perfect lasagna or roast chicken.

For years, roast chicken had little real appeal for me.  It’s not that I had anything against it, I just never really sought it out.  We ate plenty of chicken when I was growing up, generally breasts roasted in the oven, or my mom would sometimes grab a cooked rotisserie chicken from the local supermarket because it was fast and easy and tasty enough, but I never really remember whole roasted chickens — probably because I was such a picky eater that I refused anything that remotely resembled dark meat or chicken skin (I’ve thankfully grown out of that).

Recently, I’ve started roasting chickens at home, and I’m starting to understand how it can be one of those meals that screams home and comfort food for so many people.  This past weekend, I offered my services to my favorite aunt (who’d be my favorite even if I had ten thousand aunts instead of just the one, by the way) who has been dealing with some health issues and had surgery a couple weeks ago.  She was heading home (much improved, I gleefully add!), needed some grocery shopping done (someday ask me about how I fell down the steps in Citarella — all in the name of good food and happy relatives!), and had a request for a roast chicken dinner.  I happily obliged, and successfully roasted two small birds (about 3# each) on a roasting pan in a tiny little DeLonghi countertop oven.  Before long, their entire apartment smelled like delicious roasty toasty chicken, and I knew, in a way that I haven’t really before, what a perfect meal

After dinner, Alex and I said our goodbyes and drove home, sated and with my mind filled with the lingering scent memory of crispy chicken skin and tarragon.  And that’s when mother nature snuck in and hit me with the honeysuckle.  Life — it smells damn good, that’s all I know.  I’m off for a long weekend here, but before I go, I had to share the simplest chicken recipe I know.  Sometimes the simplest ways are the best.

My Mom’s, My Aunt’s, and My Nanna’s Roast Chicken

1 3-4 lb. (sometimes called a broiler-fryer) chicken
6 sprigs tarragon plus
1 tablespoon finely chopped tarragon
coarse salt
freshly ground black pepper
1 can artichoke hearts in water (not in oil), juices reserved

Preheat the oven to 350°.

Clean the giblets (the neck, liver, etc. that is generally stored in the body of the bird when you buy it) out of the inside, and very very liberally coat the outside of the skin with coarse salt, and season with pepper.  Lift the skin of the breast, being careful not to tear it, so that it separates a bit from the flesh, and stuff a few sprigs of tarragon under each side.  Sprinkle the rest of the tarragon on top of the bird.  Lay the bird in a pan that is deep enough to hold a little liquid, and of course to hold the chicken.

Open the can of artichoke hearts, stuff them in the cavity of the chicken, and pour the remaining juice over top of the chicken into the bottom of the pan.

Roast at 350° for 2 to 2 1/2 hours.  The artichokes in the cavity should be at 165°, as should the temperature of the chicken when read in the fattest part of the thigh (not touching bone).  Let the chicken rest for about ten minutes before carving.

Serve with the artichoke hearts and some white rice, if you choose.  One chicken will serve about 4 people.

I’ve been reading Michael Ruhlman’s The Making of a Chef recently (on the heels of Ratio, actually), and it’s done a lot to open my mind and the way I think about what food is.  Specifically, there’s a part where he’s describing Bob del Grosso and one class that he taught that centered around a discussion on what food actually is.  To quote the book (which quotes del Grosso):

“Say you’re a Socratic cook and you want to make a hamburger.  You would begin the process by posing a question: ‘What is a hamburger?’” He posed this to the class.  One intrepid student offered, “A round patty of ground beef put between toasted buns.”  Del Grosso clarified: “Round?  Let’s call it disc-shaped.”  A lively discussion of the hamburger followed.  The point, del Grosso said, was to get them thinking critically about food.

This, of course, got me thinking critically about food.  It started with the hamburger question — does it have to be round (or disc-shaped, as it were)?  Does it even have to be beef?  What if it’s ground pork, and it’s triangular, does that make it any less a burger?  What if it’s not between a bun, but on toast (a patty melt) or an english muffin or something completely different?  Does that change the intrinsic burgerness about it?  So of course, I’ve been thinking about everything in that manner since I read that, including the old standard, French Onion Soup.

It started with onions, a pretty key component to French Onion Soup.  In fact, I’d venture to say that without the onions, you can’t have French Onion Soup.  Traditionally, it’s made from deeply caramelized onions in some kind of stock with a toasted crouton floating on top and melted cheese over it all.  It’s simple, it’s delicious, it’s pretty much perfect, so why fuck with it, right?  Well, why not, actually!  Can it be improved upon, probably not, but my thinking was that it could be altered a bit and still be, well, really freakin’ delicious.

So we come back to the onions.  What goes really well with deliciously caramelized onions?  Steak!    And what goes well with steak?  Potatoes!  The wheels in my brain started turning.  What if I made onion soup the normal way, then tossed in some beef, and instead of a crouton, I could top it with a potato cake made from shredded potatoes, then the cheese.  It’d still be French Onion Soup at its roots, but just a little different.

It just so happens that I cooked a beautiful 2 lb sirloin for dinner on Monday, but with only four people in the house, I had leftovers (even after making sandwiches from it).  I also had a couple quarts of chicken stock because I’d roasted a chicken on Saturday for some friends, and I never let a good chicken carcass go to waste.  I even had a random spare bag of frozen hash browns that had accidentally been delivered to me as part of my last Fresh Direct order (I’d never order these, to be fair, but since they were there, I thought it silly to waste them).  Oddly, the one thing I was missing was onions, as I’d used the last of my 10 lb. bag of them for the chicken stock, but onions can be gotten easily enough, and I asked Alex to pick some up on his way home last night.

I thinly sliced my onions, put them in a stock pot to cook down and caramelize, diced up the remaining steak, warmed up my chicken stock, and proceeded to cook up some hash browns in a small round that would fit in a soup bowl, then finally assembled the whole shebang, topping it with some mozzarella cheese (it was all I had, and sometimes ya gotta make due).  The result was a pretty good soup.  I should have deglazed the onions with a little white wine for some acidity, but I didn’t have that, so instead I added in a splash of red wine vinegar at the end.  It went from a good soup that seemed a little lacking somehow to a really good soup that had much more balance and depth.  Pictures and recipe are below (clicking on the pictures will give you the ginormous version)!

Monday's Sirloin Dinner

Thinly Sliced Onions

Steak, All Diced Up

Deliciously Carmelized Onions, After about an Hour of Cooking

Tasty Potato Cake

Mmmm... soup!

“French” Onion (and Steak and Potato) Soup

3 lbs thinly sliced onions
2 quarts chicken stock (beef stock could be substituted, but then it would be overly beefy, I think)
1 cup dry white wine
2 teaspoons red wine vinegar
2 bay leaves
4 sprigs fresh thyme, tied in a bundle
6 ounces rare to medium rare sirloin, diced
4 cups shredded potatoes
2 cups grated gruyère (or other delicious and easily meltable) cheese
coarse salt, to taste (I use almost exclusively Morton Coarse Kosher Salt)
freshly ground black pepper, to taste

In a large dutch oven or stockpot, put all the onions, the two bay leaves, and the bundle of thyme over medium-low heat.  Season with a liberal sprinkling of kosher salt and a few grinds of pepper.  Let the onions heat up and cook down, stirring in the pan every ten minutes or so, until all the moisture has cooked off and they start to get a deep brown, caramel color.  That took over an hour for me, and it’s worth waiting that and letting the process happen slowly.  It can be done faster, but the onions have more a tendency to burn and get bitter that way, and that’s not so much the makings of an unreal meal!

Once the onions are deliciously brown, and they’ve started to form an onion equivalent of fond on the bottom of the pan, fish out the bay leaves and deglaze the whole shebang with the white wine.  You’ll get a wonderful burst of steam to give you a nice wine facial — it smells divine; I nearly wanted to dive into the pot.  Stir with a flat edged wooden spoon or a heat-resistant spatula to pick up the little bits of onion that have stuck to the bottom, and continue to cook until the wine has almost completely cooked off.  Stir in the vinegar.

Add the chicken stock to the onions, stirring so that the onions don’t stick to the bottom of the pot, and bring everything to a boil, then reduce to a simmer.  It was at this point that I chose to dice up my steak and grate my cheese.  Once the stock and onions have simmered for about five minutes, add the steak and turn the heat as low as it will go while cooking the potato cakes.

For each potato cake, use about 1/2 cup of shredded potatoes.  In this instance, I used frozen hash browns, which are very dry and easy to cook to a crisp golden brown.  If you are using fresh potatoes, make sure that as much water as possible has been squeezed out or you’ll end up steaming the potatoes and they’ll be soggy, mushy, and not browned at all.  I find that a non-stick skillet is perfect for this, and I tend to use non-stick cooking spray rather than oil, because I feel that it makes the individual potato pieces adhere to one another well while crisping perfectly on the outside.

Cooked over medium heat, the frozen potatoes take about 4 minutes per side for each potato cake, depending on how thick you want them.  Mine were about 1/2″ thick, so they spread out a little (mostly because I was using a wide-mouthed soup bowl).  If you wanted them thicker, more like a crabcake, it would probably take longer to cook (but be sure to flip them so that they don’t burn).

Once the potatoes are cooked, ladle the soup into a bowl, top with a potato cake, and sprinkle with 1/4 c of shredded cheese.  The whole thing can be placed under a broiler to melt the cheese and crisp up the top of it.  I forewent that step because our broiler is an old-fashioned one underneath the bottom of the oven, and it’s occasionally challenging to get things in and out of there.  I really want a new range, but how does one justify buying a new range for an apartment that one rents? :p

The final product makes about 8 servings, depending on how big your appetite and whether you’re choosing to make a whole meal of this, or if you’re serving it as an appetizer.  Had I chosen to put these in the wonderful little soup tureens that I have, we probably could have gotten 8 servings.  As it was, it turned out to be about five dinner-sized portions.  Oh, and don’t forget to pull the thyme bundle!  Most of the leaves will probably have fallen off, so it’ll likely be a bunch of naked stems tied together.  Don’t be alarmed — that’s a good thing!

It occurs to me that if one wants to write a food blog, one actually has to, you know, write.  It’s totally the small, obvious details that get me sometimes.  So with that, I present you my first real post (I’ve no idea if anyone’s actually reading, but we’ll see).

There’s a lot of things that probably go into someone deciding to start a blog of any kind.  I’ve always been one of those “weird internet people,” involved in this community or that, so writing about various and sundry things often feels somewhat second-nature to me.  However, moving away from “yo, this is what I did today” type nonsense that can be interesting to my friends and toward a more specific niche requires a bit more focus and refinement.  Time will tell if I’m able to pull that off effectively.

What made me ultimately decide to give this a go was a dinner party that I hosted earlier this year.  It’s no secret that anyone who knows me (or even talks to me for two minutes) can tell how much I love food.  It’s not just eating, it’s the act of creating and crafting good meals that appeals to me on a very basic level.  Perhaps it’s about ego — who doesn’t love seeing people enjoy something delicious that you made? — perhaps it’s just the nature of cooking and seeing things come together and transform.  Whatever it is, it’s what I love to do, and because of that, I sometimes seek to do completely insane (well, insane for a home cook, anyway) elaborate things for my roommates and friends, and this dinner party definitely falls into that category.

A couple years ago I cooked a small, intimate five-course dinner for my boyfriend and I, and it turned out really well.  It wasn’t particularly elaborate, but it was particularly delicious, mostly because I put a lot of thought, effort, and care into it.  It’s become a total cliché that you hear on every competitive food show these days, but there was a lot of love that went into it.  Afterward, I started thinking about how I could do something more involved, so I got a wild idea to do seven courses.

Something to know about me — I get these ideas to do things from time to time, and pretty much nothing can stop me from achieving my goal, no matter how ridiculous, costly, time-consuming, or just downright odd it might seem to others.  When I was a little girl, my Nana used to call me “Pigfoot” because I was so stubborn, and my mom endearingly referred to me as “truculent.”  I can see how, in trying to rear a child, those would be occasionally troublesome qualities, but as an adult they serve me well — I like to consider it determination.   This determination led me to believe that I could easily put together a seven course dinner, and nothing was going to deter me from executing that.

I decided that the dinner needed a motif, and posted to a LiveJournal community to brainstorm theme ideas (see? I told you I was one of those weird internet people).  Lots of interesting things were posited ranging from ideas that incorporated the number seven (the seven seas, seven continents, seven wonders of the world) to individual types of cuisine for each course.  Someone suggested seven deadly sins, and I loved the idea, so I took that and ran with it.  People who have been loyal watchers of Top Chef know that this isn’t necessarily a unique theme, but I had never watched that show before about midway through the 4th season, and I was confident in my ability to bring this to fruition with in my own way.  I’ve actually still never seen that episode, nor even really read anything about it — I didn’t want it to influence my own choices.

At some point during the summer 2007, I started writing down notes here and there about things I could potentially use for the eventual 7DS dinner.  I’d focus on it on and off, creating spreadsheets and lists with possible course ideas, wine ideas, and even tableware.  Sometimes I’d go months and months without looking at it, then I’d think about it, and I’d say to Alex, “You know, I should do the Seven Deadly Sins thing…”  He’d drool a little, agree, and then it’d fall by the wayside again.  Until eventually it didn’t, and I decided it was time to make it happen.

And so on April 25, 2009, my roommates and I had four of our friends over and started eating and drinking at about 5 pm.  We finished somewhere past midnight, having successfully enjoyed every single bit of the following (click the image for a large version):

Seven Deadly Sins

As a result of that meal, a dear friend of mine encouraged me to document everything.  ”You could create a website — call it The Unreal Meal,” he told me.  Much like my decision to make the meal, I took that and ran with it, and here we are.  Stay tuned for more about 7DS, and about all the other unreal meals that I can invent.  They won’t all be so elaborate (most of them won’t, in fact), but I promise that they’ll all be unreal in some way!