Recently in Cooking Category

The Alinea Cookbook has landed! And I can barely pick it up again because it's a damn big and heavy book! This is the perfect coffee table book, as it is full of gorgeous photographs of amazing objects, which also have the wonderful characteristic of being edible. For many owners of this book, it is likely to remain an object of display rather than becoming stained with grease, as the recipes are seriously intimidating.

Of course, this is exactly my kind of cookbook! Almost all of the recipes require a new ingredient or a new cooking device. Despite what you might think, this is no bad thing. As is well-known, the healthy American male looks upon every project as an excuse to buy a new tool, and if the end result of the project is food then it is even better. All of those barbeque grills in American back yards are only tangentially related to feeding the family.

If you don't work at Alinea or WD-50 you can't just open to a random page of this book and start cooking. Most of us need to answer three questions: 1) Do I have the ingredients? 2) Do I have the time? -- and 3) Do I have the equipment? Since my answer was "no" to at least one of these questions for almost every recipe in the book, I had to fall back to a more abstract method for deciding where to start. I looked for a recipe that produced something extremely neat, and which seemed at least theoretically possible to pull off. After closely examining every picture in the book and imaging what it might taste like, I decided to make what is prosaically described in the book as bacon powder, wrapped in pineapple glass.

I like baby artichokes. They aren't really cute, but often they don't have a choke thus making them much easier to clean. This time of year I can find baby artichokes on Saturday at the Iacopi Farms stand at the Ferry Plaza farmer's market, and also in Chinatown where they are priced much cheaper at 10 for $1. Mark Bittman's blog Bitten recently featured a recipe for Baby Artichokes With Potatoes, Garlic, Olives and Shrimp. Since I had some baby artichokes and shrimp in the refrigerator, the constant what's for dinner question seemed settled. However, not finding any olives or potatoes, I had to make do with what I did have. Here is dinner—a recipe for Baby Artichokes, Fennel, Parsnips, Capers and Shrimp. (This does use one luxury ingredient. I had a corked bottle of 2004 Aubert Ritchie Vineyard Chardonnay which makes for a stupendous cooking wine!)

For 3 to 4 servings:

Weekends afford the time to experiment in the kitchen. After looking long and hard at the bags of sodium alginate and calcium chloride in the cabinet (more anon), I decided to experiment with something that I was more certain I would be able to eat. Accordingly my attention was drawn to one of the smoked duck breasts I had bought during the last expedition to Village Imports / Made In France in Brisbane. The following recipe isn't entirely original, but at this point I'm not certain where I first read it, and there are some changes. This recipe serves two moderately hungry gourmets.

Ingredients

One smoked duck breast
Four eggs
Three tablespoons sour cream
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
One tablespoon minced fresh chives
Three tablespoons chopped shallots
Salad greens
Vinaigrette dressing

Method

1. Peel the skin and fat from the duck breast. Place the skin and fat into a skillet over medium-low heat and render the duck fat until the skin turns into crispy crackling (about 10 minutes). Cut skin crackling into small pieces and set aside. Retain the duck fat.
   
2. Beat eggs with the sour cream, chives, salt and pepper until well mixed and fluffy
   
3. Heat some of the rendered duck fat in a skillet until hot. Add one-half of the shallots and cook for a minute or two, until softened. Add half of the egg mixture and half of the cracklings to the pan and make an omelet. Repeat for the remainder of the shallots, eggs and cracklings.
   
4. Dress the salad greens with the vinaigrette. Split the salad between two plates; thinly slice the duck breast and split between the two plates, arranging on the top of the salad greens. Place an omelet on each plate next to the salad and serve immediately.

One of the vendors at the local Farmer's market had some nice butternut squash last week, so I made the following soup. I elected to not use a recipe that roasts the squash because I wanted to avoid the resulting carmelization which leads to sweeter squash soup.

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 cup diced onion
1/4 cup diced celery
1/4 cup diced carrot
Nutmeg, salt and freshly ground black pepper
About 4 cups chicken stock
One butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cubed (1-inch chunks)

Heat olive oil in large pot, add onion, celery and carrot and cook until onion is translucent. Add squash and stock. Bring to a simmer and cook until squash is tender. Use a blender and puree the soup in batches until it is completely smooth. Return blended soup to pot. Stir and season with nutmeg, salt, and pepper. Serve as is, or get fancy and stir in some mascarpone cheese or crème fraîche as a garnish.

The hardest part about this recipe is peeling the raw squash (hmmm, maybe that's why people roast it). The chicken stock, was made from a Thomas Keller recipe and used chicken feet. which I'm sure made a big difference (it sure made a difference in time)!

Of course, as soon as this was done, Indian Summer arrived here in San Francisco, and barbecuing while drinking chilled rosé wine seemed top of mind instead of eating winter squash soup, but things will get back to normal soon enough.

It gets cold this time of year even in San Francisco. It is true that "cold" here means 15F above freezing, but it's still relatively cold and it still calls for emergency measures like chili, or even better —because it goes well with wine— braised short ribs

I purchased ~2.5 lbs of Prather Ranch short ribs and searched around for a recipe. I ended up adapting Mario Batali's very classic one as follows:

In a Dutch Oven, brown seasoned shortribs in olive oil. Remove to plate, add diced onion, carrot, and celery and brown. Add diced tomatos, red wine, veal stock, oregano, rosemary, and thyme -- scrape up and dissolve frond from bottom of pot. Add reserved meat, bring to boil, cover and keep in a 375 deg oven for two hours, or until meat falls from bone.

Remove meat from pot & reserve. Strain sauce, pressing on vegetables to extract maximum liquid. Degrease sauce, then reduce to concentrate flavors. Thicken with arrowroot.

Serve shortribs finished with sauce and garnished with a gremolata made from parsely, lemon zest, and freshly grated horseradish.

This should be served with a wine big enough to handle the strong flavors. A meal of short ribs with horseradish gremolata is a perfect excuse to break out a big Aussie Shiraz (I used a Marquis Philips Shiraz 9, and also used it for the braising wine).

'Twas good, and I'll try it again soon!

P.S. Mario's recipe specified Brown Chicken Stock instead of Veal Stock, and didn't specify degreasing, reducing, or thickening the sauce, but my Julia Child training kicked in and I couldn't help myself.

Sunday morning breakfast has always been special in my family, but as the gourmet revolution has progressed, the meaning of special has changed a bit.

When my father took over the kitchen on Sundays for the breakfast ritual, we feasted on waffles smothered in butter and Mrs. Butterworth's syrup served with big helpings of bacon or sausage. Believe me, this was a big improvement over Kelloggs cereal with cold milk. But now I am responsible for the weekly ritual and the food world is a much different place.