Monday, December 13, 2010

New Years' Eve

I'm finally doing it: shelling out for a prix-fixe dinner on December 31. I've never tried Avec, and after their run-in with bad luck, this year seemed like the perfect time to do it.

Good news: skatewing's on the menu.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Essay Contest

Anthony Bourdain's new book, Medium Raw, is being published in paperback, and he's decided to publish a short essay by an unpublished author in it, as a sort of way to pay forward the surprise success he enjoyed ten years ago.

My submission can be found here: The Deer and La Lengua. Read it, vote for it if so moved, and please above all leave an honest comment.

Matthew

Friday, July 30, 2010

In Memory of an Artisan

I only met Daniel once, about six weeks ago. I had gone down to Prairie Fruits Farm for the weekend for reasons that now seem cloudy, although I think the idea had been to talk to Leslie and her husband Wes about getting involved with the Chicago farmer's markets. Almost as soon as I arrived, I was told of a new vendor next to them at the market, a young man who'd followed his passion for bean-to-bar chocolate to starting his own business - Flatlander Chocolate. They were, believe me, absolutely incredible.

He also made caramels, and I'd tried to buy a salted one from him when I was there. Unfortunately, I'd waited too long, and he'd sold out. "Next week," he assured me with a smile. Of course, I couldn't make it to the market the next week, but I'd hoped to go down to the farm again, sometime this summer, and get one then.

Daniel was 24, and had been a graduate student in computer science (or maybe it was mathematics) at UIUC when he'd started playing around in the kitchen with cocoa nibs. Eventually, the hobby became an all-consuming passion, and he left school to pursue his chocolate-making full-time. When I was a the market, his zeal bubbled out from under his awning. He was a very charismatic young man, tall and thin, with a hipster edge. I both related to him and admired him for taking the leap and pursuing his passion full-time.

Daniel died Tuesday morning, an apparent suicide. The news out of Urbana is sketchy at best, but I have to admit, I find it hard to understand how someone who took such glee in his work could also be desperate enough to kill himself. But, of course, I only met him once, briefly, and our conversation never turned to matters of the heart or mind.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Caliente Doug's



I had an epic day of sexploration yesterday, by which I mean I ate a lot of really good food. The first stop was the always disappointing Hot Doug's. Seriously, could there be a place - anywhere on the planet - more overrated? Above is a picture of the entranceway, a picture that took two hours to get. That's right, two hours of standing in line to get a couple decent sausages.

I ordered the Keira Knightley and the infamous (and rather heroic) foie gras and Sauternes duck sausage (with truffle oil sauce). Those are pictured below, along with the pommes frites en gras de canard, i.e. duck fat fries. I'll let you in on a little secret: Pied de Cochon's fries were cooked in only 50% duck fat and theirs were a lot better. I'll let you in on another little secret: Pdc's fries are only about as good as Nightwood's.



This sausage, however, was a work of art. It was a rib-eye sausage with black garlic aïoli and a double cream Brie. Not worth the wait, but definitely worth eating.



Following a few hours' cooling off in front of HGTV (I was the only guy, that's my excuse), we headed to get some dinner. Xoco was our destination, a place that I have been eager to try since last summer, despite a slightly blah review from a trusted source. Those in the know will be aware that Xoco is Rick Bayless' sandwich shop, serving tortas and soups for lunch and dinner, but also serving coffee, churros, and the most amazing hot chocolate on this side of the Atlantic. It's at Illinois and Clark, right next to Frontera Grill, and words and images really don't do it justice. Just go there.



The tortas we shared were a Yucatecan-style pork offering, called cochinita pibil, with the ubiquitous pickled onions on the side and a fiery (but sooooo delicoius) roasted habanero salso. This one is on the left in the picture. The other was a daily special of shrimp and bacalao (it being Friday), and it was simply good. The bacalao hadn't been oversoaked, neither had it (crucially) been undersoaked. Just two very well-conceived tortas. The chocolate, their Barcelona offering, was just bittersweet chocolate heaven.

All in all, an amazing day. Now I get to get up at 4:30 tomorrow and cook my own amazing food. Cheers.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Happy Food Independence Day!




Here's a picture of an organic-egg-in-the-whole-wheat-basket. (The bread is from the Great Harvest in Evanston. So good!)

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Pasta con pomodoro



What an exciting time of the year! I love the summer solstice. The excitement of the coming growing season reaches its fever pitch right now, at least for me, just as the days reach their longest. Today, I took perhaps the last chance I'll have for a while to spend a few hours in the kitchen making dinner. I've been working on homemade pasta for a while, and it finally came out the way I wanted it.

Fresh pasta's a wonder to make, super simple: a cup of flour, two eggs, mix into a dough and then knead for ten minutes until it becomes like silk. Let it rest for ten, and then roll it thin (I mean THIN). Cut it into strips, then cook in salted boiling water for a few minutes. The pasta comes out delicate, with just enough bite. For this, i cut very wide strips, more than an inch. In the future, I'd probably cut it a little narrower, but the wide noodles worked well for this sauce.

Speaking of sauce, it couldn't have been easier. Into a hot pan, I put a few tablespoons of olive oil, chili flakes, salt and three cloves of garlic, sliced thinly. I cooked that for a bit, but before the garlic browned, I added a can of San Marzano tomatoes. For me, the flavor of that tomato was really key for this dish, so while Romas or Beefsteaks, or even fresh tomatoes, would work, they wouldn't work as well. I seeded them, too. The sauce simmered while I made the pasta, probably about half an hour. The tomatoes softened enough that they could be broken up with the side of a spoon, and then I finished the sauce with torn fresh basil.



Finally, because pasta with tomato sauce, as delicious as it may be, does not a full meal make, I made tonno e fagioli. Using canned cannellini beans, I made a dressing with about three tablespoons of very good extra virgin olive oil and a tablespoon of lemon juice, two minced cloves of garlic, salt, and freshly ground pepper. I mixed in the can of beans, and then added a can of tuna. After resting in the fridge for the flavors to meld, it made a perfect accompaniment, although it could have used some parsley (if for nothing else than color) and honestly the lemon juice would maybe have been best replaced with red wine vinegar.



So that was the meal.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Black Bean Chili



Usually, I'm not one to care about the presentation of my food. Well, that's not exactly true, but I usually go for a rustic esthetic, which reflects the flavors of my food: bold dishes, even when they are light (like risotto), the food could be easily found at a restaurant called Peasant Food.

But, Gordon Ramsay made a soup on a show a few weeks ago and it gave me an idea for tonight's dinner. One of my favorite dishes to make, because of its simplicity and almost boundless deliciousness, is black beans. Slowly cooked with onions, a large amount of cumin and an even larger amount of chili powder, I often render fat from bacon to soften the onions in and add it all to the pot. It creates a savory and aromatic dish worthy of a cattle ranch in southern Texas. Seeing the Ramsay bean soup, however, made me wonder: could I turn that bean dish into a delicate soup?

The first step was to cook the beans. Since I wanted a lighter flavor than usual, I softened the onions (about one and a half small yellow onions) in olive oil (instead of the rendered fat of salted pork belly). I added some beans, not a lot as you can see from the finished soup picture below, and then covered them with sufficient water to end with a fairly thick soup. I'm not sure how much of either, but it was probably two and a half cups or three of water, and maybe three handfuls of black beans. They were dry is all I know. I brought the mixture to the boil, dropped it to a light simmer, and then added about a tablespoon of cumin, four teaspoons of chili powder, and a bay leaf, then simmered until the beans were done, which took about the second half of the Mexico-France World Cup match.

When it was done, the beans were soft without any hard bits inside, I spooned out maybe two tablespoons of the beans, trying to make sure they were whole and their skins hadn't ruptured. Then, I pureed the rest, with cooking liquid. I added some salt (since this is a posh dish, I went with Kilauea sea salt, the black one with a deep flavor), and drizzled in high quality olive oil until the mixture was smooth and looked satiny (probably a tablespoon or so). And then I put it back in the pot to await dinner. Below, you can see a picture of the soup base. I should note, I took out the bay leaf before pureeing.




So, on to the garnish. I wanted a contrast of flavors between the soup and the garnish, but not something absurd like strawberries and cream or even fried plantains (although that would be great as a garnish!). Instead, I wanted some flavors that I would normally include in beans and rice, but decided not to include in the soup base to maintain its lightness. I fried some pancetta, and crumbled it, then carefully diced a large shallot (I think the pieces of shallot should be smaller than the black beans, but you don't want a mince). Finally, I mixed in a little lime juice, salt and pepper to taste. Below, you can see the garnish in its little bowl.



However, since this whole preparation, which I've been making for years, was inspired by my mom's vegetarian black bean chili, and that is always served with cornbread, the dish wasn't finished. Anyone who's eaten at a top restaurant knows that there has to be some ridiculous, crunchy accompaniment to a soup, one which is supposed to add a flavor note of nostalgia, bringing the whole dish back to its humble roots, but usually just ends up being a rather flavorless piece of an otherwise brilliant soup. So, I made crispy cornmeal pancakes, which were awesome when I tried them on their own, but probably weren't nearly as awesome with the soup as I wanted them to be. It was fairly simple: I poured hot water over cornmeal to hydrate it, then mixed in salt, some honey, melted butter, then turned it out on a hot griddle and cooked them until they were browned on both sides. It was a brilliant piece of a...oh, whatever. Here's a picture.



And it did taste almost exactly like the cornbread my mom used to make without taking any real amount of cornmeal or time.


To serve, I reheated the soup base, ladled it into a bowl, then topped it with a little mound of the garnish, as you can see above, it came out quite beautiful. Unfortunately, it tasted horrible. (Psych!) Honestly, this is probably the most balanced dish I've made to date. The soup base itself had a rich texture, with a strong foretaste of black beans, accented with cumin and a small taste of chilies. The olive oil left a nice buttery feel on the palate, and there was a lingering bitterness, too. All in all, fabulous!

There isn't much that could improve it, either (well, save the cornbread). Some hot pepper would have been nice in the garnish, and it would also have been nice to have more garnish than I made (read: save more beans before pureeing), but it was still an excellent meal. Of course, it would be easy to make vegetarian (or even vegan), since the only meat in the entire dish was the pancetta in the garnish, and a garnish of onion, pepper, cilantro (or epazote!), and beans would go just as well. The lime juice really brightened it up, too, although I'd probably leave that out on a day colder than about 75.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Caldo de Res Revisited

One of the few joys of unemployment (entering its third month now) is that I now have the time to spend 20 hours on one dish. This is the sort of luxury usually left for those either too old or too busy (read: restaurant cooks) to fully enjoy it.

Here is the stock, minutes after adding the mire-poix, cilantro, jalapeño, and tomato paste (but after the meat bone had simmered for about 10 hours).





That wonderful mess of fresh vegetables, with a noticeable red hue (well, maybe not that noticeable), would become (some four hours later) this masterpiece of Mexican simplicity.





My favorite soup, made from scratch.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Onion Soup



Wow, only a month and a day since my last post! There's been a lot of cooking going on, and I have some exciting stuff going on right now, but that'll have to wait for a later post. Hopefully, though, I will have more pics like this to share

So, the point of this post is to go over one of my absolute favorite dishes: the bistro classic French onion soup. The standard preparation is to caramelize onions in butter, then add beef stock and perhaps a little red wine and cook. Occasionally, in American recipes you'll find the soup thickened with flour, but the classic dish has a thin broth given body by the gelatin in the stock. (A well-made stock, using bones, is one of the most amazing things I know of to cook with, but that is a completely different post for another day.)

However, years ago, when my cooking skills were nascent at best, I read a brief mention in a Cook's Illustrated recipe of a French chef once preparing onion soup for the test kitchen where the only ingredients were onions, salt, pepper, and water. He spent hours building up a fond on the bottom of the pan, then deglazing with water, and repeating until the onions had softened to a dark color. The simplicity of the preparation really appeal to me, and I've made it a couple times. Let me tell you: the results are spectacular. The depth of flavor gives nothing away, but it is a time-consuming dish and requires - REQUIRES - a thick-bottomed pan: cast iron, copper, All-Clad. If you don't have a pan that strains the wrist when lifting it, don't even bother attempting this.

Because the key to this dish is low heat and patience.

Today, I experimented with a few things: pancetta, white wine deglaze, red wine deglaze, and tomato paste (aw yeah!). But I want to stress that what follows can be done using only water and onions, with some butter, and therefore can be an incredibly hearty and entirely vegetarian winter soup. Never mind that it's June 5th. With that, let's get on with it.

The first step, done last night, was to slice three pounds of onions. Then, I cut lardons from about a fifth of a pound of pancetta, rendered their fat, then removed them from the pot and added the onions. Below is a picture of the pancetta browning, with the onions in a bowl behind.



The onions were added, and softened over medium-low heat until a fond had formed. This takes a while, since the onions have to soften and their moisture cook out before the Maillard reaction can occur and develop that beautiful fond. Fond, in case you don't know, refers to the brown bits that form on the bottom of a pan. Le fond, in French, refers to stock, though, so don't act like you know anything now.



Once the first fond formed, I deglazed with six ounces of white wine. Deglazing just means pouring a liquid into the pan and boiling it to dissolve the fond in the liquid. At this point, I refilled the glass with six ounces of water, set it next to the pot, and waited until a fond formed again. I then added just enough water to deglaze the pot and a generous pinch of salt. In all, the six ounces of water allowed for eight deglazings. That took about two hours, but since my pan is a thick-bottomed cast iron masterpiece, it took very little attention from me. I'd check the pan about every five minutes and when the fond looked like the one below, I'd deglaze it.



Just before the final deglazing, I added about two teaspoons of roughly cracked black pepper and a bay leaf. Then, I deglazed with six ounces of red wine. This, as with the white wine before, is completely optional, although both wines do add a lot of flavor and some body.



I boiled off the alcohol, then added enough water to make it look like onion soup along with a tablespoon of tomato paste (aw yeah!), brought it to the simmer, and let it go for about half an hour.



The harsh flavor mellowed and came together beautifully and the broth gained body during the simmer, but my final tasting (or what I was hoping would be my final tasting) told me that the sweetness of the onions was way too strong and the salt had done as much as it was going to do. So, I squeezed a little lemon juice in to cut that sweetness, then let it simmer for five more minutes so the soup didn't taste like I'd just squeezed lemon juice into it.

Top it off with a broiled crouton with Gruyère on top and there it is: three-hour, four ingredient (five, six, seven, whatever, they're optional) onion soup.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Skating down the Wing

It is May, which means the return of the Stanley Cup playoffs, the greatest* annual sporting competition. This post, however, is not about that. Rather, it is about overcoming my fears and discovering something truly magical.

I have always been afraid to cook seafood.

This may seem strange. Rarely has a preparation intimidated me. My first mayonnaise was made, without breaking, only minutes after reading a recipe. I dove headfirst into breadmaking, only to discover that it is not nearly so hard as a Quebecer's head. And how many complicated curries did I merely laugh at before attempting to butcher in many painful ways?

Seafood, however, has always been an exception. Living in the Midwest, it is hard to get fresh fish, so I decided to only indulge when on the coasts. Since it was a treat, I left it for professionals to prepare it, which eventually turned into a slight hesitation to prepare it myself, and this state of affairs eventually (and quickly) spiraled into a full blown apprehension towards cooking fish and other seafood. The only thing I have prepared in recent years is ceviche, and only because it is both mind-blowingly simple and stupidly delicious.

For whatever reason, on Sunday, I jumped. On a heart's fancy, I talked my mom into trying out a fishmonger in Lake Bluff, and the fishmonger suggested I try skate wing. To make a long story short, the skate wing was very thinly filleted, so I pan fried it for just a few minutes on each side, made a pan sauce with white wine and parsley, and served it for dinner. The fish was so undercooked, it may as well have been sushi.

What?

I had always heard that fish hated overcooking. The number one rule is to err on the side of undercooking. And this was a very thin filet, cooked for not a very short amount of time. It made absolutely no sense.

The fishmonger had given us three of the skate wings. Two had been prepared. Monday morning, I went online and did some research and found out something rather surprising: Skate wing, as well as monkfish, like to be cooked for a long time. In fact, the longer the better, within reason.

Cue second attempt: same pan, more butter, longer cooking time. Much longer. Probably twice as long. The same pan sauce, although I reduced it down a lot more (lemon juice, white wine, reduced until thick, a little salt and lots of black pepper, chopped parsley and monter au beurre) than on Sunday.

And the results?

A delicate fish with a rather strange but very delicious flesh. Plus, I learned two lessons:

1) I don't know how to cook everything, so there is no reason to avoid the internet. It's an amazing tool and chances are good that someone else in the English (or French) world has already written about the very thing I'm ignorant on.

2) There is no reason to be afraid of seafood.


*Feel free to argue, but I honestly don't think the closest competitor - the Champions League - holds a candle to 31 best-of-seven series in two months' time.

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Today's Madeleine

When last in Paris, my mom made a lunch of spaghetti with an egg cracked into the sauce, turning it a bright orange. I remember eating it in our small apartment on Rue Bourg-Tibourg and being as happy as a child. That same week, we went to Les Mariages Frères, a tea salon in Paris. The scent upon entering was like breathing in something more than air. It was cold that week, and damp. There is something special about Paris when it is cold.

There is always something special about Paris.

Montreal, for all her glories, is not a moveable feast.



It is amazing what thoughts a simple bowl of pasta can stir up.