She knows

I first met Lecia a handful of years ago, and I can’t remember how. We saw each other around, and then one year, maybe 2011, she took a leap and invited us to her family’s New Year’s Day party. We stood on the deck and talked, and the sunlight was warm enough that I didn’t wear a coat. I guess that was the start of something, but for me, our friendship got its footing while I was pregnant and she, a former nurse, cheerfully withstood my cross-examinations about epidurals and other hot topics of the day, and it has grown in the months and years since, over many meals that June and I have eaten at her table. Lecia is the best home cook I know, and also the most thoughtful. Every few weeks, if not more often, she’ll text to ask if we’d like to come over for dinner, always on a night when she knows Brandon is working and we would otherwise be home on our own. Always, I say yes.

June ate lamb for the first time at Lecia’s, in a stew with cannellini beans, and it’s where she first had halibut, too. Lecia has cooked mussels for us, and linguine with clams, and another spaghetti that I keep meaning to recreate at home, with Spanish canned tuna, capers, and lemon zest. She also makes a deceptively simple thing, this broiled zucchini with basil, that I could eat every day. Lecia is the person who pointed me toward this total winner from Jerusalem, and she also gave me my first taste of this dark, sticky ginger cake with fresh cranberries, which is so good, so so good, that as I type tonight, I want to bash my forehead on the keyboard because I forgot, whywhywhyyyyy, to make it last Thanksgiving, when fresh cranberries were everywhere. But, most important for today’s purposes, Lecia is the reason why I can tell you about Yotam Ottolenghi’s Ultimate Winter Couscous.

Whenever I say the name of this recipe aloud, I hear it in my head in a monster-truck-rally-announcer voice - ULTIMATE! WINTER! COUSCOUS! IT'S AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME! But I’m going to stick with it, because it’s accurate. This couscous is ultimate. It’s spectacular, absolutely spectacular, golden and warming and bright, with layers of spice and a subtle heat that makes everything thrum. The technique is simple. First, you roast vegetables with olive oil and spices: turmeric (attention! it stains!), ginger, paprika, red pepper flakes, cinnamon sticks, star anise, and bay. Then you add water, chickpeas, and dried apricots. While it all braises and melds, you steam some couscous with saffron and butter. Then, just before serving, you stir harissa and preserved lemon into the vegetables, which are by now fudgy and soft, and you spoon it up, and you are glad.

Like a lot of us, I am easily put off by long lists of ingredients. There are exceptions, but most days, I would look at this recipe, sigh, turn the page, and never look back. I would have probably never eaten it, had Lecia not made it for me first. But! As it turns out, a good portion of the ingredients list is composed of spices, which require no prep work. The overall labor is minimal. I cut up the vegetables and measured out the spices one afternoon while June was napping, and the next evening, all I had to do was turn on the oven, stir it up in a baking dish, and set the timer. I even forgot to add the water with the chickpeas and apricots, and it was still spectacular. Keep that in mind when you make it: yours will look juicier, and will in fact be juicier, than mine in the photograph above. Also, you should put some cilantro on it. Details, blah blah blah.

Thank you, Lecia.

P.S. This is great, and it made me so sad.
P.P.S. Ashley lives around the corner from Delancey and has an office down the street, and a while back, she gave me a tube of her cookie mix. This afternoon I finally made it, and: Ashley. You are a genius. It’s perfect.


The Ultimate Winter Couscous
Adapted very slightly from Plenty, by Yotam Ottolenghi

A few introductory side notes: for the stock, I used Better Than Bouillon, and for dried apricots, I like Trader Joe’s “California Slab Apricots.” For chickpeas, I used canned. For harissa, I stole some from the Delancey walk-in, wa ha haaaa, but you can make your own, or you can buy it. For preserved lemons, we make tons of them at Delancey – preserved Meyer lemons, actually! The best – and use them on pizzas and in starters, and if you’ve got time, hey, you can make some too. If not, they’re usually available at shops selling Mediterrean or Middle Eastern ingredients, and I’ll bet Whole Foods has them, too.

And really, I know: this ingredients list is long - long enough that, in my experience, it can be easy to get lost and forget to add something. I’ve tried to make it more foolproof here by dividing it up according to what is added when. Maybe it’ll help?

First:
2 medium carrots, peeled and cut into ¾-inch chunks
2 medium parsnips, peeled and cut into ¾-inch chunks
8 shallots, peeled
5 tablespoons olive oil, divided
2 cinnamon sticks
4 star anise
3 bay leaves
½ teaspoon ground ginger
¼ teaspoon ground turmeric
¼ teaspoon paprika
¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes
Kosher salt

Then:
2 ½ cups peeled, cubed pumpkin or butternut squash (from a 10-ounce / 285-gram squash)

Then:
½ cup (about 70 grams) dried apricots, roughly chopped
1 cup (about 200 grams) chickpeas, canned or freshly cooked
1 ½ cups (350 ml) water or chickpea cooking liquid

Couscous:
1 cup (200 grams) couscous
A large pinch of saffron
1 cup (240 ml) boiling vegetable or chicken stock
3 tablespoons (40 grams) unsalted butter, diced

Last:
1-2 tablespoons harissa
1 ounce (28 grams) preserved lemon or preserved Meyer lemon peel, finely chopped
Cilantro leaves

Preheat the oven to 375°F, and set a rack in the middle position. Put the carrots, parsnips, and shallots in a large ovenproof dish (a 9x13-inch is perfect). Add 4 tablespoons of the olive oil, and toss to coat. Add the spices, cinnamon sticks through pepper flakes, as well as ¾ teaspoon kosher salt. Mix well. Bake for 15 minutes. Then add the pumpkin or squash, and stir to mix. Return to the oven, and continue cooking for about 35 minutes more, by which time the vegetables should have softened while retaining a bite. Now, add the dried apricots, chickpeas, and water or chickpea cooking liquid. Stir to mix, then continue to bake for 10 minutes more, or until hot.

About 15 minutes before the vegetables are ready, put the couscous in a large heatproof bowl with the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil, the saffron, and ½ teaspoon kosher salt. Pour the boiling stock over the couscous, and immediately cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a tight-fitting lid. Set aside for 10 minutes. Then add the butter, and fluff with a fork until the butter melts in. Cover again, and leave somewhere warm.

Just before serving, take the vegetables out of the oven, and stir the harissa and preserved lemon. Taste for salt.

Serve the vegetables over the couscous, with plenty of cilantro leaves on top.

Yield: 4 good-sized servings

Et voila

Yesterday morning, on my way into the restaurant, I stopped at the studio where I'm taking a pottery class and found that a little slab mug I made for June was out of the kiln and ready. I had glazed it in what was supposed to be a matte turquoise but came out more like forest green, and the handle was crooked, because I had rushed it. But in my hand, the glaze felt as smooth as a washed silk button-down I remember my mom wearing in the eighties, so I decided to get over it. I surprised June with it when I got home in the afternoon, and she thanked me with this gasp-and-swoon thing she picked up somewhere, very Lucille Ball, and then insisted that we celebrate with hot cocoa. Okaaaaay.

I wrote about hot chocolate here a long time ago - over seven years ago, now that I look it up: before Delancey, Essex, or June, and back when we still lived in that duplex on 8th Avenue Northwest with the white enamel table in the kitchen window and the neighbor who liked to do yard work by flashlight - and I still make that version often. If you're up for chopping chocolate, it's the best hot chocolate you can make. But if you're not up for chopping chocolate, maybe because it's the end of the workday and someone is standing on a chair at the counter, chanting "Make hot chockit, I wanna make hot chockit" like she thinks the words themselves will manifest the stuff, then you should make hot cocoa instead, and this hot cocoa is the best hot cocoa you can make.

I cannot take any credit for it, because I learned the recipe from my friend and Spilled Milk co-host Matthew. It is Matthew's Hot Cocoa.

It has only three ingredients - milk, cocoa, and sugar - and barely requires a measuring spoon. It's my favorite kind of recipe, in that once you've made it, you'll probably never need to look at the recipe again. It will be Your Hot Cocoa. If you are a person of class, you can serve it from an elegant teapot with teacups and everyone will think you are a wizard, and if you're not, you can serve it from the measuring cup you mixed it in and pour it into a homemade mug and seriously, get on it, before somebody "loves" the mug too hard and breaks it.

Et voilà.

Happy Saturday.

Matthew's Hot Cocoa

Matthew says that this formula makes one serving, but I find that it's also a nice amount for one adult and one young child. Be sure to use a high-fat, natural (not Dutch-processed) cocoa powder, like Penzey’s or Scharffen-Berger.

2 tablespoons natural cocoa powder
2 tablespoons sugar
8 ounces whole milk, heated to just bubbling on the stove or in the microwave

Whisk together the cocoa powder and sugar in a mug, if serving one, or, if serving two, just do this in the measuring cup that you measured the milk in. Add a splash of the hot milk, and continue whisking until a thick paste forms. Continue adding milk and whisking until the cocoa is rich and well-blended. Serve immediately.

Yield: 1 serving, or two moderate servings

That itch

I woke up this morning with that itchy feeling I get when I've gone too long without writing. I have a writer friend who once told me that she didn't feel right if she wasn't writing regularly, that she woke up each morning needing to write, and until very recently, I didn't really believe her, because it never felt that straightforward to me. (I also wanted, uh, just a little bit, to reach out and strangle her with my bare hands; she made writing sound so easy.) I never felt that kind of imperative to be a writer - or, really, to be anything in particular. Writing sneaked up on me. But now that I've been at it for a while, I sometimes get a sense, just the faintest nudge of a sense, of what my friend might have meant. I'm best when I'm writing, even if I sit down at my desk without a thing to say, with only that itch to go on.

I am coming off a spectacular run of cooking failures. I curdled a batch of chocolate pudding - and then fed it to my kid anyway, because two-year-olds don't care if their "chockit put-TING!" has the texture of hummus. I also made a braised zucchini side-dish recipe that involved a whole stick of butter and was totally, totally not worth that stick of butter. (We smashed it to a paste, however, and used it as pasta sauce; that was tasty.) One morning, I drank half a cup of coffee too many and, while flailing around to my Guy Picciotto playlist on Spotify, made an obscure type of French cookie that, as it turns out, should remain obscure. I also made a tomato-rice soup that promised a flavor akin to stuffed tomatoes, and frankly, you know, next time, I'll just make the stuffed tomatoes. Meanwhile, the dishwasher quietly died, and one side of the sink stopped draining well, and then, late one night, I rinsed the sludge from a one-pound can of salt-cured anchovies into that side of the sink, and my status as a genius was finally, once and for all, secured!

On the upside, Matthew and I taped a fennel episode of Spilled Milk, and in doing so, I was reminded of how good, and how easy, a shaved fennel salad is. I've made it twice since our taping. And on Wednesday night, less than 48 hours after Luisa posted it, I made Melissa Clark's braised beans with bacon and wine, which is as good as Luisa promised. (I didn't soak my beans, FYI.) June loves it, though I'm not sure if her opinion will mean anything to you anymore, now that I've told you about the chocolate pudding.

It often occurs to me that nothing is more satisfying than a well-made pot of beans. Except I should add that the other night, while the pot of beans was burbling away, doing its thing, I watched this wise snippet from Frances McDormand, and that was also satisfying in its way. And then I got out the sewing machine that Brandon bought me for Christmas - which I just learned how to use on Monday, thanks to a lesson with Keli of Drygoods Design - and sewed two doll-sized pillows and one mouse-sized reversible blanket from some fabric scraps. As my friend Andrea aptly observed, my quarter-life crisis is coming along well. I love Andrea.

Ah! I feel better already.

Have a great weekend, everybody. I'll see you next week.