Easy enough

We moved last Tuesday. I’m going to repeat that, because it sounds so unlikely, so inadvisable, that I know you might not believe me. I hardly believe me. But we did. We moved. Brandon is starting a second business, and I’m trying to start a second book, so, you know, la la la, let’s move. We’ve had worse ideas, but I can’t think of them right now.

This is the last picture taken in our old kitchen. Our old kitchen, our old place, our old duplex, where we lived for almost five years, on a noisy street with the nocturnal neighbor who does outdoor home improvement projects by flashlight. I will miss that place, but only a little, and never at night.



I don’t know where this white table is going to live in our new place. Right now, it’s in the living room, looking out of sorts, trying to seem relevant by holding up a vase with a couple of wilting ranunculus. The saddest table in the world. But I love this new-to-us house, even the red carpet and wood paneling downstairs, sort of. I hope we stay here for a long time. The dishwasher is a model called the Quiet Partner. The Quiet Partner! YES.

The kitchen is hardly set up, and I feel like an alien in there, like I’m trying to find my way on a new planet, one with banana-colored formica and a mauve oven and stove. The only thing I’ve cooked so far is spaghetti with braised kale, and then I’ve been microwaving leftovers, which is easy enough, even if you come from outer space. But tomorrow I plan to unpack the blender, and maybe I’ll find the mesh strainer with it, and then I can make parsnip soup. That’s what I want for lunch this week. Parsnip soup, toast and sharp cheddar, and an orange.

This soup is adapted from a parsnip puree that my friend Matthew taught me to make. Matthew and I co-host the podcast Spilled Milk, and recently, when we did an episode on parsnips, he made this puree. We ate it on crostini, which was terrific, but it was so nice on its own that I really wanted to eat it just like that, from the serving bowl, with the serving spoon. Matthew mentioned that with a little thinning, the recipe also makes a good soup, so when I got home, I tried it. There’s barely anything to it: a bag of parsnips, some vegetable stock, a little butter, a little cream, a little salt, a little pass through the mesh strainer. But what you get is something that you, or at least I, can be very pleased with: a perfectly smooth soup in a shade some call Cosmic Latte(!!!), subtle but gutsy, with that sweet vegetal funk and enough fragrance to fill your whole head. The key, I think, is the vegetable stock. Matthew says that the natural sweetness of vegetable stock plays up the natural sweetness of parsnips, and I’m a believer.

Have a good lunch.


Parsnip Soup
Adapted from Spilled Milk and Matthew Amster-Burton

It doesn’t get simpler than this, so be sure you start with fresh, firm parsnips and decent-tasting vegetable stock. Homemade is nice, but honestly, I use Better Than Bouillon No Chicken Base, and the results are great.

3 to 3 ½ lb. parsnips
2 quarts vegetable stock
2 Tbsp. unsalted butter, diced

Water or additional stock, as needed
½ cup heavy cream
Salt, to taste

Peel the parsnips, trim and discard the ends, and cut into ½-inch pieces. Put in a large pot, and add the vegetable stock. Bring to a simmer, and cook, uncovered, until the parsnips can be easily pierced with a fork, about 20 to 25 minutes.

Set a fine-mesh strainer over another large pot. Working in batches, puree the parsnips and stock in a blender, tossing in a couple of pieces of butter with each batch. (And remember that hot liquids expand, so never fill the blender more than a third.) This amount of stock should yield a somewhat thick soup, and you will likely need to add a little additional water or stock as you blend, until the soup reaches your desired consistency. As you finish pureeing each batch, pour the soup through the strainer into the pot, stirring and scraping as needed with a rubber spatula to push the puree through the mesh.

When the soup is entirely pureed, stir in the cream. Rewarm gently over low heat. Taste for salt, and serve hot.

Yield: I can’t remember exactly, but I would guess 6 servings.

It's called the Pantry

Well. World events don’t seem to get any less troubling, so we might as well get back to business. Yes?

Last week, I said that I wanted to tell you about a new project, and I still do. It’s a project that grows out of Delancey, but it’s a whole new thing: a business headed up by two of our friends, Brandi Henderson and Olaiya Land. Brandon is technically the third partner, but this baby really belongs to Brandi and Olaiya. It’s called the Pantry at Delancey, and we’re all very excited about it. Excited. Maybe that word isn’t strong enough. Elated? Too strong? Thrilled? Let’s go with thrilled. We are thrilled.



Maybe you already know Brandi.



She’s the executive pastry chef at Delancey. She’s been with us since December of 2009, when she moved up from San Francisco to take the job. Those of you who have been to the restaurant will recognize Brandi as the woman behind the Meyer lemon budino, the cider-poached apple with ginger streusel, the rhubarb shortcake with mascarpone cream, and the cannoli with blood orange and candied pistachios. I daydream about that cannoli sometimes. She also makes the ricotta that we use at Delancey, writes a blog called I made that!, and in her meager spare time, likes to cure meat. (That’s pancetta up there, in the top picture.) In general, Brandi likes making things, and that’s why we like her. And handily, she’s trained as an architect, which also makes her good at building things. She’s currently the construction foreman for the space that will soon be the Pantry. She’s also in need of a massage.

You know Olaiya, too. I’ve written about her a lot, because she’s taught me so much about cooking.



Brandon met Olaiya in 2006, shortly after he moved to Seattle, when they worked together at Boat Street Cafe and Kitchen. The first time we ate dinner at her place, she made baked eggs with caramelized onions, and as you can see, I still remember it. A month or two later, she braised a pork shoulder in Coca Cola and served it to us with a pile of warm corn tortillas, and even though we were helping her move and had to sit on the floor to eat, I still remember that, too. In the years since, Olaiya has run her own catering company and taught cooking classes at Sur La Table, PCC, and Delancey. I think it’s fair to say that she’s a gifted teacher. She makes it look like an afternoon stroll. I’ve gotten to sit in on her classes a few times, and if you’ve ever taken a cooking class from me and felt that you learned something, it’s not because of anything I did: it’s because Olaiya taught me how to teach.



We’ve cooked a lot together, eaten a lot together, and worked a lot together. Actually, I wrote a fair piece of my first book while sitting next to her in a coffee shop near her apartment. And I wrote the bulk of the proposal for my next book the same way. I feel lucky to get to work beside her, both independently and collaboratively. And really, when you get down to it, that’s what the Pantry means to me: making things, and making our way, with our friends.

I guess I should tell you what the Pantry is? Forgot about that.



The Pantry is a community kitchen. It’s a space for hands-on cooking classes, family-style dinners, private events, and locally sourced catering. It’s located directly behind Delancey, on Alonzo Avenue NW, with a garden entrance designed by Fresh Digs. (There’s only mud and fence posts right now, but not for long.) There’ll be a 16-foot farm table, a cooking camp for kids in the summertime, and a small retail area stocked with independent food magazines, Weck canning jars, Delancey cookie dough and pizza dough, all our best stuff. Brandi and Olaiya already have a number of classes in development: a pizza-making class with Brandon, butchering and meat-curing with Russ Flint of Rainshadow Meats, a food writing course with Francis Lam, a City Chickens class with the good people of Stokesberry Farm, classes with Olaiya, classes with Brandi, a class or two with me - more than I can easily list here. And eventually, the Pantry will also make a lot of products for Delancey, products that we currently have to source elsewhere, like fresh mozzarella, pepperoni, bacon, pancetta, and salame. The projected opening date is sometime in late spring. Cross your fingers.



I took these shots a few Saturday mornings ago. They’re outtakes - or, at least, I think they’re going to be outtakes - from the Pantry’s website, which our friend Sam is building. (More pages to come.) We were sitting there that morning, Brandi and Olaiya and Brandon and Sam and I, at the communal table in the dining room at Delancey, with cameras and film and blood orange peels everywhere, and Olaiya said something that I’m going to paraphrase badly, but maybe the spirit will still come through. She said something like, Look at this! Can you believe we get to do this? Each of us doing what we like to do, each of us doing what we do best, all of us working together?

I’m happy for our friends, and happy for that.

Find a way

I had wanted to tell you on Friday about a new project we’re working on.
(It is NOT a baby.) (I know the way you think.)



But then there was an earthquake, and a tsunami, and I think it’s fair to say that there are more important things to talk about right now. I found out tonight that the mother of one of our friends lost her home, and that her village has been destroyed. It’s hard to talk, or think, about anything else. (Though I very much like Ruth Reichl’s thoughtful post on the topic.) I hope that, wherever you are, you and your loved ones are safe. And I hope that those of us who can will find a way to help. The Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, whatever we can do.

They wake me up

Lately we’ve had a lot of friends passing through, lots of changes of sheets on the guest bed. Sam has been around a bit. Ben, our friend who moved here a couple of years ago but was quickly wooed away by work, is doing a short-term gig nearby and comes around on his days off. And Ryan, who also lived here briefly and was wooed away, is flying in tonight for a visit. The bourbon in the bottle is two fingers lower than it was last week, and the apartment feels nice, lived-in. Most days, days when we don’t have house guests, I spend long stretches of time alone, working. I like the quiet. I don’t need a lot of company. But then someone comes into town, or maybe only across town, with a pint of Coffee Heath Bar Crunch and the first season of Mad Men, and we squeeze on the couch with the dog who growls because we’ve stolen his spot, and we all know to ignore him because we’ve heard it before, we’ve done this before, many times, and then I realize how much I’ve missed my friends. They wake me up from wherever I’ve been.


This was the scene on Sunday morning, and that’s Ben’s leg there, and the edge of his napkin, after what I believe can only be called a biscuit feed. Ben’s wife Bonnie is out of frame, and Brandon, I believe, had retired to the couch by this point. You will note that there are no biscuits in sight, and that is because we ate them. But you know what biscuits look like. You don’t need a picture.

I don’t think there’s anything I like cooking quite as much as breakfast for house guests. Because if they’re sleeping in our house, we’re obviously fond of them, and who better to cook for than the people you’re fond of? Especially at the start of the day, when everyone is still a little soft, before any crap gets in the way. You can hear them coming up the stairs from the guest room-slash-dungeon in the basement, trying to be quiet, and then the shower turns on, and while it runs, you can sneak out of bed and into the kitchen and grind the coffee, boil the water, get started. You might even remember that you bought some very foxy tangelos, real supermodels, stems and leaves still attached, and decide to put them in a bowl on the table. Tangelos go with biscuits. Biscuits go with raspberry jam and a giant vat of honey.



The biscuits on the table on Sunday were Marion Cunningham’s, of course, because that’s how I’m doing things this year. This woman is teaching me so much! Like that cream biscuits are virtually impossible to mess up. Impossible! Even if you, like me, become convinced that you messed up the recipe and want to throw away the dough without even baking it and your husband and house guests have to talk you down by promising to eat said biscuits, no matter how bad they are. Which they aren’t. They’re outstanding.

Cunningham says that these biscuits belong in your permanent recipe file, and she is right about that. I’ve tried a lot of biscuit recipes, and this is my new go-to, easy. It is not for those seeking a light breakfast - the amount of cream and butter is, shall we say, festive - but it feels light going down, if that makes any difference. And it’s an epic biscuit: perfectly salted, tender-crumbed, so flaky that you can pull it apart in fine, lacy sheets.

I can say all of this, and I’m actually pretty sure I didn’t even make them quite right. I don’t think I used enough cream - the amount called for is a range - and so my dough felt tough and heavy, and by the time I started to worry, I had already worked it too much to go back and add more cream. The biscuits looked puny going into the oven. Very sad, flat, unpromising pucks. But then! In the heat of the oven, they puffed to about three times their original height, and maybe even four. Yeow. What I’m trying to say is, you can’t screw this up. No one can screw this up. And first thing in the morning, that - that, and the company of a few favorite faces - might be the most a person can hope for.


Cream Biscuits
Adapted from The Breakfast Book, by Marion Cunningham

These are terrific with jam or, of course, honey.

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. table salt
1 Tbsp. baking powder
2 tsp. sugar
1 to 1 ½ cups heavy cream
5 Tbsp. unsalted butter, melted

Preheat the oven to 425°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. (If you don’t have parchment, leave it as it is, ungreased. The parchment is just for easy cleanup.)

Combine the flour, salt, baking powder, and sugar in a mixing bowl, and stir with a fork to blend. Slowly add 1 cup of the cream, stirring. Gather the dough together gently: when it holds together and feels tender, it’s ready to knead. If it feels shaggy and pieces are dry, slowly add enough cream to make the dough hold together.

Place the dough on a lightly floured board and knead for 1 minute. (You don’t want to overwork it.) Pat the dough into a square about ½ inch thick. Cut into 12 squares. Brush each with melted butter so that all sides are coated. Place the biscuits 2 inches apart on the baking sheet. Bake for about 15 minutes, or until lightly browned. Serve hot.

Yield: 12 biscuits

This one does something interesting

In the days since we last spoke, I’ve flown to Oklahoma and back. I’ve introduced my mother to 24. I’ve made Cafe Lago meatballs with my mother, braised a pan of endive and serrano ham with my mother, and put away a couple of Negronis, also with my mother. I’ve baked a coffee cake using a tin of baking powder from my mother’s cabinet that, you know, it turns out, expired in 2006. I’ve thrown away a coffee cake. I’ve filed and paid our 2010 income taxes! I’ve had a toothache! I’ve sent off my book proposal! I’m using a lot of exclamation points!

And because of this second-to-last item, because you’ve been such cheerful, cheering, much-needed companions in Book Proposal Land, I baked you an apple crumble. Then I ate about a quarter of it - chewing only on the left side of my mouth, of course, because I’m almost sure I’m having a root canal on the right side later this week.



This recipe comes from Nigel Slater, whose latest book, Tender, Volume II: A Cook’s Guide to the Fruit Garden, has been living on my kitchen table since Christmas. We’ve been eating breakfast together. I drink my coffee; Nigel gets worked up about apples:

A baked apple, its skin split, the top half rising like a beret, is best achieved with an acidic variety. The list includes Golden Noble, Kentish Fillbasket, Emneth Early, Monarch, Charlotte, Newton Wonder, Lord Derby and the Carlisle and Keswick Codlins. Most of these I have met at some point in my cooking life; others, such as Edward VII and the Eynsham Dumpling, I have never seen on sale, let alone poured custard over. Then, of course, there are the seedlings: Bramley, Dumelow’s and Pott’s. If you are in Cornwall with nothing much to do on an October afternoon, you might like to go in search of the Colloggett Pippin. You will be in with a good chance if you pronounce it Clogget and are within sight of the Tamar. The Cornish have a habit of shortening place names the way children shorten those of their best friends.

I love him. I also like his apple crumble quite a bit. The world does not need another apple crumble recipe, as he notes, but this one does something interesting, and it’s worth noting. After you toss the apple pieces with sugar and lemon juice, you don’t just chuck them into the baking dish. You put them in a hot skillet with some butter, and you leave them alone there for a while, longer than you’d think, until they’re golden in patches and glazed in their own caramelized juices. It reminds me of the first step in making a tarte Tatin, only you’re not letting them go nearly that far. Just far enough to make them smell like some fantastic hybrid of toffee and hot cider. WAIT. Think about that. Toffee and hot cider, as one. Does that exist? World, make this happen for me.



So yes, you take those lightly caramelized apples, and you put them in your baking dish, and then comes the topping and the baking. The usual. My finished crumble would not win a beauty pageant, or even bring home the sash for third runner-up, but that’s not the point of crumbles, is it? Did I miss something? It looks like a crumble. But it certainly tastes nice.



In fact, the resemblance to tarte Tatin doesn’t end with the method. There’s a little tarte Tatin to the flavor, too, the way the soft, sticky, long-cooked apples taste under all that rubble of topping, all that butter. I’m going to hang onto this method. I might think about using more apples next time - once baked, the apple-to-topping ratio is about 1:1, and I prefer 2:1 - but that’s just fussing.


Nigel Slater’s Apple Crumble
Adapted from Tender, Volume II: A Cook’s Guide to the Fruit Garden

For my crumble, I wanted a mixture of apples: some that would fall apart, and some that would hold their shape. But all I could find today was the latter, so that’s what I went with. I used two Braeburns and two Arkansas Blacks. The amount of sugar called for in the filling worked nicely with my apples, but if you’re using sweeter varieties, you might want to cut back. Also, it’s probably a good idea to taste the apples after they’ve cooked in the skillet, before you bake them; that way, you can add more lemon or sugar, if needed. I get the sense that Mr. Slater wants us to use our intuition.

Also, about sugar: the original recipe calls for golden caster sugar, which is a challenge to find here. I don’t think it’s a dealbreaker to use standard granulated sugar instead. Or you could substitute a mixture of superfine sugar (also known as baker’s sugar) and brown sugar, maybe? I had some unrefined sugar in the pantry, so I used that, and it worked fine.

One last thing: the original is written only in grams, but I’ve added volume measurements, so you can do it either way. But if you’ve got a scale, pull it out. Much less fiddly than using measuring cups and spoons.

For the filling:
4 medium (850 grams) apples
Half a lemon
1/3 cup (75 grams) sugar
2 Tbsp. (30 grams) unsalted butter

For the topping:
7 Tbsp. (95 grams) cold unsalted butter
1 ¼ cup (150 grams) all-purpose flour
3 ½ Tbsp. (45 grams) sugar

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Peel and core the apples, cut them into rough 1-inch chunks, and toss them with the juice of the lemon half and the sugar.

Warm a skillet over medium-high heat. Add the butter, and when it stops foaming, dump in the apples and their juices. Nudge the apples around so that they lie in a single layer, and then leave them alone for a while. The juices will thicken to a syrup that coats the fruit, and the fruit should get golden in patches. Stir gently once or twice, cooking until the apples have a little color. (This may take longer than you’d expect.) They should smell sensational.

Turn the apples and any caramelly juices out of the skillet into a baking dish. (I used an oval gratin dish that measures about 10 inches long and 7 inches wide, though you would be fine with a dish that’s even a little smaller.) If there are any sticky bits left in the skillet, add a squeeze of lemon juice and/or a splash of water, and stir until they dissolve. Add to the apples.

To make the topping, put the butter and the flour in a medium bowl, and rub the butter into the flour with your fingertips until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. (Alternatively, you could do this in a food processor.) Stir in the sugar. Drizzle in a tablespoon of water, and shake the bowl back and forth until some of the mixture sticks together in gravel-sized lumps. This way, you get some parts of the topping that are sandy and others that are gravelly or pebbly. Distribute the topping evenly over the apples. Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until pale golden. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Yield: 4 servings

By popular demand

Good people! Here it is, by popular demand: my new friend Aperol. Your new friend Aperol. Our soon-to-be old friend Aperol, a most cooperative portrait subject.




I first tasted Aperol last November, when Brandon and I spent the weekend after Thanksgiving at a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn. We were wandering around that Saturday, I think, content to have no plans and no restaurant to run, and late in the afternoon, we wound up at Marlow & Sons for some oysters and a plate of soppressata. There was something called an Aperol Spritzer on the cocktail menu, and though I knew that Aperol is bitter and I had yet to meet a bitter drink I liked, I went temporarily insane and ordered it. It came in a Collins glass with a straw, just Aperol and Muscadet and some soda, and I thought, oh well, how bad could it be. It was cold and fizzy, and there was bitterness there, but it was a measured bitterness, very fragrant and pleasantly sweet. I was surprised by how much I liked it. The flavor of the Aperol reminded me of what it’s like to eat an orange peel, the way the bitter flavor doesn’t feel like an off-note or an accident, the way it’s inseparable from the flavor of the thing itself. I wished there were more of it, and I was sorry when it was over.

So I came home and started ordering every drink I saw that contained the word Aperol. I also started feeling like I need a vacation in Palm Springs, because this is how dark it was in my kitchen at noon today. NOON.

Don’t worry: I made that drink only to photograph it. I wouldn’t drink a cocktail at noon. Or maybe I would. Maybe I did! Ooh la.

I have to say this before we go on: I am not a spirits writer. If you want to delve into the topic of booze, the person to see is Mr. Jason Wilson, spirits columnist for the Washington Post. But in the past couple of months, I’ve read up a little on Aperol, and I’ve learned that what I drank in Brooklyn was essentially a classic Aperol Spritz. Like Campari and Cynar, Aperol belongs to the family of Italian bitters, or amari, commonly consumed before a meal and said to stimulate the appetite. Nearly every region of Italy has its own bitter spirit, and Aperol comes from Padua, in the Veneto. It’s a vivid shade of reddish orange and very low in alcohol - 11 percent, less than most wines - and it gets its flavor from some thirty herbs and spices and fruits, the most prominent among them being orange, rhubarb, and gentian root, whatever that is. It smells a little, just a little, like medicine - though less so than Campari, if you’re familiar with that. It’s also less bitter than Campari, sweeter and more floral, and if you have it on hand, you’re never far from a good drink.

That drink up there, in the second photograph, is the one I mentioned in my post last week, made from Aperol, white wine, and grapefruit juice. It’s a pretty color, isn’t it? I think the proper word for that color is salmon, and there was a time, a time happily long ago, when my mother had a lipstick just like it. The name of this drink is the Pamplemousse (French for grapefruit), and I had it at the Walrus and the Carpenter, one of my favorite restaurants in town. (I should note that one of its owners, Renee Erickson, is a friend and mentor of ours, but I would love the place even if I didn’t know her from a fence post.) I did a little investigative work and got the recipe, and with permission, I pass it along to you. It’s very light and immensely refreshing, and the Aperol works quietly, underlining the bitterness of the grapefruit at the same time that it sweetens it. It’s going to make your February go a lot faster.


Pamplemousse
Adapted from the Walrus and the Carpenter

At home, I serve this drink in a Champagne coupe, but at the Walrus and the Carpenter, they put it in a martini glass. Frankly, I like it so much that I could probably be convinced to drink it out of a rusty bucket, so serve it in whatever you like.

Also, consider the amount of Aperol below a starting point. I like to use a little more. And if you have sparkling wine on hand, try substituting it for the white wine - a great variation.

½ oz. Aperol
2 oz. freshly squeezed grapefruit juice, pulp strained out and discarded
2 oz. dry white wine

Fill a tall glass about halfway with ice cubes. Add the Aperol, juice, and wine, and stir to blend. Strain into glass.

Yield: 1 drink

January 30

Greetings from Book Proposal Land.



I lied. That isn’t really what Book Proposal Land looks like. Not in the winter, anyway.



(Only in the summer, from a ferry.)

It’s quiet here. The nightlife isn’t much to write home about.

Socks and slippers, mostly.

There’s not a lot of sensible eating here in Book Proposal Land. Almost no vegetables.

Just pancakes and coffee. Cereal. Girl Talk. Some John Mellencamp, when I have a sweet tooth. But last night, my friend Sam called, and then there was yellow curry and rice.




And a cocktail with Aperol, white wine, and grapefruit juice. Okay, two cocktails with Aperol, white wine, and grapefruit juice.

I’m going back in. See you in a few.