Sometimes you just need a steak.
Category: Technique
For Christmas eve dinner, we went to a party nearby with dear friends. This was a change from our original plan, but fortunately the original plan called for eight legs of duck confit so we were well prepared to arrive in style. The only hard thing about making confit is remembering that you need to do it at least the day before, preferably two. Weeks ahead is actually better, since the flavor improves over time, but it’s not crucial. Besides timing, the rest is almost as labor-free as cooking gets.
What is it that finally pushes us over the edge, and motivates us to try something new? Even when it’s something we’re pretty sure is easy and know is rewarding, it can be a real effort to begin a new venture. I’m speaking culinarily, but it’s true across all the areas of human endeavor. There’s a resistance–a fear even–that keeps us returning to the things we know. I try to overcome it regularly, and this here forum offers some incentive to mix things up and stretch out beyond the comfort zone, but sometimes there’s a long period of time that elapses before things click and I take on a new project. And there’s still more effort required to incorporate the technique into the rhythms of kitchen routine (I’m looking at you, bread-baking) so that the food in question can enter the regular rotation, truly substituting for store-bought alternatives.
In my erratic but still determined progress to outsource less and less of my food production, lately I’ve been dabbling in making vinegar. I first got serious about it when I visited Brother Victor-Antoine in June to profile him for the magazine (profile at the link). His vinegar is revelatory. Seek it out if you live in the area. He sent me home with a jar of mother (mother = a colony of bacteria and soluble cellulose that forms over time and converts alcohol to acetic acid. Acetic acid = vinegar) and it sat in my cabinet until I bought a bottle of wine that had turned to vinegar. At that same time, the biodynamic fruit CSA I had joined started including apple cider in the weekly deliveries. Faced with two half gallons, I could have frozen one, but opted instead to let it ferment. And thus a bad bottle of wine and a good bottle of cider began my zealous experimentation with homemade vinegar.
A blog is a useful thing for documenting daily matters, among which surely food. But it’s not quite ideal for the sort of ongoing, evolving festival of frugality that comprises the majority of our meals. So this post is a truncated attempt to show how it is that certain leftovers, strategically deployed, can make for a richer repertoire of weeknight dinners with no extra work whatsoever.
I spent some time last Thursday talking to students about the practice of painting, and how after all these years building said practice I have total confidence in it, even if as now I’m on a hiatus from working in the studio. That trust makes for a real absence of stress, since I know that it will be right there when I start to feel the pull to get back to it. It’s a dividend of all the time and effort I’ve invested in working over all of these years. And cooking is the same, in a way; I don’t beat myself up if I’m not really feeling it, and sooner or later I get it back and all is well. The difference is that taking a hiatus is not really an option, so when I’m not in the mood I still have to do it. But diligence does pay off, and sometimes a really good idea just sort of falls out of the sky.
Beef stew was never something I liked much growing up. Nor was pot roast. We didn’t have them all that often, though my Grandmother–a superb cook–liked to make pot roast. Boiled beef just always tasted like boiled beef and not much else, except for soft hunks of carrot and potato. Since returning to carnivory about 6 years ago, I’ve learned a great deal about how meat flavors can be intensified and how stews can be…
There are worse things in the world than roasting a chicken once a week. Of course given my lack of organization and general allergy to schedules, it never works out to be a regular, say, Sunday night thing for us. But we do it often enough, and now that it’s warm the grill can step in to replace the oven. Whichever method you use, it is vitally important to save all the bones, even if you have guests; if they think it’s weird, tell them to get over it. You boil them again, so what’s the problem? Throwing bones away before using them for stock is a crime, plain and simple.
Lately there are lots of meals for which I don’t open wine–it’s expensive to drink all the time and takes a toll physically–but for a roast chicken I almost always pop a friendly, mid-weight red–lately Borgueuils and Chinons have been really doing it for me, but with a few more degrees on the thermometer, this is a meal designed for rosé. Speaking of which, it’s back to utterly gorgeous outside (I’m drinking rosé now) but we went through a pretty chilly spell a few days ago. In response (and lately I’ve been thinking about how much the weather influences my cooking every day), I made sort of summer picnic food but with all of the cold-weather comfort quotient we needed on the evening in question.
Wok Hai (or Wok Hay) is a Cantonese expression that means, roughly, “breath of the wok.” “Hay” is “Chi” in Mandarin, so it’s as much “energy” or “spirit” as “breath,” but the idea is the same: the food has a particular flavor that can only come from quick cooking in a wok. It’s something I’ve known about for a long time, and it’s one of the qualities that has eluded my Chinese cooking for even longer. No matter how good, it never tasted authentic. Until now. See, our gas range in Brooklyn was OK, but not great. And the execrable piece of shit of a hotplate that came with this house, well, let’s never speak of it again. But the new stove–the gleaming, stainless beast that it is–was the missing ingredient. All of the circular cast-iron grates lift out, allowing a wok to sit down low and get very close indeed to the burner. And when the burner in question is 22,000 BTUs, that wok gets obscenely hot. The thin steel becomes a highly conductive membrane bathed in fire, so your food is cooking right in the flames. It’s bad-ass, and it makes the best Chinese food possible.
Since writing about pappa al pomodoro a while back, I’ve been keen on it as an excellent way to eat up otherwise obdurate heels of homemade bread. It’s also well-suited to a brainlessly quick and easy lunch, and highly tweakable. In the case of yesterday’s lunch, it benefited from the homemade prosciutto and smoked chicken stock, two items which I venture to say come awfully close to being essentials. So I sizzled minced ham, garlic,…
Chicken thighs kind of make me sad. Whole legs, I love; they’re big, and classically proportioned, and can be arranged all artfully akimbo on a plate, but thighs by themselves just sort of shrink into unappealing little lumps that are very hard to make beautiful without shredding all of the meat off to make something entirely other. And that has often been a problem, since the closest store only carries (organic, semi-local) thighs. Until now. Today I figured out that if I just treat them like wings, they work just fine; subsumed in sauce they become part of a whole, rather than the featured protein. So this evening, presented with two frozen four-packs of said thighs, I attempted to combine my parallel desires for hot wings and escabeche into one low monthly payment.
To begin, I rolled the thighs in seasoned flour. Not doing this means that the skin pretty much entirely gets stuck to the pan (we are a Teflon™-free household) and further ruins what little aesthetic charm the meat possesses to begin with. I added salt, pepper, herbs, cumin, and smoked paprika to the flour. After they were a goodly brown all over, I added a head’s worth of cauliflower florets to brown as well, and a bit more flour to roux-ify the oil in the skillet. Then I poured in a mixture of tomato paste, sherry, pork stock, balsamic, sherry, and cider vinegars along with a handful of minced garlic and herbs, covered the pan, and let it all simmer low for a while.
