When I asked Miles if he had any special projects in mind to work on over his summer vacation, he told me “I want to help you in the kitchen when you cook.”
Yesterday we picked out a knife and cutting board that will be exclusively his.
The board is an OXO with rubber edges and feet to keep it from slipping. The knife is a füri five inch santoku with a silicone grip handle.
Today, before dinner, we reviewed the rules for using the knife:
The knife always sits on the board until it’s needed.
Do not wave or point with the knife.
Work slowly.
Keep your fingers tucked out of the way.
After some practice of simply picking up and holding the knife with the proper grip, I set him to work cutting up a cucmber for our dinner:
I realized that he’s tall enough that he should be standing to work with the knife; it will also give him more control.
He’s thrilled to have helped. That may change tomorrow when I make him flute mushroom caps, tournee potatoes, and prepare a cup of brunoise.
You may remember the Cocteau Twins, the second best band1 on the 4AD label. What I loved about them — apart from their moody, evocative music — was the voice of their singer, Elizabeth Fraser. She made what were essentially nonsense lyrics sound like outpourings from the depths of her soul.
Despite her contributions to the band’s 9 albums and 12 EPs during the course of the 15-year career, Fraser may be best known for her wordless vocalising on “Papua New Guinea” by The Future Sound of London, and her contribution to Massive Attack’s “Teardrop,” a song you’ve definitely heard2.
I bring all this up because I caught this 2007 performance of “Teardrop” on the “Live from Abbey Road” series on the Sundance Channel:
Ten years on, she can still hit every note. And I love the note-perfect performance by the band, including the sound of a crackling vinyl record.
1 The best 4AD band? The Pixies, of course.
2 The intro preceding the vocal is the theme music for “House.”
Still overloaded on vegetables from last week’s market trip, I pared down the purchases today.
Boston lettuce, red chard, garlic scapes (the curly things), country sourdough loaf, asparagus, first cherries of the season, heirloom cherry tomatoes (tomatoes will be a weekly purchase until the end of their growing season), strawberries (ditto), smoked pork chops, and ground beef.
She Who Must be obeyed demanded another asparagus and pecorino salad; He Who Must Not be Ignored insists on tacos for dinner soon, which explains the ground beef. The garlic scapes will be minced and added to various salads and tossed with the chard and some sugar snap peas.
If the cherries and strawberries are nature’s candy (I overheard some hipster doofus telling that to his three-year-old), then the bread and pork chops are nature’s crack, and I’m hooked.
It’s “Dab,” by composer John Oswald (anagramatically credited to “Alien Chasm Jock”), from his legendary album plunderphonic — the greatest record you’ll never hear. It was never commercially released, but it was distributed to radio stations in 1989. Despite it’s obscurity, representatives acting for Jackson demanded that all copies be destroyed. It seems they didn’t take issue with Oswald’s Burroughs-ian cutup approach to the music, but rather took offense at the CD cover (which you can see here). I think they were more perturbed by the reworked lyrical assertion “my butt is love,” but I’ll never be able to prove it.
The irony in the claims of unauthorized use is rich; the original Jackson track samples a Eugene Ormandy recording of a Beethoven symphony. Yet the Oswald version lives on (here, for example) — may he get his extra five minutes of fame from the death of his tormentor.
My usual explanation of the difference between cooking and baking is a scientific one: Cooking uses methods, baking uses formulas.
But that’s too glib. It’s accurate in the sense that baking is much more sensitive to the amounts of ingredients — and the sequence in which they are added — than cooking is. Cook for long enough, however, and you find yourself able to start recipes based on fundamental combinations that pervade both cooking and baking. You learn that a roux starts with 3 parts flour and 2 parts fat. A pound cake has equal proportions of butter, sugar, eggs, and flour. A vinaigrette is 3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar. Cookie dough is 1 part sugar, 2 parts fat, and 3 parts flour.
What you’re doing is working with ratios. In The Making of a Chef, his excellent book about his experience as a student at the Culinary Institute of America, author Michael Ruhlman describes an interview with chef/administrator Uwe Hestnar:
He… turns to me with two sheets of paper. They contain a chart or grid covering a page and a half. This, he says, is all one truly needs. Here are the fundamentals of the culinary arts — all of Escoffier, Larousse, Câreme, as well as Julia Child, James Beard, The Joy of Cooking, and The Food Network — in their entirety, distilled to a page and a half. “I vould like to zell this for fifty dollars,” he says, “but no one vould buy.”
… I examine the sheets — a list of twenty-six items and their ratios. Along the top run the numbers 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, and 16. Along the side are rows divided by base products such as aspic, pâte à choux, sabayon, court boullion ordinaire. A primitive culinary spreadsheet.
Ruhlman, with Hestnar’s approval, expanded the basic spreadsheet and turned it into his latest book, Ratio (subtitled The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking).
The graphic on the front cover and the two pages following the table of contents are all you need, if you are to believe Ruhlman’s assertion that “cooking with ratios will unchain you from recipes and set you free.” All of the ratios are there, organized onto basic categories: doughs, batters, stocks and sauces, farçir, fat-based sauces, and custards. The realtiy is less simple, since the order of addition, temperature, and behavior of the components will determine the success of a ratio-based recipe.
The explanations account for the remaining 230 pages of the book. Ruhlman explains a basic recipe — pie dough, mayonnaise, sausage — then spins out a series of variations on the theme. The best example of his style and the structure of the book is the Doughs and Batters Ratio Chart, once again available for purchase.
I have a very good memory, but I know it’s not possible to keep all of these ratios in my head. I uploaded the chart to my iPhone, and will follow up with a retyped version of the ratios list from the front matter.
The true value of Ratio is how it has inspired me to experiment in the kitchen. I’ve already tossed out any remaining bottled salad dressing, preferring to whisk together my own (3 oil : 1 vinegar) a la minute. Family and friends will have to suffer through endless iterations of 1-2-3 cookies and 3-2-1 pie dough, but will ultimately benefit from my improved technique.
In the summer months I try to cook some meals that incorporate more vegetables and less meat, preferably meals made with the local market produce. I had eggs from a nearby farm, chorizo from a newly-opened Portuguese market, and a whole lot of Yukon Gold potatoes. A recipe in the recent Cook’s Illustrated promised a perfect tortilla española that required considerably less olive oil than other versions I’d prepared, so it was time to give it a try.
I started with a link of chorizo, about a pound and a half of potatoes, four scallions, one small onion, olive oil, and eight eggs (look at their lovely blue-gray color).
I cut the chorizo into medium dice, finely sliced the scallions and onions, and quartered the potatoes before reducing them to a pile of 1/8 inch thick slices on a mandoline. I mixed the onions, potatoes, and half a teaspoon of salt and tossed them with four tablespoons of olive oil.
I cooked the chorizo in a tablespoon of oil until it was browned.
I added the potato/onion/oil mixture and cooked it covered over medium-low heat, stirring every five minutes until the potatoes were tender, about 25 minutes.
While the potatoes cooked, I beat together the eggs and added the scallions and another half teaspoon of salt.
I turned the cooked potatoes into the egg mixture and folded everything together until combined.
I increased the heat to medium-high, added one more teaspoon of olive oil, then returned the egg mixture to the pan, folding for about half a minute while the egg began to solidify. I reduced the heat to medium, covered the pan, and continued to cook, shaking the pan every half minute to keep everything from sticking.
To finish cooking the top I inverted a plate over the pan, and, holding on for dear life, inverted the pan/plate assembly, depositing the tortilla onto the plate cooked side up. I managed to do this without depositing the contents of the pan all over the stovetop, unlike previous flipping disasters.
After two more minutes, the tortilla was done.
I let it cool for fifteen minutes, then served it with a cherry tomato salad and some ciabatta.
It was dense, creamy, eggy — but not oily or heavy — a perfect summer meal. I saved the remaining half to serve at room temperature on a hot day — if we ever have one again.
I didn’t include one of the vendors in my original post about the Union Square Farmer’s Market because I don’t consider them a seasonal addition, but rather a permanent fixture in our neighborhood. I’m talking about Taza Chocolate.
I first discovered this company at the Paper and Chocolate weekend held in a converted warehouse space a few blocks from home, in Somerville’s Boynton Yards neighborhood. Just before Valentine’s Day, letterpress printer Albertine Press and Taza opened their doors for an open house weekend. The operation at Albertine will be the subject of a future post, but Taza showed us the complete bean-to-bar process they used to make their chocolate.
The Taza site goes into much more detail, but their chocolate is stone-ground from single-bean batches imported from the Dominican Republic, sweetened with Brazilian sugar and flavored with Costa Rican vanilla. Here’s the final product they sell, as displayed at this week’s market:
The bags are whole roasted cacao beans, chocolate-covered cacao nibs, and discs of Mexican chocolate (traditional cinnamon, vanilla, salted almond, and guajillo chili). And, of course, chocolate bars:
They’re all dark chocolate, increasing in intensity from 60% to 70% to 80%, and they’re all made from single-origin beans. The bars are perfect for eating, but I’d never consider baking with them, their flavor subtleties would be lost. For a while, Taza made a perfect garnish, the now-discontinued Shakey:
I sprinkle this stuff on top of everything, because chocolate – like bacon – makes eveything better. I’ve taken to grating Taza bars and refilling the container, even though they no longer make 65% chocolate.
Taza had connected with many of the area specialty shops. I’ve found one of their displays at places as disparate as the New Deal Fish Market and Hub Comics. (You know it must be good chocolate of the local Comic Book Guy likes it.) Don’t take my word for it, go to a local shop (or Taza’s online store) and try some for yourself.
If I knew as a kid that someday I would live a stone’s throw away from a chocolate factory, I think my little head would have exploded. Now the challenge is rationing myself to keep my waistline from exploding.
Another morning spent at the farmer’s market. I’m already back in the habit of pacing myself: not buying something merely because it looks good, but only if I’ll cook it within the week.
Sugar snap peas, fresh cut flowers for She Who Must Be Obeyed, eggs and bacon from Stillman’s farm, more mozzarella, peach jam and banana nut bread from Cook’s Orchard, raspberries and heirloom cherry tomatoes from Kimball Fruit farm.
Half of the ciabatta and most of the mozzarella are already gone, made into sandwiches with prosciutto and garlic oil. The eggs and bacon are for tomorrow’s breakfast, the tomoatoes are for a salad tonight, and the raspberries will join some fresh strawberries for a repeat of last week’s berry gratin.
“Autism. It’s all over the media. The conversation is focused on causation and cure. It’s time to change the conversation toward hope, support, respect and understanding. The facts are not sexy. So, we got someone who is to explain them.”
Using a hot babe to direct attention to autism issues is a stroke of genius. The folks at Rethinking Autism are to be commended for coming up with this brilliant idea. Be sure to visit their concise, informative web site, and exercise some self control: read the other pages before you hit the videos page to see the other three spots.
Leeann is Leeann Tweeden, who has made a career out of being a Professional Hot Babe (PHB). But as I watched the video posted here, part of me was hoping the tag line would be “… and I have autism.”
A PHB with autism? That would be awesome.
(Thanks to Colin at Draw Code Fly for sending me the RA link.)
