Carrot Gnocchi with sage and mushroom brown-butter sauce

It’s a bad habit, but I’ve got a lot of books on the go right now. I finally finished one, Steal the Menu: A Memoir of Forty Years in Food, by Raymond Sokolov. The thought makes me cringe. That is, to steal your way into a place and to sneak away with a menu. It was advice given to Sokolov early in his career, and one he took to heart, to help make of his life the material for his columns. 

 

The book was an easy ready, with maybe a first quarter easy enough to skip since it’s devoted more to his upbringing and less to his professional career. I especially liked his broad timeline of food going from what he refers to as medieval French, a focus on the table where everything is brought at once; to Russian, a focus on the platter and the new skill of concocting discrete courses; to the modern, and an intense focus on the plate. You could read this as a focus on the group narrowing down to a celebration of the individual. The one perfect plate, for that one perfect person.

 

Coming back after a week away, with the temperature starting to dip and the leaves just beginning to change, the last thing I want is fussy. I’m home and I want to celebrate the return by trying to cook the feeling I get coming back: I want warm, filling comfort food. Perfect doesn’t need to mean sophisticated or challenging, perfect can be just the opposite, simple, humble and nurturing. 

 

Roast chicken is a popular go-to. It means an easy lunch and a soup on day two. But I wanted something a bit different this time. And I wanted something a little faster. I’d been gone, and didn’t want to spend more time hovering over a stove than I needed to (and of course I wanted her happy I was back, so had to do something to impress). 

 

We settled on gnocchi. Rather than use potatoes as the base, we took advantage of a surplus of cheaply bought carrots, and topped the dish with a sage and mushroom brown-butter sauce. Quick to assemble, the meal still has a lot of rich, filing flavours, and the woodsy smell of the cooking mushrooms nicely fill a kitchen.

 

Take two pounds of carrots and boil them until nice and soft. Once they’ve cooled, squash them until they are nicely pureed. Leave them aside until they cool. In another bowl, mix ½ cup ricotta, 2 tablespoons of parmesan, 4 egg yolks, ½ cup white flour and 2 tablespoons semolina flour. Add the carrots along with 1 teaspoon of nutmeg. At this point, we found the consistency still too wet, so we added another few tablespoons of white flour. Salt

 

Working carefully with two spoons, make teaspoon-sized quenelles. Place them on a lightly floured baking sheet, then stash the whole thing in the fridge to set for an hour or more.

 

 

 

When you work up enough energy to get up from the couch, bring a pot of water to boil and gently drop in the gnocchi. Check on them while their cooking. They are dense and will sink to the bottom. You don’t want to have them sticking to bottom of the pot. They are ready once the gnocchi rise to the surface of the water. Rather than use strainer, I pulled them out individually using a slotted spoon, careful not to have the gnocchi lose their shape. Some of the cooking water was reserved in case it’d be needed when adding the sage butter. I opted not to use the reserved water, in the end, since it was orange from the carrots and I thought the carrot flavor would be overpowering as a result. Use your best judgment.

 

As the water is boiling, start on the sauce. Melt a stick of butter along with a handful or two of mushrooms (I used shitake) and some garlic, salt and pepper. A glug of white wine was added to plump up the mushrooms, in this case, and then six or seven sage leaves were torn up and added to the mix. Once the smell is nicely filling the kitchen, add the gnocchi and stir until the sauce has covered everything.

 

Serve your special someone, briefly consider your place in the Sokolov’s culinary timeline, and then enjoy. You’re home

 

Fried Capers and Anchovy Bucatini

Rujira won’t let me buy a mortar and pestle, and yet I keep stumbling on recipes that scream “pound me!” Case in point was this past Saturday. (I swear I’m not purposefully looking for the recipes to make a case.) I drove back from Toronto that same morning and we needed to find something easy, quick and painless for dinner after an exhausting, rainy six-hour drive. That and we only had two more episodes to finish season 2 of Homeland. We needed food, and closure, and we needed it fast.

I stumbled across a recipe for fried capers and anchovy spaghetti on Food and Wine and it seemed right up our alley. Just the right amount of salty. A few tweaks and a happy accident later, we were golden.

 

Our first tweak was to switch noodles from spaghetti to bucatini. We haven’t tried making this pasta at home yet, and I’m not sure how it’d taste fresh. The reason I’m really liking it lately is that it has an enjoyable density to it when you bite down on the dry store-bought stuff. It’s basically spaghetti’s bigger brother.

 

In a flat-bottomed skillet heat 1/3 cup of olive oil until it’s shimmering. Fry about ½ cup of capers, stirring, until they start to shrivel and go brown. This took about 5 minutes. Once there, remove the capers from the heat. Using the same oil, I quickly cooked some diced green onions and about a cup of finely sliced mushrooms. I turned off the heat at this point until I caught up with the other stuff.

Start your pasta now, portioning out enough for four hungry people. 

 

Meanwhile, and if you had a mortar this’d be easier, mix and mash together six anchovy fillets, two garlic cloves, and 1 tablespoon of lemon zest. Mix in another 1/3 cup of olive oil, 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, red-pepper flakes to taste, and ½ cup of finely chopped parsley.

 

Drain the cooked pasta and continue cooking it for a few minutes in the skillet (which you’ve now turned back on to a low-to-medium heat). Add the anchovy paste mix and then the capers. Continue stirring till the pasta is fully coated.

 

While cooking, at this point I felt everything looked a bit too dry. I mistakenly splashed in some red-wine vinegar instead of the olive oil I thought I’d grabbed. Panicking, I proceeded to toss in about a tablespoon of Italian-seasoned breadcrumbs which I fried till the bread turned crispy as it coated the pasta. I’m not sure why I thought this would offset the taste of too much vinegar, but the crispiness of the crumbs actually complemented the taste of the anchovies and capers really well, and so I say, go for it, even with the vinegar. As for Homeland, I’d say stop with season 1 while you’re still ahead.

Shrimp roll and Pimm's cup

Truthfully, if it’s not published in the “New Yorker,” I probably read less non-fiction than is good for me. The volume of good-for-me reading tends to trend downward the older I get and the further I am from school, quite frankly. I do enjoy a memoir, however, but I’m often wondering about the justification for writing one. Is it just to chronical the falling into and out of love, an addiction, some discovery or loss of faith, or a family tragedy?

 

Elissa Altman wrote “Poor Man’s Feast” and subtitled it, “A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking.” And so I thought, no mystery here! I dug into it, though, and was confused from the get-go. One chapter starts with, ‘Every lady should carry a hanky in her purse,’ Gaga, my mother’s mother, once told me when I was four.”

 

When I was four? The book has a lot of this type of thing casually slipped in. The type of thing that once noticed makes you wonder how truthful or accurate any of the rest of the document really is. It’s told from a very present first person point of view, with minimal reported dialogue. Very quickly, the memoir is about the humbling of a native New Yorker, how she falls into love with the rural, out of love with a city, and in love with simple food over the fuss and bustle of her youth. As a love story, I can see why she would fall for the serene, doting object of her affection, but Alissa’s own voice comes across as less comical and more cutting, in many cases, and you wonder why people would have the patience for her during her slow pilgrim’s progress.

 

Of course, in the end, the author did win my patience and reading the book itself was hardly a labor. It was the work of a day or two, a few stolen, pleasurable hours, and the recipes were a nice counterpoint to the narrative body of the text. They didn’t, in all cases, connect obviously to the chapter that preceded, but they do follow a progression of their own, as they move towards the simpler, and the simpler.

 

Montreal’s knee-deep in a swelteringly humid end-of-August. The kind of weather where you sweat from standing up. Not much cooking gets done these days, save for the simple, and the simpler the better. Last night we took a slice out of “Bon Appetit” and made some lobster-roll inspired shrimp rolls. (Too hot to fuss with a lobster.) Dinner was ready in minutes, and roll in one hand, Pimm’s cup cocktail in the other, we were on the couch working our way through Season 2 of “Homeland” before the sun was down.

 

To get to this happy point, take about a pound of peeled, deveined shrimp and cook them for about two minutes in salted, boiling water. Splash them with cold water to cool them down, but be sparing you don’t want to waterlog them and want to keep them nice and sweet and juicy. Salt them, and then forget about the shrimp for a little bit.

 

Whisk together, 1 large celery stalk, finely chopped, with 3 thinly sliced green onions. Add ¼ mayonnaise (I used Hellman’s), 1 tablespoon chopped dill, 1 tablespoon of lemon juice, 1 teaspoon of prepared horseradish, 1 teaspoon of red wine vinegar, ½ teaspoon of paprika, and pepper.

 

Chop the shrimp into bite-sized bits and fold them into the mayonnaise mix. I added a bit more mayo at this point. I might have added a bit too much dill and the whole affair was looking too green.

Meanwhile, butter and toast some hotdog buns in a frying pan. The recipe makes four generous rolls, and our eyes were bigger than our mouths so I didn’t halve it. We only managed one apiece. But we have leftovers for tonight.

 

Here’s a toast to keeping things simple. 

 



Roast Chicken and Greek Salad Tart

We live at the heart of one of Montreal’s snobbier restaurant districts. Pied de Cochon is closer than the nearest grocery store. Our home suits us perfectly, and we have no complaints, but it’s never quite felt like a neighbourhood. What we get in snobbish niche we lose in variety. Most of the restaurants of the restaurants are of a type—French—and they tend towards a need for reservations. We’re missing the accessible, good quality local place you can head out to at a moment’s notice, when the fridge is empty, inspiration doesn’t hit, or you forget to turn on the timer and burn your supper. 

As much as I stand by it, my opening statement does reveal my own snobbishness. It’s that there’s a lot of a certain calibre of a certain type of restaurant here, the kind I want to eat at (the kind I want to eat at but can’t always afford), and that they tend towards French. It’s not that there aren’t others, just none that we’ve clicked with. Truthfully, we’re in the heart of bring-your-own-wine land, and we’ve got no lack of choice. It's just that there’s a big gap between the good places and the mediocre.  

We finally stopped at one of the local Greek options late last week. We won’t be going back, but we took our leftovers with us and nothing went to waste. It was just too close to what we could buy at the store, and we’d been seated in a tight patio section so raucous it made conversation difficult. It left me craving the taste and vibrancy of a good greek salad, lemon and chicken brochettes. 

You can’t get away from tomatoes this time of year. They’re often the first thing seen, if not peaches, when you walk into the bigger grocery stores, and I’ve been obsessing over them. 

I love a roast chicken, too. I did our three-pounder with an onion stuffed in the cavity along with garlic and a few sprigs of thyme. I rubbed the bird with butter, salt and peppered it and tucked some more garlic and chopped thyme under the skin. When I took it out midway to baste with its own juices, I added some thinly sliced lemons to the top of the thing to keep it moist. It turned out well, but chicken really just cooks itself, with a nice hint of the lemon. 

 

 

The salad was a bit more involved, I’ll admit it, but not that hard (mostly since Rujira’s in charge of the bread and crusts in our division of labor). I have a recipe section on my Flipboard news aggregator, and it draws pretty randomly from a few blogs. One of the ones that pops up regularly is How Sweet It Is, and it’s often pretty great for ideas. A recent post was for a salt and pepper heirloom tomato tart with whipped feta (http://www.howsweeteats.com/2014/08/salt-and-pepper-heirloom-tart-with-whipped-feta/). 

I figured I could take this and move it a step closer to Greek salad land with little trouble. 

For the crust, pulse 2 cups of all-purpose, 1 tablespoon of sugar and 1 teaspoon of salt until combined. In another bowl whisk a large egg, 1 teaspoon of vinegar and 1/4 cup of ice water. Add 3.4 cups of cold unsalted butter to the food processor and keep pulsing until you’re left with coarse crumbs. Pour the liquid mix over the flour and keep on pulsing until the dough comes together. Take it out, wrap it in plastic and refrigerate for half an hour.  

Preheat the oven at 400 and take the dough out of the fridge. Roll it out until it fits your pan. Press it down and poke holes in the crust with a fork. Bake for about 20-25 minutes, until golden. Ours shrunk quite a bit, so the sides weren’t as high as I’d like, so don’t trim it too aggressively. 

Let the crust cool before assembling the salad.

The cheese spread was about 1/3 cup of softened cream cheese and about the same of feta, crumbled. I added this and a splash of olive oil and whipped it in the food processor. You spread this with a spoon and your fingers onto the pie crust. 

Adding to this base, you build up as high as you’d like with thinly sliced tomato, cucumber, red onions and black olives. I used a mandolin for everything but the olives, and then topped it all with some fresh basil and my Joe Beef Country Salt Blend. A drizzle of good balsamic and olive oil finishes it off. As usual, there was way to much to eat. 

 

 

The salad kept for a tasty breakfast the next morning, but best to invite friends over and just finish it all right then and there. 

 

Stuffed Zucchini

My daughter’s approaching four and we made meatballs together once. She still talks about it, and it’ll become a staple recipe. If the sauce is ready, the balls themselves are a fun, easy thing to do with a kid who doesn’t mind getting her hands dirty. In contrast, I don’t have many memories of cooking as a family.

 

We had a reunion this weekend and on the drive home to Montreal, I found myself thinking about the recipes that’d get handed down generation to generation. As the matriarchs aged, group dinners, Thanksgiving and Christmas aside, have trended towards buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken shared by each (somewhat) nuclear unit. Each of these units gathered with the mass of extended family but clustered around their respective (jealously guarded) buckets. This weekend was Swiss Chalet quarter chicken dinners.

 

It worked, there was less cleanup, and no real headaches.

 

Restaurants were rare when I was young. But cooking wasn’t a job shouldered evenly and it was generally viewed as a chore, so I guess that (and space) explain a slip towards takeout when we can get away with it now.

 

When I consider my daughter, I wonder which meals she’ll grow to love, and which may evolve into traditions. I suspect I won’t have much say in the matter. My best guess is that the dish has to be easy enough to be executed quickly by a novice cook, or divided simply into stages favoring breaks and an opportunity to enjoy the company while preparing it.

 

For myself, back from a hectic week, I was looking forward to cooking. Possible traditions weren’t top on my list when I scoured the fridge and weighed options. But something easy, something fast, and something that could be broken in stages while chatting over a drink most definitely were.

 

Rujira had never really seen, or deigned to notice, a full-grown zucchini before. We still had a couple from our recent market foray. I’m reminded of goldfish or snakes and how my father convinced me they’d keep growing and growing and growing until they filled whatever aquarium they happened to live in. These zucchini had continued expanding in the crisper the week I was away.   

 

We figured stuffed zucchini were the way to go.

 

First I prepared a no-fuss tomato sauce. This one is baked. The flavors are strong, and you can use it as a base to build up from for other things if you want to add more to it. I take a can of whole tomatoes, tip it into a lasagna dish, add 5 or 6 whole, peeled, garlic cloves, salt and pepper, a tablespoon of butter, and whichever spices you prefer. Pulp the tomatoes with your hands. In our case, we added some crushed chili and dried oregano. Bake it for 40-ish minutes at 425. Stir it once half-way through. At the end it should have a jam-like texture. Crush the garlic and roughly stir it all together using a potato masher. Set aside.

 

Enter glass of wine number one.

 

While this was happening I cooked a half-cup of quinoa. We prepare our quinoa with chicken stock whenever we have it, rather than water. It lends a nice flavor.

 

Next I sautéed half of a finely diced large onion in some olive oil. I threw in crushed garlic, along with salt and pepper. Removing the meat of two spicy Italian sausages from their casings, I cut it up and threw it into the mix. This was cooked long enough to brown, but not all the way through.

 

 

 

 

Setting this aside, pouring wine, I halved the zucchini length-wise. Using a spoon, the seeds were scooped out. These and the fleshy bits were aside in case they’d be needed for the stuffing. In the end, I used very little and just mixed in a third of a cup of the cooked quinoa to the sausage and onion mixture. The stuffing was packed into the zucchini, salt and peppered, and topped with a little store-bought Italian-seasoned bread crumbs.

 

The zucchini were placed stuffing up on a baking sheet and covered with foil. They were then baked at 400 for 25 minutes, until the zucchini flesh was soft to a fork but not too tender that they’d fall apart when transferred to a plate.

 

While this cooked I assembled a quick salad. I’m loving Boston lettuce lately, especially to pair with this dressing. Using an immersion blender in a bowl, combine about a third of a cup of olive oil, a tablespoon or two of white wine vinegar, some fresh basil, a third of a cup of fresh parsley, two anchovy fillets, salt and pepper and two finely sliced green onions. Add just a teaspoon of dried tarragon. Toss the salad. I was out of radishes but I did add a finely diced cucumber.

 

 

 

Warm the tomato sauce just as the zucchini is nearing completion and garnish the plated meal with just a bit of it. Remember, the garlic and butter make it very rich, you don’t need much at all.

  

The last glass of wine was poured right about then. While we ate and talked, thoughts turned again to my daughter. I wondered if she’d ever try this recipe with her own friends and family. One day, I’d hope she stumbles on this blog. But above all, I look forward to teaching her the dish on my own.

 

Fred Flintstone Steak and Burrata Cheese

We’ve got a nice year-round farmers’ market in Montreal near Jean-Talon metro. It’s about a 45 minute walk from our place, and so we started out early Sunday morning to beat the humidity and crowds, check out the wares--coffee in hand and pockets stuffed with actual paper money.

 

Frankly speaking, I love a market, but I almost hate going to them. Maybe it’d be different if you lived right next to it, but if you go just once in while I find I’m always coming away with more food than I can cook, and oftentimes weird (though tasty) odds and ends, at that.

 

This weekend was much the same, we went in with one idea and came away with beef. Let me backtrack.

 

It was the last day before I was about to head out of town, and so the idea was nice walk, browse the stalls, get some nice, juicy tomatoes for a simple salad, and a random fish to eat alongside. No leftovers! The plan involved drinking wine on the porch, and maybe even had space for a nap.

 

We managed all of it, but made the walk back burdened with three bags full of food, including nearly a kilo of marinated rib steak. I mean Fred Flintstone steak. A hunk of meat on a bone.

 

 There’s a restaurant we’ve been to twice now on subsequent trips to New York: Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria, the grander Il Buco’s cozier and less fussy cousin. Maybe I’ll review the place later, in another post, but I bring it up now because it was on our first trip there that I was introduced to burrata cheese.

 

We’d ordered a few things off the menu, pasta for her, soup for me, selections of house made charcuterie, and then shared a sandwich as a main. We’d nearly tipped towards a braised short-rib sandwich that walked by, until we saw a heavenly looking six-inch stack of olive-oil drizzled kale stuffed into a bun. I’d been swapping in kale for spinach and other greens for a long time, but I’d never considered a sandwich of nearly nothing but. What they did here, I’m guessing, is blanch quickly, and then assemble mixed with a good olive oil and pasted anchovies, and between the thick layers was also a generous slather of the creamiest, sweetest cheese ever: burrata.

 

Promptly declaring this my favorite sandwich ever, the elusive cheese has since haunted me. When redoing the sandwich at home I’ve come close with ricotta, but never quite to the same consistency.

 

All that to say, this weekend at the market we found burrata.

 

It looks very much like a ball of fresh ball of mozzarella but it’s really soft to the touch. I hesitate to say breast, but will say “water balloon” and you can think what you want. When you cut into it, there’s a thin outer rind and then an inside like a gooey ricotta.

 

All culinary plans aside, what we ended up spending the afternoon doing was taking two of our massive, ripe, awesome market tomatoes and assembling a simple salad. Take the tomatoes and cut them crosswise into four or five sections. Make sure your knife is sharp so you don’t bruise the skin. Trim off the woody bit from the bottom so that it stands better, because you’ll be reassembling shortly, and trim out the stem section from the top of the thing.

 

Start from the bottom and on each layer add some burrata, sea salt, a glug of good olive oil, and some fresh basil. Add the next level, repeat, and repeat till you’re done. I worked slowly, chitchatting, and making sure my Jenga tower didn’t tip. I didn’t use any vinegar, but you can if you’d like. We relied on just the freshness of the tomatoes and the olive oil and salt for bulk of the flavor.

 

 

 

One of the market finds was a jar of Joe Beef’s seasoned “country salt blend.” For about six bucks, it’s a nice little treat.

 

http://www.favuzzi.com/product/1060

 

Each of our tomatoes were bigger than my fist to start and almost twice that reassembled with the cheese. We didn’t make it to the fish, not even to even to the beef. But we did stumble to bed for a good long nap.

Amelio’s

Sometimes you just don’t want to cook. Don’t feel guilty about it. For me, it’s usually because I’m already hungry or tired, and so it’s good to have a couple favorite restaurants in the back pocket ready for emergency booking.

 

Amelio’s is one of my favorite Montreal institutions. It’s cheap, it’s quick (but you can linger as long as you don’t make eye contact with the people waiting in line), it’s cash-only, bring your own wine, and, better yet, at the corner of Milton and Ste-Famille, it’s on the walk home from work. 

 

The place is a family run restaurant that keeps its Italian accented menu lean, focused just on some submarine sandwiches, a selection of pasta, and the pizza. If you come here, it’s not for subs. They don’t even serve fries. You come for the pizza and nothing else.

 

I don’t begrudge people who trend towards a thin crust wafer covered in clever tapas-like toppings, but Amelio’s has perfected the down and dirty thick crust, saucy pie I love. No matter your choice, the toppings are generous and the cheese is an awesome salty alchemical blend that changes flavors as it cools.

 

When we go, we go for what we’re craving, which we’ve whittled down to a large Italian sausage pizza topped with extra hot peppers. It does the trick every time. The cheese is so good, the crust so good, the sauce, just so good, you don’t want to lose yourself in more topping flavor. Over the years we’ve gone from all dressed, to vegetarian, to each with bacon, and each with bacon and hot peppers and sausage. Just too complicated. The parts are so good, you want them to shine.

 

Until this week, when we added bacon. And, man, if our standard wasn’t even the better for it.

 

Damn you, bacon, damn you.

 

 

Nachos & Life, on the Line

A quiet night in can mean one of two things: the time to slowly cook something for a late meal or the time to cook something easy to enjoy on the couch while watching a movie. Each can be relaxing, and each has its place.

 

My current go-to for the couch potato fix is fish tacos and a tinfoil pouch of nachos drizzled in cheese and salsa.

 

The fish can either be grilled or just pan fried, seasoned as basically as with just salt and pepper or a bit spicier with cumin and paprika. Cook it till it flakes a bit but isn’t dried out. We tend towards tilapia because it’s often on sale, frankly, but salmon works just as well. I find you want something with a consistency you can bite into so it doesn’t get hidden under other toppings.

 

Toppings themselves can be whatever you want. I like a bit of diced cucumber or avocado. Mix them with a bit of garlic and sour cream, or not at all. Some sort of hot sauce, or roasted hot pepper puree. And a quick cabbage slaw of thinly sliced red onion, cabbage, fresh coriander, salt and pepper, and a dash of lime juice and olive oil.

 

The nachos are nothing fancy, but do the job. Make an envelope matching your level of appetite out of some heavy duty tinfoil. Do a base of nachos, sprinkle with store bought salsa (I try and go with the chunkier ones so the chips don’t get all soggy), black olives, and cheese, repeat till your tinfoil pouch is full or you’re out of chips. Seal up the pouch and toast it on a grill for just a few minutes. The bottom layer of chips may crisp a bit. That’s fine, you want to leave it on the heat long enough to melt the cheese. Serve with sour cream or guacamole, if you’ve got it.

 

It was sitting down to these humble fixings that we watched, really at random per Netflix’s suggestion, the documentary “Spinning Plates.” This a 2012 doc by writer-director Joseph Levy. It features three very different restaurants and their various successes and failures. It cuts between the stories, and it’s pretty melodramatic at times, waxing philosophical over the place of food and restaurants in a life and a life’s work. But it’s effective and engaging nonetheless.

More to the point, it features Grant Achatz of Chicago’s Alinea. I’d read a longform article about the chef in the New Yorker back some time back right as he was about to gamble everything on experimental cancer treatment to fight stage IV cancer that was affecting most of his tongue, meaning he could no longer taste, and may very well never be able to again, if he even lived. I didn’t put two and two together until Achatz started describing the cancer and the treatment. I’m not one to watch food television, and most chefs are just names to me.

The guy was ridiculously articulate. A perfectionist in the way only a chef can be, and pompous as only someone who’s actually managed a crazy level of success can get away with (if barely). He’s just a year older than me and may end up joining Zadie Smith in my pantheon of personal nemeses. Say what you want, though, Achatz had thought deeply and passionately about what food was to him, whether it was the same for me or you, remains a question. He strives for something somewhat alienating, in a Modernist sense, that forces you to reconsider your stance and assumptions about what food is and how you approach it.

Following the documentary I sought out and read “Life, on the Line: A Chef’s Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat.” (A pretty big mouthful for someone who specializes in single-bite courses, granted.)

I won’t go in depth with a big review. The book is co-written with Nick Kokonas, with whom he’s opened Alinea and Next. It charts the evolution of Achatz’s palate and his work ethic, his struggle to open Alinea and then his subsequent bout with cancer. The prologue alone is enough to inspire. The rest is less about the craft of food and more about the business of a restaurant, so it depends what you were expecting. It’s an easy enough read, with a lot of drama built right into the subtitle.

If you’re going to read it on a tablet while eating nachos and tacos, I’d suggest just tracking down D.T. Max’s New Yorker article “A Man of Taste: A chef with cancer fights to save his tongue.” It’s shorter, and there’s less chance of spilling half your food. The profile was first published back in the May 12, 2008, issue, and it’s worth tracking down.

 

Black Bean Soup and Cornbread

I sometimes ask, what are the things I always need in a fridge? (I mean, aside from Dijon and more cheese than particularly healthy.) The answer changes with the seasons. This summer, it’s a lot of pesto and roasted hot pepper puree.  

 

The pesto gets thrown in everywhere: in the cavity when cooking a whole fish, along with tossed roasted veggies, on pasta, of course, or as a sauce for quick pizza. The spicy puree gets into even more places, even the pesto, into salsa, into any sauce and pretty much any cavity I can manage to stuff and grill.

 

Both change week to week, whether basil, coriander, kale or parsley based; and whichever peppers look freshest, tossed with red or green bell peppers, green onions and roast garlic.

Last week’s pepper puree was about a half dozen Jalapeno peppers, four cloves of garlic, one green pepper and two green onions, all grilled till they blistered and then pulsed in the food processor with a few glugs of olive oil and some salt.

 

Monday was dreary in Montreal. Cold weather, grey skies and rain that started at noon and never, ever let up. We’re heading out of town this weekend, so we’re once again clearing out the fridge. Colder weather and a need to clean spell one opportunity: soup.

 

Soup doesn’t need fussiness, but I tend to prepare it early and like to let it sit before rewarming it, whenever I can. A lot of recipes claim fast soups at less than half an hour, but I like a soup with a rich mingling of flavors. Flavors that, hang on, “pot-crastinate.” A soup’s best when done slowly, each step accomplished and forgotten about while you go on to other things around the house, until finally everything’s assembled, the last bit is thrown into the pot, and you just warm it up right before serving (making it look effortless).  

 

Yesterday’s project was spicy black bean soup.

 

We had a good pound and a half of tomatoes in the fridge to get through, and so I cut each of the guys crosswise and left them cut-side up along a rimmed cookie sheet. Salt and peppered each of them, along with a drizzle of olive oil, and then roasted them at 425 for a good 30 minutes (till the skin just started to blister). Plenty of time to kick back and read.

 

 

 

After letting them cool, they got thrown into the food processer for pulsing.

 

Meanwhile, I sautéed one finely chopped onion, the leftover half of red pepper we still had, and three (rapidly softening) carrots from the bottom of the crisper. Salt and pepper.

I emptied a can of diced tomatoes to the mix, and then the roasted tomatoes. A couple of tablespoons of the hot pepper puree, two-ish cups of chicken stock, and two drained cans of black beans. I added a handful of fresh coriander since I had it around, and a dash of cumin.

 

The pot came to a boil, the lid went on, and the soup simmered for a good hour. At this point, I took the immersion blender and went to town. I prefer a chunkier soup, so this is a fast step that still brings out a nice texture and lets you be a bit lazy when it comes to the initial chopping up of veggies. I added a bit more stock at this point, because the soup was creeping towards the sludgy side of things.

 

Now you can sit back and enjoy the rest of the afternoon.

 

About thirty minutes before supper I assembled the ingredients for a quick skillet cornbread to serve alongside. I took the base for the recipe from Martha Stewart’s website. Thank Google for the hit. My criteria was just something quick, and this one popped up right away.

 

“Martha’s” recipe has you add together 1 ¼ cups of yellow cornmeal and all-purpose flour, along with 2 tablespoons of sugar, 1 ½ teaspoons of baking powder, ½ teaspoon of coarse salt. In an separate bowl you whisk together 1 large egg and 1 ¾ cups of buttermilk. To this, I went off-recipe and added a tablespoon of my hot pepper pureer (why not?) and about a third of a cup of grated old cheddar. Wets and solids are mixed together and poured into a 10-inch cast iron skillet where you’ve already melted a good 4 tablespoons of butter. Bake for 25 minutes at 425.

 

 

 

Now, if you’ve timed it right, which I didn’t, you pull the skillet out just as your girlfriend arrives, before you spill that glass of wine, and just as you turn off the simmering soup just as she sits at the table. In my case, I distracted her with jokes, and managed to “plate” while the skillet was cooling and just as we cleaned up the mess from the wine.

 

A second glass was poured, and soup was served topped with slices of avocado, tiny bit of sea salt, and fresh coriander.

 

 

Burgers

We’re already past summer’s halfway point. In Montreal that means the days are already getting shorter, and soon we’ll be complaining about the snow. Still, the weather this past weekend was amazing. A lot of people took advantage and made a getaway out of the city. For us, we decided to celebrate by lighting the grill and, modestly, eating a burger from every major meat protein: fish, chicken, lamb, and of course beef.

 

It took bravery, endurance and ambition. This is that story.

 

The weekend’s work started out slowly. In fact, on Friday, we didn’t even know the scale of the adventure we’d soon undertake. Lamb was bought, buns were bought. It was only the following morning, there’s just two of us to feed, when we stared at the remaining buns and realized the opportunity we’d been given. Far be it for us to waste the leftovers, we rushed out to the store and came back with swordfish, chicken and beef to fill those lonely buns. The idea was to have a new pair of burgers ready every two hours. We failed. The part to me that still thinks he can eat as a teenager was shamed. Who knew? We finally finished the last

burger round on Sunday, with the beef, as altogether apt way to end the weekend.

 

The lamb burger, as said, was first. It consisted of lamb, roasted garlic, chopped black olives, diced and caramelized onion, feta, salt and pepper, all adjusted to taste. I grilled over indirect heat because of the fattiness of the meat. It was topped with some mayo and diced sundried tomatoes.

 

 

 

The swordfish kicked off lunch on Saturday. We don’t have a meat grinder, so the fish was just diced (slowly) until it was in the right consistency. Mixed to that was a half-cup of cooked quinoa, diced olives and sundried tomatoes, and an egg to help it all stick. Some salt and pepper, of course. I chill the burgers before grilling them, and they tend to stay together better.

 

The burgers were topped with a quick salsa of roasted green peppers, garlic and jalapeno peppers blended together into a paste, half a mango, some green onions, thinly diced, and a handful of chopped strawberries. I tossed the lot with a bit of olive oil, lime juice and some salt.

 

 

 

The chicken burger was my answer to clearing out leftovers in the fridge. While not heroic, it did seem like a good and laudable thing to do. And so under the theme “Chicken Eggplant Parmesan” I concocted a way to get rid of the last of my kale and basil pesto, as well as a half-cup of homemade garlic tomato sauce. I mixed these, some diced onions and some breadcrumbs into the ground chicken. The burger was topped with some buffalo mozzarella and some grilled eggplant.

 

I liked it in theory, but in execution I think we would have tasted the tomato more (because we only tasted the garlic, really) if I’d reserved the sauce and added it to the eggplant as a topping. Still, tasty enough overall.

 

It was at this point, maybe because of the disappointment, maybe just because of overreaching, but we took a nap, went for a walk, drank some wine, and proceeded to skip supper and fall fast asleep.

 

Finally, the beef burger. This was the simplest, actually, and the quickest. (No hand-dicing of swordfish here.) First I roasted some garlic, four bulbs total, and threw them into the beef. Then I added about two heaping tablespoons (the bottom of the jar) of spiced beer jelly, a tablespoon of beer flavored mustard, and salt and pepper.

 

I topped these guys with caramelized onions cooked in a skillet on the grill, and a slice of Griffon beer-flavored raclette cheese.

 

 

 

To be honest, I think the lamb burger was the best. And how can you go wrong with beef and beer, but the Nicoise salad-esque fish burger with salsa topping was a great, colorful summer afternoon meal.

 

We had takeout sushi for lunch on Monday.

Lobster!

I’m not entirely sure how consistent this blog will be, but here’s to Canada Day and here’s a happy hat’s off to crazy ideas that sometimes just manage to work.

Monday, July 1st eve, if that’s a thing, we were facing record humidity in Montreal. Rujira, the wiser of us, planned ahead and got herself out of work. From the evidence, she spent the day within a four-foot circle caged by the fridge on one side, the fan directly in front of her, the sink, and the couch she did her best to never leave.

It was too hot to even think about the BBQ in the back. CRAZY. I know. (We’re already mid-way through our second summertime tank for a household of two [note to self, future potential blog post: “Summer Fun; Grill and Bare It!”].

Having already declared 2014 the year of homemade pastas and bread, as bold a statement as bold statements go that nicely camouflaged the lack of real New Year’s resolutions, we’d gotten lazy once the mercury inched closer to 30.

Despite the heat, we need to eat and I was thinking we could still successfully tackle some sort of pesto. I may need to change into shorts, but this was something easy that could be done after a full day at work and served with fresh linguini. The joy of fresh pasta on a summer day is that it cooks in just three minutes.

Our American head office refused to acknowledge a national holiday other than July 4, and so as work went from busy to busier, I went from wanting something easy, to daydreaming something more complicated. Job satisfaction. That’s all I wanted, even if it wasn’t the day job.

In my mind’s eye, I pictured Rujira’s surprise when I unveiled the grand plan. Below is how it played out.

But really, it wasn’t so hard. You just need to drop the lobster into the pan. Big issue is figuring out how to pick it up without touching it.

But it worked out!

You’ll need a food processor for this one. Nothing else really special.

Strip away the leafy bits from a handful of kale. Discard the stems. Boil some water with salt, throw in the kale. Give it two or three minutes. Strain it in cold water. Throw it back into the skillet, salt it, red-pepper flakes, pepper? (sure), and douse it in a spill of white wine, whatever you’ve got on hand, and some chicken stock. Forget about it for a while.

Now, the lobster. It should be live. The one we got was a shade under three pounds. (Whatever those are.) Put it in the sink. Open the bag. Forget about it.

Chop a few green onions. Crush a bit of garlic. Rip off a handful of basil. Whatever you want. At this point, we’re kind of stalling having to face the lobster again. She might have just moved.

Throw whatever you have into the food processor. (Don’t look at the lobster.)

Pulse the crap out of the kale, the green onions, the basil. Throw in a good quarter cup of olive oil. Add some grated parmesan is you’d like. (We did.)

Now. Now. Now. The lobster. If your sous-chef is not laughing at you hysterically, it’s a lot easier, or so I’d imagine. But I’ll break it down like this:

1.Drop the lobster into salter, boiling water. Add more salt than you’d normally do for pasta.
2.For our lobster, we waited 17 minutes. Because it felt right. We also used a lid. Just in case.
3.Take the lobster apart. Here is a useful link.

 Also, ours…

4.Either make some pasta, or prepare to your liking. Cook it and reserve a little bit of the water.
5.Meanwhile, heat some oil. Throw in some of the pesto, add the pasta, toss, add some of the reserved water to help the pesto stick and then add the lobster meat.
6.Toss, and warm. Add more pesto if you think you need it.
7.Plate!