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.