Month: October 2019

scallops, lemon, spicy parsley; red napa, spring red onion

Pretty simple.

  • thirteen Hampton Bays sea scallops (15 ounces total) from American Seafood Company, rinsed, dried very thoroughly with paper towels then placed in a paper plate to prevent condensation, seasoned with local Long Island sea salt from P.E. & D.D. Seafood and freshly-ground black pepper, grilled briefly (90 seconds on each side) in a very hot enameled cast iron pan, finished with a squeeze of juice from a Gristedes Supermarket Mexican lemon and a drizzle of Cretan olive oil, Renieris Estate ‘Divina’ (Koroneiki varietal), of Hania, from Whole Foods Market, arranged on the plates with a sprinkling of some very special slightly peppery parsley, chopped, torn from a few stems that JoAnna of the Windfall Farms stand had shared with me that day at the Union Square Greenmarket

  • the thinly sliced pink/white and lighter green parts of 2 red spring onions from Norwich Meadows Farm heated, along with a tablespoon of dried Semi di Finocchietto Ibleo (a wild Sicilian fennel seed harvested in the Iblei Mountains in the southeast), in one tablespoon of olive oil inside a small antique heavy tin-lined copper pot until the onion had softened and the fennel had become quite pungent, then set aside, while another tablespoon of oil, or a little more, was heated inside a much larger copper pot of the same description, and 2 beautiful small heads (11 ounces) of a hybrid Napa cabbage, called ‘Red Dragon‘, from northern Vermont’s Tamarack Hollow Farm, roughly chopped, was gradually added and stirred until all of it was slightly wilted, the pot removed from the heat, the reserved scallion-fennel seed mixture, some sea salt, and a little freshly-ground black pepper added to its contents, and the cabbage stirred some more, finished by tossing on some more chopped spring onion

flounder with pink mushrooms, micro kale; haricots jaunes

Food is often about color, even when it’s not really about color.

But food photography, even casual food photography, is always about color.

Sometimes the colors change along the way, but that’s part of the story too.

This time it was the mushrooms that gave a show.

  • five ounces of some very definitely pink oyster mushrooms (which change to a gold yellow when they begin sautéing, through to an orange brown or copper color once cooked) from Joe Rizzo of Blue Oyster Cultivation in the Union Square Greenmarket, sliced somewhat roughly, added to a heavy antique copper skillet in which one sliced red spring onion from Norwich Meadows Farm had first been softened in a tablespoon or so of butter, the mushrooms immediately salted, to encourage their moisture escaping, and gently sautéed for several minutes until brown, a splash of Lustau dry (fino) sherry from Philippe Wines stirred in, the mushrooms seasoned with freshly ground black pepper and kept warm while the fish, whose cooking process had just begun, was finished
  • one very fresh 14 ounce flounder fillet from P.E. & D.D. Seafood Company (where I heard it also described as a winter fluke), carefully halved lengthwise, seasoned on both sides with the fisherman’s own local sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper, sautéed fairly gently in a tablespoons and a half of butter inside a large (13-inch), thick-walled antique tin-lined copper pan, flesh side firstturned after about 2 minutes and the second side cooked for about the same length of time before the fish was removed and arranged on 2 plates, the mushrooms spooned onto the edge of and next to the fillets, micro kale from Norwich Meadows Farm strewn between fish and mushrooms

pork chop with lemon/aji dulce, tomato; brussels sprouts

The chops end up looking very different whenever I revisit this recipe, one of my favorites, period. This time it looks like they were trying to emulate a tomato that couldn’t decide what color it wanted to be.

  • two 8-ounce boneless pork chops from Flying Pigs Farm, rinsed, thoroughly dried, seasoned with sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper, before being seared quickly (above a medium high flame) in a heavy enameled cast-iron pan, after which half of a Chelsea Gristedes Supermarket Mexican lemon was squeezed over the top (the lemon then left in the pan between them, cut side down), the chops placed in a 400º oven for about 13 minutes altogether, flipped halfway through, when most of one finely chopped aji dulce pepper (heatless) was scattered on top and the lemon squeezed over the pork again before being replaced on the bottom of the pan, which was returned to the oven, but 3 minutes before the chops were finished, one halved medium red and orange striped heirloom tomato from Jersey Farm Produce Inc. in the Saturday 23rd Street farmers market, the cut sides seasoned with salt and pepper, was also placed on the bottom, until the chops were done, chops and tomato removed from the oven and arranged on 2 plates, some of the juices that remained in the pan (there were very few this time) poured over them, chopped garlic chive seed from Space on Ryder Farm sprinkled on top
  • nine ounces of medium size Brussels sprouts  from Alex’s Tomato Farm in the Saturday Chelsea Farmers Market tossed with a little olive oil, salt and pepper, then roasted in a 400º oven until browned and crisp on the outside, or roughly 20 minutes (when they will taste surprisingly sweet and a bit nutty)
  • the wine was a South African (Western Cape Province/Robertson Valley) white, Arabella Chenin Blanc 2018, from Naked Wines
  • the music was Christopher Tignor‘s album, ‘Thunder Lay Down In The Heart’  

eggs and bacon for lunch: just give it a good zhug

‘Morgenblätter‘.

As someone keen on both journalism and food, I often think of that beautiful 19th century waltz at breakfast time, especially on Sundays. I don’t actually hum it, but I enjoy all the pleasant associations of the word, with the usual exception of the contents of the news itself.

Well, it wasn’t our usual morning papers-with-[b̶r̶e̶a̶k̶f̶a̶s̶t̶]-lunch Sunday: This one was attended by some Zhug.

As the citizen of a great European imperial capitol whose territories extended into the Balkans and nearly all the way to the Black Sea, Johann Strauss Jr. was able to know and appreciate more dishes than those we think of as belonging to German cuisine, but he may never have had Zhug.

I first found out about it last week.

Maybe it’s just me, and my basically Eurocentric kitchen orientation (which is driven by time and space considerations more than any immovable preference), but most of the time I find I can ignore the recipe pages of the New York Times Magazine. It seems like the editors’ choices are mostly about courting points, wherever, for their eccentricity or sensationalism, sometimes with a side trip to silly. Also for the parties.

The recipe featured this past week was an exception. The subject was Zhug, a rich green sauce from Yemen, and it included a recipe with a loving description of the somewhat laborious process involved in making it.

I don’t know what it was that kept me lingering on the pages of the article this time. It may have been the photograph that showed a rich sauce getting friendly with, among other delicacies, a simple fried egg (Barry and I both love fried eggs). In any event, when I remembered Sunday was almost upon us, and once I realized I already had or could quickly gather together all of the ingredients (note: they aren’t really exotic at all), I was on my way.

But that would be only after a quick stop to search on line whether the sauce could be stored for any length of time, since it didn’t seem worth the trouble to make some if it wasn’t to be in the quantity described by the recipe: The answer was a definite yes, and one account, spotted on Serious Eats, was pretty specific: “It should last a few weeks in the fridge (though I’ve never had a jar linger long enough to actually find out)”.

Another reason for my interest in the recipe: I can spend a lot of time (and go through a lot of little bowls) assembling a lot of condiments for our traditional Sunday bacon and eggs early afternoon meals, and I thought this rich spicy sauce could be an interesting, if probably only occasional, alternative, and a big time saver too (as if that should ever be an operating principal for such meals).

The bottom line: The sauce is pretty complex, and really delicious, and a little goes a long way. It’s also really beautiful, if you’ve managed to include some red peppers. It would be a significant addition, more than just an accent, and just very comfortable with virtually any kind or form of Mediterranean dish. The world surrounding the Mediterranean on all side is one whose cultures were birthed in the civilizations of the Middle East, and Yemen’s is one of the richest of those.  It’s that Mediterranean that describes much of the eating preferences of Barry and myself.

In my own cooking I’ve hosted more extreme deviations from the European kitchen than that represented by this sauce, and increasingly so as the years go by and I become more comfortable in my skills and my tastes, but also as our local suppliers introduce us to more and more interesting alternatives to traditional European preparations.

Did I mention that I tweaked the recipe published in the Times, even on this, my first outing? It was mostly about playing with the kinds of chilis used, because of what I had on hand, because I wanted color, and because I was looking for as much complexity of flavor as possible. Also, I didn’t have the amounts of parsley and cilantro prescribed (so much!); I used only about half the volume, but some of my mix of chilis had no heat at all, so it may have evened out in the end.

Is it European?

Gabrielle Hamilton, the author of the article in which the Zhug recipe appears, and the chef/owner of New York’s Prune restaurant, includes this paragraph in her introduction:

For the entirety of Prune’s 20 years, I’ve confined myself — with pretty strict discipline — to cooking within a European-and-Mediterranean idiom. It has been two decades of salsa verde, gremolata, sauce gribiche and maître d’hôtel butter, with all the rest doused in olive oil. Of course, giving yourself the entire European-and-Mediterranean pantry is hardly a confinement. Somehow it has never even proved to be a monotony. It has just been a nonnegotiable outline of territory on a map, so that we all know how far we can go and what we are meant to be doing as we cook menu after menu after menu, season after season, six new menus a year, 20 solid years in a row. And that’s not counting desserts.

I think this is a fair evaluation of the material many Western cooks have to work with, although we are now blessed with farmers and fishers and bakers who encourage us to expand our comfort zones. Interestingly, in her next paragraph Hamilton goes on to add that, away from the restaurant, when cooking at home, she works with no such constraints.

Sigh. With more space, and more skill, and more self-confidence, I can imagine going there too.

One thing I am proud to say about my excursion into Yemen is that I prepared my Zhug entirely by hand, working with a wonderful antique vessel, an almost 12-pound, 6″ x 6″ cast iron mortar and its original pestle, with no discernible  maker’s mark, that I had long ago spent a week rescuing from its mid-career role, which was probably that of performing inside a machine shop.

  • there were 6 fresh eggs from pastured chickens and 4 slices of bacon from pastured pigs, all from Pennsylvania’s Millport Dairy Farm in the Union Square Greenmarket, the eggs, while they were being fried, seasoned with a local Long Island sea salt (P.E. & D.D. Seafood/Phil Karlin’s own), freshly ground black pepper, a pinch of dried fenugreek from Bombay Emerald Chutney Company (purchased at the Saturday Chelsea Farmers Market), and accompanied by a dollop of Zhug, for which I had followed the recipe, and as I recall, virtually to the letter, with the exception of the makeup of the capsicum element (I used 4 kinds of peppers), and the addition of a few tablespoons of lemon juice stirred in at the very end; the sources of the fresh ingredients were: 6 cloves of ‘Chesnok Red’ garlic from Alewife Farm; 2 jalapeño peppers, one red, one green, from Alex’s Tomato Farm in the Saturday Chelsea’s Down to Earth Farmers Market; 1 habanada pepper from Campo Rosso Farm; 2 tiny Brazil wax peppers (very hot) and 2 aji dulce peppers (no real heat), both from Eckerton Hill Farm; fresh parsley and coriander from Jersey Farm Produce Inc. in the Saturday 23rd Street farmers market; several tablespoons of juice of a Mexican lemon from the Chelsea Gristedes Supermarket; leaves from a head of a mini speckled romaine lettuce from Quarton Farm. dressed with good Cretan olive oil, Renieris Estate ‘Divina’ (Koroneiki varietal), Hania, Crete, from Whole Foods Market, salt, and pepper, and some torn leaves from a branch of peppermint from Keith’s Farm; everything accompanied by slices (some toasted, some not) from a quarter of a 6-pound loaf of Orwashers Levin Locale (locally grown and milled wheat, 100% natural fermentation, durum flour, wheat bran, biga, malt), also from the Saturday Chelsea Market
  • the Sunday music was Messiaen’s ‘Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus‘, performed by Joanna MacGregor

fennel/chiles-crusted tuna; tomato, leek; lacinato; garlic

I was still recovering from a bug, and hadn’t been doing much real cooking for a few days. Although during that period we had only ordered one Mexican takeout and one pizza (both really good), by Saturday I was more interested in preparing a real grownup meal myself than coming up with another food delivery choice, no matter how basic the preparation would be or how good the takeout could be.

I walked one block west to the 23rd Street greenmarket that afternoon and selected what was probably the most easily prepared entrée, and a vegetable that would be even more easy to put on the table.

  • one modest 11.5-ounce tuna steak from American Seafood Company in the Saturday Chelsea’s Down to Earth Farmers Market on 23rd Street, rinsed, dried, halved, tops and bottoms seasoned with local P.E. & D.D. Seafood Company, sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper, ‘paved’ with almost 2 tablespoons of a mix of some incredibly pungent dried Semi di Finocchietto Ibleo [wild Sicilian fennel seed], harvested in the Iblei Mountains, from Eataly Flatiron and a little dried peperoncino Calabresi secchi from Buon Italia in the Chelsea Market [both first crushed together in a porcelain mortar and pestle], plus one finely chopped small aji dulce seasoning  pepper (no real heat) from Eckerton Hill Farm, the steaks pan-grilled above a medium-high flame for little more than a minute or so on each side, finished on the plates with a good squeeze of the juice of an organic lemon from Chelsea Whole Foods Market, scissored garlic chive seeds from Space on Ryder Farm, and a drizzle of Chelsea Whole Foods Market Portuguese house olive oil
  • one medium red/orange-veined/striped heirloom tomato from Jersey Farm Produce Inc. in the same Saturday market, halved crosswise, the cut sides seasoned with salt and pepper, placed inside a small copper skillet in a little olive oil over a medium flame until softened, arranged on the plates and sprinkled with some chopped green sections of baby French leeks from Mountain Sweet Berry Farm in the Union Square Greenmarket, drizzled with a small amount of olive oil
  • one large bunch of cavolo nero (aka lacinato, Tuscan kale, or black kale, among other names as well) from Alex’s Tomato Farm, also in the Saturday Market, the leaves stripped from their stems, wilted briefly inside a large heavy antique tin-lined copper pot in a tablespoon or so of olive oil after several cloves of ‘Chesnok Red’ garlic from Alewife Farm had first been heated inside it until fragrant and softened, the greens seasoned with salt and pepper and drizzled with a little more oil
  • the wine was a French/Touraine/Loire) white, Francois Chidaine Clos de la Grange Touraine Sauvignon 2018, from Chambers Street Wines
  • the music was the Neos label album, ‘Musica viva, Vol. 33: Peter Ruzicka’, with works performed by the Symphonie-Orchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and the Vocalconsort Berlin