This meal may be the one I repeat in our kitchen most often.  It’s a Mark Bittman recipe which I cut out of the New York Times 15 years ago (Note: I’ve learned to use only about two thirds of the suggested amount of olive oil;  any more than that and you’ll probably find the potatoes swimming in it at the end).  The formula can be prepared with many different kinds of fish, basically any white fish.  Bittman:  “Monkfish works very well . . . . But other fillets will give similar results, including red snapper, sea bass, pollock, wolffish, even catfish.”  I make one other alteration to the recipe:  While I almost never peel potatoes anyway before cooking, I definitely do not when preparing this dish.

• monkfish tail from P.E.&D.D. Seafood, and black oil-cured olives, roasted on the top of a bed of sliced and seasoned German Butterball potatoes from Mountain Sweet Berry Farm which had been roasted previously in a generous amount of olive oil along with 15 or so fresh bay leaves from Westside Market
• cavalo nero from Northshire Farm, wilted with olive oil along with garlic halves from Migliorelli Farms which had first been heated in the oil
• The wine was a Portuguese white, DAC, Dão 2013

[I forgot to sprinkle the parsley on the sauce before taking the photo.]

 

This meal was a very big deal for both Barry and I.  Our guests were very dear to us, and the meal we had chosen to share was pretty special.  We’re both very fond of game, and I have often cooked it, often deer or quail, farmed, either here or in New Zealand, and once I prepared a brace of grouse from Scotland (including offal canapés). but I have never cooked hare. Barry and I had thoroughly enjoyed it prepared by others, many years back, once in a restaurant in the Umbrian hill town of Gubbio, and once in a great restaurant which is no longer with us, Chanterelle.

Unless you hunt, or have a generous friend who hunts (I never have hunted, and my hunting Stepfather is no longer with us), if you want to cook it yourself, it’s impossible to obtain wild rabbit (Jackrabbit, or hare), or any other true game meat originating in the U.S.  The FDA doesn’t trust any domestic source for game, but apparently has no anxieties about approving it if it comes from elsewhere, or at least not game birds and hare shot in Scotland.

This winter I finally decided, expense – and carbon footprint – be damned, that I would order a wild hare from Scotland, pay for its airfare, and serve it on one of the feast days of the season.  Because of changes in our own schedule, and the plans of our two guests, we didn’t end up sitting down to my Lepre in Salmi, or Jugged Hare, until January 4.  It wasn’t quite a calendar holiday, but it was great fun, and the company was splendid.  The meal gave me at least one scare before I got it to the table, but I think I’ll call it a success, and the menu I had planned gave us some excellent excuses for sharing some great wines.

The hare course was preceded by a crab salad of Peekytoe Maine crab leg meat, Srirache sauce, lemon, and mayonaise from The Lobster Place, and toasts of Rustica Classica from Eataly.

•  The wine with the crab salad toasts was a really wonderful Slovenian white, Batič Zaria 2009

The plan I used for the hare is one I found in Antonio Carlucci’s book, only slighlty altered, and with an adjustment, for the treatment of the loin, by David Waltuck.  The hare I prepared weighed 3.25 pounds, dressed (or, truly, ‘undressed’).  This is the recipe.  In order of the ingredients shown on that PDF, these are the sources I used:

• The wine used for the marinade was an Italian red, Baccio Chianti Reserva 2009
• the two small carrots were from Rogowski Farm
• the onions were from Hoeffner Farms
• the celery ribs were from Migliorelli Farm
• the garlic was from Migliorelli Farm
• the thyme was from Manhattan Fruit Exchange
• the rosemary Queens County Farm
• the sage leaves from S. & S.O. Farms
• the hare was from Fossil Farms
• the pancetta was from Buon Italia
• the lamb’s liver was from 3-Corner Field Farm
• the brandy was Le Courvoisier
• the unsweetened chocolate was from Buon Italia
• the parsley [would have been] from Whole Foods

This was served with the hare and its sauce:

• coarsely-ground cornmeal polenta with butter
• cavalo nero from Northshire Farm, wilted with olive oil and garlic halves, from Migliorelli Farms, which had first been heated in the oil
• The wines with the hare were, in succession, an amazing Italian red, Etna Rosso Calabretta Azienda Vinicola 2001 from Flatiron wines; and a great Argentinian red, Luigi Bosca Cabernet Sauvignon 2011 Maipu, Mendoza, from Chelsea Wine Vault.

The meal had to be quick, and it had to include vegetables I already had on hand, because, other than my purchase of the scallops at the Greenmarket that day I had given no thought to what I would be making for dinner in the evening.  I had been concentrating only on the fact that I wanted us to eat earlier than usual, in order to give me time to prepare much of the next night’s much more elaborate meal, of hare, ahead of time.

• scallops from P.E.&D.D. Seafood, dried, seared briefly on both sides, finished with torn leaves of a basil plant (Full Bloom Market Garden, Whately, Mass.) from Whole Foods
• German Butterball potatoes from Mountain Sweet Berry Farm, boiled, finished with olive oil, salt, pepper, and chopped parsley from Stokes Farm
• Maine cherry ‘cocktail’ tomatoes from Whole Foods, slow-roasted with olive oil, dried Italian oregano, and quartered garlic from Migliorelli Farm
• the wine was a California white, Estancia Chardonnay Monterrey County 2012

It was New Year’s Day, but there were only the two of us.  We decided on a mini version of a traditional (traditional, somewhere anyway) roast beef holiday dinner, but we did manage to extend it into several courses.  After some good rosemary bread sticks, we enjoyed some more of the linguine and crab pasta prepared the night before, heated in cazuelas for twelve minutes in a moderate oven.  We followed the pasta course with steak and braised collards, and finished the meal with a dessert of several cheeses, thin toasts of Rustica Classica from Eataly, and Bosc pears (from Migliorelli Farm).

• ‘Linguine with Crab, Lemon, Chiles, and Mint’
• the wine with the pasta course was an Italian sparkling, Lamarca Proseco

 

• tri-tip steaks, from Dixon Farmstand Meats, briefly seared, placed in the oven for a few minutes, finished with lemon, oil, and chopped parsley from Whole Foods
• collard greens from Lucky Dog Organic, wilted in oil in which halved garlic cloves had been warmed
• the wine was a Portuguese red, DÃO Alvaro Castro 2011

 

Eggs. While they weren’t really going to be for breakfast, but rather more like lunch, the day before the first day of the new year I picked up some Shiiatake mushrooms at the Union Square Greenmarket.  I had spotted this recipe from Food52  on line the day before that.  It looked very good, it could be done without fussing, and I was happy that I had all the  ingredients on hand, except for the mushrooms (a wee bit smug about that), and, finally, everything could be cooked inside one of the ancient, well-seasoned iron pans which I  ‘inherited’ from some Australian sailors in Newport nearly half a century back.  It always gives me great pleasure to use one of my Wagner pans (no relation).

And so at some time around 2 o’clock the next afternoon we ate our first meal of 2015, ‘Baked Eggs with Mushrooms and Gruyere’.  It went very well:  The dish was delicious and, while they were barely runny inside, the yolks were totally contained by the mushroom mix, and nothing was lost on the plate.

• the mushrooms were from John D. Madura Farms, the garlic from Migliorelli Farm, the thyme from Manhattan Fruit Exchange, the cheese (Swiss Le Gruyère) from Trader Joe’s, and the eggs from Knoll Krest Farm
• the toast was from a whole wheat baguette purchased at Dean & Deluca the day before

We discovered Walrus and Carpenters last year, and now oysters on New Years’s Eve are on the way to becoming a new tradition here at Chelsea Gardens.  The fun begins when we head up to the roof in Tribeca to pick them up, hanging around with Jules, his mother, and other devotees, slurping a few on the half shell, and sipping a Rhode Island beer.

We pick them up on New Year’s Eve itself (it wasn’t raining this time!) but this time we probably arrived on the roof a little later than we should have.  We also enjoyed the ambiance and the conversation, so much that we got home later than we had planned.  By the time we had opened 5o some oysters, we found that we would be enjoying each of our two main courses in a different year.

My plate, just after finishing the first course.

• the wine was a wonderful French white, perfect for the oysters, Château de la Chesnaie Muscadet Sèvre et Maine Sur Lie 2013

I wanted the second plate to be as elegant as the first, quite simple and very easy to put together fast.  Staying with seafood seemed like a good idea, especially since we might want some sparkling wine when midnight approached (I must have had some foreboding of our eating a very late dinner). I was inspired by an elegant recipe from Bon Appètit, ‘Linguine with Crab, Lemon, Chiles, and Mint’, and that’s how I found myself making my way through the mob of tourists inside Chelsea Market and picking up some fresh cooked crab at The Lobster Place.

• Afeltra linguine served with a sauce of olive oil, butter, lemon zest and juice, salt and black pepper, shallots from Keith’s Farm, garlic from from Migliorelli Farm, more than one fresh Fresno chile  from Manhattan Fruit Exchange, Maine Peekytoe crab leg meat from The Lobster Place, and fresh mint leaves from Manhattan Fruit Exchange
• the wine was an Italian sparkling, the excellent Lamarca Proseco with the gorgeous label (which always makes a wine taste better)

Struffoli.  For me it means an Italian Christmas, but it also means the memory of one Providence Christmas almost half a century ago, and the very generous love of a good friend.  It’s a small story, but my recent revisiting of handmade Struffoli at Buon Italia made me think of Bernie.

I had never cooked anything, anywhere, until the first week I had my own kitchen.  The year was 1964, I had rented a grand studio apartment on Benefit Street in Providence. It was my first year as a graduate student in history at Brown. My introduction to cooking was both forced and an assertion of independence.  I knew I wasn’t going to trudge up College Hill to the campus for all my meals, and that I couldn’t afford to eat out regularly.  Besides, having just returned from a year in Munich, where I had immersed myself in German Gasthaus cookery (including excellent venison dinners for the equivalent of $1.25!), I decided that I wasn’t willing to go back to school cafeteria fare.

Eventually I built up my confidence, thanks to some improvising in my simple, one-wall kitchen, and leaning on The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, and later supported by The Joy of Cooking and Mimi Sheraton’s wonderful, The German Cookbook.  Perhaps just as important, in 1967 I moved around the corner into a large, two-story home along with a magical new lover; the house on South Court Street had both a dedicated, real kitchen and a separate dining room, and I began to think I really could prepare at home the food that interested me most at the time.  When the holidays approached that year, and I realized that neither of us, like many of the people I had come to know and love in Rhode Island, would be going home, naturally I decided it was the perfect time to roast a suckling pig.

One of my best friends, Bernard Scola, (who was actually going to be home, in Providence, for an elaborate Christmas dinner with his Italian family) offered to arrange to get a pig for me from a local farmer his family knew.  I don’t even remember whether I was the one who ended up paying for it, but I do remember that when we realized it might be difficult for me to transport a freshly-slaughtered animal, even a small one, in my little gray 7-year-old Porsche (yeah, I was spoiled), Bernie offered me the use of the large trunk of his big brand-new Thunderbird Landau Sedan (for those who car, it was the rather elegant one with the ‘suicide doors’).

As it turned out, the ‘suckling’ pig handed over to us in the farmyard could better be described as a ‘porker’, and that meant that it would occupy a good part of the T-Bird’s luggage space. Bernie himself was always elegant, and he was known for being perhaps the most fastidious member of our group, so when he opened the car’s trunk outside the barn, and I saw that it was beautifully lined with a light-gray patterned fabric, I froze.  But Bernie was a good sport, and gracious enough to allow me to think that it wasn’t a problem for him.  Fortunately several layers of plastic managed to do their job, and the trunk survived the trip back to Providence without a stain.

For now I’ll skip the details about preparing the pink, baby-like pig, including the part about soaking it upstairs in the tub in saltwater the night before, while we were having a party, and warning my friends not to pull back the shower curtain (we heard screams; they obviously hadn’t listened).  There’s also the part about the pig being too long even for our 30″ oven, so I had to scrunch it up on its side in an improvised pan.

But I’ll finally get to the original point, or at least the occasion, for this story.

In spite of his obligations to his own family, and to the large feast prepared every year by his mother, my dear friend managed to make it to our own Christmas dinner in the old wooden row house, not only as an honored guest and confederate, but as dessert angel:  Earlier in the day he had dropped off a large Struffoli his mother had made (here is Michele Scicolone’s recipe), which she had formed inside an angel food cake pan, removed and then carefully wrapped in cellophane and ribbon.  Of course it wasn’t very German, but it was very, very beautiful, and I had never seen anything like it.  It was also delicious. I had not even heard of Struffoli, before, but that Christmas I decided that it was the happiest, most festive cake I had ever seen.  It still is.

Earlier this year I learned that my old friend, with whom I had lost touch after he had married, died four years ago.  In case I didn’t say it enough back then, I’ll say it again.

Thank you Bernie.

 

* For far more information on preparing suckling pig than I had back in the 60s, see this site.

On the day before the day before the first day of the year, we ate, . . . leftovers.  But there are leftovers and there are leftovers.  This was an assemblage of the latter, by which I mean it was a meal in which each element tasted as good as or better than it had its first time around, and now each had a chance to show itself off in new company.

The fresh baby spinach from Rogowski Farm, whihch I barely wilted, was the only part of the meal which hadn’t been prepared in the days prior.

• the hare, and the noodles, were from the smoked bluefish on toast, and pappardelle with hare dinner
• the sweet and sour red cabbage with fennel were from the ham steak dinner
• the polenta were from the braised lamb shank, polenta, and Brussels sprouts dinner
• To accompany it all, even before I had finished imagining everything that would be included, we chose a wine which we thought might be worthy of this rich meal, a sturdy Italian (Sardinian) red, Cannonau di Sardegna Riserva 1010 Sella Mosca

Rarely do I post about lunch, mostly because we don’t usually make much of a deal about midday meals at home, but when I assemble something out of leftovers and other things I might have on hand – especially if there may be some lesson in it, for me at least – I’m tempted to share it.  For it to happen, of course, the picture also has to be presentable.

I started out only wanting to put together a quick meal for the two of us, but the soup which resulted was even more delicious than it deserved to be under the circumstances.

I know that I’m supposed to cook everything from scratch, and as much as possible with local ingredients, but this was just lunch.  Never underestimate the usefulness, or goodness, of Knorr leek mix.  I’ve had a soft spot for the company, founded in 1838 to make a coffee substitute, since I was living in Hanover in 1961.  I think part of my fascination with the rudimentary German supermarkets at the time might have been the discovery that there was such a thing as Ersatzkaffee, but I’m not certain it was Carl Heinrich Theodor‘s product I knew then.  Today the Knorr brand is owned by Unilever.  I go for long stretches not thinking about it, but then I’ll  spot the tidy icon in a store, and I melt just a bit.  I don’t know what I had in mind when I bought the firm’s leek mix packets perhaps a couple years ago, but the last one came in very handy today.  The fact that the dry mix tasted as good as it always does/did probably helps explain it’s usefulness – and popularity.

• a package of Knorr ‘Leek recipe mix’ I had found in the larder, simmered for five minutes and with two and a half cups of chicken broth made with Better Than Bullion chicken base (another kitchen savior, as are the company’s beef and vegetable versions), after which I added some wilted Golden Beet greens which I had left over from a dinner I made three days before
• slices of a crusty loaf of Trucio from Sullivan Street Bakery
• the beverage was a cold pitcher of still New York tap water

Both Barry and I have a soft spot for good traditional German cooking.  My own obsession goes back to 1961, and my first trip to Germany, although much later I realized that I had actually grown up with it by way of my mother’s cookery, which was a combination of Franconian tradtions and an enlightened modern American kitchen.

This particular meal employed the simplest preparation of a smoked pork ‘steak’, purchased in our local greenmarket from an Amish* farm in Pennsylvania, and an extraordinarily delicious red cabbage grown in Vermont, also picked up in the greenmarket.  I had never used this particular recipe, from Bon Appétit I found on line some years back, and it’s not entirely German (I mean, fennel and balsamic vinegar?), but the dish was very quick to assemble, incredibly delicious, and, in the end, pretty German after all.

The wine was absolutely wonderful, and a perfect accompaniment to the meal;  it was what I dream of finding in German wine pairing.  My excitement was probably not unrelated to the fact that the fruity and slaty riesling originated in a vineyard not that far from my father’s family’s family’s Heimat southwest of Trier, on the Saar. We don’t know where we had purchased the bottle, but we know we had had it for several years.  I’m hoping that we can find its equivalent again, and that it wasn’t just the extra bottle aging in the wine rack inside our apartment that made it taste so good.

• a smoked ham slice from Millport Dairy, dried, then seared in butter and olive oil before being buried for fifteen minutes in a large pot of onions, sweet-and-sour red cabbage and fennel after it had already been cooking for about 45 minutes, placed on plates with the vegetables, and sprinkled with a generous amount of chopped fennel fronds;  the onions came from Hawthorne Valley Farm, the cabbage was a cone-shaped ‘Red Beefheart from Tamarack Hollow Farm, and the fennel bulb was from Eataly
• the wine was a German white, Urban Riesling 2011 from das Weingut St. Urbans-Hof

 

* Only in the last decade or so have I come to realize that the Amish culinary traditions are actually not unrelated to my own family’s, in spite of our Catholic fanciness.