Barcelona, Spain, March 2010
I exit customs control, laden with little bags because I don’t own a proper suitcase. I’ve got a small, wheeled number, a bulky suede overnight bag hoisted over one shoulder and a computer/book bag slung over the other. My walk is ungainly as I try to tug, roll, and keep my balance. Of course, none of the bags matches: one is royal blue, one brown and the piece de resistance (or the Peep de resistance) is Easter candy lilac. Who let me out of the house like this?! Did I not say I was going to Europe?! Like my mismatched bags, my flow-y yoga pants do not suggest chic but at least they show some planning (unlike the bags) in that they were chosen for comfort. (Gawd: I sound so American when I say that.) I do not look like a world traveler, more like a busker who makes balloon animals. Which is perhaps good because my traveling companion, who is waiting for me on the other side of the barrier, looks like a homeless person.
He sees me as I come through the cordon and smiles that sheepish smile/smirk of his. “I am not going to let on that I am happy to see her,” he is thinking. Somehow to show that would mean he’s given up some emotional control and he is loath to do that. Of course, he could just be laughing at how ridiculous I look. He is your basic twenty-something backpacker who has spent a month working on organic farms in Normandy and Brittany and who has just flown in from a week mini-tour of Eastern Europe. His hair is greasy and his jaw is sprouting reddish tufts last seen in a Dr. Seuss book but which he calls his beard. His clothes have that ground-in dirt sheen and he wears a mustard yellow knitted scarf that, I am later to learn, has not been washed since he got it several months ago and was worn throughout all of his farm chores, including the birthing of a calf. He is my son. And we are about to embark on a two-week journey together.
The next few blogs will be dedicated to my dinners with Andre… in Barcelona, San Sebastian, Lyon and Paris. If you’re thinking about traveling with your adult child, you might want to read these before you hit the “submit” button to purchase those airline tickets.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Saturday, June 26, 2010
We Jammin'
“The rule is jam to-morrow and jam yesterday but never jam today.”
The White Queen, Alice in Wonderland
Jam is so cool. I love jam. I love to open a jar of apricot jam and enjoy a too large dollop of it atop my levain toast spread with sweet butter. Sadly, after I put the jar back in the fridge, I tend to forget all about it. It’s sad because jams are so intensely flavorful and so very much the essence of the fruit that I’m really missing out on one of the glories of the breakfast table. And I’m not kidding about the missing out: my breakfast is natto on nori (fermented soybeans on seaweed sheets—kinda like beans on toast, Japanese style). Despite my rather suspect bonafides with regard to jam-eating, I was invited back to the kitchen with Cardinal Baker Nicola and Chef Beatrice on Friday. They had decided to take advantage of the perfect June strawberries offered by Nancy at Middleton Farms (Healdsburg, CA) and make jam.
“Make jam.” Sounds so quaint, so easy. In the old days, they used to say “put up.” I think that is a more apt term for all that jam-making entails. Nicola first bought pints and pints of berries. (At least I think she did. Do I measure? No. So details like this escape me.) Then she bought cute mini-mold Weck jars, the glass and rubber gasket kind with the strawberry stamped into the lid. Mind you, they HAD to be Weck jars. Remember, this is the woman who will not give me any of her recipes because I do not follow the letter of the law. I didn’t know her commandments extended to glassware as well but at least she's consistent. I do admit the jars were cute and jam is a cute food, so it works. Then she spent all evening stemming, hulling and macerating the strawberries. By Friday morning, she was anxious to put them up.
We arrived at Chef Beatrice's midday. Just as she had done with the shortcake trials, Chef Beatrice had the multiple cookbooks out—Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc, Alice Waters Chez Panisse Fruit and some English cookbook from the 70s or 80s; the computer was opened to a site dedicated to trouble-shooting canning problems. This, of course, made me envision the canning version of the Geek Squad--those guys who travel around in their little black and white VW bugs providing computer support: the Out of a Jam Team (or the Pickling Posse) would arrive in a gingham painted Honda Element, brandishing candy thermometers and botulism pamphlets to help you get to the… Jellying Point!
Little did I know that we might need such a team. Beatrice and Nicola chose a strawberry jelly recipe from this obscure English cookbook. It promised a clear, jewel-like jelly with the fruit tantalizingly suspended. The comrades in cuisine were practically in a reverie, entranced by the idea of holding the jelly-filled jars up to the streaming sunlight and seeing a cranberry-colored Chartres pectin window dotted here and there with a perfect, barely cooked berry. They cooked the berry juice to a syrup, removing and reintroducing the whole berries (in order to quickly remove the berries’ moisture and allow each berry to retain its shape). The time came to bring the jelly to 105 degrees Celsius. 10 minutes later, the candy thermometer still registered 98 degrees. Another 10 minutes and no mercury movement. More time passed, and with each degree of centigrade unmet, the comrades’ hopes began to fall: the color of the jelly turned as the winedark sea. (Or a glass of Zinfandel if you haven’t read The Odyssey lately.) Cardinal Baker Nicola turned up the heat but quickly turned it down again as foam formed on the top, threatening the clarity of the syrup. Nicole began to frown and pace but tried to show that all was under control. After all, she had made many jars of jam. Chef Beatrice turned to the computer looking for answers, and then she re-read the recipe. “Rapidly boil. We need to rapidly boil!” It was like the ER surgeon realizing what would save the trauma patient. The heat went to high. The syrup boiled vigorously and—hallelujah--came to the jellying point. As the jelly rested for the requisite 10 minutes, we retired to the living room, Nicola's and Beatrice's frayed nerves calling out for a glass of wine. But the jam was not done.
Back into the kitchen we went to put the hot jelly into the sterilized, hot-out-of-the-oven jars. The jelly was clear but dark, dark like oxblood, with the berries clustering like platelets. I thought the jars were beautiful but the comrades were not pleased. The jelly didn’t look like how they imagined it. Uh, but how does it taste? We each dragged a finger across the sticky puddle left in the pot. “Too sweet,” Beatrice announced. “Like a Popsicle,” Nicole offered. Not what they were going for. Beatrice made notes in the margins of the recipe and both Beatrice and Nicole thought the recipe, by not indicating that the syrup must be boiled rapidly, had let them down. The author had let them down, and she would not have their trust so easily the next time. “Next time we make the apricot jam,” Beatrice announced in her get-back-on-the-horse fashion. “But we’ll use another cookbook.”
And, so, it came to be that it was jam tomorrow but never jam today.
The White Queen, Alice in Wonderland
Jam is so cool. I love jam. I love to open a jar of apricot jam and enjoy a too large dollop of it atop my levain toast spread with sweet butter. Sadly, after I put the jar back in the fridge, I tend to forget all about it. It’s sad because jams are so intensely flavorful and so very much the essence of the fruit that I’m really missing out on one of the glories of the breakfast table. And I’m not kidding about the missing out: my breakfast is natto on nori (fermented soybeans on seaweed sheets—kinda like beans on toast, Japanese style). Despite my rather suspect bonafides with regard to jam-eating, I was invited back to the kitchen with Cardinal Baker Nicola and Chef Beatrice on Friday. They had decided to take advantage of the perfect June strawberries offered by Nancy at Middleton Farms (Healdsburg, CA) and make jam.
“Make jam.” Sounds so quaint, so easy. In the old days, they used to say “put up.” I think that is a more apt term for all that jam-making entails. Nicola first bought pints and pints of berries. (At least I think she did. Do I measure? No. So details like this escape me.) Then she bought cute mini-mold Weck jars, the glass and rubber gasket kind with the strawberry stamped into the lid. Mind you, they HAD to be Weck jars. Remember, this is the woman who will not give me any of her recipes because I do not follow the letter of the law. I didn’t know her commandments extended to glassware as well but at least she's consistent. I do admit the jars were cute and jam is a cute food, so it works. Then she spent all evening stemming, hulling and macerating the strawberries. By Friday morning, she was anxious to put them up.
We arrived at Chef Beatrice's midday. Just as she had done with the shortcake trials, Chef Beatrice had the multiple cookbooks out—Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc, Alice Waters Chez Panisse Fruit and some English cookbook from the 70s or 80s; the computer was opened to a site dedicated to trouble-shooting canning problems. This, of course, made me envision the canning version of the Geek Squad--those guys who travel around in their little black and white VW bugs providing computer support: the Out of a Jam Team (or the Pickling Posse) would arrive in a gingham painted Honda Element, brandishing candy thermometers and botulism pamphlets to help you get to the… Jellying Point!
Little did I know that we might need such a team. Beatrice and Nicola chose a strawberry jelly recipe from this obscure English cookbook. It promised a clear, jewel-like jelly with the fruit tantalizingly suspended. The comrades in cuisine were practically in a reverie, entranced by the idea of holding the jelly-filled jars up to the streaming sunlight and seeing a cranberry-colored Chartres pectin window dotted here and there with a perfect, barely cooked berry. They cooked the berry juice to a syrup, removing and reintroducing the whole berries (in order to quickly remove the berries’ moisture and allow each berry to retain its shape). The time came to bring the jelly to 105 degrees Celsius. 10 minutes later, the candy thermometer still registered 98 degrees. Another 10 minutes and no mercury movement. More time passed, and with each degree of centigrade unmet, the comrades’ hopes began to fall: the color of the jelly turned as the winedark sea. (Or a glass of Zinfandel if you haven’t read The Odyssey lately.) Cardinal Baker Nicola turned up the heat but quickly turned it down again as foam formed on the top, threatening the clarity of the syrup. Nicole began to frown and pace but tried to show that all was under control. After all, she had made many jars of jam. Chef Beatrice turned to the computer looking for answers, and then she re-read the recipe. “Rapidly boil. We need to rapidly boil!” It was like the ER surgeon realizing what would save the trauma patient. The heat went to high. The syrup boiled vigorously and—hallelujah--came to the jellying point. As the jelly rested for the requisite 10 minutes, we retired to the living room, Nicola's and Beatrice's frayed nerves calling out for a glass of wine. But the jam was not done.
Back into the kitchen we went to put the hot jelly into the sterilized, hot-out-of-the-oven jars. The jelly was clear but dark, dark like oxblood, with the berries clustering like platelets. I thought the jars were beautiful but the comrades were not pleased. The jelly didn’t look like how they imagined it. Uh, but how does it taste? We each dragged a finger across the sticky puddle left in the pot. “Too sweet,” Beatrice announced. “Like a Popsicle,” Nicole offered. Not what they were going for. Beatrice made notes in the margins of the recipe and both Beatrice and Nicole thought the recipe, by not indicating that the syrup must be boiled rapidly, had let them down. The author had let them down, and she would not have their trust so easily the next time. “Next time we make the apricot jam,” Beatrice announced in her get-back-on-the-horse fashion. “But we’ll use another cookbook.”
And, so, it came to be that it was jam tomorrow but never jam today.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Short on Shortcake or the Triumph of the Stove
I have two friends who have recently formed their own Cook’s Illustrated alliance. That is, they are cooking in search of the best recipe for... whatever. One week it was for a galette (which later morphed into quiche) and another it was for vegetable stock. Both are wonderful cooks but different in temperament. Nicola is an artist by training and profession. She loves the details. Once she gave me a chocolate chip cookie recipe. I made it with lots of substitutions because I couldn’t be bothered to get the exact sugar she recommended or let the dough sit for the exact amount of time. The cookies came out good but not great, definitely not like hers. When I told her about the substitutions, she was aghast. I had just committed heresy in the Church of Saints Butter, Eggs and Flour. She excommunicated me, telling me she would never give me another recipe as she could not trust me to follow it AS IT WAS WRITTEN. And, yes, she did use capital letters when she wrote me this, just as I am sure Moses did when he was carving out the Commandments. My other friend, Beatrice, is a bit more like me in temperament in that she doesn’t sweat the small stuff. Well, at least she didn’t before she went to the Cordon Bleu. Now she is into measuring and weighing. She even got drawer organizers when, for ten years prior, the whisks and spoons and graters and ravioli molds all lay together in a tangled mess of steel cuneiform. Anyone who doubts the life-changing impact of education clearly has not been schooled at the Cordon Bleu. Beatrice was always an amazing cook but now she has become a chef by anyone’s account.
So, last week, Cardinal Baker Nicola and Chef Beatrice decided to test shortcake recipes for strawberry shortcake. Even though I’m not much of a shortcake fan—-too dry, too bready, just gimme the whipped cream—-I went over to see what these two kitchen sisters were all about. Cookbooks crowded the countertop, kitchen island, and dining room table, each opened to a shortcake recipe (and, unaccountably, a Pavlova recipe?). Nicola was bent over some pages, her glasses perched at the end of her nose, her gaze unwavering--she reminded me of an apothecary concentrating on the formulation of a secret elixir. Beatrice was already rolling and cutting her first batch of biscuits made following the Tartine recipe. Zoe, Nicola’s daughter and baking novitiate, was reading a Dorie Greenspan recipe aloud while her boyfriend Steve ceremoniously emptied the dry ingredients--plop!poof!-- into a stainless steel bowl as each powdery substance was intoned.
Daunted by all this baking, I busied myself with cleaning up. All those measuring cups and measuring spoons! Sheesh. Flour everywhere. Not a knife or a sauté pan to be seen. (As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, I am not a chef. I cook, yes. Sometimes pretty well. But really my forte is the eating department.) I was a bit unsure of how to make myself useful amidst all that cutting, rolling, flouring, oven-opening-and-closing. Then Chef Beatrice mentioned that the Tartine recipe had a caramel sauce that went with the shortcake. Music to my ears! Butter, sugar, heavy cream and a stovetop, you say? I’m there, baby. You don’t really think I would enter into the competitive foray of shortcake making, do you? Unh, unh. Do the thing no-one else is doing, do it relatively well and you are, like the caramel, golden.
After multiple batches made from four recipes—Michael Mina’s, Edna Lewis’, Tartine’s and Dorie Greenspan’s—we sat down to evaluate. (Oh, did I mention I also made a strained berry sauce of blackberries and strawberries flavored with drizzle of balsamic vinegar and a splash of Cointreau? Again, done at the stovetop; no measuring spoons were de-nestled for the making of this.)
We all had a different favorite depending if we were looking more for flavor from the shortcake or a particular texture to go with the berries and cream. We decided the Edna Lewis biscuit really needed to be slathered with honey butter (or the Apricot Vanilla Butter from June Taylor) rather than serve as the stage for berries. (Aside: have you noticed how often "slathered" is used to describe butter on a biscuit? And rightly so...) The Tartine shortcake was the hit flavor-wise; it's the one we could have eaten on its own, though Chef Beatrice also really liked the Michael Mina recipe for that. A few of us put the Dorie Greenspan dropped (rather than rolled out) shortcake recipe to the top of our list as its crumbly texture and crunchy tops provided a nice foil to the loftiness of the cream and juice of the berries. There was, as Chef Beatrice noted, no clear winner. Well, not with the shortcakes, anyway.
One thing everyone agreed on: the caramel sauce was the best.
Sometimes you don’t need to go with four recipes. Just do one and execute really well. No-one will even bother going to look for the competition.
So, last week, Cardinal Baker Nicola and Chef Beatrice decided to test shortcake recipes for strawberry shortcake. Even though I’m not much of a shortcake fan—-too dry, too bready, just gimme the whipped cream—-I went over to see what these two kitchen sisters were all about. Cookbooks crowded the countertop, kitchen island, and dining room table, each opened to a shortcake recipe (and, unaccountably, a Pavlova recipe?). Nicola was bent over some pages, her glasses perched at the end of her nose, her gaze unwavering--she reminded me of an apothecary concentrating on the formulation of a secret elixir. Beatrice was already rolling and cutting her first batch of biscuits made following the Tartine recipe. Zoe, Nicola’s daughter and baking novitiate, was reading a Dorie Greenspan recipe aloud while her boyfriend Steve ceremoniously emptied the dry ingredients--plop!poof!-- into a stainless steel bowl as each powdery substance was intoned.
Daunted by all this baking, I busied myself with cleaning up. All those measuring cups and measuring spoons! Sheesh. Flour everywhere. Not a knife or a sauté pan to be seen. (As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, I am not a chef. I cook, yes. Sometimes pretty well. But really my forte is the eating department.) I was a bit unsure of how to make myself useful amidst all that cutting, rolling, flouring, oven-opening-and-closing. Then Chef Beatrice mentioned that the Tartine recipe had a caramel sauce that went with the shortcake. Music to my ears! Butter, sugar, heavy cream and a stovetop, you say? I’m there, baby. You don’t really think I would enter into the competitive foray of shortcake making, do you? Unh, unh. Do the thing no-one else is doing, do it relatively well and you are, like the caramel, golden.
After multiple batches made from four recipes—Michael Mina’s, Edna Lewis’, Tartine’s and Dorie Greenspan’s—we sat down to evaluate. (Oh, did I mention I also made a strained berry sauce of blackberries and strawberries flavored with drizzle of balsamic vinegar and a splash of Cointreau? Again, done at the stovetop; no measuring spoons were de-nestled for the making of this.)
We all had a different favorite depending if we were looking more for flavor from the shortcake or a particular texture to go with the berries and cream. We decided the Edna Lewis biscuit really needed to be slathered with honey butter (or the Apricot Vanilla Butter from June Taylor) rather than serve as the stage for berries. (Aside: have you noticed how often "slathered" is used to describe butter on a biscuit? And rightly so...) The Tartine shortcake was the hit flavor-wise; it's the one we could have eaten on its own, though Chef Beatrice also really liked the Michael Mina recipe for that. A few of us put the Dorie Greenspan dropped (rather than rolled out) shortcake recipe to the top of our list as its crumbly texture and crunchy tops provided a nice foil to the loftiness of the cream and juice of the berries. There was, as Chef Beatrice noted, no clear winner. Well, not with the shortcakes, anyway.
One thing everyone agreed on: the caramel sauce was the best.
Sometimes you don’t need to go with four recipes. Just do one and execute really well. No-one will even bother going to look for the competition.
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