recipephile

Notes On Creativity: "Gives Peas a Chance" or "Eat It or Wear It"

As I thought about this posting I could not decide what to title it -- "Gives Peas a Chance" or "Eat It or Wear It".  Both are completely relevant and catchy. Once you give this one a read you will have to let me know your thoughts.

Over the weekend I spent time with my family celebrating my mom's 70th birthday. During our stay we enjoyed great food and great wine.  The weekend was a perfect way to celebrate my mother and this amazing rite of passage.

I noticed something very interesting about my nieces and nephews. As a family of foodies they are exposed to all types of food, but what amazes me is how their tastes vary.  Sam, my 13 year old nephew, loves stinky cheese, but shuns most other "exotic" foods. Maggie, my 8 year old niece, loves tackling the briniest of oysters, but when I tried to tempt her with my Creamed English Peas With Pancetta and then Red Abalone from Pacific's Edge she said "Ummm... I will pass Uncle Monkey" with that I smell poo look on her face.  Lucy, the spunky and adorable 4 year old, would not eat a burger from In-N-Out because it wasn't from McDonald's.

The psychology behind what kids will and will not eat amazes me, but after thinking more about it I realized that it must be a combination of nature vs. nurture. Although I have no proof behind the assertion my thought is that we are born with trained taste buds and stomachs that can handle certain types of foods.  Although I like hot sauces, they never agree with me so I rarely eat them without some Tums. My father, who loves great food trained me early on that oysters were amazing... this is the nurture part of the puzzle.  In fact, he would regularly tell us, when we refused to try something, "eat it or wear it". The thought of wearing slimy oysters was never appealing so I immediately dug in when I heard that comment.

What I am trying to say here is that although we cannot necessarily control the nature piece of the puzzle, parents, adults, uncles, aunts all play a role in expanding a child's epicurean horizons. So give them raw oysters and sushi. Turn them on to D'Affinois and Gorganzola Dolce. Encourage them to devour sweetbreads and pate.  The list of fascinatingly delicious foods is a long one, but if we ask our kids to "Gives Peas a Chance" or scare them with "Eat It or Wear It" collectively we are helping to create a society of children who realize there is much more than McDonald's and Potato Chips when it comes to food choices.

Notes on Creativity - Mis en Place

I learned this one from my mother, who is one of the most organized cooks that I know.  Mis en Place is the French way of saying -- make sure that all of your stuff is in order and in its place. Cooking, like any other tactical thing you do around the house, is a process and the easiest way to get from start to finish is to plan ahead.  As you begin thinking about a meal grab a piece of paper and a pen and mark down each and every ingredient you will need. Bring your list with you to the grocery store and when you get home begin organizing the ingredients.  I personally like to measure out the ingredients before beginning to cook and have a number of bowls and ramekins that help keep things organized during cooking.  Organizing yourself and having all of your things in their proper places makes the process and the clean up that much easier.

Oh yeah... one more word of advice... Clean as you go and keep the sink free from excess dishes.  This will also ensure that all things are in order and the process of cooking will be much more enjoyable.

Notes On Creativity - Own It

Last night my friends Crispin and Brian decided to host a dinner party for a group of us. You may remember Crispin from his cheese discovery that I wrote about almost five years ago. He and I have been friends for a while now and his husband Brian has also become a close friend of mine.

I have to hand it to both Crispin and Brian, every time they host a party they own it. What does that mean?  From start to finish every detail is taken care of.  You never walk into their house and experience the two of them darting from room to room still preparing appetizers, cleaning the house or making the meal.  They are prepared, and with gin and tonics or a glass of champagne in hand they greet you at the door, take your coat and hand you a drink.  Both are masters in the art of entertaining and they play off of one another very well.  While Crispin prepares plates for dinner, Brian is entertaining guests and serving appetizers.  Its as if there is a maestro in the room silently directing their every move.

I have learned so much from the two of them, not only about entertaining, but also about the importance of long lasting friendships and how that can be celebrated by gathering around a table and toasting past, present and future memories.

So next time you host an event take a lesson from my two very good friends -- Own It.

"Waste-not want-not, volume 2: Making your own vegetable stock"

This posting comes from my good friend Jeffrey and this practice of stuffing the freezer with veggie scraps comes from our friend John Spear who now lives in London. Take it away Jeffrey...

One of the most superbly flavorful, aromatic and useful things I make in my kitchen is essentially free. 

I'm talking about making vegetable broth from scraps and clippings... the kinds of veggie bits and pieces you would probably just throw away or squish into the garbage disposal.  These include onion tops and skins, carrot peelings, celery cores and greens, bits of leftover garlic and shallots, the goop from tomatoes when you core them, the hard bases of asparagus.  Even potato peelings, the whites and seeds from peppers, pea pods, and other sundry leftovers are useful.

I save all of these random bits and pieces in a couple 1-gallon zip-top bags in my freezer until the two bags are so chock-a-block full that my roommates start to give me cranky glares when I harp on them to save vegetable clippings.

At this point, I empty the two bags into a large soup pot, add a rounded teaspoon of salt, a couple bay leaves, and enough water to amply cover the vegetables, all on high heat on the stove.  Once the water has come to a full boil, I reduce the heat to a simmer and continue to cook for 65-75 minutes.  You can add some water midway through if too much of it evaporates while it's simmering.  After the simmering, I turn off the heat, scoop out the vegetable goop and strain the broth. You should taste the broth at this point and decide if it need to cook down more so teh flavor will intensify.

I tend to go straight from this process into making a broth-based soup (chicken or minestrone or lentil or else the corn, black bean & lime soup that my uncle taught me last Christmas.)  But if you don't have time for that, then you can freeze your broth for 2-3 months (freezing a combination of large portions of broth-filled ice-cube trays will be most useful for soups, sauces, low-fat sauteeing, risotto-making and other stuff), or it will keep refrigerated for maybe 2 weeks.

I swear to you that in the latter 20 minutes of your broth-simmering, your kitchen will never have smelled so good.  And all from stuff you would have tossed into the garbage or compost heap!

Quid pro quos to keep in mind when stowing your vegetable clippings: there are some vegetables which you should not use.  Cabbage, beets, eggplant, and Brussels sprouts come to mind.  Basically, if the vegetable is pretty darn strong or eccentric in flavor, I would think twice.  Also, use your tomato bits in thoughtful moderation.  They add great flavor, but too much of a tomato quotient and you end up with an acidic broth, which can be good in the right circumstances but limits a broth's versatility.  Lastly, chicken bones, necks and giblets can be saved in much the same way to make chicken broth. The one added step you may have is to skim off a layer of the rendered fat and schmutz that films at the top of your pot when simmering.

Notes on Creativity: What's in the Kitchen? What Should Always be in the Kitchen?

Today's Posting Was Guest Written By Jeffrey Lais -- Thanks Jeffrey -- Note to Jeffrey's Mom:  Your Son ROCKS in the kitchen

Sometimes you simply haven't got time for lots of planning and shopping, and you need to whip up a dish with what you've got.  Maybe it's for a mid-week dinner and the workday has sapped the energy you would otherwise have dedicated to a dish or an extravagant meal.  Maybe your Aunt Susan just called and gave you 30 minutes notice that she's town and how about she and Uncle Phil and their friends Gene and Eunice stop by to say hello.  We live in a society in which we're over-committed and spread thin, and things like this just come up all the time.

I had a time such as this recently, and was glad that I keep my kitchen stocked with a few essentials that are handy and versatile.  It was a Monday night after work, and the following evening straight after work I was headed with several friends to a concert in an outdoor venue in Berkeley.  I remembered that you're allowed to bring food in, and I also remembered that the food sold at this venue is preposterously expensive.  So I wanted to put a couple things together to bring.

But I had just come home from a 10 hour work day. And because I had been out of town last weekend, I hadn't done much in the way of grocery shopping lately.

In just an hour, though, I managed to put together two distinct and zippy bean dips from stuff in my house, and as a result the only pre-concert errand I need to run is to pick up chips or pita or crackers to accompany them.

The first dip I made was a standard hummus recipe: garbanzos (aka chick peas), tahini, lemon juice, olive oil, and coarse salt.  These recipes are all over the web.

The second dip I prepared was much more "on the fly" and made cunning use of a few essentials as well as a couple left overs and random things in the fridge:

Spicy tangy white bean dip:

- 2 cans white kidney beans (drained, rinsed and picked over for the inevitable dud or two)
- juice of 1 lemon, about 4 tbsp.
- 4 cloves crushed garlic
- a bunch of fresh chives, coarsely chopped
- 1 tsp. kosher salt
- 1 tsp. dried oregano
- 4 tbsp. shredded Parmesan cheese
- 1/4-1/2 tsp. Tabasco
- 1/2 tsp. fresh ground pepper
- 5 or 6 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 plum tomato, cored and diced

Put all but the last 2 ingredients into your food processor.  Seal the lid and turn it on.  As the ingredients mix, slowly drizzle in the olive oil until there's enough to help everything coalesce.  Continue to mix for about 2 minutes, stopping midway through to scrape down the sides if you need to.  When the dip has reached the desired consistency, scoop it into a bowl and fold in the diced tomato.  It was colorful, tasty, and easy easy easy.

For me there are a few obvious lessons here: (1) keep a few staple ingredients in the kitchen all the time - you never know when you might need them!  What these things are will depend on your cooking style. I tend to go very Mediterranean in my cooking during the summer, so for me those staple ingredients are types of canned beans, fresh herbs, lemons and tomatoes; (2) see what you've got in the fridge and let those things guide you. I probably would have opted for parsley in this dip, but I didn't have any. I had chives though, so I used the chives. And hoozah! They brought a freshness and very summery quality to the dip that it might not have yielded otherwise.  I threw in the few tablespoons of Parmesan that were left over, and they not only complemented the chives but also added texture. The diced tomato I folded in brought color and more texture as well as a mellower layer of acidity to accompany the lemon juice.

The bottom line is this: if you make a habit of always having the 8 or 10 important things you cook with, and if you are willing to let what else is around help guide you, then last minute food prep and entertaining isn't so daunting after all.

Notes On Creativity - Bring Your Vacation Back to the Kitchen Revisited

My friends Courtney, Jeffrey & I spent this past weekend north of San Francisco in the scenic Russian River Valley.  Upon our arrival, we sat out at a picnic table to play a game of Scrabble, enjoy a bottle of wine, and relax.  To complement our afternoon, Jeffrey brought some crackers and a Middle Eastern cheese called Labneh, which he had eaten a lot of during a recent vacation to Israel.  Labneh is a soft yogurt-based cheese, and Jeffrey's container of it included an olive oil drizzle and a sprinkling of a spice mix called za'atar.

We loved it, and the discovery reminded me of several vacations I've taken during which I encountered wonderful foods and later incorporated certain exotic elements into my own cooking back home.  I've written about this here before, but the idea is worth iterating.  Jeffrey mentioned that Labneh was fairly easy to make, so I asked him to put together a recipe for us to share here:

Making Labneh:

You'll need: a quart of unflavored yogurt (this can be from goat, sheep or cow milk, but should have at least some fat percentage to it and should not be too runny), a lime, cheese cloth, string, and either a salad spinner or a colander placed inside of a larger bowl.

Mix the juice of 1/2 of a lime into the tub of yogurt.  Open up a large square (16-18") of cheese cloth, and empty the yogurt onto it.  If the yogurt is at all runny, then use 2 or even 3 cheese cloths.  Bring the sides up and the corners together on top, making a ball out of the yogurt.  Tie the cheese cloth corners together with the string.  Place this yogurt ball - you'll already see some of the liquid starting to leech out - onto the salad spinner.  Why a salad spinner or similar colander & bowl combo? Basically, you want the yogurt ball to be able to drain without then swimming in the released liquid.

Put this in the refrigerator, and wait.  Check it every 12 hours or so just to make sure that there is still clearance for more liquid to drain.  If in doubt, pour out the liquid from the bowl every so often.

After 2 days, remove the bowl from the refrigerator and pour out all of the liquid.  There, you have Labneh!  It should keep refrigerated (be green and reuse the yogurt container!) for however long the shelf life of the yogurt was.

To serve the Labneh, spread it onto a plate or spoon it into a bowl.  Drizzle it with extra virgin olive oil, and serve with a combination of toasted pita wedges, crackers or cut vegetables.

If you can get your hands on a Middle Eastern spice combination called zatar (sometimes spelled za'atar), sprinkle this generously atop your Labneh when you serve it.  Zatar is a combination of ground sumac, toasted sesame seeds, oregano, marjoram and coarse sea salt.  You can make it yourself if you're able to find the sumac, which is the primary ingredient. This can be difficult to find in traditional grocery stores, but fortunately both zatar and sumac are available from some Middle Eastern markets and from internet specialty vendors like Penzeys Spices (www.penzeys.com).

And remember, when you're traveling on vacation, savor the regional fare as much as possible, and don't be afraid to give it a go in the kitchen after you're come home.

Notes on Creativity - Enlist Your Friends and Make it Fun

My friend Jeffrey sent me this posting for RecipePhile. I loved it and thought it would make a GREAT Note on Creativity. Thanks Jeffrey

Sometimes cooking is about the personal process of making something spectacular and elegant for your friends. Other times it's more of a pleasant necessity leading up to a social engagement. This past Saturday it was reminiscent of the arts and crafts table in kindergarten.

My roommates and I had some friends over to watch a movie, and we tricked out this otherwise sedentary evening with a make-your-own-pizza dinner theme. We loaded up their kitchen island with bowls and bowls of various toppings, sauces and cheeses, and the guests took turns making their own personal pizzas from whatever they chose. What fun!

We gussied this up with some 'fancy' stuff – grilled chicken, grilled veggies (onion, pepper, eggplant, zucchini), toasted pine nuts, ricotta and gorgonzola cheeses in addition to already shredded part-skim mozzarella, fresh minced basil and oregano, and pesto as well as a traditional tomato sauce. I am personally a fiend for anchovies, and seem to have been the only one who availed himself of this particular topping.

Really, though, no ingredient list or recipe is needed here. Each of you knows what you and your friends want on your pizza. Pick up some fresh pizza dough and encourage your friends to get their hands dirty and play!

But here are a few tips to get you going:

On selecting toppings: if you want an everyone shares everything kind of tapas evening, go for toppings that pretty much everybody likes.

On the dough: Most grocery stores offer bags of bread or pizza dough and a few even offer whole wheat versions. If you get desperate, there are always those pre-fab pizza shells, but avoid them if you can. A tablespoon or so of olive oil smeared on your hands will help prevent sticking when stretching out the dough, and a sprinkling of corn meal on the baking sheet or pizza stone will accomplish the same thing during the baking process.

On baking: Bake your completed pizzas in the oven, preheated at about 425 or 450 degrees. Depending on their thickness, they'll need about 12 minutes, but watch them closely starting at 9 minutes. If you want to save time or if your friends are persnickety about getting messy, then I suggest you pre-bake the pizza crusts for about 7 minutes before the assembly begins, and then reduce the second post-assembly cooking time to about 6 minutes.

Notes on Creativity - Try Everything

Okay... I broke a major rule yesterday.   My goal is to do as much food preparation as possible and use this forum to write about my experiences.  I just moved into a new place and for the first time ever, I have a microwave.  So as I was strolling the aisles of the frozen food section a Lean Cuisine caught my eye.  At first I walked away and said NO.  Then I walked back and thought... "This is something I have to try.  230 calories and 7 grams of fat. Why not?" 

I chose the turkey with stuffing and apple sauce, went  home, popped into the microwave for 4 minutes and then sat at my desk to read email and eat.  It was by no means amazing and by no means absolutely inedible (I ate the whole thing), but for me it lacked the excitement I have in actually preparing a meal for myself or friends.

It was an experience and provided me with some real insight.  Some I apply to business all of the time is "the worst that anyone will say is NO" and the worst that this meal would say to me was "NO" you do not like me and so never try me again. 

I will not be lining up to buy Lean Cuisine any time soon, but now I know because I tried it.  So get out there and try stuff.  Pigs feet, tripe, pork rinds, whatever life presents you. 

 

Notes on Creativity - Watch Your Mom

Over Christmas my mother whipped up an apple pie in a matter of minutes.  Well… she whipped up the filling and had the pie assembled and ready to go into the oven in minutes.  She used fresh apples and canned apples. She also used store bought piecrust and when I questioned her on this she said to me… “Michael, I make ten different cookies, ravioli and so many other foods during the holidays that I do not have time for making homemade pie crust.  Store bought is fine and to be honest, nobody recognizes the difference.” Some insightful wisdom from a woman whom I totally respect when it comes to food.  The moral of this story… Watch your mom (or anyone else that cooks) while she is cooking in the kitchen. You will learn lots of tips, tricks, shortcuts and so many more things that you never even knew.  Most importantly apply those learnings.  Your skill set will SOAR!

Notes on Creativity - Fail Forward

This is one of the hardest lessons to learn.  Not only in business and in life, but also in the kitchen.  Everyone hates failure. It is marred with negative connotations and makes us feel down, out and incapable. 

Enough with the negativity however.  Now it is time to look at failure in a much different way.  Failing forward is the art of learning from your mistakes, and in the kitchen I have made many.  The lessons I have learned however, have been invaluable.  One of my favorite failures happened right before a dinner party complete with roasted chickens.  After roasting the chickens in Pyrex I removed the birds and placed the Pyrex on the stovetop to make my gravy.   The heat was cranked up high as I added my chicken stock and white wine then all of the sudden -- CRASH -- the dish exploded into pieces and my gravy seeped down into the depths of my stovetop. 

No gravy for dinner, but a lesson was learned.  Pyrex dishes can withstand intense indirect heat in the oven, but when the heat of the dish is changed rapidly it undergoes thermal shock and explodes.  The lesson -- when making gravy after roasting chickens or turkey or any other kind of meat, make sure the pan is not glass or Pyrex. 

Now... think back to your worst kitchen disasters and search for the lesson, you will be surprised how it changes your perspective on past failures.