Category: cook

The first thing you eat in the morning should be fantastic. So it may as well be this:

1)  Homemade oatmeal bread, toasted. Unable to make your own homemade bread? Marry someone obsessed with baking!

2)  Peanut butter. Normally I advocate for lots and lots of peanut butter, but a thin layer is best here because we don’t want to overpower thing #3. All we’re really going for is protecting thing #3 from melting due to the heat of the toast.

3)  Dark chocolate sprinkles!!! To get these, you need to have dear friends who went to Amsterdam and brought some back for you. Oh wait–you can get them on Amazon, too!

This is as fine of a breakfast as one can possibly eat.

This winter, I’ve been learning how to cook fish.  Every Saturday morning at the winter farmer’s market, I’ve been buying super-fresh fish from the Globe Fish ladies (direct from Boston Fish Pier) and every Saturday evening I’ve been gaining confidence and mastering the two central challenges of fish-cookery:

• how to turn it over in the pan without destroying it, and
• how to know when it’s done.

My guide has been “Ad Hoc at Home” by Thomas Keller, which E. received as a holiday gift from his boss.  It claims to contain “family-style recipes” but at first glance the recipes seemed too fussy for my cooking style (duck…roux…gastrique…).  But, there are some good basics here, and well-written instructions.

Caramelized sea scallops. I made these three different weeks, partially because they were so good the first week it was all we could think about, partially to practice my scallopsmanship, and partially to use up the clarified butter I made the first week. The scallops from the fish ladies are so sweet. After brining them for a few minutes, searing on each side in the clarified butter, then squeezing on some lemon juice, they’re done. There’s a neat trick to scallops: they stick to the pan until they’re ready to turn. Once they loosen up, they’re ready to flip over, and it’s easy to do it.

Wild cod en persillade.  Yesterday, cod and haddock were the two thickest non-salmon fillets available. Tip from the fish ladies: although the haddock had skin to deal with, it was sweeter than the cod. So I dealt with the skin, which was actually easy to remove with a sharp knife, and made wild haddock en persillade instead. I watered down some whole-grain dijon mustard and brushed it over one side of the fillet, then dipped that side in bread crumbs. A persillade is a mixture of bread crumbs and parsley, but I didn’t have any parsley, so at this point I was making wild haddock en bread crumbs. After one or two minutes in hot pan on the stovetop, I moved it to a warm oven for 8 or so minutes, finishing it up without the need for any messy spatula aerobatics. Joy of Cooking makes the audacious claim that “all fish is done at 137 degrees.” So that’s how I knew it was done.  Yum, yum, and yum.

For Chrismas, C & A gave us “Mexican Everyday” by Rick Bayless.  Considering the lack of good Mexican restaurants in our neighborhood, and my lack of knowledge about Mexican cooking, it was a most welcome gift.  And also welcome because, in this time of year, in the lull after the holidays, in the bright snow-covered days of the middle of winter, I love spending late weekend afternoons in the kitchen.

Last weekend we inaugurated the book by making two recipes.  First, a mixed-berry Skillet Upside-Down Cake which we enjoyed with some of our neighbors over Banangrams, and then for our New Year’s dinner, Chicken in Oaxacan Yellow Mole with Green Beans and Chayote.

Everyone loved the cake–it was simple and light, yet somehow felt more rich and more generous than it was.  Over the past two years I’ve been baking almost exclusively from Martha Stewart’s “Baking Handbook,” whose recipes are delicious, buttery, and labor intensive.  As much as I enjoy that sort of fussy baking, this cake was a great contrast.  It’s half whole-wheat.  It’s mixed by hand, and quickly.  The finished result is practically eaten straight from the oven–you just invert it onto a plate, admire the jammy berries still bubbling on the top (they look like chocolate), and devour with friends over tea.

Many of the recipes in “Mexican Everyday” contain riffs, or suggested variations.  I appreciate the encouragement to approach cooking from a more improvisatory mind.  The skillet cake recipe called for pineapple.  I went with the frozen berry riff, and used a blend of blueberries, raspberries, and marionberries.

According to Bayless, the yellow mole is much quicker and simpler than other moles. For me, it was plenty complicated.  It sent me around town on a hunt for previously-unknown ingredients: dried guajillo chiles, Mexican–as opposed to Turkish–oregano, masa harina, and hoja santa leaves (I never did find these last two).  It required a blender, a strainer, and faith.  The result was worth the effort: a nuanced, warm, pretty, red-not-yellow sauce, more of a thick broth in which I braised chicken, potatoes, green beans, and chayotes.

Chayotes were another new-to-me ingredient, and were unexpected and sweet.  Though they’re a kind of summer squash, the raw flesh is crisp like an apple, and after cooking they taste somewhere between a potato and a turnip.  Hooray for new squashes, new recipes, new snow on the ground, and a new year!